Sexy Beast is as good a TV prequel as Andor, House of the Dragon, and Better Call Saul. I hope it runs exactly as long as creator Michael Caleo wants it to. […] It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a crime show this rich. I mean, the obvious antecedent really is Better Caul Saul. I’m very pleased to say, however, that it hasn’t been that long since I’ve seen a prequel or adaptation this good. From Dead Ringers to Fargo Season 5, miraculous extrapolations of preexisting masterpieces are, strangely, thick on the ground. I’m so glad this show exists, so glad for the performances by James McArdle, Emun Elliott, Sarah Greene, Stephen Moyer, et al — so glad that a movie I love as much as I love Sexy Beast spawned a show worthy of the name.

I reviewed the season finale of Sexy Beast for Decider. Incredible show.

As Nancy Sinatra sings “Bang Bang,” my stomach ties itself in knots. Two episodes remaining in this season of Sexy Beast and I find myself torn. Part of me wants the story to go on for however long the filmmakers want. But another part hopes they wrap everything up, since high quality isn’t the kryptonite of short-sighted cancellation it was just a few short years ago. (Fatal Attraction, we hardly knew ye.) 

More importantly, though? I’m nervous as hell. My body’s reacting to the prospect of pressing play on this episode as though it thinks I’m actually in danger myself. The atmosphere of mounting dread, created by showrunner Michael Caleo and now helped along here by writer Alastair Galbraith and director Stephen “Teddy Bass” Moyer, has me that shook. 

As it needs to. In the original Sexy Beast, you know from moment you see Aitch, Jackie, Deedee, and Gal react to the news that Don Logan called that this man is terrifying; you spend the movie wondering when he’ll make good on his reputation. The TV show’s trick is to set whatever event gave Don that reputation—whatever made people stop thinking of him as weird and annoying and start thinking of him like an alien could burst out of his chest and eat them at any moment—in the indeterminate future. We know we’re getting closer to it, but we don’t know how far we’ve gone.

I reviewed the fantastic penultimate episode of Sexy Beast‘s first (?) season for Decider.

Which brings us back to Mr. Black Magic himself. The Teddy Bass of Sexy Beast the television show is played by a TV vampire of considerable experience: Stephen Moyer, True Blood’s Bill Compton. Watching Moyer slink his way through this show, leaving a trail of dropped drawers and broken bodies in his wake, you can’t help but feel that this is the kind of monster Moyer had hoped to play all those years ago. Finally, he’s got something he can really sink his teeth into.

Younger, hungrier, and more dynamic than the older version played by McShane — who by that point is firmly on top of the pyramid — the TV Teddy is vampire-coded to a major degree. He’s quiet, pale, raven-haired, black-clad with red accents, largely nocturnal, possessed either by brooding malice or sinister good cheer and nothing in between. He kills men without compunction, rapes men without shame. He tends not to step into a home unless he’s been invited. And once he is, all are powerless before him.

In the most recent episode at the time of this writing, Teddy wheedles his way into the manse of his quarry, the corrupt aristocrat politician Sir Stephen Eaton (the marvelously named Julian Rhind-Tutt), by seducing his wife’s best friend from her university days. “He walked right up to me, this close,” she recalls giddily, “and he said ‘Everyone in this room, man and woman, wants to fuck me, but I only want you.’” Teddy fingerbangs the friend under the table at dinner, using the same hands he used to nearly shatter the bones of a loudmouth at the party, to the delight of all onlookers. By the end of the evening even Sir Stephen is tenderly brushing his hand against Teddy, even though he knows, for a fact, that Teddy has been spending the past few weeks using Gal and Don to rob him blind. He is irresistible. 

But he is also angry, righteously angry. In the monologue that opens this piece, from the episode that airs this week, Teddy explains to Gal, in a voice more Cockney than Queen’s E, that he loathes the upper class for its thievery and entitlement. It’s not until the season finale that you see his real supervillain origin story in this regard, and I won’t spoil it for you, but it’s ferociously, almost frantically anti-oligarchy, making their menace to the body politic concrete in their menace to the human body itself. Sir Stephen’s enrichment of himself at the expense of the public fuels Teddy’s quest to take him down every bit as much as Teddy’s own lust for power. This man is excited to plan a heist for Guy Fawkes’ Night because he vocally admires Guy Fawkes. 

I wrote about Stephen Moyer’s portrayal of Teddy Bass in Sexy Beast for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World.

Sexy Beast bristles with ideas, images, emotions, and sensations. This episode in particular is like the Hellraiser puzzle box, opening up and shooting chains in every direction, tipped with hooks that sink in and pull. 

[…]

Every single layer that Sexy Beast adds has enhanced rather than obscured the source text. It’s like if Coppola had made a TV series of the Vito Corleone section of The Godfather Part II. It is absolutely the goddamnedest thing. 

I reviewed this week’s amazing Sexy Beast for Decider.

Keep in mind that this comes hot on the heels of Deedee’s gutting storyline, involving a disastrous attempt to reconnect with her family over Sunday dinner. Her shitty father stonewalls her and eventually kicks her out. Her mother smiles and cries but does nothing. And her sister, who’s ostensibly her remaining friend in the family, is revealed to be the person who told Deedee’s father she’d started filming porn. (And kissing girls.) In a harrowing flashback, he bodily drags young Deedee from the house and throws her out. A more effective evocation of social conservatism — a political movement dedicated to giving men a pretext to abuse their spouses and children — I haven’t seen in a long time.

I reviewed this week’s Sexy Beast for Decider.

Don Logan is the Gollum of the Sexy Beast cinematic universe. Sometimes he’s harmless, fawning Sméagol — desperate for his friend buddy Gal’s affection, willing to catch a bullet if it means sparing his only friend in the world. Sometimes he’s Gollum, paranoid and dangerous, prone to flying off the handle at the most minor perceived slight and spurring the sort of altercations that end with cops dead at the hands of their own crooked partners in full view of multiple witnesses. The problem for Gal is you never know which Don you’re gonna get; this is also the problem for Don.

I reviewed this week’s Sexy Beast for Decider.

Sexy Beast the TV show is basically like someone Andor’d Sexy Beast the movie. How’s that for high praise? But that’s what creator Michael Caleo and his co-writers have done on this thing: They took an iconic work of cinema (referring to the whole Star Wars gestalt rather than Rogue One specifically here) and made something rich, challenging, ugly, and darkly humane out of a prequel that fleshes out the original work’s world at length. It’s the damnedest thing.

I reviewed episode three of Sexy Beast for Decider.

Oh. So it’s a real show then. Upping the ante of violence considerably — from shocking and stylish to prolonged, sexual, and horrific — this episode of Sexy Beast is at times a very tough watch. It probably had to be. There’s nothing wrong with a slick ‘90s British crime caper series featuring well-executed younger versions of characters we know and love from a bona fide movie masterpiece. But that movie is absolutely grueling to watch at times, however much its London gangster cool and brilliant soundtrack convince you otherwise. For this show to be more than a good time on the telly…well, it has to be a bad time, too.

I reviewed the second episode of Sexy Beast for Decider.

I don’t know how they do it. I really don’t. How do you take a stylistically unique, psychologically intense, stone-classic thriller from the past 40-odd years of English-language cinema and make a really good show out of it — not just once, but enough times that trend pieces can be written? What alchemy is this?

I reviewed the series premiere of the Sexy Beast prequel series for Decider. It’s really good!

I wrote about Jonathan Glazer’s incredible British gangster movie Sexy Beast for today’s edition of the New York Times’ “Watching” newsletter, which features recommendations for streaming shows and films three times a week. If you sign up for it today (it’s free) you can read what I wrote. Enjoy!