They call this episode of Daredevil “Aftermath” for a reason. As seemingly mandated by the by-now anachronistic 13-episode model all the main Marvel/Netflix series —the few that remain standing, anyway— follow, the seventh installment of the show’s third season is at least fifty percent conversations between characters about things that happened in the sixth installment of the show’s third season. At least Wilson Fisk gets to watch it on the news all at once instead of spreading it out over the course of 45 minutes of streaming television.

I reviewed the mixed-bag over-the-hump episode of Daredevil S3 for Decider. This series too is no longer standing.

If I had to select a “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” knockoff declarative lede for a glossy magazine-style profile of Julia Wells, the wealthily careworn protagonist of The Romanoffs’ latest episode, “Expectation,” it might be this: Julia Wells can’t settle down.

Played by Amanda Peet — who seems to somehow become fuller and realer in the role as time passes — Julia spends most of the hour, during which she is almost continuously on-screen, moving from one place to another, and always with another, further destination in mind. She takes a couple of subway rides, catches a couple of cabs, mills around in a couple of famous New York retail establishments, gets dressed for two separate meals out at two different restaurants. Her big errand for the day involves picking people up at the airport and dropping them off at their hotel. Her workout of choice is moving in place on the elliptical machine, and her post-workout visit to the gym locker room just entails her walking through it, navigating other women’s bodies. Even her job entails helping the homeless and the transient. And if she pauses for more than a minute, her mind does the wandering for her, flashing back to events from decades ago, years ago, hours ago, minutes ago; she daydreams about resolution and absolution that are not forthcoming. Wherever she goes, there she isn’t.

I reviewed the Amanda Peet episode of The Romanoffs for Vulture.

Does Dex’s devolvement into a grinning mass murderer in someone else’s superhero outfit scan, as far as psychological motivation goes? Well, no and, uh, no. A hard “no” in the sense that, as witnessed last episode, his backstory and history of mental illness is kind of sketched-in and scattershot and hard to swallow. You can’t methodically pick apart a character who was never a cohesive whole to begin with, no matter how hard Daredevil showrunner Erik Oleson, writer Dylan Gallagher, director Stephen Surjik, and actors Vincent D’Onofrio and Wilson (!) Bethel work to prove otherwise.

But also a soft “no,” in the sense that no human being in the history of human beings has everdevolved into a grinning mass murderer in someone else’s superhero outfit, because there are no superheroes. There are also no supervillains whose unerring aim and throwing capacity enable him to turn any household object into a lethal weapon, whether they’re dressed up as Daredevil or have their own snazzy black-and-white costume to do their killings in.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this season, Daredevil decided it needed Bullseye, so Daredevil created Bullseye. It could have gone the route of both the comics and the original Ben Affleck/Colin Farrell movie version and had the Kingpin hire an out-of-town hitter with a badass reputation, but it tried to grow one organically from within, tying his origin directly to both the protagonist and the antagonist of the show. Is there any way to do that in a wholly realistic manner? Not when your show is Blind Radar Ninja, Attorney-at-Law there isn’t.

So, y’know, have a little fun with it! Do some creepy voices and camerawork, put some baggy eyes and flopsweat on your handsome new actor, give your main heavy a chance to play master manipulator and guide a new killer to follow in his footsteps a la Hannibal Lecter. Kinda churlish to complain that the end result isn’t in the DSM, no?

I reviewed episode six of Daredevil S3 for Decider.

Dex’s brain is revealed to be a cocktail of conditions that sound spooky to the layperson: borderline personality disorder, psychotic tendencies, obsessive-compulsive disorder. He killed his beloved baseball coach for yanking him from a perfect game as an orphaned kid, and was laboring under the delusion that said perfect game would bring his parents back somehow while he did it. (I’m gonna guess he killed his parents, too, because why not.) The only person he’s ever really cared about since then was his therapist, who he threatened to kill when she was dying of cancer because he was so angry at her for leaving him. He worked at a suicide-prevention hotline, just like real-life serial killer Ted Bundy, and would occasionally steer suicidal callers into thoughts of homicide instead, or at least daydream about doing so. He’s a stalker, as we learned in the previous episode, but what we learn here is that the woman he’s stalking — a former colleague from the hotline, where he no longer works — is someone he barely knows. When she gets a job at the hotel where Dex is guarding Fisk (clearly his handiwork), she recognizes him from the hotline and asks him to meet her for dinner after their shifts; within about two minutes he’s letting slip all kinds of personal details about her he could only know if he stalked her, and he physically tries to stop her from leaving before she shouts loud enough to draw the attention of other diners and force him to let her go.

You can add all this to the fact that he uses unnecessary lethal force on the job — a job he has because none of this was picked up during the FBI’s background checks for some reason. He served in the military first, and that I can buy since the Forever War we’ve been fighting since 2001 has seen the standards for enlisting get lowered considerably, but the Bureau’s stringent requirements for its agents are already a plot point on the show, in the form of Agent Nadeem getting passed over for promotion because he’s too deep in debt and thus a recruitment target for enemy agents. I’d love to hear how a fairly obvious basketcase like Dex sailed through.

But then, there’s a lot going on this season that, shall we say, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. (Blind ninja lawyer aside, I mean.) Fisk has used phones and computers while under house arrest. He was only convicted of RICO violations when he staged a gigantic lethal firefight against the police on a major metropolitan bridge. Despite having enough hitmen after him to level an entire FBI motorcade, he’s placed inside an operational hotel that’s open to the public for safekeeping. The Feds bust down Matt Murdock’s door on the basis of Fisk’s word and a single paycheck they found from when Murdock & Nelson accidentally represented someone on Fisk’s payroll, but the security-camera footage of him blind-ninja’ing his way through a prison riot apparently slipped their notice, even though they know he was there and that he used Foggy’s name to get in and that he saw a low-level Albanian soldier while visiting.

Well, whatever. You don’t come to Blind Ninja Lawyer for a tightly written procedural.

I reviewed the wonky black-and-white Bullseye origin flashback episode of Daredevil for Decider.

You knew the time would come. Ever since Daredevil established the template in its first season, Netflix’s Marvel shows, good bad and indifferent, have staged elaborate single-take fight scenes in which their protagonists battle their way through hordes of assailants in cramped indoor spaces, typically hallways. (Stairways, warehouses, storage facilities, and hospital wards will do in a pinch.) I’m no statistician, but with a fight that spans one single unbroken shot that lasts for over ten and a half minutes, “Blindsided,” Daredevil Season 3 Episode 4, may have just taken the crown.

HALLWAY FIGHT! HALLWAY FIGHT! I reviewed, y’know, the big hallway-fight episode of Daredevil Season 3 for Decider.

There’s a bit in Daredevil Season 3 Episode 3 (“No Good Deed”) where the FBI agents assigned to guard Wilson Fisk after he’s been relocated from a prison to a stripped-down penthouse suite in a Manhattan hotel where they get McDonald’s to eat, since the hotel room service is out of the Justice Department’s price range. I don’t eat McDonald’s anymore because I’m a vegetarian, but I know my way around meatless fast food options, that’s for sure, so I can relate. It’s not just that it’s relatively cheap — it’s that it’s reliable. Once you’ve found an item or a meal you enjoy, you can order it basically any time you want to enjoy eating, and guess what? You’ll enjoy eating.

Daredevil works the same way. Despite all the people getting punched in the head until they lose consciousness, it’s comfort viewing. You know what you’re getting, and if you like it, you’ll like it. Reader, I like it.

I reviewed the third episode of Daredevil’s third season for Decider.

I’d imagine this episode will test the patience of anyone who isn’t as sold on the rhythms of this cast and this concept as I am. I know how they feel: Every time characters on Luke Cage are filmed walking half a block just to talk to someone and then leave, every time Jessica Jones had a scene of its dully sardonic protagonist making quips and shooting daggers at someone while wearing the same pair of jeans, every time one of these series stalls out seven or eight episodes into a season because they basically dispatched the most interesting villain and have to figure out how to drag it out for another school day’s worth of screentime, I rue the day superheroes went from nerd culture to monoculture too.

But the thing is I am sold on the rhythms of this cast and this concept. I love looking at the faces of Charlie Cox and Deborah Ann Woll as Matt and Karen, love their soft beauty, love their warm voices. I love how Elden Henson quickly grew into the roll of their friend Foggy, who turned from an obnoxious comic-relief character into a bonafide character with an engaging way of moving through their weird world while still seeming basically normal.

I reviewed episode two of Daredevil Season Three for Decider.

That simple pleasures are, in fact, simple makes them no less pleasurable. On the contrary! Drinking the last beer in the fridge at the end of a hard day, listening to the first ten or so Beatles singles, playing Rainbow Road in Mario Kart Wii for the 500th beautiful lunatic time — there is great satisfaction in the straightforward, great fun in the familiar. And as television, Daredevil is exactly that: satisfyingly straightforward, familiarly fun. Returning for its third season (third and a half, if you count the characters’ involvement in the Defenders crossover miniseries), it is simple, and it is pleasurable.

I covered Daredevil for Decider again this season, starting with my review of the premiere. 

Horror is a genre in conversation with itself — more so, perhaps, than any other genre, because the topic of conversation is always ultimately the same. Horror filmmakers study the things that frighten them, then reimagine, refine, and revise them, the better to unleash their own specific fears upon new audiences. This is as true of capital “G,” capital “F” Great Films like Under the Skin and Hereditary as it is of derivative corn like Stranger Things, or of recent critical darling Mandy, which after the weed-scented glacial pacing and lush psychedelia of its first half has nary an original idea in its head and is basically just Stranger Things for heshers. The stuff that’s truly worthwhile does more than merely remix the past, because the people making it filter those fears through their own unique ideas about the present.

Among many other things, “The House of Special Purpose” is a horror film, and it is not Matthew Weiner’s first. As the creator and showrunner of Mad Men he presided over several eerie and gut-wrenching hours of television, primarily during the show’s death-haunted fifth season. The fever-dream murder (guest-starring Twin Peaks’s Mädchen Amick) and the real-life terror of mass murderer Richard Speck in “Mystery Date,” the car-crash scare tactics and the shadow of tower sniper Charles Whitman in “Signal 30,” the acid-trip creepiness and artificially lit missing-person freakout of “Far Away Places” — all this is before the season’s climactic death, which I prefer not to name-drop publicly if I can help it but to which the character’s fellow cast members reacted, by all accounts, with genuine horror. (Of course, let’s not forget the lawnmower scene, either.)

But the anthology nature of The Romanoffs enables Weiner to go deeper into the genre than ever before. A self-contained story, with no previously screened backstory for the characters and no need to write for their continued existence either, abrogates the need for Weiner to do anything but creep people out in his own idiosyncratic way. Working with writer Mary Sweeney, he does exactly that.

Playing long-overdue link catchup: I reviewed the Christina Hendricks episode of The Romanoffs for Vulture.

Two episodes in is too early to hazard a guess as to what ties Matthew Weiner’s anthology series The Romanoffs together. But there’s no reward without risk, right? So here goes. Based on “The Violet Hour” and its followup, “The Royal We,” The Romanoffs might be so titled not just because its lead characters share ancestry with slain Russian royalty, but because they have nothing else to share. Both episodes feature antagonistic protagonists as hollow as Anastasia La Charnay’s Fabergé egg; the drama, and in this episode’s case in particular the comedy, arises from what they choose to fill that egg with.

I reviewed the second episode of The Romanoffs, aka the one with Corey Stolle and the god Kerry Bishé, for Vulture.

If you want to return to the world of Matthew Weiner, you’d best prepare for a rough reentry. We’re not just talking about the opening titles to The Romanoffs here, which replace Mad Men’s falling silhouette in a suit with the trickling blood of the massacred royal family of Russia as its connecting thread. Mere minutes after the last notes of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Refugee” close out the credits, we’re subjected to an almost unbearable torrent of racist invective — in subtitled French, no less — from an aging descendant of aristocracy to her grin-and-bear-it Muslim caregiver.

The younger woman, Hajar (Inès Melab), has to stand there and take it as the older woman, Anastasia La Charnay (Marthe Keller) — Anushka to her friends, and there are precious few of those — rolls out her bigoted litany. Anushka accuses Hajar of terrorism, suspects her of assassination by poison, recites half a dozen historical military victories of Christendom over Islam, brags that the traditional French croissant is the West’s way of literally eating the crescent that symbolizes her faith, and tells her, as she admires the La Charnay family’s heirloom Fabergé egg, that she “will never, ever have that.”

To Anushka, the egg means literally everything: wealth, respectability, Paris, France, Frenchness, humanity. All of it, held perpetually out of reach of people like Hajar by sad old white folks clinging to triumphs (whole Arches of them, in fact) they themselves did nothing to earn except through accident of birth. Behind Hajar’s placid grin you can all but hear her thoughts in response: “Look, lady, I just work here.”

For all its initial, confrontational unpleasantness, “The Violet Hour,” the first self-contained installment in Weiner’s ambitious anthology series for Amazon, soon settles into a familiar story pattern. Too familiar, perhaps: From my notes, I see I first predicted where the story was going at the 18:05 mark, approximately 32 and a half minutes before the inevitable big reveal. Nevertheless, some stories are worth retelling, whether because they force us to confront unpleasant truths or comfort us with resolutions that, in the real world, are much harder to come by. This episode is a little from Column A, a little from Column B.

I’m covering Matthew Weiner’s new series The Romanoffs for Vulture, beginning with my review of the series premiere. Join me, won’t you?

But this review, the last of this extraordinary season of television, isn’t, not just yet. There’s one more scene I want to discuss, one I believe is key to the entire thing.

Between the library dedication ceremony and the appeals hearing, Jimmy joylessly participates in a meeting of the charitable foundation Chuck set up to fund scholarships for promising young students with an interest in law; his spot on the board is one of the few things the elder McGill left him. Writers Peter Gould and Thomas Schnauz and director Adam Bernstein take an innovative approach to the proceedings: Within a second or two of each student beginning to answer one of Howard Hamlin’s jovial questions, they crash-cut away to the next one, as if the nature of what they’re saying means nothing compared to the nature of the process itself.

After all the interviews have concluded, Howard is prepared to offer the fund’s three scholarships to the three highest vote-getters. Then Jimmy interrupts. It was he, he says, who voted for the student who only received a single vote. “That’s the shoplifter,” one of the other board members replies, referring to the girl’s run-in with the law from a few years back. Jimmy points out that it’s precisely that experience that gave her an interest in the law in the first place, and that both her academic career and her personal essay have borne out the promise they’d be ignoring if they let that one event define the kid’s life.

Which they do. The three winners take home the scholarship, and young Kristy Esposito, shoplifter, gets the shaft. But when Jimmy races toward her outside the office to speak with her, we don’t know that yet. He breaks the news, and does so with gusto. “You didn’t get it. You were never gonna get it… You made a mistake, and they are never forgetting it. As far as they’re concerned, your mistake is who you are. It’s all you are.”

But she has an option, he tells the flabbergasted kid: beat them. Cheat. Cut corners. Hustle. Don’t play by the rules. Be smart. Be hated. “You rub their noses in it. You make them suffer… Screw them! The winner takes it all.” She walks away, the effect of this warped monologue on her uncertain.

Then a surprising thing happens. Back down in the parking garage where he used to loiter in his days working for Howard and Chuck’s firm, Jimmy’s car breaks down… and then he breaks down too. “No, no, no,” he sobs, crying for real for the very first time this season. Is he mourning his brother? The notion that his brother was right about him all along? The notion that he’s right about the hopeless odds facing him and the scholarship kid and anyone else who’s less than perfect? The idea that he’s become a person who shouts at children, encouraging them to become dirtbags and do whatever it takes to get one over on the so-called good guys? The fact that the law doesn’t benefit everyone equally, and that some people will get away with everything no matter what? That the law can be fooled? That amoral monsters can wield it as they see fit? That his life, and the lives of everyone he cares about, are slowly sliding into disaster?

Good questions, aren’t they? After the events of the past few weeks, weeks in which Better Call Saul aired its best season ever, do they sound familiar?

I reviewed Better Call Saul’s backbreaker of a season finale for TV Guide. A great season of television.

You know the bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where between the coconut jokes there’s a historian narrator who gets killed by a knight, and then there’s a modern-day police investigation, and then King Arthur gets arrested for murder? Succession is like that but for serious.

I reviewed the season finale of Succession for Decider. It makes a mistake it’s impossible for this show ever to recover from, no matter how good Jeremy Strong and Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun are. Just a shocking lack of perspective. I’ve never seen anything quite like it.

It comes down to the problem I spotted a few episodes ago: There’s an artlessness to the way this show discusses mental illness, and by extension the human condition. Think of exchanges like this:

Owen: “My mind, it doesn’t work right.”

Annie: “No one’s does.”

Or this:

Owen: “Annie, why are you here?”

Annie: “Because I’m your friend, and that’s what friends do.”

Or think of Owen describing his dilemma: “The same thing happens every time I meet someone, or get close to someone. I mess it up.”

Have all of us thought or said things like this? Yes, and that’s just it: All of us have thought or said things like this. What do we need Maniac for?

If you feel some kind of frisson from hearing actors on a Netflix-prestige show recite vanilla aphorisms about what life is like for people like you, fine, great, cool.

For me? It’s like reading one of those lovely Richard Scarry books for kids, where the little animal people in overalls and jaunty hats drive around a town where everything is labeled: “car,” “street,” “firehouse,” “hat,” “overalls.” It’s a My First Sony version of insight, rounding off all the hard edges of the psychological forces that drive and derange us until they’re so user-friendly that they represent no challenge at all to address or intake.

I reviewed the finale of Maniac for Decider. It wasn’t a good show.

SPOILER WARNING

People believe what they want to believe. That’s as true for the audience of Better Call Saul as it is for the characters. Chances are good that as you watched Monday’s episode unfold, you assumed disaster would befall Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) and his German construction crew. You likely pegged Werner (Rainer Bock), the gentle team leader who misses his wife of 26 years and always refers to Mike with a kindly-sounding “Michael,” as the victim. You probably thought Kai (Ben Bela Böhm), the cocky young demolitions expert who’s butted heads with Mike over and over, would be the culprit.

So when Werner goes back down into the subterranean depths to check on a faulty fuse laid by Kai the night the team is scheduled to blow up one last gigantic rock with dynamite — a rock spraypainted with “WIEDERSEHN,” the German word for “goodbye,” no less — you were probably nearly as nervous as Werner himself. Note: The episode is titled “Wiedersehen,” and it was written and directed by Breaking Bad top dogs Gennifer Hutchison and Vince Gilligan, respectively. You’ve heard of Chekhov’s gun? This is like Chekhov’s arsenal.

But it was all a bait and switch; indeed, the entire German subplot might have been. Werner fixes the fuse. The detonation goes off without a hitch. The teammates toast to a job well done, with Kai himself pouring a cold one in Mike’s honor.

Now the goalposts get moved once again. Could Werner, who all but begs Mike to be allowed a brief trip home to visit his beloved wife but puts on a brave face once Mike declines, be despondent enough to kill himself? His lengthy goodbyes during the extra phone call he gets allotted instead of a vacation indicate that yeah, he just might be.

Instead, the owlish little guy sabotages the security cameras, cuts through the padlocks, evades the security team, and escapes the secure facility where he and his team have lived in seclusion for months. He’s fleeing home… and given what we know about his drug lord boss, he’s risking not only his life, but Mike’s, the guards and the entire construction crew’s in the process. He may have disabled the cameras, but the real blindspot was Mike’s, believing his friend knew the stakes and could be trusted not to do anything reckless. On this show, trust doesn’t get you very far.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul Season Four for TV Guide. I liked unraveling this particular multi-episode fakeout.

If Maniac isn’t going to take its most serious episode seriously, why should we?

The penultimate episode of Maniac is a mortifying blend of mawkish sentimentality, a lousy Coen Bros pastiche, a shameless Mad Men swipe, and an embarrassing Marvel-style hallway-fight sequence. Thanks, Algorithm! I reviewed it for Decider.

I’ll say this for these past two episodes. First, it’s great, and by Netflix standards positively groundbreaking, that they are two episodes. There’s really no reason for them to be — they’re both set in the same two fantasy worlds created when Annie and Owen ingest the C-pill and tell one continuing story about them from start to finish.

But Maniac is a half-hour dramedy, give or take a few minutes from time to time (mostly take, lately, which is also frankly incredible), and by god they’re sticking to it. Thus what would be a dense hour of TV becomes two breezy sitcom-length installments. It’s amazing how much easier the result goes down. I mean, can you imagine powering through 60 minutes of the fake Lord of the Rings world? Fortunately, you don’t have to!

I’ll say this for these episodes as well: I’m kind of shocked by how much I enjoy Owen’s gangster fantasy, and Jonah Hill’s performance in it. Combine that Soundcloud-rapper look in a mafia environment, which I haven’t seen before, and that weird blend of taciturn and terrified that’s Owen’s default way of interacting with the world, which I also haven’t seen in this context before, and you’ve got something…well, that I haven’t seen before.

That’s the first time Maniac has done anything original. It’s amazing how much easier the show’s magpie tendency to pluck ideas from other films works when there’s something genuinely unusual going on. I mean, the plot mechanics of the gangster fantasy are just remixing The Departed — more so now than ever, with Owen’s lost brother Jed/Grimsson appearing as a deep-cover gangster working with the cops to rescue him at the last minute, and high-ranking guys in the outfit secretly working with the Feds, and all kinds of out-of-nowhere murders and whatnot. But with that oddball take on the rogue-prince gangster archetype at the center, I didn’t mind.

Also, murder on TV is kind of fun sometimes.

And Owen’s date with Olivia, in which they discuss the Gnostic Gospels as a metaphor for how your brain interprets reality and weeds out conflicting data, and in which Olivia reveals she had a paranoid ex-boyfriend who sounds a lot like Owen himself, is a strong scene. Okay, so lines like “For people we’re supposed to love unconditionally, families seem to have a lot of conditions” is some very writerly shit, but oh well. At this point it’s clear I’m never gonna be deeply embedded in this show’s fantasy, so I’ll take whatever blips of enjoyment I can get.

I reviewed the eighth episode of Maniac, aka the one where the epic-fantasy and gangster-movie fantasies end, for Decider. Trying to look on the bright side here.

But at bottom, unless you’re a person who just gets reflexively jazzed the moment men with Noo Yawk accents start talking about loyalty or beautiful people with long hair and grey cloaks take off their hoods and reveal pointy ears, this has nothing to offer. It’s cute, it’s funny, it’s kinda cool sometimes, but why would the key phase of the Mantleray process involve such obvious pop-culture archetypes? There’s one wonderful throwaway bit — heat waves emanate from Olivia, which she explains to Owen by saying her permanently hyperthermic skin maintains a constant temperature of 106 degrees — that points to the creepy fun that can be had with dream logic, but it’s over in an instant. When you’ve got the chance to do anything, anything, why do the same thing you’ve seen before?

I reviewed episode seven of Maniac, aka the one where the epic-fantasy and gangster-movie fantasies start, for Decider. When you’re supposed to be digging deeper into your main characters’ minds than ever before, why would you use massive and obvious pop-culture staples to do it?

The Oedipal scene between the Drs. Mantleray, at least, has the virtue of being kinda funny because it’s so blunt and brutal. But it points to a larger, worrying tendency: the artlessness with which mental illness is discussed on the show.

“For some reason it’s more exciting to tell people I cut than to actually cut,” says one patient, describing an apparent history of self-injury. “You know that movie It’s a Wonderful Life? If that happened to me there would be no difference in the world,” Owen says when asked to describe in his own words what’s “wrong” with him; later he disputes GRTA’s contention that she can cure him by stating flat-out “There’s no cure for schizophrenia.” “She laid in my bed for two months and talked to me about how she wanted to hang herself; I was eight,” James tells Azumi about how his world-famous mother handled his father’s abandonment of the family.

This isn’t writing, as I understand it, in the context of narrative fiction in general or genre fiction in particular. This is just having a character walk up to the camera and describe, in so many words, a thing about a rough part of being alive. For some people this kind of writing seems to hit like a bolt out of the blue, or at least the proliferation of Bojack Horseman screenshots on my Twitter timeline tells me so. The ecstatic reaction to Alex Garland’s Annihilation, which features an exchange in which one character suggests another’s self-injury scars indicate attempts to kill herself and a third says “No, I think the opposite: trying to feel alive” — a truism from the depths of the purplest YA fiction, or an unremarkable real-world therapy session — is another indicator.

I’m bored by it, frankly. When I think of lines from films and television shows about mental illness and suffering that have really moved me, it’s not stuff I’ve heard before cutting a check to my psychiatrist for my co-pay, it’s stuff I’d never thought of before at all, but rang true the moment I heard it. I can still remember exactly how flattened I was when I first heard Boardwalk Empire’s traumatized, murderous World War I veteran Richard Harrow explain why he stopped reading novels after the war: “It occurred to me the basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other, but they don’t.” It washed over me like a nightmare, and functioned like a nightmare in that it dredged up fears I hadn’t been courageous enough to face and forced me to stare at them. He didn’t just say “I’m having a hard time enjoying things that once brought me joy” like he’s in a commercial for a new antidepressant. He fucking walloped me. The thrill of recognition is tiny. The thrill of revelation is colossal.

So that’s my problem with Maniac now, even if Justin Theroux is far better playing an unorthodox but effective psychiatrist, as he does in the post-pill interview scenes, than a funny-looking goofball with sex hangups, like he’s forced t everywhere else. There’s no art to it, no faith in the power of genre to use spectacle and the unexpected to articulate truths in a truer way than rote recitation. This despite layer upon layer of fantastical worldbuilding and enough vectors for getting far out — semi-dystopian near future, talking supercomputer, weird clinical environment, psychoactive pills, elaborate fantasy sequences, schizophrenic hallucinations — to sustain several shows, much less just one. Let the pills take hold, man. Let the pills take hold.

I reviewed episode six of Maniac for Decider, and in so doing wrote about the workmanlike way in which shows have begun addressing mental illness. We have therapy and thinkpieces already. Be art!

Braun is so good at portraying (possibly improvising?) Greg’s perpetual state of flummoxedness that his garbled manner of formal speech — “Is there doubt afoot?” — has become the stuff of catchphrases in spite of itself. Macfadyen is just as strong cruelly toying with Greg or barking at the help as he is tormenting himself over whether or not Shiv is cheating on him; he makes it clear that neither side is the “real” Tom, because both stem from the same underlying insecurities and bottomless need to feel validated. And watching Strong sidle into faceoffs with Brian Cox’s Logan or Eric Bogosian’s Gil or especially Natalie Gold’s Rava is straight-up thrilling at this point, like watching a man who’s always half a step behind what the coke and adrenaline in his bloodstream and the butterflies in his stomach are making him say try and catch up in real time. I could watch a bonafide Tom and Greg antibuddy comedy, or an actual prestige drama about Kendall. For the first time since the pilot, I think it’s possible Succession might be able to do both.

I wrote about the penultimate episode of Succession Season One for Decider. Jeremy Strong, Nicholas Braun, and Matthew Macfadyen are the show’s breakout stars no question, but for the first time the series did right by Sarah Snook’s Shiv, too. Overall it was the most I’ve enjoyed the show since the pilot.