18. The Wheel of Time

Created by Rafe Lee Judkins; based on the books by Robert Jordan (Prime Video)

In assembling this list of the year’s best shows I decided not to hold the total number of entries to some arbitrary multiple of five. Any show where I’d say to a loved one “You know what you should watch?” makes the cut. Getting canceled immediately after this season makes The Wheel of Time a tougher series to recommend, which costs it some points through no fault of its own. It’s a shame, because Wheel, aka the High Fantasy That Fucks, had really come into its own. Its ornate, colorful design, high-camp dominatrix villains, increasingly impressive cast (we’re missing out on Shoreh Aghdashloo as a main antagonist!), prog-album-art visuals, and occasional rousing lesbian drinking song about how great the locals’ tits are all made it a show I eagerly anticipated; its pleasures are still worth sampling.

17. A Thousand Blows

Created by Steven Knight (Disney+/Hulu)

My primary memory of watching A Thousand Blows, just one entry in creator Steven Knight’s long list of period crime dramas, is being knocked flat on my back by Erin Doherty. As Mary Carr, leader of the all-women’s gang of thieves the Forty Elephants, she projects a raw need under the viciousness that’s frighteningly intense. (Anthony Boyle wowed similarly in Knight’s House of Guinness.) Stephen Graham and Malachi Kirby are deeply impressive, too, as the bareknuckle boxers whose paths intertwine with Mary’s. You want to see these people win, which is why it’s so compelling to see what they do when they lose.

16. Pluribus

Created by Vince Gilligan (Apple TV)

Particularly on television, where the genre has thrived ever since Lost landed on that island — and its roots can be traced even further back, to The X-Files and Twin Peaks and The Prisoner — the sci-fi mystery combines two genres that invite audience speculation to create a Frankenstein’s monster of theory-mongering. For a critic who prefers to write about what’s on screen now instead of what might end up on screen several episodes or seasons later, these shows are frustrating, particularly when all the speculating requires one to overlook holes in the here and now. But after creator Vince Gilligan shook off the broad comedy that tends to mark his shows’ early going and drilled into just how deranging being one of the Last People On Earth would be, the juice finally seemed worth the squeeze. The show is augmented immeasurably by its million-dollar visual, its bold use of composition and color, and the work of Rhea Seehorn, who can make a deliberately insufferable character easy to spend time with.

15. Last Samurai Standing

Created by Kento Yamaguchi and Michihito Fujii; based on the book by Shogo Imamura; Creative Director: Junichi Okada (Netflix)

Are you a fan of Takashi Miike samurai films like 13 Assassins and Blade of the Immortal? How do you feel about end-of-the-Old-West stories like The Wild Bunch and Red Dead Redemption 2? What about the way Yuen Woo-Ping rewrote the rules of on-screen combat in The Matrix, Kill Bill, and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? If any of this sounds intriguing to you, let alone a combination of all three, make a point of seeking out this stellar samurai series. Choreographed by star Junichi Okada, every fight and battle is completely different from its predecessors, and somehow better. As a bonus, it’s the kind of rousing action-adventure story you can sell to the non-sickos in your family over the break.

14. The Pitt

Created by R. Scott Gemill (HBO Max)

More stylistically and narratively straightforward — more downright broadcast-networkian, even — than anything else on this list, The Pitt was a tough sell for me at first. It was only a matter of a few episodes. Once the show gets past the unavoidable surfeit of “Here’s this doctor or nurse and here’s their name and here’s their deal” dialogue and digs deep into the physical and psychological labor involved in keeping both a hospital emergency room and its traumatized staff up and running, its game cast and real-time gimmick make it nigh irresistible viewing.

13. Task

Created by Brad Ingelsby (HBO)

Everything everyone else saw in Mare of Easttown, Brad Ingelsby’s previous drama/thriller about crime in the downwardly mobile Philadelphia suburbs, I saw here. Tom Pelphrey, perhaps the single most endearing actor working today, plays a small timer who draws big heat by trying to do the right thing after a home invasion goes horribly wrong; Tom Ruffalo, Fabien Frankel, and Alison Oliver are among the messy, endearing cops (sorry) trying to track him down. Directors Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield shoot the woods of DelCo as if drawing forth their very life force, creating a mood best labeled fentanyl transcendentalism.

12. The Lowdown

Created by Sterlin Harjo (FX/Hulu)

Unless the Dude himself is involved, sun-baked South/Western neo-noir is generally not my scene. I wear all black all the time, and this is a “guys who wear brown” genre. Oil and water, you know? Imagine my surprise, then, as The Lowdown steadily won me over. As a comedy it’s rock solid, its jokes and sight gags — more often than not at the expense of Ethan Hawk’s Lee Raybon, the good-hearted, down-on-his-luck “truthstorian” investigative reporter at the center of it all — landing with a high hit rate. The supporting cast is killer: Kyle MacLachlan, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Peter Dinklage, Keith David, Tim Blake Nelson, and Paul Sparks, just to name a few. Ethan Hawke plays Lee as what George R.R. Martin might write as hedge knight — a hardscrabble servant of the public good, whether or not he earns either money or appreciation for it (though he’d be happy for either). The Lowdown is a poignant plea to do the right thing in an era that rewards the opposite, even considering the cost.

11. Daredevil: Born Again

Created by Dario Scardapane and Matt Corman & Chris Ord; based on the work of Bill Everett, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Gerry Conway, John Romita Sr., Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, Charles Soule, Christos Gage, Ron Garney, Stefano Landini, and others (Disney+)

Daredevil: Born Again is about a blind vigilante ninja lawyer called Daredevil teaming up with his frenemy, a serial killer called the Punisher, to take down Donald Trump and his army of sociopathic cops. That’s it. That’s what it’s about. It’s as clear as day. It’s the reason Garth Marenghi called writers who use subtext cowards. This show is the best thing Marvel had put out in years, despite its many growing pains during development and production. Arriving early in the year, it was a welcome sign of artistic resistance to fascism via one of the most popular franchises on the planet; in that category, though, it would soon be topped.

10. It: Welcome to Derry

Created by Andy Muschietti, Barbara Muschietti, and Jason Fuchs; Showrunners: Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane; based on the work of Stephen King (HBO)

To paraphrase myself talking about the similarly strong start for Nick Antosca’s Channel Zero way back when, the first scene of the first episode of It: Welcome to Derry is grosser, scarier, weirder, more pointedly political, and just plain meaner than everything in director Andy Muschietti’s two It feature films combined. The show almost feels like penance for those movies, in a way — as if Muschietti and his collaborators were determined to get the queasy mix of nostalgia and brutality found in Stephen King’s masterpiece right this time. They succeed in large part thanks to a surprisingly strong lineup of child actors, led by Clara Stack and Matilda Lawler, and, amazingly, an adult cast that can command audience interest just as well as the adorable kids and the killer clown (played once again, and better than ever, by Bill Skarsgård). Jovan Adepo, Taylour Paige, Madeleine Stowe, and especially Chris Chalk as recurring King character Dick Hallorann aren’t acting like they’re in a Halloween haunted house, but rather in a place where their families, sanity, and souls are legitimately at stake. Despite some needlessly Hollywood plotting, it’s a testament to the power of cruelty in art.

9. Monster: The Ed Gein Story

Created by Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan (Netflix)

Between The People vs. O.J. Simpson, The Assassination of Gianni Versace, Dahmer, and Monsters, Ryan Murphy and his collaborators are responsible for the four best true crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Murphy and Ian Brennan’s latest Monster show, about the Wisconsin killer and grave robber Ed Gein, feels less tightly focused than the other four shows, but this is to be expected due to The Ed Gein Story‘s expanded scope. Bluntly gruesome and woven through with surreal flourishes, it really is about the Ed Gein story — not just the killer’s life, his crimes, and the media circus immediately surrounding their discovery, as was the case with O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan and Jeffrey Dahmer and the Menendez Brothers, but the legend that grew up around him. Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and the true-crime industry itself can all be traced, in one way or another, back to Ed’s lonely heart.

8. The Chair Company

Created by Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin (HBO)

The original concept behind Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, and Charlie Adlard’s comic book series The Walking Dead — which I liked quite a bit, as opposed to the TV show — was simple: What if a zombie movie never ended? “What if an I Think You Should Leave sketch never ended?” works well as a description of The Chair Company. ITYSL creators Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin trap Robinson’s senior-manager everyman Ron Trosper in a labyrinth of fraud and corruption that he uncovers more or less by being monomaniacally insufferable. I get the impression from the season’s cliffhanger ending that the plan here is to follow the original roadmap for Twin Peaks, whose creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never intended to solve their central mystery, using it instead to draw us deeper and deeper into their weird world. Will Ron ever get to the bottom of why that chair fell out from under him? Does it matter?

7. Foundation

Created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman; based on the books by Isaac Asimov (Apple TV)

There’s no other…okay, there’s one other science fiction show on television that looks as good as Foundation. (More on that in a bit.) Everything from space travel to psychic powers to genocidal superweapons are rendered as kaleidoscopic and beautiful, while owing very little to the obvious genre antecedents. There’s heroism and sadism, derring-do and body horror. There’s mid-century SF’s usual obsession with scientifically measuring and predicting the broad movements of human society. There’s sex appeal galore. Right at the apex of it all are the strange, engrossing performances of Lee Pace, Terrence Mann, and Laura Birn as the immortals cursed with the burden of Empire, turned into monsters by wielding more power than any being should hold. There’s a lesson here about personalist regimes that’s too loud, and often too blackly funny, to ignore.

6. Murdaugh: Death in the Family

Created by Michael D. Fuller and Erin Lee Carr; based on the podcast by Mandy Matney (Hulu)

I’ve deliberately avoided using the word “mesmerizing” during any of these write-ups so far, despite it being a go-to superlative for someone in my line of work. (Well, for me anyway.) This is because there is one performance out of everything I watched this year that deserves “mesmerizing,” and it’s Jason Clarke as Alex Murdaugh in this true-crime drama from under the Nick Antosca umbrella. With his Christmas-ham face, his good ol’ boy charm, and his mountain of criminal secrets, his dynamic with his kind but enabling wife Maggie (Patricia Arquette, proving the weakness of her work on Severance is just a writing issue) resembles nothing so much as that of Tony and Carmela Soprano. Both stories are about the insatiable maw at the heart of the American dream, and who gets fed into it, and by whom. A sharp, tight, sensational show.

5. Alien: Earth

Created by Noah Hawley; based on the screenplay by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett (FX/Hulu)

An unconscious man with an alien parasite attached to his face, hastily stashed under a child’s bed. A sheep with one bulbous eye, gazing coolly at its surroundings. An android with a shock of white hair, observing the sheep-creature right back. A wide-eyed billionaire manchild, vibrating with sociopathic glee. A child in a woman’s body, cooing at an apex predator from outer space. A glowering working stiff with nothing left to live for, and no morality to govern that life, save the completion of his mission. A xenomorph in full flower, running through the forest canopy, basking in the hot sun like a jungle cat. By stitching together memorable images in an almost ruminative way while never skimping on the all-out monster action, Noah Hawley has added a third entry to the Alien canon, behind only Ridley Scott and James Cameron in the originality and impact of his vision of the creature and the world it invades.

4. The White Lotus

Created by Mike White (HBO)

From the moment the show’s new and improved theme song began playing, it was clear something different was going on with The White Lotus this season. I’d previously found its broad satire of the leisure class smug and insufferable, but this season it opened up its tonal range to its great benefit. There’s a grand doomed love affair. There are characters who aim to do the right thing as much as there are who take the easy way out. There’s an astonishing monologue about the nature of desire by Sam Rockwell that has a decent claim on being the scene of the year. Lavish shots of the natural world and its animal inhabitants serve as the lifeblood of the thing, flowing between scenes and lending the whole sordid thing an air of mystery and danger.

3. Chief of War

Created by Thomas Pa’a Sibbett and Jason Momoa; showrunner: Doug Jung (Apple TV)

Jason Momoa, man. Jason goddamn Momoa. Star, co-creator, co-writer of every episode, director of its absolutely breathtaking finale, a landmark achievement in screen combat — watch Chief of War and you’ll find his achievements nearly as impressive as those of Ka’iana, the painfully ethical warlord of the show’s title. Torn between two women, at war with two kings on behalf of another — and all these characters are fully fleshed out to the point where you feel they could sustain the show as the lead themselves — Ka’iana is a real-life figure turned legendary. That’s Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett’s overall approach to the material: a myth for the Hawaiian Islands, an answer to King David or King Arthur. Appropriately, the visuals are mythic in scope, using greens and reds and yellows in painterly fashion; Momoa does things with digitially color-graded orange in the finale I’ve simply never seen on screen before, the way Danny Boyle put new shades of green on camera in 28 Years Later. It’s that kind of story, almost, right down to the presence of a Bone Temple. The finale delivers the climactic battle the show’s been promising all along, too — no false advertising here. An epic like few others.

2. Adolescence

Created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (Netflix)

You forget about the stunt aspect. That’s the highest compliment I can pay Adolescence, considering how impressive the stunt aspect is. Director Philip Baratini shoots each of the show’s four episodes as a single continuous take, immersing us in the lives of a Liverpool family being detonated by their young son’s shocking, misogynistic crime. A Thousand Blows stars Stephen Graham (the show’s co-creator and co-writer) and Erin Doherty knocked me out once already; in this they’re almost too luminous with the terrible truth of their characters’ circumstances to look at. Owen Cooper, who plays the boy at the heart of it all with precocious power, is the acting find of the year. This show is a triumph.

1. Andor

Created by Tony Gilroy; based on the work of George Lucas and others (Disney+)

“Andor,” I wrote on Bluesky partway through watching the show’s second season via advance screener copies provided to me by the Mouse, “is a stone cold masterpiece. There’s stuff in Andor Season 2, images, moments, as good as anything on television ever. Not grading on the Mandalorian curve, grading on the Mad Men curve.” I stand by every word, and I’ll go further. Andor isn’t just the best show of the year, it’s one of the ten best television shows ever made.

I believe Andor is the most expensive television series ever made, and every penny is visible on screen. Tony Gilroy and his collaborators have created a fully fleshed out society from the sketched out structure left behind by George Lucas as the bridge between his prequel trilogy and the original films. He crafts a bright, shiny dystopia of propaganda, ecocide, and genocide — one that countless viewers were all too able to recognize as our own — then examines what enforcing that regime, or fighting back against it, would really look like.

The result is a Star Wars show that treats the existence of something called the Death Star as the moral obscenity it really is. It explores the strangely compelling sexual neuroses of fascist apparatchiks, and is unsparing about the kind of sexual violence the servants of the Empire would inflict on civilians. It tells a terrifying story of genocide from start to finish. It shows the sacrifice of personal happiness inherent in a life lived for the cause. When it finally introduces the Force, a subject from which the series stays away for nearly its duration, the concept regains its power as the animus within all living things. “Life will defeat you,” Winston Smith insisted to the Party in 1984; Andor says the same thing, and means it. Vital, elegiac, magnificent.

“Harry, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair — or two cups of good, hot, black coffee, like this.”

It’s exceedingly rare to receive actionable advice on better living from a TV cop, but Dale Cooper is a rare cop indeed. I think this little speech, from the penultimate episode of Twin Peaks’ short first season, does more to endear Coop to us than half a dozen high-speed chases, collared perps, or climactic shootouts would have done.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Jason Momoa and Thomas Pa’a Sibbett’s gorgeous historical epic Chief of War was one of the best TV shows of the year, especially for viewers of a Throne-ish persuasion. Stefan and I talk all about it in the latest Patreon-exclusive episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Conversation!

Carol’s moaning was sweet, it was hot, it was tender and moving and erotic, and it got me to thinking. Carol reacts to kissing Zosia the way that she does because she’d kept every victim/beneficiary of “the Joining” at arm’s length, and they she, this whole time. But of course it’s insane to completely remove yourself from humanity, even the strange form of it represented by members of the hivemind like Zosia. You need that contact, however peculiar it has now become. Or Carol needs it, anyway: When she was totally cut off, she really did begin losing her mind.

Yet at the same time, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was also insane to talk with Zosia, to befriend Zosia, to make love to Zosia, like Zosia is a real person, when in fact she’s…well, all real people, all at once. She is the original Zosia. She is Carol’s dead wife. She is Carold’s dead wife’s relatives. She is Carol’s own relatives! She is every woman Carol ever fucked, and every woman they ever fucked, and so on, and so on, and so on. 

Is the intimacy required for even the most exhibitionistic and non-monogamistic sex possible when your partner is every living human being, minus one dozen? What about the intimacy required to confide, to conspire, to share hopes and dreams and frustrations and inside jokes? To stargaze amid incredible romantic red lights, to play croquet on the 50 yard line, to get massages, to visit an old haunt like the Mulholland Drive–esque diner the plurbs rebuild for Carol’s enjoyment? To do all the things friends and lovers do?

Keep in mind also that Zosia is also all of the world’s greatest lovers. She is every woman who’s ever given head and every woman who’s ever been given head. She’s every man in that same equation, if for some reason that knowledge should come in handy. By the time she and Carol have sex, the episode has already established that Zosia is literally unbeatable in games of skill or knowledge, having instantaneous access to the thoughts — but not the physical or emotional feelings — of every human being on earth. Tough to imagine this idea was introduced in the same episode where she and Carol fuck out of pure coincidence, right?

So is it mind-blowing? Is it the best sex she’s ever had? Is it tailor-made to match the performance and preferences of a familiar lover, like her wife? Is it deliberately dialed down by a collective consciousness that knows every sexual trick in the book, including how not to overwhelm your more inexperienced inamorata? Is there a reason it’s happening now? 

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

There are a million reasons Fallout shouldn’t work. For starters, it’s a video-game adaptation, and those almost never work regardless. It’s an over-the-top satire of capitalism and the fantasy of the American West, a subgenre with a pretty shabby success rate on the small screen. It ricochets between a dizzying array of reference points and emotional tones every episode. It treats violence both as a hideous moral blight and totally awesome.

It shouldn’t work, but it does. Adapted by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner from the games created by Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, Josh Sawyer, and others, Fallout is a spectacularly savage send-up of megalomaniacal technocrats, billionaire psychopaths, and American fascists. (Brought to you by Jeff Bezos and all your friends at Amazon!) Starring several of the most telegenic actors working today, it’s stupid like a fox, smarter than it needs to be, and so nasty I’m surprised they can get away with it.

I reviewed the series premiere of Fallout for Decider. Woo!

Twin Peaks doesn’t have storylines, it has story clusters. That’s the simplest way to picture it, I think, and the easiest way to make sense of it. There are a handful of core concepts — the murder of Laura Palmer, the Ghostwood Estates/Packard Sawmill real estate swindle, the cross-border drug trade, the saga of Norma and Big Ed, the cops, the teens, the dreams — around which different sets of characters swirl. A few characters, like Dale Cooper, Audrey Horne, Leo Johnson, Bobby Briggs, and Laura Palmer herself, are able to cross between clusters. By connecting them, they help create the sense that it’s all one big story after all.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

This fluid approach to the movies’ continuity is part of what makes this show such a surprise. “It: Welcome to Derry” feels like a mulligan for Muschietti, who directed them. The first film’s haunted-hayride vibe, the second’s nonsensical plot and warmed-over, quip-heavy dialogue: All of that has been jettisoned. In their place stands a season-long testament to the power of cruelty in art.

From start to finish, “Welcome to Derry” has relentlessly probed fears that plague our childhood and our adulthood. Children are tormented with their worst nightmares. Adults are taunted for their most painful failures and confronted with their most terrible memories.

At the center of it all lurks an orange lunatic who feeds on fear and suffering, empowered by a government apparatus working to spread that fear and suffering from sea to shining sea. As such, Pennywise is a monster for our degraded age.

I reviewed the season finale of It: Welcome to Derry, maybe the biggest TV surprise of the year for me, for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Rooting you in the physical experiences of another person, one who isn’t even real, is one of the great magic tricks cinema is able to pull off. It’s especially hard when those experiences are unpleasant, enormously so when those unpleasant experiences drag on and on for an episode or a movie. Yet the Ordeal draws us in, because there’s catharsis to be found in physically connecting with someone who is suffering — the profound catharsis of empathy, which requires us to get out of our own heads just as the Ordeal itself requires its harried heroes to leave the comforts of the familiar world behind for parts unknown. As for Manousos, he’s still got a long way to go if he survives the spines. (The arrival of a hivemind helicopter is a good sign, right?) With any luck — ours, not his — his grueling, stunning Ordeal will continue. 

In honor of this week’s Pluribus I wrote about the Ordeal, one of my favorite cinematic subgenres. Deliverance, Sorcerer, The Revenant, Stalker, Gravity, The Descent, Aguirre – The Wrath of God, Annihilation, Children of Men, Fitzcarraldo, Valhalla Rising, The Terror, American Primeval — if a movie or TV show is about someone killing themselves to get from Point A to Point B, I’m going to make a Point of C-ing it.

There’s so much that Pluribus is doing that no other show on TV is doing right now. Those crystal blue skies! The majority of entire episodes passing in dialogue-free silence! The full commitment to the bit of playing the entire “Hello, Carol” voicemail recording every single time she dials! Pluribus makes life feel like the never-ending struggle it is, and it’s damn good at it. I don’t need the jokes and gags and bits. Just point the cameraat two people slowly being driven insane by the fact that, for all intents and purposes, they are the only two people.

I reviewed last night’s strong Pluribus for Decider.

And then there’s Bobby and Shelly. Boy oh boy, is there ever Bobby and Shelly. Director Tim Hunter films the two of them making out in her unfinished house, Shelly straddling Bobby’s lap in her waitress uniform as they kiss and clutch at each other. When Bobby gets the idea to use Leo’s shirt to get rid of him, Shelly rewards him by opening her uniform to reveal a black lace teddy, against which she clutches a gun suggestively. And just like that, Bobby decides he has a few minutes to spare before he leaves after all.

I don’t blame him. Mädchen Amick is the most beautiful woman in a cast that includes Lara Flynn Boyle, Joan Chen, Sherilyn Fenn, Sheryl Lee, and Peggy Lipton, which to paraphrase The Big Lebowski puts her in the running for the most beautiful woman worldwide. Dana Ashbrook is a megababe too, whose mercurial nature — beneath the tough-guy act he’s clearly an emotional and easily hurt kid — makes his obvious hunger for Shelly feel wild and insatiable.

But that’s just it: He’s complicated, and so is their whole situation. Bobby is a red-hot lover, but he really did care about Laura, and Shelly says she wished she could have comforted him at her funeral. Shelly, meanwhile, is perfectly capable of playing the seductive desperate housewife, all bullets and black lace, but she also spends her shift commiserating with Norma about their similarly shit taste in husbands. 

So yes, they’re gorgeous, but it’s the stickiness of their situation, the sharp angles and rough edges, that makes Bobby and Shelly’s romance work so well. Passion is the means by which they process their pain. Isn’t that the purpose of soaps — like Invitation to Love, the show within the show that the characters keep on watching even as their real lives exceed it — in the first place?

I reviewed the fifth episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

“This town is the monster.” After the events of this episode, I think Charlotte Hanlon can be forgiven for stating the thesis of “It: Welcome to Derry” so baldly. The creature known as Pennywise runs riot in this episode, to be sure, in all of his head-chopping, child-terrorizing glory. But he is helped in his gruesome work by the good people of Derry, who commit a mass murder that is swept under the rug by the time people are having their coffee the next morning.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Load up HBO Max these days and you can’t miss the promos for its big comedy of the season. Created by and starring a cult-favorite comedy actor, it’s a skin-crawling look at a secret, sweaty side of the American experience. Desperate to find not just money but career fulfillment, our hapless protagonist must negotiate a world of scams, in which people with no morals purposely sell junk with no value to customers with no standards, enriching themselves at the expense of society while lying through their teeth. The show depicts the inner workings of its unique death-spiral-capitalist hellscape — one in which many of the characters do not even appear to realize they live — with an understanding of how this awful, soul-crushing shit works that borders on frightening in its clarity. But hey, if I Love LA doesn’t work for you, there’s also The Chair Company. 

I’m back at Welcome to Hell World with a piece comparing HBO’s dueling fall comedies, Tim Robinson & Zach Kanin’s The Chair Company and Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA, and their very different approaches to making a living, and a life, in a society built on scams.

For the first however many minutes of this week’s Pluribus, the louche Mr. Diabaté reenacts a generic James Bond scene with a gaggle of plurbs (for lack of a better term) dressed up as cool party people and/or evil villains. At no time is anyone in any danger, even of losing money, let alone their lives. Mr. Diabaté is not at risk. His enemy is not at risk. No one at the party is even really partying! They’re all just playing along to please him, and the moment he leaves the room they switch off the revelry and start cleaning the place up, as if someone had thrown a switch. (God only knows how creepy this effect is when the women with whom he’s constantly having orgies get up and leave the hot tub room.)

In essence, this episode asks us to spend its opening minutes watching something that isn’t happening, that doesn’t matter, and that isn’t even necessary, given that we already learned the kind of person Mr. Diabaté is during our first meeting, and that the mere existence of his Las Vegas digs conveys this too. Why waste valuable screen time on an inert Austin Powers riff?

It’s equally bold to hire a massive star to do a little cameo just for funsies. But while that may be bold, the identity of the massive star matters. Had Pluribus gotten, I dunno, Daniel Day-Lewis, now that’d be something. Instead, it got John Cena, the most happy-to-be-here man in Hollywood. 

A spinoff TV series for his D-list superhero from the DC Universe? A cohost for a show in which people get whacked by large foam-rubber balls into water 15 feet below them? A WWE event in the haven of creative freedom known as Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? An apology to the nation of China for acknowledging the existence of Taiwan? John Cena’s your man. If there’s an audience for “funny” John Cena cameos in 2025, I am not a part of it.

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

Consider Leland Palmer. He, too, has an uncomfortable outburst at Laura’s funeral. Perhaps triggered by the fight between Bobby and James, he quite simply melts down, throwing himself atop his daughter’s coffin. The hydraulic apparatus designed to lower it into the ground then malfunctions, yanking the sobbing man up and down. “Don’t ruin this too!” shrieks his wife, Sarah, who’s been decompensating in her own way as well.

Some mourners, like Shelly Johnson, find the whole thing comedic enough to reenact for the amusement of the diner patrons at the Double R. (She’s also hiding a gun in her home to protect her from her psychotic husband Leo, the prime suspect in Laura’s killing at the moment, so cut her some slack.) And it’s true, there’s something funny about it, and not just the slapstick-comedy nature of the incident. 

Leland’s grief is so over the top that it provokes nervous laughter, the kind you let out when what you’re watching is too intense to take seriously, for a moment at least. It’s hard to watch him weep and wail on the coffin, or again on the dance floor at the Great Northern, as he begs for someone, anyone, to dance with him in Laura’s place. I bet Sarah could do with some attention, too, but what happened to their daughter is pulling them apart, not bringing them together. That’s a second tragedy.

What’s worrisome is that Leland has another family member to worry about while this is going on. Laura’s cousin Madeleine — a brunette with big glasses but a lookalike in every other way, played by Laura actor Sheryl Lee — arrives in town for the funeral, and is there to witness the catastrophe at the cemetery. We’ve already seen Sarah superimpose her daughter’s face on the girl’s best friend, Donna Hayward. It isn’t difficult to imagine Madeleine being cast in that same role, whether she wants to play it or not.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Although our attention has been largely occupied by the kids and the clown, let’s not take for granted how good this show’s three grown-up leads are. Chris Chalk, Jovan Adepo and Taylour Paige make the adult material as magnetic as that of the young losers.

They don’t feel as if they’re playing characters in a spooky popcorn flick; they feel as if they’re playing human beings who are worried about their families, their ethics and their sanity. That scream from Chalk is one of the most harrowing things I’ve heard on television all year, and it’s been a harrowing year.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. Gift link!

I love how much of Pluribus takes place in silence. I love how much strength it derives from simply putting a complicated person on the screen, wordlessly, and allowing us to observe them. I love how much the show moves to the rhythms of labor, the painstaking, time-consuming, and necessary efforts we put into living that most shows ignore. There’s even a time-lapse shot of Carol Sturka sleeping as the light coming through the window shifts with the lengthening of the day. In short, Pluribus takes great pains to convey what it is like to simply exist in the world it has constructed — to be a human, a thinking person in a human body, surrounded by a world grown hostile and strange. 

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

Okay. Now we’ve seen Twin Peaks.

The show’s third episode is, in effect, the final chapter of a big three-part premiere. This is literally true, to an extent: Coop’s dream recycles footage originally created for an extended cut of the pilot for European markets. More to the point, it introduces multiple load-bearing elements of Twin Peaks’ cultural iconography, things you’ve probably seen or heard of whether or not you have any idea whodunit or where all this is headed (no spoilers, in other words): Audrey’s dreamy dance, Leland’s hysterical grief, Coop’s unconventional police work, One-Eyed Jack’s, the Red Room, the Man from Another Place (Michael J. Anderson), the backwards speech, Laura Palmer whispering in Agent Cooper’s ear, the “Fire Walk With Me” poem, one-armed Mike, Killer Bob. 

Episode three is where it becomes clear that something not just strange but supernatural is occurring in this quiet logging town. It’s where the show goes from weird to Weird. And in all its non sequitur, nonlinear surrealist menace, it’s where David Lynch as we’d know him for the rest of his career — the David Lynch of Fire Walk With Me, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire, and this show’s own unlikely comeback season — is born.

I reviewed the third episode of Twin Peaks for Pop Heist. Gift link!

The military-pillar subplot never devolves into dopey first-person-shooter shenanigans. From the start, when dozens of troops descend on a haunted house that looks as if it might fall over in a stiff breeze, the operation is depicted as hubristic folly. Men die for no reason, nothing is achieved, and the end result will be the persecution of Rose’s community for her role in the debacle.

As much as Gen. Shaw wants to believe otherwise, sending fully armed troops rolling down American streets to storm houses is a cure worse than any disease it purports to treat. Some problems can’t be fixed with boots and guns. If you try, you’ll only hurt the country you’re claiming to save.

I reviewed tonight’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

So let’s review. The Others are all permanently blissed-out people pleasers. They cannot kill other living things. They want to convert the last few holdouts, and won’t harm them directly, but won’t hesitate to hand them ways to harm themselves. They have no meaningfully personal concept of personal expression. Their big changeover has cost the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings. Assuming the show is leaving these plot holes open on purpose and I’ll grant you I’m shooting it a lot of bail here, my final question is this. If you were the senders of the transmission responsible for the Joining, and you were trying to turn a fractious planet full of nuclear armaments into a smooth, flat runway for an invasion and a pasture of docile livestock for the slaughter — if, in other words, you were making a weapon — would you have designed that transmission any differently? 

This, however, raises another question. I’m interested, in a sort of academic way, about the nature of the joining, its origin, its ultimate purpose. Let’s say I’m right and we’ve got a science-fiction story about an alien weapon that turns everyone into pod people. Hey, great! I figured it out, I solved the puzzle. Well, then what? The story itself has to offer something more than the thrill of solving a riddle. There’s a reason it’s not called “theorytelling.”

I reviewed this week’s Pluribus for Decider.

“This should be exciting,” I said to my wife as I sat down to watch the sixth and final episode of Last Samurai Standing’s first season. “There should be some cool fights.”

My wife laughed. “I think that’s a safe bet,” she said.

“Well, sure,” I granted. “Then again, I thought the same thing about Shōgun.” The point is, being the final episode of a combat-centric show is no guarantee of combat. Unless, of course, the episode in question is titled “Mortal Combat,” as this one is. In that case you can pretty much rest assured that you are, in fact, gonna see some cool freakin’ fights.

Man oh man, does this season finale deliver on that front.

I reviewed the gangbusters season finale of Last Samurai Standing for Decider.