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.

Not all of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims died. No, not all of them. I’m not even talking about the escapees — Tracy Edwards, Ronald Flowers, Somsack Sinthasomphone, the jogger who dodged his baseball bat. I’m talking about his slain victims’ families, his neighbors, even his own family, even the entire city of Milwaukee. “The Bogeyman,” once again directed by Jennifer Lynch from a script by Ian Brennan, David McMillan, and Reilly Smith, depicts the many ways in which Dahmer haunted all these people even while safely behind bars. (Safely for them, physically speaking, if not for himself, but we’ll get to that.) They lived on, but — as he’d longed to do with his actual, physical victims — he got into their heads, permanently.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Dahmer for Decider.

For Lionel, though, clinging to the belief that his son was insane when he committed his crimes is important because, for a long while at least, he lives in terror of the idea that he was in some way responsible for it all himself. When Jeff brings up the way Lionel used to help him collect and dissect roadkill, Lionel literally starts laughing in comical outrage over the idea. “You ain’t gonna lay this on me, no!” he says. “It’s not my fault! I didn’t do this! I was a good dad to you!” Of course he wants to believe this. Who wouldn’t, in his position?

I reviewed the eighth episode of Dahmer for Decider.

“I called y’all for months! Now y’all finally came and it’s too late! You came too late!” 

That would be the first time during this episode of Dahmer that I burst into tears.

“You knew he was a monster.”

“I knew. But nobody heard me.”

“I hear you, Glenda.”

That would be the last time during this episode of Dahmer that I burst into tears.

But there were times in between, and times afterwards, times after the episode ended and left me alone with what I’d just seen. Once again directed by Jennifer Lynch, from a script by co-creator Ian Brennan, Janet Mock, and David McMillan, this installment — titled “Cassandra,” after the prophetic figure from Greek mythology doomed to see the future without anyone every listening to her about it — is the most emotionally taxing thing I’ve seen on television all year. In terms of my visceral reaction to it, it’s one of the most emotionally taxing things I’ve seen on television ever.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Dahmer for Decider.

Dahmer may be the most grueling drama I’ve ever covered, and its sixth episode, “Silenced,” is one of the saddest hours of television I’ve ever seen. Anchored by a tremendous, heartfelt, achingly vulnerable performance by deaf actor and former reality TV star Rodney Burford, it offers the corrective that Dahmer has needed by giving one of the killer’s victims his own story, then slams the door on it, as you knew it must. That knowledge does not soften the blow one bit.

I reviewed episode six of Dahmer for Decider.

It’s only by cruising through life on Easy mode due to his race and gender — despite his outcast status, despite his closeted sexuality, despite his unspeakable urges, despite his overall taciturn and unlikeable demeanor — that Jeff got away with everything he got away with for as long as he did. Looked at with clear eyes, his life is just one long chain of fuck-ups. If he were a different color, if his victims were a different color, that chain might have been cut short much, much earlier.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dahmer for Decider.

There are three shots from this episode that are going to stay with me, I think. The first is Jeff in the bathroom mirror, covered in blood, accompanied by a menacing sting from the excellent score by art-rock musicians Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The second is the moment where a drunken Jeff raises his cup of beer in a toast to the test of strength at the fair, emblazoned with phrases like “HE MAN” and “GOOD BOY,” phrases that mean more to him than anyone could have ever known. The third, probably obviously, is when he kisses the severed head through the plastic at the end of the episode. The man he murdered is now his keepsake, his secret. And many more men and boys will die before the secret is out. 

I reviewed the fourth episode of Dahmer for Decider.

We’re only three episodes deep into Dahmer’s ten-episode run, and already the accrual of brutal, depressing incidents has become difficult to endure. The fantastic, committed performances of Evan Peters as Jeffrey and Richard Jenkins and Penelope Ann Miller as his parents manage to make everything both better and worse. These are real, recognizable people with real, recognizable hopes and fears — the scene in which an astonished, joyful Joyce is offered a job counseling women at the center where she was once a patient is a genuinely touching moment of kindness towards an otherwise resolutely unpleasant, if very ill, person — that Jeffrey’s deeds will pulverize as surely as his hammer smashed those bones. It’s not going to be easy to watch, but then, that’s the point.

I reviewed the third episode of Dahmer for Decider.

Once again, cowriters Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy, led by director Clement Virgo, create a gruesome portrait of a broken person who can only find wholeness by breaking other people, quite literally down into their constituent body parts. He is both sad and contemptible, a shattered person who finds his meager pleasures only in shattering other people. The degree of difficulty inherent in handling this material is astronomical, but so far, they’ve pulled it off. I’m darkly excited to see where this ten-episode limited series goes. I’m anxious. I’m frightened. I’m sick. I’m watching good television.

I reviewed the second episode of Dahmer for Decider.

It’s with all this in mind that I approached TV superproducer/auteur Ryan Murphy’s stab at the material (no pun intended) with trepidation. Murphy is perhaps the most puzzling of all the big-name New Golden Age of TV figures. He’s responsible for American Crime Story, which in three distinct seasons, each overseen by different creators, established itself as probably the best anthology series in television history. He’s also responsible for…well, for everything else he’s done, from Glee to American Horror Story. These productions did not fill me with confidence; nor did the possibility that, as an attempt to score easy points with the audience, this version of Dahmer’s story would be treated as some sort of corrective to earlier interpretations, painting him as an unmitigated and unrepentant monster while showing little interest in what made him what he was and how he struggled with it. I mean, Monster is in the subtitle, or title, depending on your point of view. Can you blame me?

So I’m happy, if that’s the right word, to report that Ryan Murphy and his co-creator Ian Brennan’s Dahmer is as good an artistic take on Dahmer’s life and crimes as I’ve yet seen. Directed by TV veteran Carl Franklin, the first episode alone brought me to tears. Dahmer is treated as appropriately pathetic, but the viciousness of his crimes is not candy-coated. It’s clear that he knows something’s wrong with him, but he’s past the point of trying to do anything to stop it, and it’s other people — almost entirely people of color — who pay the price. 

I reviewed the first episode of Dahmer for Decider.

There’s an old short story by Clive Barker, the creator of Pinhead and the writer-director of Hellraiser, that I think about a lot. It’s called “Pig Blood Blues,” and you can read a pretty beautiful comics adaptation by Chuck Wagner, Fred Burke, and Scott Hampton right here. Go ahead, take a few minutes, I’ll be here when you get back.

Anyway, old Clive, he wrote a line in this story that was frequently on my mind while watching this final episode of Raised by Wolves’ extraordinary second season. The line goes like this—

“This is the state of the beast…to eat and be eaten.”

I won’t get into who in the story says it and why—that’s for you to discover—but I will say that there’s something so perfectly fatalistic in that line, something that sums up so much of what goes on in this season finale. The beast, of course, is humankind, and it’s their—our—fate to kill each other until some larger force comes to kill us all.

I reviewed the season finale of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

So we’re left with a ragtag band of survivors, adult and child, android and human, atheist and believer, running around trying to figure out how to save themselves from a giant tentacled serpent, an acid sea full of humanoid creatures, and an ancient alien intelligence that seems to want them all dead. I can’t be the only person reminded of Game of Thrones (and not just because of the similarities between the two shows’ scores), in which various fabulously wealthy families carried on killing each other while a threat to all life grew more and more powerful, the danger more and more urgent. Good thing these are only stories on TV, right?

Right?

I reviewed last week’s episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Raised by Wolves is, among many things, a work of ferocious body horror. The human—and android—body is a grotesque battlefield on this show—bleeding white goo, erupting into hideous tumors, sprouting growths that surround the victim like a cocoon, giving birth through multiple orifices, removing and consuming weaponized eyeballs, evolving and devolving into terrifying creatures, you name it. At the climax of this episode, aptly titled “The Tree,” it seems like we have a brand new body-horror image to add to the list: Sue’s transformation into a fucking tree.

I reviewed today’s episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.