Deliberately disorienting and strange, the better to mimic the world in which Satchel Cannon now finds himself alone, this episode of Fargo (“East/West”) is by far the season’s best. Coming as it does after the bloodbath of Episode 8, it relies less on sheer body count for its power than on the mysteries described above—the meta mysteries of why the show uses the techniques it does, the in-world mysteries of Satchel and Rabbi’s fellow guests at the Barton Arms hotel (it hardly needs to be said that this is a reference to Barton Fink, which is itself set largely in a strange hotel), and the general feeling that some horrible future awaits.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo, the season’s strangest and best to date, for Decider.

“I don’t need a stand-up bath, do I?” asks Lyra Silvertongue (Dafne Keen). A young traveler between worlds, she has just learned of the marvelous technological achievement known as a shower, and she’s skeptical.

“That’s one question you don’t need to ask the alethiometer,” replies her daemon Pantalaimon (a shape-shifting animal companion voiced by Kit Connor). He’s referring to the magical, golden compass-like device she uses to ascertain the truth. And sure enough, a couple of sniffs of her own B.O. later, Lyra winds up hitting the stand-up bath.

As the joint HBO/BBC adaptation of novelist Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series enters its second season, small humanizing moments such as these take on added importance. Written by series creator Jack Thorne, the show’s second season premiere, “The City of Magpies,” is weighed down by dialogue consisting largely of arch declamations and great big gobs of exposition. Reminding us that the show’s protagonist is basically a middle-schooler who’s gone days without bathing and could use a good scrub-down is a small but vital way of keeping things down to earth when everything else is up in the air.

I’m happy to make my Fanbyte debut with my review of His Dark Materials‘ second season premiere. I’ll be covering the show there all season long, so stick around!

Now that the inevitable bloody explosion for which we’ve waited all season has taken place, it’s worth noting that three full episodes remain. Will we be looking at a protracted aftermath, or will the violence continue, or even ratchet up? Will Odis and Oraetta get their comeuppance? Will Josto’s scheming (he’s like a snake, in Gaetano’s admiring words) or Loy’s stoicism win the day? Will Zelmare seek revenge of her own? And what is to become of Ethelrida, the one decent person in the whole mess? With no righteous lawman or law-woman to anchor the action as in previous seasons, and an extra episode for creator and co-writer Noah Hawley to play with, the contours of the season’s denouement are unclear. I get the feeling, though, that Ethelrida isn’t the only character who can’t afford to make mistakes.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

I was not prepared.

No, seriously, listen: I was not prepared.

I reviewed the series finale of the magnificent Suburra: Blood on Rome for Decider.

It’s a hell of a note to end on. Only one episode remains before Suburra arrives at its final destination, and I find myself just as enthralled by these handsome criminals and their emotional misadventures as ever. Almost certainly this will leave me bereaved by the season’s end, as I just can’t imagine all of them making it out alive. I want them to, though—that’s the thing. I want my beautiful boys to live to fight another day. I want them to get along. I want the New Kings of Rome to stand triumphant, that’s how successful this show has been, over the course of its three seasons, in making me care about these dirtbags. And I have a sinking feeling I’m going to be disappointed.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome for Decider.

Watching the two of them egg each other on is like watching a dark mirror image of meetings between Spadino and Aureliano; you want the boys to get along, whereas with Manfredi and Adelaide, all you want them to do is sit down and shut up.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season Three for Decider.

The most endearing thing about Suburra is how endearing Aureliano Adami and Spadino Anacleti find each other. Despite starting the series at odds, despite all the twists and turns in their personal and professional relationship since then, you always get the sense that these two dudes fundamentally enjoy each other’s company, even at times when they enjoy very little else. There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in this episode that makes that point very clearly. At the big, ill-fated party Spadino throws to celebrate his and Aureliano’s coronation as “the new Kings of Rome,” they, along with their significant others Nadia and Angelica, toast to their success. And right then, Aureliano leans over and kisses Spadino on the arm.

The main thing to notice here is what you don’t notice here. There’s no camera cut to emphasize the gesture. There’s no reaction shot focusing on any of the characters, showing that they’re taken aback or smiling warmly at the kiss or anything like that. In the absence of that kind of basic filmmaking infrastructure it feels safe to assume that the kiss was improvised on the spot by actor Alessandro Borghi and then kept in the episode because the filmmakers liked the look of it.

But that absence of emphasis says so much about the closeness between these two guys. Aureliano can kiss Spadino on the arm and the party proceeds as normal (for now anyway) because yeah, of course these two guys love each other and would display that without it being a big deal. And it’s in moments like those that I love them too.

I reviewed the third episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 3 for Decider.

I think the thing that surprises me most about this episode is the rapidity with which Spadino and Aureliano are moving their way through Rome’s criminal power structure. We barely meet the truculent Titto before he’s opening fire on the duo’s enemies on their behalf. If the rest of the season simply frogmarches our heroes to the top of the power structure—well, I’ll be pretty excited about it, the way the episodes of Boardwalk Empire or Fargo in which someone comes out indisputably on top always excited me.

I reviewed episode 2 of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 3 for Decider.

Of course, this is Suburra, so the other star of the show is just the way the show itself looks. Competing color schemes, none of which are the typical prestige-TV palette of slate-blue or puke-green, come with each character: Aureliano is blue like the sea of his oceanside headquarters, Spadino is gold like the overly opulent decorations in his home, Nascari is crimson like a cardinal’s robes, and Cinaglia tends to be shot in harsh lighting as if he might wilt under the bright lights. The show doesn’t beat you over the head with any of this, but it’s there, and it has an impact.

I reviewed Suburra: Blood on Rome‘s third and final season premiere for Decider, where I’ll be covering the entire season.

I don’t know where this season of Fargo is going; I just know I feel like I’m in expert hands on the way there.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

I forgot to mention this, but I appeared on the Raised by Wolves podcast Crazed by Wolves to discuss the show’s wild first season. Enjoy!

I like art when it’s weirder than it needs to be. That historically has been one of the things I’ve liked best about Fargo: It’s weirder than it needs to be. Think of Lorne Malvo’s batshit extended flashback in Season One, or the prophetic dream soundtracked in part by Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” in Season Two, or V.M. Varga’s whole deal in Season Three. None of these things needed to be that way, but they were, because weirdness is where art lives.

Perhaps that’s why, in the least weird episode of Fargo Season Four to date, I keep thinking of the incredibly morose and shadowy birthday celebration (complete with creepy singing) that the Smutnys, fresh from the takeover of their family business by Loy Cannon, sing to their daughter Ethelrida. Happy birthday to you, kid! It’s really weird around here!

I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

The first thing we should talk about when it comes to this week’s episode of Fargo (“The Birthplace of Civilization”) is the last thing that happens in it. As the lights flicker and fade around the dead body of Loy Cannon’s consigliere Doctor Senator, shot dead by Gaetano Fadda’s button man Constant Calamita, Jeff Russo’s grandiosely melancholy Fargo theme—absent from the entire season until now—comes roaring in on the soundtrack. It’s as if series creator and episode co-writer (with Francesca Sloane) Noah Hawley is sending us a signal: The real show is about to begin.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo for Decider.

I’ve written before that Jude Law’s face is the real star of The Third Day. After tonight’s episode, it’s safe to say that Naomie Harris’s face shares top billing. Watch how director Philippa Lowthorpe’s camera holds a closeup as Harris’s character Helen learns that the baby she just delivered, for a woman she spent all night trying to locate and help, was fathered by her missing husband Sam—who’s still alive and well and living on the island of Osea, despite everything she’s heard to the contrary.

It’s subtle, but you can almost see the exact moment at which the tears of joy pooling in her eyes for the beauty of this mother-and-child tableau turn to tears of shock and sadness. You can just barely see her smile tighten, the love and happiness it connoted twisting around in her mind to betrayal and confusion and anger. But Helen has to keep it together, she has to maintain the serene and peaceful front. Even when Jess, the woman whose baby Helen helped bring into the world, tasks Helen with walking to the island’s “big house” and summoning Sam to see his new daughter, Helen doesn’t break. But you can see everything she’s holding back, written all over her face.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture.

This isn’t the first time Fargo the series has trafficked in the supernatural. Season Two was punctuated by alien vistations; Season Three gave us a character who was invisible to all electronic sensors, and another, played by Twin Peaks‘ Ray Wise, who can best be described as an avenging angel, meting out justice to the wicked. And there are precedents in the work of Joel and Ethan Coen, whose entire oeuvre is Fargo the TV show’s source material at least as much as Fargo the movie itself: Barton Fink, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Hudsucker Proxy, and even The Big Lebowski—whose narrator, the Stranger played by Sam Elliott, shows up and interacts with the Dude before addressing the audience directly—all dabble in the paranormal, to name a few.

But neither the show nor the body of cinematic work that inspired it has, to my recollection, presented us with so pure a figure of horror as Mr. Snowman (played by Will Clinger, according to FX’s press notes on the season). With his blackened, frostbitten fingertips, his missing nose, his pale gray skin, and his ability to change the atmosphere surrounding him, he’s more like a White Walker or one of their wights than anything we’ve seen on the show before. Why series creator and episode co-writer (with Stefani Robinson) Noah Hawley decided to veer so hard and so far in a horror direction with this entity is a mystery, at least for now.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Fargo, which was a doozy, for Decider.

There’s something in the zeitgeist. 2020 has been…well, let’s say a difficult year, and now not one but two effects-heavy science-fantasy HBO shows have tapped into an antecedent for so much of the trouble we’re now in: the Tulsa Race Massacre, the violent slaughter of hundreds of Black people and the destruction of their prosperous town-within-a-town by white attackers in 1921. First Watchmen used it as a retconned origin story for Hooded Justice, the first masked vigilante in the show’s universe. Now, Lovecraft Country returns to the atrocity as part of a time-travel storyline. I wish I could say the journey was worth it.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

One thing that is clear? The Third Day has not missed a step despite the creative changeover. (Series co-creator Dennis Kelly remains aboard, it should be noted, co-writing the episode with Kit de Waal and Dean O’Loughlin.) The causeway is still an evocative visual signature for the show. John Dagleish’s Larry is still an intimidating heavy; somehow he’s even scarier being friendly than he is being surly. The Martins remain maddening and menacing despite their surface friendliness and their ability to explain away every weird thing that happens—your missing car? Stolen, not towed! The screaming woman? She’s gone into labor! The abandoned house with a fully equipped operating theater? It’s for the birth, since the woman refuses to go to the mainland! The frightening iconography you see everywhere you look? “We’ve had our customs for years,” says Mrs. Martin; “They ain’t pretty, but I’m not fucking apologizing for them.” See? There’s a too-perfectly logical explanation for everything!

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. A fine start for the folk-horror series’ second half.

I don’t know. I just don’t know. Lovecraft Country used Emmett Till’s murder as an in-story plot motivator and I…I just don’t know.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. I really struggled with it.

I believe it was Chekhov who said that if you put an apple pie loaded with ipecac syrup on the table in the first act, you’d better use it to give a stickup artist uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea in the second. 

I reviewed last night’s eventful, scatalogical episode of Fargo for Decider.

Primarily, though, I’m grateful for a show that was so consistently surprising—the biggest surprise of all being that it was a good show in the first place. Raised by Wolves is the best American science-fiction show I’ve seen in years—asking big but not boring questions, using tried-and-true sci-fi devices in unexpected ways, constantly unfolding its dark mysteries before our eyes. With so little resolved in the finale, it is admittedly possible that the show will return for Season 2 only for us to discover it’s bitten off more than it can chew. But I’m all for a show that errs on the side of ambition. In that sense, Raised by Wolves‘s mission is accomplished.

I reviewed the wild season finale of Raised by Wolves for Decider. What an unexpected pleasure this show turned out to be.