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!

My kid is not a vocal viewer. Actually, as they’d be the first to tell you, they are a weirdly un-vocal viewer. Together, and largely at their insistence, we’ve marathoned all of The Golden Girls and Cheers and are currently working on Seinfeld; as they themselves are quick to point out, they’ve laughed out loud at these, three of the funniest shows ever made, maybe four times. Mostly they just smile and nod affirmatively. Yes, they are aware of the Seinfeld episode about the woman who just says “That’s so funny,” and are looking forward to it. For people like them it’s so rare to see yourself represented on screen.

So their reaction to the most brutal sequence of torture scenes they’ve seen in their young life gave me pause. It happened in the sixth episode of the second season of The Wheel of Time, showrunner Rafe Judkins’s adaptation of the monolithic epic fantasy series by the late Robert Jordan and his literary heir Brandon Sanderson. The episode is called “Eyes Without Pity,” and for good reason. 

In the storyline at the center of this episode, the character Egwene al’Vere—a young woman whose nascent magical powers make her one of the show’s co-protagonists—is imprisoned, enslaved, physically and psychologically tortured, and finally broken. As a lowly damane, she is being turned into a living weapon by her overseer, or sul’dam, Renna—an agent of the brutal, American-accented Seanchan empire, a colonial power that spends the season wreaking havoc in the land our heroes call home. 

The gist of it is simple. Egwene has been fitted with a magical collar, linked to a corresponding magical bracelet on Renna’s arm. As long as she’s wearing the collar, she can do no harm to Renna; the mere thought of reaching for a weapon sends agonizing waves of pain throughout her entire body, and should she manage to land a blow against her tormentor, she will receive multiple times the pain herself. (The BDSM influence on all this is unmistakable, undeniable, well explored by the fandom, and confirmed by Jordan himself, so no, you’re not crazy.)

Now Egwene has a simple task: She must pick up a pitcher of water and pour Renna a cup. Unless and until she abandons all hope of escape and any belief that she’ll be able to use the pitcher as a weapon to hurt Renna, the magically induced pain makes so much as touching the pitcher impossible. No matter how many times Renna says “Pour the water, Egwene”—a mantra along the lines of The Marathon Man’s “Is it safe?”—it simply can’t be done.

Until, finally, Egwene breaks. She reaches for the pitcher. She pours Renna the water without pain. And immediately, after day upon day of this torture, Renna dumps the water on the floor. “Good girl,” she tells Egwene.

My 12-year-old kid turns to me at this point and says, “This is a good show.”

This is the opening of the long interview I conducted for Defector with actors Madeleine Madden and Xelia Mendes-Jones about their work as Egwene and Renna in the central storyline of The Wheel of Time Season 2. It was my kid’s first exposure to what I (and they) would consider great television drama, and it involved two actors of color, a woman and a nonbinary person. I thought this was exciting, and my nonbinary kid did so too, so I had to dig in. This is very personal to me, and I hope you enjoy it.

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.

Speaking of Lanfear, did you have any idea that she was going to get this kind of reaction from viewers?
Yes, we have been stanning Lanfear since the writers’ room; there’s one writer in particular who would do her best Lanfear all over the room. As soon as Natasha O’Keeffe got to Prague and started playing the character, everyone could tell that something really special was happening. On set, we use the drag-queen dial. I’ll be like, “You’re kind of like 80 percent drag queen in this scene right now, and we need you dialed down to a 70.” That’s the shorthand we use for Lanfear.

But Natasha can deliver all of the layers of Lanfear at once. “You’re in bed talking about your past relationships, but you were actually in love with him 3,000 years ago and he broke up with you, and that’s why you joined the Dark, so you’ve always hated him, but you still love him.” She could do all that and make it feel simple.

I interviewed The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins about the show’s exceptional second season for Vulture.

But what it really ends with is a sense of possibility. The Wheel of Time is blazing a new path for fantasy on television — unmistakably epic, yet with markedly different influences and interests and emphasis than its predecessors. There are more cultural variables in play, there are more major heroes and villains at work, and the whole concept of, essentially, superheroes leading armies to save the world is a fun one. So too is a fantasy story in which most of the main characters are women and where women call the shots without much question. This is not at all to say that other approaches to gender in fantasy are invalid; the idea that this approach is superior to, say, House of the Dragon’s approach, instead of simply different, is dumb. But it is different, and that’s exciting!

I reviewed the season finale of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

It’s these human moments that make The Wheel of Time compelling television. Think also of the complex enmity between Egwene and Renna; Moiraine and Siuan, torn between love and their secret duty; Rand and Lanfear, each playing with the other’s emotions while knowing their own aren’t safe; Mat and his bone-deep conviction that he’s a no-good piece of shit; Nynaeve finally realizing, despite her ego, that Elayne’s really a better commander of their mission than she is; Ishamael’s relatable desire simply to close his eyes one day and never open them again, with the cycle of reincarnation ended forever. From Game of Thrones to Foundation, the best science-fantasy spectacles on television know that prophecies and sorceries only get you so far. Human desire is the real magic here.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Obscenity in art is a powerful thing. Not cussing and fucking, though they’re pretty great too, and thankfully in some abundance during this season of The Wheel of Time. True obscenity — the profaning of the sacred, the desecration of the holy, the soiling of the pure — is a powerful thing when you want to depict what evil really looks like.

Think of the Avatar movies and how gross and vile it feels when the human soldiers destroy that big Hometree or slaughter that poor mother whale. They’re not just committing a crime against some blue aliens but against life itself. They’re making a mockery of what we hold dear. It feels more than wrong — it feels filthy, like we’re seeing something disgusting that should never have happened. An obscenity.

That’s how I felt watching the Seanchan commander, High Lady Suroth, command her new Ogier slave Loial to “sing.” This is no mere command performance for the courtiers; this is profound magic, an obviously sacred and meaningful sonic ritual through which the Ogier can persuade the earth’s plants to grow before our very eyes. To Suroth and her cronies, it’s a party trick, like bringing a toddler out to recite the alphabet or making your dog sit with a Milk-Bone on his nose. It’s one of the most beautiful uses of magic we’ve seen so far, and they laugh at it like it’s a mere amusement. To Loial, it’s clear he couldn’t be more humiliated if they’d forced him to whip his dick out. It’s grotesque, shameful, obscene.

I reviewed this week’s brutal episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Which is good, because TWoT is at the point now where, after two very good episodes, a merely decent episode like this one feels like a step in the wrong direction. In part, this is because of the decision of the filmmakers (the episode was written by Rohit Kumar and directed by Maja Vrvilo) to stage half the episode at night, when the show has demonstrated approximately zero capability of making nighttime scenes look anything other than dim and lifeless. Not even the big fight scene between the Children of Light and Perrin and Aviendha, which is too rapidly edited to really convey the physicality of the battle, can overcome this handicap. It’s really wild: I was watching today’s episode of Billions, which at various times turns Manhattan alleyways into portals of danger and mystery, and wondering, “How the hell can a financial drama about Wall Street make the night look brighter and more magical than a megabudget fantasy spectacle?”

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

A bird’s eye view of the city of Tar Valon spread out in all its splendor around the great White Tower. A vampiric being of an ancient evil called back from beyond the grave while while dripping Hellraiser quantities of blood from her nude body. Moiraine Damodred futzing around in her childhood room, the ghost of a smile on her face as she remembers who she used to be. The ornate latticework covering every column within the tower of the Aes Sedai, a simple design flourish that communicates their beauty and skill on the one hand, their preoccupation with ritual and their decadent splendor on the other. The attempted murder of a demigoddess.

There are many things, large and small, that I could single out as the highlight of this episode of The Wheel of Time, the second very strong one in a row. You know what I’m going to go with, though? A’Lan Mandragoran, the handsome and tormented Warder, pissing on a tree trunk.

I reviewed The Wheel of Time‘s second terrific episode in a row for Vulture.

Whoa. Where did this show come from?

Far and away the best episode of The Wheel of Time yet, this third and final installment of season two’s initial batch of three bears out the wisdom of that release schedule. After watching this teeming hour-plus of television, bursting with big ideas, memorable dialogue, and committed, witty performances, it’s hard not to want to see where the Wheel turns next.

I reviewed the third episode in The Wheel of Time‘s three-part Season 2 premiere for Vulture.

There’s poetry there, right? Potentially, anyway. A neutralized wizard bids farewell to her warrior protector. A messiah can’t be with the one he loves, so he loves the one he’s with. A young student makes a new friend at the potential expense of the old. These are the kinds of relationship dynamics a show can really dig into — and should, if it knows what’s good for it.

I reviewed the second episode of The Wheel of Time Season 2 for Vulture.

There are times when the show that results from all this business feels less like a story, like a lived-in world, and more like a very large box purchased at the cost of a few hundred million dollars into which various story — and lived-in-world-shaped objects can be dropped. I’m a big partisan of the ornate White Tower as a set and location design; its pristine snow-colored latticework filigrees mark it as a place too powerful to be touched and sullied by the wars its residents constantly wage. The show has a kind of ostentatiously poly-couple sex positivity that distinguishes it from the pack, if nothing else. Pike and Henney are transcendently attractive. The Trollocs are perfect monsters under the bed. Beyond that, I’m not sure we’re getting anything here we can’t get more of, or better, elsewhere.

But sometimes that’s enough, you know? I tend to see The Wheel of Time through the eyes of my 12-year-old, a fantasy nerd to whom live-action epic fantasy is still so novel that virtually anything corresponding to that description is a home run. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t still enough of a 12-year-old fantasy nerd left within me that I myself didn’t react that way to the show, at least part of the time, even if Jordan’s books weren’t part of my personal repertoire. Sometimes you just wanna see people in tunics fire waves of magic at people in monster suits, maybe with some swords thrown in the middle. The Wheel of Time gives you that, and if you like that sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing you’ll like.

The Wheel of Time is back and so am I, covering it for Vulture. It’s mid, but in a basically good way? Here’s my review of the Season 2 premiere.

In the latest episode of the BLAH podcast, Stefan Sasse and I discuss Amazon’s adaptation of The Wheel of Time from the perspective of TWoT neophytes. Available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

The biggest problem with The Wheel of Time isn’t what’s onscreen, but what isn’t. Watching the seemingly endless credits spool out, listing a crew of hundreds if not thousands across multiple European nations, I found myself wondering what all this money and all these resources were being thrown at and drawing a blank. What is The Wheel of Time about in the end? Friendship? Yes, it’s nice to have friends; no, I’m not sure a massive monster war is required to illustrate this. Destiny? What does that even mean? Is anyone watching this show going to become the one single person capable of stemming the onrushing tide of evil? There are no Dragons Reborn IRL, I’m afraid. So what are we watching, exactly?

To draw a couple of comparisons that are sure to annoy a lot of people, TWoT is a lot more Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker than it is Game of Thrones. I hope it’s not tooting my own horn to say that I’ve made my position on the conclusion of Game of Thrones very clear, but the point I’ve always tried to make is that from the start it was a show about something, namely the way that man’s inhumanity to man keeps us from uniting against a massive common threat. (In 2021, that framework is more topical than ever.) The Rise of Skywalker, by contrast, is about how important the grandchildren of the antagonists of the previous trilogy of Star Wars movies turned out to be, which is another way of saying it’s about nothing in particular. I see a lot of Rey in Rand, and that’s not a good thing.

TWoT’s great hope for the future is that Rand’s discomfort with his own status, his drive to protect his friends by removing himself from their orbit, results in a journey of personal growth that’s both engaging and relatable. The chances are that no one reading this review will be the single person responsible for saving American democracy, stopping fascism and climate catastrophe, and generally setting the world to rights. But certainly, some of us reading this review — to say nothing of the person writing it — feel that they have personal traits best kept away from the people they care most about. If Wheel can lean into that aspect of Rand’s narrative, allowing us to relate to his decision to walk away from his friends lest he drag them down into madness and death with him, it can actually be about something, and thus become more than just a pleasant diversion in a fantasy world far, far away.

I reviewed the season finale of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

The night that follows is kind of a CliffsNotes version of great Game of Thrones calm-before-the-storm moments, like the pre-battle portion of “Blackwater” or the entirety of “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” before the Battle of Winterfell in season eight. Rand gets mad at Egwene for thinking poorly of Mat. Nynaeve gets mad at Rand and Perrin for fighting over Egwene. (Yes, apparently Perrin has it bad for Egwene, a fact that had in no way been communicated by anyone’s dialogue or performances until this episode.) Rand and Egwene make up and have sex off-camera. Nynaeve trails Lan to his adoptive family home, and later on they have sex, also off-camera.

Honestly? Other than some smooches and Moiraine’s terrific delivery of the command “on your knees” last week, the sexual relationships on this show are bizarrely sexless. The actors involved may be hot, but there’s no heat in their chemistry at all. In Lan and Nynaeve’s case, it’s not clear from the episode’s editing that she so much as removed a single garment in pursuit of her partner. It all feels like an embarrassing overreaction to the embarrassing overreaction to Game of Thrones’ use of sex and nudity, a discourse I hope and pray I never see the likes of again.

I reviewed this week’s lackluster calm-before-the-storm episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Moiraine, drinking tea. Moiraine, talking shop with a colleague in a sauna. Moiraine, letting down her hair in front of a mirror at the end of a long day. Moiraine, sneaking off for a late-night assignation with her secret lover and confidante, who’s also her boss. Moiraine, standing on the balcony, admiring the view one last time before she leaves, perhaps forever.

If nothing else — and believe me, there was plenty else — this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time (written by Justine Juel Gillmer and directed by Salli Richardson-Whitfield) established the vital but straightforward fact that Moiraine, the powerful sorceress at the heart of the narrative, has a life. She enjoys simple and not-so-simple pleasures. She has co-workers she trusts and some she doesn’t. She has an office romance on the down-low. She’s into sexual power dynamics. She likes tea, and she occasionally spills it to keep her position secure.

In short, Moiraine is a human being, not just a wizard or a plot device. So even when, at the end of the episode, she reunites the five potential Dragons Reborn, you don’t simply have a picture of a questing witch in your mind — you envision a woman, in full. She’s fulfilling a quest, yes, but she’s been a person the whole time.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Minas Tirith. King’s Landing. And now, Tar Valon. Despite its pastoral roots, fantasy filmmaking has long counted upon its practitioners to nail the look and vibe of its fictional capital cities. And so, from Middle-earth to Westeros to the world of The Wheel of Time, these ancient and ornate metropolises have played a major role. So kudos to TWoT’s team for making the city of the Aes Sedai’s White Tower such an intricate and impressive milieu — a staging ground for the human drama taking place within its beautifully patterned columns and corridors.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture. It’s the definition of “if you like this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you’ll like,” but guess what—I like this kind of thing.

In a way, storytelling is The Wheel of Time’s biggest storytelling problem.

The world Rafe Judkins has brought to the screen feels boundless, replete with different cultures and subcultures, sects and sub-sects, thousands upon thousands of years of history, of wars won and lost, kingdoms risen and fallen, songs and languages learned and forgotten and learned again. (Dip your toe in the book series’ wiki, I double-dog dare you — you might fall in and never come out again.) From an epic-fantasy perspective, this is an impressive feat.

However, from the perspective of a television drama, it’s almost an obstacle because virtually every new development requires someone to tell someone else a story about it. Every time a character sees another character praying, a conversation must ensue as to what the prayer means and to which deity or ancestor or metaphysical concept it’s directed. Each time a phrase from a lost language is uttered, someone has to explain what it means, who originally said it, and what context it was said. Each new enemy requires one of the heroes to tell one of the others what the enemy is and what its powers might be, and how best to defeat or defend against it. And so on, and so on, and so on, for fifteen novels and however many seasons of those novels’ adaptations Amazon deigns to make.

In short, The Wheel of Time is a show that’s almost all fantasy worldbuilding, at least so far. If you’re a mark for that sort of thing — as, frankly, I am — then hey, great! Worldbuilding out the wazoo!

If you’re not into it, though, hoo boy, I can imagine this is quite a slog. For every recognizable moment of human connection — Rand struggling to communicate to his best friend Mat that he doesn’t need to keep any secrets, Nynaeve’s raised-eyebrow reaction to the polyamorous lifestyle of some of the Aes Sedai — there’s great gobs of exposition about the Way of the Leaf or the Song before the Breaking or the Kingdom of Minethrin or the will of the Amyrlin Seat or what have you.

To paraphrase I Think You Should Leave, suffice to say, The Wheel of Time is a lot.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

The Wheel of Time will be compared to Game of Thrones for as long as it lasts, and for good reason: It wouldn’t exist without HBO’s blockbuster serving as a sort of proof of concept for Jeff Bezos’s bottomless pockets. But Wheel is an unapologetic and effects-heavy epic fantasy from the jump. While GoT’s initial cold-open sequence featured a White Walker, that was pretty much it in terms of magical stuff until the dragons hatched in the season finale; Wheel has already shown us more of the admittedly awesome-looking Trollocs than we’d see of the White Walkers in, like, three seasons.

Wheel is also marching us through a lot of exposition about many different lands and cultures in very short order, as opposed to the comparatively easy-to-grasp “Seven Kingdoms governed by Great Houses” world-building of early GoT. The filmmaking follows suit. No sooner are our heroes split up in that shadow city in the last episode than they wind up in three completely different landscapes, facing completely different threats and encountering completely different allies. What it lacks in recognizable human emotions and drives, it makes up for — or tries to, anyway — in sheer storytelling scope. Will this ploy be successful? Only (the Wheel of) time will tell.

I reviewed the third episode of The Wheel of Time—the last in the batch of three that went live today—for Vulture.

It’s not always the case — no piece of Hollywood visual shorthand is truly universal — but in general, a close-up on a character’s mouth as they eat with gusto is shorthand for evil. It’s a way to communicate a character’s acquisitiveness or hedonism. (Sometimes it’s just plain old fatphobia.) In the case of Eamon Valda (Abdul Solis), the Whitecloak “questioner” who gives this episode of The Wheel of Time its cold open, it’s intended to show his indifference to human suffering.

As he tucks into what is, for all intents and purposes, the Billions/Succession/Hannibal forbidden delicacy ortolan, a woman dies in front of him. Her hand has been chopped off, and she’s being slowly burned at the stake. Her crime? Membership in the Aes Sedai, the powerful order of magic-wielding women whose representative Moiraine is leading our heroes off into the unknown. Clearly, they’ve got some dangerous rivals in the do-gooding department; the collection of stolen Aes Sedai rings Eamon wears on his belt indicates that he’s been down this bloody road many times before.

Solis’s chillingly cheery portrayal of this Captain of the Whitecloaks appropriately introduces Wheel’s second episode. Much more so than its predecessor, it’s concerned with the question of what it really means to be one of “the good guys.” In the war against the dark that both the Aes Sedai and the Whitecloaks consider themselves waging, are “good guys” even a thing?

I reviewed the second episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.