Yellowjackets has always thrived when it tears out its own heart of darkness and holds it beating in front of the audience’s face. This is what’s always made the material about the teenage soccer team stranded and starving and going insane in the woods more compelling than the material about the messed-up middle-aged women having zany murder hijinks played largely for laughs. The strength of the adult cast, cleverly (though not entirely, which has always been weird to me) made up of former teen actors Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis (RIP Natalie, we miss you girl, they really should have dyed your hair blonde so you’d look more like Sophie Thatcher), Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Elijah Wood, disguises the lopsided nature of the drama somewhat, but only somewhat. As fun as, say, Ricci’s performance as adult Misty, the world’s perkiest sociopath, can be, I’d much rather watch her teenage self react with shock and grief to her first kill than her adult self react with quirky neurotic cheer to her third or fourth. 

I’m making my debut at Pop Heist, a new non-corporate worker-owned pop-culture publication!, with my review of the Yellowjackets season premiere. (Gift link!)

Tramell Tillman’s work as Milchick is really extraordinary, isn’t it? To be blunt, this kind of self-consciously quirky character would normally make my skin crawl with cringe, but Tillman makes his every throwback styling choice, every unnecessarily stiff and formal sentence, every bit of tendentious bullshit, every deeply weird thing he does (including authoring the entire “kindness reform” for the severed floor) feels like the product of a three-dimensional (if cartoonishly deranged) person’s mind. Contrast this with Patricia Arquette as Cobelvig, a collection of Disney-villain quirks that never congeals into anything solid. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Using a populist ignoramus who inherited everything from his daddy as a catspaw, the richest person alive takes over the federal government. Paradise is the show that dares to wonder what would happen if this far-out, science-fictional, dystopian scenario were ever to come to pass. Fortunately, It Can’t Happen Here, right?

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

Over on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour Patreon, we like to stretch our muscles a bit to stuff less directly relevant to ASOIAF/GOT/HOTD/fantasy/SF/the sweep of history. If you’re a subscriber, listen to our new episode on Mike Flanagan’s Netflix horror miniseries Midnight Mass. I think it’s one of our best.

She doesn’t get caught because she gets overheard plotting with the Board. She doesn’t get caught because she accidentally lets slip that she knows something she couldn’t possibly know. She doesn’t even get caught because she invented a “night gardener” as a shoddy alibi regarding her time on the outside, or because Irving B. has a weird prophetic dream when he sleeps rough in sub-freezing temperatures. 

No, it’s simply being a little bit too mean that gives this impostor away. “What you said to me last night, it was cruel,” Irving B. tells her, his suspicions confirmed by this behavior. “Helly was never cruel.” Indeed, the way “Helly” deflects Irving B.’s accusations by bringing up his heartache over his loss of his office romance Burt G. stands out like a sore thumb in the moment, even before you think through what it says about who she really is. It’s the kind of emotional manipulation we saw Milchick use to get Mark to come back to work just a couple episodes ago — straight out of the Lumon handbook, perhaps even literally.

Shows that try their hand at mystery-box storytelling would do well to follow the example set by Severance in “Woe’s Hollow” (Season 2 Episode 4). It’s much more compelling to let the nuances of performance and writing reveal a character’s layers over time, the way they do in a regular drama, than to constantly pull rabbits out of hats like a stage magician. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Acting is the engine that drives Paradise. Not the plot, which you’ve seen before on better shows (watch Silo! watch Fallout!); not the dialogue, which is a wildly mixed bag of astute and cartoonish. Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, James Marsden: These are the load-bearing components of what creator Dan Fogelman has built down in that bunker.

To that number we can safely add Jon Beavers, who plays — or played — Agent Billy Pace, the character who gave this episode its title. Via a series of flashbacks, we learn how he became the man he is — or was — today, and it’s a very different man than what we’ve seen from him so far. But Beavers is so endearing in the role and so deft with his bantering dialogue that he almost singlehandedly makes the contradiction make sense.

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

Well, that was fast! It was probably inevitable that Severance would, at some point, un-sever Mark and Mark S., the outie/innie pair at the center of the series. But if it went anything like everything else on this show goes, the process would take several painstaking steps over several hour-long episodes, during which time any number of other pathways would open up and get walked down before we made our way to our appointed destination.

Instead, Mark learns he can be reintegrated, agrees to do it, then gets it done in a grand total of two back-to-back scenes at the very end of this episode. Zero to 100, just like that, in defiance of the way this show has told its story since its inception. It’s a surprise that works on more than just an entertainment level, too: If your show is about the tyranny of routine, it’s a good idea to break from routine now and then.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

It may be an espionage thriller, but no one’s gonna mistake Paradise for Michael Clayton or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy anytime soon. Information about the assassination of President Cal Bradford and the compromising positions of virtually everyone involved in the case isn’t unearthed or deduced — it’s delivered in great gobs of personal exposition, the confessor standing face to face with the interrogator. The casework seems to amount to a series authority figures asking people “Did you do it?” and backing down when the person says “No.” I’ve seen more compelling detective work in episodes of DuckTales. 

Okay, so creating a thrilling murder mystery is not Paradise’s strong suit. What it relies on instead is using the strength of its cast to turbo-charge its tearjerking tales of their pasts. Even when the material is kind of underbaked, simply involving Sterling K. Brown means you’ll get something edible.

I reviewed episode three of Paradise for Decider.

I single out these two moments for a reason: Man oh man do they make creator/co-writer Dan Fogelman’s strengths crystal clear. Working with co-writer Katie French, he just sort of casually tosses off two enormously endearing moments, from two very different spheres of human interaction. The flirtation is fun and genuinely sexy. The family bonding is warm and sincere. None of it feels particularly like something from a television show — or if it does, it feels like it’s from a good television show. You know, the kind of television show that doesn’t immediately give young Dylan a terminal illness to wring out extra sympathy points for his mother, who in the present day is a calculating man-behind-the-throne figure straight out of billionaire reality. 

But Paradise is that kind of show, too! Paradise is the kind of show that has the son beg Julianne Nicholson to tell him if he’s going to Heaven and what it will be like — it’s going to have more horsey rides! — over a breathy cover version of, I swear to god, “We Built This City” by Starship. This is a level of tasteless, mawkish sentimentality that feels like it comes from a whole different universe than that bit about her lying in hopes of picking that dude up. It’s so much broader, too, than everything this beautifully observed moment outside the supermarket on the horse with the ice cream had been right up until that point. 

From a strictly mercenary perspective, I get it: People like having their heartstrings tugged. But the show had already proven it could do so without resorting to crass, poorly soundtracked emotional manipulation. Why settle for a single when you’re a home-run hitter?

I reviewed episode two of Paradise for Decider.

Even after just one episode (out of three debuting simultaneously), the strengths of Paradise are obvious — and they have nothing to do with the twist, or even with the simple murder mystery. If anyone’s gonna care about any of that at all, they owe it to Fogelman’s knack for writing engaging, real-feeling friendly banter, and the casting of the deeply charming (and good-looking, which doesn’t hurt) actors Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden to deliver much of it. Whether Xavier is allowing his kids to gently bust his chops, or whether he’s doing the same thing to his buddy Billy, or whether he’s navigating his complicated relationship with President Bradford, the conversations are lively and hard to predict from one beat to the next. It’s a gift to write that kind of scene, and I feel I can assume without looking that this is what drove This Is Us at least as much as the twists and turns.

I also assume we’ll get a whole lot more of those in the episodes to come. When you drop “oh by the way, this is science fiction” on the audience at the end of your pilot, it’s hard to imagine there are no further tricks up your sleeve. That’s putting aside the fact that Fogelman made his bones off creating an engaging sense of mystery and surprise for his viewers. The subject matter feels weird in the present moment, that’s for certain — for one thing, it presupposes the continued existence of the federal government, which seems like an open question at this point. Many of the creative choices — the pedestrian teal-and-apricot color grading, a breathy ominous cover version of a pop hit to close the episode out — fall flat the same way they do when pretty much any show tries them. (Remember True Detective Season 4?) But “What will they do next?” is a decent hook, especially with actors like Brown, Marsden, and Nicholson dangling from it. Sure, I’ll bite.

I’m covering Paradise, the new show from the creator of This Is Us and Only Murders in the Building, for Decider

But the main benefit of an episode like this is to take us out of the, for lack of a better word, zany world of the severed floor. Down there, Mark S., Dylan G., and Irving B. are basically empty shells, or maybe characters in a one-panel gag cartoon about office life. (Helly R., who never buys into the bullshit for a second, is considerably more vibrant.) Up top, however, Mark is a real guy, a guy who hangs out with his sister a lot and gets real angry about his wife’s death. Irving seems to share his innie’s vocal pattern, but his military background, music taste, obsessive painting of a secret location in the basement, and potential link to anti-Lumon activities mark him as a very different guy from his lovesick but largely comical counterpart. I wish we weren’t being kept in the dark about Dylan and Helena’s lives at home, but at least there’s some dark to explore. I’m interested in these people, not the meticulously constructed world around them.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear. Since it began, Severance has relied on obfuscation as a load-bearing element of its storytelling. Created by Dan Erickson, the show is many things at once — a dystopian thriller, a sci-fi satire, a workplace dramedy, a black comedy about cults, an anticapitalist broadside, an on-again off-again meditation on what we owe the people we love. But it’s stuffed all of those things into a Lost-indebted mystery box, and every time one of its mysteries is solved, you get another three or four mysteries as a perk, or a penalty.

I’m covering the widely beloved show Severance for Decider, starting with my review of the Season 2 premiere.

Brutalist architecture is misleadingly named. When people think of the stark, colossal buildings that are the hallmark of the style, they think brutal as in overpowering. In fact the term comes from the french word brut, meaning “raw,” referring to the style’s tendency to display rather than mask its raw materials, its concrete and steel.

Brutalism is often associated with such massive construction projects as low-income housing or government buildings, and for good reason: It’s a postwar style that emerged from the social-democrat consensus following the conflict, and was embraced by left/liberal governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Only when the tail end of the Cold War and its conservative ascendency shook that consensus did these buildings take on the vaguely sinister air with which they are often associated to this day. 

The reason for that is simple, as anyone who’s ever seen a crumbling castle or haunted house can tell you. When a system dies, the buildings constructed by that system for the greater good become symbolic instead of the system’s collapse. City halls become sites of faceless bureaucracy. Monuments become gravestones. Shelters become tombs. 

[…]

The Silo — the Silos, plural — are brutalist in their construction: the concrete is unadorned and enormous in scale. They’re brutalist in their purpose: They were built to safeguard 10,000 souls apiece, recreating society in miniature. 

But they’re also “brutalist” in the misnomer sense: They are the site of authoritarian oppression. If indeed they ever really were built to safeguard anything, all they really exist for now, as Lukas and Bernard and Juliette and Jimmy all learn, is to seal off the lives of those within forever, lethally if need be. 

The Silos are the brutalist paradox transmuted into sci-fi plot form. Are these massive structures the only hope for humanity? Or are they indeed better thought of as haunted places, places of deceit and domination, because whatever world they once existed to protect is long dead? 

[…]

Silo asks a provocative and timely question, one reflected in the controversy of the architectural style upon which it’s based: Are structures of protection really structures of oppression? And when the time comes, will we be able to tell the difference?

I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider.

From the start, Skeleton Crew has run like an R2 unit whose motivator is a bit on the wonky side: In large part, it still works just fine. Its theme-park-ride sense of forward motion and energy alone makes it the most entertaining — okay, make that the only watchable — new Disney Star Wars show since Andor. That’s before you get to its deployment of oodles of fun creatures and droids and space pirates, the kind of good clean fun you want in a Star Wars show for kids. The key ingredient is the lead performance of Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood; his transformation from bad guy with a heart of gold to a real rat bastard is the kind of genuine, character-based surprise that a shocking twist or secret identity can only hope to deliver. 

But there were always signs that the machine wasn’t running as smoothly as it could be. The premise and the show’s initial suburban setting amount to crass Gooniesploitation. The core kids started out as stock characters reciting dialogue straight out of kids’ adventure movies; Wim, the worst offender, never grew out of it. Key action sequences felt thrown together. Most tragically, Kelly MacDonald, who by rights should be the co-lead in a whole Star Wars show of her and Jude Law’s own, gets like two minutes of screen time. 

Like the pirate frigate that makes a fiery but stately descent into the surface of At Attin after being blown out of the sky by X-wings, this is the episode where it feels like the whole thing just kinda stalls out and comes in for a crash landing. It’s the kind of finale that feels like it wasn’t so much written as translated from a series of shoulder shrugs in the writers’ room. After all of this adventuring, the good guys flip the special good guy switch after sending the good guy signal, and the good guys win. 

I reviewed the season finale of Skeleton Crew for Decider.

As I write this review, wildfires brought on by climate change are ravaging Los Angeles. The climate change denier whom a plurality of voters selected to be their president, and who as best I can tell is completely insane, is threatening to bring back American expansionism by conquering Canada and Mexico and Greenland as his conservative Christian backers cheer him on. In this final episode of American Primeval, a fanatical Brigham Young rants about his God purifying the world from wickedness as his Mormons, fresh off a genocidal attack on the Shoshone, solidify their claim on Utah by burning Fort Bridger to the ground. You hear Young’s words over the flames. It feels familiar, is what I’m saying. People will always use fires they themselves started as a smokescreen for their murderous ambition, I guess. 

I reviewed the finale of American Primeval for Decider.

It’s preposterous how good Shea Whigham is at delivering dialogue. Boardwalk Empire, Perry Mason, American Primeval — whatever the assignment, he makes every line sound like he’d never heard a word of it before thinking it up right then and there. When Whigham’s Jim Bridger verbally spars with Kim Coates’s appropriately bloviating Brigham Young, he makes the great evangelist sound like a high school freshman at his first debate club event. Sure, Bridger has likely just brought the murderous wrath of the Mormon nation down on his head with his backtalk and intransigence — not to mention his heavily armed squad of employees, mountain men, and Native Americans with nothing left to lose. But Young attacking Bridger now after failing to verbally fluster the grizzled frontiersman in the slightest is a bit like Drake suing after Kendrick Lamar beat the brakes off him in their beef. Even if he wins, he’s a sore loser. 

I reviewed episode five of American Primeval for Decider.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I’m thinking about this line from 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke a lot while watching Silo these days.

I reviewed this week’s Silo for Decider.

One of my favorite film microgenres is the Ordeal. In Ordeal movies, characters embark on a perilous journey across some wild territory, and endure a grueling struggle for survival along the way, marked with repeated instances of terror and pain. Think Deliverance, Sorcerer, The Descent, Gravity, and most relevantly The Revenant, written by American Primeval creator Mark L. Smith. Go ahead and throw Martin Scorsese’s After Hours in there if you’re feeling generous, and Homer’s The Odyssey if you want to be complete about it. These narratives are compelling because of how they join the viewer and the protagonist at the hip: You’re not going anywhere until this guy or girl gets out alive, or dies trying. The only way out is through.

American Primeval is an attempt to create an Ordeal TV Show, which in this age of spiffy limited series is now a possibility. There are pros and cons to this approach. In the former column is the obvious point that on  television show, your Ordeal can last a whole lot longer. You can drag out that primal struggle, allowing for more moments of bloody horror and stark beauty. And to fill up that extra real estate, you can create multiple protagonists, each on a different path, each undergoing an Ordeal of their own, each with their own appeal.

[…]

But on the big screen, the Ordeal is a uniquely focused form of storytelling. The pleasure of the Ordeal is its ability to burrow deep into the mindset of its main character as they’re put through their paces over the course of an entire film. By the end, ideally, you feel what she feels in your gut. That’s just not going to be the case when you’re bouncing around between stories and characters on a regular basis, episode after episode. It can even start to feel a bit, well, episodic: This happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and then this happens, and the next thing you know a grizzled mountain man is snapping a screaming child’s splintered bone back into place and it’s cut to black, roll credits.

I reviewed episode four of American Primeval for Decider.

American Primeval is taking an open-world video game approach to its brand of revisionist Western. As our characters wander around, they encounter all kinds: friendly Mormons and murderous ones, friendly indigenous people and murderous ones, friendly settlers and murderous ones. You just never quite know which one is which when you stumble into them, until the shooting starts. 

This approach can be a little, well, video-gamey. As a horror guy, I was certainly tickled when a blind cackling hillbilly witch showed up to lure our heroes into Consanguinity Corner, but you can only take a show that otherwise self-evidently prides itself on gritty realism when Leatherface and Grandpa from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre show up. 

Yet at the end of the episode, Captain Dellinger writes a lovely and heartfelt letter or journal entry in which he laments the way he feels he’s losing his essential character in the ceaselessly violent world he’s entered. “Hatred” and “brutality” are everywhere, driving out “compassion and basic tenderness.” 

“I am overcome at this time by a deep pain from a tremendous and always present lack of love,” he writes. “So few in these lands know of grace. There is only brutality here.” He’s painting things with an awfully broad brush, as the concurrent shots of Abish being treated with care and kindness by the Shoshone women demonstrate. But he’s not wrong overall. American Primeval may have a kind of shopworn way of showing it, but it really is exhausting to think about how many people in this land of ours like it better when they know others are suffering.  

I reviewed episode three of American Primeval for Decider.

Director Peter Berg has a knack for depicting the inherent sternness of all this. The determined faces of actors Betty Gilpin and Taylor Kitsch and Saura Lightfoot Leon as Sara and Isaac and Abish. The leaders of the Church of Latter-Day Saints, gathered around a campfire, silhouetted agains the big sky. Our four heroes captured with a low angle that makes them look like the Fellowship of the Ring. Rolling vistas and billowing mists. Forests and scrubland. Hard people in a hard land. It’s solid stuff.

What it isn’t is unique, special, or even particularly provocative beyond the in-your-face violence. If that sounds harsh, I don’t mean it to be — it’s just the way it is. American Primeval is a bloody modern Western, and that’s about the extent of it. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. But unlike Brigham Young, this show isn’t making any converts just yet.

I reviewed episode two of American Primeval for Decider.