I guess that’s a weakness of your basic post-apocalyptic road-movie structure: You’re only gonna run into so many people, most of whom are adults, most of whom are carrying guns that they may or may not be shooting at you. Not a lot of opportunities to explore the rich panoply of human emotion, you know? This lack of variety is reflected in the effectively one-note performances of both Ramsey and Pedro Pascal, and it handicaps the show considerably. More interesting or innovative writing could work around that, but, well, you get what you get. 

Even the exceptions, like this flashback, aren’t really much to write home about. You can see Ellie’s wide-eyed wonder at the mall coming the moment its lights switch on, and the show does nothing unexpected with the sequence. Even if it did, Gustavo Santaolalla and David Fleming’s constant, hyperactive, sledgehammer-subtle score tells you exactly how to feel about everything at every moment. I’ve been rewatching The Sopranos recently — I know, I know, that’s hardly a fair comparison for this or any other show — and it’s amazing how its lack of a score makes it feel so much more wide-open and intriguing than this. A little more faith in the audience’s ability to think for itself would go a long way.

Which is the story of The Last of Us, I think. Every week it comes on, every week it’s basically serviceable genre entertainment, and with a couple of exceptions (the highs of Episode 3, the lows of Episode 5) every week it’s out of my mind within minutes of the closing credits rolling. You don’t really need to think for yourself, as there’s simply not much to think about.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.

If there were an award given out for the year’s most adequate hour of television, The Last of Us Episode 6 (“Kin”) would be a contender. Basically competent, mildly engaging, largely inoffensive, gesturing in the direction of emotional power without ever running the risk of triggering it directly, it comes nowhere near the highs nor the lows of the five episodes that preceded it. Some lovely scenery, some cursory worldbuilding, a reunion and a farewell, a bunch of wild animals in a post-apocalyptic city, an unsuspenseful cliffhanger, and that’s a wrap. It’s a fresh installment of the biggest show on TV right now, and it’s pretty much just there.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.

The Last of Us made its sympathetically portrayed fascist collaborators Black and Jewish and had them hide with a child in an attic or else the antifascists would murder them. When you type it out it feels even more unpleasant than it did to watch it. Who does this thought experiment serve? In whose shoes is this placing us? Surely it’s intended to be “makes you think” television. What, exactly, are we supposed to think here?

I reviewed The Last of Us episode five for Decider.

A group of revolutionaries has overthrown the fascist FEDRA government — but is the cure worse than the disease? Pretend you don’t know anything about how Hollywood tells stories and find out tonight on The Last of Us!!!

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.

My illustrious cohost Stefan Sasse and I talk The Last of Us Episode 2 and Episode 3 on our Patreon-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Moment podcast. Go subscribe and listen!

Along the way they play Linda Ronstadt on the piano, they eat delicious meals prepared by Bill, they revel in strawberries grown by Frank (Bill’s high-pitched squeal of delight upon tasting a fruity delicacy he probably hasn’t enjoyed in over a decade is delightful), they fend off an attempted invasion of their property by raiders with a show of booby-trap force that makes Kevin McCallister look like a guy with a banana peel, they befriend Joel and Tess (RIP), they renovate the neighborhood and some nearby shops, and they pretty much act like basically decent people making the absolute best out of the absolute worst situation. Keep in mind the entire main narrative stops short for, I dunno, 50 out of the episode’s 76 minutes to show all this.

I reviewed this week’s The Last of Us for Decider.

A striking brunette with porcelain skin, piercing blue eyes, and a body that’s been a meme since True Detective Season One, Alexandria Daddario is the perfect lead for Mayfair Witches. Sure, she can act, which is also true of the rest of the show’s core cast: Annabeth Gish, Beth Grant, Harry Hamlin, Tongyi Chirisa, and Jack Huston. But, and I stress, she’s also one of the most attractive women on god’s grey earth, and that counts for a lot in the endemically horny world of Anne Rice’s witches.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches for my Patreon.

The rest of the episode, and this is definitely the cool thing about it, stars a grand total of three characters and three characters only: Joel, Tess, and Ellie, trekking through the overrun ruins of Boston in order to exchange the girl for the battery the adults will need to fire up a truck and take it cross country. That’s right: no resistance fighters, no jackbooted security personnel, no working stiffs, no fellow smugglers, not even extras save for the infected. It’s all Pedro Pascal, Anna Torv, and Bella Ramsey, which sets up the unconscious expectation in the audience that if enough of these three characters die, so too will our story. It’s smart filmmaking.

Smart enough, I think, that it can power through a lot of objections you might have as to the been-there-done-that nature of what they say and do. I’ll state for the record once again that I have not played the Last of Us video games; I’ll state for the record once again that this doesn’t matter, since I’m reviewing a TV show and not the games it’s based on. As such, well, it’s 2023: You’ve seen crumbling cities overrun by vegetation a million times before (Netflix’s Alice in Borderland Season 2 got there just a few weeks ago!). Ditto plant/fungus-based humanoid monsters. Ditto dialogue like “This is your chance, you get her there, you keep her alive, and you set everything right,” which when delivered by an infected and doomed Tess is supposed to come across like a major moment instead of throwaway text from a cutscene. It’s way more the latter than it is the former, I’m afraid.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Last of Us for Decider.

Provided you don’t mind watching a show without a single original thought in its head, the series premiere of The Last of Us is an okay way to spend an hour and twenty minutes. And honestly, why would you expect this show to blaze new trails for the post-apocalyptic zombie genre? It’s an adaptation of a ten-year-old video game that itself arrived years deep into the zombie renaissance best represented by The Walking Dead, from Chernobyl creator (and labor “dissident”) Craig Mazin. George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead it isn’t. Hell, James Gunn and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead it isn’t, either. For one thing, both those movies were scary.

I reviewed the first episode of the next big thing for Decider.

Once again, Stefan Sasse and I are doing a Patreon-exclusive series of TV reviews for the Boiled Leather Audio Hour Patreon, this time around for The Last of Us!

Alexandra Daddario impresses here, too. True to her filmography she’s playing Rowan Fielding as a sort of White Lotus character, a brilliant and accomplished woman who chafes to the point of physical tics at being condescended to — by anyone for any reason, but especially men — but who’s been given the supernatural ability to make people’s brains explode instead of just sleeping with their husbands or ruining their vacations or whatever. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mayfair Witches for my Patreon.

Until things get down and dirty — not just sensual or half-naked but genuinely perverse — Mayfair Witches is doomed to feel like one of those sexy supernatural CW shows. Interview worked right out of the gate; Mayfair has a lot of work left to do.

I’ve decided to cover Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches for my Patreon, starting with my review of the series premiere.

But like I said, this is the climax, and it’s okay to get a little less nuanced and more bombastic overall. Creator Rolin Jones has constructed a remarkable show regardless, one that captures the essence of Anne Rice’s work while improving upon it, for its new era and medium, with every change it makes. I don’t know what I expected of Interview with the Vampire beyond “I hope I have a good time watching the sexy vampires,” but it delivered in every way I could have wanted, and many more I didn’t know I wanted till I got them. Interview is a beautiful and sparklingly intelligent show. It’s going to be hard to wait until next year for Season 2, but I know a vampire who could tell you a thing or two about the beauty of delayed gratification.

I reviewed the season finale of Interview with the Vampire for Decider. It’s up a week early online!

The only problem with Interview with the Vampire is that at a certain point you simply run out of superlatives. Like its contemporaries Andor and House of the Dragon, IWTV provides proof week in and week out that genre television rooted in nerd-beloved source material can be as smart, incisive, surprising, and rich as any of its more traditional prestige-TV counterparts. 

I reviewed last night’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

“I’m trying to think of something more fucked up than this.” Me too, Daniel Molloy, me too. Titled “A Vile Hunger for Your Hammering Heart” with the show’s typical baroque brio, the fifth episode of Interview with the Vampire is a troubling hour of television. It chronicles first the disintegrating sanity of the young vampire Claudia, then the traumatic event that forces her back home, then the final collapse of her surrogate family via the abusive tendencies of its miserable patriarch. It does all this while sacrificing none of the richness that has made the characters, and the show, so vivid and surprising all this time. 

I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

I think that’s the key thing about this episode, written by Eleanor Burgess and directed by Keith Powell, and about the show in general. Its ability to balance the thrills and chills and sex and blood and comedy of an over-the-top Gothic vampire romance with serious observations about race, wealth, addiction, unhappy relationships, and now de facto child abuse and the misery of teenagers is hugely impressive. It manages to deliver pretty much everything you’d want from a vampire show, and more besides. And now we have four core performances that are funny and empathetic and nasty and brilliant, from Bailey Bass as well as from Jacob Anderson, Sam Reid, and Eric Bogosian. 

Between Interview, Andor, and House of the Dragon, those of us who hunger and thirst for legitimately sophisticated nerd-genre storytelling are eating very, very well this Halloween season.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

The best way I can sum up Interview with the Vampire so far is that, like House of the Dragon and Andor, it’s what I once imagined nerd cultural hegemony might be like: smart, sharp, horny, campy, and at least a little bit unpleasant and disgusting — everything you might have wanted before mighty corporate machines figured out how to produce the stuff like they produce breakfast cereal. 

I reviewed last night’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

The sense of humor brought to this fine adaptation of Anne Rice’s goth classic by showrunner Rolin Jones, writers Jonathan Ceniceroz and Dave Harris, and ace TV director Alan Taylor is undoubtedly a pleasant surprise, but it’s one of many. Simply put, this show is a cavalcade of delights, some dark and some less so. Blood and horror exist on the same plane as sex and sensuality; flashes of piercing insight into the human condition rival those into the inhuman condition; sharp commentary on race, sexuality, and even the grim toll of the pandemic is there to be found alongside jokes about eating babies. In other words, this is good, good shit.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

All in all it’s a marvelously melodramatic production. The prose of creator Rolin Jones’s script is defiantly purple. The costumes and sets are lavish and decadent. Anderson and Reid are mesmerizingly attractive, a key component of Rice’s legendarium. Director and Game of Thrones vet Alan Taylor knows his way around torchlit period pieces, that’s for sure. Daniel Hart’s score is like something out of Old Hollywood. Hell, they even put ominous thunderclaps in the background during Lestat’s assault on the church and conversion of Louis into the undead. 

Of course, you have to be willing to go with all that kind of stuff to get anything out of the show. Which, I think, is a price of admission worth asking for, if not paying. Any show that’s really intent on adapting the vibe of Anne Rice’s sublimely arch, hypersensual books — even if it’s changing the time frame and, rather crucially to the story, the race of one of the protagonists — has to be willing to go there, to leave taste behind and go over the top with, well, pretty much everything. You can either stomach that sort of thing or not.

I certainly can. I’m excited to see a vampire show made with such evident craft and care, instead of the umpteenth show about teenage vampires trying to make it through Vampire High or whatever. I’m excited to see a vampire show that presents vampires as both thoroughly awful — whatever else he is, Lestat is an egomaniacal dickhead murderer — and completely irresistible once they have you in their clutches. I’m even excited to have a horror show on TV that is more about vibes than raw terror or pitch-black bleakness, one more indebted to Bram Stoker’s Dracula than 28 Days Later or Under the Skin. And I’m excited to see any show this relentlessly, bombastically horny. These are notes worth playing, and based on this performance, I’m willing to listen.

I reviewed the delightful series premiere of Interview with the Vampire for Decider.

Ian Brennan, Ryan Murphy, Evan Peters, Niecy Nash, Richard Jenkins, and their collaborators have created one of the most harrowing, most viscerally upsetting, television shows I’ve ever seen. And when they finally turn the violence against its primary perpetrator, they make it hurt, they make it hard to look at. In the end, there’s nothing glamorous about this dead man who caused the deaths of so many others, who shuffled and stumbled his way through life, whose presence at the center of a vortex of homophobia, racism, bad policing, bad medicine, bad parenting, and pervasive isolation tells us so much about how what this country values, and how it rewards those who fail to measure up. 

I reviewed the finale of Dahmer for Decider. I’m grateful to have taken on this difficult assignment.