I’ve never really bought the idea that Amazon and Netflix are doing something materially distinct from HBO and AMC or any other terrestrial TV network. Television has been doing heavy serialization since The Wire, and before that Twin Peaks, and before, during, and after that in every single daytime soap. Netflix and Amazon execs can make all the noise they want about seeing the season rather than the episode as the fundamental storytelling unit, but this too is basically true of every good prestige drama, to one extent or another—just ask David Simon. In my experience, if a streaming series suffers when seen one episode at a time as opposed to in multi-hour chunks, that’s not because streaming TV is a different medium, it’s because the show isn’t that great. Jessica Jones would not have been less a slog had I watched five episodes a day instead of one, you know?

I wrote about my skepticism toward the idea that streaming TV is a different medium from weekly TV, and how Mad Dogs has challenged that skepticism, for Decider.

As critiques of Toxic Masculinity™ go, it’s pretty cutting. Who doesn’t love their crime thrillers with a terrifying, gun-toting dwarf in an animal mask mixed in? It’s precisely the kind of surreal badassery such films have trafficked in since the world first heard the phrase “bring out the gimp.” You could read Cobi, Lex, Gus, and Joel trimming the Cat’s claws as Mad Dogs indulging that kind of cinematic cool just long enough to reject it.

I reviewed episode three of Mad Dogs for Decider.

When a dwarf in a cat mask shoots your friend to death and warns you to return his stolen property in 24 hours or you’ll be next, you’ve pretty much got your day planned out for you. It’s also reasonable to assume this has the TV series in which you’re starring pretty much mapped out as well. Surely Cobi, Gus, Joel, and Lex, the feckless foursome at the heart of Mad Dogs, will spend its ten-episode run battling their way back to the boat, like Martin Sheen going up the river looking for Colonel Kurtz (who they went so far as to name-drop in the pilot), right?

Wrong, actually. Well, kinda. Within the first few minutes of “Xtabai,” Mad Dogs’ second episode (which you can watch on Amazon Prime Video), our heroes have already triumphantly returned to the stolen yacht that got their frienemy Milo murdered. Granted, it gets a whole lot more complicated from there. But the unexpected immediacy with which they find the boat was a pleasant shock to the system. For one thing, zooming right through what seemed like it was going to be a long journey through beaucoup screentime toward an obviously inevitable destination was a smart storytelling decision. Unless you’re Game of Thrones, a lot of shows would benefit from taking a hatchet to all the buildup and just getting down to business. For another, genre shows like this rely on familiarity way more than originality — that’s what makes a genre a genre, after all, common tonal and narrative elements — so almost any curveball is worth throwing.

I reviewed episode two of Mad Dogs for Decider.

Chronicling the lifestyles of the rich and bodyshameless has always been abyss-gazes-also shit, with the line between critique and exploitation blurring the moment the panties drop. Surrounding some outré sex shit with the trappings of big money, then stepping back and going “Wild, huh? Really makes you think” doesn’t make anyone think at all, not without a level of technical and tonal control of a Martin Scorsese—and Wolf of Wall Street even gave him a run for his money. (It worked, though, unless you’re the type to hold filmmakers responsible for the reactions of the biggest moral morons in the audience.) Right now we’re simply not far enough into the parallel narratives of Chuck Rhoades and Bobby Axelrod, not well versed enough in the rules that govern the show’s handling of sexuality and morality, not well-acquainted enough with any of the characters involved for this Strong Sexual Content shit to feel like anything but a corny, horny Showtime After Hours series.

It’s worth leaning hard on this, because the rest of the show still seems promising enough to handle constructive criticism. In this episode, the scenes in which Axe and his merry (mostly) men quote GoodFellas and trade R-rated insults so elaborate they must stay up late workshopping them is as sharp about the malignant side of masculinity as the sex stuff elsewhere is sloppy. “We have to be more pure than the Virgin Mary before her first period,” Axelrod’s right-hand man Wags warns his crew as the SEC closes in; “Fuck, Wags,” Axe chuckles, admiring the effort to come up with just the right grotesque thing to say. Elsewhere he cuts Wags off in the middle of a hurdling metaphor to ostentatiously spare a down-on-his-luck broker’s feelings. This is a game to them, and as long as they’re winning they’ll play by whatever rules they like.

I gave last night’s episode of Billions some tough love for the New York Observer.

They almost never makes it into the actual reviews, but as God is my witness my notes for every episode of Downton Abbey are full of the wit and wisdom of the Dowager Countess, and this episode alone had at least three exchanges for the ages. There was her back-and-forth with Lord Robert about how despite her handsome racecar-driving suitor, Lady Mary needed more than “a handsome smile and a hand on the gearstick”: “I’m surprised you know what a gearstick is.” “I know more than you think.” There was her dismay with her supposed ringer in the great hospital debate, Lady Prudence Shackleton, for failing to come to her aid during the argument: “How can I present myself as an expert when I don’t know the facts?” “It’s never stopped me!” And there was her riposte to Lady Edith for daring to suggest Isobel Crawley had a right to be heard: “I suppose Cousin Isobel is entitled to put up an argument.” “Of course she is! She’s just not entitled to win it!” With that, Lady Violet began chuckling and cooing to herself, as if simultaneously appreciating her own rapier wit and soothing her frazzled nerves like a purring cat. So if I’m not shining the spotlight on Dame Maggie Smith and Lady Violet, it’s not because she doesn’t deserve it—it’s because she’s been stealing it so deftly herself.

But it’s Thomas Barrow and Lady Mary Crawley who are Downton Abbey’s major creations. As Thomas and Mary, Rob James-Collier and Michelle Dockery have great faces, great voices, and feel taut and unyielding in a way few leads this side of Betty Draper are allowed to be. The Dowager gets most of the laugh lines, but these two challengingly, rewardingly difficult characters get far stronger stuff, and we get more out of them in turn. On last night’s episode, we got plenty.

In my review of last night’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer I wrote about Thomas, Lady Mary, and why Downton is more than just the Dowager.

In TV terms, the spectacle of middle-aged men indulging their id is abundant and low value, so to speak; this means Mad Dogs’ execution must be unimpeachably tight to distinguish it. Provided the premise alone doesn’t turn you off, so far so good. The cast is solid, yes, and the tropical-paradise eye candy is tasty, though that’s easy enough for TV today too. But what really works is the editing, the rapid-fire kind we olds used to call “MTV style” but which you rarely see in contemporary dramas. It gives the proceedings a sort of adrenaline sheen, but it can be played with to great effect too, whether by dragging things out—a club sequence crash cuts through three different and distinctive songs to suggest that the gang stayed there for a long time—or slowing things down—the quieter scenes drop the staccato rhythm for longer takes that drive the importance home.

I’m covering Amazon Prime’s new show Mad Dogs for Decider this season, starting with my review of its promising pilot.

As a rule, it is better to be pissed off than pissed on. Chuck Rhoades, however, doesn’t play by the rules. Pissed off? Plenty. Played Paul Giamattically by Paul Giamatti, the crusading attorney general at the heart of Showtime’s new show Billions spends the bulk of the high-finance drama’s pilot fuming about one damn thing or another. But during the opening scene, in which a a faceless woman extinguishes a cigarette on his bare chest and then urinates on the burn, he’s happy as a clam. There’s a time and a place for it, sure, but ol’ Chuck rejects your pissed on/pissed off binary. He’s bodyfulid-fluid. Cable drama, motherfuckers! It’s where anything can happen…and usually does!

I’m covering Billions for the New York Observer this season! First up is my review of the series premiere, which was better than that opening scene but still hamstrung by it.

SPOILER ALERT

Tom’s in his Downton, all’s right with the world. I hope you’re sitting down, but yes, I, Sean Thomas Patrick Collins, am Irish-American. So when it comes to Downton Abbey, I relate to and root for chauffeur-turned-radicalt-turned-suitor-turned-aristocrat-turned-widow-turned-American Tom Branson the way tomboys connect to Arya Stark, or how people who believe sociopaths who slaughter human beings like pigs just need someone to love pull for Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham to finally make it official. So imagine, just effing imagine, my unspoiled delight when I heard his dulcet brogue ring out from off screen during the wedding reception for Mr. Carson and Mrs. Hughes. Picture my unbridled joy when he said he’s back from Boston for good, ready to rejoin the family and the place he loves. Take my hand in yours and pray with me that finally, finally, he and Lady Mary will get together, a romance I ship like the Royal goddamn Navy. And imagine the entire spontaneous outpouring of emotion, complete with cheering and laughing and literal clapping at my TV screen, occurring in the final sixty seconds of the episode, with no prior warning. That’s good television, ladies and gents.

I reviewed last night’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer. No, I didn’t watch the season as it aired in the UK. No, I don’t know what happens. No, I don’t want to know what happens.

Hidden pregnancies. Children switched at birth. Scandal in a great family. Nothing happening to Lady Edith, her daughter Marigold, and the Drewes—the family generous and unfortunate enough to have tried to help her out of a jam, only to be repaid by emotional devastation and physical displacement—would be out of place on your daytime soap opera of choice, back when you had a lot to choose from. But if you pick apart this central storyline from last night’s Downton Abbey, you’ll find it’s more than the sum of its suds. As is often the case on this show, the middling or superfluous b-plots that drive many viewers mad matter very little compared to the visual, observational, and emotional strength of its finest moments.

This was lost in my dismay over the death of David Bowie, but I reviewed last week’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer.

Like the House of Grantham itself, Downton Abbey begins its sixth and final season in a much diminished state. The show’s fall from grace with American critics, who once discussed it as PBS’s entrée into TV’s New Golden Age, has if anything grown more precipitous over the past year; given the series’ rather aimless fifth season, perhaps that fate is at least somewhat deserved. And while comparing one’s take on a television program to the consensus is usually a mug’s game, for a show as status-obsessed as this one it makes some sort of cosmic sense. Just as Lord Robert, Lady Cora, Lady Mary and the gang must come to terms with their uncertain future when they visit a fire-sale auction at the former home of their aristocratic friend Sir John, we’ve got to figure out where it’s all headed. With only ten or so hours to go, is there still a place in the world for the Crawleys and their loyal servants?

The answer is yes, in the real world, anyway—though it’s only if you ignore the answer in the world of the show itself that this becomes apparent. Downton has repeatedly painted its big-picture theme of change coming to the genteel realm of the English upper class with Thomas Kinkade–like factory precision, to the point where you can satirically sum it up in a single tweet with, like, half the character count left over. On a plot level, too, the series has largely exhausted the youthful energies that drove it during its first several seasons, as the three people who best personified them—Jessica Brown-Findlay’s Lady Sybil, Dan Stevens’s Matthew Crawley, and Allen Leech’s Tom Branson—departed the show, taking much of its storytelling mojo with them.

Fortunately for you and me, we’re watching a TV drama, not writing a middle-school book report. Downton’s exceedingly circumspect front-line report from interbellum England’s class warfare has little to offer a commentariat trained to respond to a hardboiled cliché-fest like Jessica Jones as if it’s Marvel’s answer to Steinem and Davis, but ideally we’d made our peace with its lack of firepower in this regard several seasons ago. The lack of the Mary/Matthew and Sybil/Branson romances is a more difficult obstacle to surmount—this is a soap opera, after all—but not an impossible one. If, as it did in tonight’s season premiere, Downton simply continues its sharp observations of human behavior among fundamentally decent people, as animated by some of the loveliest faces, voices, and cinematography on the tube, it still has much to offer.

I’ll be covering the final season of Downton Abbey for the New York Observer, and I began with a review of last night’s season premiere. I think I write well about this show; maybe you’ll think so too.

SPOILER ALERT

Still, the biggest surprise is that defiantly anticlimactic ending. Anyone hoping for a knock-down drag-out fight between Ash and Ruby, let alone him and the forces she controls, is outta luck. (Save it for your Bruce Campbell/Lucy Lawless fanfic.) What you’ve got instead is an exhausted middle-aged man who wants to save his own ass, keep his friends from getting killed, and give up the fight to go live the good life down in Jacksonville. Ruby talks a good game, claiming her goal isn’t the apocalypse but its opposite — an orderly world in which evil coexists with good under her command. That’s part of why Ash takes the deal, sure. But the real reason goes back to what Kelly said about him last episode: He always takes the easy way out if given the chance.

Maybe that’s what explains the character’s enduring appeal. Campbell, of course, is Exhibits A, B, and C in the case of Evil Dead’s lasting legacy. But Ash isn’t just the cartoon character he comes across as. He often makes decisions that aren’t just stupid, but shitty — something action-horror-comedy hybrid heroes are rarely permitted. His carelessness with the Necronomicon is what got everyone into this mess, and his willingness to fob it off on anyone, even Ruby, appears to have brought on Armageddon. In the end, he saves his friends and hightails it out of there, leaving the entire world to its fate; he gets to the finish line and immediately hooks left. It’s not how heroes, even funny ones, are supposed to act. It’s not how stories like this are supposed to work. But Ash vs. Evil Dead never claimed that it would play by the rules. It’s too crazy and confident to be anything but its own groovy self.

I reviewed this weekend’s season finale of Ash vs. Evil Dead, which did not go as I expected, for Rolling Stone.

When you talk about what makes a TV series succeed or fail, you typically want to avoid repeating the same points over and over. Who wants to sound like a broken record, right? Tell that to John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they made “Revolution 9” — and if repetition is good enough for the Beatles, it’s good enough for us, and for Ash vs. Evil Dead. The penultimate episode of the show’s first season — “Bound in the Flesh” — gets where it’s going by repeating the same trick it’s pulled since the pilot: taking the gore and nastiness as far as it can, then taking them one step beyond. Like that creepy voice saying “Number nine … number nine …” over and over, it works.

I reviewed this weekend’s Ash vs. Evil Dead for Rolling Stone.

By switching the question from “whodunit?” to “which of the two whodunit does Noah really care about?”, the show traded the big mystery that sustained its first two seasons for another one with impressive seamlessness. Courtroom theatrics notwithstanding, the transition also moves the show firmly away from its crime-thriller elements, focusing instead on the characters themselves, and on the power and nature of love—how it begins, grows, falters, and ends. This has always been The Affair’s heart and soul, the place where it pushed hardest, dug deepest, and took the biggest risks. The irresistible pull of sexual desire. The fracturing of families young and old, large and small. The idea that people are more complicated than simply characterizing them by the best and worst things they do allows. The notion that pain might be a worthwhile tradeoff for happiness, but it’s no guarantee. The idea that people can make mistakes from which they can never recover and for which they can never atone. (Especially after tonight, when Noah and Alison’s affair, and their slow drift away from it, directly destroys all of their lives, and ends Scotty’s.) Every episode, The Affair says what we rarely even have the guts to say to ourselves. This new twist puts paid to the criticism that the murder storyline diffused the impact of this approach. If anything, the events surrounding the death of Scotty Lockhart are its most powerful payoff to date.

Megan O’Keefe and I reviewed the season finale of The Affair for Decider.

SPOILER ALERT

As a general rule, Ash vs. Evil Dead has its tongue buried so far in its cheek it pokes through the side of its own face. True to its splatstick roots, the series cranks up the blood and guts to a more-funny-than-scary degree, and uses its talented troupe of comedic actors to crack wiseass jokes about the carnage. It’s not that it’s making light of violence, let alone celebrating or valorizing it — its attitude is that in the face of evil, death, and the combination thereof, you just have to laugh.

Which makes tonight’s episode — “Ashes to Ashes” — such a shock. From the title on down, it seemed like little more than an excuse to introduce the series’ goofiest antagonist yet: a clone of Ash J. Williams, grown from the stump of his own severed hand. A Bruce Campbell vs. Bruce Campbell fight scene? Groovy, right? But when the evil Ash killed Amanda Fisher — the dogged, surprisingly flirtatious detective who went from nemesis to love interest in the blink of an eye — it was a development that the show’s shits ‘n’ giggles tone made impossible to see coming, and emotionally difficult to withstand.

I reviewed this weekend’s Ash vs. Evil Dead for Rolling Stone. This show has really been a pleasant surprise.

When it comes to television soundtracks, there are good music cues, and there are great music cues, and Fargo Season Two has had plenty of both. And then, my friends, there’s “War Pigs.” Black Sabbath’s orgiastic antiwar anthem enters “Palindrome,” the show’s stunning season finale, as a literal nightmare—an accompaniment to Betsy Solverson’s vision of a glorious future of Costcos and Game Boys and family dinners, shattered by the hatred and violence that runs so deep in this land’s veins it’s unlikely to ever be pumped clean. It’s a fucking mighty moment, a sign that showrunner Noah Hawley, director Adam Arkin, and company have an unshakeable grasp of the themes of their show and the period pop-culture they’ve used to advance them. And it’s a prophetic moment as well. The song foretells the day of judgment when the rulers responsible for the slaughter are made to answer for their crimes, as all their plans and strategies come to naught. If you want a picture of the future for the characters we’ve spent the season following, from kings and conquerors to victims and vanquished, you’ve got one.

I reviewed the Fargo Season 2 finale for the New York Observer. This was really some season.

“Life is hard and dangerous, and sometimes you just gotta chop off somebody’s head to survive.” Wait, since when did Ash vs. Evil Dead become The Walking Dead? We kid, of course. Unlike the smash-hit zombie series, Starz’s resurrection of the beloved splatstick franchise is neither pretentious nor nihilistic enough to serve up that line of dialogue with a straight face. While TWD doles out its sadistic, kill-or-be-killed valorization of violence in all misguided seriousness, tonight’s Ash episode — “Fire in the Hole” — treats it like the joke that it is. In this go-round, Ash J. Williams and his merry band come across a militia full of Rick Grimes–style might-makes-right gun fetishists, and promptly pull their asses out of the fire.

I reviewed this past weekend’s Ash vs. Evil Dead for Rolling Stone.

When the season began, Cole (Joshua Jackson) was a man at rock bottom. He was alone, strung out, and living in a trailer parked outside his cheating wife’s house and driving rich assholes around his hometown. Since then, he’s faced family feuds, family curses, and an impromptu hook up with Alison (Ruth Wilson). And now? He’s engaged to a good and loyal woman, rolling in money, and buying the Lobster Roll with Alison. He’s even gotten Scotty to go to rehab. Everything’s coming up Cole Lockhart.

How the hell did that happen?

Megan O’Keefe and I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for Decider.

SPOILER ALERT

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.”

—H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds

Four things put me in mind of this passage, one of the most famous and evocative in the history of science fiction, while watching tonight’s episode of Fargo, which I think it’s safe to say contains one of the finest action sequences in the history of the medium. The first should be obvious enough. When the UFO that has hovered just above the events of this season swung low for a close-up look at the Massacre at Sioux Falls, it did more than save Lou Solverson’s life, and most likely Ed and Peggy Bomquist’s as well, at the expense of Bear Gerhardt’s. It marked the moment at which the moral catastrophe of the violence that has dogged these characters from the start finally overflowed the banks of normalcy, of reality, and needed to conjure something supernatural into existence just to find an image commensurate with its enormity. This is the function of the fantastic in fiction, when used well: to express in visceral, visual terms emotions too intense for the vocabulary of the everyday to articulate. The mute spaceship, the baleful gaze of its spotlights draped over combatants and corpses alike, a liquid discharge dripping down upon them like so much blood, appearing out of nowhere and then disappearing with no more explanation than when it arrived…If this show, to say nothing of this year in real life, has taught us anything, is it not that this is exactly how the eruption of violence in our lives feels—instantaneous, inexplicable, and overwhelming?

I reviewed last night’s Fargo for the New York Observer.

Given the depth and power both the writing and Ritter brought to the material involving trauma, which remained the series’ strongest point throughout the run, it’s tremendous shame it didn’t extend to other areas of the show. This is especially the case for Tennant and Kilgrave, whose constant, transparent evil lets real abusers, able to hide or temper it, off the hook: “See, we’re not like that!” That the show is dealing with a difficult and horrifically underrepresented subject ought to obligate it to do better than “good enough”; recognition alone is the start of a conversation and the bare minimum of merit, not the be-all and end-all. While nothing here was offensive or insulting, nor was anything inspired or inspiring. Considering the potential, that’s a crime. Case closed.

I reviewed the season finale of Jessica Jones for Decider. This was a very frustrating, disappointing series.

Foremost among those achievements: the fucking acting. By the time he hit that first chorus in “Homeward Bound,” the Simon & Garfunkel song that enabled Kevin Garvey’s escape from his return to the afterlife after getting gutshot by John Murphy, Justin Theroux had already paid off two seasons of work with just a minute of facial expressions and passable Paul Simon. His portrayal of Kevin has long been an inversion of his archetypal tall dark and handsome good looks; unlike Jon Hamm, whose transitions between Don Draper’s strong, suave side and his insecure, guilt-ridden shadow were distinct and dramatic, Theroux always plays Kevin as guy with a godlike body, an incandescent stare, and the loosest of grips on both his emotions and reality itself. Here he really got to crack, not in his usual freak-out mode but as a man so moved by the meaning of the song he’s singing he can barely get the words out without breaking down in tears. It’s somehow both restrained and totally vulnerable, a bravura combination. The scene is for him what “The Suitcase” was for Hamm on Mad Men or what “Crawl Space” was for Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad. Shot in a series of tight, spotlight-illuminated closeups by Leder, it gives you nothing but a face and a voice, and gets more out of them than you could have imagined.

I reviewed the extraordinary season finale of The Leftovers for Decider.