What happens in that Firefly hospital, then, isn’t a material break with the past, but rather a palette swap. Marlene is a more sympathetic figure than either Kathleen or David, she has her eyes on a much bigger and legitimately noble prize, but in the end she’s still just a person other than Joel who thinks she knows what’s best, and “what’s best” involves killing Ellie. Again and again we’ve been conditioned to believe that when faced with such a person, there’s only one right move for Joel to make.What do you think? Post a comment.

A more charitable critic than I might say “Yes, and that’s the point: after zigging and zigging and zigging for eight episodes, The Last of Us has finally zagged. It’s meant to be confounding. It’s meant to be challenging.” To that I can only reply that the show doesn’t have the chops to pull off such a complicated maneuver, not after the season of rehashed The Walking Dead/The Road/The Mandalorian that it offered us up until this point.

I reviewed the season finale of The Last of Us for Decider.

Working off a script by Amiel and Berger, the director Fernando Coimbra — with Blanchard’s invaluable help — crafts a convincing and familiar 1930s Los Angeles atmosphere for this motley crew of strivers and sad sacks to inhabit; it truly is hard to notice the creative handoff that has occurred between seasons. We’re back in business with Perry, and so far, business is good.

I reviewed tonight’s season premiere of Perry Mason for the New York Times, where I’ll be covering the show all season.

And I’m actively repulsed by Joel’s half of the story, the 40,000th illustration of the necessity and effectiveness of violence that the American culture industry has produced in the past 20 years. In reality torture is ineffective and — this is the important thing — fucking immoral. Creating scenarios in which it’s the only way out for the good guy, and thus the good guy’s goodness makes torture acceptable, is slimy, wormy shit. So is doing the same thing to set up one kill-or-be-killed scenario after another, thus conveying to the audience that wholesale slaughter in the name of your loved ones is the only moral arbiter. The Walking Dead made a whole show out of this low-grade fascist bullshit. Who needs another?

I reviewed last night’s The Last of Us for Decider.

I guess that’s a weakness of your basic post-apocalyptic road-movie structure: You’re only gonna run into so many people, most of whom are adults, most of whom are carrying guns that they may or may not be shooting at you. Not a lot of opportunities to explore the rich panoply of human emotion, you know? This lack of variety is reflected in the effectively one-note performances of both Ramsey and Pedro Pascal, and it handicaps the show considerably. More interesting or innovative writing could work around that, but, well, you get what you get. 

Even the exceptions, like this flashback, aren’t really much to write home about. You can see Ellie’s wide-eyed wonder at the mall coming the moment its lights switch on, and the show does nothing unexpected with the sequence. Even if it did, Gustavo Santaolalla and David Fleming’s constant, hyperactive, sledgehammer-subtle score tells you exactly how to feel about everything at every moment. I’ve been rewatching The Sopranos recently — I know, I know, that’s hardly a fair comparison for this or any other show — and it’s amazing how its lack of a score makes it feel so much more wide-open and intriguing than this. A little more faith in the audience’s ability to think for itself would go a long way.

Which is the story of The Last of Us, I think. Every week it comes on, every week it’s basically serviceable genre entertainment, and with a couple of exceptions (the highs of Episode 3, the lows of Episode 5) every week it’s out of my mind within minutes of the closing credits rolling. You don’t really need to think for yourself, as there’s simply not much to think about.

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

If there were an award given out for the year’s most adequate hour of television, The Last of Us Episode 6 (“Kin”) would be a contender. Basically competent, mildly engaging, largely inoffensive, gesturing in the direction of emotional power without ever running the risk of triggering it directly, it comes nowhere near the highs nor the lows of the five episodes that preceded it. Some lovely scenery, some cursory worldbuilding, a reunion and a farewell, a bunch of wild animals in a post-apocalyptic city, an unsuspenseful cliffhanger, and that’s a wrap. It’s a fresh installment of the biggest show on TV right now, and it’s pretty much just there.

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

The Last of Us made its sympathetically portrayed fascist collaborators Black and Jewish and had them hide with a child in an attic or else the antifascists would murder them. When you type it out it feels even more unpleasant than it did to watch it. Who does this thought experiment serve? In whose shoes is this placing us? Surely it’s intended to be “makes you think” television. What, exactly, are we supposed to think here?

I reviewed The Last of Us episode five for Decider.

A group of revolutionaries has overthrown the fascist FEDRA government — but is the cure worse than the disease? Pretend you don’t know anything about how Hollywood tells stories and find out tonight on The Last of Us!!!

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

My illustrious cohost Stefan Sasse and I talk The Last of Us Episode 2 and Episode 3 on our Patreon-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Moment podcast. Go subscribe and listen!

Along the way they play Linda Ronstadt on the piano, they eat delicious meals prepared by Bill, they revel in strawberries grown by Frank (Bill’s high-pitched squeal of delight upon tasting a fruity delicacy he probably hasn’t enjoyed in over a decade is delightful), they fend off an attempted invasion of their property by raiders with a show of booby-trap force that makes Kevin McCallister look like a guy with a banana peel, they befriend Joel and Tess (RIP), they renovate the neighborhood and some nearby shops, and they pretty much act like basically decent people making the absolute best out of the absolute worst situation. Keep in mind the entire main narrative stops short for, I dunno, 50 out of the episode’s 76 minutes to show all this.

I reviewed this week’s The Last of Us for Decider.

A striking brunette with porcelain skin, piercing blue eyes, and a body that’s been a meme since True Detective Season One, Alexandria Daddario is the perfect lead for Mayfair Witches. Sure, she can act, which is also true of the rest of the show’s core cast: Annabeth Gish, Beth Grant, Harry Hamlin, Tongyi Chirisa, and Jack Huston. But, and I stress, she’s also one of the most attractive women on god’s grey earth, and that counts for a lot in the endemically horny world of Anne Rice’s witches.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches for my Patreon.

The rest of the episode, and this is definitely the cool thing about it, stars a grand total of three characters and three characters only: Joel, Tess, and Ellie, trekking through the overrun ruins of Boston in order to exchange the girl for the battery the adults will need to fire up a truck and take it cross country. That’s right: no resistance fighters, no jackbooted security personnel, no working stiffs, no fellow smugglers, not even extras save for the infected. It’s all Pedro Pascal, Anna Torv, and Bella Ramsey, which sets up the unconscious expectation in the audience that if enough of these three characters die, so too will our story. It’s smart filmmaking.

Smart enough, I think, that it can power through a lot of objections you might have as to the been-there-done-that nature of what they say and do. I’ll state for the record once again that I have not played the Last of Us video games; I’ll state for the record once again that this doesn’t matter, since I’m reviewing a TV show and not the games it’s based on. As such, well, it’s 2023: You’ve seen crumbling cities overrun by vegetation a million times before (Netflix’s Alice in Borderland Season 2 got there just a few weeks ago!). Ditto plant/fungus-based humanoid monsters. Ditto dialogue like “This is your chance, you get her there, you keep her alive, and you set everything right,” which when delivered by an infected and doomed Tess is supposed to come across like a major moment instead of throwaway text from a cutscene. It’s way more the latter than it is the former, I’m afraid.

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

Provided you don’t mind watching a show without a single original thought in its head, the series premiere of The Last of Us is an okay way to spend an hour and twenty minutes. And honestly, why would you expect this show to blaze new trails for the post-apocalyptic zombie genre? It’s an adaptation of a ten-year-old video game that itself arrived years deep into the zombie renaissance best represented by The Walking Dead, from Chernobyl creator (and labor “dissident”) Craig Mazin. George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead it isn’t. Hell, James Gunn and Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead it isn’t, either. For one thing, both those movies were scary.

I reviewed the first episode of the next big thing for Decider.

Once again, Stefan Sasse and I are doing a Patreon-exclusive series of TV reviews for the Boiled Leather Audio Hour Patreon, this time around for The Last of Us!

Alexandra Daddario impresses here, too. True to her filmography she’s playing Rowan Fielding as a sort of White Lotus character, a brilliant and accomplished woman who chafes to the point of physical tics at being condescended to — by anyone for any reason, but especially men — but who’s been given the supernatural ability to make people’s brains explode instead of just sleeping with their husbands or ruining their vacations or whatever. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Mayfair Witches for my Patreon.

Until things get down and dirty — not just sensual or half-naked but genuinely perverse — Mayfair Witches is doomed to feel like one of those sexy supernatural CW shows. Interview worked right out of the gate; Mayfair has a lot of work left to do.

I’ve decided to cover Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches for my Patreon, starting with my review of the series premiere.

I hope we get to see more of the Copenhagen underworld, in every sense of that word. I hope we see more hours and hours of Refn (aided and abetted by co-developer Sara Isabella Jønsson and a talented writing staff in tune with their sensibilities). He’s a filmmaker completely confident in his obsessions who, for some reason, has been given more or less free rein to pursue them. You don’t see that on TV very often. Copenhagen Cowboy proves that you should. 

I reviewed the season (fingers crossed!!!!) finale of Copenhagen Cowboy for Decider.

There’s only one hour to go in this series — or season? — and Miu still has a lot of business to attend to: Chiang, Miroslav, the gang war, Nicklas and his family, you name it. (Even my pet favorite loose end, André, makes an appearance this episode via his pop song music video.) Given the relative simplicity of the story and subject matter compared to Too Old to Die Young or even The Neon Demon and Only God Forgives, I don’t anticipate world-shaking explosions. But you know what? Fireworks will do just fine.

I reviewed episode five of Copenhagen Cowboy for Decider.

Copenhagen Cowboy is best experienced while profoundly stoned. Perhaps that’s an obvious point, but it’s still one worth making. Nicolas Winding Refn’s work can certainly be enjoyed stone-cold sober; honestly, I think of watching Too Old to Die Young high and get a little frightened. But the lurid colors, the sumptuous naturally lit scenes, the throbbing glowing score, the pregnant pauses, the leisurely-to-the-point-of-indolent camera movements: All of it is tailor-made for weed’s time-stretching, sense-enhancing effects. Don’t say you weren’t told, is all I’m saying.

I wrote about Copenhagen Cowboy‘s fourth episode for Decider.

Now that we’ve reached the halfway point (!!! seriously, this show is only six episodes long!), it seems safe to say that compared to Too Old to Die Young, Copenhagen Cowboy represents a retreat from the transcendent to the merely terrific. That’s nothing for creator/co-developer/director Nicolas Winding Refn to be ashamed of, either. Most shows don’t get anywhere close to terrific! And very few shows indeed (beyond TotDY obviously) have ever looked and felt like this one does.

I reviewed the third episode of Copenhagen Cowboy for Decider.

The bottom line is that Copenhagen Cowboy is cool and confident television, made by an artist secure in his aesthetic and obsessions and intent on transmitting them to the audience. It’s how TV should be.

I reviewed the second episode of Copenhagen Cowboy for Decider.