That Andor, a Star Wars television series on Disney+, received an Emmy Award nomination for Best Drama doesn’t tell you much about Andor. Like all awards shows, the Emmys are ultimately about themselves; following their nominees and winners from year to year is less a way to keep track of what’s actually good and more a way to track the values of the Academy of Television Arts & Science’s values and preferences as they change, or don’t change, over time. For example, the acting on the satirical HBO dramedies Succession and The White Lotus was very good, but please take it from someone who covers this stuff for a living: In no way did these two shows alone contain the eight best supporting actor performances of the year all by themselves, unless they were the only two shows you watched.

Similarly, Andor’s nods for Best Drama, Best Directing, and Best Writing — three of its total of eight nominations — are very nice for Andor, a show acclaimed by nearly every critic from nearly every quarter. But please note that the rote exercise in IP management Obi-Wan Kenobi, aka Ewan McGregor’s Divorce Attorney Needs a New Pair of Shoes, also landed a nomination in the historically competitive Best Limited Series category. Put it all together and what you have is evidence that Emmy voters listen when the Mouse tells them something is For Your Consideration, that’s all. It’s just like how the capture of an entire category by two shows that aired on the same network/streamer in the same time slot on the same night while parodying the same kinds of people tells you more about how Emmy voters like spending their Sundays than anything else.

Fortunately, what Andor’s success in the gold statuette realm really means is that we have another opportunity for us, you and me, to talk about just how good Andor is. 

I wrote about Andor for Decider.

“Rip-roarin’” isn’t an adjective I’d use to describe Foundation, science-fiction godhead Isaac Asimov’s heady tome (is there any other kind of tome?) about a rogue mathematician’s plan to save humanity from itself. I do not mentally associate the novel with the phrase “psychedelic freak-out.” Nowhere in its pages do I recall a chapter entitled “The Emperor Fucks a Robot, Then Has a Fight Scene in the Nude.”

And yet, my friends. And yet!

Bombastic, lascivious, arch, gorgeous — “In Seldon’s Shadow,” the long-awaited return of David S. Goyer’s epic-scale adaptation of Asimov’s magnum opus, is all of the above. Written by Goyer and his fellow genre luminary Jane Espenson and directed with verve and grace by Alex Graves, it indicates that this show learned every possible lesson from its inconsistent but entertaining first season. It leans hard into its strengths, shores up its weaknesses, and provides enough beauty — both science-fictional and human-physical — to leave me as optimistic about this show as I’ve ever been. 

And I’m not gonna bury the lede here: Lee Pace has a naked fight scene in it.

I reviewed the terrific season premiere of Foundation for Decider.

Everyone says you can’t make a good thriller in the age of cellphones. Ed Solomon and Steven Soderbergh just said “bet.” “Charger,” the portentously titled second episode of the duo’s new crime pulse-pounder (is that a word?), bakes ubiquitous smartphone usage into the drama so smartly and organically that you’d be amazed anyone ever considered the devices a problem for stories involving mystery and suspense. Maybe people just aren’t trying hard enough?

I reviewed the second episode of Full Circle for Decider.

The Road Warriors never stayed put. Considered one of the greatest tag teams in the history of professional wrestling, the two muscled-and-mohawked behemoths known as Hawk and Animal brought their Mad Max–indebted brand of post-apocalyptic style and mayhem to wrestling promotions across the country and around the world, never staying in one place for very long. They’d dip in, wreck shop, and bounce. It made them superstars.

At the risk of being the first person in human history to compare Steven Soderbergh to a couple of gargantuan ex-bouncers who entered the ring wearing spiked shoulder pads while blasting Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” the director’s career reminds me of theirs quite a bit. Bouncing from genre to genre, style to style, tone to tone, and in this particular case film to television — a medium he visits every few years, directing the shit out some show or other before departing for the movies once again — he’s a journeyman filmmaker in the very literal sense that his filmography is a journey across one boundary after the next. 

Soderbergh’s latest trip to the small/streaming screen, Full Circle, is a reunion with his frequent collaborator, comedy-turned-crime screenwriter Ed Solomon. And based on its trickily plotted, emotionally earnest first episode…well, go ahead and cue up “Iron Man.”

I’m covering Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon’s quintessential Gripping New Thriller Full Circle for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

At any rate, presented with a starring vehicle he himself helped build, Tesfaye proceeded to get in that vehicle, aim at the wall, and plow into it at full speed throughout the course of The Idol’s five episodes. I’m not talking about the strength of his performance, which I’ll get to, or the critical and commercial reception of the show, which is irrelevant. I’m talking about the deliberate damage he did to his image as a suave, sophisticated, ice-cold Hollywood vampire. The goofy name, the rat-tail hairdo, the rehearsed pickup lines, the corny daddy-dom sexual antics, the on-screen comparisons to parasitical showbiz-adjacent cults run by weirdly charismatic grifters like the Manson Family and NXIVM, the backstory of decidedly unglamorous pimping and abuse, loudly jacking off in the dressing room of an upscale clothing boutique, getting hammered and trying kung fu to intimidate his inamorata Jocelyn’s (Lily Rose Depp) ex-boyfriend, obnoxiously heckling Joss after she rejects him and plans her next career move without him, visibly struggling not to puke after a multi-day bender as industry bigwig Nikki (Jane Adams) tells him what a genius he is — Tedros, the character Tesfaye created with showrunner-writer-director Sam Levinson and co-creator Reza Fahim, is a stake driven through that Hollywood vampire’s heart, over and over again.

I wrote about Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye’s performance in The Idol for Decider.

Anyway, does any of this resemble how the music industry works? I don’t have a clue, and I don’t really care. For one thing, I don’t think any of that matters much for visual fantasias about pop stardom. Velvet Goldmine changed my life and I don’t think it was a realistic look at how David Bowie’s management screwed him contractually. For another, realism in this kind of satirical erotic-thriller thing is beside the point: I don’t go to Body Double for a look at the adult film industry of the early ‘80s, which I’m reasonably sure involved fewer Frankie Goes to Hollywood performances IRL. I don’t think Basic Instinct is an accurate portrayal of homicide detectives or novelists, and I wouldn’t want it to be. Once it became clear what The Idol was doing — and that what it was doing was good shit, in the vein of much good shit from days of yore — all I wanted, and what I got, was for it to keep doing it, and doing it, and doing it well, as the song goes. It hit an unpleasant note there at the end, but that’s by design. If it were any more pleasant, they’d have been doing it wrong.

I reviewed the finale of The Idol for Decider. I am not in the prognostication business but I’ve read enough recently from sharp writers to lead me to suspect the tide will shift in favor of this very good show.

I can’t remember the last time a show had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way “Outside,” the finale of Silo’s crackerjack first season, did. Actually, no, that’s not strictly true. I can’t remember the last time a show that wasn’t professional wrestling had me gasping and howling and pointing at the screen the way this episode did. Silo is the most purely entertaining drama of the year, and these drum-tight 40-odd minutes demonstrate why.

I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider. What a fun show!

When it comes to The Idol, I think Jabba the Hutt put it best: “This bounty hunter is my kind of scum, fearless and inventive.” It’s smart about its sordidness in a way that leaves me thoroughly entertained. As it shifts from one tone to another, from sledgehammer-obvious satire to genuinely unpleasant psychological horror (nobody says torture porn on my watch) to Skinemax-style erotica, there’s one constant: It’s a nasty bit of business (complimentary). 

[…]

The Idol (which I’ll note for the record is airing during the WGA strike, which the studios could end at any time by paying and treating their writers fairly) has its fairly obvious film antecedents, Basic Instinct and Showgirls and The Neon Demon and Body Double and so forth. But while the vituperative reaction to the show may mask it, it’s not alone in TV land either. Nicholas Winding Refn’s Copenhagen Cowboy and Too Old to Die Young, Nick Antosca and Lenore Zion’s Brand New Cherry Flavor, and even some elements of Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope and The New Pope, not to mention Levinson’s own Euphoria, point in the direction of this visually lurid, tonally fluid exploration of exploitation and glamour. It’s like biting on sexy tinfoil. I’m all for it.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Idol for Decider.

Let’s first focus on the man who appeared to be the show’s big bad before Bernard revealed his true nature: Sims, the Judicial commandant played by Common. Actually, Sims is just “Rob” to his friends and family, who from his boss Bernard to his wife Camille (Alexandria Wiley) appear to view him with legitimate love and respect. Of course, Bernard’s willing to look past all that when he reprimands Rob for sending unauthorized guards to escort Camille and their son to his apartment, but be that as it may: The point is that this jackbooted thug is just some guy, a guy with a wife and a kid and a tiny apartment and dreams beyond his station. Kind of like literally everyone else in the Silo, in other words.

It’s up to Common to pull off this contrast, and he does so using the same tools that make him intimidating. Take his black-leather-jacket-and-turtleneck wardrobe, for example. On one hand, it’s secret-police chic. On the other, the cut and styling are reminiscent of the 1970s-indebted clothing often worn by musicians who emerged from the same conscious-rap/neo-soul circles Common himself did as a hip-hop artist back in the day. Scary but sexy, that’s our Sims.

Common’s made two separate careers out of using his voice, and that helps him here too. Like George Clooney, he’s blessed with pipes that make him sound handsome as well as look it, and that mellifluous baritone makes him an attractive figure as well as a convincingly caring parent and spouse. But any guy who can speak that softly and still sound that commanding is a perfect villain from an aural perspective, and that’s a big part of what makes him believable as a guy who will stop at nothing to acquire his target, runaway Sheriff Juliette Nichols.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Silo season one for Decider.

But the problem with Secret Invasion’s AI credits isn’t just one of ethics, or of ugliness. It’s a waste of some of the most valuable creative real estate any television show has. Throughout television history, thoughtfully crafted opening title sequences have set the tone for the shows to follow, conveying valuable information about everything from the mood you can expect to the plot of the show itself. Some are woven so deep into the fabric of the series they kick off that the two become synonymous. The best function like short films, artistic statements on their own. Speaking plainly, AI just doesn’t have the juice.

When Cheers wanted to show you a place where everybody knows your name, they relied on a carefully curated and edited selection of illustrations and photographs depicting nostalgic good-old-days revelry created by James Castle, Bruce Bryant, and Carol Johnsen. Monty Python member Terry Gilliam established his troupe’s style of surrealistic inanity with animation that would become a staple of the show. David Lynch and Mark Frost used second-unit footage and the evocative music of close Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti to transport you to Twin Peaks.

I wrote about the ethical and, above all, artistic failure of Disney’s decision to use AI to “create” the opening credits for its new show Secret Invasion for Decider.

But why is material that’s this much of a live wire present in the grunting-as-he-jerks-off, “cartay blanchay” show? You’ve gotta return to your Basic Instinct and your Body Double for the answer to that. The Idol is a sort of satire you don’t really see much that often, not even on a network as satire-heavy as HBO: the kind of satire that effectively imitates, and thus also functions as, that which it’s satirizing.What do you think? Be the first to comment.

Succession played with the allure of extreme wealth as both a selling point and a plot point, but it’s not like it felt like Dynasty or Dallas at any point; it was satirizing these kinds of people, not those kinds of shows. Same with The White Lotus or The Righteous Gemstones. 

The Idol, by contrast? Well, you know how RoboCop and Starship Troopers lampoon action movies but are also incredibly kickass action movies? For that matter, you know how Twin Peaks’s initial run was both a weird parody of nighttime soaps while also being the best nighttime soap on television? The Idol is doing fucked-up sex shit even as it pastiches fucked-up sex shit. To put it in terms from the show itself, it’s Chaim saying “I fucking love that guy” one minute, and “I think our girl’s in trouble” the next.

I reviewed this weekend’s episode of The Idol for Decider.

The best way I can describe Silo is this: Imagine you’re a baseball player and your thing is that you’re a monster home run hitter, like pitchers are afraid of you, you get intentionally walked a lot, when you take the field they play “Iron Man” by Black Sabbath. You are one home run away from breaking the record. And for some reason, the league has given you a choice: You can take your chances with the best relief pitcher in the game…or you can simply set a tee on home plate, put a ball on it, and knock it out of the park, easy-peasy lemon squeezey.

Silo is a show that always chooses the latter option. It’s not here to impress you with its high degree of difficulty. Why would it, when it’s so much easier to keep things simple and just deliver on what you set out to do, over and over and over?

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

To that point, this episode has very little time for the “The Idol is a glorification of abusers” viewpoint, because much as he was in the pilot (remember that gross coke loogie he hocks?), Tedros is depicted as a tacky and obvious grifter creep at every opportunity — the exception, of course, being when he’s pouring on the charm-and-dom routine for Jocelyn in the flesh. But behind the scenes, he’s talking about her like a business investment for his club — the exact same way he talks about Dyanne (Jennie Kim), the talented backup dancer he seems to have steered into Jocelyn’s orbit specifically to replace her. Writer-director Sam Levinson literally has Tedros do the “no, I’m alone” bit over the phone to Joss when in fact he’s surrounded by people and getting his hair braided that very moment. For god’s sake, his name is Tedros Tedros! Tedros is a ridiculous dick! It isn’t subtle!

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Idol for Decider.

Ah, the simple pleasures of Silo. It’s a show I look forward to watching and writing about every week, because it’s a show that, to paraphrase the Sex Pistols, knows what it wants and knows how to get it. Its aim is to explore a central mystery — who’s keeping everyone inside this Silo and why — and it does that. Its technique is to use the fundamental building blocks of suspense filmmaking — cat and mouse games, races against the clock, a drip-drip-drip of clues — and it does so with skill and panache. If this sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, then I’m misspeaking, because it really is a formidable achievement. Lots and lots and lots of science fiction shows try and fail to achieve what Silo makes look easy.

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

So, my point. Based on all of this — the constant joking at the expense of the scandal mill and the people who get paid either to feed or defeat it, the casual assertion that what’s depicted in the photo is nbd (the real issue is that it got leaked, and that half her entourage is trying to treat it as a glass-half-full situation), the depiction of Tedros as a Kramer-esque goof who nonetheless has the kavorka — I have a hard time looking at The Idol as exploiting any of this behavior, let alone endorsing it. It seems pretty clear where the show stands on all that. 

For example, can anyone take the ranting about intimacy coordinators being a pain in the ass done by Joss’s creative director Xander (Sivan) seriously, given that at no point are any of these people treated as being serious? Or his counterintuitive insistence that Joss breaking the intimacy rider already agreed to is about bodily autonomy, when he then spends the rest of the episode’s first act hiding some pretty important news involving her bodily autonomy from her? Again, I feel like this is all pretty clear.

None of this is to say that it isn’t sleazy as shit. Oh, it’s hugely sleazy! But it’s a familiar kind of sleaze: visually, sonically, thematically, locationally, in its use of comedy and nudity and perverse sex, this is an erotic thriller in the mode of the genre’s semi-satirists, Brian De Palma and Paul Verhoeven. The wider genre is very much in vogue at the moment, but despite watching a lot of horny television, I haven’t seen anything else working in this specific, spectacularly tasteless mold. I for one am all for it.What do you think? Be the first to comment.

Because given sufficient skill — and true, it takes a lot to reach sufficiency — you kind of can have your cake and eat it too with this stuff. You can, as Nikki says in her opening woke has gone mad–style monologue, “let people like sex, drugs, and hot girls,” while also making them uncomfortable with, and even making fun of them for, liking it. The real trick though, is to then make them sit with how being made to feel uncomfortable adds to their enjoyment. 

I reviewed the first episode of The Idol for Decider.

“What if everything you know to be true, everything you’ve been told by the people you love, was in fact just one big lie?” Good question, George Wilkins! And the beauty of it is that like so much of Silo, it has a double meaning. The surface one, the obvious one, is your bog-standard dystopian Everything You Thought You Knew Was Wrong boilerplate, a rebel telling the woman he loves why he’s rebelling, because he believes the Silo is built on bullshit. 

The other meaning — the more insidious one for said woman, Juliette Nichols — is that she’s not the woman he loves, because he doesn’t really love her at all. At least according to his ex-girlfriend Regina Jackson (Sonita Henry), George is, or was, a serial user of people, women in particular, who could get him closer to the only thing he really does care about: the forbidden history of the Silo and the world that surrounds it. 

Don’t worry, I’m not bragging about sussing out this dual interpretation. The show is not subtle about all this. Nor does it need to be. Silo, as I’ve said before, is a simple show rather than a simplistic one. It has one big central mystery — loosely, “What’s the deal with the Silo?” — as its core support pillar, and wraps everything else around that, from sub-mysteries to world-building to character development — around that pillar like the spiral stairs at the center of the Silo itself. 

I reviewed this past weekend’s episode of Silo for Decider.

Tim Robbins is here to remind you he’s a movie star. Not through anything flashy or theatrical, mind you — just through his ability to play the most mild-mannered character on this show and still come across as the most fascinating and charismatic guy in any room he’s in.

As played by Robbins, Bernard, the new mayor of the titular Silo, is an interesting cat. From what we’ve seen from him so far, he displays both the gentle arrogance of an expert in his field (IT) and the quietude of someone unused to relating to other people in a personal way, which is another form of arrogance I suppose. His gestures at camaraderie are simultaneously ineffective and endearing: his corny joke at Mayor Jahns’s funeral about filling her very big shoes, but not literally, since her feet were actually small (you can all but see his mental note: “Pause for laughter”); his offering of a drink to the Silo’s other officials, then his silent “okay, more for me then” affect as he consolidates the glasses he’s already poured and takes a swig. 

I reviewed episode five of Silo for Decider.

In short, Fatal Attraction is a remake where the game is worth the candle, one that honors the anxieties that animate the original while jettisoning its thriller approach in favor of something both more expansive and more humane. And unlike the original, the story does not end when the monster is destroyed and the status quo is restored so that everyone can live happily ever after; the damage lives on, and another monster may have been born in the bargain. Filled with memorable performances from terrific actors, it’s one of the best-written shows of the year. Let’s hope it’s one of the best-written shows of next year thanks to a second-season renewal, too. It’s earned one.

I reviewed the season finale of Fatal Attraction for Decider.

Two words come to mind when describing Episode 7 of Fatal Attraction: emotional abattoir. That’s the environment Alex Forrest grew up in, as we learn in the series of flashbacks that give this episode its spine. And the moment I realized that’s where this was headed, that the kid we were watching play mini-golf in the opening scene while her father ignored her to flirt with another woman was Alex, I could feel my whole body tense. I knew we were about to examine the family dynamic that made her into what she eventually became, I knew it would be horrific, and I was right.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Fatal Attraction‘s (hopefully) first season for Decider.

I came into the Yellowjackets season finale expecting it to be brutal. Well, it was brutal alright, just not in the way I hoped it would be. Folks, we need to talk about needledrops, specifically all the ones on this show. Simply put, Yellowjackets has the worst music supervision on television, and it’s fucking the rest of the show up, bad.

Seriously. “Zombie” by the Cranberries as everyone staggers back to the cabin with Javi’s corpse in tow, eyes glassy, completely drained, shuffling around like, you guessed it, zombies. “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” by Radiohead as Natalie hallucinates being back on the crashing plane as she dies from an accidental lethal injection by Misty before, you guessed it, fading out. “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen, one of the most overused music cues of the past two decades (which should have been retired after its pitch perfect usage by Richard Kelly in Donnie Darko), as the surviving kids stand outside their burning cabin, looking forward to a future of, you guessed it, killing people under the moonlight. 

Every song is hugely famous already, carrying tons of preexisting emotional weight, and used to the most literal effect possible, like a sort of musical Cliff’s Notes for what’s happening and how we’re supposed to feel about it. It’s all so blunt, so artless. It makes Stranger Things sound like The Sopranos. (Nora Felder, who took over from Euphoria’s Jen Malone on music supervision duties this season, also handled Stranger Things, to which I can only say no shit.)

I reviewed the season finale of Yellowjackets for Decider. Woof.