There are all kinds of reasons why last night’s episode of Billions was the show’s first unmitigated artistic success, so naturally I’m going to start with the most minor and incidental: It quoted The Big Lebowski. And not in the way it usually quotes the touchstones of guy-beloved cinema, either, with one of the series’ machismo-obsessed characters calling themselves Keyser Soze Motherfucker or whatever. This was an honest-to-god homage in which it seems that they called one of their supporting characters Donnie just so they could refer to the beauty of nature “he loved so well” at his funeral, just like Walter Sobchak did when bidding Steve Buscemi’s character Donnie adieu in the Coen Bros. comedy classic. Shit, they even named this Donnie’s husband Walter! Any knucklehead could have had Wags or Axe or any of these other goons shout “this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass” or whatever, but it took real planning and a considered affinity for the material to work in a reference to Donnie’s gallows-humor funeral scene in a gallows-humor funeral scene. I didn’t know Billions had it in ’em!

I reviewed this week’s Billions, the show’s best episode so far, for the New York Observer.

I’m a reactive audience member when it comes to good TV. I hoot and holler, I gasp and curse, I laugh and cheer, and at the best of times I cry. Even so, it’s not often I get to the end of an episode and literally applaud. But that’s what I did when the closing credits rolled on this week’s installment of The Americans. Normally that’s a reaction reserved for crowded theaters where you’ve just watched a good movie on opening night, or seen the curtain come down on a play whose performers can, you know, actually hear you clap. This time it was just me, sitting in my living room, watching a TV show, spontaneously responding to a job well done.

I reviewed this week’s drum-tight episode of The Americans for the New York Observer.

“Is everything alright?” “No.” Hashtag: #SummarizeTheAmericansInFourWords. This exchange between Martha Hanson, the hapless administrative assistant who suffered the singular misfortune of working in the wrong FBI office at the wrong time, and Philip Jennings, the spy who seduced her, used her, and has now killed in her name, says pretty much all you need to know about The Americans, television’s most profoundly unhappy show. I mean “profoundly unhappy” in every sense of the phrase, by the way. Most everyone in the series is miserable, and the series’ misery runs deep, cuts deeper, and reveals the ugly buried truth about living a lie, whether personal or political.

I inexplicably forgot to link to this last week, but I’m reviewing The Americans for the New York Observer again this season. If it’s not the best show on television now, it’s a photo-finish.

“I wouldn’t be interested in the work of an artist if they didn’t suffer from debilitating anxiety,” Daniel Clowes says. “It’s part of the process.”

I interviewed Daniel Clowes about anxiety, religion, violence, the death of his best friend, and his new book Patience for the New York Observer.

Visually speaking, Kim’s face was the image that defined the episode. This began early, with a long-held look at her as she sits on her bed, listening to Jimmy serenade her answering machine with a reedy rendition of “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific. Saul’s a show that doesn’t mind sitting with a supporting character as she sits quietly and soaks in the goofball charm of its protagonist, a guy with whom at this point she’s both furious and, despite herself, infatuated. Using this as the payoff for her morning routine, during which it becomes increasingly apparent she was waiting for him to call despite having no intention of picking up, was a lovely idea, and director Michael Slovis’s execution was inspired.

I reviewed this week’s Better Call Saul for the New York Observer.

Home is where the horror is. That’s the underlying logic of This House Has People In It, which debuted with little fanfare at 4am Tuesday morning as part of Adult Swim’s elusive “Infomercials” initiative. The network, a ratings powerhouse which nonetheless airs some of the most ferociously experimental stuff on TV, used this horror-comedy-parody umbrella project to launch a genuine viral hit with last year’s smash sitcom satire Too Many Cooks. But its successor, Unedited Footage of a Bear, was the best and most brutal of the bunch—a send-up of medication commercials that rapidly devolved into one of the most frightening works of doppelgänger horror this side of Mulholland Drive, as well as an emotionally upsetting vision of how severe mental illness can hold entire families at its mercy.

Now AB Video Solutions and Wham City Comedy, the overlapping Baltimore art, music, and performance collectives who unleashed Unedited Footage, have returned with This House—an even more ambitious stab at the horror genre. Constructed as an assembled collection of surveillance-camera recordings of a seemingly ordinary blended family, the 11-minute movie takes place on the day of their son’s birthday, when his older sister’s…condition, let’s say, threatens to shatter the suburban tranquility forever. But the story spills beyond the confines of the video, into a website for “AB Surveillance Solutions” that’s packed with hidden links, videos, text files, images, and audio recordings that further flesh out the family’s plight. We don’t want to spoil the sick surprises, but they involve a mysterious ailment called Lynks Disease, a kids’ cartoon character named Boomy the Cat, an amateur sculptor with a hankering for clay and a dark secret, a whole lot of screaming, and a very special houseguest who’ll keep you from feeling comfortable in basements, bedrooms, and backyards for a long, long time. Sure enough, Reddit sleuths have been working round the clock to unearth every hidden horror.

We spoke with This House co-writers and executive producers Robby Rackleff, Alan Resnick, and Dina Kelberman—all of whom played multiple roles in its creation alongside fellow ABV members Ben O’Brien and Cricket Arrison, with Resnick making a cameo and serving as director, cinematographer, co-editor, and effects supervisor, Rackleff co-editing and co-starring as the family’s father, and Kelberman providing web design—about the video(s), the site(s), the superfans, and the reason suburban families provide such fertile territory for terror.

I wrote about This House Has People In It, which you should watch immediately, and interviewed its co-creators Alan Resnick, Robby Rackleff, and Dina Kelberman, for the New York Observer.

Which brings us back to both the nonexistent investigation into deaths incurred during the search and rescue attempt and Trump’s hang-‘em-high routine. Who’s to blame for the Bergdahl debacle? The Obama Administration certainly broke the law by not informing Congress of its intentions, though as Koenig points out this is hardly unprecedented where the invocation of executive authority is concerned. And pretending there’s no evidence anyone died because of Bergdahl’s actions when the truth is no one ever bothered to try to collect any is impossible to excuse. Civilian oversight of the military is vital to a democracy, even when those civilians are Republican congresscreeps. At the same time, the Administration lied to Congress because Congress, and the entire Republican governmental, political, and media apparatus, has made it a matter of course to deny Obama anything he wants, ever, as well as maintain an hysterical level of fear-mongering about the Gitmo detainees (whose detainment, by the way, is also completely illegal, though you don’t hear HASC complaining there) and terrorism generally. Distrust met with distrust, intransigence with mendacity, illegality with illegality, until traditional political action became impossible. The result: an escalating pattern of hatred of the political enemy and a precipitous loss of faith in the existing institutions to do anything about it. Thus, a market is created: Gee, if only someone whose hatred of the enemy and contempt for the institutions could, somehow, make America great again.

How the battle over Bowe Bergdahl prefigured the rise of Trump: this week in my review of Serial.

The Jimmy half of Better Call Saul is very good, sure. But the Mike half of Better Call Saul feels like the onset of a panic attack. You can feel it creeping up on you like have your back turned on a menacing stranger, one who’s tracked you down and is walking his way toward you, quiet and full of bad intent. Certainly that’s how I felt as I watched the final scene of “Rebecca,” this week’s episode. As Mike Ehrmantraut sat with his back to the door of his favorite diner, Hector Salamanca materialized from the debris where Breaking Bad left him to gently request that the ex-cop help get his nephew Tuco off the hook. Nothing overtly threatening about it, of course, no visible stick to go with the carrots of a kindly disposition and a bribe of $5,000. Tio Salamanca doesn’t even bat an eyelash when Mike parries back his blandishments with deadpan disinterest: “You see what I’m getting at?” “Not really.” “I would like for you to tell the police that the gun was yours.” “Would you.” No, all the menace comes from the implications of putting these two men, these two murderers, in close proximity. We know where their stories end up, but that does nothing to lessen the tension. Rather, our knowledge increases it, investing the current moment with our foreknowledge of all the awful moments to come.

I wrote about this week’s Better Call Saul, a very sophisticated hour of television, for the New York Observer.

Coincidentally or not, this was the first episode of Billions to feature dialogue I’ll remember after the closing credits roll. Hall to Axe when they uncover Pouch’s alleged treachery: “Don’t be surprised. On a long enough timeline, everyone you know will turn against you.” Chuck to Wendy, after she snaps at him for grousing about Axe: “Sometimes I wish I were your patient, because then maybe I would get a sympathetic ear every time I’m not my absolute best self 24 hours a day.” Chuck to Brian on framing an innocent man: “There are no innocent men. Not on Wall Street.” Alternately aphoristic and insightful, and occasionally both, a few more lines like these per episode would do wonders for Billions, which has been both smart (most of Chuck and Wendy’s discussions of their imperfect but happy partnership-of-equals marriage) and spectacularly stupid (that horrendous dogshit speech from early in the run) in dialogue-driven scenes.

Will it ever develop into a great show, though? I mean, who can say. There’s still something ersatz about it, perhaps because of how many cast members hail from other, better prestige-drama shows; Halt and Catch Fire and The Leftovers both grew enormously over time, but neither show had the supergroup cast that this one does, which makes its disappointments keener. But a few more episodes like this and the show will be too entertaining to be disappointed about.

I reviewed this week’s Billions, one of the season’s better episodes, for the New York Observer.

Mike, meanwhile, shuffled his way into a bonafide Breaking Bad prequel. Our first guest: Lawson, Deadwood actor Jim Beaver’s folksy and efficient gun dealer, years before selling Walter White his series-ending machine gun. His scene with Mike drops a major reveal—the old man’s a Vietnam vet—and is chilling for its casual, workaday vocabulary regarding machines designed only for killing. “Too much gun,” Mike worries about one particularly large rifle. “For most applications, I’d tend to agree,” Lawson replies, as if they’re discussing which iPhone model gets the most bang for the buck. The two men respect each other for their shared calm demeanor and knowledge of the trade; given that the trade is murder, the ease with which an ex-cop and veteran can pick it up doubles as political commentary.

I reviewed this week’s better-balanced Better Call Saul for the New York Observer.

Where are Chuck and Wendy Rhoades’ kids? They’re around after school, or so we’ve been told. Their paintings decorate the walls of the Rhoades’ kitchen. IMDB says they’ve been cast, which probably means we actually saw them for a scene or two already. But in an episode so focused on how the behavior and fortune of Bobby and Lara Axelrod affects their children, the on-screen absence of the Rhoades rugrats feels like a deliberate and pointed omission. For all that Chuck sees Bobby as a monster fucking the masses out of their just rewards, only one of those two men spends time with his family.

The question of “The Punch,” this week’s episode of Billions, is whether that difference actually makes a difference. Bobby begins the episode by tracking down and decking a neighbor who drove his children home from an arcade drunk, then spends the rest of the hour frantically trying to fend off both the legal ramifications and Lara’s attempts to stop spoiling them. Bobby wants them spoiled, wants them to enjoy the benefits of the carefree life he struggled to provide them, one neither he nor Lara experienced growing up. And while he’s embarrassed about his assault on the DUI dickhead, that’s outweighed by his love of being seen by his kids as a protector. Look no further than his midnight “rescue” of the boys from the tough-love outdoor camp Lara sent them to for proof of that. In that light, Axe’s ability to spend time with this children is hardly a blessing.

I reviewed this week’s family-focused episode of Billions, on which the characters remain distressingly opaque, for the New York Observer.

Serial Season Two is a lot like the Afghanistan peace process, actually. Good intentions? Check. Grand plans? Check. The slow collapse of both due to institutional unsuitability to the task at hand? Check. There’s a great story to be told about the capture and release of Bowe Bergdahl. There’s a great story to be told about the decade-plus-long attempt to get us out of the mess we made in the country where he was captured. There’s just not a great story to be had by wedging the latter into the former on a podcast.

I reviewed this week’s rambling episode of Serial for the New York Observer.

Better Call Saul is two of the best shows on TV right now. One of them is a subtle, period workplace drama about a con man trying desperately to go straight but finding his old ways too lucrative to avoid employing in his new life too. The other is an ominous slow-burn thriller about a retired cop with the eyes of a Methuselah and the voice of a mausoleum door, slowly being drawn into a life of crime he’ll be better at than anything he was before, but which will inevitably destroy him, body and soul. If AMC put these two shows on back to back, it’d have a hell of a programming block on its hands. But if it ran the period workplace drama while some other network played the doom-laden quiet-man crime thriller in the same time slot…well, I know which one I’d DVR and which one I’d watch live.

I reviewed this week’s bifurcated Better Call Saul for the New York Observer.

Better Call Saul has a Mike problem. Granted, this is what Marlo Stanfield from The Wire would refer to as “one of them good problems,” but a problem it remains. Simply put: No matter how thoughtfully composed the shots, no matter how refined the acting from the show’s cast of largely comic talents gone dramatic with excellent results, no matter how strong a character Jimmy McGill remains—when Jonathan Banks is on screen as Mike Ehrmantraut, there’s no one else you’d rather be watching.

I reviewed this week’s Better Call Saul for the New York Observer.

Matthew Goode’s performance does Henry no favors either. With the exception of his touching breakdown after the death of his friend in a car crash, he’s stuck on store-brand Young Hugh Grant mode, without the endearingly irritating stammer. His allegedly charming and irresistible character delivers lines like “I’m hot, I’m cold, I can barely breathe, and it’s all because of you” as if reading them from cue cards. Compare this to the quiet, aching intensity of Dan Stevens’s Matthew Crawley the night before his wedding to Mary, when he told her “I would never be happy with anyone else as long as you walked the earth”; the line exploded like an atom bomb of absolute devotion, not some half-assed ode to teenage twitterpation.

Most frustrating of all is the fact that none of this would have been necessary had Julian Fellowes simply spent the past three seasons taking the pieces he already had on hand and building toward their eventual assembly. In other words, it is madness, madness, that Tom and Mary never got together. I mean really, did no one involved with this production see this? Both characters lost their star-crossed spouses to sudden death at tragically young ages—when the actors playing them moved on for greener pastures, that is. In so doing, Dan Stevens and Jessica Brown Findlay gave Fellowes a gift he’d never have gotten had only one of them ankled the show: a symmetrical vacuum the surviving characters could easily, artfully fill. Sure, it would have been tough to swallow at first. But after this season especially, featuring scene after scene depicting Tom and Mary’s abiding friendship and respect—not to mention their explosive argument after she sabotages Edith’s engagement, overflowing with the kind of anger only people who truly love each other can generate—can anyone deny the chemistry was there? Yet the gift went unopened, the chemical reaction uninitiated. Fellowes had years to build them up, but instead we got Tony Gillingham and Miss Bunting and Henry freaking Talbot. Madness. Madness!

And yet! Frustrating though the conclusion to Mary’s completely theoretical grand romance with Henry may have been, it wasn’t enough to ruin what surrounded it: scene after scene of payoff for longstanding storylines, giving a sizeable segment of the cast their best material in literally years.

I reviewed last night’s big big big Downton Abbey for the New York Observer. I did not wind up where I thought I would with this one.

I almost never say this kind of thing, but I believe my writing on Downton Abbey is among my best. Check it out, maybe you will too.

To be blunt, why would Wendy do something so stupid? On a show full of “the smartest guy in the room”s, she may very well bethe smartest guy in any of the rooms, Bobby’s savant-like mastery of the market notwithstanding. Surely she can see that the last place she should be with the multibillionaire her federal attorney husband is trying to put behind bars is in a pool while in the nude. The most reasonable supposition is that she did it because the show needed her to, to provide Axe with the ammo he’ll need to fight Chuck off as the season progresses. If we’re being generous, though, you could see this not as a plot-hammer goof, but as a deliberate indictment. In this line of thinking, Wendy’s so keen on proving herself perfectly neutral, impossible to intimidate, and a better student of Axe and Chuck’s psyches than Axe and Chuck themselves that she doesn’t even see how idiotic what she’s doing really is. That’s certainly the kind of trap Axe, who’s legendary for always thinking like a dozen steps ahead of anyone else, would set for her. I just wish it didn’t feel like such an out-of-character misstep for her to fall for it.

I reviewed last night’s Billions for the New York Observer. Like, I get what they’re up to, but I don’t think it’s working.

This time, we’re not just counting on fellow soldiers and childhood friends to explain just how ill-suited Bowe and his delusions of heroic grandeur were to army life—we’ve got the man himself. In an interview with screenwriter Mark Boal, Bergdahl describes himself as “lost in the fantasy” of being a soldier—not the modern-day kind, the only variety actually on offer, but a mythologized hybrid of soldiers from World War II, the 1800s, the era of the samurai, and the completely fictional world of kung-fu flicks. Bergdahl’s conception of the soldier’s life was entirely based around outmoded, if not outright invented, ideas of valor and honor. Bowe realizes his viewpoint was not realistic, but sticks with it nonetheless, insisting that the conditions he found unacceptable “shouldn’t be acceptable to anyone.” And since he believes in the bushido code, he doesn’t take any of the more readily traveled roads available to him, from speaking with an embedded reporter (not soldierly enough) to contacting any one of the dozens of officers at the forward operating base he was at days before he wandered off (not heroic enough). Reality had disappointed him, and the ideas he’d generate to reclaim his fantasy would be invariably grandiose—and doomed to failure.

What better writer to give voice to this childlike view than the philosopher queen of take-my-ball-and-go-home right-wing extremism, Ayn Rand? Bergdahl’s friends groan to Koenig as they recall a group email he sent out just prior to his departure, titled “Who Is John Galt?” and cribbing extensively from the Objectivist ur-text Atlas Shrugged, demanding that institutions shape themselves around men of worth, not the other way around. A copy of the novel winds up arriving at his old friend Kim’s house, along with his valuables, days after his disappearance. It’s a shame, in a way, that Bergdahl didn’t go into politics, where Objectivism is often a ticket to the august ranks of the United States Senate and a subsequent failed mid-tier presidential primary campaign. Instead, he went into the Army and “went Galt” when the system failed him, demanding it all grind to a halt in his service. The results were entirely predictable.

I reviewed the second installment in last week’s Serial doubleheader for the New York Observer.

Over the episode’s relatively short running time of 38 minutes, Koenig presents a litany of first-hand testimony to Bergdahl’s unique psychology. She begins with the many, many soldiers who highly doubt his retrospective rationale for running away from his post, arguing he had years to cook up this flattering story. Some proffer an alternate theory: According to them, Bergdahl sometimes wondered aloud about faking his death, going AWOL, running off to Pakistan, making his way to India, joining the Russian mafia, working his way to the top as a mercenary and hitman, killing the boss, and taking over. Hey, he’s nothing if not ambitious! In the end the story is even less credible and logistically possible than Bergdahl’s version, but it speaks to his overwhelming desire to be seen as a great warrior, a self-made ubermensch.

If this version of Bergdahl is a bit on the Bane side, interviews with earlier acquaintances paint him as more of a Batman type. Growing up isolated and homeschooled on a remote farm, Bergdahl eventually fell in with a slightly artsy crowd clustered around on a performing arts center and teahouse in a nearby town. There he learned how to fence, became famous among his circle for testing his own mettle (seeing how long he could go without speaking, punching trees and rocks to strengthen his hands), and began amassing makeshift weapons to protect his little clique in the event of…god knows what. His friends describe him as a young man obsessed with the concept of virtue and determined to arrive at his own definition rather than follow someone else’s. What he came up with—basically, you can only be a good person if you’re doing everything in your power to solve any problem in the world that you can observe—could be considered crippling in its impossibility to implement…if your goal really was to ameliorate every problem you encounter. If your goal is to be seen as the kind of man who does that, by both yourself and others, then the course is a bit clearer. For Bergdahl, who friends say wanted to be seen as “a silent protector” of the innocent, it was plain as day.

I reviewed the first of last week’s two, count ‘em two, episodes of Serial for the New York Observer.

Few prestige dramas since the term was coined have made as much use of the quiet as Better Call Saul, which returned last night with its Season Two premiere, “Switch.” Considering its status as the can’t-miss prequel to one of the era’s most explosive shows, Breaking Bad, this is something of a surprise. That series didn’t mind silence, of course, but it was always a silence freighted with the expectation of eventual explosion—the hiss of a fuse before the dynamite blows. Pretty much from the start, BCS co-creators and BB honchos Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have dwelled in the other end of the dynamic range. Rather than recreate the rollercoaster rise and fall of Heisenberg in all its white-knuckle tension and tumult, they’ve been telling the story of Jimmy McGill’s transformation into Saul Goodman in half-muted slow motion. He’s a small man with small dreams, the kind that are shattered by harsh words and hopelessness rather than bombs and bullets. The tonal shift is is dramatic, and given how easy it would have been to cash in with Breaking Bad Part Deux–level mayhem (Fear the Walking Dead, anyone?), creatively courageous.

I reviewed the season premiere of Better Call Saul for the New York Observer, where I’ll be covering the show this year. I snuck my Top 10 TV Shows of 2015 in there too.