Of all the ways prestige cable dramas could redress the woeful full-frontal-nudity gender imbalance — and I’m sure we’ve all thought of several, many of them involving Kit Harington — using the penis of a dead, nude black man for a raunchy bit of prop comedy is probably last on the list. And yet! This is the road The Night Of has chosen to go down. In “The Season of the Witch,” overall the series’ most awkward combination of hardcore crime drama and gross-out humor to date, a district attorney and a medical examiner debate the origin of a knife wound in a photograph placed, for no apparent reason other than laughs, next to the exposed genitalia of a corpse in the middle of getting the fluids from its eyeballs and bladder drained. Shit, I’ve already complained about the overabundance of sexualized shots of the unclothed body of the female murder victim at the heart of the story; “sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander” is not the remedy I had in mind.

And hey, this isn’t even the only nude, brutalized black male body on display this week! Earlier in the episode, Naz is offered the opportunity of revenge against the man who burned him last week by his benefactor Freddy, who has the assailant naked, prostrate, and trapped in the showers. Naz gets a half-hearted kick or two in on his tormenter and is ready to walk away — until the man, unwisely given his circumstances at the time, taunts the kid as a “faggot.” Since there’s nothing more menacing than having your sexuality threatened by a black man, Naz goes berserk, pounding the guy into a bloody pulp until Freddy’s goons have to pull him off to keep him from committing “another” murder. Later, Freddy expresses admiration for the “secrets and rage” that motivate his new apprentice; this conversation, at least, does not take place in front of a dead or injured person’s penis for no apparent reason, so thank heaven for small favors.

I had real problems with last Sunday’s The Night Of, which I reviewed for Decider.

“Have you ever wondered how the world would look if the 5/9 had never happened? How the world would look right now?” This question is being posed by a minister of the Chinese state security to a guest attending a party in his home, a young F.B.I. agent who’s investigating the attacks to which he’s referring. They’re standing before a closet full of amazingly intricate women’s dresses. He says they belong to his sister. He does not have a sister.

“In fact, some believe there are alternate realities playing out that very scenario,” he continues, “with other lives that we’re leading, other people that we’ve become.” His smiling eyes welling with tears, he pauses for breath. “The contemplation,” he concludes with a lump in his throat and a slight, self-effacing laugh, “moves me very deeply.”

As well it should. This may be the high-ranking official charged with heading the E Corp hack on Chinese soil, but this, we’ve learned, is a secret identity no closer to the mark than Clark Kent is to Kal-El, the Last Son of Krypton. She is really Whiterose, the transgender woman who leads the lethal cyberterrorism organization the Dark Army. On both sides of her secret life she wields tremendous power, power which she will unleash the next day in the form of a mass shooting that wipes out nearly the entire F.B.I. contingent tracing the hack.

But in this moment, with these words, it’s clear she wants nothing so much as to end the fiction of the fake sister and shed the male-presenting mask once and for all. The sequence is a variation on the Bluebeard fairy tale, but the locked room is full not of the bodies of women Whiterose has killed, but the dresses of the woman she wishes she could always be. If you’ve ever been momentarily overcome by the profound power of a beautiful, impossible ideal, you’ll recognize its effects etched into the actor B D Wong’s face and echoing in his quavering voice. On “Mr. Robot,” even supervillains suffer.

I’m proud of this passage from my review of last night’s Mr. Robot for the New York Times.

I’ve never seen a show fail as spectacularly as Preacher did in its Season One finale. I mean that in every sense of the phrase, honestly. As is the show’s custom, “Call and Response” went as far as it could possibly go, then pushed even farther. Graphic violence of virtually every variety, narrative zig-zags and head-fakes and dead-ends that would make Lost go “now hold the phone,” gross-out moments as stomach-churning as a basic-cable show can get, more tragically hip music cues than a mid-‘90s Miramax movie soundtrack, a complete and total abandonment of taste, decorum, or even just the sensible fear of being corny as hell: Preacher has always been willing to go for it, and went for it the finale did. It just so happens to have gone for the goddamn face of a cliff. It was spectacular, yes. It was also a failure. A complete, total, spectacular failure.

I’ve simply never seen anything like last night’s episode of Preacher. I did my best to explain what I mean in my review for the New York Observer.

Say what you will about what happens in this week’s The Night Of: At least you can see it, for a change. Titled “The Art of War,” this episode was directed by The Theory of Everything and Man on Wire’s James Marsh — the only episode in the series not helmed by co-creator and, as of next week’s installment, co-writer Steven Zaillian. Marsh eschews the ostentatious, obfuscatory camerawork that has marked Zaillian’s contributions: no characters talking while out of focus, no shots of the back of people’s heads, no endless series of close-ups of inanimate objects, no random portraiture of brick walls or puddles. When he does isolate elements of the setting — a dripping hot-water faucet, cigarette smoke wafting up to the ceiling, the harsh overhead lights of the cellblock — these shots have meaning to the characters. You can, and probably should, complain that that meaning is getting doled out with a trowel (the episode ends with a shot of smoke right after Naz makes a deal with the devil! Get it???), but it sure beats spending multiple minutes of screentime zoomed in on the corners of tables just to prove that this is a gritty environment, or whatever.

There’s good news and bad news about last night’s The Night Of. The good news is above. The bad news you can read in my review for Decider.

It starts with the character’s look. Reilly’s physical appearance has always served him well as an actor. There’s something about the combination of his large frame and round, expressive face that makes him look not so much tall as overgrown, like a child stretched to adult proportions. This gives him an air of vulnerability that belies his size; it lends pathos to his dramatic performances, like the sad-sack cop in Magnolia, and a goofball naïveté to his comedic turns, like the fake music legend in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.  It’s how a guy who’s six-foot-two can sing the ode to interpersonal invisibility “Mr. Cellophane” in the film adaptation ofChicago and earn an Oscar nomination, or pair up with the relatively diminutive Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights and come across like a natural sidekick.

In these strictly physical terms alone, Dr. Steve is his magnum opus, the idiot man-child he was born to play. Wearing a brown suit that’s at least two sizes too small, teasing his curly hair to fright-wig proportions, twisting his mouth and squinting his eyes to give his face a vibe of permanent confusion, Reilly leans into his quirks as Dr. Steve.

I wrote about how John C. Reilly’s turn as the title character on Check It Out! with Dr. Steve Brule is one of the best dang performances in TV comedy today for Vulture. I’ve been saying it for years and I’m so glad I got the chance to obsess on it publicly.

One of the most fascinating aspects of “Mr. Robot” has been its ability to capture the moment — whether airing its series premiere days after the revelation of a massive breach of United States government computer systems, or postponing its Season 1 finale because of a real-world shooting — despite being made months in advance of the news. So it feels right for the show to seize the pop culture moment as well. Thus, even as Netflix’s 1980s horror homage “Stranger Things” becomes one of the streaming service’s buzziest shows of the year, this week’s episode of “Mr. Robot” opens with a paean to getting high and reliving the fright flicks of your youth.

In the opening flashback scene, set immediately before the events of the first season, Elliot and Darlene celebrate an impromptu family reunion by watching a fictional slasher film called “The Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie.” (Luis Buñuel and Tobe Hooper, call your lawyers.) It turns out that movie’s rich-kid-targeting killer wore the moneyman mask eventually embraced by fsociety as its symbol. Sure enough, when Elliot tries on a copy provided to him by his sister as a gag, the monster is unleashed. His posture straightens, his low-energy voice grows raspier and more strident, his Rs harden and his vowels sharpen into the distinctive vocal cadence of the actor Christian Slater. Elliot’s not here anymore — we’re looking at and listening to Mr. Robot.

The transformation’s so striking that I wondered if the two performers’ voices had been digitally blended; I might have thought the actors themselves had been switched, if Mr. Malek’s eyes weren’t so big and bright they could be seen clearly through the eyeholes of the mask. The horror movie orchestral music cue that accompanies the appearance of the “Mr. Robot” logo in the credits completes the uncanny effect.

I reviewed this week’s Mr. Robot for the New York Times. This show has reached Hannibal levels of speaking in a cinematic language of its own devising. Don’t believe anyone who tells you this isn’t a great thing.

I’ve been hard on Preacher, and that’s never been harder on me than this week. By any objective measure last night’s episode, “Finish the Song,” ended with the sort of sheer convention-shredding narrative audacity every TV critic worth their salt would commit at least a misdemeanor offense to see more often. It’s actually heartbreaking to how far the show is willing to go, and how hard it works to get there, only to watch it fall short again.

Preacher made one of the boldest storytelling decisions I’ve ever seen on TV, and it still didn’t work. I tried really hard to unpack why in my review of this week’s episode for the New York Observer.

I’m similarly baffled by their insistence on what I referred to last week as uncommunicatively artsy framing. I actually lost count of the number of close-ups of the rear of someone’s head as they 3/4-cheated their faces away from the camera. What idea or mood or character insight is this intended to convey? Why cut yourself off from the ability to capture the nuances of the human face unless you’ve got a damn good reason? I’m stumped.

The technique reaches its nadir during Naz’s bizarre scene with the jail’s resident kingpin, Freddy (a thoroughly wasted Michael K. Williams, naturally introduced with a series of closeups of seemingly every inanimate object in his room, beginning with — rimshot! — a wire). A prizefighter turned druglord turned unofficial lord of Rikers, he’s bribing the male guards, fucking the female ones, and intimidating everyone else into line. For some reason he’s taken an interest in Naz, and he offers him protection after a strange Luciferian monologue in which he tells the kid, “Close your eyes, give me your hand,” like he’s singing the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame,” and makes him feel a handful of veal. As he makes his offer, in the stilted language a vampire might use when demanding to be invited into someone’s home, the scene is shot from the back of Naz’s head, with Freddy completely out of focus. Maybe you can make the sophomore-year film-student argument that the latter choice conveys the man’s inscrutability to Naz. But why obscure Naz, too? Why hide his face, when it’s all we have to go on?

I reviewed last night’s The Night Of for Decider. I don’t think it’s what it’s cracked up to be.

I appeared on my favorite music podcast (and my favorite podcast period), Chris Ott’s Shallow Rewards, to discuss how the critical narrative of the 1990s has distorted the reality of how the era’s music, “alternative” and otherwise, functioned, flourished, and failed. There are substantial digressions about the overall state of arts criticism and journalism in there, too. Nobody does a better job than Chris of editing a podcast for maximum impact — honestly, it’s not even close. Moreover his work has been a huge inspiration and influence for me, and it was an honor to be a guest. Please listen!

Download part one

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Tonight, after over a season of portraying a character with bug-eyed, lock-jawed, pharmaceutical-numbed restraint, Rami Malek cut loose.

To the pseudo-orchestral strains of “Lovely Allen” (a mid-’00s music-blog hit by a band with a name not fit to print), Elliot Alderson goes on a sleep-deprived tear of Adderall-induced optimism and excitement. He’s filmed in fast forward, or with multiple versions of himself walking one behind the other, as if a single body’s not enough to contain his manic good cheer. When he climbs stairs, they light up beneath his feet. When he washes the dishes, the sun gleams off a plate like the sparkle of a cartoon character’s smile. When his pal Leon talks to him about “Seinfeld,” he starts screaming things like “It’s classic George, am I right?” in response. (“I don’t like this, bro,” Leon deadpans in return, a fine and funny moment from the M.C. turned actor Joey Bada$$.)

The freakout concludes at the basketball court as the hacker genius turned paranoid recluse sounds his barbaric yawp: “WOOOOOOOO, SLAAAAAAAM DUNNNKKK!!!” It’s a thing of goofily cathartic beauty …and it’s almost immediately cut off at the knees when he turns to us and his narration says, with weary resignation, “You’re not buying any of this either.”

This week’s episode of “Mr. Robot” takes great pleasure in these moments of unexpected, self-effacing humor. Given that the main rap against the show is its grim tone — as if seriousness and self-seriousness are conterminous phenomena — it’s a useful tool for the series to have in its arsenal. On a surface level, this installment is concerned with some of the bleakest events in the story to date: the discovery of the old-school phone hacker Romero’s corpse by his confederate Mobley, the latter’s increasing conviction that their group has been marked for death by the fearsome organization the Dark Army, Elliot’s desperate attempts to overdose himself out of his Mr. Robot persona’s clutches, his garrulous new pal Ray’s tragic and violent back story. But the writing, the performances, and the filmmaking make it seem like all involved are having the time of their lives, off-camera anyway.

I reviewed last night’s Mr. Robot, which was delightful, for the New York Times.

Faced with the challenge of explaining why something is or is not “hard-core pornography,” Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart punted, famously. In the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio, Potter wrote “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.” In attempting to evaluate “Subtle Beast,” the second episode of The Night Of, I find myself returning to the good justice’s words. By many external markers — classy cinematography, gritty subject matter, a cast drawn from basically every noteworthy HBO drama and crime show of the past 20 years — this is a good show. But I know good shows when I see them, and the program involved in this case is not that.

Let’s focus on the cinematography at first, since I think that’s the biggest headfake at play here. Characters are situated low in the frame, or off to one side. Scene transitions are marked with close-ups of individual objects in the environment, abstracted and imbued with significance by their sudden centrality to what’s on screen. Fade-transition shots of the murder scene are overlaid with the sounds of the events leading up to the murder. New York City is depicted as an overcast hellscape. Lots and lots and lots of characters are shot stylishly smoking with their backs to alley walls. Twenty seconds of people walking are shot as an upside-down reflection in a puddle…just because.

Director Steven Zaillian checks off item after item from the “how to make your crime film look fancy” playbook, but it’s all resolutely uncommunicative in its artsiness. Now here’s where we get into “I know it when I see it” territory, but here goes: Shows like Better Call Saul, Hannibal, and Mr. Robot use unconventional framing not just to class up their potboiler plots, but to externalize the emotions of the characters, to present a visually cohesive worldview, to emphasize isolation and mental illness. They’re expressionist TV.The Night Of, by contrast, takes a pointlessly pointillist approach to a vision of Noo Yawk we’ve all seen a million times. These shots do little but pad out the running time.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Night Of, with which I remain deeply disappointed, for Decider.

If you want an object lesson in how Preacher is just about half a head shy of being an actual good show, you could do worse than to look at this week’s episode. ‘El Valero’ could be considered a climactic installment, insofar as Odin Quincannon’s forces succeed in taking back the church from Jesse Custer, while the angels fail in removing Genesis. But nearly everything that happens hints at greatness, or at least damn goodness, that goes frustratingly unrealized.

Take Odin Quincannon. This episode begins with a flashback to what amounts to his origin story: He lost his entire immediate and extended family to a ski-lift collapse while he was stuck at home working, then went slightly mad and disemboweled both a cow and his daughter’s corpse to “prove” that the idea of a human soul is bullshit. Yes, the Quincannon family’s totally-‘80s wardrobe and hairstyles are played for laughs, and yes, Odin’s over-the-top reaction is there for the gross-out factor. But at least once it becomes clear that this wasn’t a murder he orchestrated — i.e. an attempt by the show to demonstrate just what a badass bastard he is — but a genuine, tragic accident that cost children their lives and broke a man’s spirit with survivor’s guilt, the performance by Jackie Earle Haley as the grief-stricken, mad-at-god meat magnate thrums with real sadness and anger and hate. His reversion to type throughout the rest of the episode — barking sarcastic orders at his men like the opening scene had never happened — cuts the impact off at the knees. (Or shoots off its dick, as the show would likely have it.)

I reviewed this week’s Preacher for the New York Observer.

“Why this mask? It’s a bit silly, isn’t it?” The opening lines of the second season of “Mr. Robot” may emerge from the mouth of corporate creep turned America’s most-wanted missing person Tyrell Wellick, but the man speaks for many of us. Despite having joined forces with the show’s mentally unstable main character Elliot Alderson and his hacker confederacy fsociety, Wellick is not above questioning the group’s corny iconography. The Anonymous-indebted disguises, the snide sobriquet, the “Fight Club” posturing: Is there really a method to this madness, Wellick wonders, or is it all a cheesy cover for adolescent anarchism that won’t change a thing in the long run? That’s the question “Mr. Robot” is apparently trying to answer — and so far, that answer is a surprisingly grim one.

I’ll be covering this season of Mr. Robot for the freaking New York Times, where I made my debut with my review of tonight’s season premiere.

The Night Of is being hailed as a truly great drama, perhaps the first HBO has aired in half a decade that isn’t set in Westeros. It’s being compared to all manner of acclaimed crime stories, even documentaries, from Making a Murderer to Serial to O.J.: Made in America to The Jinx to American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson toFargo and on and on and on. And who knows? To extent that the critics making these comparisons have seen the whole shebang, they may well be proved right. But as of “The Beach,” the series premiere, I’m about as optimistic about this series becoming one for the ages as poor wrongfully accused Nasir Khan is about getting released on his own recognizance. One overlong episode in, The Night Of is a deeply okay show.

Which comes as something of a shock even if you don’t factor in its rapturous reception. For a series with such a writerly pedigree — Price is an acclaimed novelist in addition to his work writing for The Wire; Zaillian is an A-list screenwriter with credits like Schindler’s List, Gangs of New York, Moneyball, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo under his belt — what’s on offer here is surprisingly, disappointingly rote. The biggest problem is Andrea Cornish, the murder victim. A sort of manic-depressive pixie dream girl, she waltzes into Naz’s purloined cab mouthing vague, poetic, patently unrealistic dialogue: proclaiming “I can’t be alone tonight,” citing her destination as simply “the beach,” and so on. You know, like you do when you’re a woman hopping alone into a complete stranger’s car in the middle of the night.

As the night goes on she becomes even more of a magical mystery tour in female form — dispensing drugs, inviting him back to her sumptuously appointed apartment, lending a sympathetic ear when he’s mocked by an Islamophobic passer-by, dispensing more drugs, indulging in a bit of erotic mumbletypeg with Mazzy Star’s “Into Dust” cooing in the background, and finally fucking him. As far as the show’s concerned, she died as she lived: a glamorous cipher for the advancement of the male protagonist’s plot.

I reviewed the premiere of The Night Of for Decider. I was not a big fan.

Jesse Custer’s in a really bad mood. Accidentally sending a teenager to Hell will do that to you, of course. The fascinating thing about “He’s Gone,” this week’s episode of Preacher and the first I’ve felt has anything more on its mind than what you might find in a college sophomore’s bathroom reading material, is the complex manner in which that bad mood is manifested. This was the first hour I’ve spent in Jesse’s company that left me wondering what he might do next — not in an “oh shit anything can happen on Preacher…and usually does!!!” way, which is as predictable as anything, but in a “human beings are complicated, difficult creatures and we probe their mysteries at our peril” way, which is the hallmark of television worth watching.

I reviewed last night’s Preacher, which was the first episode of the show I felt had more going on for it than well-done spectacle, for the New York Observer.

The fight scene’s what will get most of the attention, but my vote for the best moment in which Preacher gets physical this week is when Jesse and Cassidy stand around in their underwear. With their clothes in the wash after a knock-down-drag-out brawl with the angels that left an entire motel room looking like Jon Snow and Ramsay Bolton were staying in the adjoining suite, the two men (well, one man with an angel-demon hybrid inside him and one vampire) kick back with a morning beer and talk about their tattoos. Why? Because when you’ve got two guys in your cast with the physiques of Dominic Cooper and Joe Gilgun, why not? Preacher has been a show about spectacle and sensation from the start, and you don’t get more sensational than that.

So if there’s a problem with “Sundowner,” it’s not that heaping helping of eye candy, any more than the show’s bold stylization and blood ’n’ guts violence have been a problem as a whole. The generic Texas-shithole setting aside, Preacher has always been a heck of a thing to look at. The issue is what lies beneath, or more accurately what doesn’t. The glitzy surface conceals lapses in logic and a hollow heart that would easily have felled a less audacious and accomplished show by now.

I reviewed last night’s Preacher for the New York Observer.

5. What’s up with Euron Greyjoy?

“I am the storm, brother. The first storm and the last.” Tough talk from a guy whose first act as King of the Iron Islands, after murdering his older brother Balon for the title, is to have his fleet stolen from him by his niece and nephew. But in George R.R. Martin’s source novels, Euron is a true menace — a maniacal nihilist pirate who dabbles in sorcery and revels in cruelty, like a seafaring Ramsay Bolton with magic powers. And note the similarity between how he describes himself and how Jon Snow describes the White Walkers: “I promise you, friend, the true enemy won’t wait out the storm. He brings the storm.” Is Greyjoy a human agent of the Night King? Is he simply crazy enough to wreak havoc regardless of the consequences? Will his new fleet attack Daenerys or invade Westeros? Whatever his destination, it sure seems like he’s being groomed to be the next big bad guy now that the Boltons and Sparrows are out of the way.

In the last (sniff) of my annual Game of Thrones traditions, I wrote up seven big questions I’ve got for next season now that this one’s wrapped up over at Rolling Stone. None of them are “How did Varys get back to Meereen that fast?”

The most direct contrast between this season and its direct predecessor is the relative position of its leaders. By the end of Season Five, Cersei had been imprisoned, beaten, publicly humiliated, and placed under house arrest. Daenerys lost control of the city of Meereen and got dropped by her dragon in the middle of hostile Dothraki territory. Sansa endured unbearable sexual violence until she and Theon managed to run for their lives while their tormenter Ramsay was busy defeating Stannis. And most strikingly, Jon Snow was freaking dead.

Where are they now? In a much stronger place, though whether that’s for better or for worse depends on the rulers involved. Cersei vaporized all her enemies, from the High Sparrow to Margaery Baratheon, in a Night of the Long Knives–style act of score settling. It cost her the life of her beloved son Tommen, who killed himself when he heard the news, but that cleared the path for her to take the Iron Throne herself. After taking down the Dothraki khals, Dany retook Meereen with their men; now she appears poised to do the same to Westeros at the head of a massive all-star alliance. Like her former running buddy Theon, who helped broker his sister’s alliance with the Khaleesi, Sansa played an integral part in defeating the Boltons and securing her half-brother Jon’s claim on the Winterfell (perhaps to her own chagrin).

Then there’s Lord Snow himself, who by the way is no longer dead (!). In the most dramatic turnaround of all, considering where he started the season (i.e. as a corpse), he has been crowned the new King in the North. The so-called “White Wolf” is now the undisputed leader of his region’s great houses, the knights of the Vale,  and his wildling allies; no doubt whatever’s left of the Night’s Watch would follow his lead as well. And now that we know via Bran’s psychic flashback that Jon’s DNA contains both wolf and dragon strains — he’s actually the son of Lyanna Stark and Dany’s older brother Prince Rhaegar Targaryen, who died before she was born — he has a decent claim on being ruler of a whole lot more than just his native land.

I took a big-picture look at Game of Thrones Season Six for Rolling Stone.

The ‘Game of Thrones’ Season 6 Post-Game Show

Like Arya Stark joining the kitchen staff at the Twins, we’re just gonna get right down to business here: This episode, Sean & Stefan discuss the just-concluded sixth season of Game of Thrones, from the finale on down, for a full (boiled leather audio) hour. As a special bonus made possible by our Patreon subscribers, Stefan’s got a new mic, which means this ep sounds better than we ever have before. Enjoy!

Download Episode 51

Additional links:

Sean’s overview of Season 6.

Sean’s review of the finale.

Sean’s ranking of all 60 episodes.

Links to all of Sean’s Game of Thrones writing.

Stefan’s review of the finale.

Stefan’s Game of Thrones tag.

Our Patreon page at patreon.com/boiledleatheraudiohour

Our PayPal donation page (also accessible via boiledleather.com).

Our iTunes page.

Mirror.

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Sean’s blog.

Stefan’s blog.