Grappling with the big questions?

Try The Young Pope and The New Pope (HBOGo/HBO NOW)

Here’s the deal: Italian director Paolo Sorrentino’s outrageously bold pair of series take on the iconography and ideology of the Catholic Church with a sly sense of humor and a knack for surreal visuals. The Young Pope stars Jude Law as Lenny Belardo, an “incredibly handsome” American elected Pope by his brother cardinals, whom he comes to rule with an iron fist. The New Pope, which is simply The Young Pope Season 2 by a new name, introduces John Malkovich as Belardo’s successor, the dandyish Englishman Sir John Brannox. Fully loaded with eye candy, both shows grapple head-on with the power of faith and the mystery of love—or is that the other way around? Your jaw will drop even as your mind expands.

I wrote a guide to 10 off-the-beaten-path shows to binge-watch during quarantine for Decider. This one was a long time in the making—I hope you dig it!

8. Mindhunter: “M.E.” by Gary Numan

After a shaky first season that was all over the map in terms of what we were supposed to feel about its main characters — remember the stiff Holden Ford romance subplot? — Mindhunter settled into a comfortably macabre groove in its second season, chronicling the drudgery involved in tracking down some of the world’s worst people. In the case of the musical montage set to “Cars” singer Gary Numan’s synth stomper “M.E.,” the drudgery is the whole point.

The sequence follows FBI Agents Holden Ford and Bill Tench as they stake out bridges where they hope to trap the perpetrator of the Atlanta Child Murders. It’s a joyless slog of bad sleep, shitty room service, buzzing mosquitoes, muggy weather, cigarette smoke, and ever-shortening patience. Numan’s song, sung from the perspective of a machine that survived the apocalypse alone, provides a surprisingly apt accompaniment to a routine that breaks Ford and Tench down until they feel unmoored from the very humanity they’re trying to protect.

In case you missed it—I know I did!—I wrote about the ten best TV music cues of the year for Vulture.

The final episode of “The Affair” begins and ends with different versions of the same song. In its opening minutes, “The Whole of the Moon” by the Irish folk-rock band the Waterboys blares forth while Noah Solloway drills friends and family in a dance routine for his daughter Whitney’s wedding. As sung by the vocalist Mike Scott, the lyrics regard a loved one with awe that borders on pagan devotion: “I saw the crescent,” he joyfully yelps. “You saw the whole of the moon.”

By the time the episode ends, Noah is an old man, alone with his memories on the shores of Montauk. This time, Fiona Apple, who provided the show’s opening theme, performs the song. In her ragged voice, the lyrics sound less like praise and more like accusations: When she sings “I sighed, but you swooned,” the words catch and drag in her throat like a curse.

Yet the sense that Apple is in love, deeply, with the person to whom she is singing is no less palpable here than it is in Scott’s original. Rather, her performance reflects the way the people we love can confound, even infuriate us while at their best as well as at their worst. Sometimes, loving someone who feels bigger and better than we are can be an enormous burden. Sometimes we want to see only a sliver of the sky rather than the whole thing, and to hell with those who would force us out of ourselves to do otherwise.

If you’ve watched all five seasons of “The Affair,” you can see where this is going. To Helen Solloway, her ex-husband, Noah, is maddeningly impulsive and self-pitying but also patient and sweet. To Noah, his ex-wife Helen is infuriatingly Type A and judgmental but also caring and almost impossibly together. Sometimes their virtues are nearly as difficult to tolerate as their vices. But that’s love, isn’t it?

I reviewed the series finale of The Affair for the New York Times. It’s been one of the great rewards of my career to watch and write about this show.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. Tough to know what to make of it.

Joanie, Joanie, Joanie. What are we going to do with your share of “The Affair”? The grown-up daughter of Cole and Alison Lockhart dominates this episode — which, given the strength of Noah Solloway’s segment, ought to be a compliment. But when Joanie seeks out and finds her mother’s killer, what happens manages to upend the show’s narrative apple cart so completely that it’s hard to appreciate anything that came before.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It took a wild left turn and I did not come along for the ride.

In a way, this episode feels like “The Affair” mourning its departed stars. Seeing Joshua Jackson’s open, soulful face as Cole in flashbacks; hearing Ruth Wilson’s ragged, bottomed-out voice as Alison in voice-over; watching Joanie wrestle with her memories of both parents as if those memories were living things she must defeat in order to survive … all of it draws attention to the enormity of the contribution those actors and their characters made to the show, and the void left in their wake. After half a season of the Solloways and their circle of lovers, friends and family, the Lockharts finally get their due, and it’s long overdue.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair, which I suppose is the one where I realized how much I miss Alison and Cole and how shaky I am on Joanie as a replacement, for the New York Times.

“I don’t want to be looked at anymore,” Whitney Solloway says. “I want to be the one that does the looking.”

“That is where the power lies,” agrees the wealthy gallery owner to whom she is speaking. Soon she will tell him all her dreams — owning her own gallery, where she can foster new artists whose work shows her things she’s never seen before. Soon after that, she’ll be making love to her abusive ex-boyfriend while the owner looks on and masturbates. The quid pro quo is explicit, in every sense.

But Whitney’s initial exchange with her would-be benefactor speaks to more than their arrangement. What is “The Affair” if not a five-season-long exploration of the power of looking? Noah and Helen Solloway; their departed counterparts, Cole and Allison Lockhart; Cole and Allison’s daughter, Joanie; the odd boyfriend or girlfriend; and now, at long last, Noah and Hellen’s daughter Whitney: Whatever humiliations and calamities befall them, they have been given the ability, in turns, to make us see it all through their eyes. That is power. And on this week’s episode, “The Affair” wields that power beautifully and provocatively.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair, which finally gave us a Whitney segment, for the New York Times.

In its closing minutes, this week’s episode of “The Affair” shows us a vision of Montauk, N.Y., a few decades from now. It’s nothing short of post-apocalyptic. Gutted buildings, flooded parking lots, shattered streets in which nothing moves but salt water fish brought in by the tide.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

Resilience is a trait “The Affair” shares with its leading lady. The show spent four seasons chronicling the tumultous lives of Noah (Dominic West), Helen (Maura Tierney) and the other couple drawn into and destroyed by the series’s central affair, Alison Bailey (Ruth Wilson) and Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson). Then it weathered the departures of two of its four leads, first Wilson (her character was killed off) and then Jackson (his character’s fate is unclear), under circumstances about which the involved parties have been … less than forthcoming.

Other series might not be up to the task of continuing after so severe an alteration to their basic make-up. But it’s a challenge to which “The Affair” is uniquely well suited. The series’s co-creator and showrunner, Sarah Treem, who wrote this season’s premiere, has never been interested in the neatly plotted arcs many viewers demand of their TV dramas. (Try talking to an angry “Game of Thrones” fan about Daenerys Targaryen or Jaime Lannister if you don’t believe me.)

Rather, the messiness of “The Affair” has always been its greatest strength. Its defining theme is the messiness of adult life, and all the forces — including love, lust, money, class, race, gender, parenthood and divorce — capable of laying waste to our best-laid plans. Birth and death rank right up there, too, and it is with these topics that the premiere concerns itself, using the shifting, sometimes contradictory point-of-view structure that has always set the show apart.

I’m thrilled to be back covering The Affair, one of my favorite shows, for the New York Times this season, starting with my review of the season premiere.

Weird ‘Flix, but okay: 2018 saw a certain streaming behemoth finally achieve the approximate cultural reach and clout the Big Four broadcast networks still enjoyed as recently as a decade ago. Unfortunately, the level of artistic quality and risk-taking roughly followed suit.

But even the algorithm-assisted return of TV monoculture—you can have any flavor you like, as long as it’s a flavor our data indicates you’ve enjoyed before—couldn’t stamp out the hard-earned gains television has made as an art form since Tony Soprano woke up that morning 20 years ago. Shows predicated on the idea that challenging your audience is a vital part of entertaining that audience, even if it’s an audience you have to will into existence in the process, are still out there.

Television can still make even a jaded viewer sob with sorrow and joy, recoil in suspense and terror, stare in silent (or shouting!) awe at the sheer emotional and aesthetic audacity of it all. Between them, the eight shows below did all that for me and more.

8. On Cinema at the Cinema (Adult Swim)

Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do. But comedy is about making people laugh, which turns characters in comedies into joke-delivery mechanisms rather than characters in the fully developed sense from which we derive value in drama. So it takes a lot for a comedy to make my list of the best the medium has to offer.

In the case of On Cinema, Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s byzantine saga of atrocious human behavior in the guise of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie-review show starring two idiots, here is what it took: Tim, the right-wing hedonist host whose endless series of jilted wives, abandoned children, unwatchable action-movie side projects, unlistenable alt-rock and dance-music spinoffs, disastrous alternative-medicine experiments, near-death experiences (including toxic shock from unsterilized acupuncture needles, malnourishment from an all-drug diet, and incineration after falling asleep with a lit cigarette in the storage locker cum VHS-tape library he’d been reduced to living in) culminated in a mistrial for murder after 20 kids died from smoking his tainted vape juice at an EDM festival. The subsequent tenth season of his movie-review show (“On Cinema X”) saw him caught between the diktats of the show’s snake-oil sponsor and the civil judgment won by the family of one of his victims.

Somewhere in there, he and Gregg may or may not have awarded Solo: A Star Wars Story their coveted Five Bags of Popcorn seal of approval; between Tim screaming obscenely about the district attorney (against whom he mounts a quixotic electoral campaign) and Gregg prattling on about how Tim Burton won’t answer his letters, it’s a bit hard to tell. Heidecker and Turkington have played out this shaggy-dog joke for years, anticipating (not kidding at all here) both the rise of Donald Trump and the role that aggrieved nerds would play as his cultural vanguard. The result is maybe the best thing the extended Tim & Eric universe has ever produced. Long may they rant.

I named the eight best television series of the year for Decider. I believe in all eight of these shows very deeply, which is why it’s just a top eight and not a larger, rounder number. I hope you enjoy them too.

SPOILER WARNING

“Everybody’s so crazy,” says Helen Solloway in the final minutes of the final episode of the extraordinary fourth season of “The Affair.” O.K., she employs an uncouth adjective unfit for this publication when she says it, but you get the idea.

And why wouldn’t she think so? The woman her ex-husband Noah left her for has (they all believe) committed suicide, just days after Helen gave her what seemed like a life-changing pep talk. Noah, who attended the funeral, has just told Helen that Alison’s other ex-husband, Cole Lockhart, disrupted the service by stealing her ashes and running away with them.

Helen and Noah are having this conversation outside the hospital where her partner Vik is dying after refusing to seek treatment for his pancreatic cancer, a decision he now regrets. At that very moment he’s being told by their neighbor Sierra that he’s the father of her unborn baby. Helen, whose attempts to have a baby with Vik herself were prevented by the onset of menopause, is less mad about this than you’d think, since she also slept with Sierra. And oh, Vik’s helicopter parents are up there too, excited because the oncologist treating him is a woman he used to date in med school. When it rains, it pours.

Though it’s broken into three different segments — the first from Noah’s perspective, the second from Cole’s and the third from Helen’s — this maddening messiness of adult life is the episode’s unifying thread. Speaking plainly, I adore it.

I reviewed the moving season finale of The Affair for the New York Times. It’s been such a pleasure writing about this show for this publication this season. I remain convinced it’s doing work about actual adulthood few if any other shows have ever dared try.

SPOILER WARNING

I have a confession to make. Why not, right? Confessions are in the air tonight.

My confession is this: “The Affair” just aired the most conceptually ambitious, emotionally painful episode of its entire run, and at the moment of truth it went someplace I could not bring myself to follow.

I was so riveted that when I look over my notes for this episode — a showcase for Ruth Wilson and Ramon Rodriguez, the only two people on camera for the entire hour — they read less like jotted-down thoughts and more like a fully annotated transcript. But when the truth is revealed and the worst case scenario happens, you won’t find that in my notes at all. Ben’s attack on Alison, her collision with the wall, the blood pouring from her head, the light going out in her eyes — it’s just a blank space in the document. Words and words and words, and in the middle, a rupture.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It knocked me flat.

There’s no way to prepare for an episode like this week’s installment of “The Affair.” That’s as true for the audience as it is for the characters involved. Perhaps that’s why so much of this devastating hour of television is spent being not particularly devastating at all.

I reviewed today’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It was very hard to do.

The sex scene between Helen and Sierra isn’t particularly explicit. But what Sierra says leading up to their liaison certainly makes a lasting impression. She enjoys sleeping with women, she tells Helen, because their shared struggles make the connection more intimate. She feels “primal admiration” for seeing a fellow woman in bed, “naked and confident and hungry for orgasm.” And she feels a greater degree of control — “control is really hot,” she concludes, before they finally kiss. By the time she’s finished talking, the temperature in that yurt has surely risen several degrees.

[…]

While we’re on the subject of Janelle, it has to be said that the chemistry between Sanaa Lathan and Dominic West is considerable. Granted, that’s par for the course on this show, which has yet to serve up a lukewarm sex scene (except on purpose) in three and a half seasons. But when Noah and Janelle finally get into bed together, there’s an easy, joyous intimacy to it — my favorite bit is when she jokingly moans “Does it turn you on that I’m your boss?” and then immediately starts laughing — that’s so convincing I almost felt bad watching. Almost.

In that regard, it’s a lot like the intense buildup to Helen and Sierra’s hookup earlier in the episode, which made their encounter, for all its problems, seem like the proverbial “consummation devoutly to be wished.” Seems to me that if sex were less fun, people wouldn’t risk all these complications to their lives in order to have it with each other. This is yet another aspect of adult life that “The Affair” shows it understands, week in and week out.

I reviewed last weekend’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

And now, a brief aside about an outer-space action movie that I provides a useful interpretive framework.

Alison’s father’s latest wife is played by Dina Meyer, one of the stars of Paul Verhoeven’s ultraviolent sci-fi satire “Starship Troopers.” That film, which chronicles a militaristic future Earth’s intergalactic battle against a sentient species of giant insect, has long disgusted some critics and delighted others in equal measure. On the surface, its story of young, beautiful soldier-citizens waging a war of extermination against literal vermin reads as gleefully fascist.

But Verhoeven and his collaborators’ conceit was to make the kind of war movie such a society would make about itself, celebrating the virtues espoused by the fictional society it depicts. The film is positioned as the product of the mind-set of the characters within the film — not a bad way to understand how what we see on “The Affair” is filtered through the perspectives of its main characters.

I reviewed yesterday’s episode of The Affair, which dug right into the heart of Alison Bailey and the show itself, for the New York Times.

Vik spills his guts to Sierra, perhaps for the first time to anyone at all. All his life, he says, he has struggled to be the good immigrants’ son, “parenting” his own parents by studiously living up to all their dreams instead of his own. The one exception he carved out for himself was to build a family on his own terms, but that, too, is now tainted: He got together with a single mother partly as an act of rebellion, and now he is demanding she have a baby for their sake rather than for his or hers. “I’m going to die, and I haven’t really made a single choice for myself,” he says, before collapsing into sobs.

The actor Omar Metwally is frighteningly committed to this scene, digging up and spilling out a profound sense of failure and loss. In turn, his partner in the scene, Emily Browning, makes Sierra feel like a lived-in, serious presence, despite her narrative function as a vehicle for Vik’s moments of self-realization and infidelity.

The confession (and, admittedly, the very hot sex scene) is “The Affair” in a nutshell. This is a show about the gender-based shapes society allows our self-image and suffering to take. Noah is the guy who played by the rules but never got the chance to break them. Helen is the perfect partner and mother who has had a hard time making it look easy. Cole is the Good Guy who just cares too much. Alison is a Magdelene-like martyr-siren. I was all prepared to type out something about how Vik is the Good Son and the Model Minority who has never really lived for himself. But then he went ahead and said it for me.

I reviewed this week’s excellent episode of The Affair for the New York Times. I realized afterwards that there’s a trick to watching this show similar to the one you have to pull off with Starship Troopers: Everything you’re seeing is the product of an in-world mindset.

Also, if you’re into watching beautiful actors fuck, and if you aren’t what the hell are you watching movies and TV for, this episode has you covered. Joshua Jackson, Phoebe Tonkin, Omar Metwally, Emily Browning, goodness gracious me.