Channel Zero (2016-2018)

There are more scares packed into the first scene of the first episode of the first season of showrunner Nick Antosca’s exceptional horror anthology series than most horror TV shows can muster in their entire run. Amazingly, it only gets better from there. Each surreal standalone season of Channel Zero loosely adapts a famous “creepypasta” from the internet — the subjects include a cursed children’s television broadcast, a Halloween haunted house with a dark secret, a family of wealthy cannibals, and a woman haunted by her imaginary friend — and uses a different talented director. This gives story a different feeling, look, and tone, with one thing in common: All four are legitimately terrifying. The episodes and seasons are short, too, making each one a perfect weekend afternoon binge. And if you feel like the series ends too soon, don’t worry: Antosca has since co-created a quartet of killer streaming miniseries about murder and madness — The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Candy, and A Friend of the Family — that are just as distinctive and chilling.

For Decider, I wrote about ten of my favorite horror television shows since 2016.

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 mesmeric qualities of Refn’s filmmaking make taking in all of this cacophonous and terrifying information a leisurely, sensual matter. The sparse dialogue and the long stretches of silence surrounding it make the monologues outlining the fascist mindset stand out like towering obelisks of ideology. The performances of the five leading actors are masterful in their vagueness, blank screens against which we can project our own hopes, fears, and lusts. The result is a show for our time. It is perhaps the show of our time.

I reviewed the season finale of Too Old to Die Young for Decider. (I’m gonna be playing some catch-up on old links, so these descriptions are gonna be pretty no-nonsense. But this was a hell of a show, I’ll say that!)

Titled “The Empress,” presumably in reference to Yaritza though quite possibly in reference to Diana—and it seems like a lot will be riding on the answer to this riddle in the finale—the penultimate episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s masterpiece of surrealist noir is less an advancement of the plot than an escalation, or the promise of one to come.

I reviewed episode nine of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Aside from Fargo Season Three and David Thewlis’s hideously acquisitive character V.M. Varga, Too Old to Die Young is the only show I personally have seen that responds to the Trump era with appropriate and unvarnished disgust and fury. In the person of Martin’s openly fascist colleagues on the Homicide squad (sample quotes from this episode: “DEMOCRACY’S MY BITCH! FAKE NEWS! JESUS!”) and Janey’s perverted billionaire father, this show identifies the enemy, hones in on the twin poles of their reactionary politics—a belief in the virtue of violence against the unclean and a belief that the vulnerable exist to be exploited, abused, and discarded, both of them privileges of the select—and creates narrative situations that alternately expose them for the monstrous cretins they are and punish them appropriately.

I reviewed episode eight of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

So, we have fascist, racist law enforcement officers who prey on children. We have a grotesque billionaire who declares, publicly and repeatedly, that he’s sexually attracted to his own daughter. And we have a tremendous explosion of horrific violence.

I dunno. Think there’s a connection to be made there? Think there’s a topical subtext to Too Old to Die Young‘s vicious, vacuous killers and their flimsy yet fanatical justifications for murder? Think there’s something about Janey’s dad that trumps his role in the story—something that connects him to the real world, and invites thoughts of not just punishment but retribution? Think there’s more going on here than just what shows up on the screen?

I reviewed episode seven of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Running through the plot in this much detail is kind of a must, given how little there is to say about what happens. Aside from the final scene, and everything that happened off camera before the events of the episode begin, and maybe the Janey encounter, there’s just not much there, there. But when a show is this accomplished, this confident, this unlike anything else on the air, it doesn’t matter what is there. The journey is at least half the fun. Like Jesus’s Mama Magdalena, Too Old to Die Young is simply an acquired taste.

I reviewed episode six of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Let us sing the praises of James Urbaniak, whose dark energy in “The Fool,” the riveting fifth episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s currently peerless crime drama, is powerful enough to fuel the goddamn Death Star.

I reviewed episode five of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

The fourth installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s extended meditation on the evil that men do is one of the most unnerving episodes of television in recent memory. I’d put it up there with any highlight you’d care to name from The Terror, The Act, Channel Zero, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, and even the gut-churning war-crime climax of Game of Thrones.

I reviewed episode four of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Titled “The Hermit” after the corresponding card from the tarot (that’s where every episode gets its moniker), the third exquisite installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young has only one thing wrong with it that I can see: It could have been longer.

I reviewed episode three of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Murder? Yes. Illicit sex? You bet. Gross rich criminal father figure? Mmhm. Hot monochromatic and duochromatic lighting? Oh, indeed. Tracking shots and camera pans so slow they should be measured by half-life? Absolutely. Yes, most of what characterized the first episode of Too Old to Die Young shows up in the show’s second outing as well. With one major exception: the main character.

I reviewed episode two of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Here’s a cinematic axiom you can take to the bank: It’s impossible to be pretentious when you’re patient.

At the very least it’s damn difficult. To the extent pretentiousness means anything (other than “this person thinks they’re better than me and my concern is they’re right”) it signals that an artist is rubbing an unearned sense of intellectual or aesthetic superiority in the audience’s face. The last thing a truly pretentious artist would want is to give that audience time to think. For one thing, pretentious artists don’t believe the audience is capable of thinking, at least not on their own level. More importantly, time for the audience to think is time better spent showing off.

Now consider Nicholas Winding Refn, one of Danish cinema’s many enfants terribles. With each film he’s made since his breakthrough Drive—the Ryan Gosling reunion Only God Forgives, the Elle Fanning fashion-horror freakout The Neon Demon, and now Too Old to Die Young, an elephantine miniseries co-created by crime comics writer Ed Brubaker—his willingness to not bum-rush the viewer from one signpost of his ostensible genius to the next has grown to an almost perverse degree.

For all their lurid colors, lurid subject matter, and ultraviolence, Refn’s movies are ssssslllllllloooooooowwwwwwwwwww. Closeups, zooms, pans, tracking shots, exchanges of dialogue, tones from Cliff Martinez’s vibratory scores: They all proceed at the pace of the profoundly stoned, which indeed is the best state in which to watch them. While dazzling, I don’t think their intent is to dazzle, since that implies a reflective surface. If you like a Refn movie it’s because you sink right into it, and can float around inside it with the company of your own thoughts to fill the space, kill the time, and assign meaning to these multicolored worlds full of moral morons.

This is my long-winded way of saying “The Devil,” the feature-length pilot episode of Refn & Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young, whips ass. Am I being pretentious? That, dear reader, is for you to decide.

I reviewed the series premiere of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young for Decider. This show is exquisite and disturbing. (NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)