The speed with which Hollywood can shuffle between all these storylines and all these modes—the personal, the artistic, the political—isn’t trivializing any of them, I don’t think. If anything, it’s arguing that these factors are all fundamentally inseparable. The big test of the show, I think, will be whether it argues that success in one sphere equates to success in the others. Does making a politically worthy film make the film good, or make the filmmakers good people? Can great art affect political change, or do we settle for it in lieu of political change? I don’t know how Hollywood will answer these questions, especially with just two episodes to go. But my butt will be in the seat until I find out.

I reviewed episode five of Hollywood for Decider.

I agree with the basic thesis advanced by creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan and their co-writer and director for this episode (“(Screen) Tests”) Janet Mock, I really do. Representation matters. Culture sends messages people receive and act on. Hollywood is not nearly so powerless when it comes to what the public will accept and pay for as they make themselves out to be every time they shy away from roles for women and queer people and people of color, both behind and in front of the camera. They’ve got all the power in the world where that’s concerned.

But the idea that they’re more powerful than the goddamn government in terms of their ability to ameliorate oppression and suffering…well, that’s kind of why we’re in the mess we’re in right now, isn’t it? Generations of liberal politicians downplaying expectations, winning the culture war for the most part but ceding vast swathes of the body politic to the sworn enemies of women, of queer people, of people of color. I want Ace Studios to cast Camille, the right woman for the role, same as Roosevelt does. But I also want the government to pound Jim Crow laws into dust, which government and government alone, motivated by mass action, has the power to do.

I reviewed episode four of Hollywood for Decider.

I’ve never quite seen Hollywood‘s blend of earnest social-justice anachronism and dirty-minded played-for-laughs smuttiness before. I certainly never would have guessed it would go down like peanut butter and chocolate. But here we are, three episodes into a seven-episode run, and I’m enjoying every dick joke and every impassioned speech about standing up for who you really are. Sometimes—like when Henry tells Rock he reminds him of what it was like to truly care about someone, declares that he’ll make Rock the biggest movie star in the world, then makes him have a threesome with Roy Calhoun and Tab Hunter—I’m enjoying them within the same scene. That’s Hollywood, baby!

I reviewed episode three of Hollywood for Decider.

“Sometimes I think folks in this town really don’t understand the power they have. Movies don’t just show us how the world is, they show us how the world can be. And if we change the way that movies are made—you take a chance and you make a different kind of story—I think we can change the world.”

As mission statements go, Hollywood could not make it plainer. Through the voice of Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss), a neophyte director and a half-Filipino man who passes as white, Hollywood co-creators Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan are making their position clear, or at least it seems that way for now. You chip away at the kind of people who make it to the screen here, you chip away at the kind of people who make those decisions there, and before long the world will remake itself in Hollywood’s new image.

I reviewed the second episode of Hollywood for Decider.

Hollywood is not Ryan Murphy‘s first television series about Hollywood. It’s not his first series about fame, or performance, or the desire to remake oneself. From American Crime Story to Nip/Tuck, from Glee to Feud, these topics have been the prolific writer/director/producer’s bread and butter since his own Hollywood career began. But this new Netflix miniseries gives him a chance to flex his dream-factory muscles at the absolute apex of the Hollywood studio system, its true Golden Age, and still involve both his bawdiest and most high-minded storytelling obsessions: sex, identity, performance, what stories get to be told and who gets to tell them. And judging from this pilot episode (“Hooray for Hollywood”), it’s Ryan Murphy done right.

I reviewed every episode of the new Netflix series Hollywood for Decider, starting with my look at the series premiere. This is both the most cornily earnest and gleefully filthy show I’ve seen in a long time. I enjoyed it!

Thandie Newton and Evan Rachel Wood have a sword-and-knife fight. If you take away nothing else from this episode of Westworld (“Passed Pawn”), let it be the sight of these two badass women kicking the living shit out of each other.

It’s the episode’s highlight — even if it’s never quite clear why they don’t work together instead of trying to tear each other apart. (It’s got something to do with Maeve’s alliance with Serac, and Dolores’ control of the key to the robot heaven called the Sublime … but these seem like problems that could be resolved over a cup of coffee rather than a rumble.) Sometimes you just want to see two talented, beautiful actors have a Matrix style knock-down drag-out fight, and on that count, this week’s installment did not disappoint.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone.

Gripping? Yes. Great? Though it’s often talked about in the same breath as the likes of Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, two other shows about family men behaving badly, those comparisons don’t quite fly. Ozark is like those shows, sure. But prestige-TV analogies fail to recognize the difference between this series and the others: This is a Netflix show, designed by creators Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, showrunner Chris Mundy, and producer-director-star Jason Bateman, with Netflix’s binge model in mind. You’re meant to get onboard quickly and stay onboard for the duration. As such, Ozark’s creative decisions make it the Platonic ideal of a Netflix drama. It is its own unique beast.

I wrote about Ozark and the Netflix drama model for Vulture.

Weirdness is where art lives.

I wrote about the season finale of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’

You can’t swing a dead parrot on Netflix without hitting content from comedy’s answer to the Beatles—all four seasons of their Flying Circus series are on there, along with a bunch of documentaries, greatest-hits comps, and the religious satire Life of Brian. But you can’t beat the granddaddy of them all, the midnight-movie masterpiece that put John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam et al in the world of King Arthur and his Knights Who Say “Ni!”—no, wait, his Knights of the Round Table, sorry. The movie’s laconic pace and legendary bits (“Just a flesh wound!”) make for the baked equivalent of comfort food. And don’t forget to stick around until the very end of the closing theme for the best sketch of the bunch!

Celebrate 420 Day with this list of ten perfect stoner movies and shows on Netflix that I wrote for Decider. Comedy, drama, action, horror, musicals, documentaries, you name it!

Add it all up, and what do you get? An episode exciting and jam-packed enough to help us put some of our reservations about the course of the show aside, at least for the time being. Is it still a bit glib with the violence? Yes. Is Serac still a bit too much of a one-note supervillain? Yes. Did a gigantic riot-control robot pulp a bunch of redshirts as part of a war between beautiful murder androids? Yes. Does that last bit trump the rest?

Maybe it does, folks. Maybe it does.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone.

This episode of Better Call Saul focuses on Jimmy’s trauma after witnessing his first murder, an important and necessary thing for the show to do. But because of the skill of actor Rhea Seehorn, the story of the episode can be told almost entirely by a series of looks on her face.

I wrote about the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul Season Five for my Patreon.

Look, sociopathic tech gurus are a dime a dozen, and it’s not a stretch to believe that Serac would orchestrate some extremely shady shenanigans in order to preserve their fortunes, further their visions for society etc. But getting their hands dirty directly by murking someone themselves? That’s a bit harder to swallow — the stuff of comic-book supervillains like Lex Luthor, not real-life oligarchs. It’s like watching a version of The Social Network in which Mark Zuckerberg beats the Winklevoss twins to death with his bare hands.

[…]

It’s worth noting here that all of this might have gone down a bit more smoothly had his story been a gradual reveal from episode to episode. This installment is basically a data dump — literally and figuratively — in which his life story, raison d’être, and mad plans for the future are all delivered in big clunky chunks of exposition. Compare that to the mythic sweep and power of the comparable Akecheta spotlight episode from last season, and the Serac arc comes up short. Think about the leisurely pace with which the show got us up close and personal with Dolores, Maeve, Bernard, the Man in Black — a much better approach, no?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone. It’s the first of the new batch that has left me wondering if there’s insufficient gas in the tank for the show’s latter-day switch to straightforward pulp.

A traditional bottle episode limits the action to one location, usually closed, and a small number of actors, in order to both create a sense of intimacy/isolation/claustrophobia and save money. “Bagman” manages to be an episode that’s mostly about two guys doing things mostly by themselves, but upends the rest of the logic of a bottle episode, smearing blood and piss across the desert landscape. It has a lot in common with its bottle-episode antecedents in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe, like the (overly?) acclaimed Rian Johnson–directed “Bug,” but it does what it’s doing by turning the bottle episode inside-out. That shredded jug of water Mike finds in the car of the final sicario he kills makes for a decent stand-in. You might call this an open-bottle episode.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

“I travel in worlds you can’t even imagine! You can’t conceive of what I’m capable of! I’m so far beyond you! I’m like a god in human clothing! Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips!”

Jimmy McGill is right about all of this in at least two respects I can think of. For one thing, he’s probably right: Howard Hamlin would not believe what Jimmy McGill is capable of—helping a murdering cartel boss walk free, for example. To borrow a phrase from Lloyd Henreid in The Stand, “small-time shit” is the extent of the trouble Howard can likely imagine Jimmy getting into. Little does he know.

I wrote about last week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

It’s Doloreses all the way down.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone.

The Delos corporation has created a monster. Yes, another one.

This particular robotic beast isn’t an eerily accurate android replica of humanity. It’s a towering riot-control robot, one that looks more like Optimus Prime or Robocop‘s ED-209 than Evan Rachel Wood. There are hundreds more just like it, just waiting for a buyer. But the host-pretending-to-be-Delos bigwig Charlotte Hale has other ideas. “I’m sure we can find some use for them,” she deadpans. Consider Chekov’s mantle-placed gun officially locked and loaded, humankind.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone.

And so passes a season of Ozark that largely, if not quite entirely, did away with the previous season’s writing tics—the timed ultimatums, the ultraviolence during the cold opens—and dug us deep into a brand new character, only to yank him away from us by the end, Sopranos-style. It may not be a canonical drama, no matter what the awards shows say, but it’s an entertaining one, and one that isn’t afraid to aim high now and then. At the end of last season I speculated that the show might be on the verge of greatness, and said I’d be thinking about it for a long time. I don’t think either of those predictions quite played out, but the show kept me engaged and never insulted my intelligence in the process. Sometimes, that’s plenty.

I reviewed the season finale of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

There’s a Sopranos episode, maybe you remember it, called “Long Term Parking.” In that episode, [CHARACTER A REDACTED] reveals to [CHARACTER B REDACTED] that they’ve been working with the FBI, in hopes that Character B, too, will want to flip on the mob. The two separate, and then Character A receives a phone call from [CHARACTER C REDACTED] that Character B has attempted suicide, and that [CHARACTER D REDACTED] will come pick Character A up to visit Character B in the hospital. As Characters A and D take that ride together, your brain reels back and forth from relief to dread to relief again, since it seems Character A is in the clear. Only they’re not, not by a long shot. Character D isn’t there to give them a ride—at least not the ride they wanted. Character D is there to drive Character A out into the middle of nowhere and murder them, which Character D does. All these characters who seemed to love Character A are revealed as charlatans, or at the very least as people who put their own safety ahead of every other consideration. If you pose a risk to the family, you will be killed. It’s that simple.

Anyway, the cinematographer for that episode of The Sopranos is Alik Sakharov. Sakharov also directed Ozark Season 3 Episode 9 (“Fire Pink”). Why do I bring that up? Oh, no reason.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

What we have here is a chickens-come-home-to-roost episode. Ozark Season 3 Episode 8 is titled “BFF” for reasons that I must say elude me at the moment; it’s the antepenultimate installment of Ozark‘s third season which sees a lot of long-delayed reckonings, as characters wake up to truths that should probably have been self-evident. And the truth hurts.

I reviewed episode eight of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

The thing I keep returning to while watching this show is how taxing it must be for Marty and Wendy to constantly have to think at maximum brain capacity, all day every day. Like, that casino license business—what must it take to keep stuff like that in line and still find the time and energy required to, I dunno, eat dinner or go to the bathroom or schedule a doctor’s appointment? It must be enormously draining for everyone involved. I think Ozark may be an experiment in seeing how far and how taut a string can be pulled before it finally snaps.

I reviewed episode seven of Ozark Season Three for Decider.