Are professional wrestlers just the world’s most muscular theater kids? To quote wrestling legend “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, who appeared on last night’s episode of WWE’s Monday Night Raw: Hell yeah.

Broadcast live without an audience for the first time in history, both Monday Night Raw on the USA Network and last Friday’s episode of Smackdown on Fox stripped wrestling down to its bare essentials: a ring, a microphone, and wrestlers to use both. The result was less like the WWE’s usual played-to-the-rafters gladiatorial spectacle and more like tech week for a black-box production. It showcased the performers at their weirdest, wildest, and most, well, theatrical.

I wrote about the strangeness of wrestling without crowds for Vulture.

Holster your six-shooters and hitch your horses: After a two-year hiatus, Westworld is back — only it’s barely recognizable as Westworld anymore. Taking last season’s scattered segments set outside the Delos corporation’s theme-park system and stretching them out to (almost) an entire episode, the sci-fi brain-teaser’s season premiere (“Parce Domine”) introduces its new main character: the real world. It’s part Black Mirror, part Battlestar Galactica, and, on the whole, a major improvement.

I’m back on the Westworld beat for Rolling Stone this season, starting with my review of tonight’s season premiere. I liked it more than I thought I would!

When it finally happens, the meeting of the Young Pope and the New Pope is an anticlimax. It’s not the confrontation, the clash, the climax promised by the opening credits, which feature Sir John Brannox leading a procession from the right-hand side of the screen while Lenny Belardo strides across the beach in his skivvies from the left, presaging a showdown in the center that never arrives. It’s just Pius XIII in the garb of a simple priest, walking into a room where John Paul III waits for him. It happens so simply and so quickly I didn’t even realize what I was looking at.

And that’s just one of the ways that the season finale of The New Pope, one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen, defies expectations.

I wrote about the finale of The New Pope for Vulture. It was a pleasure and a privilege to write about this extraordinary show, the best thing about which I can say is that it was worthy of its predecessor.

On Better Call Saul, the devil is in the details. This has been true if not from the start then at least from the early going, when it became clear that co-creators Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan were out to depict the show’s thriller sequences, whether of the legal or action variety, as matters of tradecraft. It has this in common with The Americans, which though it faltered slightly with its too-generous ending always rooted the espionage antics of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings in utter tedium. If Mike Ehrmantraut took a brake from painstakingly studding a garden hose with nails long enough to watch the Jennings dig a hole to exhume a dead colleague practically in real time, he’d certainly relate.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

Like its predecessor, the third episode of Better Call Saul‘s fifth season begins and ends with images of waste. At the start, we witness the fate of the ice cream cone Saul was forced to discard on the sidewalk at the end of the previous episode, as ants shot in extreme closeup approach, detect, swarm, and devour it. This isn’t the first time the extended Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe has utilized insect imagery to make a point about its characters; cf. the fly in the meth lab with which Walt becomes obsessed in the famous Breaking Bad bottle episode “Bug,” or Walt’s stint using an exterminator company as a front for his cooking operation in the show’s last seasons. Connoting both insectoid coldness and verminous corruption and filth, the utility of this imagery in regards to narratives of men slowly succumbing to crime and cruelty is obvious.

I wrote about episode three of Better Call Saul season five for my Patreon.

I could go on, and on, and on. It’s that rich a show. It’s a show rich enough to actually merit the comparison to Twin Peaks that all “weird” shows get—it’s that accomplished and sophisticated, that bold, that sexy, that sad. And for a brief moment in this shitty world, it transported me with its belief in the power of love to make the world less shitty. For me, it turned “love thy neighbor as thyself” from a dimly remembered concept from Catholic school into an imperative, into a beacon of hope that such love is still possible. I don’t even know what to say about a TV show that can pull that off. Thank you, I suppose?

I reviewed this past Monday’s extraordinary episode of The New Pope for Vulture.

If you’re a subscriber to my Patreon, every week you’ll get a new piece on one of my favorite movies. Here’s what I’ve tackled so far:

• All That Jazz
• L’Avventura
• Barry Lyndon
• Casino
• Darkon
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Heavenly Creatures
• Hellraiser
• Hellbound: Hellraiser II
• The Lord of the Rings
• Lost Highway
• Manhunter
• The Master
• Natural Born Killers
• Nightbreed
• Star Wars
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
• To Live and Die in L.A.
• Velvet Goldmine

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Tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul begins and ends with images of waste.

I wrote about the second episode of Better Call Saul Season 5 for my Patreon.

“Gene Takovic” lives in a gray world, black and white and rich, grainy gray. He is the future self of Saul Goodman, who was the future self of Jimmy McGill, who was the future self of “Slippin’ Jimmy.” All roads lead to Omaha, Nebraska, where “Gene” toils as the manager of a Cinnabon and hopes he will not be exposed as the accessory to mass murder that he is. The world he inhabits, as shot by director Bronwen Hughes and longtime director of photography Marshall Adams, is a lot like the way imagine the world to look when you put on the One Ring. It’s a world of murk and shadow, with light that adheres rather than illuminates. It’s a dead world.

I will be covering this season of Better Call Saul at my Patreon, starting with my thoughts on the season premiere.

I want to close these thoughts on this exceptional hour of television by noting that Lenny says something interesting about heaven to Eva and the doctor. After whispering his detailed knowledge of the place into the ear of their son, who weeps a single tear after hearing it, he later explains that heaven is exactly like Earth, “except it’s not the same, because in heaven, we glimpse God.” On a smaller, less cosmic scale, I think this is what The Young Pope and The New Pope offer audiences. This is a very real world, a world of cigarettes and sex, politics and personal grievances, dead dogs, dead brothers, sick children, sickened parents. Except it’s not the same as our world, because on The Young Pope and The New Pope, we glimpse … not God, I suppose, but Art. That’s close enough.

I wrote about the seventh episode of The New Pope for Vulture. This was some TV, boy howdy.

If the antihero with a guilty conscience is a fantasy, then it takes its place among beings from other forms of fiction animated by the unrealistic, the supernatural, the fantastic: dragons, zombies, alien invaders, masked slashers, haunted hotels, mad titans, sinister doppelgängers, xenomorphs, terminators, predators, you name it. No one holds the unreality of these entities against the works they inhabit, or at least no one should. No, we accept the unreality in exchange for what these things can reveal to us about our own lives — how they give us an imagistic vocabulary commensurate with the outsized and enormously powerful emotions we feel, emotions too strong for the vocabulary of everyday reality to properly convey.

And what do Saul Goodman and his difficult peers enable us to address? Our own guilt, our own shame, our own regret, our own conviction that had we been a better person in this or that moment, our lives and the lives of those we care about might have turned out very differently. Much maligned for allegedly teaching us to sympathize with the devil, the prestige-TV protagonist instead invites us to take a ruthless inventory of ourselves. On a much larger canvas than we ourselves possess, they play out the dramas of conscience we ourselves face on a smaller scale. That’s what they’re there to do: not to encourage us to give real-world bastards a pass, but to drive us to look at our own bastardry, however minor or major it may be, with fresh and unblinking eyes.

I wrote about Better Call Saul, “difficult men,” and the purpose of prestige TV for my latest column at the Outline.

I’ve heard Narcos and Narcos: Mexico described as the platonic ideal of a Netflix show: eminently bingeable, instantly forgettable. I don’t know if that’s entirely fair, particularly (as I’ve said before) for the Wagner Moura/Pablo Escobar seasons. But here we are at the end of a season that I enjoyed watching from start to finish, but would be hard pressed to, like, recommend to anyone for any particular reason, aside from maybe all the screentime Scoot McNairy got. He was right: This story does not have a happy ending.

I reviewed the season finale of Narcos: Mexico Season Two for Decider. Good but pointedly not great.

There’s one episode left in this season of Narcos: Mexico, and there’s over thirty years of actual narcos in Mexico remaining before the series gets up to date. So there’s plenty of room for final twists and turns in the season finale, which may or may not see the fates of Félix and his plaza bosses sealed, to say nothing of Walt back in Sacramento. All we know for sure is that, to quote Dune, the spice must flow. The only question remaining for this ruthlessly plot-driven show to answer is who will control that flow, and who will act to shut it off.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Narcos: Mexico Season 2 for Decider.

There’s one more moment that sticks with me from this episode. When the representative from the opposition notices that the government’s tech guy is entering secret passwords for separate sets of results, he gets so angry he starts cursing. The Minister of Defense, who’s in the process of colluding with a druglord to conduct this massive fraud at that very moment, chides him for his language. It reminds me of the bit from Apocalypse Now when Brando says “We train young men to drop fire on people, but their commanders won’t allow them to write ‘fuck’ on their airplanes because it’s obscene!” From Saigon to Mexico City, civility is barbarity’s shield.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Narcos: Mexico Season Two for Decider.

I don’t know if it was deliberate or just dumb luck, but my favorite part of Narcos: Mexico Season 2 Episode 7 (“Truth and Reconciliation”) doesn’t come up in conversation between the characters. It’s not a plot point either, or a particularly striking shot. It’s just rain, that’s all—a gentle patter of rain.

The rain falls on the windows of a truck as DEA Agent Walt Breslin is driven back from a meeting with Juárez plaza boss Pablo Acosta by his girlfriend, Mimi. Spurred by her secret pregnancy and by her love for the man himself, Mimi called in a tip to the U.S. Embassy that Acosta might be willing to play ball and help bring Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo down. Walt dutifully hears the man out as they hang out on his roof and share beers—and stories of their brothers, both of them led to their deaths by drugs. Mimi explains to Walt that she hasn’t told Pablo about her pregnancy because his decision to walk away from his life of crime must be made for his own sake. As she and Walt talk, little drops of rain plink down the windshield—droplets of life and hope in an arid landscape. Again, I don’t know if this was an artistic choice, but how much of any work of art comes down to choice, anyway?

I reviewed Narcos: Mexico Season 2 Episode 7 for Decider.

When I saw in the opening credits that this episode (“El Dedazo”) was written by series co-creator Carlo Bernard and directed by its head helmer Andrés Baiz, I figured we were in for something momentous and mournful, the way the best Narcos and Narcos: Mexico episodes tend to play out. That…really wasn’t the case, as it turned out. Instead, it’s the usual formula: incremental movement across a tangle of plot threads, generously seasoned with graphic violence and political cynicism. Not even a side plot in which Félix more or less stalks his Long-Suffering Ex-Wife adds much to the mix.

But one thing Narcos teaches you is to look for the little things. It’s in the way one of the murderous PRI brothers waxes rhapsodic about women in tennis skirts. It’s the idea of a man whose name means “The Crazy Pig” getting sent to conduct high-stakes negotiations. It’s in that weird glance Ramón Arellano Félix shoots him before his men open fire. It’s in the fact that Cochiloco takes off his sunglasses for maybe the first time since we’ve met him, only to get shot seconds later. It’s in the way Félix finds himself swept up in a rally for the PRI’s rival party, a development that seems to start the wheels turning in his head for a maneuver that could pull his ass out of the fire one more time. Narcos is rarely, if ever, going to blow you away—but that just makes any moment where it scores a direct hit on you that much more impactful.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Narcos: Mexico‘s second season for Decider.

I’ve thought about this tumultuous, remarkable episode quite a bit, and the connective tissue seems to me to be the issue of desire. Desire can make a person beautiful through the act of feeling it, the way Attanasio became beautiful to Ester through his desire for her. Not being desired can make a person feel ugly, the way Sofia sees her own face distorted in a mirror after the truth about her husband comes out. A lifetime of not being desired, the kind of life Brannox has experienced after the death of his brother, leaves one searching for something to fill the void — religion first, then drugs when that won’t do. Follow the love: That’s where you’ll find failure. It’s harsh, but at times at least, it’s true.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The New Pope for Vulture.

What does it all mean? It means you’re watching Narcos. As I put it in my review of the previous episode, “You can probably expect the usual cat-and-mouse, one-step-forward-two-steps-back kind of stuff to happen.” We’re firmly in two-steps-back mode at the moment: for Walt, whose decision to sow dissension in the cartel instead of just rolling up the tunnel-diggers himself leads to innocent miners losing their lives; for Chapo, whose big innovation has gone up in a cloud of dust and who now has the very angry brothers to worry about; for Félix, whose plan to dictate terms to the Colombians has gone completely backwards, and who barely escapes the episode with his life. You can pretty much expect the next set of twists and turns to reverse everyone’s fortunes again, since that’s how this show rolls nearly every time—until, inevitably, one of the major players falls for good, at which point someone else will step up to fill the vacuum. Is this a recipe for fulfilling television? No, probably not. Does it make for very watchable television? You bet.

I reviewed episode 5 of Narcos Season 2 for Decider.

“You’re not an idea guy, Chapito.” So says Palma, the head of the Sinaloan branch of Mexico’s cocaine cartel, to his doofus underling Chapo.

Famous last words, am I right?

With his Moe Howard haircut and pipsqueak voice, Chapo comes across like an overgrown child, an impression he complains about in Narcos Mexico Season 2 Episode 4…to his mommy. But as even a casual observer of the news knows full well, he will one day become El Chapo, one of the most powerful and dangerous narcotraffickers in history. This episode takes its title, “The Big Dig,” from the innovation that proved he was “an idea guy” after all.

I reviewed episode four of Narcos: Mexico Season 2 for Decider.

Watching Narcos: Mexico means following along with an endless series of deals, double crosses, alliances forged and broken, leverage gained and utilized, cards getting played and dominoes falling down. It’s not high art; neither opening an episode with a dream sequence nor peppering it with De Palma-esque split-screen sequences changes that. But if you’re into this kind of thing, you make like Zuno and go along for the ride.

I reviewed the third episode of Narcos: Mexico Season Two for Decider.