Vik spills his guts to Sierra, perhaps for the first time to anyone at all. All his life, he says, he has struggled to be the good immigrants’ son, “parenting” his own parents by studiously living up to all their dreams instead of his own. The one exception he carved out for himself was to build a family on his own terms, but that, too, is now tainted: He got together with a single mother partly as an act of rebellion, and now he is demanding she have a baby for their sake rather than for his or hers. “I’m going to die, and I haven’t really made a single choice for myself,” he says, before collapsing into sobs.

The actor Omar Metwally is frighteningly committed to this scene, digging up and spilling out a profound sense of failure and loss. In turn, his partner in the scene, Emily Browning, makes Sierra feel like a lived-in, serious presence, despite her narrative function as a vehicle for Vik’s moments of self-realization and infidelity.

The confession (and, admittedly, the very hot sex scene) is “The Affair” in a nutshell. This is a show about the gender-based shapes society allows our self-image and suffering to take. Noah is the guy who played by the rules but never got the chance to break them. Helen is the perfect partner and mother who has had a hard time making it look easy. Cole is the Good Guy who just cares too much. Alison is a Magdelene-like martyr-siren. I was all prepared to type out something about how Vik is the Good Son and the Model Minority who has never really lived for himself. But then he went ahead and said it for me.

I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of The Affair for the New York Times. I realized afterwards that there’s a trick to watching this show similar to the one you have to pull off with Starship Troopers: Everything you’re seeing is the product of an in-world mindset.

Also, if you’re into watching beautiful actors fuck, and if you aren’t what the hell are you watching movies and TV for, this episode has you covered. Joshua Jackson, Phoebe Tonkin, Omar Metwally, Emily Browning, goodness gracious me.

“The Affair” takes the work of adulthood seriously. That is different than saying that adults on “The Affair” always behave in a serious manner, or what passes for it in narrative fiction. Alison, Noah, Cole, Helen and all their various relatives, friends and lovers rarely make the linear progress we’d like to see from ourselves, or rise and fall in the more predictable arcs we enjoy from television characters.

They circle back on the same issues and reprocess the same traumas, yet they hide others for years. They repeatedly fall hard when Mr. or Ms. Right appears to come along, not letting past transformations into Mr. or Ms. Wrong stand in the way. And they hash it all out in arguments and heart-to-hearts, in therapeutic settings and in impetuous getaways, in sexual encounters that are as much about figuring things out as they are about feeling good. No one here is “adulting like a boss,” as the ultimately infantile pop culture phrase goes. On “The Affair,” people do adulthood like nine-to-fivers, like tipped workers, like freelancers with unstable incomes. It’s work, and it’s more refreshing than a dip in the ocean.

I continue to make the case for The Affair at the New York Times with my review of this week’s episode.

“All right, so, let me get this straight. She was married to you, and then she cheated with you, and then she left you for you, and then she cheated on you with you, and then she had your baby, but then said it was your baby. Did I get that right?”

Sure, I could identify the men referred to by each use of the word “you” in the above monologue, delivered by the high-school student Anton Gatewood to his teacher Noah Solloway and Noah’s former romantic rival Cole Lockhart. But would it really even matter? Watching the actor Christopher Meyer say all this stuff from the back seat of a car to the two men in the front, his head swiveling back and forth as if he were watching some kind of bizarre, psychosexual Wimbledon, says it all. As an encapsulation of the chaos into which the titular relationship on “The Affair” plunged its various participants, Anton nails it. And judging from the cryptic flash-forwards that have opened each episode of Season 4 so far — in which Noah, Cole and Anton embark upon what appears to be a search for Alison Bailey — there’s more chaos to come.

But this particular brand of interpersonal mayhem takes a back seat to more immediate professional and physical concerns in this week’s episode, which returns us to the Los Angeles half of this season’s story. While Noah navigates the rocky waters of class, race and faculty politics at the charter school where he works, his ex-wife Helen and her boyfriend, Vic, receive a devastating medical diagnosis that throws their already strained relationship into greater turmoil. Connecting the two story lines is the sense that life is turmoil and chaos, and that the times we’re able to control it are happy accidents at best.

Savior complex: I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

Coincidence, synchronicity, luck of the draw: If any show on television is aware that these mysterious forces are often less than benign, it’s “The Affair.” The series’s titular relationship began with what seemed like kismet between a frustrated father and a grieving mother, and it ended in a slow-motion crack-up of the families involved. In the process, Noah landed in prison for a death he didn’t cause, covering for both his current wife and his former one. And those are just the two most prominent instances among many.

Which brings us to tonight’s episode, in which the often traumatic experiences of undocumented immigrants plays a central role in the story — airing, it just so happens, on a week when it has played a central role in American life and politics.

True, the back story behind Cole’s second wife, Luisa, was planted when she first appeared on the show; Sarah Treem, the series’s co-creator and its sole showrunner, has long had an eye for the undercurrents in this country that can drag otherwise fully functional adults down. Indeed, another such riptide, the small-town drug epidemic made manifest by the Lockhart family’s coke-dealing side hustle, popped up again this week after many, many hours of screentime had elapsed since it last played a part.

Still, this week’s installment, written by Treem and directed with Atlantic Ocean coolness by Rodrigo García, brings home the difficulties faced by America’s 11 million undocumented immigrants by tying it to quotidian and universal events. Let’s say you aren’t an undocumented immigrant, or don’t know any personally: You’ve almost certainly experienced the stomach-dropping dread that comes with seeing the lights of a cop car in your rearview mirror. You’ve probably also at some point felt like the odd person out, prevented by circumstances beyond your control from truly fitting into the life of a person you love. And you’ve most likely wondered why people who are supposed to care about you are too tied up in their own petty concerns to treat your plight with the seriousness it deserves.

That’s Luisa’s story, told from Cole’s perspective over the course of a bad couple of days in their life. For those of us in the real world, the timing could not be better. (Or worse.)

I reviewed last week’s typically on-the-money episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

Does the series still work? Did it ever? Appropriately, that may depend on your perspective. There’s an old saw taken from therapists and their countless dramatized depictions that sums up the experience of watching “The Affair” quite neatly: “How does that make you feel?” And from its very first hour, when its multi-perspective template was established, this series has emphasized feeling, serving more as a vehicle for impressionism rather than for realism. The differences among its characters’ competing histories speak to a basic truth about the unreliability of memory, but some of them are probably too major to explain away as tricks of the mind. (I mean, two totally different people saved the same kid from choking to death all the way back in the pilot.) As such, I have long believed that the best way to process “The Affair” is as a portrait of those mindsets, not as an effort to reconstruct the truth.

Viewed from that perspective, all the sex, lies, self-destruction, screaming matches and occasional violent outbursts and murder mysteries are merely the screen on which the series projects its kaleidoscopic picture — a picture of the ways in which grief, guilt, lust, love, parenthood, couplehood, marriage, divorce, age, class and (especially) the limits of traditional gender roles replace reality, deep down inside us. And if you can accept that, then “The Affair” winds up looking like one of the smartest, most observant, most empathetic things on television — the most truly adult show since “Mad Men.” You just have to let yourself feel it.

So how does it feel? Not always great, but I don’t think it’s supposed to. Helen and (especially) Noah aren’t merely unreliable narrators in this episode, they’re also unpleasant ones. The series — and the actors Maura Tierney and Dominic West — isn’t afraid to make these people ugly, and to look ugly doing it. They pay the price every time a viewer or critic says, “Get your act together, Helen,” or, “Ugh, Noah is the worst.” But expecting otherwise treats that ugliness (to echo Helen) as if it were the show’s “fault” rather than its strength. That misses the point.

Because if you’ve reached adulthood without ever failing to get your act together or being the worst … well, bless your heart, because that sure doesn’t look like life from where I’m sitting. “The Affair” — angry, guilty, horny, and as restless as the ocean Fiona Apple sings about in the opening credits — does.

I’m excited to be covering The Affair, one of my favorite shows, for the New York Times this season, beginning with this review of the season premiere. Co-creator and showrunner Sarah Treem saw this review and said “I’ve never seen anyone articulate what I’m trying to do on this show as clearly,” so there’s that.

What a way to cap a season in which this ruthlessly entertaining and intelligent show, so gimlet-eyed about the corrupting influence of power and so deft at depicting its argot and appeal, finally brought in the buzz it has long deserved. To paraphrase the Hulkster, “Billions”-mania is running wild, brother. Long may it flex.

I reviewed the season finale of Billions for the New York Times. What a pleasure to write about this show this season!

This week, on “Billions”: Salt Bae.

The viral-video sensation and steakhouse hearthrob Nusret Gokce makes an unexpected appearance to open the episode. Of all the real-life restaurateurs, athletes and hedge-fund aristocracy who’ve appeared on this show, none made me laugh harder at their sheer delightful audacity. Come to think of it, I don’t know if anything on TV has made me laugh harder than this.

The look of lust in the eyes of Condola Rashad’s normally unflappable attorney Kate Sacker, accompanied by the sensual strains of Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” on the sound system, simply add additional seasoning to the scenario. Silly as it sounds, the scene is a textbook example of the attention to detail “Billions” pays to its Manhattan machinations. The show never settles for satisfying when spectacular will do.

Billions is so good. I reviewed this week’s episode for the New York Times.

It would do the show’s writers — in this case, the series co-creators Brian Koppelman and David Levien, joined by Matthew Fennell — a disservice to describe these financial machinations as merely a MacGuffin; too much effort is put into nailing the almost esoteric intricacy and jargon of these multi-hundred-million dollar transactions. But in the same way that the Maltese Falcon or the “Pulp Fiction” briefcase are meaningful mostly through what people do in their name, Bobby’s predicament — moronically described as “Defcon 6” by his unctuous, hilarious compliance officer Ari Spyros (Stephen Kunken) — enables an entire cast of characters and guest stars to shine.

It’s Paul Giamatti vs. Clancy Brown and Damian Lewis vs. John Malkovich with a heaping helping of David Krumholtz, Maggie Siff, Asia Kate Dillon, and Maria Sharapova (!) on the side: I reviewed last week’s Billions for the New York Times. Absolutely unimpeachable writing, casting, acting.

You can take the boys out of the blood feud, but you can’t take the blood feud out of the boys. Just two episodes after the successful conclusion of the truce that saw the main men of “Billions” call an end to hostilities and help each other out of potentially career-ending legal trouble, both Bobby Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades have launched dangerous new contests of the will. And this time around, it’s not the courtroom versus the boardroom: Each man has entered into a rivalry with a bigger fish in their own professional pond.

For Chuck, this means setting his sights on a new white whale: Attorney General Jock Jeffcoat, the Alamo authoritarian running the Justice Department. For Bobby, it entails entering an alliance of creepy convenience with Grigor Andolov, a cheerfully violent Russian oil baron, whose bottomless reserves of liquid cash are exceeded only by his well-earned reputation for criminality and cruelty. Together, writers Adam R. Perlman and Willie Reale and director Stacie Passon operate this week’s episode, titled “Icebreaker,” like a factory assembly line, cranking out perfect new foils for two characters who are never complete without conflict.

If you needed another reason to start watching Billions, please note that John Malkovich and Clancy Brown now play major antagonists. I reviewed the episode that introduced Malkovich’s character for the New York Times.

There’s no denying it now: “Billions” belongs in a special class of dramas — “The Americans,” “The Leftovers,” “Halt and Catch Fire” and even the era-defining “Breaking Bad” — that skyrocket upward in quality from one season to the next. In fact, I think the last of those is the best series with which we can compare “Billions” at this point. “Billions” is the new “Breaking Bad,” with white collars instead of blue meth.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Billions, which I think was the show’s best, for the New York Times.

If there’s one place where we can come together in these divided times, surely it’s to appreciate a show that gives us opening scenes like the one this week: Axe and Wags, sitting at a table with cloth napkins draped over their heads, faces obscured, “for two reasons,” as Wags puts it: “to keep the aromas from escaping, and to hide this shameful and depraved act from God.”

“Well, if there were a God, I think He’d know,” comes Axe’s reply — in a room lit with enough candles to fuel a decent-sized pagan sacrifice. There’s no immediate explanation, no follow-up whatsoever until the final 15 minutes of the episode, but the tone is set for one of the best episodes of “Billions” in recent memory. It’s the simple pleasures that bind us, you know?

I reviewed last night’s fantastic episode of Billions for the New York Times. The tone is very different, but can absolutely put Billions in the same class as The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, The Americans, and Breaking Bad (which started off fun but broad) in terms of shows that just skyrocketed upward qualitatively year over year.

This week on “Billions,” romance is in the air. Who’da thunk it, right? Sex, sexuality, the rewards and compromises of long-term relationships, even the eroticized thrill of spectacular professional success — these themes are never in short supply on this show. But the pangs of infatuation that make your eyes widen, your heart quicken, and (with any luck) your clothes melt away to the tune of Echo and the Bunnymen? That’s … unexpected.

Even more unexpected? The young lovers involved. The casting of comedian Mike Birbiglia added an uncharacteristically mellow presence to this high-strung, hard-charging show. If you predicted that this addition was a prelude to an affair between Birbiglia’s Silicon Valley “venture philanthropist” character, Oscar Langstraat, and Bobby Axelrod’s handpicked successor, the tightly wound gender-nonbinary genius Taylor Mason, congratulations: Your powers of prognostication outstrip even those of Axe himself. Yet from the moment these two very different visionaries make a nerd-love connection in defense of a supposed “Star Wars” plot hole, it makes sense, retrospectively, that they would hook up. It just feels right. (Granted, I’m slightly biased in that I agree with their reasoning — “What material could withstand the heat expended from that mammoth sphere?” “Plus, it was fortified with gun turrets!” — but only slightly.)

Predicated on a trip to San Francisco designed to further the connections between Oscar and Axe Capital, the story line is successful mainly because of how exciting it feels to see Taylor, well, excited by something. Asia Kate Dillon’s portrayal of this blue-eyed brainiac is rooted in a Spock-like blend of ironclad logic and an outsider’s insight into the prevailing culture. To see the flush of a crush on Taylor’s face, melting that resolve and reserve, is a beautiful thing. The subsequent sex scene between the two characters is sweet, hot and groundbreaking in equal measure. You’d be a fool to ignore any one of those three indissoluble elements.

I reviewed this week’s marvelous episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Chuck Rhoades Jr. and Charles Rhoades Sr. are at war. They have been since the last season of “Billions,” when son betrayed father as part of a plot by Chuck to ruin his nemesis, Bobby Axelrod. But the most powerful weapon wielded in the conflict so far hasn’t been a legal threat or a stock swindle. It’s the kiss that Charles plants square on Chuck’s mouth, hands locked on his son’s head to prevent him from pulling away.

That kiss is the climax of “Hell of a Ride,” this week’s aptly titled episode from the writer Randall Green and the director John Dahl. In a series that has made a study of the physicality of the rich and powerful, the scene is a graduate-level course.

On one level, and like so many of these characters’ other words and actions, it is very likely a reference to a work of macho pop culture: the kiss of betrayal that Michael Corleone plants on his disloyal brother Fredo in “The Godfather Part II.” (Bobby quoted the first “Godfather” film earlier in the episode when he instructed his philanthropy guru, Sean Ayles (Jack Gilpin), to “use all your powers and all your skills” in support of his latest stealthy venture.) But like the best such moments on “Billions,” the context transforms the reference into something new and unique, and in this case uniquely disturbing.

I reviewed the latest terrific episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Written by Wes Taylor and directed by Colin Bucksey with all the wit and verve that is now par for the “Billions” course, this week’s episode continues to treat unchecked ambition as a metastasizing cancer that consumes everything it touches.

[…]

“You want it darker, we kill the flame,” Leonard Cohen croons on the soundtrack; funny and fast-paced though it is, “Billions” likes it quite dark indeed.

If you put together these two lines from my review of last week’s Billions for the New York Times, you’ve got a clear picture of the show’s never-stronger appeal right now.

Live like a king. It’s a phrase that connotes wealth, luxury, excess, a life of unlimited possibility and security. How easy it is to let the sparkle of the crown jewels blind us to the dead enemies and discarded undesirables through which they were purchased. This week’s episode of “Billions” reminds us, as bluntly as the show ever has, that the games played by Bobby Axelrod and his billionaire boys club in order to remain comfortable on their thrones can have as steep a cost to bystanders as to any player in the game.

I reviewed the second episode of Billions’ third season for the New York Times. This one leaned into the cruelty of both the billionaire class and the Trump regime real hard.

It’s in those final steps of the hunt for the killer that the problems really begin. Kreizler bamboozles Roosevelt and his men so that Kreizler and Moore, already under close watch by Byrnes, could sneak away to the child-killer’s new lair unnoticed. How do they know that this lair is in the Croton Reservoir? How does Sara, whom Kreizler also dupes (reasons unclear), figure out that same thing in turn, arriving at the reservoir just in time to save their lives? There’s some hand-waving about interpreting the killer’s map of the water and sewer systems, a change in his modus operandi, and his apparent obsession with John the Baptist. But that’s all wild guess work, and New York was a really big city — on an island, no less — even during the Gilded Age. Water, water everywhere, yet they know exactly where to go.

The episode ratchets up the tension by including Byrnes and Connor as factors in the final showdown, from a poorly explained scene in which Byrnes monitors our men at the opera house to Connor’s almost comically dogged pursuit of the alienist’s team. But while their acute interest in the case made sense while one of their high-society patrons was under suspicion, it made considerably less sense once that patron was killed by Connor. His involvement in the murder of Laszlo’s beloved Mary seems to be an open secret as well, although this, too, is poorly explained. Now Connor goes to all this trouble just because the police object to the doctor’s newfangled methodology? It simply doesn’t hold up as a motive.

Put it all together, and it feels rushed and forced, as if the filmmakers looked at the clock, realized they were running out of time and did a speed run through the final hour of what until now had been a very meticulous, patient detective story.

I reviewed the finale of The Alienist, a show I never really liked but also kind of enjoyed (??), for the New York Times. Charming performances by Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning, and a slightly harder-to-swallow but still endearing turn from Daniel Brühl, buoyed the proceedings considerably. Still, it never had that spark, you know? That magic. Some shows do and some shows don’t.

“There’s a new sheriff in town,” drawls Attorney General Waylon Jeffcoat to an assemblage of United States attorneys now under his employ, “and you are my deputies. Gonna be one hell of a turkey shoot!”

Well, yes and no. After watching the Season 3 premiere of “Billions,” Showtime’s amusement-park ride of a financial drama, it is clear that the show’s creators and characters are indeed coming out guns blazing. But the new sheriff, known as Jock, hasn’t changed the series’s old winning ways. A boots-on-the-desk Texan played by the dulcet-toned character actor Clancy Brown, Jock Jeffcoat announces he’s pulling the Justice Department away from Wall Street’s white-collar crimes. Elsewhere, the revelation that the unctuous hedge-fund creep Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), previously the show’s comic-relief antagonist, has been named Treasury Secretary is perhaps the best gag of the episode, in that funny-because-it’s-true sort of way.

The premiere is the most direct reference to the advent of the Trump era we’ve seen so far, if not explicitly so. And yet “Billions” is still the story of the hedge-fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), the crafty, crusading prosecutor out to take him down. The two remain uncomfortably connected by Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff), Axe’s on-staff therapist and performance coach who’s also Chuck’s wife and dominatrix. Each man is the other’s Ahab, with Wendy playing Ishmael to them all, complemented by one of the strongest supporting casts on television. Trump may have changed the playing field, but the players and the game remain the rollicking, entertaining same.

I’m very excited to be covering Billions for the New York Times this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a terrifically fun show in which the writing just gets tighter and the performances cannier with each passing episode, it seems, so it’s a delight to write about anyplace of course. But writing about it for the Times, where a) the readership could not possibly be more Billions’ target demographic, and b) my reviews will almost certainly be among the most left-wing things the paper publishes, is a little something extra.

You don’t want to reduce an actual human being to an avatar of impersonal forces at work in the world, but Andrew is in one sense the weaponization of all the obstacles that have been placed in all those people’s way by homophobia. Even at Versace’s funeral, the priest performing the ceremony refuses to take his partner’s hand in comfort.

Yeah. All of that is real. We’ve got the footage of the priest pulling his hand away from Antonio. That’s not an inference — we can see it. That priest knew he was on camera, knew he was in front of thousands of people, knew he was at the funeral for this man, and still couldn’t control his hatred. He still felt no need to control it. Versace was so successful he managed to overcome that, which was what was so extraordinary about him. But the whole point of Andrew’s personality was that he wanted to impress people, and he’s born into one of the most marginalized groups in society. That paradox — How can you impress someone when they find you disgusting intrinsically before you even open your mouth? — that’s the conundrum of Andrew.

I think it’s tricky. The most homophobic person in this story is Andrew, by far. When he becomes this killer, he becomes a horrific homophobic bully. It’s like he’s soaked up everything and unleashes it on Lee and Versace. He’s like, “I’m going to shame you. You’ve achieved success and I’m going to rip it down, both through physical destruction, but also through the act of scrutiny and having the world look down upon you.”

Even when he was younger and acting as a welcoming figure in the gay community, he was pushing his racial identity as an Asian American to the side. That’s a stark contrast.

You know, he kind of did both. He wanted to change his name from Cunanan to DeSilva so he could say he’s Portuguese rather than from the Philippines. Then he was saying he was Israeli. So yeah, he would push the racial thing to one side. But the sexual thing is interesting, if you look at the way his life tracks. He can’t deal with anyone who might be critical. If he met someone who was homophobic and he wanted to be friends, he would say that he was straight, or that he had a wife and a daughter. He would play the audience. Eventually he went into an audience of these older men that he didn’t have to play to, because he was instantly impressive. He was younger and witty and clever and appreciated. Once he lost that audience, he hit rock bottom.

There’s this moment we never managed to get into the show which I’ve always thought captured something about Andrew. He was at a party when his descent was really accelerating, and no one was paying attention to him; in fact, someone had already reprimanded him for being really annoying. He just went over to this table and set fire to a napkin. He needed people to run over and notice him.

I interviewed Tom Rob Smith, the writer of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, for the New York Times. Again, ACS Versace is a great show.

It all leads to the grimmest discovery of the season, coupled with its goriest onscreen moments. While John’s young friend Joseph listens in horror, the murderer butchers one of his friends in the public baths, dragging his bloody corpse down the hall and off to whatever urban aerie will become this latest victim’s chosen resting place. At the same time, in the killer’s bedroom, Sara opens a heart-shaped box and discovers an actual human heart, while Marcus Isaacson uncovers a jar filled with human eyeballs — many more, it’s clear, than the known victims could have provided.

It’s an awesome, awful image, one that easily transcends its B-movie-prop connotations because of what it enables both the investigators and the audience to truly see. Each of these gross little chunks of nerve and tissue, floating in a jar stuffed away under bed, represents the life of a child, plucked out at the root. What’s more, each of the victims came from the immigrant underclass; the killer groomed them all by commiserating over their abusive, hated fathers. (In the victims’ cases, many of their dads were also neglectful gambling addicts, which Beecham was in a position to know through his gig as a debt collector.) In a grotesque sense, the murderer values them more than anyone else ever has.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It’s not a particularly good show, but Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning are very watchable in it, and in moments like the one described above it proves gore can still be communicative.

To its credit, “The Alienist” always treats the deaths of the children upon whom its serial killer preys as a series of tragedies. It is equally respectful, and properly outraged, about the grotesque class inequities that help enable the murderer to operate with impunity, or even under outright protection. The conditions to which the mentally ill are subjected by the institutional options of the day, the routine dismissal and degradation of women by men, the barbarity of white America’s genocidal war on the indigenous population, the cycle of sexual abuse that turns victims into victimizers ad infinitum: This episode alone exhibits fist-on-the-table fury about all of it. The PG-13 “Perils of Pauline” routine can only cloud this moral clarity.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It can be hard to make a crime show about how murder is tragic when the threat of murder is also supposed to be exciting.