There’s no way to prepare for an episode like this week’s installment of “The Affair.” That’s as true for the audience as it is for the characters involved. Perhaps that’s why so much of this devastating hour of television is spent being not particularly devastating at all.

I reviewed today’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It was very hard to do.

Just how bad will Jimmy McGill break this season? That’s the big question for viewers as “Better Call Saul” returns to AMC for Season 4 on Monday, Aug. 6. Created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould as a prequel to “Breaking Bad,” “Saul” stars Bob Odenkirk as its title character … sort of.

“Saul” tells the story of Jimmy McGill, a small-time lawyer and part-time con man who devolves into the criminal attorney we first met on “Breaking Bad,” Saul Goodman. Figures from both his past and his “Breaking Bad” future push and pull him toward that grim destination, their own stories playing out in parallel.

Given the fiery, tragic finale of Season 3, can Jimmy pick up the pieces and set a straight course? We already know the answer, but the journey is fascinating to watch. And if you need a quick road map ahead of the season premiere, this character-by-character guide should get you caught up.

I wrote a Better Call Saul refresher/cheat sheet thing for the New York Times. Can’t wait for the show to return.

The sex scene between Helen and Sierra isn’t particularly explicit. But what Sierra says leading up to their liaison certainly makes a lasting impression. She enjoys sleeping with women, she tells Helen, because their shared struggles make the connection more intimate. She feels “primal admiration” for seeing a fellow woman in bed, “naked and confident and hungry for orgasm.” And she feels a greater degree of control — “control is really hot,” she concludes, before they finally kiss. By the time she’s finished talking, the temperature in that yurt has surely risen several degrees.

[…]

While we’re on the subject of Janelle, it has to be said that the chemistry between Sanaa Lathan and Dominic West is considerable. Granted, that’s par for the course on this show, which has yet to serve up a lukewarm sex scene (except on purpose) in three and a half seasons. But when Noah and Janelle finally get into bed together, there’s an easy, joyous intimacy to it — my favorite bit is when she jokingly moans “Does it turn you on that I’m your boss?” and then immediately starts laughing — that’s so convincing I almost felt bad watching. Almost.

In that regard, it’s a lot like the intense buildup to Helen and Sierra’s hookup earlier in the episode, which made their encounter, for all its problems, seem like the proverbial “consummation devoutly to be wished.” Seems to me that if sex were less fun, people wouldn’t risk all these complications to their lives in order to have it with each other. This is yet another aspect of adult life that “The Affair” shows it understands, week in and week out.

I reviewed last weekend’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

And now, a brief aside about an outer-space action movie that I provides a useful interpretive framework.

Alison’s father’s latest wife is played by Dina Meyer, one of the stars of Paul Verhoeven’s ultraviolent sci-fi satire “Starship Troopers.” That film, which chronicles a militaristic future Earth’s intergalactic battle against a sentient species of giant insect, has long disgusted some critics and delighted others in equal measure. On the surface, its story of young, beautiful soldier-citizens waging a war of extermination against literal vermin reads as gleefully fascist.

But Verhoeven and his collaborators’ conceit was to make the kind of war movie such a society would make about itself, celebrating the virtues espoused by the fictional society it depicts. The film is positioned as the product of the mind-set of the characters within the film — not a bad way to understand how what we see on “The Affair” is filtered through the perspectives of its main characters.

I reviewed yesterday’s episode of The Affair, which dug right into the heart of Alison Bailey and the show itself, for the New York Times.

The Dream Machine: ‘Superman: The Movie’ (1978)

Where to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

The machinery of the modern-day blockbuster — kick-started by Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” and thrown into high gear by George Lucas’s “Star Wars” — never operated in a more chaotic, or mercenary, fashion than it did in this big-budget work of art-by-committee. There was its small army of screenwriters, credited and uncredited (including the author of “Godfather,” Mario Puzo); the decision to shoot the film and its sequel simultaneously in order to increase the return on investment; the fortune thrown at Marlon Brando for just a few minutes of screen time as Superman’s Kryptonian father; the conflicts between director Richard Donner and his producers that led to his ouster before the sequel was completed (Richard Lester stepped in): All in all, the process was as industrial as building a car.

But all that fades away the moment the movie begins. The visual effects, most notably the Zoptic front-projection system that made Superman’s flight convincing, won an Oscar. The star-studded supporting cast, with Margot Kidder as a vivacious Lois Lane, Brando as Jor-El and Gene Hackman as Lex Luthor, gave the thing gravitas. Finally, there’s Superman himself: Christopher Reeve, in a performance so effortlessly charming yet rooted in thoughtful physicality, it forever associated him with the role. His instantaneous change in posture and expression when he switches between Superman and Clark Kent remains a wonder to behold.

The Reaganomicon: ‘RoboCop’ (1987)

Where to watch: Stream it on DirecTV Now or IFC; rent it from iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

Despite the success of “Superman” and its even better sequel, “Superman II,” the standard superhero seemed a little superfluous in the 1980s. With President Ronald Reagan telling tales of good versus evil straight out of a comic book, and action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis sculpting their physiques to cartoon-worthy levels, who needed spandex?

Enter “RoboCop,” the sci-fi satirist Paul Verhoeven’s biting black comedy in ultraviolent action-hero drag. In a dystopian future where hospitals are driven by profit and police departments use military-grade weaponry — imagine all that! — a badly-wounded rookie cop (played by the unlikely action star Peter Weller) is fitted by a creepy corporation with cybernetic enhancements that increase his lethality but wipe out his memory. The story of a super-cop literally fighting against his own programming in order to reclaim his humanity — in a city being stripped for parts by the superrich — is as poignant now as it was in Reagan’s America.

Blockbuster Begins: ‘Batman’ (1989)

Where to watch: Rent it on iTunes, Amazon or YouTube

Almost as soon as the TV show “Batman” went off the air, darker material began to ferment in the comic-book depictions of the Caped Crusader and his peers. “Batman” was the blockbuster that brought this grimmer vision roaring into multiplexes and the mainstream consciousness. Directed with confident neo-noir style by Tim Burton, the movie pivoted off works like the cartoonist Frank Miller’s “The Dark Knight Returns” and employed an array of talent — the composer Danny Elfman; the production designer Anton Furst; and Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson as Batman and his psychopathic nemesis, the Joker — working at or near their career peaks.

While “Batman” remains one of the genre’s best films (the best, if you want my opinion), its industry innovations sometimes overshadow its aesthetic excellence. The movie’s PG-13 rating became standard for tent-pole movies, while its record-breaking box office enshrined opening-weekend revenue as a key measurement of a film’s success. “Batman” was an inescapable last gasp of Big ’80s monoculture; that summer, the bat symbol was nearly as ubiquitous as Coca-Cola.

I’m really glad my editors at the New York Times talked me into writing a cultural history of superheroes on film and television, touching on changing mores, aesthetics, technology, showbiz, and American society in general. I’m very proud of how this piece turned out, especially of the effort we made to give proper credit to the characters’ original creators. And there’s links to where you can watch every single movie and show on the list online!

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.