This week’s episode of Clarice finds the show at its most Hannibal-esque, and I mean that in both senses of the word. First, you have some of the show’s most boldly aestheticized shots: a roast duck filmed in disorienting, slow-moving close-ups designed to make it look like something out of The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, the appearance of Clarice Starling’s memories in a glass orb on her therapist’s end table, a slow-motion suicide off a bridge that ends with a scream and an artful blood splatter on the frozen river below. I don’t think Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet’s show is going to be mistaken for Bryan Fuller’s anytime soon, but it’s willing to borrow a few tricks from Hannibal’s bag now and then.One Great StoryThe one story you shouldn’t miss, selected by New York editors

In this episode, Clarice also proves willing to invoke the H-man himself — not by name, since that’s contractually verboten, but at least by reputation. “I am not worried about him,” Clarice tells her therapist when the woman mentions the famous serial killer who had previously taken an interest in the workings of Starling’s mind. When the therapist presses, Clarice insists, “He is not coming after me. For him, hunting me wouldn’t bring relief. It would only articulate his own unspoken self-loathing.” I’m still holding out hope that Clarice gets a season-ending phone call from her old friend — hey, this is Hollywood, miracles happen — but this’ll do for now.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

Is it real or is it fake? Is it a sport or is it an art form? Is the story what goes on inside the ring or what happens behind the scenes? These questions animate any serious discussion of professional wrestling; the key to understanding this American pastime is that the answer is yes, on all counts.

No series has understood this better than Dark Side of the Ring. Billed as the most-watched show in the history of Vice TV, Dark Side digs into the history of professional wrestling for its most controversial and criminal moments, which it portrays with genuine style and considerable compassion. Returning for its third season on May 6, it’s a must for true-crime junkies and wrestling aficionados alike. You don’t need to be a pro-wrestling scholar to find it a gripping, moving watch.

I wrote about Dark Side of the Ring for Vulture in anticipation of last night’s season premiere. I put a lot into this one and I hope you enjoy it.

Here’s the thing about that: Mare of Easttown clearly expects us to take its title character’s side. Yes, even when she’s raiding the department’s evidence locker for packets of heroin she can plant in an ex-junkie’s vehicle in order to ruin said ex-junkie’s life. This isn’t portrayed as a heinous act of corruption and authoritarianism, but as the rash but understandable act of a grandmother acting in her grandson’s best interest. For me? It just left me wondering how many real-world cases of police misconduct get justified by the participants and swept under the rug by their superiors in the way that Mare and the Chief do here. It’s darkly fascinating to see to whom Mare of Easttown is willing to extend the benefit of the doubt, you know?

I reviewed Sunday’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

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I’m please to announce the debut of Cut to Black, a new podcast about how we experience television from me and Gretchen-Felker Martin. Our first episode is on our favorite line of dialogue ever, from Boardwalk Empire‘s Richard Harrow. You can currently find us on Spotify and Anchor; more platforms should be forthcoming shortly, so thank you for your patience. Happy listening!

The titular Mare of Easttown does not have an easy life. Maybe that’s a given, when you consider that she’s seemingly the sole detective in a town with at least one outstanding missing-persons case and a fresh murder of a teenage girl on its docket. But there’s more to it than that. In “Fathers,” Episode 2 of HBO’s murder-mystery Mare of Easttown, we learn that her son Kevin killed himself. We learn that her grandson Drew has begun to display some of the same tics that Kevin did as a child, prior to his downward spiral. We learn that Carrie (Zosia Bacon), Drew’s mother, is filing for full custody despite living in a sober house after an unspecified drug or alcohol addiction. And everywhere Mare turns, she’s forced to confront old friends and acquaintances with whom she’s now at life-and-death odds, whether that’s the mother of the girl she’s failed to find, the father of the girl whose corpse she’s just examined, or the parents of the girl who beat the dead girl up on camera the night of her murder. If I were her, I’d pound Rolling Rocks like they were bottles of Gatorade the very second I got off duty, too.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

It’s an arresting visual, I’ll give it that. A man in a red, white, and blue angel costume descending from the heavens, cradling the dead body of a slain radical in his arms. If it took five-plus hours to get us to that one image, it was probably worth it to Marvel for the gifs and fan art alone.

The episode that surrounds the shots of the angelic new Captain America sprinkled throughout the Season 1 finale of The Falcon And The Winter Soldier, though? Good God, what a mess. Written by series creator Malcolm Spellman and Josef Sawyer, “One World, One People” is a shockingly incoherent product for an experienced purveyor of unobjectionable and slick genre fare like Marvel, right down to borrowing its idealistic-sounding title from the very radical group its heroes spend the episode defeating and killing.

I reviewed the finale of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

I see what Mare of Easttown is going for; with creator Brad Ingelsby’s workmanlike script, it’s impossible not to. Teenage mothers, dead-end jobs, opiate addicts, cancer patients, necessary but unaffordable medical procedures, chronic illness, the constant flow of cheap booze, old high-school glories substituting for any new real-world ones: This, the show argues, and not without reason, is small-town America in the year of our Lord 2021, or at least it would be if we weren’t still in the grips of the pandemic that shuttered the show’s production for a time. For what it’s worth, I don’t detect a ton of condescension in the portrayal. Ingelsby is a native of the area, and although the gap between Hollywood screenwriter and, say, exurban teenage mother is a big one, he does his best to paint everyone in a sympathetic, even noble, light.

Is it possible this is its own form of condescension? Yeah, I suppose it is. There’s something a little Barton Fink-y, a little “theater of and about and for The Common Man,” in Mare‘s portrayal of Easttown and its denizens. You can get as granular and gritty as you want with the talk of deductibles and diapers, but in the end, you’re still air-dropping one of the most famous movie stars in the world into this thing, and having her play a cop to boot. The very idea of a downtrodden but fundamentally good-hearted police officer, at this point in time…I mean, if you find it hard to swallow, I find it hard to blame you.

I’ll be covering Mare of Easttown for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

There’s one episode left in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, and given the way Sam was eyeing the contents of the high-tech Wakandan briefcase Bucky delivered to him, it seems safe to assume the Falcon—whose wings got torn off by Walker, if you’re in the symbolism market—is about to don the stars and stripes himself. I’d guess some sort of reckoning with Sharon is in the offing, as well as a battle with Karli and the Flag-Smashers that will paint them as well-intentioned but dangerously misguided and militant the way the whole rest of the season has done. Walker, by the way, is still walking around free, lying to the parents of his slain friend Lamar that he’s already killed their son’s killer. He’s got a grudge against Karli and a potential backer in the Contessa, and if we know anything about this show, it’s that people can show up anywhere at a moment’s notice, so I wouldn’t count him out of the final battle just yet either.

All told, it’s a whole lot of work just to get Sam to the place where the movies left him. I get that the show is supposed to be a meditation on the idea of Captain America in light of the fictional peril of criminal superhumans (whether in the form of Karli or the pre-cure Winter Soldier) on the one hand and the real-life issue of anti-Black racism on the other. But a show like this was always going to answer these questions simply by pointing at the heroes and declaring theirs the correct path. The game isn’t worth the candle. Oh hey, look over there, it’s Elaine from Seinfeld!

I reviewed today’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

What Them does believe in is evil, manifested in white supremacist racism. The supernatural element merely recreates, as a parable, the evil that men do. You might be able to walk away from that alive, but you can’t walk away from it unscathed, or unchanged. The same can be said of the show itself. Them marks the arrival of a major new talent in showrunner Little Marvin and a staggering achievement in television horror. It’s vital as it is violent. It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

I reviewed the season finale of Them for Decider.

Directed in stark black and white by Craig William Macneill (Channel Zero) from a script by Dominic Orlando, “Covenant II” is reminiscent at turns of The Witch, The Lighthouse, Hereditary, There Will Be Blood, episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return. Like its predecessor “Covenant I,” is one of the most brutal things I’ve ever watched in a lifetime of watching horror. It, like Them, is a masterpiece.

I reviewed episode nine of Them for Decider. Please note that Amazon swapped the running order episodes eight and nine after screeners were sent out, so you may notice artifacts of the previous running order.

Clocking in at just over half an hour, not counting the closing credits, this is a short, throat-clearing episode, a squall-before-the-storm. The details are, as always, impeccable: George’s casually sexist insistence that his prisoner Betty wear more pink; the masks on Marty’s shirt and the Iron Cross on the car he tries and fails to fix in his garage; the brooch on the doctor’s lapel that matches the one worn by Helen the real estate agent and, I think, the flowers plucked by Livia to put in that awful bloody pillowcase; the parallel fucking chicken dinners consumed by George and Betty on one hand and Marty and Earl on the other. And maybe it’s foolish to have hope when watching a show like this, but that excruciating basement scene did end with Ruby retrieving that axe from the corner of the basement. It’s going to get buried in someone before this all ends—if it ends for the Emorys at all.

I reviewed episode eight of Them for Decider. Please note that the running order of episodes eight and nine was switched by Amazon after screeners were sent out, so you may notice some weird artifacts of the previous running order.

In dedicating his book The Stand to his wife Tabitha, Stephen King referred to it as “this dark chest of wonders.” “Wonders,” in this case, is a euphemism: The Stand is a catalog of horrors from its first page to its last. Episode seven of Little Marvin’s masterful Them (“Day 7: Night”) can be seen in a similar light. Each storyline, each scene, feels like retrieving some fresh nightmare from the recesses of a box long forgotten in an attic, or a basement. When, in the end, an actual box is revealed to contain something truly horrific, it feels both surprising and inevitable.

I reviewed episode seven of Them for Decider.

Livia achieves a momentary catharsis—and I do mean momentary, the payoff lasts about 15 seconds before cutting off abruptly—when, after returning home with Gracie, she gets sick of Betty’s racist taunts and slaps her across the face. James Brown’s “The Big Payback” plays for a few seconds, ceasing suddenly when Livia and Gracie go inside their house. Betty, too, goes back inside, and promptly destroys nearly everything she can get her hands on—including the wallpaper (this show practically doubles as a wallpaper gallery), behind which is the black mold she metaphorically warned about in her speech at the Home Owners Association meeting. She finally calms down enough to call her milkman, asking him to do her the favor he promised after mentioning to her that he did the things in Korea that most men could not.

Betty warned Livia a while back that things were only going to get worse for her. I’m worried she’s right.

I reviewed episode six of Them for Decider.

It’s rare to think “I will never forget watching this episode of television,” rarer still to mean it. Even within the sphere of horror, a genre dedicated in part to searing imagery into your brain, the truly unforgettable is thin on the ground.

Not this time, though. Not this time.

I reviewed episode five of Them for Decider.

Finally, the Emorys return home. With the kids in bed, Livia and Henry begin to make love. Neither of them sees the voyeur in the corner: the Black Hat Man (Christopher Heyerdahl). It’s a scare, yes. But at the end of this long day, in which so many attempts to escape have gone sour, it’s hard not to see this figure as a sign that this form of escape won’t save the Emorys either. As Major Garland Briggs, a character from another great horror television series, Twin Peaks, once said, the most frightening thing is the possibility that love is not enough.

I reviewed episode four of Them for Decider.

“The woman was holding her baby.” “A man came to the house.” Those are my notes on Them Episode 3 (“Day 4”), which revolves around the nightmare from which Livia Emory awakes on the morning of her family’s fourth day in their new home, a nightmare about her baby Chester and…whatever happened to him in North Carolina. Simple statements, conveyed with simple shots, all the more menacing for their simplicity. Whatever did happen on “that day,” as her husband Henry refers to it—and from the show’s first scene there’s been a dreadful, growing certainty that we’ll be forced to bear witness to it at some point—there’s no distance far enough to move from it, not even all the way across the country. It’s always there.

I reviewed episode three of Them for Decider.

This is the story being told by Them. This is what creator/co-writer Little Marvin, co-writer David Matthews, director Nelson Cragg (previously the cinematographer for Ryan Murphy’s masterpiece American Crime Story), director of photography Xavier Grobet, and editor David Kashevaroff (not to mention executive producer Lena Waithe) convey with every tool at their disposal—the relentlessly downbeat script, the breathtaking use of every camera trick in the book from Dutch tilts to split screens to Vertigo shots, the disorienting staccato editing, and the uniformly thoughtful and precise performances of both the Emory family and their enemies up the block, led by the increasingly unhinged Betty. Them is a ghost story, yes, and the specter of Miss Vera and the blood pouring from the poor dog’s grave at the end of the episode promise more in store along those lines. But in terms of where the atmosphere of terror and dread this show maintains actually come from, it is about being sane in an insane land, never knowing whether, say, the kindly old white man at the hardware store is going to reveal himself to be an inveterate racist (he doesn’t, though in Livia’s mind he encourages her to buy an axe off the wall display just in case she has further trouble with the neighbors), or whether the teacher at your school will punish you when your classmates make monkey noises at you because you answered a question. It’s about putting your best foot forward in a world intent on cutting you off at the knees. It’s about choking down that goddamn pie, choking down every last bite.

I reviewed the second episode of Them for Decider.

Them is about the real-life horror of racial covenants, which excluded Black families from home ownership in certain neighborhoods and towns. Harold chose to move to Compton despite its covenant past because covenants are, at this point, illegal. But there are other ways to enforce the racial hierarchy, as Betty and company realize very quickly. In essence, Livia and Henry are inverting the fundamental, foundational myth of America—the myth of the pioneer, moving into a land that doesn’t welcome them—only it’s the white people who are the true savages. One need look no further than the 1/6 insurrection or the new Jim Crow voting laws in Georgia or the anti-trans bill in Arkansas or the union-busting zeal of the well-to-do spokespeople of Amazon, the company airing this show, to see the truth in this.

But cinematically, Them is about more than that. It’s about the way the light looks on a sunny California afternoon, and the way the night looks in the well-lit home of a family that loves each other’s company. It’s about framing Livia and Henry up against the edge of the screen as they talk to each other, conveying their intensity and intimacy. (There’s a closeup on the two of them after kissing that’s just achingly, ferociously romantic.) It’s about the kind of staccato editing that represents Livia’s terrible memories, and the brutality of her current predicament. It’s about sparing the audience a bunch of getting-to-know-you bullshit and moving right to the stuff that’s frightening and unpleasant and vital. It’s about how sometimes the pain and fear we face is so overwhelming that the vocabulary of the quotidian fails us, and we must reach for the supernatural for recourse. It’s beautifully shot. It’s thoughtfully edited. It’s mercilessly written. It’s the best new show I’ve seen this year.

I’ll be covering Them‘s entire first season for Decider over the next few days, starting with my review of the series premiere.

The most powerful tool in Clarice’s arsenal is right there in the title. At this midway point in the show’s debut season, Rebecca Breeds’s lead performance is holding up remarkably well. Never once when I’m watching her do I think, Oh, that’s a Jodie Foster impersonation; I think, Oh, that’s Clarice Starling, and move on. There was never any guarantee that this process would take place, but Breeds brings the right combination of fragility and steel to the role, and her accent is impeccable (especially when you consider her Australian background). With so much riding on this central role, the show would have collapsed almost instantaneously had Breeds not brought so much to the table. She makes it seem seamless, and that’s no small feat.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Decider.