“I want him with whole heart, body, and soul,” Number Two says early on, while rejecting the usual offers to use more extreme methods to break Number Six. That is the way of fascism. It’s not enough to submit: You must embrace your own submission. That this itself is a destruction of heart and soul does not concern the regime. Your heart and soul are your masters’, and they will remake you in their grey and grinning image.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

From start to finish, this episode’s entire “creature/other creature/monster sex/gross eggs/evil robot/monster’s revenge” sequence is a perfectly executed daisy chain of escalating sci-fi action and gross-out splatstick humor. Rampaging robots, Lovecraftian beasts, huge gooey 1980s horror movie style slime-dripping monster eggs — this thing has it all. It serves as a bombastic bookend to the subdued first scene, which relies not on special effects or spectacular gore but the performance of David Dastmalchian as Gurathin, whose combination of shame, gratitude, and awkwardness about his checkered past and the way Mensah rescued him from it is riveting to watch. 

This is a really fun show, man!

I reviewed this week’s Murderbot for Decider.

Number Six is his own worst enemy. But you don’t have to take my word for it: just ask the administrators of the Village. For two episodes in a row now, they’ve used his own determination to smash the security of his prison and break free to drag him down deeper into their morass of mind games. 

I think this is why Patrick McGoohan works so well in the role. Sure, he created the show, stars in it, wrote and directed several episodes, uses his own professional headshot for Six’s dossier photograph, uses his birthdate for Six’s right down to the second, et cetera. (This is partly why co-creatorship claims by McGoohan’s collaborator, the writer and script editor George Markstein, strike me as exaggerated.) 

But beyond that, he’s developed a very physical style of acting that meshes well with the man of action he portrays. I’ve joked before that Six has three settings: lurk, lurch, and loom. His movements are sudden, almost erratic. Quick-cut editing makes them seem even choppier and more unpredictable. Even his style of hand-to-hand combat, which he’s deployed in two episodes running now, is all stiff punches. This guy’s gonna hit you till you fall down, full stop. He’s gonna get where he’s going at top speed. He’s gonna get answers from the people he wants answers from even if he has to chase them down and pop out of the woodwork to grab them. 

He’s unstoppable, and that’s his problem.

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. Gift link!

But the most unnerving thing about the episode is the way it depicts Number Six’s fellow Villagers as mysterious, fundamentally unknowable people. Some of them are brainwashed automatons. Some of them are active agents of the enemy. Some seem reluctant to fulfill their duties, others positively gleeful. They spend their days in endless parades and celebrations, blasting John Philip Sousa marches and screaming at the top of their lungs — except for the times when they’re eerily silent and still. 

How can you possibly live in a society constructed of people this unreliable, this unstable, this incapable of conceiving of genuine common good and working towards it together? How can you live with people who’ve collectively abandoned reality?

My latest review of The Prisoner is up at Pop Heist. (Gift link, but please subscribe, it’s worth it!)

Murderbot is a triumph of casual viewing. It’s breezy without feeling flimsy and disposable. It’s intense without demanding that you respond to that intensity with your entire mind, body, and soul. The violence is taken seriously and depicted graphically, but it’s still more in the “Halloween haunted house” vein than the “Jesus Christ this is a real endurance test” mode. 

Everyone’s performance is lively and engaging. The biggest star in the piece steps back and mutes his wattage — it’s inherent to his character — so that everyone else shines brighter. There’s interesting romantic chemistry going on between a whole bunch of people with interesting faces, people who are handsome and beautiful in a real way rather than a movie-star-with-veneers way. 

Every episode is substantial but short, and you can watch it with your laptop on your lap, your feet kicked up on the sofa, stoned and eating pretzels and hummus quite comfortably. (Ask me how I know!) All told, Murderbot is my favorite way to spend 20 minutes on TV this season. 

I reviewed this week’s Murderbot for Decider.

“I am not a number! I am a free man!”

To this last declaration of Number Six, the final line of the dialogue that from here on out is a standard fixture of the opening sequence of The Prisoner, the new Number Two only laughs. Everything else Number Six says to her, she dignifies with some sort of response. The idea of freedom garners only mocking dismissal without a word.

I reviewed the second episode of The Prisoner for Pop Heist. (Gift link!) Please note! If you’re following along you’ve already noticed we’re watching the show out of order vs. how it’s listed on streaming sites. That’s because it was not really intended to be watched in the order it was aired! Fun, right? We’re using Zack Handlen’s so-called AV Club order, which you can find here, in a nifty table you can rearrange according to the various suggested viewing orders floating around out there with a couple of clicks.

I, a dad who sometimes watches TV standing up, am quoted in this piece by my pal, the great stand-up comedian Josh Gondelman, on why dads watch TV standing up. The answers may surprise you!

To paraphrase Ghostbusters: Yes, it’s true. This Murderbot has no dick.

I mean, so we’ve seen, in, uh, non-graphic detail. Whatever organic components went into the construction of our reluctantly, confusedly heroic SecUnit, a penis was not one of them. But that doesn’t stop Leebeebee (Anna Konkle), the delightfully stupidly named sole survivor of the DeltFall habitat massacre, from fantasizing about his imaginary potential penis at length. No pun intended. 

I reviewed the most recent episode of Murderbot for Decider.

The Prisoner can largely be credited, or blamed, for the mystery-box genre via its outsized influence on Lost, which in many ways feels like a sexier, less severe version of this show — The Prisoner: Pacific Nights, if you will. Certainly the question of who runs the Village and why they’re so obsessed with Number Six is of grave concern both to the audience and Six himself. 

But what I take away from this episode is not a puzzle to solve but a person to study. Here’s a guy who did Her Majesty’s dirty work, and apparently with enough aplomb and success to drive a preposterous sportscar. He was so good at his job of being a spy for a Western government that the Village, whoever or whatever is behind it, has dedicated its resources to cracking his brain open and seeing what’s inside. 

And what is his attitude towards all this? Lol yeah right, best of luck, assholes. Is he confused, is he angry, is he frightened? Oh, for sure. But he has a single conviction, and it is this:

“I will not make any deals with you. I’ve resigned. I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.”

The most talked about and praised show of the year is Andor, Tony Gilroy’s exploration of violent insurrection in the face of fascism, set in the Star Wars universe. The reason it has resonated so much with people, I think, is because its eponymous character shares this sentiment. 

For all its maddening — and intentional; it serves fascists well to confuse their opponents and victims — contradictions, fascism presents us with a straightforward proposition: We are human only to the extent that we fit the regime’s perpetually constricting definition of who is human. Resisting fascism is in large part a matter of personal integrity: My words will match my thoughts, my actions will match my words, I will be the person I am and not the servant they want me to become, I will not betray my soul. Number Six, who in this episode gives Patrick McGoohan’s birthdate as his own down to the minute, will not go along with any of this either. He’s not the machine-man with a mind of gray sludge that Number Two and his masters want him to be. He is a human. He is not a number. He is a free man. 

So are you.

Oh boy! Starting today over at Pop Heist, I’m launching a new series called Prestige Prehistory, about stone-classic pre-Sopranos dramas that helped (re)define what you could do on television. My first show is Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, beginning with its premiere, “Arrival”!

Pop Heist is worker-run, subscription-supported, and anti-algorithm, and new reviews go up early for subscribers. Check it out!

There’s one moment in this episode in particular that I think speaks to a much broader problem with The Better Sister as a whole: a phone call in which Chloe reports Agent Olivero’s misconduct to an FBI complaint hotline. The operator’s dialogue is stiff and wooden. The report, if you can call it that, goes into no details whatsoever beyond saying his behavior was inappropriate and hanging up. This takes place while actor Jessica Biel is behind the wheel of a car, with sunglasses on, effectively making it impossible for her to convey emotion. 

And the entire conversation lasts about 20 seconds. It’s so abrupt, so goofy, like on the level of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie, that I actually laughed. The effort feels so minimal! If The Better Sister had put half the energy into making little scenes like this work that it did into ensuring everyone dresses exclusively in shades of blue-green and orange-brown, it might have been something, well, better.

I reviewed the finale of The Better Sister for Decider. What a turkey!

I miss the days when people on television wore colors. Sure, television is still in color, technically, but on far too many shows that color runs the gamut from Point A to Point A. Everything is blue and orange, apricot and teal, denim and wood, aquamarine shirts and orange skin tones. The fourth season of True Detective Season 4 served as a real Magic Eye poster for this critic in this regard — once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it, and now I see it everywhere, up to including otherwise brilliant works of art like the second season of Andor. And I’m not crazy — oh no, not I! Watch this episode of The Better Sister and take a drink every time you see a shot with that exact blue-orange palette or a variation thereof. By the end you’ll be drunker than Nicki after getting roofied by her husband Adam.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

There is, however, one genuinely strong scene in this episode, the cold open. In a flashback, we see Adam in a confessional at a Catholic church. Rather than confide his own sins in the priest, however, he enumerates Ethan’s. He sees the boy as a fat, slothful stoner-gamer who’s ungrateful for everything Adam’s worked so hard to provide him with, and he sees his mother, Chloe, as an enabler who keeps throwing bad money after good where the boy is concerned. Corey Stoll is quietly but very frightening in this scene; you can feel how his anger would warp Nicky, Chloe, and Ethan around itself one after the other. 

It takes the priest to point out that he hasn’t actually confessed any sins to be forgiven, but he grants Adam absolution anyway. When Adam asks what for, the priest replies, “You can name it, son.” He can tell this is a man who can’t even admit to himself the things he’s done wrong, but he knows they’re there, and he’ll need to face up to it sooner or later. 

Stoll’s performance makes the scene, but it’s beautifully and moodily lit as well, it deepens the character of Adam, and it even retroactively explains his career as a prosecutor and his current work with the FBI — he was a do-gooder because he’d done bad and wanted to atone for it. In other words, the whole thing makes sense, aesthetically, narratively, emotionally, intellectually. It can be done. I just wish this show did it more often.

I reviewed the sixth episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

But in terms of it success as a show, MobLand pulls off the most important caper of all: It gets deeper as it goes. There’s no way I expected this show to be such a sharp interrogator of Tom Hardy’s charms as an actor, or such an empathetic (if still inarguably gangster) look at how abuse can affect the course of people’s life and feeds into/emerges from other forms of violence, state-directed and otherwise. I honestly thought it’d be Tom Hardy mixing it up with callow young London ganglords and maybe shagging some birds, I dunno. Instead it proved it had a brain without ever losing its balls. 

I reviewed the season finale of MobLand for Decider.

Elsewhere, Paul Sparks is characteristically excellent as Ken, the soft-spoken writer with vaguely Jimmy Buffett styling who runs the AA meeting Nicky rushes to after enjoying some hair of the dog with a man who pretends to be her father in one of the show’s oddest scenes so far, which is saying something. Anyway! I’ve enjoyed Sparks in everything I’ve seen him in since Boardwalk Empire, where he played a memorably chickenshit gangster; watch him carefully here and you’ll see that while what he’s doing isn’t showy, particularly next to Elizabeth Banks’s broad performance as Nicky, he simply never makes an uninteresting choice as a performer. The inflection of a sentence, a glance from the corner of his eye, the way he wears a shirt or holds a cigarette — he feels less like an Interesting Character and more like a character who is interesting, if that makes sense. With this show — with any show, good bad or indifferent — you’ll be a happier viewer if you learn to enjoy the good stuff when you get it, however fleetingly.

I reviewed the fifth episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

You will watch few performances this year as sleeveless as Jessica Biel’s in The Better Sister. Biel’s character, the allegedly ultra-competent magazine editor Chloe Taylor, spends half the episode swanning around in a heather gray tank top, presenting a physique and a silhouette that look like the work less of a trainer and more of an impressive visual effects workshop. The effect portrays her as both tightly muscled and tightly wound, a woman who ensures her body, face, and hair look spectacular so no one will look too closely.

And you don’t have to take my word for it, either. Over and over in this episode, characters comment on Chloe’s appearance, in ways that can be deemed either effusive or offensive depending on how you feel about the contemporary beauty standards and/or the patriarchy. Her sister Nicky admiringly plays with Chloe’s ultra-neat bob, purring about having wanted to get her hands on that hair since she arrived in New York. Her increasingly estranged mentor/advisor/financial backer Catherine insists on a face-saving memorial get-together for her murdered husband Adam — if only, she says, to make sure Chloe eats. When Chloe envisions a conversation with Adam, he tells her “You look thin,” sounding concerned — until they both grin at how much she always loved it when he’d tell her this.

I think I speak on behalf of everyone with eating-disorder experience when I say, Yeesh! But also, yeah, that tracks: Chloe absolutely would interpret that as a compliment, even if in public she’d likely mouth all the right bromides about body acceptance. It’s very easy to talk about that kind of thing when your body looks like Chloe’s — and the show’s final scene, in which she strips out of her dress for the wake and stands around in black underwear and high heels for a while, makes sure we get an eyeful. 

I reviewed the fourth episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

So far, The Better Sister is one of those take-what-you-can-get kind of shows. Biel is an obvious selling point. Corey Stoll playing his umpteenth type-A shitheel — I mean, there’s a reason he gets these kinds of roles, because he’s really good at them. Nicky’s survival instincts, like insisting on a bigger tip-slash-bribe for Arty the doorman, cut right through the character’s clownishness. There are one or two ostentatiously arty shots that don’t really communicate anything but are fun enough to look at. Guidry and Bowen as a sort of arranged work marriage, where she’s older and gay and doesn’t like his personal grooming but they constantly flirt by making fun of one another anyway, is a fun choice for roles we’d otherwise have seen a thousand times. Cut the ancient punchlines, take Nicky out of her Billy Joel baseball tees (which doesn’t make sense anyway, she’s not even from Long Island) and make her a real person instead of a rough sketch, and those individual components may cohere into something memorable.

I reviewed episode three of The Better Sister for Decider.

 Biel is a compelling actor, one of those performers blessed with looks so striking they have to figure out something interesting to do with it lest it swamp their talents. (Think of half the cast of Mad Men, for example.) In Biel’s case, she uses her severe, patrician beauty and gym-toned silhouette to suggest being tightly wound, even brittle. She projects the air of a person whose house of cards is about to come tumbling down just by how she inhabits her wardrobe, her hairstyle, the screen itself. 

This all works particularly well when contrasted with the flashbacks that show her as a looser, less particular version of herself when her relationship with Adam began. And talk about a psychological cocktail there: Chloe and Adam trying to make up for Nicky’s failure by effectively recreating the relationship with a different sister swapped in. But despite this potentially fertile material, there’s simply a limit to what any actor can do with a character who’s less a person and more a contradiction in terms.

I reviewed the second episode of The Better Sister for Decider.

We love watching the ultra-rich suffer. This has always been true to one extent or another, but less than 15 years ago we mostly loved watching the ultra-rich either dress up in science-fiction armor and blast supervillains, or buy Dakota Johnson lingerie for spanking purposes. But the days of Iron Man and 50 Shades of Grey gave way to the time of Succession and The White Lotus some time ago, and the advent of an American government run for the sole purpose of taking money out of your pocket and putting into Elon Musk’s and Donald Trump Jr.’s has only sharpened the viewing public’s metaphorical guillotines. 

Into this heady atmosphere emerges The Better Sister. Adapted by Olivia Milch from the novel by Alafair Burke, it’s the story of an extremely put-together go-getter who’s tied to her good-for-nothing sister by the man they both loved and the child they both share through him, brought back together when that man gets murdered. There’s a lot of potential in the idea. There’s a lot less potential in the execution. 

I’m covering the new Amazon show The Better Sister for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Once again, Murderbot delivers on its modest promise: fun sci-fi shenanigans, 20 minutes at a time. 

I reviewed this week’s Murderbot for Decider.

If you’ll permit one last bit of TV-critic musing, I’ll say this: I’ve seen shows go from “yeah, it’s pretty good” — or even “yeesh, it’s not that good” — to “whoa, something’s going on here” before. Usually the real quantum leap in quality occurs around the Season 2 premiere, but there tend to be glimpses of a better show beneath the surface of the existing one in the final quarter or so of the debut season. That’s what we’re experiencing with MobLand right now, and that’s a great sign, for the season finale and beyond.

I reviewed this past weekend’s MobLand for Decider.