Do you feel there was a sublimated romantic or sexual tension between Rhaenyra and Alicent?

CAREY As a queer person myself, I read an undertone in the script that I knew could be played. That being said, I don’t think Ryan Condal [a creator and showrunner] sat there writing a Sapphic drama. If you want to see it, you can. If you want to pretend it’s not there, you can also do that.

The thing is, these girls don’t know what “platonic” or “romantic” means, whether that be the words or the feelings themselves. There’s just a closeness between two young women that cannot be verbalized, especially in the world they live in. I don’t think they fully understand the feelings; it’s just all-consuming love.

There’s an underlying jealousy that I read into it, especially coming off the back of Episode 4. It was this scene where we were on a bench, and it’s the first time we’ve seen these two women reconnect after losing this closeness they had. I remember in rehearsal at the end of the scene, we were like, “Did you feel like we were about to kiss?”

ALCOCK And I was like, “Yeah!”

I interviewed Milly Alcock and Emily Carey about their time on House of the Dragon for the New York Times.

Were you a “Game of Thrones” guy before you got this part?

Yes, I was. It had been going for about three or four seasons before I actually watched it because fantasy is not really my genre. I was staying with a friend in L.A., and he said to me, “Have you seen this ‘Game of Thrones’?” And I was like: “No. It’s got dragons, why the hell would I watch that?” [Laughs.] He said, “Just watch one episode.” And it was so much more gritty and, for want of a better word, realistic than I was expecting. I was hooked.

I interviewed House of the Dragon‘s Steve Toussaint for the New York Times.

Prince Daemon Targaryen is a man of action, and that suits the man who portrays him on “House of the Dragon” just fine.

“On an acting level, I was always quite pleased that I wasn’t in loads of the big table scenes,” said Matt Smith, who shares his royal character’s distaste for the minutiae of sitting down and running the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. “They’re often the ones that are hardest to shoot — the ones that can drive you bonkers. I preferred being on a horse with a sword in the hand.”

Of course, starring in “House of the Dragon” — the prequel series to HBO’s blockbuster “Game of Thrones,” based on the fantasy novel “Fire & Blood” by the author George R.R. Martin — means riding far more exotic mounts than mere horses. As the potential heir to the Targaryen dynasty and its royal seat, the Iron Throne, Daemon is a dragon-rider, and a dangerous one at that.

Created by Martin and Ryan Condal, who serves as a showrunner along with the director Miguel Sapochnik, “Dragon” chronicles a turbulent time in the history of the Targaryens and their fiery steeds, when a crisis of succession threatens to tear the family, and the realm they rule, apart. As the younger brother of the ruling King Viserys (played by Paddy Considine), Daemon is at the heart of the conflict, and emerged in Sunday night’s series premiere as one of the show’s most charismatic characters.

And if you found him fascinating, you’re not alone. In a phone conversation last week, a pensive Smith, who has had earlier star turns in other major franchises like “Doctor Who” and “The Crown,” openly wrestled with Daemon’s duality — agent of chaos one moment, ferociously loyal and loving the next.

“There’s a sort of folklore among ‘Fire & Blood’ fans and ‘Game of Thrones’ fans that when a Targaryen is born, you flip a coin,” he said “One side is greatness and the other side is madness, and you don’t know which side it’s going to land on.”

“With Daemon,” he continued, “the coin is still in the air.”

I interviewed House of the Dragon star Matt Smith for the New York Times.

In the final episodes of HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” the mad queen Daenerys Targaryen incinerated most of the capital city of King’s Landing. But what was it like when it was all still standing, and the Targaryen dynasty ruled with an iron fist — er, throne?

That’s the question explored by “House of the Dragon,” the new series set in author George R.R. Martin’s revisionist epic-fantasy world. Created by Martin along with Ryan Condal, who serves as showrunner with the veteran “Thrones” director Miguel Sapochnik, “Dragon” takes place far back into the ancestral line of the “Thrones” protagonists Daenerys and Jon Snow, whose own Targaryen identity was revealed late in the original show’s run.

As their forebears battle for control of Westeros’s Iron Throne, what do you need to know about the new series, and its connection to what has gone before — or, more accurately, after? Our cheat sheet has you covered. Read on and prepare to dance with dragons.

I wrote a handy primer on House of the Dragon for the New York Times.

There are times, and this is one of them, when “Billions” feels less like a show to recap than like a show to be decoded. Not because it’s a “Lost”-style mystery-box series, constantly introducing new known unknowns to be theorized about, but because its plotting is so dense and meticulous that if you miss a beat, you miss the point.

I’ve been staring at my laptop screen for a long, long time, trying to figure out how best to explain this episode. It begins with Chuck Rhoades and Mike Prince, along with their attorneys Ira Schirmer and Kate Sacker, dragged in for questioning by Chuck’s successor, Dave Mahar. After bouncing back and forth to a series of flashbacks, it ends as Prince loses $3.5 billion but salvages his political career and Chuck is sprung from jail for the express purpose of ending that career. TL;DR: It’s complicated!

I reviewed the season finale of Billions for the New York Times.

Chuck refers to Prince as “Greg Stillson from ‘[The] Dead Zone,’” a reference to the Stephen King book in which a psychic sets out to stop a wildly dangerous presidential candidate by that name. Prince may be fictional, but take a look around the political landscape: Greg Stillsons are one thing this country still manages to produce in bumper crops.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Billions, aka the one with the big reveal, for the New York Times.

When you put all the pieces together, you’re left with one of the strangest and most unsettling, and unsettled, episodes of “Billions” in quite some time. Chuck, Prince, Taylor, Wendy — they all seem to be “at the precipice of a crossroads,” as “The Sopranos” would put it. For all its complexity, this episode is essentially a holding pattern, a brief reprieve before the masters of the universe at its heart select their next lines of attack.

Here’s hoping they let the power go to their heads. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have much of a show, would we?

I reviewed tonight’s odd episode of Billions for the New York Times.

“We need Chuck dead, not wounded and angry.” Wise words, those, from Governor Bob Sweeney. He has intuited something Chuck himself failed to, when Chuck yanked the Olympic Games away from Mike Prince without delivering a killing blow. In retrospect, it was obvious that a wounded, angry Prince, for all his self-avowed graciousness in defeat, would strike back. It just wasn’t clear that his retaliation would, in fact, be a death blow.

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

When dealing with the Olympics honcho Katerina Brett (Jennifer Roszell), Chuck embarks on a lengthy analogy involving “high-grading” bears, which before hibernation eat only the choicest parts of the salmon they catch, leaving the rest to rot. To Chuck, billionaires like Prince are the bears, and we civilians are the salmon. I’m not quite sure what that makes Chuck.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

You know, it’s funny: Before I watched this episode of “Billions,” I’d been thinking to myself, “It’s been too long since Chuck Rhoades went to a dungeon.”

Seriously! The series launched with an image of Chuck in flagrante, and his so-called “arousal template” played a major role in the show on and off for quite some time. A calculated admission of his predilections helped him win the attorney general’s office. And a failure to service his kink spelled the end of his relationship with last season’s romantic interest, played by Julianna Margulies.

In this very episode, in fact, Rhoades says regarding sex workers, “I’m out of that game.” An almost entirely sexless sixth season, at least as far as Chuck is concerned, just didn’t sit right.

So it was with some pleasure that I greeted Chuck’s descent into his old dungeon, on a quest to uncover the current location of the high-end brothel where Wags illegally entertained the bigwigs who select the host city of the 2028 Olympics. It was great to see Clara Wong as Troy, Chuck’s one-time dominatrix, and even better to see Paul Giamatti squirm as Troy painfully tweaked Chuck’s ear.

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

There are few things on television I enjoy more than a good “Billions” fake-out. The sine qua non comes from the stellar Season 2 episode “Golden Frog Time,” in which a Chuck Rhoades who at first appears to be sobbing is actually laughing hysterically because his plan to undermine his enemy Bobby Axelrod worked like a charm. (At the expense of his best friend and his father, but still!)

The sleight-of-hand that occurs in this week’s episode isn’t nearly as momentous, but it provides that thrilling frisson nonetheless. For a moment, it looks as if Chuck has put the screws to Mike Prince’s alma mater, Indiana A&M, to prevent it from investing in his firm. How? By blackmailing the university’s endowment chair, Stuart Legere (Whit Stillman alum Chris Eigeman), who has been embezzling.

But it turns out that the opposite is true. Chuck is blackmailing Legere and the endowment into investing with Prince by threatening to expose the embezzlement. Having previously rejected his father for the role as too obvious a choice, Chuck wants an inside man who will report back on Prince’s every move, and now he has found one. The needle drop of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” that accompanies the maneuver is no mere music cue. It’s a mission statement: No matter what Mike Prince does, the watchful eyes of Charles Rhoades Jr. will be on him, whether he knows it or not.

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

Six hundred dollars for coffee with Kate Sacker; $46,863 for Wendy Rhoades’s wardrobe; $162,500 for a night at a Covid-free bordello with Wags; $300 million for Mike Prince’s new yacht, plus an extra $300 million to neutralize its carbon footprint. We’ve said before in this space that the credo of the pro wrestler Ted DiBiase (a.k.a. the Million Dollar Man), “Everybody’s got a price,” holds sway in the world of “Billions.” Never before has the show made it quite this literal.

In one of the boldest stylistic choices ever made by the show — you could argue the boldest, and I wouldn’t object — this week’s episode of “Billions” repeatedly freezes the action and superimposes graphics that show you the cost of all the name brands, grand plans and illegal indulgences enjoyed by Michael Prince and his employees. Did you know that a private hog roast with the restaurateur Rodney Scott costs $25,000? That a batch of quaaludes and a courier to deliver them runs you $8,400? That multiple characters’ personal wardrobes and grooming routines on a given day cost more than this country’s yearly per capita income? You sure do now!

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

“I look at every competitor as a potential partner … right up until I can’t anymore.” As far as one-sentence encapsulations of the Mike Prince Method go, it’s hard to beat this statement by the billionaire coprotagonist of the sixth season of “Billions.” In this week’s episode, titled “S.T.D.” (it’s not what you think), Prince drives one such competitor — one of the more odious figures in the “Billions” legendarium — to the edge of defeat, then rides in to save his bacon and enrich them both.

It’s a feat of bargaining so impressive that it literally drives Prince’s enemy Chuck Rhoades into the street, wielding a bullhorn instead of his authority as Attorney General. In the end, Chuck may find the former more effective than the latter.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

If you’re looking for the future of “Billions,” two quotes from this week’s episode point the way forward, I think. The first comes from Wendy Rhoades, describing to Taylor Mason her fear that their boss, Mike Prince, might suffer from narcissistic personality disorder: “He thinks he’s better than everyone else, and he won’t stop till he gets what he wants.”

The second comes from Chuck Rhoades, describing the method to his newfound rabble-rousing madness: “No one is safe.”

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Which brings us to the big question asked by the episode, and perhaps by the entire show: Is there such a thing as an ethical billionaire? “Billionaires break the laws of decency, even while obeying the letter,” says Chuck. “By definition, having that much is criminal.” Prince disagrees; he’s a billionaire himself, so what did you expect?

But as a character, he represents a unique challenge to Chuck Rhoades’s entire raison d’être: He believes that, even as a billionaire, he can effectively police himself and his peers on the Prince List in the bargain. Somehow I doubt that the newly minted torches-and-pitchforks Chuck will agree.

I’m covering Billions‘ sixth season for the New York Times, starting with my review of the season premiere. Always good to be back on this beat.

Prince sees himself as an ethical billionaire. Is there such a thing?

It’s an open question. There are billionaires who definitely do great things with their wealth, and their companies generate wealth for others, and they may be good people. I think the show is actually more interested in … There’s the cliché “Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” The other side of that is what the great fortune does to that person — what the power and wealth and resources do to a person’s soul, for lack of a better word.

In terms of my own opinion of it, it takes a big leap for me to imagine having that kind of wealth and hoarding it, keeping it for myself and doing whatever I have to do to grow it. I find it very hard to put myself in the shoes of someone like that. I understand greed and covetousness as much as anybody, but on that scale, I find it really difficult to conceptualize what would keep you underpaying your workers when you already have tens of billions of dollars.

I interviewed actor Corey Stoll about his role as Mike Prince, Billions‘ new antagonist/co-protagonist, for the New York Times. This should be in the print edition too sometime soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

SPOILERS AHEAD

“So this is what it is to lose,” says Bobby Axelrod. “OK.”

He’s talking to Mike Prince, the man who helped engineer his downfall — a decisive one this time. How do we know it’s decisive? Because, I think, of that concluding “OK.” (Also, Damian Lewis, who plays Axe, just made public he is leaving the show.) Until this point, Axe has always scratched and clawed like a cornered animal to fight his way out of defeat, whether at the hands of his legal nemesis Chuck Rhoades or his business rivals, like Prince. This time, though? He admits he has been beaten, and makes his peace with it.

So why does it feel like a loss for Chuck, too?

I reviewed tonight’s big, big Billions season finale for the New York Times.

Watching “Billions” may be a breeze, but watching “Billions” to recap it is not. Constant pausing and rewinding is required to catch the countless twists and turns of every scheme; I would estimate that an hourlong episode takes me an hour and a half — at a minimum — to finish.

Nice work if you can get it, but it makes covering even famously dense shows like “The Wire” or “Game of Thrones” feel like recapping “Blue’s Clues.”

And this second-to-last episode of the show’s fifth season is even more complicated than the average. The conspiracy to take down Bobby Axelrod by involving him in a shady cannabis-funded banking deal, hatched by his enemies Chuck Rhoades, Mike Prince, Kate Sacker and Taylor Mason, is as dizzying a display of double- and triple-crossing as the show has ever served up.

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

Chuck Rhoades is cooking eggs.

That’s it. That’s the scene.

For three uninterrupted minutes — without dialogue, without music, without so much as a single cut — the attorney general for the great state of New York cracks, scrambles, fries, flips and serves an omelet to his daughter, Eva (Alexa Swinton), and their guest, the billionaire Mike Prince. In “Billions” time, those three minutes might as well be an eternity. Suddenly, we’re miles away from the mile-a-minute patter and breakneck plot twists that make “Billions” one of the fastest-moving shows on television. For these three minutes, it is slow cinema, a cousin to the endless floor-sweeping and glacial soup-sipping of its sister Showtime series, “Twin Peaks: The Return.”

That this happens in the most momentous episode so far of the season’s long-delayed latter half seems like no coincidence. As the first installment to truly address the Covid-19 pandemic — it appears to be set after the initial quarantine stage, when people started making their way back to workplaces and family gatherings — it is keenly interested in the ways human beings connect. There’s video conferencing and FaceTiming, as well as spirited dinner conversations, an in-office date and an intimate phone call. Viewed in this context, the omelet scene is an attempt to slow things down and capture the vibe of what it’s like to pull an all-nighter with a colleague, share a joint and then fix an early breakfast for your daughter.

I wrote about last night’s episode of Billions, which contains one of my favorite scenes in the history of the show-slash-on TV all year, for the New York Times.

“He’s not dead till I say he’s dead,” says Bobby Axelrod of his decabillionaire rival, Mike Prince.

“Bobby Axelrod has to be wiped from the face of the earth,” says Mike Prince of his decabillionaire rival, Bobby Axelrod.

Heck yeah, says I.

“Billions” is never better than when its combatants (often a more apt word than “characters”) have well and truly joined the battle against one another, concocting complex schemes and building toward dramatic denouements for their rivalries. As this week’s episode drew to a close, not one but three worthy adversaries — Mike Prince; Chuck Rhoades; and, in something of a surprise, Taylor Mason — had all joined forces to take Bobby Axelrod down.

Will it stick? Probably no more or less than all their past attempts, including those that took place in this very episode. Will it be fun to watch? I would bet a decabillionaire’s daily ill-gotten gains on it.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.