The idea that we hoi polloi see the ruling class who lord over us as louche, overindulgent, perverse, and dangerous is nothing new. It is, after all, as clear how Edgar Allan Poe felt about Prince Prospero and his revelers as it is how Mike Flanagan feels about Prospero Usher and his. But in the main, television’s swipes at the ultrarich have been satirical and visually straightforward, and have preferred to keep violence to a sanitized minimum. Succession is a very nice-looking show, as is The White Lotus (2021– ), but they don’t feel as though the depravity of the characters has seeped through into the stuff of the filmmaking itself.

The New Lurid, by contrast, gives television auteurs and viewers alike a new narrative and visual vocabulary, one commensurate with the degeneracy of our overlords as represented by the characters to which they often directly correspond. Like a televisual vanitas, it is sensual but death-haunted, lush to the point of rottenness, like a once-magnificent family finally, terminally, gone to seed.

I wrote about Copenhagen Cowboy, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Idol, Dead Ringers, and a genre I like to call “The New Lurid” — overheated, oversaturated, oversexed tales of depravity and violence among the entropic elite and its interlopers; think “Saltburncore” — for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

The latest episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Podcast takes a look back at the year in television, as Stefan and I review my picks for the ten best shows of 2023. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts!

9. The Idol (HBO/Max)

Fuck what you heard. The Idol, 2023’s most hated show, is far and away the TV I’ve thought, and argued, about the most this year. Hype and backlash cycles notwithstanding, Sam Levinson and Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye created a sleazy, lurid, funny, fucked-up, incredibly straightforward satire of the starlet factory à la Paul Verhoeven. Unlike, say, Succession, which spoofs the ultra-wealthy without simultaneously trying to feel like Dallas or Empire, The Idol sends up the sex-and-drugs world of pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp in the year’s most underappreciated performance) and her grifter svengali Tedros Tedros (Tesfaye in the year’s second most underappreciated performance) while also embodying it. 

The two leads act out their intense and at times humiliating material without a net, but they’re buoyed by a Greek chorus of comedic performances by the likes of Hank Azaria, Rachel Sennott, Eli Roth, Jane Adams, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who turns on a dime to deliver genuinely affecting material whenever called for). All of these terrific actors perform in front of a backdrop of lush retro synths and strings courtesy of Tesfaye, Levinson, and composer and super-producer Mike Dean, appearing as himself. In a sane world this would have just been Pop Starship Troopers — gnarly, nasty, sexy, fun, appreciated by those who get it and basically ignored by everyone else. It couldn’t sustain the discourse around it, and shouldn’t have had to, when its meaning was so plain to see, and enjoy

I wrote about the ten best television shows of 2023 for Decider. I’m enormously proud of this list. The variety I’ve seen across TV critics’ best-of lists this year can be nothing but good for both TV and criticism, and I’m glad to have contributed in my own way. Anyway, I believe in all these shows and think they’re worth your time.

Copenhagen Cowboy, Dead Ringers, The Idol, Foundation Season 2: It’s been a great year for the lurid and the florid on television, maybe the best I can remember. The Fall of the House of Usher fits right alongside them, glowing and buzzing like a gorgeously lit, expensively dressed corpse. 

I reviewed the finale of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

Similarly, the script, by Mike and Jaime Flanagan, reveals that Freddie would have been a dentist in another life, because, ha ha, he tears Morrie’s teeth out with pliers. Once again, major kudos to the dead actor of the episode, Henry Thomas, for finding remarkable depths in his character’s shallowness. There’s no real pathos for Freddie of course, the way there was for the other four kids: There’s just disgust at discovering that someone this ineffectual could also be this cruel. It’s like watching a tree sloth light an orphanage on fire. You wind up relishing every swing of that pendulum as it slices his drugged but conscious and feeling ass in half.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

As was the case with T’Nia Miller last episode, Samantha Sloyan is outstanding as an extraordinarily wealthy and well put-together woman coming apart at the seams. The way she almost physically wills her presentation back on track after stumbling out on stage shouting the f-bomb at a nonexistent person, with the camera never flinching from her high-cheekboned, anxiety-ridden face, is a wonder to behold. She handles the explicit sex stuff in the sex tape with the practiced frankness of a woman confident in asking for what she wants. (As much as her fetishes represent a deeper dysfunction, I don’t think Usher is presenting the fetishes as a dysfunction in and of themselves, any more than Chuck Rhoades being a sub on Billions is supposed to indicate he’s an unethical prosecutor.)

I reviewed episode six of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

True, the episode may lack keep-you-up-at-night scares — the occasional flash of a corpse in a place where corpses shouldn’t be isn’t enough — but it makes up for that in intensity. It’s like an Evil Dead movie in that regard: I don’t think anyone has a hard time sleeping because of anything Ash slices up with that chainsaw hand, but none would deny that Evil Dead 2 is horror, because it was clearly made by filmmakers dedicated to shotgunning outrageous fucked-up violent gross over-the-top shit at your face every thirty seconds. From its rich assholes’ long Glengarry monologues about their own awfulness to the deliberately cruel demises of all the Usher kids, that’s obviously The Fall of the House of Usher’s intention too. You could say that’s its beating heart.

I reviewed episode 5 of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

It’s my kind of catty, my kind of blunt, my kind of gross, my kind of show.

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

And so we continue with the recipe that’s worked so far: Graphic violence, sexual fetishism, actors having fun playing heel, and the unwavering belief that the ultrawealthy should be brutally punished for their crimes. What, honestly, is not to like here?

I reviewed episode 3 of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

Okay, I’m calling it: This show fucks! Somewhat literally! Titled “The Masque of the Red Death” after the Edgar Allan Poe story upon which it’s loosely based (Is that how this is gonna go? It’s a stealth anthology series with an overarching storyline?), this episode of The Fall of the House of Usher is one of the horniest episodes of television I’ve seen in a while. And I covered Season 2 of Foundation! Honestly, it takes me back to the the bone-deep kinkiness of Alice Birch and Rachel Wesiz’s Dead Ringers, a show with which Mike Flanagan’s Usher has some stylistic as well as narrative similarities. Those similarities now also include the desire to rev your engine.

I reviewed the second episode of The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.

I can think of worse ways to spend a few nighttime hours this month than in the company of these rich assholes as they slowly destroy each other in a creepy mansion, while Mike Flanagan’s script introduces a patent attorney named Ligeia, or reveals that the artificial heart Victorine implanted in that monkey has the brand name Tell-Tale, or turns the monkey into a murderer on the rooftops of Paris, or whatever. At the very least, the element of satire should cancel out his more maudlin tendencies. (“Whatever walked there, walked together,” anyone?) Flanagan feels about as convincingly Poe-ish as B-movie legend Roger Corman did back in the day when he loosely adapted the bard of Baltimore’s work. But if we’re having some spooky fun, so what?

I reviewed the series premiere of Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher for Decider.