The Jimmy half of Better Call Saul is very good, sure. But the Mike half of Better Call Saul feels like the onset of a panic attack. You can feel it creeping up on you like have your back turned on a menacing stranger, one who’s tracked you down and is walking his way toward you, quiet and full of bad intent. Certainly that’s how I felt as I watched the final scene of “Rebecca,” this week’s episode. As Mike Ehrmantraut sat with his back to the door of his favorite diner, Hector Salamanca materialized from the debris where Breaking Bad left him to gently request that the ex-cop help get his nephew Tuco off the hook. Nothing overtly threatening about it, of course, no visible stick to go with the carrots of a kindly disposition and a bribe of $5,000. Tio Salamanca doesn’t even bat an eyelash when Mike parries back his blandishments with deadpan disinterest: “You see what I’m getting at?” “Not really.” “I would like for you to tell the police that the gun was yours.” “Would you.” No, all the menace comes from the implications of putting these two men, these two murderers, in close proximity. We know where their stories end up, but that does nothing to lessen the tension. Rather, our knowledge increases it, investing the current moment with our foreknowledge of all the awful moments to come.

I wrote about this week’s Better Call Saul, a very sophisticated hour of television, for the New York Observer.

Coincidentally or not, this was the first episode of Billions to feature dialogue I’ll remember after the closing credits roll. Hall to Axe when they uncover Pouch’s alleged treachery: “Don’t be surprised. On a long enough timeline, everyone you know will turn against you.” Chuck to Wendy, after she snaps at him for grousing about Axe: “Sometimes I wish I were your patient, because then maybe I would get a sympathetic ear every time I’m not my absolute best self 24 hours a day.” Chuck to Brian on framing an innocent man: “There are no innocent men. Not on Wall Street.” Alternately aphoristic and insightful, and occasionally both, a few more lines like these per episode would do wonders for Billions, which has been both smart (most of Chuck and Wendy’s discussions of their imperfect but happy partnership-of-equals marriage) and spectacularly stupid (that horrendous dogshit speech from early in the run) in dialogue-driven scenes.

Will it ever develop into a great show, though? I mean, who can say. There’s still something ersatz about it, perhaps because of how many cast members hail from other, better prestige-drama shows; Halt and Catch Fire and The Leftovers both grew enormously over time, but neither show had the supergroup cast that this one does, which makes its disappointments keener. But a few more episodes like this and the show will be too entertaining to be disappointed about.

I reviewed this week’s Billions, one of the season’s better episodes, for the New York Observer.

Five episodes into Vinyl’s initial spin and one thing is clear: This show hates Jethro Tull.

Remember a few episodes ago, when Richie Finestra got so incensed by the “Aqualung” impresarios’ flute-laden prog rock that he yanked the record off the turntable and smashed it over his knee? This week, merely presenting our antihero and his A&R right-hand man Julie with a group of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Ian Anderson renaissance-faire goobers was enough to get the Ivy League tryhard Clark (“I graduated from fucking Yale!”) demoted to sandwich gofer. Look, we believe Metallica should have won that Grammy 27 years ago too, but after the second season of Fargo used “Locomotive Breath” to score an amazing gang-war montage, this should all be water under the bridge. You’re really gonna listen to “Cross-Eyed Mary” and argue that these dudes were everything wrong with Seventies rock & roll, while Loggins & Messina walk free? Fight the real enemy, folks.

I reviewed this week’s Vinyl and defended Jethro Tull for Rolling Stone.

Mike, meanwhile, shuffled his way into a bonafide Breaking Bad prequel. Our first guest: Lawson, Deadwood actor Jim Beaver’s folksy and efficient gun dealer, years before selling Walter White his series-ending machine gun. His scene with Mike drops a major reveal—the old man’s a Vietnam vet—and is chilling for its casual, workaday vocabulary regarding machines designed only for killing. “Too much gun,” Mike worries about one particularly large rifle. “For most applications, I’d tend to agree,” Lawson replies, as if they’re discussing which iPhone model gets the most bang for the buck. The two men respect each other for their shared calm demeanor and knowledge of the trade; given that the trade is murder, the ease with which an ex-cop and veteran can pick it up doubles as political commentary.

I reviewed this week’s better-balanced Better Call Saul for the New York Observer.

In Frank Miller’s influential graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns, a lion-in-winter tale about an aging Batman’s final hurrah (until the sequels came out, anyway), the Caped Crusader’s trusty butler Alfred Pennyworth is faced with the grim task of destroying Wayne Manor and the Batcave so that the outlaw vigilante’s enemies cannot exploit them. As the bombs detonate and the whole complex collapses into the earth, a stroke fells the faithful servant simultaneously. The narration spells out what passes through Pennyworth’s mind in these final moments: “‘Of course,’ he thinks, as his head goes light. ‘How utterly proper.’”

Any resemblance between Downton Abbey and the Dark Knight is almost certainly coincidental. But there was indeed something utterly proper about the downfall of another devoted butler, conveniently occurring just as the show, if not the estate itself, shuffled off this mortal coil. Carson, the captain of the upstairs/downstairs ship and a far more ferocious guardian of its class system even than those who truly benefited from it, suddenly developed a tremor in his hand and ended his days as the head of the household. As symbolism goes, it’s a bit less brutal than Batman’s manservant dropping dead in the middle of burning his mansion to the ground, but it’s no less blunt. The old ways, those who practiced them, and the show that chronicled them, now must all step aside.

I reviewed the final episode of Downton Abbey, a show I treasure, for the New York Observer. It is likely the only such review to compare the show to The Dark Knight Returns.

Where are Chuck and Wendy Rhoades’ kids? They’re around after school, or so we’ve been told. Their paintings decorate the walls of the Rhoades’ kitchen. IMDB says they’ve been cast, which probably means we actually saw them for a scene or two already. But in an episode so focused on how the behavior and fortune of Bobby and Lara Axelrod affects their children, the on-screen absence of the Rhoades rugrats feels like a deliberate and pointed omission. For all that Chuck sees Bobby as a monster fucking the masses out of their just rewards, only one of those two men spends time with his family.

The question of “The Punch,” this week’s episode of Billions, is whether that difference actually makes a difference. Bobby begins the episode by tracking down and decking a neighbor who drove his children home from an arcade drunk, then spends the rest of the hour frantically trying to fend off both the legal ramifications and Lara’s attempts to stop spoiling them. Bobby wants them spoiled, wants them to enjoy the benefits of the carefree life he struggled to provide them, one neither he nor Lara experienced growing up. And while he’s embarrassed about his assault on the DUI dickhead, that’s outweighed by his love of being seen by his kids as a protector. Look no further than his midnight “rescue” of the boys from the tough-love outdoor camp Lara sent them to for proof of that. In that light, Axe’s ability to spend time with this children is hardly a blessing.

I reviewed this week’s family-focused episode of Billions, on which the characters remain distressingly opaque, for the New York Observer.

To be honest, not everything Vinyl does that falls outside the usual prestige-drama purview actually works. The frequent fantasy cutaways to late musical legends performing songs vaguely relevant to the characters’ state of mind — these things are already obvious from what we’ve just seen and stop the show dead in its tracks every time. Musically, they could just as easily be slipped into the soundtrack instead of unconvincingly staged by lookalikes in some celestial nightclub; unbelievable as this sounds, True Detective Season Two did it better. In the case of the many, many black R&B and soul singers these segments have featured: If the show (correctly) thinks they’re so important, maybe it should have been a show about them,and not about the obnoxious white guys who got rich off of their work. As it stands, there’s an uncomfortable touch of the “magical negro” trope to every time an African-American performer pops up to provide musical accompaniment to Richie and company’s innermost feelings.

And simply in terms of rock & roll fandom, there’s just something kind of off about these scenes. Vinyl‘s take on big-time music fans has generally been pretty tight — think of Richie and Zak trading childhood memories by the pool at his party — which makes this fundamentally misconceived device so frustrating. A good song can transport you to another place, but is that place ever an empty room with a lone, blindingly backlit performer? When you really connect to a song, it draws you in, weaves its way into your brain, becomes a part of who you are. It doesn’t leave you in the audience while the singer does their stuff. Maybe that’s why the most effective of these sequences involved Karen Carpenter, of all people: Besides the fact that there’s no icky race stuff in play there, her appearance melted directly into Devon’s life, singing in Mrs. Finestra’s car instead of in Rock Flashback Limbo. (By the way, the show’s respectful and admiring approach to the freaking Carpenters ought to leave people who complain about its supposed “rockism” with a lot of explaining to do. Sigh.)

I reviewed this week’s Vinyl for Rolling Stone. I actually liked it quite a bit, because it’s willing to buck tradition and be crazy rather than grim, but this was an aspect of the show I wanted to hash out.

Better Call Saul is two of the best shows on TV right now. One of them is a subtle, period workplace drama about a con man trying desperately to go straight but finding his old ways too lucrative to avoid employing in his new life too. The other is an ominous slow-burn thriller about a retired cop with the eyes of a Methuselah and the voice of a mausoleum door, slowly being drawn into a life of crime he’ll be better at than anything he was before, but which will inevitably destroy him, body and soul. If AMC put these two shows on back to back, it’d have a hell of a programming block on its hands. But if it ran the period workplace drama while some other network played the doom-laden quiet-man crime thriller in the same time slot…well, I know which one I’d DVR and which one I’d watch live.

I reviewed this week’s bifurcated Better Call Saul for the New York Observer.

Devon goes to visit her old friend Andy Warhol, with a silkscreen of herself in tow. As he shoots her with his new video camera, their playful banter turns serious when he realizes he’s being prodded to sign the painting so that she can sell it. The dance company she oversees up in Connecticut, the last vestige of her old bohemian lifestyle, needs the money. “I can get a brush and sign it. That way they’ll buy it,” he tells her as she chokes back tears, before adding a joke to put her at ease: “You want me to sign your dress? They’ll buy that too.”

It’s a killer scene for several reasons. One is John Cameron Mitchell ofHedwig and the Angry Inch fame, who plays the great pop-art painter. His Warhol, as others have pointed out, is an altogether warmer and more charming figure than the shock-topped zombie we’re accustomed to seeing in films. (Wouldn’t he have to be, given that his entire business model as a superstar artist was knowing everyone?) In Mitchell’s hands, the Pop Art godhead is a people person, immediately intuiting the real reason for Devon’s visit and becoming quietly defensive. Then when he senses how desperate she truly is, he responds by helping her out.

But the scene is a standout primarily for how it’s shot. Courtesy of the episode’s director, Mark Romanek — whose influential music videos include Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer,” Johnny Cash’s “Hurt,” and Jay Z’s “99 Problems”— we see Devon primarily through Warhol’s camera, via either a nearby video monitor or POV shots from behind the lens itself. The living, breathing woman is out of focus, as is her silkscreen simulacrum; even the picture on the monitor is grainy. Andy’s questions become more like an interrogation designed to draw the truth out; Devon’s responses read like a performance playing positivity toward the camera. The setup emphasizes the fluidity of what she’s saying, the reduction of a former Factory luminary to a blurry memory of what she used to be. It’s thoughtful, carefully considered work, both verbally complex and visually stunning.

I reviewed this week’s fine episode of Vinyl for Rolling Stone.

Better Call Saul has a Mike problem. Granted, this is what Marlo Stanfield from The Wire would refer to as “one of them good problems,” but a problem it remains. Simply put: No matter how thoughtfully composed the shots, no matter how refined the acting from the show’s cast of largely comic talents gone dramatic with excellent results, no matter how strong a character Jimmy McGill remains—when Jonathan Banks is on screen as Mike Ehrmantraut, there’s no one else you’d rather be watching.

I reviewed this week’s Better Call Saul for the New York Observer.

Matthew Goode’s performance does Henry no favors either. With the exception of his touching breakdown after the death of his friend in a car crash, he’s stuck on store-brand Young Hugh Grant mode, without the endearingly irritating stammer. His allegedly charming and irresistible character delivers lines like “I’m hot, I’m cold, I can barely breathe, and it’s all because of you” as if reading them from cue cards. Compare this to the quiet, aching intensity of Dan Stevens’s Matthew Crawley the night before his wedding to Mary, when he told her “I would never be happy with anyone else as long as you walked the earth”; the line exploded like an atom bomb of absolute devotion, not some half-assed ode to teenage twitterpation.

Most frustrating of all is the fact that none of this would have been necessary had Julian Fellowes simply spent the past three seasons taking the pieces he already had on hand and building toward their eventual assembly. In other words, it is madness, madness, that Tom and Mary never got together. I mean really, did no one involved with this production see this? Both characters lost their star-crossed spouses to sudden death at tragically young ages—when the actors playing them moved on for greener pastures, that is. In so doing, Dan Stevens and Jessica Brown Findlay gave Fellowes a gift he’d never have gotten had only one of them ankled the show: a symmetrical vacuum the surviving characters could easily, artfully fill. Sure, it would have been tough to swallow at first. But after this season especially, featuring scene after scene depicting Tom and Mary’s abiding friendship and respect—not to mention their explosive argument after she sabotages Edith’s engagement, overflowing with the kind of anger only people who truly love each other can generate—can anyone deny the chemistry was there? Yet the gift went unopened, the chemical reaction uninitiated. Fellowes had years to build them up, but instead we got Tony Gillingham and Miss Bunting and Henry freaking Talbot. Madness. Madness!

And yet! Frustrating though the conclusion to Mary’s completely theoretical grand romance with Henry may have been, it wasn’t enough to ruin what surrounded it: scene after scene of payoff for longstanding storylines, giving a sizeable segment of the cast their best material in literally years.

I reviewed last night’s big big big Downton Abbey for the New York Observer. I did not wind up where I thought I would with this one.

I almost never say this kind of thing, but I believe my writing on Downton Abbey is among my best. Check it out, maybe you will too.

To be blunt, why would Wendy do something so stupid? On a show full of “the smartest guy in the room”s, she may very well bethe smartest guy in any of the rooms, Bobby’s savant-like mastery of the market notwithstanding. Surely she can see that the last place she should be with the multibillionaire her federal attorney husband is trying to put behind bars is in a pool while in the nude. The most reasonable supposition is that she did it because the show needed her to, to provide Axe with the ammo he’ll need to fight Chuck off as the season progresses. If we’re being generous, though, you could see this not as a plot-hammer goof, but as a deliberate indictment. In this line of thinking, Wendy’s so keen on proving herself perfectly neutral, impossible to intimidate, and a better student of Axe and Chuck’s psyches than Axe and Chuck themselves that she doesn’t even see how idiotic what she’s doing really is. That’s certainly the kind of trap Axe, who’s legendary for always thinking like a dozen steps ahead of anyone else, would set for her. I just wish it didn’t feel like such an out-of-character misstep for her to fall for it.

I reviewed last night’s Billions for the New York Observer. Like, I get what they’re up to, but I don’t think it’s working.

Yes, it’s early yet, and maybe there will be more to these women revealed in future episodes. But it’s 2016, folks. Prestige drama’s “wife problem” is an issue of long standing, and giving the females in these bad boys’ lives something interesting to do — even if it’s constrained by the sexism of the time — is hardly asking the a writers’ room to split the atom. This show has enough faith in its musical message to allow us to laugh about it. Hopefully, it will display an equal commitment to its characters by taking all of them seriously.

This week’s Vinyl was a mixed bag, with a welcome sense of humor about Richie’s rock’n’roll salvation and a pro-forma lonely-wife storyline sitting uncomfortably side by side. I wrote about it for Rolling Stone.

Longtime friend of the blog Elana Levin and her cohost Brett Schenker invited me on their Graphic Policy Radio podcast to discuss the season finale of Jessica Jones, as well as the whole season itself. It was contentious and fun. (Spoiler Alert: I’m Officer Simpson’s Bad Fan.) Give it a listen!

Few prestige dramas since the term was coined have made as much use of the quiet as Better Call Saul, which returned last night with its Season Two premiere, “Switch.” Considering its status as the can’t-miss prequel to one of the era’s most explosive shows, Breaking Bad, this is something of a surprise. That series didn’t mind silence, of course, but it was always a silence freighted with the expectation of eventual explosion—the hiss of a fuse before the dynamite blows. Pretty much from the start, BCS co-creators and BB honchos Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould have dwelled in the other end of the dynamic range. Rather than recreate the rollercoaster rise and fall of Heisenberg in all its white-knuckle tension and tumult, they’ve been telling the story of Jimmy McGill’s transformation into Saul Goodman in half-muted slow motion. He’s a small man with small dreams, the kind that are shattered by harsh words and hopelessness rather than bombs and bullets. The tonal shift is is dramatic, and given how easy it would have been to cash in with Breaking Bad Part Deux–level mayhem (Fear the Walking Dead, anyone?), creatively courageous.

I reviewed the season premiere of Better Call Saul for the New York Observer, where I’ll be covering the show this year. I snuck my Top 10 TV Shows of 2015 in there too.

Sure, everyone does yeoman’s work in selling Henry Talbot’s supposed emotional connection to Mary, mostly by making the most of the emotions that emerge in the wake of the wreck. Actor Matthew Goode looks marvelously bottomed-out when next we see him—crouched near the track, smoking a cigarette, tear-lined eyes staring blankly, covered in soot. Michelle Dockery’s porcelain face can never really properly be described as “contorted,” but as Mary she widens her eyes and mouth into perfect black O’s of terror that slacken ever so slightly the moment she realizes it was poor Charlie, and not beloved Henry, who perished. “Do you know the worst thing?” she asks in horror to Tom Branson afterwards. “When they said it was Charlie and not Henry who was dead, I was glad! Think of that—I was glad!” Mary’s ability to self-indict for her coldness and callousness has always been one of her most compelling characteristics; here she’s turning it on herself in a way that simply isn’t fair, given how most anyone would involuntarily react under such circumstances, and it’s wrenching to behold.

But while her undue disgust with herself is as easy to parse as it is hard to endure, the devastation she ostensibly feels about the end of her relationship with Henry is impossible to connect with. Who is this guy, honestly? We’ve only ever seen him show up, be handsome and charming (or a reasonable facsimile thereof), and get psyched about cars. He’s a cipher, and no amount of late-night break-up phone calls can change that, let alone a bait-and-switch in which a minor character is sacrificed in order to fan the flames of Mary’s ardor.

If Downton is serious about matching Henry up with Mary by series’ end, this represents a tremendous dereliction of duty. Mary and Matthew had over two seasons of buildup before they finally tied the knot, during which time their romance was not only the central storyline of the show, but the symbolic representation of its entire old-versus-new theme. In the process of hashing out both the plot and the metaphor, the pair got so much screentime we couldn’t help but get to know them as well as any characters in the show. Henry remains a black hole, and if Mary falls for him for real, she’ll fall right into it and take the series along with her in the end.

I reviewed this week’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer. I like a lot of things about this show, but the forced romance between Mary and Henry is not one of them.

Billions appears to have gotten its first major problem, raunch for raunch’s sake, out of its system with this episode. The sex scene between Bobby and Lara is as hot as you’d expect a little afternoon delight in the pool involving Damian Lewis and Malin Akerman to be. Even a visit to a BDSM club by Chuck goes from a cheap fetish freak show to an illustration of his and Wendy’s very thought-through sexual dynamic when he not only calls her to confess that he’s there, but she also demands he stay on the line and walk her through what he sees, calling the shots the whole time. So that’s one distraction down.

Which brings us to a second, even bigger problem, which is that with said distraction gone, we’re left to realize how little there was to distract from. Simply put, who are these people? Five episodes in and Bobby Axelrod is just not that interesting a guy. He’s barely crooked enough to qualify as a villain. His taste in everything is bland and bro-ish (I get that trying to watch Citizen Kane after his rock-singer friend suggested it because that’s the sort of thing people like him do but then not being able to finish it is supposed to say something about who this guy is, and it does: It says that he’s shallow and boring, all too well.) His primary demon seems to be loving his job making money hand over fist too much, which is like asking us to worry about a baker whose donuts are too goddamn delicious.

I reviewed this week’s episodes of Billions for the New York Observer. Tough to be interested in these characters.

Even a record that’s a start-to-finish stone classic has one or two standout tracks that sum up the whole blessed thing: your “Stairway to Heaven” or, say, your “Drunk in Love.” And in the pilot episode of Vinyl, — the Martin Scorsese–directed, Mick Jagger–produced Seventies NYC rock drama fromBoardwalk Empire creator Terence Winter — a pair of scenes distinguish themselves from the pack. In the first, a coked-up, bottomed-out record exec named Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale) rapturously watches the New York Dolls deliver a performance of “Personality Crisis” so blistering it literally brings down the house. In the second, Finestra and industry sleazebag Joe Corso (portrayed by real-life ex-cop and frequent Scorsese collaborator Bo Dietl) take a radio mogul played by Andrew “Dice” Clay and bash his skull in on-screen.

Based on this initial episode, in other words, this show is not going to make converts out of skeptics. Vinyl is for Horror City nostalgia buffs and people predisposed to belief in the healing power of rock & roll. It’s for music nerds who’ll flip out equally for cameos by golden god Robert Plant, his maniac manager Peter Grant, and hip-hop progenitor DJ Kool Herc … all on the same night! It’s for those pop scholars who’ll catch references to both perpetual also-rans the Good Rats and soft-rock punchlines England Dan and John Ford Coley. And it’s also for the kind of Scorsese fans who’ll recognize a scene’s doo-wop-soundtracked mafia meeting as a GoodFellasdescendant and who crave first-person voiceover narration like Jordan Bellfort jonesed for quaaludes.

So is it for you? You may think you know the answer already. But don’t be so sure.

I reviewed the series premiere of Vinyl, which I thought was a hoot, for Rolling Stone, where I’ll be covering the show this season.

Nor has there been a finer, sadder example of a wounded warrior than Richard Harrow. Introduced by writer Howard Korder during season one while waiting for a psychiatric evaluation at a veteran’s hospital, Harrow (an unrecognizable Jack Huston in his breakthrough performance) makes a knockout first impression with his broken-throated, Gollum-like croak, the unnerving uncanny-valley mask he uses to hide his severe facial disfigurement (a sniper himself, he was shot in the face), and with the black nihilism he cites as the reason he no longer reads novels. “It occurred to me: The basis of fiction is that people have some sort of connection with each other. But they don’t.” I gasped when I first heard this line, dredged from my worst fears about life, love, and their collective lack of lasting meaning. Richard’s capacity for belief in humanity was blown out of him in the Great War, and much of his time on the show chronicled its slow restoration, though dozens of dead bodies dropped behind him on his way. This archetype — the man (usually) who is taught violence in service of an ideal, only to discover one is real and the other a cheap fiction — is a distinctly American one; The Wire’s Omar Little,Fargo’s Hanzee Dent, and Game of Thrones’ Sandor “The Hound” Clegane all share Richard’s table in their sad Valhalla. And though his final scenes were devastating, his greatest contribution to the series is in the teeth-grinding tension of the shoot-out sequence that completes the third season, as he blows his way through a small army of Rosetti men to rescue his late friend Jimmy’s son. The scene weds action to emotion as effectively and movingly as any I’ve ever seen, its resolution viewed through a blood-spattered window, an impenetrable barrier to normalcy for this tragic figure.

On the eve of the debut of Vinyl from the same creative team, I got to write a longtime dream essay of mine, a full-throated defense of Boardwalk Empire as one of the New Golden Age of TV Drama’s hidden treasures, for Vulture.

4. Joffrey Baratheon, Game of Thrones

Seven gods, seven kingdoms, zero redeeming qualities — the atrocious boy king who bedeviled House Stark was a living embodiment of George R.R. Martin’s furious fantasy revisionism: If you’re a rich man with a good family name, you can get away with literally anything. In Joffrey’s case, this included torture, murder, sexual assault, the beheading of the show’s main character (R.I.P. Ned, you were too good for this world), and generally being a sneering little shit. He was so hateful that the few times he received any kind of comeuppance—an insult, a slap, a good old-fashioned regicide at the so-called Purple Wedding — are among the show’s most meme-able moments. Actor Jack Gleeson retired from showbiz immediately upon completion of the role; by scraping the bottom, he went out on top.

I ranked the 40 greatest TV villains of all time for Rolling Stone. This, of course, is definitive and inarguable.