Before we get to the specifics, here’s my thinking on this, see if you agree. Superhero stories are a subgenre of multiple genres, depending on the character and the approach; there are elements of science fiction, fantasy, crime, sometimes mystery, sometimes war, usually a soupçon of character-based drama, often some comedy, and the basic template of heroism that you can map everything from Greek mythology to professional wrestling onto. But the key component is action, and great action films and shows employ action to convey emotion. They set up a closed system where conversation is insufficient to vent the turmoil beneath the surface, so it comes out in punching and lasers and so on, the same way that in opera or musical theater it comes out in singing, or in horror it comes out in demonic possession or people getting their faces torn off.

Now, a really good superhero story can manage the conversation bit too, of course. Or it can express intimacy in other ways, like we’ve talked about in this space before—tending to injuries, physical closeness, etc. But what it cannot afford to do is stop everything for an hour of samey two-person dialogues that a show with a smaller episode order could easily eliminate and lose absolutely nothing of value.

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

The Punisher is a murder machine. He’s not a gunslinger or a samurai, there to dazzle the audience with brio or technique. To the extent that his lethal maneuvers are impressive at all it’s down to how casual and calculated they are, especially when contrasted with the expression actor Jon Bernthal wears on his face for such scenes. Close-quarters hand-to-hand shit is one thing—that’s where he goes beastmode, growling and bellowing. But when it’s a firefight and his job is to advance on and kill his enemies until none are left, he has the attitude of a person tasked with a difficult but eminently doable task, like mowing the lawn. He puts people down like he’s using a hedge trimmer. Got it, next.

The most interesting thing about “Trouble the Water” (The Punisher Season 2 Episode 3) is how it shows the cost this ruthless efficiency extracts in human suffering.

I reviewed the third episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

In this episode of The Punisher, a lady uses tweezers to take a bullet out of Jon Bernthal’s bare ass.

There. Never let it be said that I’m one to bury the lede.

But if there’s one thing the Marvel/Netflix shows, even the ones I’m not crazy about, have been good at, it’s tying their superhero/vigilante violence to moments of physical intimacy. Sometimes this involves the main characters having sex, and from Jessica Jones and Luke Cage to Luke Cage and Misty Knight to Matt Murdock and Elektra Natchios, those scenes have been hot across the board. That’s certainly true on this show as well, from Agent Madani and Billy Russo to David “Micro” Lieberman and his wife Sarah to “Pete Castiglione” and Beth the bartender just last episode.

At other times the violence itself is intimate. This naturally tends to be the case more for the characters who lack super-strength than for those who do, but it’s true. Watching mortal men like Matt Murdock and Frank Castle be made vulnerable by the infliction of violence on their bodies is a display of intimacy. To quote myself quoting Barbara Kruger regarding another show, “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” Hallway fights are an intricate ritual indeed.

I reviewed the second episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

Have we—as a nation, a society, a people—done enough for Jon Bernthal? No, that’s not even the right thing to ask. What viewers of The Punisher, and all other media, must do is take a fearless personal inventory on the Jon Bernthal Question: What have I, personally, done to show respect and gratitude to this great man? If nothing else, The Punisher Season 2 will give all of us the opportunity to look inward and see if we’ve done right by the Last Action Hunk. You hear that, America? Fix your hearts or die.

I reviewed the season premiere of The Punisher for Decider. Jon Bernthal is perfect in this role.

(Note: These episode review summaries will be short while I play link catch-up. You’ll just have to read the reviews!)

Already you can see that this isn’t just Season One Redux. Like McConaughey’s tortured cop, Wayne is lonely. But he’s just a bachelor, not a guy who sleeps in a bare room with a crucifix above his mattress. He’s a drinker, but just ties one on a few times a month rather than pounding a six pack during a deposition. He suffers from mental illness as an older man, but it’s not, uh, whatever makes you see spirals in the sky and say stuff like “time is a flat circle” to homicide detectives.

Wayne’s partner Roland is a less well-defined figure at this stage in the season than Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart was during his. But so far, despite playing the straight man/good ol’ boy role in the partnership, he isn’t half the sexist shitkicker his predecessor proved to be. What’s more, Roland trusts his mercurial counterpart implicitly, defending the unorthodox tracking technique he picked up in ‘Nam when the local fuzz takes issue with it. That whole “one guy says something insanely profound (or profoundly insane) and the other guy tells him to shut the fuck up” dynamic is nowhere to be found.

Nor are the one-dimensional, do-nothing female characters from Season One. Ejogo’s Amelia is a full-fledged person, a welcome development that follows McAdams’ talking point last season. The show still isn’t perfect on this score — the documentarian character is an oblivious do-gooder whose talk of intersectionality and oppression we’re clearly supposed to find baffling and laughable — but we’ll take it.

I’m back on the True Detective beat for Rolling Stone, starting with my review of last night’s two-episode season premiere.

I returned to Elana Brooklyn’s Graphic Policy podcast to talk about The Punisher Season One from the perspective of the Left (and goths). Give it a listen!

We had a small, very passionate writer’s room, and everybody in it brought their own fears to each story. And we just we had certain guidelines: Keep it personal. Draw from character. If something feels right then explore it, even if you don’t know what it means right away. That, to me, is what great horror does. It makes you dig deeper, makes you explore the parts of yourself that you’re afraid of, that you’re traumatized by.

I was thrilled to conduct a deep-dive interview on all four seasons of Channel Zero, one of the most frightening TV shows I’ve ever seen and as good as anything in the recent horror renaissance, with creator Nick Antosca for Polygon.

Polygon: The first scene of the first episode of the first season of your show scared me more than other horror shows have during their entire runs.

Nick Antosca: You mean the interview at the beginning of Candle Cove? Sooo frequently, we were told to cut that scene. I’m not going to disparage, at all, the people who’d give us notes; we have a really supportive network and studio. But every round of notes on that, we were told “Cut that scene, cut that scene, it’s bad!” I knew that we were going to be asked to do that when I wrote it, so I put all of the exposition that would be necessary to understand the show in that scene so you couldn’t cut it.

The scene is like the opening of David Cronenberg’s The Brood, when Oliver Reed is having that weird therapy session onstage. Everything is dark and you have no idea what’s going on.

Antosca: You know, our show references The Brood in multiple seasons in other places, but that was not a deliberate reference to it. In the script, that was written as being interviewed by Dr. Phil at one point, then it was written as being interviewed by Charlie Rose and then Matt Lauer. We asked them both to do it and they wouldn’t do it. Thank God.

As frightening as that first scene was, the series basically never lets up.

Antosca: The idea of the show was always to capture a sense of dread, and we felt it was very important to establish that in the first scene, in a way that was different from other horror shows that I’m familiar with.

I interviewed Nick Antosca about his phenomenal horror anthology series Channel Zero for Polygon.

Weird ‘Flix, but okay: 2018 saw a certain streaming behemoth finally achieve the approximate cultural reach and clout the Big Four broadcast networks still enjoyed as recently as a decade ago. Unfortunately, the level of artistic quality and risk-taking roughly followed suit.

But even the algorithm-assisted return of TV monoculture—you can have any flavor you like, as long as it’s a flavor our data indicates you’ve enjoyed before—couldn’t stamp out the hard-earned gains television has made as an art form since Tony Soprano woke up that morning 20 years ago. Shows predicated on the idea that challenging your audience is a vital part of entertaining that audience, even if it’s an audience you have to will into existence in the process, are still out there.

Television can still make even a jaded viewer sob with sorrow and joy, recoil in suspense and terror, stare in silent (or shouting!) awe at the sheer emotional and aesthetic audacity of it all. Between them, the eight shows below did all that for me and more.

8. On Cinema at the Cinema (Adult Swim)

Now, nobody likes a good laugh more than I do. But comedy is about making people laugh, which turns characters in comedies into joke-delivery mechanisms rather than characters in the fully developed sense from which we derive value in drama. So it takes a lot for a comedy to make my list of the best the medium has to offer.

In the case of On Cinema, Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s byzantine saga of atrocious human behavior in the guise of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down movie-review show starring two idiots, here is what it took: Tim, the right-wing hedonist host whose endless series of jilted wives, abandoned children, unwatchable action-movie side projects, unlistenable alt-rock and dance-music spinoffs, disastrous alternative-medicine experiments, near-death experiences (including toxic shock from unsterilized acupuncture needles, malnourishment from an all-drug diet, and incineration after falling asleep with a lit cigarette in the storage locker cum VHS-tape library he’d been reduced to living in) culminated in a mistrial for murder after 20 kids died from smoking his tainted vape juice at an EDM festival. The subsequent tenth season of his movie-review show (“On Cinema X”) saw him caught between the diktats of the show’s snake-oil sponsor and the civil judgment won by the family of one of his victims.

Somewhere in there, he and Gregg may or may not have awarded Solo: A Star Wars Story their coveted Five Bags of Popcorn seal of approval; between Tim screaming obscenely about the district attorney (against whom he mounts a quixotic electoral campaign) and Gregg prattling on about how Tim Burton won’t answer his letters, it’s a bit hard to tell. Heidecker and Turkington have played out this shaggy-dog joke for years, anticipating (not kidding at all here) both the rise of Donald Trump and the role that aggrieved nerds would play as his cultural vanguard. The result is maybe the best thing the extended Tim & Eric universe has ever produced. Long may they rant.

I named the eight best television series of the year for Decider. I believe in all eight of these shows very deeply, which is why it’s just a top eight and not a larger, rounder number. I hope you enjoy them too.

Everything I’ve ever heard about Channel Zero, I’ve heard from other people on the internet. Perhaps that’s the way it should be. This rich, gorgeous, and astonishingly frightening horror anthology series takes the story lines for each of its four seasons so far from creepypasta — scary short stories in the form of faked message-board posts and comment threads. They’re the online era’s equivalent of urban legends, passed around from one terrified reader to the next. That’s how Channel Zero reached me, pretty much: from other impassioned viewers, desperate to persuade me to watch it too. The show infected them like a virus, until they passed that virus to me. And now … well, if you’re reading this, it’s too late.

But there’s so much more to the series than that slightly cutesy high concept, which I suspect turns as many people off as it turns on. Created by Hannibal veteran Nick Antosca, Channel Zero is full-service Good Television. It’s engrossingly beautiful and austere filmmaking, as shot by a different promising director every season. It’s a showcase for intriguing and surprising performances by a wide variety of talented actors, particularly women, who’ve led three of its four seasons. It’s a merciless autopsy of suburban disconnection, and how the few intimate bonds that are formed in that environment — with friends, with family, with lovers — can harm as well as help.

And above all, it’s scary. Just incredibly scary. I say this as a horror person, who crammed all four seasons down my gullet as fast as I could, alongside my partner, another horror person, and was flabbergasted by its singular, consistent, and prolonged ability to frighten, disturb, disgust. Take it from someone who endured several prestige-y limited-series adapted from famous horror novels/novelists this year: I was scared more, and more often, by the first scene in the first episode of the first season of Channel Zero alone than I was by quite a few other horror shows combined.

I came late to Channel Zero, but Julia and I burned through all four seasons in October and November and I’ve taken to it with the zeal of the converted. I tried to explain why in spoiler-free fashion (except for mentioning some characters and monsters) for Vulture. You’ve got to watch this thing.

The men of The Terror did not, as they say, die as they lived. They lived as interchangeable cogs in the machine of empire—sailors in the Royal Navy of Great Britain, the largest imperial project ever undertaken by humanity between the ride of the Khans and the Pax Americana currently dying all around us. So the show based on their final misadventure dresses them in their blue uniforms, swaddles them in shapeless and face-covering winter gear, allows the cold to redden their faces and lengthen their beards, until distinguishing between them requires an expert’s eye and ear. (Or at least a thoroughgoing knowledge of English and Irish character actors.)

They lived their final years trapped in the frozen waters and barren lands of the Arctic, searching for an open lane of water that would bridge the Atlantic to the Pacific without the need for Her Majesty’s Ships to sail around the tip of South America to get there—the fabled Northwest Passage. (Only one of them would actually live, and not for long, to see the Passage, and only by accident.) So the show shoots them against endless uniform vistas of white and gray, with snowblinding daylight or soulcrushing darkness alternating for periods that lasted months at a stretch.

And in the end, they lived their final weeks, days, hours, minutes, moments dying from the same things: malnutrition, food poisoning, disease, starvation, exposure to the cold, murder at one another’s hands…and, in some cases, mutilation and consumption by ferocious hulking thing on the ice, out for their English blood. (Fee-fi-fo-fum.)

But when they died? When they died, it was different. They were different. Replacing the uniforms and the uniformity were visions as unique and beautiful and terrible and individual as people are themselves, deep down inside.

I wrote an essay on the many deaths of The Terror for Decider. As you’d expect for a piece on character deaths, there are many spoilers. I tried to do this magnificent show justice and I hope you enjoy the result.

10. Westworld: “Do the Strand” by Roxy Music

Few shows have been as guilty of music-cue abuse as Westworld. Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s leaden and labyrinthine sci-fi parable has folded an entire Spotify playlist of classic alt-ish rock songs into its narrative via instrumental arrangements by composer Ramin Djawadi. Give a listen to his best-in-field work on Game of Thrones and it’s painfully clear he can do much better than player-piano Radiohead or Japanophile remixes of Wu-Tang Clan’s “C.R.E.A.M.” or whatever.

This is what makes Westworld’s in-world cranking of Roxy Music’s boisterous 1973 hit “Do the Strand” so remarkable. Blasted at full volume by James Delos (Peter Mullan), the Scottish founder of the Westworld theme park (and, unbeknownst to him, one of its core artificial-intelligence experiments), glam rock’s answer to Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” sounds as unexpected in the dour songscape of this series as Delos’s “dance like no one is watching” behavior looks. Yet Bryan Ferry’s hedonistic lyrical promise of the next big thing — “There’s a new sensation, a fabulous creation” — and Brian Eno’s retro-futuristic flourishes as the band’s in-house effects guy fit Westworld’s themes like they were engineered in a lab to do exactly that.

This is always one of my favorite pieces to do: I wrote about the 10 best music cues of 2018 for Vulture. Definitely stick around for Number One.

“It was that moment when it all fell apart.” The most compelling point made by the season finale of Narcos: Mexico (“Leyenda”) is that just when it looks like the United States is finally getting serious about heeding the warnings, cutting through the corruption, and taking the fight directly to the bad guys…well, they become the bad guys, or just as bad as them, if they weren’t already. The narration that closes this languorous, occasionally horrifying episode doesn’t appear anywhere else in the episode, and its voice finally represented on-screen in the person of a burned-out, gun-smuggling American agent played by Scoot McNairy. Both maneuvers lend extra weight to the narrator’s words, which are accompanied by real-life news footage of heavily armed soldiers and dead bodies. Those words essentially take the emotional logic of how the story of Narcos: Mexico has developed — indeed, the entire moral logic of the War on Drugs itself — and drag it out back to be bashed in the head and dumped in a field.

I reviewed the season finale of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

What gets me most is the raw, brainless brutality and venality of the whole affair, as two governments and an organized-crime outfit with the profit margins of a Fortune 500 company spend millions of dollars and waste untold lives over a drug war that’s unwinnable by definition, and which isn’t even in full swing yet. Do the people zapping Kiki with a cattle prod and piercing the bones of his hand with an electric drill actually think he knows anything that will help them evade prosecution? Did the agents and soldiers who lit Rafa’s $2.5 billion weed farm on fire think it would materially damage the cartel, let alone affect the overall flow of contraband into the United States? How many people have to die so rich and powerful criminals, on both sides of the law, can stay rich and powerful?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Narcos: Mexico for Decider. I think it displays some noble intentions but undercuts them by refusing to go all the way with the cruelty involved.

In this episode of Narcos: Mexico, dozens of people are killed so the United States government and its Mexican-government allies can burn a five-thousand-ton marijuana field valued at two and a half billion dollars. Then the owners of that field and their Mexican-government allies, who are also America’s allies when it comes to suppressing the left, kidnap one of the U.S. government agents responsible for the raid and prepare to torture him to death for information the U.S. government’s plans for further action. By this point the U.S. government has decided, by the way, not to take any further action, so as not to embarrass its Mexican-government allies.

Folks, I’m starting to wonder if the War on Drugs was a bad idea.

I reviewed episode eight of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

Titled “Jefe de Jefes,” after the Lucky Luciano–style “Boss of All Bosses” sobriquet bestowed upon Félix by his high-flying lieutenant Amado, the show’s seventh episode makes ample use of the parallels between its protagonist and antagonist. That, at least, is par for the course. The series began by setting up Gallardo and Camarena as opposite numbers with the same basic makeup: both of them cops, both of them relocating to Guadalajara, both of them hoping to advance in their respective careers after being stymied back home, both of them often thwarted by the established power structure, both of them exceptionally driven to work around obstacles to achieve their goals.

Now, though, it feels both excessive and unnecessary to maintain that parallel structure. Both men are planning to leave town to go back home. Both run into opposition from their Concerned Wives when they decide not to do so. Both make major power plays to defeat the last governmental obstacles to their end goals. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, to be sure, but when you’re creating historical fiction based on the strange truth, there’s definitely a point at which “stranger than fiction” becomes “too cute by half.”

I reviewed episode seven of Narcos: Mexico for Decider. Stuff like this is why as good as this franchise can be from time to time, it never quite achieves liftoff.

The Romanoffs currently has a 43% rating among “top critics” on Rotten Tomatoes. The Walking Dead, the zombie juggernaut no one seems to like anymore, more than doubles that score with 88%. Arrow, one of several interconnected shows about DC superheroes, is sitting even prettier at 91%. Even the largely maligned but seemingly immortal CBS nerd-culture comedy The Big Bang Theory rates a 75% among people whose job it is to tell you whether a TV show is any good. Outside of network publicists and Rotten Tomatoes itself, I don’t think anyone would argue that review aggregators actually tell you much about the quality of a given show. But looking at those numbers, I think they say an awful lot about the qualities of shows that critics find valuable, and it’s not anything good.

[…]

By my tally, The Romanoffs was half good-to-great, and half okay-to-meh. In that light, perhaps a score hovering in the 40-50% range makes sense. But in a world where Arrow is nine percentage points shy of perfection? It’s pure-dee nonsense for a show this ambitious, involving this much acting talent, to get a failing grade. Even among critics, series that take no risks because they have no ambition are rewarded above those that do. You don’t even have to like The Romanoffs, let alone Matthew Weiner, to recognize that. And a TV landscape without room for wild, swing-for-the-fences use of unprecedented financial backing and creative clout, even if they strike out half the time—a world where reassurance, fanservice, and algorithmic crowd-pleasing hold sway—is a bleak one indeed.

I reviewed the season finale of The Romanoffs, and got some stuff off my chest about the state of TV criticism, for Vulture.

Displaying considerable moxie, the show chooses G.W. Handel’s stately, morose “Sarabande” to accompany much of the action, particularly the climax in which Gallardo narrowly escapes arrest and then returns home to discover his infidelity has been discovered in turn. Real Kubrick headz know that this is the theme music to the great director’s period-piece masterpiece Barry Lyndon — itself the story of a country boy who becomes rich and powerful through a combination of luck and deceit. I kinda wonder if the filmmakers were gonna go with a more appropriately adulterous Kubrick music cue, Shostakovich’s “Waltz No. 2” from Eyes Wide Shut, before thinking better of it and going for a less obvious choice. (Also, its Netflix sister show Altered Carbon got there first.) At least they didn’t use Strauss.

I reviewed episode six of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

Actor Wagner Moura’s Pablo Escobar was one of my favorite television characters of the decade — a singular performance that’s all the more appealing and imposing because of how much he underplayed it. It’s funny hearing all of Gallardo’s friends with a foot in the coke world warn him about Pablo being “temperamental,” an assessment with which Escobar himself agrees, because looking at and listening to him you’d swear the guy was coming down off painkillers after a root canal. (Maybe it’s all that weed he’s smoking.)

Cocaine, schmocaine: Pablo’s chief export was the ambition and anger he grew inside himself. But the genius of version of the character we saw on Narcos was that his reserved temperament when encountered in person forced everyone to lean in closer and hang on his every word. It’s more effective, and frightening, than exploding all the time would have been. To reflect this, Amat Escalante keeps Pablo shrouded in darkness and half-light during an outdoor nighttime soirée. It may simply be a workaround for Moura’s post-Pablo weight loss, but it presents a stark contrast with the brightly lit office of the Calí boys, and it gives the character the vibe of a supervillain without requiring him to do anything outwardly supervillainous at all.

I reviewed episode five of Narcos: Mexico for Decider. God bless Wagner Moura.

And for crying out loud, how great is the sequence where Rafa and his partner-turned-babysitter Don Neto have to figure out a way to kill time in their big empty safehouse? The two get massively coked up, and then have a little two-man dance party to freaking Culture Club. As Boy George croons “Karma Chameleon,” Neto (who winds up nearly getting arrested during his drunken drive home, then makes the cop who stops him his indentured-servant driver) hoots and hollers about his new CD player, simply unable to contain his joy that the music won’t skip no matter how much you jump around. In a music-nerd move so amazing I can hardly contain myself about it, Rafa’s reaction is momentarily muted when he produces a stack of vinyl records in their cardboard sleeves and starts ranting about how the album cover will become a lost art when the canvas shrinks to CD size. It’s like he stepped out of every conversation about music I had with my dad in 1990. Writer Scott Teems deserves some kind of award for this scene alone.

I reviewed episode four of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.