At this point, I want to state for the record that I am currently covering not only The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and Game of Thrones: House of the Dragon, and in neither case do I feel it’s my job to adjudicate the differences between the books and the shows. The books are the books and the shows are the shows — two different media, two different sets of structures and demands and rewards. Ultimately, what matters is what winds up on screen, and how that comes across to the viewer.

That being said, I must admit that it’s extraordinarily difficult for a person like me — a guy who first read The Hobbit at age 5, who’s seen the LotR movies more times than I can count, who’s read Tolkien’s books to his children multiple times, who has the goddamned White Tree of Gondor tattooed on his arm — to formulate an equal appreciation for the canonical characters and the invented ones. Galadriel and Elrond, and even Finrod and Gil-galad — these are old friends of mine, dating back decades. Arondir and Bronwyn and Theo and Nori? To paraphrase Mariah Carey, I don’t know them.

I reviewed tonight’s series premiere of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, which was okay, for Decider.

Once again, I’ve updated my House of the Dragon character guide for Vulture to reflect the events of the most recent episode. If you’re confused, this will set you straight!

Were you a “Game of Thrones” guy before you got this part?

Yes, I was. It had been going for about three or four seasons before I actually watched it because fantasy is not really my genre. I was staying with a friend in L.A., and he said to me, “Have you seen this ‘Game of Thrones’?” And I was like: “No. It’s got dragons, why the hell would I watch that?” [Laughs.] He said, “Just watch one episode.” And it was so much more gritty and, for want of a better word, realistic than I was expecting. I was hooked.

I interviewed House of the Dragon‘s Steve Toussaint for the New York Times.

Which brings us to the heart of the story: family drama. At this point, underneath all the dragon-riding and crab-feeding, this is ultimately a show about a dad, a daughter, and the demands that are pulling them apart.

Paddy Considine and Milly Alcock, the performers in question, root this material in vivid, empathetic acting. Considine constantly wears a hangdog expression on his instantly likeable face; his Viserys is a guy who wants to be happy, and is deeply frustrated to find that he can’t be. No wonder he selects Alicent, who’s become his closest friend, to rule the realm with him.

Alcock, meanwhile, projects a blend of precociousness and vulnerability, enhanced by the show’s blocking choices. She may insist on selecting the next Kingsguard knight, but she has to stand on a stepstool to see the candidates; she convinces Uncle Daemon to back down, but he towers over her in much the same way that his dragon dwarfs her own.

I reviewed last night’s episode of House of the Dragon for Rolling Stone.

Kicking off what we hope will be the start of a weekly series, Stefan Sasse and I review the premiere of House of the Dragon in the new episode of the Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast! Available at the link or wherever you get your podcasts!

My guide to the characters of House of the Dragon for Vulture has been updated to cover the events of the premiere. Have a quick brush-up before tonight’s second episode!

Prince Daemon Targaryen is a man of action, and that suits the man who portrays him on “House of the Dragon” just fine.

“On an acting level, I was always quite pleased that I wasn’t in loads of the big table scenes,” said Matt Smith, who shares his royal character’s distaste for the minutiae of sitting down and running the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. “They’re often the ones that are hardest to shoot — the ones that can drive you bonkers. I preferred being on a horse with a sword in the hand.”

Of course, starring in “House of the Dragon” — the prequel series to HBO’s blockbuster “Game of Thrones,” based on the fantasy novel “Fire & Blood” by the author George R.R. Martin — means riding far more exotic mounts than mere horses. As the potential heir to the Targaryen dynasty and its royal seat, the Iron Throne, Daemon is a dragon-rider, and a dangerous one at that.

Created by Martin and Ryan Condal, who serves as a showrunner along with the director Miguel Sapochnik, “Dragon” chronicles a turbulent time in the history of the Targaryens and their fiery steeds, when a crisis of succession threatens to tear the family, and the realm they rule, apart. As the younger brother of the ruling King Viserys (played by Paddy Considine), Daemon is at the heart of the conflict, and emerged in Sunday night’s series premiere as one of the show’s most charismatic characters.

And if you found him fascinating, you’re not alone. In a phone conversation last week, a pensive Smith, who has had earlier star turns in other major franchises like “Doctor Who” and “The Crown,” openly wrestled with Daemon’s duality — agent of chaos one moment, ferociously loyal and loving the next.

“There’s a sort of folklore among ‘Fire & Blood’ fans and ‘Game of Thrones’ fans that when a Targaryen is born, you flip a coin,” he said “One side is greatness and the other side is madness, and you don’t know which side it’s going to land on.”

“With Daemon,” he continued, “the coin is still in the air.”

I interviewed House of the Dragon star Matt Smith for the New York Times.

For now, there’s already plenty to marvel at — the uniformly excellent cast, for starters. Considine is marvelous as Viserys, a man who simply wants to be liked by everyone, an impossibility for someone in his position. Alcock is similarly impressive as the young Rhaenyra, caught in limbo between the freedom she enjoys and the power she’s beginning to realize she desires. Toussaint and Ifans make strong impressions as the king’s most powerful counselors, ever at odds. And Smith is a revelation as Daemon — both a brute and a sensualist, who’s able to privately smile at his rival’s insults even as he plots to defeat them.

I’m back at my old Game of Thrones stomping grounds, Rolling Stone, for my review of the House of the Dragon premiere.

Seven kingdoms, one Iron Throne, and a whole lot of people with odd names to keep track of: That was the formula for Game of Thrones. Now House of the Dragon, HBO’s would-be blockbuster prequel to its most successful series of all time, is set to follow suit.

The good news for fans of the world created by novelist George R.R. Martin is that Dragon features way fewer houses to keep track of; it tells the tale of a budding conflict and eventual civil war within the ruling family of House Targaryen. The bad news is that everyone is someone else’s aunt or uncle or brother or cousin or spouse — often more than one at once — and most of them share the same surname.

But don’t worry! With the help of the new show’s source material, Martin’s faux-historical novel Fire & Blood, we’ve put together a quick-and-easy guide to all the main characters you’ll meet during the premiere. Sit back, relax, and brush up on the history of House Targaryen before the Dance of the Dragons begins.

These are the people in your neighborhood: I wrote a House of the Dragon character guide for Vulture. This will be updated throughout the season, so stay tuned!

I wrote about the series finale of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

I wrote about the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

But ultimately, it’s about Jimmy Keene’s desperation to help the girls’ families Larry murdered. In other words, his discovery of a cause much bigger and more morally meaningful than his own freedom should his mission succeed. That’s why he could no longer sit there and listen as Larry detailed his crimes and gleefully anticipated his own likely release. That’s what made him blow up at Larry, what made him scream for the doctor or the warden or the FBI, what drove him to repeatedly infuriate his guards despite the punishments they doled out to him, what caused him to scrawl all over the cell walls in his own blood like a madman, what made him cry and feel like a failure even after McCauley tells him he’s nailed Larry. Even after he’s free, the judge commutes his sentence while wondering aloud where Jimmy’s overwhelming sense of entitlement went while in that “hell” he went to.

Those girls, their lives, their deaths, the love their families felt for them, and the love they felt for their families: These things are real to Jimmy in a way nothing else, not even his own plight, is.

I reviewed the magnificent finale of Black Bird for Vulture. This was a powerful show that exceeded my expectations.

Cheekily titled after the series from which it is a spinoff, Better Call Saul‘s most recent episode deftly if unspectacularly stitches together scenes from the past and present of Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman/Gene Takavic’s life. It will thus likely be remembered for the cameos not just of BCS regulars Tina Parker as Jimmy/Saul’s secretary Francesca (with whom it appears he devised a method to keep in touch) and Jonathan Banks as Mike Ehrmantraut (seen in a flashback reporting on the real identity of Saul’s potential new client “Heisenberg”), but also and especially Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul as Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, whom we rejoin during their half-assed kidnapping of Saul the night they first hired him. The present-day material, in which Gene re-recruits the man he ran the department-store scam with for a far more ambitious series of home invasions and identity thefts, adds a certain pathos to all this; at this point, the former Jimmy McGill is just another middle-aged man with a dated mustache, turning to a life of crime more out of boredom than Walt’s desperation.

But none of that is what I’ll really remember from this episode.

I wrote about tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

With this simple act, this insistence on giving Larry Hall’s sole legally accredited victim a voice in her own story, Black Bird earns my undying respect. Why should the killers monopolize the stories of the lives they snuffed out? Why shouldn’t their victims, vibrant and alive and full of their own hopes and fears and dreams, have a say in how they are remembered? If a show about the murder of girls doesn’t treat them as fully human and possessing agency, who will?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Black Bird for Vulture.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

At long last, Gretchen Felker-Martin and I return with a new episode of our TV podcast Cut to Black! This time around we’re talking about the address to the College of Cardinals from The Young Pope—available here, here, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Where does that leave us, then? In the grips of an expertly made story of devotion and deceit, supported by excellent acting (I’m particularly impressed with John Lithgow’s ability to convey dismay and disbelief in seemingly dozens of different ways), played out with guns, on an international scale. And hey, did I ever mention how beautiful those medieval-style opening titles with the dogs are, by the way? The Old Man is crackerjack TV, in other words. I can’t wait for round two.

I reviewed the excellent season finale of The Old Man for Decider.

None of this would work half so well as it does if not for the fine, carefully contrasted performances of Taron Egerton as Jimmy and Paul Walter Hauser as Larry. Hauser’s showier, if you can call the reedy-voiced Larry showy; his distinctive manner of speech and off-kilter physicality no doubt reflect the careful study of such men. But Egerton is impressive in his own right, always walking in such a way as to emphasize his muscular bulk — as if to impress women and frighten abusers who are no longer there.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Black Bird for Vulture.

I walked around my apartment, holding a beer and singing the opening riff to “Plainsong” by the Cure to myself. I wasn’t sure what else to do. 

In the very first installment of my series of posts entitled My Favorite Music, I wrote about the Cure’s Disintegration, calling it an album about a sadness so huge you could land a spacecraft on it. It’s about outsized emotions, extravagant emotions, emotions in excess, emotions too big to be talked about, to be hashed out, to be discussed in logical terms.

In tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul, Jimmy McGill snaps. Instantly, as far as the magic of TV time is concerned. One moment, he’s being dumped by his wife Kim Wexler, who is so aghast at the horrors their conduct together has wrought that she gives up her life as a lawyer as well as his wife. The next moment, Jimmy awakens to a Journey song, next to a prostitute, in a ghastly and gaudy new apartment. He then makes the transition to his awful strip-mall office, with its inflatable Statue of Liberty on the roof and the ridiculous text of the Constitution written on its high-columned walls.

It happens that fast. He’s Jimmy for most of the episode, and then he’s Saul, forever and ever, amen.

I wrote about tonight’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

[whispering to date while watching The Old Man when The Old Man first appears on the screen] That’s The Old Man

Apologies to Twitter user @vineyville, but that was the tweet that came to mind the moment John Lithgow’s Harold Harper, the simultaneously scheming and well-intention assistant director of the FBI, told Jeff Bridges’ “Dan Chase” that “the Old Man”—Joel Grey’s Morgan Bote—has his daughter, Alia Shawkat’s Angela Adams/Emily Chase. Their daughter, actually, if you want to count Angela/Emily’s close work relationship with Harold as a father-daughter thing, which both characters seem comfortable doing.

If that paragraph seems confusing, congratulations—you’re watching The Old Man! This penultimate episode of the skillful spy drama’s first season is an at-times dizzying display of conflicting loyalties, secret relationships, and sudden betrayals. Like the coded messages that Angela and Chase send to each other using secret bank accounts, it can take a lot of deciphering.

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