The emotional climax of Vinyl‘s first season is the performance of a fake punk band fronted by the son of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall. Songs by the Stooges and the MC5 — bands that did the Nasty Bits’ pseudo-proto-punk better, and years before the fact, IRL — bookend it on the soundtrack. The New York Dolls watch from the side of the stage, beaming with approval even though their very real, and also superior, music kicked off the season by literally tearing the house down. The individual members of the Ramones are in the audience, apparently so impressed that they go out and form a band, the way the Sex Pistols’ 1976 gig in Manchester begat Joy Division, the Buzzcocks, the Fall, and the Smiths (and, uh, Simply Red). The concert ends when the police shut it down on obscenity charges, like a Jim Morrison reboot. It’s supposed to be the second coming of pure rock and roll and the salvation of American Century — excuse us, Alibi Records; instead, it comes off like a needle scratch.

I reviewed the season finale of Vinyl, a huge disappointment, for Rolling Stone.

“Ring Around the Rosie” is not about the bubonic plague. It’s not a song invented by medieval children about carrying posies to ward off infection, or about how the disease’s rash takes the form of a rosy red ring, or in which “ashes to ashes” is a corruption of the “ah-choo” sound of sneezing, or in “we all fall down” refers to death. The idea that it is is pure fabrication, an urban legend spread around by people who get a thrill out of inserting fake-deep, phony-dark meaning into entertainment for children. So naturally, it’s the perfect chunk of horseshit for Fear the Walking Dead.

Fear presents the fake factoid with a straight face in this week’s episode — actually named “We All Fall Down,” for god’s sake — as a way a doomed little girl to get schooled by sadder, wiser teenager Alicia, despite the fact that the Snopes page debunking the claim is “Ring Around the Rosie”’s second fucking google hit. I never thought I’d tell a show as tryhard as FtWD to try harder, but seriously, Fear writers, Let Me Google That For You.

I reviewed last night’s Fear the Walking Dead for Decider. What a contemptible show.

The way some people talk and write about The Americans, it’s like they’d never listened to New Wave or had sex until Elizabeth & Philip Jennings did. This is a great show, one of the best shows, and there’s no question its astute pop-music cues and explicit sex scenes factor prominently into that. But is the combination of Yaz and oral really all that exotic? Jeez, just put the kids to bed early and put on some Berlin already. It’s the grim morality play, not the Big ’80s hits and the cowgirl position, that are irreproducible elsewhere.

This, I suppose, is my way of saying that the desperate “Under Pressure”–soundtracked fuckfest that concluded “Clark’s Place,” last night’s episode, left me a bit deflated. This is not entirely The Americans’ fault: Fear the Walking Dead shit the bed so badly with its try-hard use of “Five Years” during last weekend’s season premiere that David Bowie is going to be very difficult to enjoy on any other series for quite some time, especially in light of the likelihood that the late genius’s catalogue will be every TV show’s go-to for EMOTIONAL RESONANCE for the rest of the year. I can’t lay that at the show’s feet, any more than I can in good conscience protest that the lyrics were, to use the single worst phrase in any TV critic’s vocabulary, “too on-the-nose” — not after The People v. O.J. Simpson proved time and time again that when it comes to period-appropriate pop, blunt can be beautiful.

No, in this case, the problem is unique to the song itself, I think. Simply put, “Under Pressure” is so perfect, such a marvelous showcase of both Bowie and Queen’s equally sorely missed Freddie Mercury, that an intensely personal relationship and a set of associations with the track are almost impossible not to form. Invested though I may be in Philip, Elizabeth, Stan, Martha, Paige, and the rest of the gang, I’ve also drummed along on my car steering wheel to the “Can’t we give ourselves one more chance?” so hard and so often that my hands can feel the sense-memory as I type this; the emotions it brings up can’t help but drown out the ones the story demands. A strategically deployed anthem can be a knockout blow on a show, as it was last season with Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain,” for instance, or on Mad Men when Don Draper listened to “Tomorrow Never Knows” like he was trying to decode a message from an alien culture. (Which, in effect, he was.) In this case, though, the song overwhelmed the sequence whose spine it provided, Keri Russell’s bare ass be damned.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Americans for the New York Observer. I think I write well about this show, for whatever that’s worth, same way I thought I wrote well about Downton Abbey.

In the immortal words of Drake, “this ain’t what she meant when she told you to open up more.” Throughout tonight’s episode of Empire (“The Tameness of a Wolf” — what is this, Game of Thrones?), Lucious Lyon has been prepping a music video that will tell his true life story, warts and all. This includes the childhood trauma he’s kept secret: the abuse he suffered at the hands of his bipolar mother, who shot herself in front of him over what she’d done. Proud of her ex’s honesty, Cookie screens a rough cut for her whole family at her birthday party. But instead of bonding them, it blows them apart. Andre explodes, lambasting his dad for hiding his grandmother’s illness — the knowledge of which could have helped him cope with his own. His father responds by calling both grandmother and son embarrassments. When it comes to being a bastard, psychiatry has yet to devise an effective treatment.

I reviewed this week’s Empire for Rolling Stone.

The parable of the Good Samaritan is in effect our culture’s first tale of AAA roadside assistance. After several more respectable types pass by a man who’s been mugged and left to die by the side of the road, a Samaritan, seen as an outcast demographic by Christ’s audience, stops to rescue him. Tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul is a rare case in which a Good Samaritan is true to his namesake. Nacho, Mike’s man in the cartel, uses the moniker to describe the nameless do-gooder who pulled over and came to the aid of the trucker and drug courier Mike Ehrmantraut hijacked and hogtied on a remote stretch of highway. For his good deed, he gets killed and buried out there, so that the cops Mike was counting on investigating the Salamanca outfit won’t be alerted to the hijacking. Do right and suffer for it? Hmmm. Put aside the homemade spike strip Mike pulls across the road like a snake-charmer to stop the truck—there may be another, more biblical reason this episode is called “Nailed.”

I reviewed this week’s tight, grim episode of Better Call Saul for the New York Observer.

From the Nasty Bits’ lips (literally) to God and the writers’ ears: It’s always a great idea to place Jamie Vine at the center of the action. Juno Temple’s ambitious A&R up-and-comer is one of the series’ most vibrant players: living on the edge, ears and eyes open to new experiences but nostrils mostly closed to them. And since no good Vinyl character comes without a signature Seventies look, don’t forget her incredible hairstyle (her face seems to be poking through a blonde waterfall). She’s the “Rock and Roll Queen” that gave tonight’s episode its title, if the Mott the Hoople song that soundtracks her MMF threesome with Kip Stevens and his guitarist Alex is any indication. It’s her self-possession and confidence that turned what could have been a dreary “girl comes between the boys in the band” storyline—the exact one predicted by a furious Andrea Zito when she discovers both Jamie and CeCe are sleeping with American Century acts — into a surprising, spontaneous, sexy scene. Now that’s what I call conflict resolution!

I reviewed last weekend’s Vinyl for Rolling Stone.

They called it Fear the Walking Dead because The Walking Dead was taken and Sad-Faced People Walking Into and Out of Rooms on a Boat for an Hour was too long for twitter. But make no mistake: Sad-faced people walking into and out of rooms on a boat for an hour was precisely what “Monster,” the premiere of FtWD Season Two, delivered. Sure, there were zombies on the beach at the beginning and zombies in the ocean at the end, but for the most part, there were unhappy, underwritten characters, played by actors who treat their presence on the show like a trip to the county courthouse to dispute a parking ticket, entering the places where other such characters are, having a desultory conversation about mercy or family or safety or bravery or some shit, then leaving again. This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a snoozer.

For my sins, I’m covering Fear the Walking Dead for Decider again this season. Here’s my review of the season premiere.

“What have I done wrong?” Bobby Axelrod asks Chuck Rhoades during their season-ending dick-measuring contest. “Really? Except make money. Succeed.” Anticipating the obvious response, he continues, “All these rules and regulations? Arbitrary. Chalked up by politicians for their own ends.” Perhaps he’s right. I mean, I didn’t think that a TV show could get away with stealing the climax of one of the greatest thrillers ever made simply by naming the episode in question after it. But that was before I saw “The Conversation,” the finale of Billions’ first season, which ends in exactly the same way Francis Ford Coppola’s classic story of espionage and paranoia did: with a guy tearing his place apart down to the baseboards and wiring, looking for a bug that isn’t there. Is there a rule that says it’s not cheating if you admit it? Alright, alright, maybe you can get away with calling this whole thing “homage,” but the brazenness of the episode title is just…well, it’s like Bobby Axelrod buying that gigantic mansion in the pilot, just daring Rhoades to take a run at him. All I know is that if chutzpah is a crime, Billions is guilty as charged.

I reviewed the season finale of Billions for the New York Observer. The show toughened up toward the end, but given the talent involved it’s hard to see it as anything but a disappointment.

It’s musical, it’s political, it’s packed with enough soap-opera outrageousness to make The Young and the Restless look like a work of gritty realism — all of this is true about Empire. But don’t overlook the secret weapon in its entertainment arsenal: It’s funny as hell. Tonight’s episode — “A Rose by Any Other Name” — may be named after a line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, but it’s more concerned with comedy than poetry, and all the better for it.

And as always, Cookie Lyon is the Empire’s First Lady of Shade, and this episode contains two of her Best. Insults. Ever. She calls her rival for the throne, Naomi Campbell’s scheming Camilla Marks-Whiteman, “Ol’ Resting Bitchface” — far be it from us to resting-bitchface-shame, but that’s pretty good. Later, when Jamal complains that estranged patriarch Lucious is spreading the word that he’d slept with a woman, costing him the support of the LGBTQ community, the Lyon Queen says “We all know your father is a tampon.” Problematic? Yeah. Hilarious? You bet your ass. When she tells lawyer Thirsty Rawlings, “Stop wearing your granddaddy’s suits,” he gets off relatively easy.

I reviewed last night’s Empire for Rolling Stone.

Elizabeth Jennings dreams of death. As she lies in bed, burning with fever from an adverse reaction to chloramphenicol, the powerful antibiotic that gave last night’s episode of The Americans its title, her mind takes her back to her childhood in the Soviet Union. She’s tending to her late mother, suffering from her own early brush with mortality in the form of tuberculosis. The woman gives her daughter instructions on what to do if she dies, though in reality her death is still decades away. When Elizabeth awakens, she’s determined to give her own daughter the same gift her mother gave her, at least according to their liaisons at the Centre: the knowledge that she died loving her child. If the Centre goes through with the plan to murder Pastor Tim and his wife Alice, their own daughter, Paige, will never forgive them, never understand that the love they say they feel for her is real and not a Soviet mind game. After all they’ve put her through, isn’t sparing her that the last they can do?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Americans for the New York Observer. I’m proud of this piece.

SPOILER ALERT

A superhero story is only as good as its villain. Actually, pretty much any genre work based on conflict with a “villain” is subject to this same dependency. The X-Men didn’t take off as a concept for 15 years or so, until writer Chris Claremont and artists Dave Cockrum and John Byrne beefed up Magneto as their archnemesis and transformed leading lady Jean Grey, aka “Marvel Girl,” into the godlike Dark Phoenix. Once Lost cycled through its initial season of nonstop mystery and frustrated viewers with its Schrodinger’s Hatch, the introduction of Benjamin Linus midway through the second season sustained the show for years to come. And if you wanna get highfalutin about it, where would the great religious works — or the great religions themselves — be without Satan? Paradise Maintained just doesn’t have that same ring to it, you know?

In general, this principle has served Daredevil very well. Its first season was marked by an all-time-great character-meets-performer act of villain creation in the person of Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk; its climax was driven by putting these two completely incompatible yet equally compelling figures together in an alley and having them pound on each other until one of them stopped moving and the other was left standing. Season Two flipped the script by using DD’s fellow vigilantes as villains, with the Punisher, Elektra, and Stick’s unrepentant lethality driving Matt Murdock apart from his friends, his firm, and his entire normal life as he battled either to stop or save them.

But with Frank Castle cut free from the storyline that bound him to Murdock, Nelson, and Page and both Elektra and Stick firmly in pocket, these threats are neutralized, dramatically speaking. That left Daredevil to battle the faceless horde known as the Hand and its leader, the physically powerful but emotionally inert Nobu, for the season’s grand finale. And that made “A Cold Day in Hell’s Kitchen,” the Season Two finale, a chilly farewell.

I was left a little flat by the final episode of Daredevil Season Two, which I reviewed for Decider. That said, it’s still the best live-action superhero adaptation in nearly three decades.

Did Larysa Kondracki just have her Cary Fukunaga moment? The director of “Fifi,” last night’s Better Call Saul, opened the episode with a single four-minute-plus shot that swirled and soared around a border crossing and the drug-courier truck attempting to pass through it every bit as complex and stunning as the multi-minute gang shootout that made Fukunaga a superstar on True Detective. But that famous sequence ended its episode. This was one was merely the beginning of an hour of some of the most carefully composed, strikingly shot, drop-dead gorgeous television of the year. With frequent BCS cinematographer and Breaking Bad veteran Arthur Albert riding shotgun, Kondracki crafted a visual achievement to rival anything on either of those shows—or Mr. Robot, Hannibal, and any other compositionally audacious series of recent vintage you’d care to name. Forget Jimmy McGill and Kim Wexler: Larysa Kondracki should be the one setting up her own shingle.

I reviewed this week’s simply extraordinary Better Call Saul for the New York Observer. I really dug deep into this one and I hope you like it.

SPOILER ALERT

Both of the ultraviolent vigilantes at the center of this season’s dueling narratives, the Punisher and Elektra, reached a point at which they could decide to become the cold-blooded killers people said they were, or figure out another way to fight. Frank Castle chose what was behind door number one, murdering his mentor-turned-enemy and seizing his arsenal of military-grade weaponry for his own. “If you do this,” Karen had warned him, “you are the monster they say you are.” Well, that settles that.

In fact, Frank takes the metaphor a step further. “You’re dead to me,” Karen shouts in dismay when it becomes apparent he plans to kill Schoonover for his role in the gang shootout that (coincidentally? it’s unclear) wiped out the family of his former subordinate. “I’m already dead,” Castle responds, allegorically identifying himself with both the grim reaper his superhero costume evokes and even with zombie-like warriors of the Hand, who pursue their bloody quest for domination from beyond the grave. Frank Castle can relate. The whole sequence is shot like a cabin-in-the-woods horror movie, leaving Karen as the “final girl” who survives the killer’s rampage.

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

The Axe is losing his edge. In the opening minutes of “Magical Thinking,” last night’s episode of Billions, Bobby Axelrod goes against the advice of every analyst in his employ and hangs on to a stock he thinks is a sure thing to explode—only for it to collapse completely, taking upwards of a billion of Axe Capital’s dollars with it. The opportunity to make a smart move and keep his company on the right track was right there, and he blew it. When you compare last week’s top-to-bottom success of an episode to this week’s far spottier installment, you can’t help but wonder if Billions just did the same. The scope, structural complexity, high emotional stakes, and game-changing character revelations it had suddenly proven itself capable of pulling off are gone, in favor of a meandering long dull night of the soul.

I reviewed this week’s frustrating Billions for the New York Observer.

It’s the golden rule of cool: The more you try, the less you are. Should Vinyl ever take that lesson to heart, we might have a hell of a show on our hands. The fact is that when its characters are sagging rather than swaggering, losing rather than boozing — that’s when it’s at its most watchable.

Take the opening scene of tonight’s episode, entitled “E.A.B.” To the (highly expensive to license) tune of the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun,”Richie, Zak, and Skip walk into a bank in slow motion, where they try and fail to get a loan. It’s a funny, charming sequence, taking full advantage of actors Bobby Cannavale, Ray Romano, and J.C. MacKenzie’s sad-sack faces, their perfect period clothing and hair, and their natural Three Stooges interplay. In essence: When its characters fail, Vinyl works.

I reviewed this weekend’s Vinyl for Rolling Stone.

Eleven episodes deep into the season and with only two more to go, Daredevil’s plotlines are proliferating at an alarming rate. The Blacksmith, a sinister druglord I’d previously assumed to be just a McGuffin to keep the moving parts running, has now taken on central importance as both Daredevil and Punisher attempt to track him down. The Kingpin is in play, as is his old associate Madame Gao, who’s simultaneously battling the Blacksmith herself and issuing dire warnings about “the real threat” to the city. Said real threat is most likely the Hand, run by another former Fisk running buddy, Nobu, and his ninja army. They’re re-kidnapping brainwashed teens, murdering nurses, and fighting Daredevil, who is also busy fighting Gao’s men, the Blacksmith’s men, and the Punisher. Some mysterious person, likely the Blacksmith but yet to be confirmed as such, is murdering people and framing Frank Castle for it, including the district attorney and medical examiner who covered up the government’s involvement in the shootout between the Mexicans, the Irish, and the bikers, orchestrated by the Blacksmith and responsible for the deaths of Castle’s family. Karen Page is another of their would-be victims, though she’s now been saved twice by the Punisher. Matt’s other ex-girlfriend, Elektra, is similarly the survivor of a hit ordered by her and Matt’s old mentor Stick, who is also fighting the Hand. She’s now tracking him down to kill him, a confrontation Daredevil is racing to stop. Also Karen Page got a new job as an investigator for the Daily Bulletin, Claire Temple quit her job after the Hand bought off her hospital, and Foggy Nelson got a job offer at the law offices of Jeryn Hogarth from Jessica Jones from his sexy ex-girlfriend. Does that about cover it?

So it’s a testament to Daredevil and to this episode, “.380,” that the chaos feels planned — that it’s Daredevil’s world, not his show, spinning out of control.

I reviewed episode 11 of Daredevil Season Two for Decider.

My favorite moment of this week’s The Americans was silent. Told that she’s been found guilty, that the only question is whether she’ll survive her punishment, triple-crossed triple-agent Nina is handed a letter written on her behalf by Anton Baklanov, the kidnapped scientist she was instructed to monitor but befriended instead, risking her life and that of her estranged but supportive husband to help him make contact with his son. We don’t know what it says, don’t even see the writing on it, let alone have it translated by subtitles or read aloud by Nina. But whatever it is, in that grey room, in her grey prison clothes, it makes her smile. Moments of happiness are so few and far between in the ironically optimistically titled “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow,” last night’s episode—the next closest things were Paige Jennings watching her oblivious brother Henry play video games, Stan Beeman figuring out that Martha Hanson is the mole in his office, and Agent Aderholt agreeing to help him figure it out; none of these characters have much happiness in store if things proceed in their current direction—that this has the impact of an explosion.

I reviewed last week’s The Americans for the New York Observer.

It’s only been four months since Fox’s hit show aired its “fall finale” before breaking for the winter — never mind that it feels more like four years, especially if you’ve been following the presidential primary season. The campaign trail’s thorny issues of race, class, sex, and gender have fueled a soap opera beyond series creators Lee Daniels and Danny Strong’s wildest imaginings, which makes the return of this primetime juggernaut feel oddly anticlimactic and understated. Annika pushed a pregnant Rhonda down the stairs? Donald Trump’s threatening riots if he doesn’t win the Republican nomination. Even for this ridiculous country, the outrageous-behavior bar has been raised considerably.

So does tonight’s episode — “Death Will Have His Due” (love, love, love these Empire titles) — stand its ground amid the shifting landscape? More or less, and largely by simply sidestepping hot-button issues entirely. While the show has traditionally drawn tremendous strength and displayed serious chops by sandwiching nuanced, morally and ethically complex social topics between big slices of high-camp cheese, the mid-season premiere keeps the action focused almost entirely on the business and its personal, rather than political, fallout. As such, it’s a fun hour for reuniting with your old friends (and frienemies), but pretty much a placeholder in all other aspects.

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

Daredevil is the only superhero show that matters.

I explain why Daredevil is the best there is at what it does for Decider.

Of all the things that “Seven Minutes in Heaven,” the ninth episode of Daredevil’s second season, does well, restaging the sensational hallway fight from Season One with the Punisher as its protagonist may be the smartest. Nothing drives home the moral, philosophical, tactical, and phyiscal differences between the two vigilantes quite like watching each of them tear through a small army of opponents in an enclosed space: With Daredevil, the worst that happens is that one of his foes gets beaned with a flying microwave oven; with Punisher, dudes get their eyeballs gouged out. As if to make the point that this fight scene reveals who Frank Castle really is even clearer, the sequence ends with an ersatz Punisher skull logo emblazoned on the man’s chest. It’s red on white rather than white on black, but I think we get the picture.

I reviewed episode nine of Daredevil season two for Decider.