One of Suburra‘s many strengths, and the one most responsible for making it such a strangely endearing show regarding its dirtbag characters —other than the fact that they’re all played by incredibly beautiful actors I mean— is how emotional it is. I think I’ve used that word every time I’ve discussed the show at any length, but it’s the only one that fits. There are so many shots of so many people quietly crying about losing other people while that lush, mournful theme hits in the background that you can’t help but feel something like what they’re feeling, you know? It’s the contrast between everyone’s affected tough-guy personas and their tendency to melt into sobbing puddles when they’re rejected or bereaved that makes you care.

“Consequences” (Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2, Episode 2) counts on this. It drills right down into one of the series’ closest and most volatile relationships, and then ends it.

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

Judging from this fast-paced premiere—which despite a three-month gap since the Season One finale seems to pick up right where we left off—Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 will offer all the pleasures of its initial outing.

The moody and often beautiful score by Canadian electronic musician Loscil is there, lending grandeur and pathos to the high points of the squalid proceedings. Cinematographer Arnaldo Catinari and director Andrea Molaioli serve up one stunning bit of portraiture after another, and collaborate on a color scheme unlike anything else you’ll see in the genre, with bright blues and lurid greens you won’t see either in the ice-blue/sickly-green palette of the usual prestige-adjacent crime shows or the bisexual lighting that’s dominated tales of slick and attractive people who kill other people for living on the big screen for several years. The plot is a tangled web of hastily formed alliances that keeps you alert but remains easy to follow so long as you pay attention, despite the language barrier. There’s a theme of generational and familial conflict that rings true whether or not your family is involved in organized crime.

And at the heart of it all is a suite of performances from skilled and (this must be stressed) extremely attractive actors. Particularly the core trio of newly minted local Roman crime boss Aureliano Adami (Alessandro Borghi), his Sinti Roma opposite number Alberto “Spadino” Anacleti (Giacomo Ferrara), and drug dealer turned double agent turned cop Gabriele “Lele” Marchilli (Eduardo Valdarnini). Whether killing each other’s fathers to giving each other mudbaths, these three crazy kids are impossible to take your eyes off of. Why would you want to, anyway?

I reviewed the premiere of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

(NOTE: These review summaries will remain brief while I play catch-up with links. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)

Judging from this fast-paced premiere—which despite a three-month gap since the Season One finale seems to pick up right where we left off—Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 will offer all the pleasures of its initial outing.

The moody and often beautiful score by Canadian electronic musician Loscil is there, lending grandeur and pathos to the high points of the squalid proceedings. Cinematographer Arnaldo Catinari and director Andrea Molaioli serve up one stunning bit of portraiture after another, and collaborate on a color scheme unlike anything else you’ll see in the genre, with bright blues and lurid greens you won’t see either in the ice-blue/sickly-green palette of the usual prestige-adjacent crime shows or the bisexual lighting that’s dominated tales of slick and attractive people who kill other people for living on the big screen for several years. The plot is a tangled web of hastily formed alliances that keeps you alert but remains easy to follow so long as you pay attention, despite the language barrier. There’s a theme of generational and familial conflict that rings true whether or not your family is involved in organized crime.

And at the heart of it all is a suite of performances from skilled and (this must be stressed) extremely attractive actors. Particularly the core trio of newly minted local Roman crime boss Aureliano Adami (Alessandro Borghi), his Sinti Roma opposite number Alberto “Spadino” Anacleti (Giacomo Ferrara), and drug dealer turned double agent turned cop Gabriele “Lele” Marchilli (Eduardo Valdarnini). Whether killing each other’s fathers to giving each other mudbaths, these three crazy kids are impossible to take your eyes off of. Why would you want to, anyway?

I’m covering Suburra: Blood on Rome for Decider again this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. I love this show.

(Note: I’m playing catch-up so these review descriptions will be brief. You’ll just have to read the reviews, I suppose!)

46. Paul Giovanni – The Wicker Man (1973)

The Wicker Man is never what you expect it to be. Like its hero, a Scottish police sergeant trying to find a missing girl in a pagan community, the New York musician Paul Giovanni was a stranger to the old Celtic folkways he was hired to investigate for Robin Hardy’s haunting horror film. His outsider’s ear for both the then-booming British folk scene and its ancient antecedents made the music he composed the ideal mirror for such a twisted journey. The opening song is a tightly harmonized adaptation of Scottish poet Robert Burns’ “The Highland Widow’s Lament,” nearly abrasive in its mournful mountain-air beauty. Sex is a frequent topic for the film and music, rendered in forms both profane (the absolutely filthy drinking song “The Landlord’s Daughter”) and sacred (“Willow’s Song,” the set’s dirty-minded but gorgeous standout). Rousing community singalongs and sparse hymns of ritual sacrifice weave conflicting narratives of their own. It’s a soundtrack that casts strange shadows and remains ungraspable, like a tongue of flame.

I reviewed the soundtracks for The Wicker Man, GoodFellas, and This Is Spinal Tap for Pitchfork’s list of the best soundtracks of all time.

True Detective season three is about the fate of the Purcell children, yes. But it’s also about the prejudice and PTSD that drove Native American Vietnam vet Brett Woodard to spark a lethal firefight after his neighbors tried to lynch him for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s about the mysterious one-eyed man who gave the Purcell kids a doll he purchased from a racist parishioner at the local Catholic church, then resurfaced a decade later to harangue Amelia for profiting off other people’s suffering. It’s about the black neighborhood that understandably reacts to a visit from the police like an invasion by outside occupiers. It’s about the three random metalhead teenage assholes who nearly get jammed up for murder because they’re surly and wear Black Sabbath shirts in a God-fearing southern community. It’s about Tom Purcell, driven to alcoholism to dull the pain of life in the closet. It’s about his wife, Lucy, who employs drugs, drink, and promiscuity in much the same self-medicating way after a childhood of abuse and incest. It’s about the contemporary true-crime boom, and how well-meaning filmmakers and podcasters and writers can get us closer to the truth but do a lot of damage on their way there. It’s about the way wealthy men and their allies in government and law enforcement can collude to treat the communities they rule with the kind of impunity that would make a feudal lord envious. It’s about an old man with Alzheimer’s, whose own life is fast becoming as big a mystery to him as the case he could never quite solve, and whose loved ones are slowly slipping into anonymity the same way the real killers and kidnappers did.

In this respect, True Detective season threehas learned lessons not only from its own direct predecessors, but from the ne plus ultra of small-town murder mystery television: Twin Peaks. And it’s learned the right lessons, too.

I wrote about True Detective Season 3 in the context of Twin Peaks–style small-town sadness and horror for Vulture.

When was the last time you walked away from a season of a Marvel/Netflix show with basically no complaints? The final bullets of The Punisher Season 2 have flown and I’m just freaking delighted to report that pretty much all of them hit the bullseye. Other than that one episode spent playing for time early in the season, this was…great, just great, just a terrific interpretation of the character of Frank Castle and how to tell stories with him. It avoided all of the usual pitfalls of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s TV end, like doubling up on villains but then not knowing how to balance them, or reaching an obvious endpoint about three-fifths of the way to the finale and then concocting some absurd plot contrivance to keep the story moving. It played to the general strengths of superhero stories, using violence and action to convey outsized emotion and treating the fallout as a metaphor for psychosexual vulnerability. The specifics of the violence and action were brutal, as befits the character. The politics were, in the main, sharp and counterintuitive given the Punisher’s often reactionary fanbase. Every major actor in it was good. Some (Amber Rose Revah, Annette O’Toole, Josh Stewart, Ben Barnes, and especially guest star Deborah Ann Woll) were fascinating. And one, Jon Bernthal, was an all-timer.

I reviewed the season finale of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

Originally recorded by doo-wop group the Chords, who charted with it in 1954, “Sh-Boom” became part of the pop-culture firmament largely because of a cover version by the Crew Cuts that was also a hit later that year. Both versions are the kind of gleeful pure-dee nonsense that make doo-wop such a fun genre to pronounce, let alone listen to. While Chords’ rendition has a jaunty swing to it, the Crew Cuts’ whitebread revamp emphasizes the gliding, carefree, “life could be a dream” side of the song. It sounds like a Sunday drive.

Of course, most people content themselves with driving on the right side of the road, Sunday or any other day, whether they’re listening to “Sh-Boom” or “Yakety Yak” or “Symphony of Destruction” by Megadeth. This is not just because it’s the law, or because it’s much safer not to drive into oncoming traffic. It’s because staying in your lane allows you to chart a long straight course, and a long straight road is the most fun kind to drive. The Germans modeled a whole genre of music after it and everything.

When we see Brad Wesley driving his red convertible (a Ford, possibly ill-gotten from Strodenmire’s ill-fated Ford dealership) with the top down on a bright sunny day, the fact that he’s singing “Sh-Boom” fits. It’s that kind of song. Wesley is also swerving from one side of the road to the other and back, over and over, like a sine wave, like a snake. This, too, fits. He’s that kind of person. But the actual driving process deserves closer examination.

Until Dalton passes by headed in the other direction, nearly getting run off the road in the process, there isn’t another car in sight. Wesley has the road all to himself. He could comfortably cruise along, taking in the air and the scenery. He could floor it if he felt the need for speed. (“He’s go the sheriff and the whole police force in his pocket,” Red Webster tells Dalton later in the film; the line is likely intended to explain why crimefighting in Jasper is entirely the province of bouncers, but it explains a lot of other things too.) This is what normal people who enjoy a nice drive would do.

As anyone who’s whipped around an empty high-school parking lot could tell you, rocking the steering wheel back and forth like Wesley does creates a push-pull swerving sensation that’s much more enjoyable in theory than in practice. If you’re a 17 year old looking for a quick thrill when you’re all out of kratom or whatever, sure knock yourself out. But to drive that way over a significant distance is less fun than just driving straight, not more.

Ben Gazzara sells the nauseating joyride as well as you’d expect from an actor who, prior to Road House, created the role of Brick in Cat in a Hot Tin Roof by Tennessee Williams. And indeed we can take Wesley’s glee as entirely sincere, but not because he’s having fun driving in and of itself. He has gone out of his way to make his drive less physically enjoyable, because the thrill of being a gigantic asshole and recklessly endangering the lives of others more than compensates for the loss.

This is the kind of man Brad Wesley is. He can hey-nonny-ding-dong-alang-alang-alang his way back and forth across every inch of asphalt in Jasper and none can say him nay. That’s worth a crick in the neck.

Take Officer Frank here, for instance.

Has the Blue Lives Matter Flag Punisher Skull found its human avatar at last? Hardly. Frank’s wearing a uniform he stole from a crooked cop who was going to kill him both for money and out of loyalty to a gangster relative. He’s pictured here sometime between resisting arrest and kidnapping a Republican senator whose industrialist parents are covering up the fact that he’s gay by murdering teenagers. I’m not sure this will stop the meatheads from misappropriating the image, but it will mark them as the morons they are, that’s for sure.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

The Punisher Season 2 Episode 11 (“The Abyss”) is basically another one of those placeholder episodes. You’ve had a bunch of action, a bunch of violence, and now you’re gonna get an hour of filler before we hit the next stretch of rapids. But unlike the previous dreary episode the season has aired in that vein, this one has Karen Page going for it. Reuniting the Daredevilcostar with her other vigilante platonic-romance partner makes for must-see viewing.

Deborah Ann Woll is so goddamn good in this role at this point. She’s turned Karen into some kind of vulnerability vortex, sucking everyone within a ten foot radius into her maelstrom of pain, care, comfort, and psychosexual entanglement with men who get beat up all the time. Combine that with Jon Bernthal, who’s basically her male equivalent, and…just…man.

Oh man.

Man oh man.

I reviewed the eleventh episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

With Kingdom, no one is tuning in tomorrow, same Chang-time, same Chang-channel. Gratification must be delayed until Season 2. And while the show is to be commended for steering the genre away from The Walking Dead‘s reactionary “us against them” politics in favor of a story where the real heroes are those who risk their own safety and comfort to defend the lives of the less fortunate, what are you really gonna get in the second go-round besides a mashup of your favorite genre franchises but with very nice robes. In the end, that’s Kingdom for you. Decent politics and lovely wide shots aside, it never delivers more than the minimum it needs to.

I reviewed the season finale of Kingdom for Decider.

“The Dark Hearts of Men.” That’s the title of The PunisherSeason 2 Episode 10, and as they say across the pond, it does what it says on the tin. Juxtaposing the usual one-on-one heart-to-heart conversations the show is built on—this time focusing on what really makes Frank Castle and Billy Russo tick—with all-out savagery and depravity, it’s as extreme a statement as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made to date.

I reviewed the tenth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

Kingdom is doubling down on its The Lord of the Rings vibe. Does this shot of three heroes running across the fields in pursuit of their quarry look familiar to you, for instance?

How about this supreme badass hacking his way through the monstrous hordes arrayed against him?

Or perhaps the giant column of heavily armored warriors marching toward a fortified location to seal the doom of everyone inside?

And that’s not all! There’s starving peasants, flaming arrows, last-minute rescues by wise men with beards, a kingdom overthrown from within by an evil advisor, a descendant of royalty who’s prepared all his life for one final confrontation with his arch-enemy. If you ever wanted to know what The Two Towers would look like if everyone had better hats, Kingdom has you covered.

There’s no reason to believe this isn’t sincere admiration on the part of the filmmakers, if indeed it’s even deliberate. (I have a hard time believing the beacon-lighting thing that’s appeared in two episodes is the handiwork of people who haven’t watched LotR, but I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my arm, so my mind tends to go there regardless.) But there’s still a whiff of cynicism to the whole thing. Like Stranger Things before it, Kingdom is a mash-up of the world’s most popular entertainment. It’s a layup.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Kingdom Season 1 for Decider.

Goddammit, they’re still killing kids in this thing. And I just…I just don’t think the material quite justifies the extremity.

[…]

I’ve listened to multiple little girls scream in terror about their impending death, and I’ve seen an adorable kid lie dead with an arrow in her back from a government soldier and then get gently laid to rest by the woman she spent about one day viewing as the replacement for the mother she watched eat her sister alive. And for what? A six-episode Netflix zombie thriller? Doesn’t The Walking Dead abuse serious tragedy for cheap sentiment in much the same way? You can count apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic stories that put the suffering of children at the center and deal with it in a worthwhile way on two hands,maybe. Could Kingdom possibly be headed anywhere worth that journey?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Kingdom for Decider.

The storytelling flaws that keep The Punisher from being even better than it is still linger. With the exception of a very strong cold open in which Frank admits to his small circle of friends that “This is always who I was” and says his wife knew and loved him for it, so said friends should just “Let me be what I’m meant to be,” pretty much every conversation happens in the exact same way. Two people stand or sit together, usually after one of them arrives where the other has been waiting. After that there are two options: Either one character demands to know something and the other character tells them, or one character spills their guts and the other character does so in turn. Billy and Dumont, Anderson Schultz and John Pilgrim, Anderson Schultz and his closeted son David, Pilgrim and some guy who knows a crew of hitters, Curtis and Amy, Frank and a bartender who knows Billy’s location, Madani and Billy, Amy and her old friend and future betrayer Sean, Frank and Amy over the phone, Billy and Dumont again, Madani and Dumont after the latter lures the former to her place, Pilgrim (formerly known as “Robbie, apparently) and his old boss in whatever Nazi gang he used to run with, Amy and Frank after she shoots a person for the first time…you get the picture. You can tweak it around the margins a bit—Curtis and Amy are both in the same place when they start their little chat, Dumont and Billy are in bed during one of theirs, at one point Curtis talks to multiple veterans instead of just one—but virtually every human interaction on this show could be staged like My Dinner with Andre.

I reviewed the ninth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

A few seasons into the run of Mad Men it was briefly voguish to speculate that one of Don and Betty Draper’s children would die. (People also thought that about Megan Draper, and Roger Sterling, and Don himself I believe. They also thought Don Draper was legendary airplane-heist perfect-crime architect D.B. Cooper. TV criticism gets weird sometimes.) I can never find the quote when I’m looking for it, but creator Matthew Weiner said something in response that has stuck with me for years. He said he’d never kill off a child on Mad Men, because any show in which children die must, in the moral-imperative sense, become a show about children dying. Anything less, he argued, is not commensurate with the life-remaking magnitude of such an event on the survivors. To do it for shock value, or for an individual story arc in a show that remains about, like, advertising or working in an office or whatever, is insufficient justification.

Weiner, it should be said, has not always taken his own advice on ethical issues, but on this one at least he practiced what he preached. In the episode of The Romanoffs that came closest to centering on such an event, in which an American couple had to decide whether to adopt a promised Russian infant who turned out to have severe developmental disabilities or abandon her to the orphanage system, was about the momentousness of that choice, and the cruelty of a world that makes such choices possible. To the extent that series ranging from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones have involved the murder or attempted murder of children, the specter of those crimes informs everything that comes afterward. They are meant to demonstrate the inhumanity against which such stories warn us.

Whatever noises Kingdom makes about the evils of the aristocracy or the cruelty of the class system—and in this episode it makes plenty—are seasoning, not the main ingredient. The rich and powerful villains are so feckless and cowardly as to serve primarily as comic relief; their maltreatment of the poor is sledgehammer-subtle. What Kingdom really is is a show in which zombies eat people and people behead zombies with swords while wearing cool costumes, because these things are exciting and fun to watch.

You know what’s not exciting and fun to watch? You know what’s the kind of thing your period-action-horror-fantasy swashbuckler shouldn’t do unless it plans to dig way, way deeper into the subject that it clearly has any intention whatsoever of digging? Putting a terrified little girl on camera and having scream “Mommy, what is wrong with you? You’re scaring me! Stop it!” before her mother eats her alive.

I reviewed the third episode of Kingdom for Decider.

The Punisher’s chief weapon is surprise. Surprise, and fear. Fear and surprise. His two weapons are fear and surprise, and ruthless efficiency…His threeweapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to his slain family…His four—no. Amongst his weapons— amongst his weaponry—are such elements as fear, surprise….I’ll start again. Amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to his slain family, and a nice black uniform—oh, damn.

All praises due to Monty Python, of course, but the Spanish Inquisition has nothing on Frank Castle. He shares pretty much all of their weaponry, plus one that goes unlisted but is the whole point of the thing: humor. No, really! Hardly for the first time this season —Billy Russo had a laugh-out-loud moment last episode when he talks about how he’s learned lost “my company…apparently,” the latter tacked on as a can-you-believe-I-can’t-remember-this-shit afterthought— The Punisher Season 2 Episode 8 (“My Brother’s Keeper”) kept me entertained as much with well-executed moments of comedy as with guns and psychopathy.

I reviewed the eighth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

A six-episode season is too short to delve deep into character and give them room to breathe, the way a longer run would allow; and it’s too long to get away with having slight, sketched-out characters (likeable or loathsome though they may be, as befits their status as faces and heels). Without getting to know them all—and I mean see how they act when the cameras are off, so to speak, not just “here’s a scene where they have some camaraderie, now here’s a scene where they argue, etc.” With all-out zombie warfare on the horizon, I don’t see the show pulling that off. In addition to human flesh, zombies devour screentime.

I reviewed the second episode of Kingdom for Decider.

You know how I spent the last review comparing the relationship between Billy “Jigsaw” Russo and Dr. Krista Dumont to the one between the Joker and Dr. Harleen Quinzel?

Yeah. If you need me, I’ll be over here, awaiting my Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Episode 7 of this season of The Punisher is titled “One Bad Day.” I know, I know: one bad day? Do any of these characters have any other kind of day? But the title references a key component of the definitive, if not technically canonical, Joker origin story, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke. The thesis there is that all it took is one awful, awful day (albeit one that culminated in an acid bath) to turn a down-on-his-luck family man and wannabe standup comic into the deadliest serial killer on the planet. The Joker, who only vaguely remembered the details of his own life pre-Clown Prince, was determined to test this thesis on Commissioner Gordon, whom he kidnapped, stripped naked, and forced to look at gigantic photos of his daughter Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon, also stripped naked, after the Joker shot her in the spine, paralyzing her from the waist down.(It’s a problematic fave.) So it’s hardly like the show is trying to hide its homage to the Distinguished Competition’s supervillain supercouple.

I reviewed the seventh episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

If you like this sort of thing, here’s the sort of thing you’ll likehas been Netflix’s mantra for a minute now. It’s not just the original programming that works this way, either. When ’80s nostalgists run out of Stranger Things or ’90s nostalgists run out of Maniac or people who love Pablo Escobar run out of, like, five different shows about Pablo Escobar, they can always watch the Big Red Machine’s library of the most popular shows on broadcast network television from the past couple decades, which not coincidentally are also the majority of the most popular shows on Netflix.

I’m not saying this approach never pays off creatively. Narcos is a fun show with a great theme song, a great performance in Wagner Moura, and an occasional Great Episode. The troubling German science-fiction show Dark snuck in on a wave of “It’s kinda like Stranger Things” early press (tonally they’re worlds apart but plotwise, yeah, a bit) and became its own engrossing thing. The Punisher, the best of the Marvel/Netflix shows, is a direct Daredevil spinoff from a line of six interconnected series set in the most popular franchise of all time. Still, if you’re looking for something to kick down the doors the way The Sopranos did…well, here are some cooking shows!

But you’ve gotta hand it to them with Kingdom, this sweeping new original Korean-language series. Plenty of networks and plenty of shows have tried and failed to capture the magic of Game of Thrones, the show on TV that is the sort of thing the most people like out of pretty much all the shows on TV at this point, and bellyflopped. (MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles, anyone?) But for whatever reason, none of them isolated one of the most instantly appealing elements of George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, and Dan Weiss’s baby, a concept so brilliant in its simplicity that it shows up before the opening credits of the pilot even roll and will be the subject of the entire final season. Yes, Game of Thrones is “The Sopranos with swords,” as the early buzz hailed it. But it’s also, and on a much larger and more immediately, nerdily impactful scale, The Lord of the Rings with zombies.

Kingdom has cracked the case.

I reviewed the series premiere of Kingdom for Decider.

(NOTE: These review summaries will be brief while I play link catch-up. Just read the reviews!)