Are we meant to sympathize with George Mullen? This is largely a rhetorical question, as the answer is obviously yes, or else you don’t ask legendary actor Robert De Niro to play the character as America’s Grandpa. But it’s not entirely a rhetorical question. It’s one thing to sympathize with the man’s plight: his mission to uncover the parties responsible for a devastating cyberattack, his need to navigate the political rat’s nest he’d previously extracted himself from, and his fight against the slow, insidious development of senile dementia. It’s quite another thing to sympathize with how he’s dealing with all of it: pressing on blindly in one of the most-high stakes jobs in the history of (fictional) America, knowing full well his aging brain can no longer hack it. Gosh, if only we had one or two recent real-life examples of what a bad idea this is. 

I reviewed the second episode of Zero Day for Decider.

The plot of Zero Day reads like a laundry list of phenomena the real world has rendered totally moot. Transportation crashes due to the rapid shutdown of vital infrastructure? Our government is doing that itself, right out in the open. A president suffering from obvious cognitive decline? The most recent guy had that, and he lost to another guy who also has that. (Reagan had it forty years ago.) Rogue, Russian-aligned actors seizing control of the nation’s digital nerve system? I hope Tulsi Gabbard and Pete Hegstreth get to the bottom of this when they’re not exchanging greeting cards with Vladimir Putin. A massive, unconstitutional civil-liberties power grab that could see people being disappeared off the streets without a warrant? That’s just your tax dollars and our pals at ICE at work. Lizzy Caplan wondering if neo-Nazis had somehow learned to use computers? I give you DOGE. Lunatics shrieking at the government about conspiracies and crisis actors? The day I’m writing this, the Senate voted to confirm, as Secretary of Health and Human Services, a man who has claimed covid was bioengineered to spare Jews. And so on, and so on, and so on, and so on, and on and on and on, and, and, you get it, we all get it, it’s great.

I’m covering the Robert De Niro political thriller Zero Day for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere.

The theme song for The White Lotus is, or was, musical cilantro. Created by Cristobal Tapia de Veer for writer-director-creator Mike White’s anthology series’ first season, then tweaked in a Mediterranean direction for Season 2, it is, or was, chirpy and screechy and unlike anything else on television. To many people, it’s the banger theme music of the decade. To my ears, it was basically unlistenable. 

In this sense, the theme matched the show it accompanied. The White Lotus is, or was, a cheaply cathartic satire of the rich and useless, inviting you to pull up a chair and have your mind blown by the fact that wealthy, attractive people are often, get this, huge assholes. (Glad you were sitting down, aren’t you?) The beautiful resort-hotel settings — not to mention White’s obvious, infectious, seemingly out-of-character love of filming nature, especially water — distinguish it somewhat from your average anti-capitalist dramedy, but it’s still basically just Succession: Hawaii Nights.

When what to my wondering ears should appear but a whole new theme song! It’s less abrasive, and I suppose fans of the original, uh, “melody” will miss it, but it’s just as propulsive, and its ominous, bassy synth washes toward the end suggest both depth and menace. Based on this initial episode, the show may be following suit. It’s weird to say a filmmaker as accomplished and acclaimed as White has finally found his sea legs, but with this particular project it may well be the case. 

I’m covering The White Lotus‘s third season for Decider starting with my review of the season premiere. For the first time, I really liked it!

Two of Yellowjackets’ greatest strengths are on display in this week’s episode before five minutes have elapsed. The first: This show has long offered viewers some of the gnarliest self-applied field surgery the small screen has ever aired. Here we have Mari, her knee dislocated after a fall into Coach Ben’s trap, following his advice and shoving her grotesquely out-of-whack kneecap back into place. It’s the kind of scene that makes you say to yourself “It’s only make-believe,” for all the good it does you. Like all of the show’s makeshift amputations and childbirths and facial reconstruction surgeries before it, you know it’s not really happening, it’s just very good practical effects, but that doesn’t stop you from feeling it in your own bones. It’s great stuff.

So too is the opening credit sequence. With its eerie and aggressive theme song by Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker (of ’90s alt-rock bands Shudder to Think and that dog. respectively) and its distressed VHS aesthetic courtesy of Digital Kitchen art directors Rachel Brickel and Peter Pak, it towers above an opening-title landscape that’s been dominated by “shapes of familiar things morph into shapes of other familiar things” for what feels like a decade. Honestly, it may be almost too good, as it promises a level of anxiety and terror that the show only occasionally aims for or achieves. 

Actually, we can throw in a third strength of the show: At no point is it ever digitally color-graded into a bluish haze or a gray-purple murk or a ghastly teal-and-orange mailman-with-a-fake-tan color palette. When you see these kids out in the woods, it looks like they’re in the woods. When you see these grownups out and about in the ‘burbs, it looks like they’re in the ‘burbs. There’s light and shadow and contrast. I’m not saying the cinematography is spectacular, but it’s not meant to be: It’s meant to be legible, to be a reliable delivery mechanism for the story being told by Ashley Lyle, Bart Nickerson, Jonathan Lisco et al are telling. It never distracts, and that really is an achievement. (This is admittedly a bugbear of mine, but the aquamarine nighttime of True Detective Season 4 and the bright orange nighttime of The Penguin broke something in me.)

I reviewed the second episode of Yellowjackets Season 3’s two-part premiere for Pop Heist. (Gift link!)

Yellowjackets has always thrived when it tears out its own heart of darkness and holds it beating in front of the audience’s face. This is what’s always made the material about the teenage soccer team stranded and starving and going insane in the woods more compelling than the material about the messed-up middle-aged women having zany murder hijinks played largely for laughs. The strength of the adult cast, cleverly (though not entirely, which has always been weird to me) made up of former teen actors Melanie Lynskey, Juliette Lewis (RIP Natalie, we miss you girl, they really should have dyed your hair blonde so you’d look more like Sophie Thatcher), Christina Ricci, Lauren Ambrose, and Elijah Wood, disguises the lopsided nature of the drama somewhat, but only somewhat. As fun as, say, Ricci’s performance as adult Misty, the world’s perkiest sociopath, can be, I’d much rather watch her teenage self react with shock and grief to her first kill than her adult self react with quirky neurotic cheer to her third or fourth. 

I’m making my debut at Pop Heist, a new non-corporate worker-owned pop-culture publication!, with my review of the Yellowjackets season premiere. (Gift link!)

Tramell Tillman’s work as Milchick is really extraordinary, isn’t it? To be blunt, this kind of self-consciously quirky character would normally make my skin crawl with cringe, but Tillman makes his every throwback styling choice, every unnecessarily stiff and formal sentence, every bit of tendentious bullshit, every deeply weird thing he does (including authoring the entire “kindness reform” for the severed floor) feels like the product of a three-dimensional (if cartoonishly deranged) person’s mind. Contrast this with Patricia Arquette as Cobelvig, a collection of Disney-villain quirks that never congeals into anything solid. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Using a populist ignoramus who inherited everything from his daddy as a catspaw, the richest person alive takes over the federal government. Paradise is the show that dares to wonder what would happen if this far-out, science-fictional, dystopian scenario were ever to come to pass. Fortunately, It Can’t Happen Here, right?

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

Over on the Boiled Leather Audio Hour Patreon, we like to stretch our muscles a bit to stuff less directly relevant to ASOIAF/GOT/HOTD/fantasy/SF/the sweep of history. If you’re a subscriber, listen to our new episode on Mike Flanagan’s Netflix horror miniseries Midnight Mass. I think it’s one of our best.

She doesn’t get caught because she gets overheard plotting with the Board. She doesn’t get caught because she accidentally lets slip that she knows something she couldn’t possibly know. She doesn’t even get caught because she invented a “night gardener” as a shoddy alibi regarding her time on the outside, or because Irving B. has a weird prophetic dream when he sleeps rough in sub-freezing temperatures. 

No, it’s simply being a little bit too mean that gives this impostor away. “What you said to me last night, it was cruel,” Irving B. tells her, his suspicions confirmed by this behavior. “Helly was never cruel.” Indeed, the way “Helly” deflects Irving B.’s accusations by bringing up his heartache over his loss of his office romance Burt G. stands out like a sore thumb in the moment, even before you think through what it says about who she really is. It’s the kind of emotional manipulation we saw Milchick use to get Mark to come back to work just a couple episodes ago — straight out of the Lumon handbook, perhaps even literally.

Shows that try their hand at mystery-box storytelling would do well to follow the example set by Severance in “Woe’s Hollow” (Season 2 Episode 4). It’s much more compelling to let the nuances of performance and writing reveal a character’s layers over time, the way they do in a regular drama, than to constantly pull rabbits out of hats like a stage magician. 

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

Acting is the engine that drives Paradise. Not the plot, which you’ve seen before on better shows (watch Silo! watch Fallout!); not the dialogue, which is a wildly mixed bag of astute and cartoonish. Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, James Marsden: These are the load-bearing components of what creator Dan Fogelman has built down in that bunker.

To that number we can safely add Jon Beavers, who plays — or played — Agent Billy Pace, the character who gave this episode its title. Via a series of flashbacks, we learn how he became the man he is — or was — today, and it’s a very different man than what we’ve seen from him so far. But Beavers is so endearing in the role and so deft with his bantering dialogue that he almost singlehandedly makes the contradiction make sense.

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

Well, that was fast! It was probably inevitable that Severance would, at some point, un-sever Mark and Mark S., the outie/innie pair at the center of the series. But if it went anything like everything else on this show goes, the process would take several painstaking steps over several hour-long episodes, during which time any number of other pathways would open up and get walked down before we made our way to our appointed destination.

Instead, Mark learns he can be reintegrated, agrees to do it, then gets it done in a grand total of two back-to-back scenes at the very end of this episode. Zero to 100, just like that, in defiance of the way this show has told its story since its inception. It’s a surprise that works on more than just an entertainment level, too: If your show is about the tyranny of routine, it’s a good idea to break from routine now and then.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

It may be an espionage thriller, but no one’s gonna mistake Paradise for Michael Clayton or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy anytime soon. Information about the assassination of President Cal Bradford and the compromising positions of virtually everyone involved in the case isn’t unearthed or deduced — it’s delivered in great gobs of personal exposition, the confessor standing face to face with the interrogator. The casework seems to amount to a series authority figures asking people “Did you do it?” and backing down when the person says “No.” I’ve seen more compelling detective work in episodes of DuckTales. 

Okay, so creating a thrilling murder mystery is not Paradise’s strong suit. What it relies on instead is using the strength of its cast to turbo-charge its tearjerking tales of their pasts. Even when the material is kind of underbaked, simply involving Sterling K. Brown means you’ll get something edible.

I reviewed episode three of Paradise for Decider.

I single out these two moments for a reason: Man oh man do they make creator/co-writer Dan Fogelman’s strengths crystal clear. Working with co-writer Katie French, he just sort of casually tosses off two enormously endearing moments, from two very different spheres of human interaction. The flirtation is fun and genuinely sexy. The family bonding is warm and sincere. None of it feels particularly like something from a television show — or if it does, it feels like it’s from a good television show. You know, the kind of television show that doesn’t immediately give young Dylan a terminal illness to wring out extra sympathy points for his mother, who in the present day is a calculating man-behind-the-throne figure straight out of billionaire reality. 

But Paradise is that kind of show, too! Paradise is the kind of show that has the son beg Julianne Nicholson to tell him if he’s going to Heaven and what it will be like — it’s going to have more horsey rides! — over a breathy cover version of, I swear to god, “We Built This City” by Starship. This is a level of tasteless, mawkish sentimentality that feels like it comes from a whole different universe than that bit about her lying in hopes of picking that dude up. It’s so much broader, too, than everything this beautifully observed moment outside the supermarket on the horse with the ice cream had been right up until that point. 

From a strictly mercenary perspective, I get it: People like having their heartstrings tugged. But the show had already proven it could do so without resorting to crass, poorly soundtracked emotional manipulation. Why settle for a single when you’re a home-run hitter?

I reviewed episode two of Paradise for Decider.

Even after just one episode (out of three debuting simultaneously), the strengths of Paradise are obvious — and they have nothing to do with the twist, or even with the simple murder mystery. If anyone’s gonna care about any of that at all, they owe it to Fogelman’s knack for writing engaging, real-feeling friendly banter, and the casting of the deeply charming (and good-looking, which doesn’t hurt) actors Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden to deliver much of it. Whether Xavier is allowing his kids to gently bust his chops, or whether he’s doing the same thing to his buddy Billy, or whether he’s navigating his complicated relationship with President Bradford, the conversations are lively and hard to predict from one beat to the next. It’s a gift to write that kind of scene, and I feel I can assume without looking that this is what drove This Is Us at least as much as the twists and turns.

I also assume we’ll get a whole lot more of those in the episodes to come. When you drop “oh by the way, this is science fiction” on the audience at the end of your pilot, it’s hard to imagine there are no further tricks up your sleeve. That’s putting aside the fact that Fogelman made his bones off creating an engaging sense of mystery and surprise for his viewers. The subject matter feels weird in the present moment, that’s for certain — for one thing, it presupposes the continued existence of the federal government, which seems like an open question at this point. Many of the creative choices — the pedestrian teal-and-apricot color grading, a breathy ominous cover version of a pop hit to close the episode out — fall flat the same way they do when pretty much any show tries them. (Remember True Detective Season 4?) But “What will they do next?” is a decent hook, especially with actors like Brown, Marsden, and Nicholson dangling from it. Sure, I’ll bite.

I’m covering Paradise, the new show from the creator of This Is Us and Only Murders in the Building, for Decider

But the main benefit of an episode like this is to take us out of the, for lack of a better word, zany world of the severed floor. Down there, Mark S., Dylan G., and Irving B. are basically empty shells, or maybe characters in a one-panel gag cartoon about office life. (Helly R., who never buys into the bullshit for a second, is considerably more vibrant.) Up top, however, Mark is a real guy, a guy who hangs out with his sister a lot and gets real angry about his wife’s death. Irving seems to share his innie’s vocal pattern, but his military background, music taste, obsessive painting of a secret location in the basement, and potential link to anti-Lumon activities mark him as a very different guy from his lovesick but largely comical counterpart. I wish we weren’t being kept in the dark about Dylan and Helena’s lives at home, but at least there’s some dark to explore. I’m interested in these people, not the meticulously constructed world around them.

I reviewed this week’s Severance for Decider.

There’s something happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear. Since it began, Severance has relied on obfuscation as a load-bearing element of its storytelling. Created by Dan Erickson, the show is many things at once — a dystopian thriller, a sci-fi satire, a workplace dramedy, a black comedy about cults, an anticapitalist broadside, an on-again off-again meditation on what we owe the people we love. But it’s stuffed all of those things into a Lost-indebted mystery box, and every time one of its mysteries is solved, you get another three or four mysteries as a perk, or a penalty.

I’m covering the widely beloved show Severance for Decider, starting with my review of the Season 2 premiere.

Brutalist architecture is misleadingly named. When people think of the stark, colossal buildings that are the hallmark of the style, they think brutal as in overpowering. In fact the term comes from the french word brut, meaning “raw,” referring to the style’s tendency to display rather than mask its raw materials, its concrete and steel.

Brutalism is often associated with such massive construction projects as low-income housing or government buildings, and for good reason: It’s a postwar style that emerged from the social-democrat consensus following the conflict, and was embraced by left/liberal governments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Only when the tail end of the Cold War and its conservative ascendency shook that consensus did these buildings take on the vaguely sinister air with which they are often associated to this day. 

The reason for that is simple, as anyone who’s ever seen a crumbling castle or haunted house can tell you. When a system dies, the buildings constructed by that system for the greater good become symbolic instead of the system’s collapse. City halls become sites of faceless bureaucracy. Monuments become gravestones. Shelters become tombs. 

[…]

The Silo — the Silos, plural — are brutalist in their construction: the concrete is unadorned and enormous in scale. They’re brutalist in their purpose: They were built to safeguard 10,000 souls apiece, recreating society in miniature. 

But they’re also “brutalist” in the misnomer sense: They are the site of authoritarian oppression. If indeed they ever really were built to safeguard anything, all they really exist for now, as Lukas and Bernard and Juliette and Jimmy all learn, is to seal off the lives of those within forever, lethally if need be. 

The Silos are the brutalist paradox transmuted into sci-fi plot form. Are these massive structures the only hope for humanity? Or are they indeed better thought of as haunted places, places of deceit and domination, because whatever world they once existed to protect is long dead? 

[…]

Silo asks a provocative and timely question, one reflected in the controversy of the architectural style upon which it’s based: Are structures of protection really structures of oppression? And when the time comes, will we be able to tell the difference?

I reviewed the season finale of Silo for Decider.

From the start, Skeleton Crew has run like an R2 unit whose motivator is a bit on the wonky side: In large part, it still works just fine. Its theme-park-ride sense of forward motion and energy alone makes it the most entertaining — okay, make that the only watchable — new Disney Star Wars show since Andor. That’s before you get to its deployment of oodles of fun creatures and droids and space pirates, the kind of good clean fun you want in a Star Wars show for kids. The key ingredient is the lead performance of Jude Law as Jod Na Nawood; his transformation from bad guy with a heart of gold to a real rat bastard is the kind of genuine, character-based surprise that a shocking twist or secret identity can only hope to deliver. 

But there were always signs that the machine wasn’t running as smoothly as it could be. The premise and the show’s initial suburban setting amount to crass Gooniesploitation. The core kids started out as stock characters reciting dialogue straight out of kids’ adventure movies; Wim, the worst offender, never grew out of it. Key action sequences felt thrown together. Most tragically, Kelly MacDonald, who by rights should be the co-lead in a whole Star Wars show of her and Jude Law’s own, gets like two minutes of screen time. 

Like the pirate frigate that makes a fiery but stately descent into the surface of At Attin after being blown out of the sky by X-wings, this is the episode where it feels like the whole thing just kinda stalls out and comes in for a crash landing. It’s the kind of finale that feels like it wasn’t so much written as translated from a series of shoulder shrugs in the writers’ room. After all of this adventuring, the good guys flip the special good guy switch after sending the good guy signal, and the good guys win. 

I reviewed the season finale of Skeleton Crew for Decider.

As I write this review, wildfires brought on by climate change are ravaging Los Angeles. The climate change denier whom a plurality of voters selected to be their president, and who as best I can tell is completely insane, is threatening to bring back American expansionism by conquering Canada and Mexico and Greenland as his conservative Christian backers cheer him on. In this final episode of American Primeval, a fanatical Brigham Young rants about his God purifying the world from wickedness as his Mormons, fresh off a genocidal attack on the Shoshone, solidify their claim on Utah by burning Fort Bridger to the ground. You hear Young’s words over the flames. It feels familiar, is what I’m saying. People will always use fires they themselves started as a smokescreen for their murderous ambition, I guess. 

I reviewed the finale of American Primeval for Decider.

It’s preposterous how good Shea Whigham is at delivering dialogue. Boardwalk Empire, Perry Mason, American Primeval — whatever the assignment, he makes every line sound like he’d never heard a word of it before thinking it up right then and there. When Whigham’s Jim Bridger verbally spars with Kim Coates’s appropriately bloviating Brigham Young, he makes the great evangelist sound like a high school freshman at his first debate club event. Sure, Bridger has likely just brought the murderous wrath of the Mormon nation down on his head with his backtalk and intransigence — not to mention his heavily armed squad of employees, mountain men, and Native Americans with nothing left to lose. But Young attacking Bridger now after failing to verbally fluster the grizzled frontiersman in the slightest is a bit like Drake suing after Kendrick Lamar beat the brakes off him in their beef. Even if he wins, he’s a sore loser. 

I reviewed episode five of American Primeval for Decider.