As a rule, it is better to be pissed off than pissed on. Chuck Rhoades, however, doesn’t play by the rules. Pissed off? Plenty. Played Paul Giamattically by Paul Giamatti, the crusading attorney general at the heart of Showtime’s new show Billions spends the bulk of the high-finance drama’s pilot fuming about one damn thing or another. But during the opening scene, in which a a faceless woman extinguishes a cigarette on his bare chest and then urinates on the burn, he’s happy as a clam. There’s a time and a place for it, sure, but ol’ Chuck rejects your pissed on/pissed off binary. He’s bodyfulid-fluid. Cable drama, motherfuckers! It’s where anything can happen…and usually does!

I’m covering Billions for the New York Observer this season! First up is my review of the series premiere, which was better than that opening scene but still hamstrung by it.

SPOILER ALERT

Tom’s in his Downton, all’s right with the world. I hope you’re sitting down, but yes, I, Sean Thomas Patrick Collins, am Irish-American. So when it comes to Downton Abbey, I relate to and root for chauffeur-turned-radicalt-turned-suitor-turned-aristocrat-turned-widow-turned-American Tom Branson the way tomboys connect to Arya Stark, or how people who believe sociopaths who slaughter human beings like pigs just need someone to love pull for Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham to finally make it official. So imagine, just effing imagine, my unspoiled delight when I heard his dulcet brogue ring out from off screen during the wedding reception for Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes. Picture my unbridled joy when he said he’s back from Boston for good, ready to rejoin the family and the place he loves. Take my hand in yours and pray with me that finally, finally, he and Lady Mary will get together, a romance I ship like the Royal goddamn Navy. And imagine the entire spontaneous outpouring of emotion, complete with cheering and laughing and literal clapping at my TV screen, occurring in the final sixty seconds of the episode, with no prior warning. That’s good television, ladies and gents.

I reviewed last night’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer. No, I didn’t watch the season as it aired in the UK. No, I don’t know what happens. No, I don’t want to know what happens.

Hidden pregnancies. Children switched at birth. Scandal in a great family. Nothing happening to Lady Edith, her daughter Marigold, and the Drewes—the family generous and unfortunate enough to have tried to help her out of a jam, only to be repaid by emotional devastation and physical displacement—would be out of place on your daytime soap opera of choice, back when you had a lot to choose from. But if you pick apart this central storyline from last night’s Downton Abbey, you’ll find it’s more than the sum of its suds. As is often the case on this show, the middling or superfluous b-plots that drive many viewers mad matter very little compared to the visual, observational, and emotional strength of its finest moments.

This was lost in my dismay over the death of David Bowie, but I reviewed last week’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer.

Like the House of Grantham itself, Downton Abbey begins its sixth and final season in a much diminished state. The show’s fall from grace with American critics, who once discussed it as PBS’s entrée into TV’s New Golden Age, has if anything grown more precipitous over the past year; given the series’ rather aimless fifth season, perhaps that fate is at least somewhat deserved. And while comparing one’s take on a television program to the consensus is usually a mug’s game, for a show as status-obsessed as this one it makes some sort of cosmic sense. Just as Lord Robert, Lady Cora, Lady Mary and the gang must come to terms with their uncertain future when they visit a fire-sale auction at the former home of their aristocratic friend Sir John, we’ve got to figure out where it’s all headed. With only ten or so hours to go, is there still a place in the world for the Crawleys and their loyal servants?

The answer is yes, in the real world, anyway—though it’s only if you ignore the answer in the world of the show itself that this becomes apparent. Downton has repeatedly painted its big-picture theme of change coming to the genteel realm of the English upper class with Thomas Kinkade–like factory precision, to the point where you can satirically sum it up in a single tweet with, like, half the character count left over. On a plot level, too, the series has largely exhausted the youthful energies that drove it during its first several seasons, as the three people who best personified them—Jessica Brown-Findlay’s Lady Sybil, Dan Stevens’s Matthew Crawley, and Allen Leech’s Tom Branson—departed the show, taking much of its storytelling mojo with them.

Fortunately for you and me, we’re watching a TV drama, not writing a middle-school book report. Downton’s exceedingly circumspect front-line report from interbellum England’s class warfare has little to offer a commentariat trained to respond to a hardboiled cliché-fest like Jessica Jones as if it’s Marvel’s answer to Steinem and Davis, but ideally we’d made our peace with its lack of firepower in this regard several seasons ago. The lack of the Mary/Matthew and Sybil/Branson romances is a more difficult obstacle to surmount—this is a soap opera, after all—but not an impossible one. If, as it did in tonight’s season premiere, Downton simply continues its sharp observations of human behavior among fundamentally decent people, as animated by some of the loveliest faces, voices, and cinematography on the tube, it still has much to offer.

I’ll be covering the final season of Downton Abbey for the New York Observer, and I began with a review of last night’s season premiere. I think I write well about this show; maybe you’ll think so too.

SPOILER ALERT

Still, the biggest surprise is that defiantly anticlimactic ending. Anyone hoping for a knock-down drag-out fight between Ash and Ruby, let alone him and the forces she controls, is outta luck. (Save it for your Bruce Campbell/Lucy Lawless fanfic.) What you’ve got instead is an exhausted middle-aged man who wants to save his own ass, keep his friends from getting killed, and give up the fight to go live the good life down in Jacksonville. Ruby talks a good game, claiming her goal isn’t the apocalypse but its opposite — an orderly world in which evil coexists with good under her command. That’s part of why Ash takes the deal, sure. But the real reason goes back to what Kelly said about him last episode: He always takes the easy way out if given the chance.

Maybe that’s what explains the character’s enduring appeal. Campbell, of course, is Exhibits A, B, and C in the case of Evil Dead’s lasting legacy. But Ash isn’t just the cartoon character he comes across as. He often makes decisions that aren’t just stupid, but shitty — something action-horror-comedy hybrid heroes are rarely permitted. His carelessness with the Necronomicon is what got everyone into this mess, and his willingness to fob it off on anyone, even Ruby, appears to have brought on Armageddon. In the end, he saves his friends and hightails it out of there, leaving the entire world to its fate; he gets to the finish line and immediately hooks left. It’s not how heroes, even funny ones, are supposed to act. It’s not how stories like this are supposed to work. But Ash vs. Evil Dead never claimed that it would play by the rules. It’s too crazy and confident to be anything but its own groovy self.

I reviewed this weekend’s season finale of Ash vs. Evil Dead, which did not go as I expected, for Rolling Stone.

When you talk about what makes a TV series succeed or fail, you typically want to avoid repeating the same points over and over. Who wants to sound like a broken record, right? Tell that to John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they made “Revolution 9” — and if repetition is good enough for the Beatles, it’s good enough for us, and for Ash vs. Evil Dead. The penultimate episode of the show’s first season — “Bound in the Flesh” — gets where it’s going by repeating the same trick it’s pulled since the pilot: taking the gore and nastiness as far as it can, then taking them one step beyond. Like that creepy voice saying “Number nine … number nine …” over and over, it works.

I reviewed this weekend’s Ash vs. Evil Dead for Rolling Stone.

By switching the question from “whodunit?” to “which of the two whodunit does Noah really care about?”, the show traded the big mystery that sustained its first two seasons for another one with impressive seamlessness. Courtroom theatrics notwithstanding, the transition also moves the show firmly away from its crime-thriller elements, focusing instead on the characters themselves, and on the power and nature of love—how it begins, grows, falters, and ends. This has always been The Affair’s heart and soul, the place where it pushed hardest, dug deepest, and took the biggest risks. The irresistible pull of sexual desire. The fracturing of families young and old, large and small. The idea that people are more complicated than simply characterizing them by the best and worst things they do allows. The notion that pain might be a worthwhile tradeoff for happiness, but it’s no guarantee. The idea that people can make mistakes from which they can never recover and for which they can never atone. (Especially after tonight, when Noah and Alison’s affair, and their slow drift away from it, directly destroys all of their lives, and ends Scotty’s.) Every episode, The Affair says what we rarely even have the guts to say to ourselves. This new twist puts paid to the criticism that the murder storyline diffused the impact of this approach. If anything, the events surrounding the death of Scotty Lockhart are its most powerful payoff to date.

Megan O’Keefe and I reviewed the season finale of The Affair for Decider.

SPOILER ALERT

As a general rule, Ash vs. Evil Dead has its tongue buried so far in its cheek it pokes through the side of its own face. True to its splatstick roots, the series cranks up the blood and guts to a more-funny-than-scary degree, and uses its talented troupe of comedic actors to crack wiseass jokes about the carnage. It’s not that it’s making light of violence, let alone celebrating or valorizing it — its attitude is that in the face of evil, death, and the combination thereof, you just have to laugh.

Which makes tonight’s episode — “Ashes to Ashes” — such a shock. From the title on down, it seemed like little more than an excuse to introduce the series’ goofiest antagonist yet: a clone of Ash J. Williams, grown from the stump of his own severed hand. A Bruce Campbell vs. Bruce Campbell fight scene? Groovy, right? But when the evil Ash killed Amanda Fisher — the dogged, surprisingly flirtatious detective who went from nemesis to love interest in the blink of an eye — it was a development that the show’s shits ‘n’ giggles tone made impossible to see coming, and emotionally difficult to withstand.

I reviewed this weekend’s Ash vs. Evil Dead for Rolling Stone. This show has really been a pleasant surprise.

When it comes to television soundtracks, there are good music cues, and there are great music cues, and Fargo Season Two has had plenty of both. And then, my friends, there’s “War Pigs.” Black Sabbath’s orgiastic antiwar anthem enters “Palindrome,” the show’s stunning season finale, as a literal nightmare—an accompaniment to Betsy Solverson’s vision of a glorious future of Costcos and Game Boys and family dinners, shattered by the hatred and violence that runs so deep in this land’s veins it’s unlikely to ever be pumped clean. It’s a fucking mighty moment, a sign that showrunner Noah Hawley, director Adam Arkin, and company have an unshakeable grasp of the themes of their show and the period pop-culture they’ve used to advance them. And it’s a prophetic moment as well. The song foretells the day of judgment when the rulers responsible for the slaughter are made to answer for their crimes, as all their plans and strategies come to naught. If you want a picture of the future for the characters we’ve spent the season following, from kings and conquerors to victims and vanquished, you’ve got one.

I reviewed the Fargo Season 2 finale for the New York Observer. This was really some season.

“Life is hard and dangerous, and sometimes you just gotta chop off somebody’s head to survive.” Wait, since when did Ash vs. Evil Dead become The Walking Dead? We kid, of course. Unlike the smash-hit zombie series, Starz’s resurrection of the beloved splatstick franchise is neither pretentious nor nihilistic enough to serve up that line of dialogue with a straight face. While TWD doles out its sadistic, kill-or-be-killed valorization of violence in all misguided seriousness, tonight’s Ash episode — “Fire in the Hole” — treats it like the joke that it is. In this go-round, Ash J. Williams and his merry band come across a militia full of Rick Grimes–style might-makes-right gun fetishists, and promptly pull their asses out of the fire.

I reviewed this past weekend’s Ash vs. Evil Dead for Rolling Stone.

When the season began, Cole (Joshua Jackson) was a man at rock bottom. He was alone, strung out, and living in a trailer parked outside his cheating wife’s house and driving rich assholes around his hometown. Since then, he’s faced family feuds, family curses, and an impromptu hook up with Alison (Ruth Wilson). And now? He’s engaged to a good and loyal woman, rolling in money, and buying the Lobster Roll with Alison. He’s even gotten Scotty to go to rehab. Everything’s coming up Cole Lockhart.

How the hell did that happen?

Megan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for Decider.

SPOILER ALERT

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.”

—H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Four things put me in mind of this passage, one of the most famous and evocative in the history of science fiction, while watching tonight’s episode of Fargo, which I think it’s safe to say contains one of the finest action sequences in the history of the medium. The first should be obvious enough. When the UFO that has hovered just above the events of this season swung low for a close-up look at the Massacre at Sioux Falls, it did more than save Lou Solverson’s life, and most likely Ed and Peggy Bomquist’s as well, at the expense of Bear Gerhardt’s. It marked the moment at which the moral catastrophe of the violence that has dogged these characters from the start finally overflowed the banks of normalcy, of reality, and needed to conjure something supernatural into existence just to find an image commensurate with its enormity. This is the function of the fantastic in fiction, when used well: to express in visceral, visual terms emotions too intense for the vocabulary of the everyday to articulate. The mute spaceship, the baleful gaze of its spotlights draped over combatants and corpses alike, a liquid discharge dripping down upon them like so much blood, appearing out of nowhere and then disappearing with no more explanation than when it arrived…If this show, to say nothing of this year in real life, has taught us anything, is it not that this is exactly how the eruption of violence in our lives feels—instantaneous, inexplicable, and overwhelming?

I reviewed last night’s Fargo for the New York Observer.

Given the depth and power both the writing and Ritter brought to the material involving trauma, which remained the series’ strongest point throughout the run, it’s tremendous shame it didn’t extend to other areas of the show. This is especially the case for Tennant and Kilgrave, whose constant, transparent evil lets real abusers, able to hide or temper it, off the hook: “See, we’re not like that!” That the show is dealing with a difficult and horrifically underrepresented subject ought to obligate it to do better than “good enough”; recognition alone is the start of a conversation and the bare minimum of merit, not the be-all and end-all. While nothing here was offensive or insulting, nor was anything inspired or inspiring. Considering the potential, that’s a crime. Case closed.

I reviewed the season finale of Jessica Jones for Decider. This was a very frustrating, disappointing series.

Foremost among those achievements: the fucking acting. By the time he hit that first chorus in “Homeward Bound,” the Simon & Garfunkel song that enabled Kevin Garvey’s escape from his return to the afterlife after getting gutshot by John Murphy, Justin Theroux had already paid off two seasons of work with just a minute of facial expressions and passable Paul Simon. His portrayal of Kevin has long been an inversion of his archetypal tall dark and handsome good looks; unlike Jon Hamm, whose transitions between Don Draper’s strong, suave side and his insecure, guilt-ridden shadow were distinct and dramatic, Theroux always plays Kevin as guy with a godlike body, an incandescent stare, and the loosest of grips on both his emotions and reality itself. Here he really got to crack, not in his usual freak-out mode but as a man so moved by the meaning of the song he’s singing he can barely get the words out without breaking down in tears. It’s somehow both restrained and totally vulnerable, a bravura combination. The scene is for him what “The Suitcase” was for Hamm on Mad Men or what “Crawl Space” was for Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad. Shot in a series of tight, spotlight-illuminated closeups by Leder, it gives you nothing but a face and a voice, and gets more out of them than you could have imagined.

I reviewed the extraordinary season finale of The Leftovers for Decider.

My favorite thing about this week’s episode of The Affair is that there are two more episodes to come after it. The show’s first season was just ten episodes long, but this year it’s gotten the bump to twelve, which I didn’t realize until the coming attractions. To this I say “hell yeah.” When you go Solloway, you gotta go all the way!

My second favorite thing about this week’s episode of The Affair was the half Meghan got to cover. Noah’s solo stint in couples therapy was the most realistic portrayal of a therapy session I’ve ever seen on screen—which makes me think it’s long past time for me to seek out Affair co-creators Sarah Treem and Hagai Levi’s psychologist-centric show In Treatment. It was also the most in-depth and even-handed investigation of Noah’s strengths and weaknesses as a person—or as “a man,” as he might prefer to put it—we’ve gotten yet.

Alison’s half of the episode wasn’t half as meaty, but it was at least twice as juicy. By missing the therapy session, she missed out on a chance to take a long journey inward, but she got to give the plot all its forward motion as a make-good.

My compadre Meghan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for Decider. So jealous she got to cover Noah’s therapy session!

Six episodes into its first season, AvED shows no signs of either slowing down or slipping up. In fact, in sheer entertainment terms, this week’s episode — “The Killer of Killers” — may be the best of the bunch so far. Yes, it lacks the genuine jump-scares of the pilot’s haunted-house atmosphere — hard to pull off when your climactic battle is staged in a greasy spoon — or the inventively awful creature design of the Eligos installments. But it more than makes up for this with crackerjack jokes, no-nonsense viciousness, and enough gore to fill an elevator in the Overlook Hotel. Directed by Michael Hurst, whose resume is full of rollicking genre fare (Hercules, Xena, Spartacus, the Bruce Campbell–starring Jack of All Trades), it’s the most fun you’ll have in 24 minutes this weekend.

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of Ash vs. Evil Dead for Rolling Stone. My editor cut the concluding “…without taking your clothes off” from this graf but otherwise I stand by it.

The show’s willingness to take on subjects with a degree of difficulty high enough that even so-called “prestige” dramas tend to steer clear remains impressive. Case in point: Following their rousing duet “Powerful” — a Black Lives Matter protest anthem mixed with “Roar”-style empowerment pop — inveterate morning-DJ troublemaker Charlamagne tha God, appearing as himself, bluntly interrogates the pair about their identities. “You black now?” he asks Skye, accusing her of “singing about a race she never really claimed.” Without realizing that he’s struck a nerve, he asks Jamal how people would react if, despite being gay, he suddenly started dating a woman. You can see every possible shade of these sentiments expressed across social media anytime a celebrity’s statements on race or sexuality make the national news. A quickie photoshop of Skye with “a Rachel Dolezal wig” adds even more authentic viral-politics flavor to the mix.

All of this was in service of last week’s shocking smooch — maybe the single soapiest moment in the show’s history, at least until that staircase tumble tonight. The series could have coasted off the sensationalism of that moment for as long as it wanted; instead, it choose to dig into the sociopolitical subtext. (Showrunner mindreading attempts are always ill-advised, but it’s not tough to imagine it’s because this shit matters to them.) Not that any of it felt like getting lectured, of course. It wouldn’t be Empireif even sensitive topics weren’t turned into “oh shit!” moments, whether that’s the shock of Charlamagne’s Q&A or the heartbreaking bigotry ofLucious when, with tears of joy in his eyes, he tells Jamal, “She fixed you!”

I reviewed the “fall finale” of Empire for Rolling Stone.

Here, I suppose, is where we’ve got to grapple with the most unsurmountable problem the show faces: the flat performances of its two leads. With only one episode to go, my earlier reservations about the work being done by Krysten Ritter and David Tenant have blossomed into full-blown dislike. There’s almost nothing to Ritter’s acting here beyond dead-eyed, monotone sarcasm, pitched up into anger or down into tears at appropriate moments. Tennant, in turn, is a scenery-chewing gentleman villain, unrelated to and unrecognizable from any comparable figure in real life.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Jessica Jones for Decider. It was bad.

The gravity of the situation is consistently undercut. This begins almost immediately, right there in the restaurant where Hope stabbed herself to death and four others came within a hair’s breadth of hanging themselves. Jessica wants to orchestrate a cover-up in order to avoid entangling the cops in Kilgrave’s web, but her goofball neighbor Robyn, who unleashed the telepath as part of an extremely dumb plan to get to the bottom of her brother Ruben’s death, isn’t having it. “We tell our truth,” she says, “for Ruben.” Then, referring to Hope, whom Jessica has shrouded under a tablecloth, “For tablecloth girl.” Nothing says “We take this seriously” like a cutesy nickname for a distraught woman who just slit her own throat! I get gallows humor, but this is too much too soon, and it jibes with neither Hope’s death nor Robyn’s horrifying close call.

I reviewed the eleventh episode of Jessica Jones for Decider. It was bad.

About the best thing you can say about Jessica Jones’s tenth episode is that Carrie-Anne Moss and Robin Weigert have a horrifying fight scene. With encouragement from Kilgrave and an accidentally lethal last-second rescue by Pam, Jery and Wendy’s vicious divorce turns violent, with the doctor attempting to make emotional “death by a thousand cuts” the lawyer dealt her all too literal. The assault goes on for an uncomfortably long time, with Wendy counting out every slash of the knife against the body of the woman she once loved more than anything. She winds up dead with a glass table embedded in her skull, staring forward with dead unseeing eyes at the woman it turns out she didn’t see clearly in life either. The superhero genre is powered by the use of violence as metaphor, a spectacularly physical way of speaking the unspeakable, and this is as good as the show has ever gotten in that area. Too bad the rest of “AKA 1,000 Cuts” fails just as spectacularly.

I reviewed the tenth episode of Jessica Jones for Decider. It was bad.