Risk is the essence of romance. A wise woman told me that once; I live with her now, so I’m inclined to believe she knew what she was talking about. Exposed and vulnerable, we reach out to another person and hope they’ll reach back. We put ourselves at their mercy in hopes of connection. In some cases, we put ourselves at the mercy of a world that will punish us for that connection should it be discovered. There is some pain we suffer gladly because it’s the vessel in which pleasure comes.

Titled “403 Forbidden” — like every episode title so far, it’s both an internet error message and a signpost for the story — this installment of “Mr. Robot” has both the series’s protagonist and antagonist putting themselves at risk in romance’s name. In one case, it leads to disaster. In another … well, the season isn’t over yet.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times.

It’s wild!

No, seriously, it really is wild. It reminds me, in a good way, of some of the most far-out episodes of Lindelof’s Leftovers run—the ones where Justin Theroux near-death-hallucinates that he’s an international assassin, say, or the one where Christopher Eccleston talks to God on a weird cult’s orgy boat before God gets mauled to death by a lion. Where Moore and Gibbons’s Watchmen eased you into its world’s weirdness—which to be fair was orders of magnitude less weird than either the Marvel or DC shared universes of which it served as a critique—Lindelof and director Nicole Kassell dump you into the deep end and expect you to do the butterfly, with the aggressive and eerie music of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross blaring in the background.

I reviewed the series premiere of Watchmen for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season. It’s good!

Now here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today: The season finale of The Terror: Infamy moved me to tears.

Wait, what? We’re talking about the same The Terror: Infamy that squandered its predecessor season’s goodwill by shoddily cobbling together warmed-over J-horror with real-world historical atrocities? The one that employed a central supernatural metaphor that appeared to place the blame for Japanese Americans’ political predicament on Japanese Americans themselves rather than their racist captors? The one that was haphazardly plotted, jerking from location to location and time period to time period with seemingly no sense of narrative balance or emotional logic? The one where the main character chose the moment when he and his family are rounded up by the American government as potential traitors to tell his mom that he got some lady in a family way? That The Terror: Infamy?

Yes, that The Terror: Infamy.

Written by co-creator and showrunner Alexander Woo and directed by Frederick E.O. Toye, “Into the Afterlife,” the final episode of the AMC anthology series’ second season, is an extended grace note for a story that up until now had just been banging on the keys at random. Attentive to the historical import of the time period it chronicles, generous in spirit toward its characters both living and dead, and driven in large part by the season’s most effective and poetic imagery, it nearly makes up for all the dross that’s come before. It left me imagining a season that had lived up to this standard from the start, and wondering how much more impact a finale like this would have had if it had.

I reviewed the shockingly good finale of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

Adding additional layers to an already complicated plot is tricky business, of course. But the mysteries are so intriguing, and Esmail’s command of his craft so sure, that the investment seems sound as a pound.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mr. Robot for the New York Times. It’s good!

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. Tough to know what to make of it.

Succession‘s second season finale ends on a high point not just for the episode or the season but the entire series. Until now it’s seemed almost unthinkable that one of Logan Roy’s brood would defy him this dramatically after first agreeing not to. This is more shocking than Kendall’s first attempt to dethrone his dad, since we’d watched him build to that point over several episodes. Our only clues here were implicit and contextual: the presence of Cousin Greg, who kept copies of incriminating documents, by Kendall’s side; the Judas/Fredo kiss Kendall planted on his dad’s cheek when he agreed to be the fall guy required to placate congressional investigators and nervous shareholders alike. With so little fanfare beforehand, watching Kendall actually get up there on the world stage and call his dad out for what he is feels like watching a dog suddenly stand on its hind legs and speak fluent Latin.

I reviewed the season finale of Succession for Decider. I liked it, though people need to calm way down about this thing. As I say elsewhere in the review, dramedies are the coward’s drama.

“Government property, in the middle of New Mexico???” You had to know this was coming, even if Chester Nakayama and his family did not. The moment—the moment—Yuko the yureiescaped the fire Chester set in that cabin in the internment camp a few weeks back simply by showing some hustle, I thought to myself “You know what kind of fire she won’t be able to escape?”

Sure enough, we’re now in the Summer of ’45, the Nakayamas are in a bunker in the middle of the New Mexico desert, a random British guy with security clearance is wandering around drunkenly celebrating mankind’s conquest of the laws of nature, and a certain vengeful spirit almost certainly has a date with nuclear destiny. You didn’t think a series as heavy-handed with history as The Terror: Infamy would let the specter of Hiroshima and Nagasaki pass by unmolested, did you?

I reviewed the inevitable penultimate episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

It starts with the death of a main character. It seems, at first, to end with the death of the main character. In between, it plays out like an eerie paranoid thriller against a backdrop of international corruption and capitalism run amok. Written and directed by the series’s creator, Sam Esmail, the fourth and final season premiere of “Mr. Robot” plays to all the show’s strengths and none of its weaknesses.

I reviewed the season premiere of Mr. Robot for the New York Times. I liked it quite a bit, which was a relief.

Joanie, Joanie, Joanie. What are we going to do with your share of “The Affair”? The grown-up daughter of Cole and Alison Lockhart dominates this episode — which, given the strength of Noah Solloway’s segment, ought to be a compliment. But when Joanie seeks out and finds her mother’s killer, what happens manages to upend the show’s narrative apple cart so completely that it’s hard to appreciate anything that came before.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It took a wild left turn and I did not come along for the ride.

The chickens have sailed home to roost. Written by series creator Jesse Armstrong and directed by series mainstay Mark Mylod, this week’s episode of Succession sees the long-simmering cruise-ship sex-abuse scandal storyline bear fruit, as the Roys and their lackeys are called to testify before the Senate to answer for their crimes. Now, this is Succession, so you know ahead of time nothing will come of it. But the Roys are generally at their most compelling when they’re forced to pretend to be normal humans during the rare occasions when other people have a leg up on them, and this is one of those occasions. It’s worth taking a little time to savor.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Succession, which I liked better than most, for Decider.

I’ve gone easy on The Terror: Infamy. No really, I have. As you fine A.V. Club readers and commenters have pointed out to me, last week’s installment, with its slapdash approach to how its characters handle for-certain knowledge of malevolent spirits, probably deserved worse than the C- I awarded it. As a horror guy, I can be swayed by shows that show a little bit of effort in that regard, and as such the gruesome opening skin-graft sequence was the episode’s saving grace.

This week’s opening sequence? It ends with a jump-scare crash-cut the moment Yuko the yurei opens her eyes—huge shock, I know, considering how we’ve watched this same undead woman skulk around, eyes wide open, everywhere from Oregon to Guadalcanal. Is it possible to telegraph a moment you’ve already delivered to the audience in triplicate? Apparently so, if you’re as misbegotten a series as The Terror: Infamy.

Speaking once again as a horror guy, something about that moment really…well, almost insulted me. Are we supposed to be that stupid, we horror fans? Are we supposed to be scared just because what we’re being shown has assumed the scare-shape of a moment that’s frightened us before in other, better work? The unexpected eye-opening resurrection beat is a bit that’s been done to death (no pun intended); are we supposed to jump out of sheer Pavlovian conditioning?

I no longer really care what we’re supposed to do, not in The Terror: Infamy’s case at any rate. Titled “My Sweet Boy,” the series’ eighth installment is a hodgepodge of moments that make no more artistic or narrative sense than expecting us to be scared when the undead character reveals that, yes, she is in fact still undead. It’s a trite, lazy, condescending mess from start to finish.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

As if a giant clamshell washed ashore and birthed it nude and radiant from my mind’s own womb, this week’s episode of Succession felt like it was crafted to illustrate my argument that the show’s blend comedy and drama is fundamentally unworkable by the gods themselves. It’s an hour-length demonstration of how going for the cheap and easy laugh can neuter sociopolitical critique and reduce deft character work to hamfisted about-faces a daytime soap would look down on.

[…]

Anyway, I’m sure Kendall’s stupid rap is the toast of Twitter, right up there with the joke about j-school grads writing clickbait (“Ten Reasons Why You’re Never Getting Paid”) and a brief mention of the Democratic Socialists of America. In terms of middling political shows, Succession is The West Wing for people who’ve tweeted about how much they dislike The West Wing, and it just aired its answer to “The Jackal.” Tweet away.

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

In a way, this episode feels like “The Affair” mourning its departed stars. Seeing Joshua Jackson’s open, soulful face as Cole in flashbacks; hearing Ruth Wilson’s ragged, bottomed-out voice as Alison in voice-over; watching Joanie wrestle with her memories of both parents as if those memories were living things she must defeat in order to survive … all of it draws attention to the enormity of the contribution those actors and their characters made to the show, and the void left in their wake. After half a season of the Solloways and their circle of lovers, friends and family, the Lockharts finally get their due, and it’s long overdue.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair, which I suppose is the one where I realized how much I miss Alison and Cole and how shaky I am on Joanie as a replacement, for the New York Times.

“Your people made this mess. Now you gotta live with it.” Admit it: When you first sat down to watch The Terror: Infamy, billed as a historical horror story set in World War II–era internment camps for Japanese Americans, you didn’t expect the show’s thesis statement to come from the narcissistic bigot who serves as camp commandant. But there’s really no way around it. Major Bowen’s assessment of the evil presence stalking the camp is entirely accurate. Yuko the yurei is not the product of American jingoism, springing instead from the superstitions and beliefs of the Japanese community she menaces. I don’t think the makers of this show set out to imply that these poor people brought it on themselves, but how can the work they’ve produced be read any other way?

I reviewed the latest misfiring episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

Doesn’t this get tiresome for people other than me? Like, don’t you want a little more variety in your comedy-drama hybrid than fucking dick jokes an average of once every ten minutes like clockwork? Is that really and truly the only way the venality and machismo of the ultra-rich can be conveyed via humor? Dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick? (“How many dicks is that?” “A lot.”)

I reviewed episode seven of Succession Season 2 for Decider.

I’ve got my media-consumption hands full. I’m a full-time freelance critic who spends pretty much every free moment watching some show or movie or listening to some album or reading some comic I’m getting paid to write about. I’m a parent of two kids who have their own faves, for which I come along for the ride. My partner, the smartest person I’ve ever met, is a cartoonist and aesthete, adding another set of artistic reference points for me to follow. I don’t watch “real” sports, admittedly, but I play the occasional video game while high, and I think that counts.

Which is why I can tell you without fear of contradiction that wrestling — freaking professional wrestling — is as exciting and engrossing and life-affirming and generally excellent as all of the above. I enjoy it with a purity I didn’t think possible. I think you might, too. Because here’s the thing about being a wrestling fan today: 20 years’ worth of advances in technology, representation, and pure athleticism have made the sport smarter, better, and more fun than ever before.

I wrote about why this is such a great time to get into wrestling for Vulture. This piece was months in the making and means the world to me. I hope you like it, and if you like it I hope you share it!

Perhaps by now you’ve seen the problem with all this: The allegory at work here is an absolute muddle. The prisoners in this internment camp are being stalked not by some punishing avatar of the crimes of American empire or even those Imperial Japan, but by…a spiritual representation of their own community’s small-mindedness and provincialism, derived from their own mythology and belief system. Horror logic does not have a strict one-to-one relationship with reality—and you shouldn’t trust any polemical horror story that does—but essentially, they brought this particular horror on themselves. Why set the story in an internment camp when you run the risk, unintentional but still very much a factor, of implying that internment is punishment for some original sin?

Indeed, by divorcing the central supernatural premise so totally from the show’s sociopolitical framework, The Terror: Infamy effectively argues itself right out of its historical context. After all, had Japanese Americans never been rounded up and held in concentration camps, wouldn’t Yuko still have risen from the grave to seek Chester and extract revenge against those who wronged her? She’d be just as much the ghost of his suicidal mother if the war never broke out and they were all back home on Terminal Island happily fishing, or even if they’d been permitted to get on board with the war effort like every other American subculture instead of being treated like the enemy within. Why bother with the internment camp setting at all?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club. Despite showing some life in the supernatural department, it’s a mess.

This morning I appeared live of SiriusXM Volume‘s Feedback to talk about the Do’s and Don’ts of Needle-drops with hosts Lori Majewski and Jim Shearer. If I find a way to listen to it online I’ll let you know!

As satire, this is pretty thin gruel. Succession has precisely one target audience: The kind of people who know enough about what Aspen and Davos are to want to make fun of them, but who are never going to be at any risk of actually attending them. Perhaps you’ve seen these people all the way up and down your Twitter feed. Perhaps you are one of these people! If so, pat yourself on the back, because someone finally invited you to see how the other half lives. God, look at these assholes, amirite? Pass the vape pen.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Succession, which was actually better than most despite my continued reservations about its overall quality, for Decider.