“The Pitt” loves its teachable moments. If a patient doesn’t have insurance, characters will discuss the way many families fall in a coverage no man’s land: too poor to afford health insurance, not poor enough to receive Medicaid. If a nurse ignores a deaf woman in favor of her A.S.L. translator, he — and the hearing members of the audience — will be gently reminded to address deaf people directly when speaking to them. If a secretly bulimic patient’s pneumonia is caused by her eating disorder, the safe money says that the friendly emergency room doctors will persuade her to accept help almost immediately. They will also note, correctly, that Black women with eating disorders are underdiagnosed.

Every episode of “The Pitt” features moments reminiscent of “very special episodes,” in which 1980s sitcoms briefly silenced their laugh tracks to address serious societal issues. Moments like those in “The Pitt” work as much like educational programming or civics lessons as they do drama.

But the skill of the actors and filmmakers goes a long way toward lessening the sense that you’re being lectured. It would indeed be nice to live in a world where the differing needs of people from different backgrounds and with different conditions were met with care, respect and understanding. No matter what cases come their way — and the cliffhanger ending, about an antibiotic resistant infection, suggests they’ve got a doozy on their hands — it is a safe bet that the staff of the Pitt, for all their imperfections, will teach by example.

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

Although we’re only two short episodes into the season’s brief six-episode run, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is already a significant shift from the somber grandeur and Grand Guignol horror of “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon.” Its tone is light. Its threats are decidedly less than world-shaking. Its protagonist is a commoner, not a noble. Its editing is positively zippy in places.

Moreover, while the show relies on the interplay of Peter Claffey’s decent but dense Dunk and Dexter Sol Ansell’s precocious problem child, Egg, the result is less a “Lone Wolf and Cub”/“The Last of Us” survival story than a mismatched buddy comedy. Ser Duncan may be the only contestant in the tourney dopey enough not to realize that there is more to his suspiciously knowledgeable and headstrong squire than meets the eye.

I reviewed this week’s episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

“The Pitt” is not a show for the cynical. The show is full to bursting with heartfelt declarations of devotion, moving rapprochements between estranged loved ones, copious tears of both sadness and joy, and celebrations of cooperation and community. This sweet stuff can be hard to swallow when you’ve been weaned on a bitter diet of prestige antihero dramas like “The Sopranos.”

But “The Pitt” is not a show about normal circumstances. Every patient who arrives in the E.R. introduces a new set of potentially life-or-death stakes for the core cast to handle. Even cases that aren’t potentially fatal often reveal some horrible defect in the American health care system.

The friends and family members by the bed sides of their loved ones are alternately terrified, furious, confused, devastated and grateful beyond belief. Why wouldn’t they be? A group of competent medical professionals just healed the person they care about — or failed to. Emotions run hot and close to the surface. Apply enough pressure, as circumstances in the Pitt do, and those emotions explode with volcanic force.

In essence, the hospital setting of “The Pitt” is a cheat code. It allows us to access our deepest, most profound emotions without embarrassment because those big emotions match the scale of the triumphs and tragedies we witness on an hour-by-hour basis.

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

You don’t hear whistling in Westeros very often. The warring kings, the scheming viziers, the occasional incursion by angry dragons or ice zombies — there’s just not a whole lot to feel cheerful about in the Seven Kingdoms. It’s hard to whistle while you work when the work is a Hobbesian war of all against all, unless you’re being a real Joffrey about it.

But in “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,” the new HBO show set in the same world as “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” there’s whistling on the soundtrack. Lots of it, in fact. Jaunty, carefree whistling, atop a bed of folksy acoustic guitar. The work that composer Dan Romer does here is a world removed from the dramatic, swirling score provided by Ramin Djawadi for this show’s predecessors. Only once does the music hint at that familiar, rousing theme song … and it is immediately cut off by a shot of the show’s hero violently moving his bowels.

In other words, you can literally hear that this is a different kind of show than the previous Westerosi epics. (The episodes are near-sitcom shortness, too.) “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” is adapted from the author George R.R. Martin’s novella “The Hedge Knight,” a far more compact and straightforward story of bravery and villainy than his epic “A Song of Ice and Fire” series of novels. Ira Parker, who created the series with Martin and oversees it as showrunner, is not telling a story that determines the fate of nations or the future of humanity in this fantasy world. (Not so far, anyway.) No wonder the music sounds less like “The Lord of the Rings” and more like “Harold and Maude.”

I reviewed the series premiere of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms for the New York Times. Always great to be back on the Westeros beat, especially now that maybe my most beloved character in the setting is on deck. (Gift link!)

Maggots feasting on a living man’s arm. A bone poking through a bloody wound before getting forcibly shoved back into place. A man smiling happily as his distended stomach is drained of liter after liter of fluid. A syringe drawing blood from a fully visible and erect penis.

Normally, you’d have to turn to the work of purveyors of the extreme such as Clive Barker, Takashi Miike or Lars von Trier to see such sights. This week, they’re on America’s favorite weekly medical drama. Who says Hollywood is risk-averse?

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

It’s all in a day’s work at the Pitt. (A long day: Like the show’s first outing, Season 2 will tell the story of 15 consecutive hours in the E.R., played out across 15 weekly episodes.) But “The Pitt” isn’t, or isn’t just, a workplace drama. Certainly the friendships and flirtations, the alliances and rivalries, the infuriating inconveniences and the “man, I love this job” moments will feel familiar to anyone who has worked hard with the same group of people in the same place, day in and day out.

But what Wyle, the creator R. Scott Gemmill and the director John Wells achieve here is more than a recreation the past glories of their stints on “ER,” which before the New Golden Age of TV ushered in by “The Sopranos” represented the cutting edge. More germane points of comparison for the world of “The Pitt” include the teeming city of King’s Landing in “Game of Thrones” and “House of the Dragon,” or the fully realized and lived-in sci-fi environments of “Andor.” “The Pitt” is an act of world-building first and foremost.

That starts with the show’s formal aspects: one contiguous set, filled with all different kinds of people, filmed by two hand-held cameras, set in what is meant to feel like real time. After even one episode in that crucible, you start to see it as a place you could hang out in and explore, even get lost in. “The Pitt” shares a sense of repleteness with the grand fantasy epics — the feeling that they’re teeming with life, which continues whether you’re watching or not.

As important to that parallel, though, are the staffers of the Pitt. They are heroes, drawn from all walks of life to serve their collective mission to save that lives. Neither addiction, nor immigration status nor autism spectrum disorders prevent them from doing their jobs. Indeed, their wide variety of life experiences are crucial to their ability to help as many people as possible.

The personal struggles of the medical staff, the intriguing — and often gory and disgusting — cases of the patients, the dazzling you-are-there production: These are the hooks that get you watching. But beneath it all is a message. Rock-star Robby may be the main attraction, but “The Pitt” is a full-throated celebration of expertise, competence, cooperation, science and diversity, at a time when those values are under widespread attack. In “The Pitt,” at least, those values are still alive and kicking.

The Pitt is back for Season 2 and this time around I’m covering it for the New York Times, starting with my review of the season premiere. (Gift link!)

When we learn his company helped drop the bombs itself, it hits viscerally. Why did you make that choice?

What we were trying to grapple with is a corporation whose stock price goes up when there’s a war and people are terrified. They’d have financial motivation to stoke the fears of war further and further, which might actually cause the bomb to drop. Look around and see what’s happening with A.I., or new technologies in the military space. It feels like everyone’s on this hamster wheel because it’s increasing the number of zeros in their bank accounts, the world be damned. That’s why this felt so interesting and frightening to me. The world might end because a few people needed to get rich.

I interviewed Fallout co-creator and co-showrunner Geneva Robertson-Dworet for the New York Times. Yes, they made the Ghoul sexy on purpose.

This fluid approach to the movies’ continuity is part of what makes this show such a surprise. “It: Welcome to Derry” feels like a mulligan for Muschietti, who directed them. The first film’s haunted-hayride vibe, the second’s nonsensical plot and warmed-over, quip-heavy dialogue: All of that has been jettisoned. In their place stands a season-long testament to the power of cruelty in art.

From start to finish, “Welcome to Derry” has relentlessly probed fears that plague our childhood and our adulthood. Children are tormented with their worst nightmares. Adults are taunted for their most painful failures and confronted with their most terrible memories.

At the center of it all lurks an orange lunatic who feeds on fear and suffering, empowered by a government apparatus working to spread that fear and suffering from sea to shining sea. As such, Pennywise is a monster for our degraded age.

I reviewed the season finale of It: Welcome to Derry, maybe the biggest TV surprise of the year for me, for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Ingrid does not appear evil at first. Was it challenging to keep that aspect of the character under wraps?

Andy [Muschietti] actually loved her very much! He feels that she was good in her heart. That wasn’t a difficult thing to portray. There’s a sense that Ingrid is stunted. She’s caught in the age when this terrible tragedy happened. She’s been in a state of suspension all these years, waiting for the impossible, waiting for her father to be reclaimed. She sees something in this girl Lilly, and her compassion for her is very real — but then it stops, because there’s something else that’s really driving her. Part of that involves Pennywise’s trickery over her, the illusion that he’s created.

But when I see what’s going on right now, there are grand illusions happening before our very eyes. And nobody believes that they’re a bad human being. You can see that in the Epstein emails, for instance. It’s fascinating to me, watching Epstein have conversations with Larry Summers: They’re saying certain things about Donald Trump, but nobody’s looking to themselves. They view themselves as the good guys. In Ingrid’s mind, she thinks she can extract her father from It and bring him back to himself, and all the rest will end. It’s an “end justifies the means” situation.

I interviewed Madeleine Stowe about her role on It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. She did not mince words. (Gift link!)

“This town is the monster.” After the events of this episode, I think Charlotte Hanlon can be forgiven for stating the thesis of “It: Welcome to Derry” so baldly. The creature known as Pennywise runs riot in this episode, to be sure, in all of his head-chopping, child-terrorizing glory. But he is helped in his gruesome work by the good people of Derry, who commit a mass murder that is swept under the rug by the time people are having their coffee the next morning.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Although our attention has been largely occupied by the kids and the clown, let’s not take for granted how good this show’s three grown-up leads are. Chris Chalk, Jovan Adepo and Taylour Paige make the adult material as magnetic as that of the young losers.

They don’t feel as if they’re playing characters in a spooky popcorn flick; they feel as if they’re playing human beings who are worried about their families, their ethics and their sanity. That scream from Chalk is one of the most harrowing things I’ve heard on television all year, and it’s been a harrowing year.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. Gift link!

The military-pillar subplot never devolves into dopey first-person-shooter shenanigans. From the start, when dozens of troops descend on a haunted house that looks as if it might fall over in a stiff breeze, the operation is depicted as hubristic folly. Men die for no reason, nothing is achieved, and the end result will be the persecution of Rose’s community for her role in the debacle.

As much as Gen. Shaw wants to believe otherwise, sending fully armed troops rolling down American streets to storm houses is a cure worse than any disease it purports to treat. Some problems can’t be fixed with boots and guns. If you try, you’ll only hurt the country you’re claiming to save.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

The eyeball scene and the flashback are the episode’s two standout sequences, and they’re a mixed bag. The injection of Indigenous folklore into the “It” story feels like a tip of the cap to “Twin Peaks,” which similarly chronicled a town haunted by a demonic presence secretly known to both Native Americans and the United States military. The voice-over narration, however, makes the flashback material feel clumsier and cornier than it needs to be. It would have stood better as a stand-alone episode, the way similar stories were told by shows like “Lost” and “Westworld.”

Poor Margie’s eye-popping experience, by contrast, is a top-to-bottom success. It is gross, gory and inventive, constantly ratcheting up the violence, discomfort and cruelty. The use of a bifurcated snail’s-eye-view effect to show us events from Margie’s perspective, forcing us to experience the horror through her googly eyes, is disturbing on a gut level. That’s what I want from a horror television show.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Instead of a haunted house, what if there were a haunted city? What if the troll lurking under the bridge hid beneath the entire municipality? What if small-town America’s racial, sexual, gender and class divisions could be exploited by a billion-year-old cosmic shape-shifter that has taken the form of a child-eating clown?

These propositions are fundamental to “It,” Stephen King’s 1986 doorstopper of a horror novel, which for my money is his most frightening book. Derry is not just a setting, it’s a secondary antagonist. The real horror of “It” is that the presence of the evil entity beneath that quaint Maine town has warped the place’s inhabitants.

No one in Derry ever seems to notice when bad things happen — when outcasts are bullied, Black people tormented, L.G.B.T.Q. people bashed, women assaulted, children abused. The good people of Derry stare, dead-eyed, and do nothing. The second episode of “Welcome to Derry” conveys this pervasive sense of wrongness by fleshing out the city, with the Main Street shopping district, the Black side of town and the nearby air base all taking their turns in the spotlight. Derry feels like a real place, where real children live and grow and, frequently, vanish.

I reviewed this weekend’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Full disclosure: This episode made it hard for me to get a good night’s sleep. There are horrific images, excruciating moments, and an overall tone of queasy cruelty in this hour of television that I simply couldn’t shake. To me, that’s the mark of great horror.

I recall getting that feeling from reading the 1986 novel “It,” Stephen King’s epic portrait of a small town in Maine called Derry that is haunted by a demonic, shape-shifting, child-eating clown. I first read it in middle school, when I was the same age as its young protagonists — I’m closer in age to their adult selves now — and it hit me like a possessed car. Beyond being King’s scariest book, and his grossest, it is also his cruelest: a nightmare dive into the horrible realities of child abuse and small-town closed-mindedness, transmuted into the supernatural.

I did not get that welcomely awful feeling from the two films to which this series serves as a prequel, “It” (2017) and “It Chapter Two” (2019), both from the director Andy Muschetti. Which is why I’m happy, if that’s the right word, to report that the first scene of this first episode of “It: Welcome to Derry” is scarier and more disturbing than everything in the two movies combined. With Muschetti once again behind the camera for the premiere, he and the showrunners, Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane, serve up a perfect nightmare of mounting panic and terror.

I reviewed the series premiere of the It prequel Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Noah Hawley has done what countless unfortunate employees of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation have been unable to do for nearly 50 years: He brought Aliens to Earth successfully.

I reviewed the season finale of Alien: Earth for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

I’m also not convinced this is going to go well for the (noticeably wide-eyed) Boy Kavalier. This is a man used to being the smartest guy in the room — or used to being told he is, anyway. It doesn’t occur to him that even as he’s figuring out how best to make use of the eyeball, the eyeball is determining the same thing about him. These monsters have already destroyed a robot so sophisticated it was presumed to be nearly indestructible. The hubris of the powerful is a much softer target.

I reviewed tonight’s Alien: Earth for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

What happened out there? How does a crew with the competence level of the people we’ve seen aboard the Maginot round up not only the universe’s deadliest alien, but several comparably awful creatures? How do you even set foot on a planet where these monsters run wild without getting your head bitten off or your lungs sucked out the moment you take five steps from your landing craft? Is there some kind of big cosmic zoo out there, constructed by more sophisticated aliens, that our Weyland-Yutani pals simply burglarized?

I reviewed this week’s Alien: Earth for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

What manner of man becomes a Morrow? I don’t mean a cyborg, though this flashback episode of “Alien: Earth” gives us that answer: The chief security officer of the doomed spaceship Maginot was once a “feral street kid with a palsied arm.” He was “taken in” by a long-ago Ms. Yutani, the grandmother of the woman who is currently in charge of her family’s mega-corporation. She, or the company she ran, gave him his mechanically enhanced, transforming arm.

In exchange, he gave Yutani a lifetime. More than a lifetime, in fact.

It’s never been clear what tempts people to take jobs on Weyland-Yutani’s long-haul space flights. By the time the gig is over, you’ll have spent years, perhaps decades in cryo-sleep, frozen in stasis while the world moves on without you. Morrow already mentioned that he had a little girl back home who died long ago; now we know the circumstances.

Morrow clearly joined the mission in order to permanently provide for his little girl, whose painfully cute pet name for him is “Dadabear.” But eight years into the journey, Morrow received word from the Company that his daughter died in a house fire. A printed-out memo indicates 53 years would have to pass between Morrow hearing the news and Morrow returning to Earth to collect his daughter’s belongings. By then he might be the only person alive who remembers she existed.

So for the bulk of his time in the cold recesses of space, surrounded by people he doesn’t like, collecting disgusting and deadly creatures capable of wiping out everyone aboard, Morrow has known he has nothing to return to. All this time, all this loss, is for nothing. I think that might break me too.

But nothing can be turned into something if you try hard enough, or if you need it to badly enough. With nothing else to cling to, Morrow now has only two priorities. He must fulfill his mission to bring back the specimens safely to Earth, or it really will have all been for nothing, and that cannot be borne. And he must do so to honor the trust and care shown to him by the chief executive’s grandmother long ago.

I reviewed last week’s Alien: Earth for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

This episode offers us a brief history lesson of the “Alien” world, courtesy of Joe, the still-human brother of the show’s lead “hybrid,” Wendy. (Joe insists sentimentally on using her human name, Marcy.) Joe explains to the childlike hybrids that once upon a time there existed things called governments, in which people voted for how they wanted their world to be run. “It didn’t work,” Joe says simply. So the corporations stepped in, and “apparently, they solved all the problems.” That “apparently” sure feels pointed.

It’s a chilling scene for several reasons. First, every single thing we’ve seen about Boy Kavalier would indicate that this man should be nowhere near the levers of power. The default assumption that the ability to succeed in business or technology makes one a natural leader is one of the fundamentally delusional capitalist beliefs that the “Alien” franchise exists to skewer, ever since the Weyland-Yutani Corporation sent a bunch of long-haul truckers to recover a lethal species of giant parasitical space piranhas in the 1979 film that started it all.

But beyond that, the scene shows how corporate control of education and media eliminates the ability of Joe and the hybrids to understand and articulate the problems facing the world they live in. Democracy “didn’t work”? OK … says who? The five corporations who replaced it? They hardly seem an unbiased source of information. “Apparently, they solved all the problems?” What problems did they solve? And why are there still so many problems now?

I reviewed tonight’s Alien: Earth for the New York Times. Gift link!