Never let it be said that Succession doesn’t know its audience. Effusively chattered about by New York’s downwardly mobile professional media chatterers, the series this week served up an inside look at its fictional BuzzFeed/Gawker equivalent, “Vaulter.” (The company name doubled as the episode title.)

The fake headlines generated in the storyline about the gutting of a once-promising new media company display the kind of laser-focused contempt that the phrase “it takes one to know one” is meant to cover; whoever came up with “Meet the World’s Richest People Trafficker (He’s a Surprisingly Nice Guy),” “5 Reasons Why Drinking Milk on the Toilet Is Kind of a Game-Changer,” and “Is Every Taylor Swift Song Secretly Marxist?” has a devotée’s, or perhaps even a veteran’s, familiarity with the milieu.

[…]

The thing about the Vaulter storyline is that all the jokes are the obvious ones if you follow the media business at all. Clickbait, SEO, Facebook algorithm changes, unionization, almond milk in the cafeteria, a lot of good-looking twentysomethings with glasses, pivot to video, middle-class marxism, union busting … yes yes, we all get it.

What I don’t get is why jokes so accurate they barely qualify as jokes require such a slovenly wind-up. The looseness of Succession—the improvisatory stop-start feel of the dialogue with all its repetitions and “um”s and “yeah”s, the amount of time spent watching people just walk into rooms, the handheld shakicam and its innate inability to stay steady for long—better befits more nuanced material, where giving the audience the time and freedom to interpret and focus as they will is a necessary component to the filmmaking. Here it just feels…lazy. Like, all this just to say that rich people fuck over the poor(er) people who work for them, especially in digital news media? Billions would do this in a two-sentence exchange between Wags and Dollar Bill and have plenty of room left over for Paul Giamatti in a bondage harness. (Billions is also way too tightly written a show to generate joke headlines like the above, which as funny as they are undercut the vital-to-the-story notion that this might be a business worth saving.)

I wrote about Succession‘s pander-fest of an episode this week for Decider.

The killer is already inside the house. The woman doesn’t know it yet. She puts down her groceries and calls out, but only the sinister sound of Roxy Music’s nightmarish song “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” can be heard in response.

That, and the sound of a door shaking under the strain of a rope tied to the knob.

She makes her way down the hall, calling out “Honey?” She sees the door shake. She opens it, and a man collapses forward—rope around his throat, a cheap kewpie-doll mask on his face, a woman’s slip on his body.

She runs away, gasping, in slow motion. He calls after her, saying he was just playing around. He’s not her killer, then. He’s her husband.

This is how Mindhunter returns after nearly two years—though only a week has passed in the world of the show. Right away we see the series, created by Joe Penhall and directed here by David Fincher, is leaning into its strengths.

Season One was an aggressively mixed bag, its deeply compelling serial-killer scenes interspersed with interpersonal drama that you’d need a Behavior Science Unit to try and make sense of. So opening things up with a visit to the BTK Killer, who for the first time is brought to the attention of the pioneering agents of the BSU later in the episode, makes sense.

What’s exciting is how the interpersonal stuff seems to have played catch-up during the time off. For the first time, Holt McAllany’s Agent Bill Tench, Jonathan Groff’s Agent Holden Ford, and Anna Torv’s Dr. Wendy Carr all feel like thoughtfully drawn characters whose problems, and responses to those problems, are those of real people, not just styrofoam packing peanuts shoved into the story at random to pad out the time between visits to psychopaths.

I’m covering Mindhunter again for Decider this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a step in the right direction.

Setting a ghost story against the backdrop of a major historical atrocity is a high-risk, high-reward proposition. As to the risk, no one can fault the filmmakers for a failure to take this troubling subject seriously, even personally. Promotional materials for the show indicate that lead actor Derek Mio’s grandfather was imprisoned at Manzanar, as was director Lily Mariye’s. Her grandfather died there, while her father’s family was killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s grandfather survived the blast. And supporting actor George Takei, who also serves as a consultant to the show, was interned in two camps himself. So I believe the show is interested in chronicling and decrying this historical crime in and of itself, not merely as a backdrop for J-horror shenanigans, nor even as an easy allegory for the present-day horrors of the Trump Administration’s immigrant gulags.

But good intentions only get you so far. As a work of horror filmmaking, this doesn’t go very far at all.

I’m covering the new season of the anthology show The Terror, titled The Terror: Infamy, for the AV Club, starting with my review of the premiere. It’s not promising.

Ah yes, television, that escapist medium we turn to for respite from the real world. Instead of watching the rich and powerful loot everyone else and getting sad about it, we can switch on Succession to watch the rich and powerful loot everyone else and have a few laughs!

Or try to, anyway. After a buzzworthy first season (the reach of which far exceeded its grasp), Succession returns for another look at the life of Rupert Murdoch stand-in Logan Roy (Brian Cox), his chief failson and would-be successor Kendall (Jeremy Strong), and the rest of their relatives and retinue. The premiere, titled “The Summer Palace” after the very smelly mansion in which much of it takes place (we’ll get to that), is the kind of thing you’ll like a lot if you liked this kind of thing the last time around. Skeptics, and I’ll cop to being one, will find the same frustrations.

I’m covering Succession for Decider again this year, starting with my review of the season premiere.

The mesmeric qualities of Refn’s filmmaking make taking in all of this cacophonous and terrifying information a leisurely, sensual matter. The sparse dialogue and the long stretches of silence surrounding it make the monologues outlining the fascist mindset stand out like towering obelisks of ideology. The performances of the five leading actors are masterful in their vagueness, blank screens against which we can project our own hopes, fears, and lusts. The result is a show for our time. It is perhaps the show of our time.

I reviewed the season finale of Too Old to Die Young for Decider. (I’m gonna be playing some catch-up on old links, so these descriptions are gonna be pretty no-nonsense. But this was a hell of a show, I’ll say that!)

Titled “The Empress,” presumably in reference to Yaritza though quite possibly in reference to Diana—and it seems like a lot will be riding on the answer to this riddle in the finale—the penultimate episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s masterpiece of surrealist noir is less an advancement of the plot than an escalation, or the promise of one to come.

I reviewed episode nine of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Aside from Fargo Season Three and David Thewlis’s hideously acquisitive character V.M. Varga, Too Old to Die Young is the only show I personally have seen that responds to the Trump era with appropriate and unvarnished disgust and fury. In the person of Martin’s openly fascist colleagues on the Homicide squad (sample quotes from this episode: “DEMOCRACY’S MY BITCH! FAKE NEWS! JESUS!”) and Janey’s perverted billionaire father, this show identifies the enemy, hones in on the twin poles of their reactionary politics—a belief in the virtue of violence against the unclean and a belief that the vulnerable exist to be exploited, abused, and discarded, both of them privileges of the select—and creates narrative situations that alternately expose them for the monstrous cretins they are and punish them appropriately.

I reviewed episode eight of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

So, we have fascist, racist law enforcement officers who prey on children. We have a grotesque billionaire who declares, publicly and repeatedly, that he’s sexually attracted to his own daughter. And we have a tremendous explosion of horrific violence.

I dunno. Think there’s a connection to be made there? Think there’s a topical subtext to Too Old to Die Young‘s vicious, vacuous killers and their flimsy yet fanatical justifications for murder? Think there’s something about Janey’s dad that trumps his role in the story—something that connects him to the real world, and invites thoughts of not just punishment but retribution? Think there’s more going on here than just what shows up on the screen?

I reviewed episode seven of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Running through the plot in this much detail is kind of a must, given how little there is to say about what happens. Aside from the final scene, and everything that happened off camera before the events of the episode begin, and maybe the Janey encounter, there’s just not much there, there. But when a show is this accomplished, this confident, this unlike anything else on the air, it doesn’t matter what is there. The journey is at least half the fun. Like Jesus’s Mama Magdalena, Too Old to Die Young is simply an acquired taste.

I reviewed episode six of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

The final episode of Dark‘s relentlessly gripping second season is entitled “Endings and Beginnings,” a reversal of the season premiere’s title “Beginnings and Endings.” And believe me, that cheap symmetry is the only cheap thing about it. Whether you’re talking about Stranger Things on Netflix, Westworld on HBO, or even the letdown of (sigh) Mr. Robot Season 3 on USA, Dark is the science fiction show to beat. Its take on its sci-fi concept is wholly original. Its grasp on its complex story is sure. Its creation of characters worth caring about—not necessarily liking; there’s a difference, and it cuts in Dark’s favor—is unmatched. Its refusal to pull punches is glorious.

I reviewed the season finale of Dark Season Two for Decider.

This is how a time-travel story can be used as a metaphor—a barely disguised one at that—for how our own lives can feel like a closed system from which there can be no escape. It’s direct, it’s discomfiting, and it is very dark.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Dark Season Two for Decider.

From the opening montage to the closing scene, this is a tour de force episode of Dark. The everyday trials and tribulations of the adult and teenage characters are sexy and sad and often both. The Hannah/Ulrich/Katharina triangle of love, lust, friendship, and betrayal clicks in every respect. The beach scenes are funny and hot. The party is both sweet and, knowing what we know about the fates of everyone involved, brutal. Ben Frost’s music, particularly during the Martha/Jonas love scenes, is huge and rapturous, the way doomed young love feels.

And the meeting between Jonas and Michael is powerful and quietly crushing given its outcome. Actors Louis Hofmann, a truly extraordinary talent, and Sebastian Rudolph seem to pour themselves out all over the table where they sit and talk. What’s more, unlike the Ulrich/Mikkel material from the previous episode, the emotional impact of this father/son reunion isn’t hampered in the slightest by relying on sci-fi shenanigans to take place.

It feels like what it is: a son trying to save the man he loves most, a father trying to save the boy he loves most, and the both of them arriving at a decision over who must live and who must die. It takes the toughest decisions we must make as members of a family, as children and as parents, whether we’re ever actually forced to make them or whether they remain the stuff of troubling daydreams and what-ifs, and uses the science-fiction genre to probe that nerve as directly as possible. It does the same with falling in love, with the loss of virginity, with marital infidelity, with motherhood, with couplehood, with friendship. It’s reminiscent of “The Garveys at Their Best,” the standout episode from the first season of HBO’s The Leftovers—the episode that showed that series would become a classic. It’s dynamite. I’m glad it exists.

I reviewed episode six of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Adding an entire working theory of theology, theodicy, and the nature of the universe to, y’know, families in the German suburbs being torn apart by time travel, episode five of DarkSeason Two offers a lot to ponder, from plot to philosophy. It offers an eye-opening look at both the tactics and the worldview of Adam, the prime mover of Winden’s cross-generational “war” for control of time and the wormholes within it. Yet it muddies up some of the show’s more directly effective and affecting interpersonal elements.

I reviewed episode five of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Let us sing the praises of James Urbaniak, whose dark energy in “The Fool,” the riveting fifth episode of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s currently peerless crime drama, is powerful enough to fuel the goddamn Death Star.

I reviewed episode five of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

“The Travelers” brings us to the halfway point of Dark‘s strong second season, and the music of composer Ben Frost is our company on the journey. An experimentalist whose musical and geographical travels have taken him far and wide, and who’s spent time working with venerable avant-rock superproducers Brian Eno and Steve Albini (just don’t call them superproducers to their faces), Frost’s work in this episode is a sanity-testing tide basin of shrieks and thrums and tones of alarm. It’s reminiscent of Brian Reitzell’s confrontational work on Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal, or the collaborative soundscape produced by Angelo Badalamenti, Dean Hurley, and David Lynch on Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return. Not just sonically, either: Dark continues to make the case that it’s the best genre drama Netflix has put out yet. If it’s not on Hannibal‘s level, much less Twin Peaks‘s, it has no reason to be shy about standing in their company.

I reviewed episode four of Dark Season Two for Decider.

The fourth installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s extended meditation on the evil that men do is one of the most unnerving episodes of television in recent memory. I’d put it up there with any highlight you’d care to name from The Terror, The Act, Channel Zero, The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, and even the gut-churning war-crime climax of Game of Thrones.

I reviewed episode four of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

Time travel, kidnappings, cancer, nuclear apocalypse—yes, sure, all well and good. But for this review of Dark, I’d like to start out by showcasing some acting. That’s an advantage of having two or three different actors play every single character at different times in their lives, right? There’s a lot more acting to go around!

I don’t mean to make light of it, either. “Ghosts,” the third episode of the German Netflix drama’s second season, shows how important the cast is to making this crazy-on-paper project work. Following young, adult, and old versions of characters spread across a hundred-year timespan, often interacting with each other anachronistically and even starting whole new lives out of sync, is demanding work for the audience. Rooting that work in the happiness, sadness, and shame of the characters—making them people, not plot devices—is the secret of the show’s success.

I reviewed episode three of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Titled “The Hermit” after the corresponding card from the tarot (that’s where every episode gets its moniker), the third exquisite installment of Nicholas Winding Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young has only one thing wrong with it that I can see: It could have been longer.

I reviewed episode three of Too Old to Die Young for Decider.

As always, getting through the raw plot of the show takes up a lot of column inches. But don’t let it take up all the storage space your brain has allotted for the show. While the family tree is a maze of brambles and the timelines look like the tangle of wires connecting your TV to your Xbox, the emotions are recognizable and real. Feeling like you don’t really know the people who are supposed to love you; feeling like you’re trapped in a great cosmic fuck-up and the only way to be happy is to try to just ignore it; feeling powerless to stop oncoming tragedies both great and small—that’s the stuff this show is working with, the stuff it really cares about. It’s dark matter indeed.

I reviewed episode two of Dark Season Two for Decider.

Easily one of the most thematically ambitious dramas Netflix has produced (in any language), and certainly the most narratively complicated one, Dark has returned after a year and a half for a second season of sci-fi and sadness in the woody suburbs of Germany. It does so without making the slightest concession to the notion of jumping-on points for viewers coming to the second season fresh. This is not that kind of show. If you want to get the most out of Dark—if you want to get anything out of Dark—you’d better start from the beginning. This is a journey you have to follow every step of the way.

I reviewed the premiere of Dark Season Two on Netflix for Decider. It’s the network’s best show, give or take a Suburra: Blood on Rome. 

(NB: Descriptions in these link posts will be minimal due to me playing catch-up. I guess you’ll just have to go read the reviews!)