I’m speculating like crazy, because “The Lowdown” is a show designed to get you worked up. Lee is constantly escaping jams by the skin of his teeth, only to return home to his growing pile of personal calamities. The high-anxiety presence of Ginger as his partner in crime-fighting only adds to show’s race-against-the-clock energy.

The result makes you feel like you’re watching your favorite team’s running back dodge an entire defensive line in a last-ditch attempt to score a game-winning, season-saving touchdown: Sure, it isn’t actually you out there on the field, but for the minutes you’re watching, it can sure feel like it. The same is true of watching Lee careen around Tulsa in his beat-up white van, causing commotions and dodging disasters like a human Looney Tunes character. That anvil could drop any minute, and you’re right there with him as he races to avoid it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Lowdown for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

But that’s Lee for you, making friends wherever he goes. He almost instantaneously strikes up a rapport with a recently fired corrections officer with the improbable name of Chili Franks (a delightfully unhinged Paul Schneider). His hair is a thistle of frosted tips, his uniform is still on regardless of his actual employment status, he has a reputation for being a depressive sort … and he makes the best cheeseburgers you’ve ever had. Or so he insists, anyway, when he invites Lee back to his place to keep their conversation going.

By now, Lee has learned that the officer who menaced him and Ginger is named McMann — he saw a shirtless photo of him in a charity calendar. (The guy’s a slab of beef.) Over a long, drunken, cringe-inducing evening, Chili tells Lee that McMann is the unofficial boss of the guards and fired him for reasons he doesn’t specify.

At one point, Chili grabs a shotgun and appears ready to kill himself over it. But when Lee reveals he’s a reporter out to take powerful people like McMann down, Chili suggests they go out for more beers and instead drives Lee to McMann’s house. The ex-guard sees this as his chance to get back in the boss’s good graces.

In the episode’s funniest sight gag, Lee flees into the trees surrounding McMann’s house, dodging shotgun blasts … only to discover that every tree he hides behind has a motion-activated floodlight rigged to it, revealing his location over and over and over. It’s like something out of “Coyote vs. Acme.”

I reviewed the second of tonight’s two episodes of The Lowdown for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

But Harjo is also an entertainer. The mystery of Mekko and Ginger is instantly engaging, and the jokes fly from every direction. I can’t decide if my favorite is the conversation between Lee and his lawyer neighbor, Dan (Macon Blair), about Dan’s “throuple trouble,” or Ginger ending an angry telephone call with a client photographed with cocaine all over his face with an incongruous “I love you too.”

Actually, no, scrap that: I’m giving it to Ginger, because Gilpin is the best actor on television. She never makes a boring, predictable or unnatural choice, and she is good in everything she has ever been in, elevating shows by dint of her presence in them. After Jeanne Tripplehorn’s formidable and complex romantic foil for Lee in Season 1, Gilpin has a tough act to follow. But she and Jones, as Lee Senior, are the kind of performers who can power “The Lowdown” to new heights.

I’m covering The Lowdown for the New York Times this season, starting with my review of the first half of tonight’s two-episode Season 2 premiere.

In addition to interrogating Saddam, John is eventually brought in to share his findings with President Bush. How did it feel to be in those two rooms with those two people?

NIXON I’m one of the few people who actually shook the hand of both President George W. Bush and President Saddam Hussein. If I had one that I’d rather hang out with, it would probably be Saddam Hussein. I came away liking him a lot more than Bush.

But I found there were a lot of similarities between them. They’re surrounded by an inner circle that basically isolates them from the real world, so much so that they really are out of touch with reality. A week before the American Army’s going to end his reign, Saddam is working on a novel and asking Tariq Aziz, “Hey, let me know what you think of this draft — I think it’s pretty good.”

KINNAMAN Saddam thought 9/11 was going to bring the U.S. and Iraq closer because it was clear they had a common enemy. To hear that from Saddam is the biggest indictment of all the motivations of going to war with Iraq, because it just shows how 100 percent wrong those reasons were, especially in motivating the American people on a false premise. It’s terrifying how the men in these positions have such a shallow understanding of what’s actually going on in the regions of the world where they’re wielding their power.

[Smiling] Fortunately, we now have leadership that is so much more mature and thoughtful and are really just thinking of the common good of the entirety of the human race. I’m so glad we’ve evolved as a society, and that we’re finally past these petty tyrants.

I interviewed actor Joel Kinnaman and former CIA analyst John Nixon about High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam, Kinnaman’s new series dramatizing Nixon’s identification and interrogation of Saddam Hussein following his capture by American forces, for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

SPOILERS AHEAD

Tragedy ends the episode, and the season. Depressed, alone, confined to her quarters and cruelly force-fed after refusing to eat, the pregnant Queen Helaena throws herself from the palace window onto the spikes below. Her suicide is crosscut with footage of Tumbleton’s casualties as meanwhile her mother, Alicent, somewhere far away, watches as a flight of moths takes off around her — one last visit, perhaps, from a daughter who loved the beauty of insects and hated the ugliness of people. An achingly mournful piece by the composer Ramin Djawadi accompanies all these images. The sadness of it all, the sights and sounds of pain and waste, made me cry.

The episode is aided by some of the cast’s strongest work to date, with Matt Smith exploring the outer limits of Daemon’s tolerance for violence, Freddie Fox’s Gwayne emerging as a desperate voice of reason and Phia Saban embodying Helaena’s anger and misery. But this is Emma D’Arcy’s episode. Resplendent and imposing in Rhaenyra’s evil-queen get-up — a visual makeover that echoes her psychological transformation into a much more frightening kind of ruler — D’Arcy all but physically vibrates with the Black Queen’s barely contained fury and self-regard.

I reviewed the overwhelming season finale of House of the Dragon for the New York Times. I watched this a few days ago and woke up with the music from the final sequence stuck in my head the next morning. This one lingered with me.

With Corlys in Ormund’s clutches (his severed finger is sent to Rhaenyra as a macabre warning), Mysaria has become Rhaenyra’s right hand. Constantly at cross purposes with her ex-lover Daemon and rejected by the common folk for whom she is a self-styled champion, the former prostitute falls back on the familiar. Just watch Rhaenyra during their last scene together — see how magnetically her gaze, and her desire, is drawn to Mysaria. Even though Rhaenyra knows the White Worm has manipulated her against her own husband, the two fall into bed together. I’m sure it’s a pleasant diversion for Rhaenyra, but make no mistake, it is a diversion.

I reviewed tonight’s House of the Dragon for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Just before he embarks on his final, fatal campaign, Criston daydreams of Alicent singing songs of his death. He wraps her favor around his sword hilt as he makes his last stand. I was surprised she was still so close to his mind.

I don’t know, man. I’ve been in love a small handful of times, and it’s very hard to think about anything else. The people you think about when the end is near are the people you love. He doesn’t have a father, a mother, siblings, a wife, children. What has this man loved? Alicent is the only true thing he’s loved. It doesn’t feel surprising to me that she’s so prevalent in his final moments.

I interviewed actor Fabien Frankel, who plays Ser Criston Cole on House of the Dragon, for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Rhaenyra Targaryen has the better claim to the Iron Throne of Westeros than her rival half brother Aegon. She is the better human being, not that this is a high bar to clear. But is she any better at the job?

This is the trick “House of the Dragon” has pulled, on both the realm and the audience. Everyone’s focus, including Rhaenyra’s own, has been on the fact that she is a good person (relatively speaking) with a good claim. Neither, however, guarantees she will be a good queen. As it turns out, she’s kind of terrible at it.

I reviewed last night’s House of the Dragon for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

“Nobody ever wins a fight.” Dalton, the philosophical bouncer played by Patrick Swayze in the 1989 cult classic “Road House,” offers these words of wisdom when he checks himself into the hospital with a knife wound. He knows whereof he speaks.

When it comes to the Dance of the Dragons, it seems Dalton is right. In this week’s episode of “House of the Dragon,” the war is not going well — not for the Blacks; not for the Greens; not for gold cloaks, white-armored kingsguard or blue-eyed princes; not for anyone. Knowing that the dragons are all long vanished by the events of “Game of Thrones” has given us a clue about the end result already, but right now, it truly does feel as if nobody were going to win this war.

I reviewed tonight’s House of the Dragon for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Daemon Targaryen is a hard man. He has left a trail of dead enemies across the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros and done it with a smirk on his face. His preferred tactic of negotiation is “take it or leave it.” It is exceedingly rare for him to display any negative emotion at all that doesn’t end in violence or its implied threat.

It’s with this Daemon in mind that we watch him encounter his daughter Rhaena in the wilds of the Vale. Daemon’s dragon, Caraxes, leads him right to the cave where Rhaena’s own dragon, Sheepstealer, has made its lair. Sheepstealer’s disastrous rampage through the Battle of the Gullet helped drive Queen Rhaenyra’s son Jace to his death, and she wants its rider brought to justice. Now Daemon knows the horrible truth: To avenge Rhaenyra’s child, he would have to sacrifice his own.

“No,” he gasps, doubling over. The reaction staggered me nearly as much as the revelation staggers the Rogue Prince. He has displayed a devil-may-care attitude all season long, but it turns out the devil does care after all. 

I reviewed this week’s House of the Dragon for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

The composer Ramin Djawadi has been working in Westeros since 2011. First on “Game of Thrones” and now on “House of the Dragon” — which now uses a souped-up version of its predecessor’s famously rousing opening theme — Djawadi has crafted hours of music tailored to the setting’s many disparate cultures, characters, environments and emotions. His work so far this season bears special attention: He has given each of the three episodes its own sonic signature.

In the season premiere, a low, threatening synth line conveyed the horror-movie horror of the Battle of the Gullet. In the second episode, insistent strings built in a swirling crescendo that never seemed to resolve, adding tension and dread to the fall of King’s Landing to Rhaenyra’s invading dragons.

Now Rhaenyra sits on the Iron Throne, Queen of the Seven Kingdoms … and her sonic signature is a repeated, percussive, distracting sound, an ominous bong halfway between a bell being struck and someone punching the strings of a piano. In this episode it can be heard again and again, when Rhaenyra is faced with an insurmountable challenge, an unexpected obstacle or a reminder of the fragility of her rule.

As if to reinforce that this “music” represents the tumult in her head, at several points we see that Rhaenyra is straight-up hearing things. Murmurs, whispers, the roar of a distant crowd or the low voices of a nearby one — these, too, provide an auditory window into the mind of the Black Queen. She even has a full-blown hallucination of her dead son Jacaerys, bong included.

… Is that good?

I reviewed last night’s House of the Dragon for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

“What have you done? Jace. Jace! What have you done? How could you? How could you do this to me? Answer me!”

Like the bereaved King David crying “O Absalom, my son!” repeatedly in his despair, Queen Rhaenyra is facing a grief so total that her brain short-circuits and runs on a loop. As she looks at the corpse of her son and heir, Jacaerys, all she can do is upbraid him over and over, like the disappointed parent she is. But disappointment doesn’t come near to what she’s feeling. Devastation is more like it.

Rhaenyra is bedridden with sorrow when her husband, Prince Daemon, returns from the Riverlands after hearing the news. To him, she spells out the grim absurdity of her situation: “The boys who clung to me, who hid their little faces in my skirts, dead, so that I may sit upon a throne of swords?” She has lost two sons, Luke and Jace, to her cause. To fight on seems pointless.

“Will you let them die in vain?” Daemon responds.

I reviewed tonight’s House of the Dragon for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

From its opening moments, something is different about this episode of “House of the Dragon.” The composer Ramin Djawadi adds several extra measures of nothing but pounding drums to the start of his main title theme. When the story opens and the score kicks in, the dominant sound is not stirring strings but a recurring, sinister synth hook, so low in the bass register that it’s practically chthonic. The sonic symbolism is not subtle. This is the sound of all-out war.

I reviewed last night’s premiere of House of the Dragon for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Season 2 of HBO’s epic “Game of Thrones” prequel “House of the Dragon” ended with massive battles brewing on land, sea and sky between the warring factions of House Targaryen, the royal family of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The Dance of the Dragons has begun.

But with a cast of characters this sprawling, their many schemes, betrayals and furtive alliances can be hard to keep track of — let alone remember after nearly two years since the show last aired. Ahead of the Season 3 premiere on Sunday, here is a refresher on the battle lines and secret pacts that have been drawn for the conflagration to come.

I wrote a primer on House of the Dragon Season 3 for the New York Times, one of several places I’ll be covering the show this season. (Gift link!)

When the rooftop watch party for the Fourth of July fireworks finally commences, the day’s darkest events are written all over the faces of McKay, Mohan, Santos, Javadi, Mel and especially Nurse Perlah. She sobs in Dana’s arms while they all watch the city’s big celebratory display. No one is smiling. No one is feeling lifted after a day of death, depositions and deportations. With a patient and a nurse in ICE custody, no one looks proud to be an American, where, to paraphrase lyrics by the MAGA favorite Lee Greenwood, at least they know they’re free.

The multicolored lights of the fireworks shine down on faces uncertain about the future of the country being celebrated. Their uncertainty is sadly familiar, the opposite of the assurance Robby tries to make himself and the baby feel. “Everything’s going to be just fine,” he said. No one can know that for sure.

I did say there was catharsis as well as pain, though, and that’s where final scene comes in. After the action fades out on Robby and the baby, as the credits begin to roll, we hear crowd noises and then voices, singing the opening lines of Alanis Morissette’s poison-pen classic “You Oughta Know.” It’s Santos and Mel, out doing karaoke together and really going for it.

Are they note-perfect? No, but a good karaoke performance isn’t about perfection; it’s about commitment. As Mel and Santos thrash and scream and whip their hair around — Mel even loses the glasses! — they’re giving the most you can ask of anyone, on a karaoke stage or anywhere: their all. They do the same in the hospital, but considering the day these two have had, I hope they are having too much fun to think about it.

I reviewed the season finale of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

But I keep coming back to Dr. Robby’s statement “I don’t know if I want to be here anymore.” Depression is a dark journey, and passive suicidal ideation is one of the hardest stretches of road you’ll find on it. Yet it is strangely validating to hear sadness this profound come out of the mouth of such a mensch. This is a disease to which no one, not even the Superman of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center, is immune.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Pitt Season 2 for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

We have come to it at last. In episode after episode, Dr. Michael Robinavitch has dropped hints, given warning signs and generally worried his friends and colleagues with his increasingly frazzled demeanor. Now, in this episode’s cliffhanger moment, he says what everyone has been thinking: His impending sabbatical might be permanent.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

“The Pitt” does not work the way most dramas do. It’s a medical procedural, but it treats that venerable TV genre like the intense opening reel of “Saving Private Ryan.” The action is visceral, intense, virtually constant and realistically random; there’s rarely a cohesive theme or narrative progression to be constructed from each episode’s pile of unconnected cases.

The show’s near-real-time gimmick, moreover, dictates the pace at which the staffers of the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center grow and change while we watch. We follow these people during a busy shift on a single day, not over the course of weeks or months. Amid that concentrated tumult, character development is squeezed into rare quiet moments between cases, or shouted over the cacophony of crowded hallways and beeping hospital equipment.

But in the dozen episodes we’ve seen this season so far, I can hear a steady, ominous drumbeat beneath the din. Looking over my notes, rereading these reviews, I see myself asking one question, over and over: Are Robby and Dana, the heart and soul of the E.R., ever going to return after this shift from hell is over?

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

I’ve never felt the mood in Dr. Robby’s department shift the way it did when a new patient, Pranita (Ramona DuBarry), was brought in by I.C.E. agents. She is suffering from injuries incurred when they raided the restaurant where she worked, in pursuit of President Trump’s draconian mass-deportation policy.

She is not allowed to contact her daughter to tell her where she is. She is not allowed to tell the hospital staff so they may do so on her behalf. In the end, she is not even allowed to wear the sling she is prescribed to help her damaged arm.

The agents’ rough handling of Pranita proves to be too much for Nurse Jesse, who tries to intervene. Suddenly, the sounds of struggle and shouting can be heard throughout the department. Within seconds, Pranita and Jesse are being led away in zip ties by the agents. They refuse to say what Jesse did that merits his detention, or where he and Pranita will be detained.

The whole incident seems to stem from when Robby dresses down one of the agents, who is still wearing his gaiter, for the chaos their presence has caused in the hospital. Dozens of patients and staff have fled, fearing their immigration status will lead the agents to target them, too. Sick people are not getting the treatment they need, Robby says, and they will go home to get even sicker, forced to return when it may be too late. At the same time, much-needed professionals are no longer around to do their jobs. Raising his voice and dropping an expletive, Robby asks them to take their prisoner and get going as soon as they can before they make things worse.

“No problem, doc,” the agent responds, a little too softly. He has Jesse on the ground in his next scene.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

But while Jude’s prognosis is good — he kept his three most important fingers, which will work fine once they close the wound — his family situation is not. His sister and legal guardian, Chantal (Sasha Compère), informs Santos, Robby and Dylan that their parents were seized and deported to Haiti during a routine immigration appointment. You can almost see the air get sucked out of the room when she says it.

This cruel implementation of the current administration’s mass deportation policy has forced Chantal to transfer out of her college and move back home to care for Jude. But they have almost no money, so she works long hours on top of her continuing education, leaving Jude unsupervised for long stretches of time.

Now it isn’t certain that either of them will graduate, or that social services will leave Jude in Chantal’s custody. Dylan, the social worker, is optimistic, but he also thinks they may be better off with their parents in Haiti, a place they’ve never been.

The Pitt’s staff attack any problem that comes their way as if they had a fighting chance, but they stand little chance against the punitive powers of a government that is actively hostile toward immigration. Their sense of frustration and sadness is palpable.

“We can’t separate her from her brother,” Santos says. “It’s not right.”

“A lot of what happens to people around here isn’t right,” Robby replies. Happy Fourth of July, folks.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Pitt for the New York Times. (Gift link!)