Nor do the season’s problems prevent it from being beautiful to look at. The final episode alone contains two of the series’ most visually striking scenes: First, Bubbles and his sponsor Walon sit in the park at night, discussing the article that’s been written about him, the glow of the lamplight illuminating them like they’re characters in a painting by a Dutch master. Later, after he’s sprung from jail to begin his new career as a legitimate businessman, Marlo is regaled with tales of fortune and glory by the corrupt developer Andy Krawczyk as they gaze through a window at the harbor, the humming blue light of the night giving a scene that must already feel strange to a soldier like Marlo an almost science-fictional surreality. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of Season Five’s visual achievements. Just for example, when I think of Templeton’s evening under the underpass with the homeless, or Bunk interviewing Michael’s mom while standing in her open front door, or Sydnor giving the secret anti-Barksdale squad their assignments in the parking lot, I’m not sure any show has ever done a better job of capturing the warm electric indigo glow of the early summer evening.

If only that kind of acuity had extended beyond the visual plane. Just as there are all kinds of ways to shoot a city at night, there are any number of paths the show could have taken to explore the effects of a bad newspaper on community that relies on it, or how detectives simultaneously facing devastating departmental cutbacks and the most vicious criminal of their careers might cut corners to get their job done. Why take the most heavyhanded, hamfisted approach every time? When all those shades of blue are available, why paint in black and white?

Since these are the concluding episodes of the series, it follows they serve as a conclusion, one that the show is drawing about its own subjects. We can draw one in turn: didacticism and sentimentality, Season Five’s twin problematic poles, are the series’ overall weaknesses as well. Even at its best, which is as good as TV has ever ever ever gotten, The Wire never leaves you thinking “wow, I don’t know what to think.” It does the work for you, rather than trusting that work to be done in the ephemeral space where author, intentionality, art, and audience all interact, creating something unpredictable and unique and exponential. “We’re building something here,” Lester said all the way back in Season One. “And all the pieces matter.” But art is not casework. The piece that makes a perfect fit is a fine, fine thing. But it means less than the missing piece, left for us to picture on our own.

The final paragraphs of my final review of the final episodes of the final season of The Wire. For the rest of it, read my last The Wire Wednesdays column at the New York Observer.

I’m so glad I got the chance to (get paid to) revisit this series. Thanks to my editor, Drew Grant, for giving me the gig; this swig of Jameson’s for you.

Would it be weird to call Better Call Saul lovely? Okay, not during the leg-breaking. Or the screaming about the leg-breaking. Or the vomiting after the leg-breaking. But still! After tonight’s episode “Mijo,” that’s the word that comes to mind. With its lyrical, impressionistic approach to filmmaking, largely absent from the airwaves since co-creator Vince Gilligan said, “It’s all over now, baby blue meth” to Breaking Bad in 2013, this prequel show makes for sumptuous viewing, even though its story has yet to deliver a real “this is a must see” moment….Much has been made of whether Better Call Saul has a reason to exist, given how completely its predecessor mastered this milieu. But isn’t quality reason enough? The two-part, two-night premiere of BCS has given us an unusual character (very different from an everyman who starts cooking crystal to make ends meet), and used every tool in its visual, aural, and editing arsenal to make his pre-Heisenberg life something memorable and enjoyable to watch. If that story never transforms into the runaway train that Walt’s did, so what? Stop and smell the vending-machine coffee instead.

The second episode of Better Call Saul was also very, very good. I reviewed it for Rolling Stone.

Hit the Bat-signal and spread the word: Gotham is crawling out its slump. For the second week in a row, strong writing for the series heavies, from its dueling Dons to the once and future Scarecrow, injected much-needed mirth and menace into the often shaky show. Serious flaws are still abound, but you may be having too much fun to notice.

For starters, a Scarecrow was born, as teenage Jonathan Crane receives a hot shot of toxin so strong it warps his mind forever. (If he only had a brain!) But while his J-horror-meets-4H hallucinations of straw men with gaping maws and fiery eyes were reasonably creepy, it was his father,Dr. Gerald Crane (a realistically rumpled Julian Sands), who was the episode’s true nightmare. His pseudoscientific scheme to rid himself of fear by essentially overdosing on it made intuitive, if not biological, sense; when it comes to supervillainy, that’s more than enough. The point was driven home most effectively not by Crane’s hallucinations of his incinerated wife, but by something more prosaic. “Think I’m afraid of you? Afraid of your guns?” he asks when the cops corner him — then immediately comes out blasting, right out there in the open, bullets be damned. That jolt of surprise delivered the message in a way that medical monologues or syringe close-ups couldn’t.

I liked another episode of Gotham! I reviewed tonight’s ep for Rolling Stone.

Another rung lower on the generational ladder, Lady Mary continues to impress as one of TV’s least easy characters. Her self-possession and self-confidence are admirable, appealing, and, yes, very sexy traits, all the more so when she’s demonstrating them while sporting a stylish bob haircut and a gorgeously androgynous riding outfit. (Of course, everyone looked so good in that get-up — Lord Gillingham, Mr. Blake, Miss Mabel Lane Fox, Rose’s new beau Atticus Aldridge — that if the show suddenly became all horse-racing all the time I’d hardly complain.) Yet even at her best and brightest, she has an edge that’s hard to handle: joking to her rival-turned-ally Miss Fox that she showed up at the race looking hot so that Tony could see what he was missing, then telling Blake that she beat Mabel in the race despite the advantages of letting her be the first woman to finish because “I don’t believe in letting anyone win.” Then there’s her barely concealed contempt for her kid sister, which flares up even when Edith’s in extremis over the murder of her boyfriend Gregson in Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch (!). Mary greets the situation not with empathy, but with exasperation so unfeeling as to be nigh unforgivable: “What did she think he was doing, living in a tree?” What a creep! Even here, though, we have to consider both that Mary doesn’t know all the facts (she’s in the dark about Edith’s daughter with the dead man) and that Edith is, indeed, behaving unreasonably, bordering on unstably. Just when you think you’ve got Lady Mary pinned down as hero or goat, face or heel, Fellowes and actor Michelle Dockery flip the script just enough to force you to reconsider.

I reviewed last night’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer. I continue to like this show a great deal.

How do you get there from here? Breaking Bad loved answering this question. Four of its six premieres began with cold opens depicting mysterious future events, only to slowly rewind time and march us toward these inevitable destinations episode by episode. Better Call Saul, the new prequel series from co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, takes this technique of narrative reverse-engineering and recreates it on a much larger scale. We already know how Saul Goodman, the con-artist formerly known as Jimmy McGill, ends up: disgraced, alone, working behind the counter of a shopping-mall Cinnabon in Omaha, Nebraska. What’s more, we’re intimately familiar with his story’s whole final volume: how Saul scored the biggest client of his life and eventually caused him to lose everything. The question, then, is this: Will Jimmy McGill’s long, winding road to “Saul Goodman” — and to the moment that Walter White walks into his office — be worth the trip?

Based on Better Call Saul‘s Gilligan-directed pilot episode “Uno,” the answer is yes — and despite the show’s pedigree, that was in no way a sure thing. Even great shows tend to start with their broadest material, playing to the cheap seats in order to keep butts planted firmly in them. Astute viewers may recall that Breaking Bad itself began as a splatstick black comedy before reaching its dark and terrible final form around the end of the second season, with the one-two punch of a death-by-vomit and a plane going down. Even if you feel that the series finale wrapped things up too neatly and let Heisenberg off the hook too easily, the show was brutally suspenseful, morally uncompromising, and beautifully made right up until that final pulled punch.

But “Uno” earns a favorable verdict by playing to its predecessor’s quieter strengths, not trying to top its loudest ones. That starts with Vince Gilligan, the showrunner responsible for what was arguably the most stylistically bold and formally inventive show in the New Golden Age canon. So many scenes and sequences in “Uno” were simply beautiful: the hand-held, off-center aesthetic of the black-and-white “present day” opening; the piss-yellow palette and florescent-lightbulb hum of the courthouse; the torchlit darkness of the house of Jimmy’s sick older brother, Chuck McGill, a man stuck in an enveloping cloud of obvious mental illness. If you fondly remember Bad‘s visual panache — from those pants floating in the air to that pink teddy bear, from those musical montages to that crawl-space freakout — this premiere episode makes the case that you’ve got a lot to look forward to.

I reviewed the series premiere of Better Call Saul, which was very good and not in the ways I expected, for Rolling Stone. I’m psyched to be covering the show this season!

Move over, the Mountain and the Viper—the past year of TV has a new most disgusting moment. But let’s not oversell the gross-out aspect of the act that gave “Baggage,” this week’s episode of The American’s, its sick-joke title. Yes, the sight of Philip, Elizabeth, and their murderous Pakistani asset Yousaf breaking the bones of a nude, dead woman to fit her into a suitcase (making this the second season of the show in a row to open with a brutal murder in a hotel room) was stomach-turning enough to make even a veteran gorehound like yours truly physically recoil from the screen. But in the hands of smart filmmakers, spectacle, violent or otherwise, is more than an end in itself. Like the eye-popping violence in that Game of Thrones episode, the packing of Annalise — the physical reduction of a human being to inert trash to be toted away and discarded — is depicted so shockingly not just for shock’s sake. The Americans uses that shock, employs it to batter down our usual defenses and force us to acknowledge the horrifying ideology beneath the horrifying act.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Americans for the New York Observer. It was right in my wheelhouse.

Jimmy McNulty steals a newspaper. Jimmy McNulty sees a front-page story naming Cedric Daniels, the commanding officer who rescued him from harbor patrol and helped him make the case of his career, the heir apparent to the Commissioner of the entire Baltimore PD. Jimmy McNulty flips past it to find the story he planted about the fake serial killer he concocted. In this moment, Jimmy McNulty is The Wire Season Five. And The Wire Season Five is bad.

The Wire’s fifth season pursues parallel plots in which narcissists make up elaborate lies in order circumnavigate institutional obstacles set in place by financial contractions. On the cop side, McNulty invents a sexualized slayer of homeless men to drum up funding for the Marlo Stanfield investigation from a police department that newly minted Mayor Carcetti is stiffing for long-term political advantage. In the scope-expansion slot previously occupied by the dockworkers, the Carcetti campaign, and the school system, Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Templeton creates sources and quotes from whole cloth to score better bylines and burnish his resume in a newsroom beset by cutbacks. Largely because of these storylines, Season Five has a reputation for being not just the show’s worst, but one of prestige drama’s worst, so bad it undercuts the series’ achievement overall. This is a reputation it deserves.

Upon revisiting these episodes for the first time since they aired, a prospect I greeted the way I approach cleaning the gunk out of my kitchen-sink drain, I half expected to emerge with a radical reevaluation, akin to how some critics now describe the serial-killer and newsroom storylines as satire of institutional dysfunction that makes the season one of the show’s best. To be blunt, no fucking way. Largely abandoned to his own devices by his writing partner and sounding board Ed Burns, who recognized the newsroom storyline as the personal matter it was, David Simon was subsequently abandoned by his own gifts — for nuance, for empathy, for characters who, while shaped by the system in which they are a part, never merely take the shape of that system, like allegorical figures in a hackneyed editorial cartoon. Point-making, score-settling, nose-tweaking: not the stuff of great drama, very much the stuff of this season.

The day has come: I reviewed the first half of The Wire Season Five for the New York Observer.

Who is Saul Goodman? The story of how an Irish lawyer named Jimmy McGill became the sleazy, pseudonymous strip-mall ambulance-chaser who checked Walter White and Jesse Pinkman’s attorney-client privilege throughout Breaking Bad will be told in the prequel series Better Call Saul, starring Bob Odenkirk, which debuts with a two-part premiere this Sunday and Monday. But Breaking Bad already gave us a lot of info about Albuquerque’s favorite “criminal lawyer”: his associates, his ex-wives, his alma mater (kinda?), his Xanax connect, and much more. We’ve pulled the files on Saul and arranged every bit of info Breaking Bad gave us on the guy in this easy, episode-by-episode timeline. There’s no better way to find out who you’re gonna call.

Hey, it’s my Vulture debut! I went through Breaking Bad and listed every tidbit I could find on Saul Goodman.

Whoa, whoa, whoa: Was that really the same Bat-time, same Bat-channel we just watched?

Tonight’s episode of Gotham, “The Fearsome Dr. Crane,” was clever, creepy, funny on purpose, deliberately disturbing (instead of thoughtlessly so), and graced with an excellent villain-of-the-week. In other words, it was everything the show has not been for a long, long while. The temptation here might be to use it as a Batarang and lob it at every other half-hearted installment this lackadaisical longform origin story has given us, but I don’t think that’s what Thomas and Martha Wayne would want, may they rest in peace. This was a good hour of TV, for God’s sake. Let’s just enjoy it while it lasts.

I liked tonight’s episode of Gotham. I repeat: I liked tonight’s episode of Gotham. I reviewed it for Rolling Stone. If I might suggest it, please pay attention to the last graf, where I talk about the episode’s approach to horror, which was enormously effective.

It’s a shame that disliking sports has passed from lame through cool back to lame again, at least in the circles I run in, because man, I really dislike sports. Downton Abbey, though? That’s something I’m willing to tailgate for. (Since there are no team colors per se, I’ll be painting my bare torso in the likeness of Lady Mary.) And if you’re into the game of love, this week’s episode was a veritable Super Bowl. So let’s consider each competitor to see who took home the trophy.

THE LOSER: MISS BUNTING

On paper, this pint-sized but passionate left-wing teacher looked like a sure thing. She reawoke Tom Branson to both his politics and his potential as a romantic partner after the death of his wife. She took a healthy interest in improving the lot of one of the downstairs servants (the extremely grateful Daisy) and in tweaking Lord Robert for his calcified ways, something many of the best characters, and people, on the show have done to great effect in the past. The problem is that she took that last bit way too far. Even if his lordship were worthy of all that invective, Tom isn’t it, nor, as he points out, are his late wife and his young daughter. Lord Robert loves all three — shouldn’t that be enough to earn him some forbearance from a woman who purports to love Tom in turn? She’s so off-base about this that when she asks Tom “Don’t you despise them?” she seems genuinely shocked that his answer is no. A nice lady, and on the side of the angels, but she doesn’t know Tom half as well as she thinks she does, so it’s hard to feel too bad about her departure from the field.

THE WINNER: LORD MERTON

It’s not the first time I’ve said this, and it may not be the last: Lord Merton is much, much better at this game than Miss Bunting. Whereas she seems determined to make everyone uncomfortable lest her pursuit of Tom compromise her political ideals, Lord Merton approaches his courtship of Isobel Crawley with sensitivity and solicitousness. He shares her interest in medicine, her enthusiasm for positive change in society, and her ability to put others at ease when in their company, to the point where even his potential romantic rival Dr. Clarkson comes to like the man and his relationship with Isobel despite his own best interests. And that’s to say nothing of the prompting of the Dowager Countess, who’s initially so opposed to the potential match-up that she describes Lord Merton’s aristocratic background in terms even Miss Bunting might find extreme; she too is won over in the end. It doesn’t seem a romance for the ages, which on Downton makes it less likely to pan out. But however he does in the post-season, he played one hell of a game tonight.

Alright sports fans, I reviewed last night’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer.

However you slice it, The Americans dodged the [prestige-drama “wife problem”] bullet. The show stars a wife who not only doesn’t oppose her husband’s awful antics, she leads the charge. Elizabeth Jennings isn’t Philip’s suspicious sweetheart or nagging conscience, she’s his partner in crime. Indeed, actor Keri Russell receives top billing over Matthew Rhys, and her character’s ideological fervor outstrips his; in the series’ pilot, he’s ready to turn himself in and defect, while she wants to continue the mission. Comrades the Jennings may be, but Elizabeth is first among equals, and The Americans is the story of her antiheroism above all.

But what does that amount to, exactly? For the purposes of that discussion, let’s put aside the tonally broader, plot-hole-ridden first season. Everything the show is interested in — spy-thriller action and suspense; the uncomfortable eroticism of the Jennings’ undercover work; secondary characters like FBI Agent Stan Beeman, the Soviet agents of the Rezidentura, and the Jennings’ kids; the steely, wiry physicality of Russell and Rhys that makes their characters so convincingly commanding even buried under pounds of big glasses, bad wigs, and spirit gum — got tighter and sharper in Season Two, to the point where few of the first season’s flaws remained.

With one major exception, that is: All the terrible things that Elizabeth and Philip do, the show acts as though they’re being done to them, not by them, and that’s a problem. The anhedonia of Don Draper, the depressive rages of Tony Soprano, and the world-collapsing panic of Walter White are all gut-wrenching to behold, but their shows come across a lot more clear-eyed about the pain they inflict trumping their own. By contrast, even though Elizabeth and Philip are basically always miserable, never seeming to take any pleasure at all from what they do or the skill with which they do it, we’re rarely asked to linger on the suffering they cause except insofar as how hard it is for them to live with it. (This is where the lack of a long-suffering spouse of whatever gender hurts the show structurally.)

If this moral dynamic sounds familiar, that means you’ve been reading your pop-culture thinkpieces over the past few weeks. If Mr. and Mrs. Jennings worked for the USA during the Iraq War instead of the USSR during the Cold War, we’d basically be talking about American Sniper, which has been held up as an inspiring exploration of how hard it must have been for a man to kill for his country. The people who got killed had it a lot harder, you know? And that’s true whether your flag is red white and blue or red and yellow. Empathy is valuable, but it must be tempered with moral clarity; the plight of a murderer pales in comparison to the plight of the murdered. Paradoxically, it’s by making Philip and Elizabeth so torn up by their awful vocation that its real awfulness is obscured.

I reviewed the season premiere of The Americans, and really The Americans generally, for the New York Observer. Very excited to be covering the show this season.

Call it heartbreaking. Call it breathtaking. Call it brutal. But don’t call The Wire’s fourth season tragic. This final stretch of episodes, surely what most people think of when they call The Wire the greatest show of all time, contains many of its most agonizing moments, its most crushing defeats. But tragedy implies inevitability. What makes this the hardest, greatest part of The Wire to watch is that there was nothing inevitable about any of it. If people had tried harder, politicked less, cared more, the ruined lives of the series’ school-based season could have been saved.

In the latest installment of my weekly rewatch/review column The Wire Wednesdays at the New York Observer, I cover the final seven episodes of Season Four, one of the best stretches of television ever to air.

Let us now sing the praises of no man’s lands. “Welcome Back, Jim Gordon,” tonight’s episode of Gotham, features two brief scenes shot in semi-subterranean nether-regions, places that exist solely as way-stations between the places you actually want to go. In the first, anonymous goons in the employ of Don Falcone wheel a gurney with an unseen, unknown passenger through an equally unfamiliar — and underlit — abandoned warehouse-cum-torture laboratory of a mob Mengele named Bob.

In the second, recently reinstated Detective Jim Gordon chases a corrupt cop called Delaware down into the GCPD’s parking garage, cuffing him on the hood of his car and rifling through his trunk for contraband. Cold blue daylight shines down through grates in the ceiling while vertically mounted florescents on every column radiate a sickly green. The settings may not be unique, especially in dark genre fare, but they’re beautifully visualized nonetheless — sprawling yet claustrophobic, creepy and lovely to look at.

If emphasizing the lighting and set dressing in a couple of throwaway sequences gives the impression that there’s not much else worth praising here…well, yeah, pretty much. Corruption within the Gotham City Police Department has driven the story of some of the best Batman comics of all time, from Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s Batman: Year One to Ed Brubaker, Greg Rucka, and Michael Lark’s Gotham Central, two obvious influences on the show. Yet the topic’s handling here is as subtle as the character’s countless fists to each other’s face.

I reviewed tonight’s Gotham for Rolling Stone. It was Gotham, alright.

In an episode where Lord Robert gets trolled to the point of apoplexy at the dinner table, Thomas attempts to chemically castrate himself, and Lady Mary groans “ohhhh, yummy” at a fashion show, standing out as the single craziest thing to happen takes some doing. So let’s hear it for Lord Tony Gillingham, whose berserk reaction to Mary’s attempt to break up with him — in Seinfeldian fashion, he basically refuses to be dumped — sends him skyrocketing to the top of the Downton Abbey holy-shit list. It’s not the worst thing ever to happen to Lady Mary’s love life, but it may be the most topically relevant, revealing double standards about male and female sexuality that persist to this day.

Tony’s steadfast refusal to take Lady Mary’s “no” for an answer is based on his conviction that no lady of Mary’s station could possibly sleep with a man she hadn’t intended to spend the rest of her life with. Nevermind that the stated purpose of their sexual exploration was to determine whether or not spending the rest of their lives together was a good idea in the first place! No, Lord Gillingham has retconned their liaison into a fait accompli, a preemptive confirmation of love everlasting. If Lady Mary believes otherwise, well, she’d better just think a little harder, huh?

The implied threat, of course, is that if Lady Mary really were speaking the truth of her heart now — if she slept with a guy and subsequently decided to dump him — then she’s no lady at all, and therefore her confidences, and her reputation, are undeserving of Lord Tony’s further protection. “I won’t be tarnished again,” she said last week, only to discover now that the greatest threat along those lines is the guy she said it to. Her predicament is painfully reminiscent of any number of recent real-world incidents: the theft and leak of nude photos from a host of female celebrities, the use of private information to intimidate feminist video game critics by the Gamergate movement, the attempts to expose the identity of the woman at the heart of the UVA rape story. When intimacy and privacy are weaponized, women bear the brunt of the impact.

I reviewed last night’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer. I love this show, man.

The best line from The Wire is also, not coincidentally, its bleakest. It comes from the lollipop-sweetened mouth of Marlo Stanfield, who during the first half of Season Four handles surveillance cameras, high-stakes poker, inter-gang rivalries, and gunpoint stickups like he’s got icewater in his veins, but who cannot abide the backtalk of a lowly convenience-store security guard. The guard tries to explain to Marlo — who’d knowingly stolen candy in full view of the guy just to fuck with him — that even though such behavior is trivial, and even though he wouldn’t dare truly challenge Marlo over it, it strips him of what little dignity his dreary dayjob affords him. Marlo, his arrogance filling his wide eyes with something that approximates life, responds with one repeated phrase: “You want it to be one way.” When the guard finally backs down, Marlo delivers the punchline: “But it’s the other way.” Marlo keeps his lollipops. The guard loses his life. You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way.

This fatalistic credo (fatal for the people on the wrong side of it, anyway) fits The Wire to a tee, and never more so than in Season Four. How could a season dedicated in large part to the American education and electoral systems be about anything but the clash between great expectations and horrorshow reality? But the line could just as easily apply to the show’s decision, once again, to push its main characters to the side in favor of these new worlds. The Barksdale outfit has been shut down; McNulty, Daniels, and Carver are happily working the Western District; Kima and Lester join Homicide after the Major Case Unit is destroyed from within by the bosses. All of them are marginalized to make room for Marlo, the Mayor, and middle-schoolers. And just as in Season Two, it pays off spectacularly.

So much of the credit must go to the kids at the center of the school storyline: Randy, a friendly and ambitious foster kid whose side hustles gets him into trouble; Namond, the class-clown son of imprisoned Barksdale soldier Wee-Bey (whose wife, Namond’s mother, is the worst wife character on the show yet, which is saying something); Duquan, the weirdo of the group, a smart, strange kid marginalized by the extreme poverty of his junkie parents; and Michael, whose quiet self-confidence draws people to him even as he tries to hide a sexual secret. The Wire has the best track record with child actors this side of Game of Thrones, and the foursome to whom it awards the lion’s share of screentime this season (Maestro Harrell, Julito McCullum, Jermaine Crawford, and future R&B star Tristan “Mack” Wilds) are all as good as it gets. They’re so easy and enjoyable to watch as they navigate new additions to their world, from Marlo’s crew to their new teacher, former cop Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski, that the absence of McNulty and Daniels barely registers. (Both are deep in domestic bliss with their former Major Case colleagues Beadie Russell and Ronnie Pearlman respectively.) That’s without even considering the school setting, which like the docks and unions of Season Two has the irresistible aura of a once vital thing slowly dying.

I reviewed the first six episodes of The Wire Season Four for the New York Observer. “You want it to be one way, but it’s the other way” is one of the best things ever aired on television.

Over in the mob-war storyline, Fish Mooney finally makes her move against Don Falcone by staging a kidnapping of Liza, her mole in the boss’s inner circle. “I didn’t think it was going to be you,” Falcone tells Fish when she makes contact. After playing dumb for 15 seconds, she admits the plot is hers. His reply? “Of course it is. How long have I known you? You’re the smart one in the family, didn’t I always say so?” So he didn’t think Fish would betray him, but he’s known her so long and admired her intelligence so much that “of course” he knew she betrayed him? These lines come less than a minute apart in the same conversation!

I reviewed this week’s atrociously written episode of Gotham for Rolling Stone. Do stick around for the comments; angry Gotham fans are easily the most adorable angry TV fans.

[Warning: The following statement is NSFWR (Not Safe For White Russians); please escort any and all refugees from the Revolution out of the drawing room before continuing.]

If I had to describe Lady Mary Crawley’s sex life in a sentence, I’d turn to Karl Marx. History repeats itself, he warned us, first as tragedy, then as farce. How better to describe Mary’s dangerous liaisons? The first, with the dashing Turkish attaché Kemal Pamuk back in the pilot episode, ended in death and disgrace. The second, with eager-beaver suitor Lord Tony Gillingham in tonight’s episode, turns out to be a source of dirty jokes and awkward pauses, but little else.

That’s undoubtedly disappointing for Mary, and for any of us hoping for some genuine heat emanating from her sexy skullduggery with Tony. But the comedy was cute, and that counts for something. Tony’s groan-worthy response to Lady Mary’s room-service order — “Well, you’ve worked up a big appetite” — is exactly the kind of try-hard, corny crack you might make when you’re just starting to test the boundaries of newfound intimacy. Gillingham recovers well enough, it must be said, responding to Mary’s weary “I can’t bear vulgar jokes” by telling her “I’ll make note of that. I’ve made note of everything.” But given the grimace with which Mary greets him several days later when he pays an unexpected visit to her at Downton, it seems unlikely he’ll get the chance to put his research to any use.

“I can’t bear vulgar jokes”? Speak for yourself, Lady Mary! I reviewed last night’s Downton Abbey for the New York Observer.

WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW

The end of Stringer — his misguided ambitions, his misplaced faith in his ability to outfox experienced white-collar criminals like Clay Davis, his successful but short-lived attempt to overhaul Baltimore’s drug trade into something more cooperative and less lethal, his tasteful interior decorating — at the points of Omar’s shotgun and Brother Mouzone’s Walther PPK provided the season’s climax. But his story had no shortage of competitors in its headlong rush to the finish line. Lacking the tragedy that the deaths of Wallace and Frank Sobotka provided its predecessors, it compensated by setting up a whole series of ticking time-bomb scenarios and counting them down one on top of the other. Thanks to Avon’s betrayal, Mouzone and Omar got to String first, but Daniels, McNulty, Kima and company were only steps behind, while his parallel plot to rat Avon out to the cops was nearing completion just as quickly. Even as the police prepped to pinch Avon, his own men were moving into place to take down his rival Marlo Stanfield. It felt, marvelously and terrifyingly, like any fucking thing could happen at any fucking moment.

Elsewhere, in the social-experiment storyline centered on Bunny Colvin’s de facto decriminalization of drugs in “Hamsterdam,” a similar race was on. A whole slew of characters — Bunny, his loyalists like Carver, rebellious troops like Herc and gung-ho Travis Bickle wannabe Colicchio, the press, the brass, the Mayor, and the increasingly shifty politician Tommy Carcetti — ran neck and neck to determine the final fate of the free zones. In that case, only a series of bad decisions led to the race’s unhappy resolution: Commissioner Burrell thought Mayor Royce was delaying the shut-down in order to more securely fuck him, when in fact Royce was inches away from exporting the initiative’s successes citywide; acting on Burrell’s faulty intel, Carcetti chose to hang Colvin out to dry and hang it on the Mayor for political advantage. Given The Wire’s thesis that the system is irrevocably fucked — a thesis on evidence in the endemic brutality and corner-cutting displayed by even the most heroic cops, which with post-2014 hindsight is even more uncomfortable to contemplate than Simon likely intended it to appear at the time — it couldn’t have gone down any other way. But such is the skill of the show that it sure as shit felt like it could have.

I reviewed the final six episodes of The Wire Season Three for the New York Observer.

God’s in his heaven, the King’s on the wireless, and the thirst is real for Lady Mary Crawley. Yes, in one of Downton Abbey’s most delightful developments ever, Mary has embarked on a secret sex safari with dashing Lord Tony Gillingham, determined to determine their sexual compatibility before tying the knot. So much of the business of tonight’s episode was about preparing for this clandestine fuckfest — ordering Anna to purchase birth control, rebuffing past suitor Mr. Blake, figuring out which clothes to pack based on whether they can be removed by a revved-up gentleman instead of an expert lady’s maid — that it might as well have been called Down-Low Abbey instead.

Which is great! I mean, who’d have thought that Julian Fellowes, Tory member of the House of Lords, would craft arguably TV’s most compellingly, uniquely sexual character, and a woman to boot? Downton never uses Lady Mary’s sexuality to make her a figure of ridicule or of menace, never presents her desire as foolhardy or grotesque, never surplus or insufficient to the needs of some male counterpart. She remains herself — charming, cutting, a bit aloof, serious enough about her own happiness not to make it subservient to anyone else’s — whether in the bedroom or out of it. This can be awfully, awfully sexy, as self-confidence often is: When Anna suggested choosing only certain dresses for the trip “so you can take them on and off without my help” and Mary responded “Well, I’ll have his help,” I all but collapsed onto my fainting couch. But it can make for some terrific, character-revealing comedy too, as when she tells Mr. Blake she’s only recently emerged from the “mist” that surrounded her following Matthew’s death: “And the mist is clearing around the lithe and supple figure of Tony Gillingham,” he deadpans. “Maybe,” she shrugs, completely indifferent to how this level of indifference looks. She likes Tony, she’s planning a getaway specifically to have sex with Tony, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Few women on TV (outside of the surprisingly sophisticated Broad City, of all things) are afforded that kind of emotional freedom.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Downton Abbey for the New York Observer. It’s a good show!