When a television show gets on a real creative tear, something special often occurs. To me, anyway. Whether it’s a stone classic deep into its run, firing on all cylinders; a killer from jump, blowing you away right away; or — as is the case here, with Foundation — a formerly sputtering spacecraft that has achieved escape velocity and is now hurtling towards the stars, there comes a point when a regular review simply won’t do, and a litany of superlatives is all that can get the job done. 

In other words? There is simply too much shit to like in “The Last Empress.” Directed with total confidence by Roxann Dawson, working off a remarkable script by Liz Phang, Addie Manis, and Bob Oltra, it’s Foundation’s best episode to date. (Seems like we’re saying that a lot lately, no?) 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation, a success on every level, for Decider.

There are times when the show that results from all this business feels less like a story, like a lived-in world, and more like a very large box purchased at the cost of a few hundred million dollars into which various story — and lived-in-world-shaped objects can be dropped. I’m a big partisan of the ornate White Tower as a set and location design; its pristine snow-colored latticework filigrees mark it as a place too powerful to be touched and sullied by the wars its residents constantly wage. The show has a kind of ostentatiously poly-couple sex positivity that distinguishes it from the pack, if nothing else. Pike and Henney are transcendently attractive. The Trollocs are perfect monsters under the bed. Beyond that, I’m not sure we’re getting anything here we can’t get more of, or better, elsewhere.

But sometimes that’s enough, you know? I tend to see The Wheel of Time through the eyes of my 12-year-old, a fantasy nerd to whom live-action epic fantasy is still so novel that virtually anything corresponding to that description is a home run. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t still enough of a 12-year-old fantasy nerd left within me that I myself didn’t react that way to the show, at least part of the time, even if Jordan’s books weren’t part of my personal repertoire. Sometimes you just wanna see people in tunics fire waves of magic at people in monster suits, maybe with some swords thrown in the middle. The Wheel of Time gives you that, and if you like that sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing you’ll like.

The Wheel of Time is back and so am I, covering it for Vulture. It’s mid, but in a basically good way? Here’s my review of the Season 2 premiere.

Ahsoka comes across as the bare minimum of Star Wars required to make Star Wars fans go “Sure, I’ll watch it.” It feels less like a television show, let alone a movie, and more like a Happy Meal tie-in toy. If you’re absolutely desperate to hold something from a galaxy far, far away in your hands, it’ll do in a pinch. But the better toys, and the imagination required to make them worth playing with, are found elsewhere.

I reviewed today’s episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

Watching a good episode of “Billions,” which this undoubtedly is, is like watching someone expertly play a puzzle game — solving a Rubik’s cube, say, or beating a level of “Tetris.” You gaze in admiration as skilled hands slide pieces and panels from one place to the next until everything lines up exactly where it should. Chuck’s friends and enemies inadvertently guide him to the correct course of action. Wendy’s petulance puts her on the path toward a major breakthrough. Winston’s defection provides Wags with the fresh kill he requires. “Billions” makes it look easy, but if it were, everyone would be doing it.

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

One element worth singling out: The deft, origami-like folding of Constant and Poly, General Bel Riose and his husband Glawen Curr, and Hober Mallow and the Spacer hive into one single elegant construction. In a sort of cascading series of scenes, Hober makes Hari Seldon’s big offer to the Spacers: an unlimited supply of a synthetic version of the compound that keeps them alive, heretofore controlled by Empire, in exchange for their support. The spacer queen, She-Is-Center (Brucella Neman-Persaud), decides the risk isn’t worth it and rats him out to her daughter, She-Bends-Light (Judi Shekoni), who serves with Bel and Glawen. Hober is handed over to their custody, but escapes thanks to his sentient navigator beast Beki and makes a jump right there within Bel’s ship’s hangar, thus proving the existence of Foundation’s advanced faster-than-light travel technology. As a result, Poly and Constant are brought before the Cleons and Demerzel, taunted, tortured, and returned to prison. It’s almost elegant, the way the pieces are put together.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

Instead, though, most of our time is spent with Rosario Dawson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and Natasha Liu Bordizzo. Man, I just do not know what’s going on there. Winstead’s delivery is completely undistinguished — où sont la Swango d’antan? — and Bordizzo and Dawson sound like someone forgot to wake them up. I don’t want to oversell this, mind you, it’s not like I’m outraged or appalled or upset, I’m just confused. I know these actors. How did this happen? What do you think? Post a comment.

And the show still displays absolutely zero facility for action or suspense, an absolute dealbreaker for the setting. I’m trying hard not to constantly compare Ahsoka to its predecessors, but the heist of the hyperdrive by the bad guys has an apples-to-apples comparison in the form of the heist in Andor, while the double-bladed two-on-one lightsaber battle Ahsoka has with a droid and that mystery assailant is straight-up Duel of the Fates stuff. In neither case is the comparison a flattering one. It’s an embarrassing one, is what it is.

I reviewed the second episode of Ahsoka for Decider.

The costumes look like decent San Diego Comic-Con cosplay. The commemorative mural on display at a big ceremony in Sabine’s honor is laughably amateurish. The children’s drawings Sabine finds in a bunk on Ahsoka’s ship are so obviously an adult trying to draw like a child that it’s almost a provocation to include them. The opening crawl is a syntactical nightmare. The score is frequently dreadful — a ghastly guitar-driven rock song here, lugubrious and out-of-place string sections there. Two lengthy sequences involve puzzle-solving you normally think of as the domain of the parts of Tears of the Kingdom you don’t like playing.

The performances aren’t helped by the dialogue, naturally. There’s only so much anyone can do with clunkers like “May their courage and commitment never be forgotten” or “Mentoring someone is a challenge” or “Sometimes even the right reasons have the wrong consequences.” (Jesus.) The ne plus ultra of this combination of bad writing and bad acting comes in this exchange between Dawson and Bordizzo’s characters:

“I go where I’m needed.” “Not always.” “You never make things easy.” “Why should I? You never made things easy for me, master.” “There is nothing easy about being a Jedi.” “Well, then I should have made a good one.” “Yes, you should have.” It’s like listening to an AI voice chat program train. 

I reviewed the series premiere of Ahsoka for Decider. Dreadful.

You know, when it comes to this week’s episode of Foundation, I think Tim Robinson put it best: What the fuck?! What the fuuuuuuuuck?!?!

I’ve been OOO but I cannot let the weekend pass without drawing your attention to one of the most insane things I’ve seen on TV in a long time: this week’s episode of Foundation, which I reviewed for Decider.

AI does not feel like the future, at least not the future I want. It feels like I’m watching a robot take a shit. It feels like I’m being forced to consume some kind of vile digital excrescence — a Silicon Valley Salò. Resnick, O’Brien, and Kelberman’s grotesque floating heads and their meaningless drivel got there ten years ago. It’s simply taken the real world this long to catch up, or more accurately, fall down.

I wrote about Live Forever as You Are Now with Alan Resnick, the old Adult Swim infomercial that predicted the vileness of AI to a tee

Foundation is funny, exciting, lyrical, dazzling to the eye, epic in scope, and horny at heart, in service of the refreshingly non-pollyannaish goal of limiting humanity’s next dark age to a mere millennium. Even its hero’s journey involves getting off a few stops early and walking. That’s just one more thing to admire about the year’s best comeback.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation for Decider. More big-budget streaming-network SFF adaptations should feature plotlines in which the supreme leader is in serious diplomatic trouble because immortal robot lover never taught him that the cowgirl position exists.

Long one of the most purely entertaining shows on television, “Billions” has always preferred to let its message about the robber barons who rule our world play out amid the beats of a well-made financial thriller over the more direct and unmissable approach preferred by heavy-handed satires like “Succession” and “The White Lotus.” If what we’re seeing in this premiere holds true for the series’s remaining episodes, though, the show seems to have well and truly gotten religion at last. It will spend its final hours depicting our heroes, and many of our villains too, battling to prevent a dictatorial billionaire from becoming the leader of the free world.

Bobby Axelrod is back in the Billions business and so am I, baby. I reviewed today’s seventh and final season premiere (if you’re streaming, Sunday if not) for the New York Times.

I didn’t even realize Lee Pace wasn’t in this week’s episode of Foundation until after it was over. How’s that for a high compliment? 

I reviewed today’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

Right there you can see that Cloud’s range is astonishing, and this is what the contention that “he’s just playing himself” gets so wrong. Cloud and Fez may have had a similar vibe in casual conversation. But to access the comedic timing required to pull off that blackly hilarious interrogation scene, in which he conveys the largely accurate idea that the Jacobs’ lives are even more fucked up than his own? To convincingly portray a guy so thoughtful and attentive that a good girl like Lexi would grow closer to the town’s top drug dealer than to any of her own girlfriends? To voice the audience’s anguish as the adorable little psychopath Ashtray goes down in a hail of cop bullets? And to seem like exactly the right person for the job in every scenario? Any one of these tasks requires real talent, real effort, real work as an actor. Cloud did it all, and did it so seamlessly and so absent of ostentation that many viewers didn’t even notice his labor.

And when I say he’s the gateway between Euphoria-as-melodrama (complimentary) and Euphoria-as-thriller (also complimentary), I mean it. Take a look at the episode I consider to be the show’s masterpiece, the fifth ep of Season 2, “Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.” It’s a showcase for Zendaya first and foremost, as she first has a mortifying emotional battle with her friends and family when, first at her house and then at Lexi and her sister Cassie’s, they attempt interventions to get her clean. It’s absolutely savage work by Zendaya, as raw and riveting as any of the New Golden Age dramas of yore.

But by the end of the episode, all the manipulation and gaslighting and guilt-tripping is over. Rue’s no longer lambasting her mother for being a shitty parent or accusing her best friends of betraying her or airing out other kids’ dirty laundry to take the focus off of her — she’s on a high-speed foot chase with the cops, breaking into houses, jumping over fences, landing in catctuses, and generally participating in crime thriller antics. Again, the transition is so seamless that you barely realize you’re suddenly watching a different kind of show until you’re knee-deep in some unsuspecting family’s backyard with the police on your tail.

What happens in between? Fez. When Rue has exhausted all of her family and friends, it’s Fez she turns to. When she tries to rob Fez’s grandmother’s meds, it’s Fez who turns her away. She approaches him via the show’s first brand of ugliness, the reality of addiction and confrontation, and departs him for a journey deep into the second variety, the heightened kill-or-be-killed reality of a Boogie Nights, a Pulp Fiction, an American Psycho. Fez is the fulcrum.

I wrote about the late Angus Cloud and his crucial, wonderful work on Euphoria for Decider.

But that’s just it: This a documentary about a current WWE wrestler, produced by WWE. That means you’ll be hearing a lot of the bizarre, cult-like lingo developed by Vince McMahon to describe the product he’s been selling for forty-plus years. For example, both the narration and multiple interview subjects, from Cody on down, use the sanitized word-salad phrase “sports entertainment” in place of “professional wrestling”; it’s a McMahon innovation you will never hear a human being not on WWE’s payroll say, unless they’re doing a bit.

Similarly, the adversity Cody faced during his initial WWE stint — bad gimmicks, bad ideas, writers and executives who refused to listen to him — is treated like some kind of natural phenomenon rather than the result of actual decisions made by people with names and addresses. The result is an onslaught of passive verbs that would make reporters about “police-involved shootings” blush, in which Cody is repeatedly fucked over by figures unknown.

But it’s a documentary’s job to make the unknown known, right? Like, when Cody says his demand to revert to “Cody Rhodes” from “Stardust” after his dad’s death “was met very much poorly” — met very much poorly by whom? Elsewhere, Brandy describes the situation that kept her husband down thusly: “Somebody said to somebody, ‘Not you.’” Who said it? To whom did they say it? Who are the somebodies? If “they” wouldn’t let Cody do what he wanted, who are “they”?

The answer, of course, is Vince McMahon himself, the man who for decade after decade has overseen WWE’s creative decisions on the most macro and micro of levels alike. The documentary treats this man like Zeus, a figure of might and legend who occasionally descends from his Stamford Olympus to bestow his blessings upon the worthy. Cody gets there eventually, but the years in which McMahon — who it’s widely believed bore a grudge against his one-time rival businessman Dusty Rhodes to the man’s dying day, even during the periods during which Dusty worked for WWE — kept him down are glossed over.

This is to say nothing of the well-documented series of incidents in which McMahon engaged in illicit sexual conduct with his own employees, then paid millions in hush money to cover it up. Or about how he “retired” when this news broke, then forced his way back into the company to oversee its sale to perhaps the only potential buyer willing to leave him in charge, Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor — which also owns UFC, run by the similarly politically reactionary and personally abusive Dana White. Or about his Succession-like power plays against his daughter Stephanie and her husband, former wrestler Paul “Triple H” Levesque, both of whom hold (or held, in Stephanie’s case) executive positions within the company. 

McMahon’s conduct (and of his years-long track record of creative bankruptcy; whatever juice the guy once had, it dried up 20 years ago) got me to swear off watching WWE shows unless and until he’s gone for good. Stand-up guy though he might be, the same cannot be said of Cody. All of this is worth exploring in a way an official WWE documentary can and would never do, yet it’s exactly this stuff that would make the doc worthwhile.  

I had a grand old time writing about American Nightmare: Becoming Cody Rhodes and the ways it both does and doesn’t escape WWE’s weird gravitational field for Decider.

I’m about to say the most “I’m a professional television critic” thing I’ve ever said, so please bear with me: This week’s episode of Foundation was a hell of a good time, and I have my reservations about that.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

I’ve often said that all I’m looking for when I go to the theater is “a fun time at the movies,” and the same can be said of television. Transcendent experiences are nice, but being solidly entertained by serious people at the top of their craft for six episodes is, as I said above, plenty. It’s a circle I don’t mind standing in.

I reviewed the finale of Full Circle for Decider.

But you want to know what my big hope is for the finale, more so than wanting this or that character to get freedom or justice or their comeuppance? It’s that the deal at the center of the circle never gets fully explained. The way writer-creator Ed Solomon and director Steven Soderbergh have depicted the chaos that followed from it is good enough for me. Some mysteries are best left unsolved.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Full Circle for Decider.

If I were to construct a Prime Radiant based on all my knowledge of all the shows I’ve ever reviewed, I’d gaze into its holographic projection of the future and tell you that if things continue along their current path, there are warning signs for what might happen. It happened to Billions, for example. It happened to The Leftovers. Closest to home of all, it happened to the earlier Lee Pace starring vehicle Halt and Catch Fire. What happened, you ask? (“What happened, O Prophet?” is also acceptable.) What happened was that shaky shows with glimmers of promise in their first seasons became dynamite in their second. If I’m not mistaken, if there’s no intervening Crisis, Foundation is on that golden path. 

I reviewed the new episode of Foundation for Decider.

I think I’ve sussed out what Full Circle is up to. Besides being the quintessential Gripping New Crime Thriller, that is. The show’s fourth episode (“Safe in the Circle”) is like a Jenga tower made of lies, dating back decades from the kidnapping at the center of the show, and the characters spend it pulling the tower apart piece by piece. Everyone lies, as (unfortunately) Morrissey once sang. That’s the big idea.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Full Circle for Decider.

Move over, Transformers: There’s a new “more than meets the eye” show in town. Returning for its second double dose of twisty crime hijinks, Full Circle spends its third episode (“Jared’s Body”) revealing one surprising connection between the players after the other. It does so with minimalist precision, serving up just enough information to get the audience on the right track, confident everyone watching is smart enough to keep up. Personally? I appreciate that vote of confidence. Everyone else seems to be getting in on the investigation; why shouldn’t we?

I reviewed the third episode of Full Circle for Decider.