Dread, Mr. Robot explains, is that feeling of crossing a line you don’t realize exists until you’ve already crossed it. It’s that “My God, what have I done” sensation, when you find yourself in over your head and realize you’re the one who got yourself there.

And if there’s one thing the director Sam Esmail does well, it’s dread. His long takes, his slow zooms, his beautiful close-ups of big-eyed people staring in disbelief: They make him television’s poet laureate of waiting for the other shoe to drop, and knowing that when it falls, it will hit hard.

This week’s episode of “Mr. Robot” was all about that ugly feeling. It divides its time between three situations in which characters are held against their will, desperate to find a way out, waiting to see what their captor will do next. Throw in the composer Mac Quayle’s increasingly ominous score and the cinematographer Tod Campbell’s confidently stark camera work and you have a recipe for a very black Christmas indeed.

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

The final episode of “The Affair” begins and ends with different versions of the same song. In its opening minutes, “The Whole of the Moon” by the Irish folk-rock band the Waterboys blares forth while Noah Solloway drills friends and family in a dance routine for his daughter Whitney’s wedding. As sung by the vocalist Mike Scott, the lyrics regard a loved one with awe that borders on pagan devotion: “I saw the crescent,” he joyfully yelps. “You saw the whole of the moon.”

By the time the episode ends, Noah is an old man, alone with his memories on the shores of Montauk. This time, Fiona Apple, who provided the show’s opening theme, performs the song. In her ragged voice, the lyrics sound less like praise and more like accusations: When she sings “I sighed, but you swooned,” the words catch and drag in her throat like a curse.

Yet the sense that Apple is in love, deeply, with the person to whom she is singing is no less palpable here than it is in Scott’s original. Rather, her performance reflects the way the people we love can confound, even infuriate us while at their best as well as at their worst. Sometimes, loving someone who feels bigger and better than we are can be an enormous burden. Sometimes we want to see only a sliver of the sky rather than the whole thing, and to hell with those who would force us out of ourselves to do otherwise.

If you’ve watched all five seasons of “The Affair,” you can see where this is going. To Helen Solloway, her ex-husband, Noah, is maddeningly impulsive and self-pitying but also patient and sweet. To Noah, his ex-wife Helen is infuriatingly Type A and judgmental but also caring and almost impossibly together. Sometimes their virtues are nearly as difficult to tolerate as their vices. But that’s love, isn’t it?

I reviewed the series finale of The Affair for the New York Times. It’s been one of the great rewards of my career to watch and write about this show.

“It’s cool, dude. We don’t have to talk.” From Darlene Alderson’s lips to the creator, writer and director Sam Esmail’s ears: The fifth installment of the final season of “Mr. Robot” is almost entirely dialogue free.

It’s an attention-getting feat from the filmmaker, who is no stranger to such stunts. Recall that high-rise thriller episode that looked like it was filmed as one long take, for example, or the series’s perfect simulacra of 1990s sitcoms and 1980s slasher films.

This episode primarily tracks Darlene and her brother, Elliot, as they finagle their way into a secure server farm in order to hack the bank account used by their nemesis, Whiterose, and her Dark Army. One side plots tracks the outgoing E Corp chief executive, Phillip Price, and the compromised F.B.I. agent Dom DiPierro as they follow the Dark Army’s instructions. Another tracks Elliot’s therapist, Krista, who doesn’t realize she is being followed by the minions of Elliot’s old drug-dealing enemy, Vera, until it’s too late.

It all makes for a rather miserable Christmas Day for all concerned; indeed, the contrast between the characters’ stressful states and the compulsory joy of all the Christmas music they encounter is the episode’s best running gag.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Mr. Robot‘s final season for the New York Times.

Risk is the essence of romance. A wise woman told me that once; I live with her now, so I’m inclined to believe she knew what she was talking about. Exposed and vulnerable, we reach out to another person and hope they’ll reach back. We put ourselves at their mercy in hopes of connection. In some cases, we put ourselves at the mercy of a world that will punish us for that connection should it be discovered. There is some pain we suffer gladly because it’s the vessel in which pleasure comes.

Titled “403 Forbidden” — like every episode title so far, it’s both an internet error message and a signpost for the story — this installment of “Mr. Robot” has both the series’s protagonist and antagonist putting themselves at risk in romance’s name. In one case, it leads to disaster. In another … well, the season isn’t over yet.

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

Where Does the TV Show Pick Up?

The show is set roughly 30 years later; during much of that time, Robert Redford has been president. Vigilantism remains banned except under official government auspices thanks to the Keene Act, a 1977 law named after Senator Joe Keene, whose charismatic son is now challenging Redford for the presidency. And Dr. Manhattan, who despite his near-omniscience was unable to stop Ozymandias’s plot, has fled the planet for Mars, where he has lived alone for decades.

Historically and psychically, the TV series roots itself in the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Okla., in which a white mob swarmed the prosperous black part of town, resulting in as many as 300 deaths, with thousands more displaced. In the fictionalized present day, the series pits the Tulsa police force, whose members wear vigilante-style masks to protect their identity, against a militant white supremacist group called the Seventh Kavalry, which has adopted Rorschach’s lethal methods and black-and-white mask.

I wrote a quick and dirty guide to Watchmen—the comic, the show, and their shared world—for the New York Times.

Adding additional layers to an already complicated plot is tricky business, of course. But the mysteries are so intriguing, and Esmail’s command of his craft so sure, that the investment seems sound as a pound.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times. It’s good!

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. Tough to know what to make of it.

It starts with the death of a main character. It seems, at first, to end with the death of the main character. In between, it plays out like an eerie paranoid thriller against a backdrop of international corruption and capitalism run amok. Written and directed by the series’s creator, Sam Esmail, the fourth and final season premiere of “Mr. Robot” plays to all the show’s strengths and none of its weaknesses.

I reviewed the season premiere of Mr. Robot for the New York Times. I liked it quite a bit, which was a relief.

Joanie, Joanie, Joanie. What are we going to do with your share of “The Affair”? The grown-up daughter of Cole and Alison Lockhart dominates this episode — which, given the strength of Noah Solloway’s segment, ought to be a compliment. But when Joanie seeks out and finds her mother’s killer, what happens manages to upend the show’s narrative apple cart so completely that it’s hard to appreciate anything that came before.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It took a wild left turn and I did not come along for the ride.

In a way, this episode feels like “The Affair” mourning its departed stars. Seeing Joshua Jackson’s open, soulful face as Cole in flashbacks; hearing Ruth Wilson’s ragged, bottomed-out voice as Alison in voice-over; watching Joanie wrestle with her memories of both parents as if those memories were living things she must defeat in order to survive … all of it draws attention to the enormity of the contribution those actors and their characters made to the show, and the void left in their wake. After half a season of the Solloways and their circle of lovers, friends and family, the Lockharts finally get their due, and it’s long overdue.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair, which I suppose is the one where I realized how much I miss Alison and Cole and how shaky I am on Joanie as a replacement, for the New York Times.

“I don’t want to be looked at anymore,” Whitney Solloway says. “I want to be the one that does the looking.”

“That is where the power lies,” agrees the wealthy gallery owner to whom she is speaking. Soon she will tell him all her dreams — owning her own gallery, where she can foster new artists whose work shows her things she’s never seen before. Soon after that, she’ll be making love to her abusive ex-boyfriend while the owner looks on and masturbates. The quid pro quo is explicit, in every sense.

But Whitney’s initial exchange with her would-be benefactor speaks to more than their arrangement. What is “The Affair” if not a five-season-long exploration of the power of looking? Noah and Helen Solloway; their departed counterparts, Cole and Allison Lockhart; Cole and Allison’s daughter, Joanie; the odd boyfriend or girlfriend; and now, at long last, Noah and Hellen’s daughter Whitney: Whatever humiliations and calamities befall them, they have been given the ability, in turns, to make us see it all through their eyes. That is power. And on this week’s episode, “The Affair” wields that power beautifully and provocatively.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair, which finally gave us a Whitney segment, for the New York Times.

In its closing minutes, this week’s episode of “The Affair” shows us a vision of Montauk, N.Y., a few decades from now. It’s nothing short of post-apocalyptic. Gutted buildings, flooded parking lots, shattered streets in which nothing moves but salt water fish brought in by the tide.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

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

Resilience is a trait “The Affair” shares with its leading lady. The show spent four seasons chronicling the tumultous lives of Noah (Dominic West), Helen (Maura Tierney) and the other couple drawn into and destroyed by the series’s central affair, Alison Bailey (Ruth Wilson) and Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson). Then it weathered the departures of two of its four leads, first Wilson (her character was killed off) and then Jackson (his character’s fate is unclear), under circumstances about which the involved parties have been … less than forthcoming.

Other series might not be up to the task of continuing after so severe an alteration to their basic make-up. But it’s a challenge to which “The Affair” is uniquely well suited. The series’s co-creator and showrunner, Sarah Treem, who wrote this season’s premiere, has never been interested in the neatly plotted arcs many viewers demand of their TV dramas. (Try talking to an angry “Game of Thrones” fan about Daenerys Targaryen or Jaime Lannister if you don’t believe me.)

Rather, the messiness of “The Affair” has always been its greatest strength. Its defining theme is the messiness of adult life, and all the forces — including love, lust, money, class, race, gender, parenthood and divorce — capable of laying waste to our best-laid plans. Birth and death rank right up there, too, and it is with these topics that the premiere concerns itself, using the shifting, sometimes contradictory point-of-view structure that has always set the show apart.

I’m thrilled to be back covering The Affair, one of my favorite shows, for the New York Times this season, starting with my review of the season premiere.

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

Chuck Rhoades has issued his own mission statement. “I myself will be doing my usual boogie,” he tells the gaggle of favor-trading power brokers he’s assembled to help him take down Jock Jeffcoat. “Inducing mistakes through temptation, misdirection, obfuscation and conflation-slash-corruption of the ideals that built this great nation.” A brief pause for breath follows, before he adds, “For a good and noble purpose, of course.”

The assembled bigwigs all nod in the affirmative and concur. Why wouldn’t they? For one thing, they’re all in on Chuck’s shady attempt to expose Jeffcoat’s even shadier collusion with a voting machine manufacturer to rig elections. That “good and noble purpose” is ostensibly one they share.

But you don’t need to be part of criminal conspiracy to recognize the underlying sentiment. Chuck’s merry men all agree that this self-admitted liar is telling them the truth, in the familiar manner of people who’ve decided to humor someone who’s full of it because disagreeing would be more trouble than it’s worth.

Fortunately, we here are under no such obligation.

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