We’re in the early going yet, but it would be a tough sell to say the plot and the characters are strong suits of “3 Body Problem.” The actors are entertaining, but so far they’re playing not much more than broad personality types engaged in a mildly interesting sci-fi mystery. Chao has the more dramatic backdrop of the Cultural Revolution, depicted here as a full-on “1984” meets “The Crucible” dystopian nightmare, to play against — not to mention the more dramatic setting of that satellite installation. But it’s a low bar to clear.

No, it’s the imagery that lingers more than anything else. The colossal transmitter, roosting at the cliff’s edge like an enormous bird of prey. The gradual way the countdown clock emerges into Auggie’s consciousness, from a blur on a karaoke video to a full-on superimposition over the face of anyone she tries to talk to. The uncanny sight of the stars flickering as one. Can the story and the characters rise to that level?

I’m covering 3 Body Problem for the New York Times, starting with my review of the premiere. This is the first time they’ve ever done episodic reviews for an all-at-once season launch.

But as driving as Tokyo Vice’s plot can be, it’s the look and atmosphere that keeps me coming back excited week after week. Carefully composed and illuminated nighttime street scenes. Vistas of the city seen through windows behind our characters, or our characters seen through a window from somewhere high in the sky above the city. Needlessly gorgeous interior shots. Seriously, if you look at my notes on the gifs that illustrate this review, the adjectives are all effusive: “Stunning elevator shot,” “really cool hotel hallway shot,” “incredible street scene with the green phone.” Even in a show this good-looking, director Eva Sørhaug and DP Corey Walter do memorable work here.

Actors, of course, can contribute to the look and the atmosphere of a show as much as anyone. All these handsome men in tailored suits. Ansel Elgort painstakingly lighting and smoking a cigarette as Jake guts his way through his meeting with Yabuki. Rachel Keller and Show Kasamatsu getting into bed at the end of a long day, looking exhausted and beautiful. The way actors look and move and sound is as much a part of the art of filmmaking as cinematography or editing, and in this case it’s all sumptuous stuff. This suits Tokyo Vice, the most sumptuous show on television right now, to a tee.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

By now, all Blackthorne wants to do is take his ship and his crew and go home. He feels he’s upheld his end of his deal with Toranaga. But following that punishing conversation with Lady Mariko, she refuses to translate accurately for him anymore, and his pleas go unheeded.

But John Blackthorne has a talent for being in the wrong place at the right time. His shipwreck on the shores of Japan placed him in grave danger, but it was also what gave him the chance to alert Lord Toranaga, the closest thing Japan has to a ruler, to the perfidy of his Portuguese allies. He winds up a prisoner, but his imprisonment allows Toranaga to delay, and then escape, his impeachment and execution.

Now, just moments after Mariko sabotages his request to leave, he bears witness to an earthquake and a landslide — the kind of natural disaster that horrified him when Mariko first told him about such occurrences.

The landslide gives Blackthorne the opportunity to spring into action, find Lord Toranaga buried beneath the dirt and help drag the man to safety. The Anjin slaps Toranaga on the back a few times until he coughs up the last of the dirt blocking his airway, and then gives Toranaga the swords gifted to him earlier by Lady Fuji, an act just as impressive to this audience in its way. Once again, by finding himself in a jam, Blackthorne is also perfectly positioned to prove his worth to the man on whom his life depends. He is the luckiest unlucky man on television.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

All that and more applies to leading man Alessandro Borghi. Borghi’s fearless, shameless performance as Rocco is one for the ages — an actor leaping naked into the deep end and swimming downward as far and as fast as he can. It’s not just the countless sex scenes, or the explicit dialogue. It’s the willingness to be seen as a sex idiot, a man whose dick does his thinking for him. This can make him seem incredibly sexy or incredibly vulgar, like a dog humping another dog in the park while everyone watches. Emma Stone just won an Oscar for this kind of genitals-first performance, and I think Supersex has more to say, more insightfully, about sex than Poor Things manages to muster, that’s for sure.

A seemingly endless font of sexual fantasy, fetish, and dysfunction, Supersex is one of the bravest shows I’v ever seen. It turned me on and fucked me up. I’m grateful to have watched it.

I reviewed the finale of Supersex for Decider.

Okay, now I’m really paying attention. For the second time, The Regime has bucked my expectations of what The Regime would be about. 

I reviewed episode three of The Regime for Decider.

Watching Supersex is like shaking a snow globe filled with particles of the densest psychosexual shit imaginable, then seeing how these poor bastards deal with the fallout. Its frankness and ambition in this are unparalleled in my memory. 

I reviewed episode 6 of Supersex for Decider.

Supersex has already conjured up some of the most intensely traumatizing sexual experiences a person can have; perhaps it was inevitable that it would eventually get around to some of the most intensely transcendent. Set apart from the other episodes even by its title, “The Island,” Supersex’s fifth episode and its best since the premiere, chronicles a months-long lost weekend of endless, loving, liberating sex between Rocco and his new girlfriend, his first girlfriend. In this, as in its portrait of Rocco’s abuse and awakening, the show is fearless. 

I reviewed episode 5 of Supersex for Decider.

Rocco Siffredi, the Italian Stallion, future icon of the porn industry, is kind of a goofball. Have you noticed this? The floppy hair with its tips bleached blond. The goofy smile he gets when he’s amused, eyes squinted and teeth bared by his retracted upper lip. The constant sense that he doesn’t quite know what’s going on, or what to do next, or who to do it with. He’s like an overgrown kid who has found his candy store at last.

I reviewed episode four of Supersex for Decider.

This installment splits its time between the Adelsteins’ in Missouri and the situation back in Tokyo. Somewhat to my surprise, the American material doesn’t feel like time wasted compared to the sumptuous unfamiliarity of the Tokyo underworld. In fact, it’s its very difference that makes it come alive. After all this time spent in the close quarters of Tokyo’s glass, concrete, and neon, seeing all those big trees, all those green lawns, all that open blue sky feels like entering another world. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Tokyo Vice for Decider.

If Supersex has a problem at this point, it’s similar to Rocco’s: It hasn’t quite mastered the animal within. It has the spirit, obviously, the willingness to go there, whether there is Rocco’s mountain of childhood trauma or the show’s many explicit sex scenes. In a variety of ways this is not a forgiving climate for a show revolving in large part around how quickly a man does or doesn’t get an erection or ejaculate, much less for one willing to show so much of the process on screen in such explicit, if not actually graphic, detail. In a world where the filming of The Idol was all but ruled a sex offense by the press and the public, that Supersex even exists is exciting.

But that doesn’t forgive some of its soap-operatic excesses. The plot beats can get predictable: Tell me you couldn’t see Tommaso accusing Rocco and Lucia of sleeping together coming from a mile away, for example. Other times they seem to come and go as the needs of the show require them to: Weren’t the Corsicans after Rocco, and weren’t the cops after Tommaso? Meanwhile, writer-creator Francesca Manieri and director Francesco Carrozzini rely too heavily on the same set-ups for the creation of drama: If you made a drinking game where you took a shot every time the camera lingers on someone’s wide or flat or tear-swollen eyes as they stare at someone else doing something they don’t want them to do, I hope you have a very strong liver.

Still, there remains much to recommend Supersex if you’re interested in its core subject: the power of sex. I’ve never seen a television series this fixated on that one specific area of human experience, in those terms. I think they’re onto something, frankly. Sure, we may not all become world-famous porn stars as a result of those first pubescent stirrings of lust the way Rocco did. But something fundamental in us changes at that point, introducing an entirely new set of priorities into lives previously concerned with, I dunno, paleontology or Sailor Moon. It’s huge, basic driver of human behavior, even if it only becomes the driver of all our behavior for a very few of us. Supersex, and the character of Rocco, respect that power. They both ask how, or if, it can be controlled.

I reviewed the third episode of Supersex for Decider.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a television show dig this deeply into the annihilatory power of sex, into its ability to make you forget not just the troubles of the day but troubles at all, its ability to make you feel like you’re everywhere and nowhere all at once. (In fact I may never have seen it tackled this directly by a show; this territory tends to be reserved for feature-length erotic bummers like In the Realm of the Senses or Last Tango in Paris.) The Supersex persona is liberating for Rocco because it’s his way of not being himself anymore, not even being a person anymore. He’s a force, an entity, an energy animating a penis with a vestigial human attached to it. 

I reviewed the second episode of Supersex for Decider.

Sato and Samantha are in bed together, and Sato is taking his ring off. Watching from home, I’m wondering why. Is this item of jewelry significant to him in some way — a mark of his membership in Chihara-kai, maybe? If so, I don’t remember it coming up before. Nor is it a wedding band he couldn’t bear to part with following a death or divorce, not unless there’s a whole lot about Sato we don’t know. I couldn’t quite figure out why writers Annie Julia Wyman & Joshua Kaplan and director Takeshi Fukunaga bothered to include this detail, beyond perhaps adding a little down-to-earth touch to the sex scene…until I noticed the position of Sato’s arm between Sam’s legs. He took off his ring so he could finger her without hurting her. 

I bring this up not out of prurient interest — although I firmly believe that if you’re not operating at least partially out of prurient interest, you’re not watching TV for the right reasons — but out of admiration for how Tokyo Vice handles, well, pretty much anything. For the second episode in a row, the show has served up an admirably graphic sex scene, in which the technical aspects of physical sexuality are made clear, whether that’s Trendy’s legs in the air around his boyfriend or Sato slipping off his ring before putting his fingers inside Sam. Much as I hate to give them any oxygen, there’s a vocal contingent of viewers who prefer not to watch sex scenes at all. Sex is as much a part of life as anything else going on in Tokyo Vice, and as such it belongs on screen. The show has little time for those who think otherwise, and good on the show for it.

I reviewed this week’s Tokyo Vice for Decider.

The acquisition and hoarding of wealth and power should be understood as a mental illness. Period, point blank, deadass. At the very least it’s a cognitive impairment on par with getting spike piledrivered onto your noggin in a wrestling ring for several decades running. This is in no way a joke. Access to the money and authority that prevents you from every hearing the word “no” if you don’t want to turns your brain into soup. Ask Elon Musk. 

The Regime gets this and runs at it more directly than any other satire of its sort, which makes it the satire for me. Kate Winslet as the incredibly sexy and stylish, incredibly self-absorbed and stupid, incredibly gullible and theatrical and vindictive and woo-woo New Age-y, and incredibly impossible to actually be around or get to know unless you’re just as fucked in the head as she is commander-in-chief of a modern nation. That, friends, is a TV show. It’s also life in these United States, but it’s a TV show too, boy howdy.

I reviewed the second episode of The Regime for Decider.

Supersex upset me worse than any other show…ever, really. I had a reaction to “Superpower,” the premiere of this loosely biographical series about Italian porn legend Rocco Siffredi, so intense, so severe, that it knocked me out for the rest of the day. There’s a chance this review runs late because of it and everything. 

Good. Good! I’ll say it again: Good. Art should have that kind of power. Art should be able to change your entire day. That it changed my day for the worse is immaterial. Supersex moved me, and that’s what good television is supposed to do.

I reviewed the premiere of Supersex for Decider.

But Blackthorne’s decency toward Fuji clearly impresses Mariko. So does his naked body, of which she gets an eyeful when she stumbles upon him preparing to bathe in a hot spring. There they sit back to back, and using increasingly tender, sensual dialogue, he walks her through what it might be like to spend an evening in London as his guest. In part he’s joshing her, saying he’d take her right to the queen. But he’s not kidding about going to the theater and enjoying a good tragedy, just as she does. And his near-poetic reverie about walking along the Thames seems to transport her right there.

Yet it might be his praise of her fortitude that truly plants the seeds. When you look at a house that’s been knocked down and rebuilt by one of Japan’s natural disasters, he explains, you don’t see the ruins, you see the house. Whatever happened to ruin Mariko’s life in the past, including the recent death of her husband, she has managed to rebuild herself. The two face away from each other throughout the conversation so that solely words bridge the distance between them. Through this arrangement, the writer Emily Yoshida and the director Frederick Toye paradoxically heighten the sense that the characters are closer than ever.

I reviewed last night’s very good episode of Shōgun for the New York Times.

Much like many (but not all) of its main characters, The Gentlemen is, above all things, clever. For six episodes, it places one proverbial Chekhov’s gun after another on the mantle, to the point where there are more guns than the mantle. Do any of these guns go off in the end, leading to the explosive conflagration we all knew (and admittedly hoped) was coming?

I wrote about the final two episodes of The Gentlemen Season 1 for Vulture. What a pleasure this show turned out to be, no less so for that pleasure being simple.

What went wrong with True Detective: Night Country? Stefan and I conduct a postmortem in the latest subscriber-exclusive Boiled Leather Audio Hour podcast!

This ain’t your mother’s Dreamhouse. Or yours, most likely. In fact, until Greta Gerwig came along to escort Barbie to Oscar territory, I’m not sure they ever made a Dreamhouse like this one.

Created at the zenith of the Obama era, the animated web series Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse anticipated the fourth-wall-breaking, consumerism-lampooning, Ken-mocking comedy of 2023’s Barbie by over a decade. It’s smart, it’s funny, it has a 12-episode run on Netflix right now, and if you’re looking for more of the movie’s cheerfully subversive magic, it’s all right here.

Written primarily by David Wiebe and Robin J. Stein and produced by Mattel as a series of web and YouTube shorts — collected by theme into the 12 Netflix episodes — from 2012–15, Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse has little in common with the glut of other CGI Barbie animated shows littering the big red streaming service. This isn’t a straightforward comedy-adventure kids’ cartoon, though it’s certainly kid-friendly (no jokes about Ken’s flesh-colored bulge in this one). Much like the movie, it’s an admittedly gentle but extremely sharp satire of the doll it’s supposed to be marketing. I’m not sure what Barbie creator Ruth Handler would think of it, but Don Draper would be pleased.

Wiebe, Stein, and their crew of talented writers, animators, and voice actors (led by Kate Higgins as Barbie herself) mined decades of Barbie iconography and stereotypes to get adult-size gags out of the children’s toy. In the process, they wrote a partial playbook for the approach the film would take years later. At this point, you may be looking at the shocking pink plasticity of the series and thinking I sound crazy. Trust me, ever since my kids found the series ten years ago, I’ve been getting that on a regular basis. Until people watch, that is. Life in the Dreamhouse, like the Matrix, is something you have to experience for yourself. If you liked the movie, you’ll see the two have a lot in common.

It’s a dream come true for me: I finally got to write about one of the funniest kids’ cartoons I’ve ever seen, Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse, for Vulture!

And just like that, we’re back on track. Not that The Gentlemen took a severe dip in quality in its third and fourth installments, which were good for plenty of fun crime hijinks. It’s just that once you introduce Hitler’s testicle into the equation, things may have gotten a bit too fanciful, even for a show that’s like a Narcos parody set in Downton Abbey.

But with episodes five and six, The Gentlemen comes down to earth, and resumes the breakneck pace of its first two installments. They introduce major new players who look to stay involved for the duration rather than villain-of-the-week types. They feature a startling revelation that completely upends the relationship between Eddie and Susie we’d known. They get surprisingly serious about the human consequences of their telegenic gangsterism. And they remain a ton of fun.

I reviewed the fifth and sixth episodes of The Gentlemen for Vulture.

Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t watch a pair of episodes in which a woman hacks a man to death with a machete and a machine-gun battle over the future of Hitler’s testicle gets decided with a vintage hand grenade and say the television show in question is taking its foot off the gas a bit. After all, either event would be the most exciting thing that ever happened in, I don’t know, This Is Us. But this is The Gentlemen we’re talking about here, and in its first two episodes, writer-director Guy Ritchie set the mayhem bar pretty high.

But if the show’s third and fourth outings don’t clear that bar, they glide pretty confidently right underneath it. The main issue is simply a structural one. The first two episodes were one long daisy chain of escalating close calls, narrow escapes, and victories snatched from the jaws of defeat (only to be dropped immediately into a new, larger pair of jaws), connected by the Freddy shotgun-murder cliffhanger. These are the kinds of tricks Breaking Bad and even Ozark used to keep things cooking.

By comparison, “Where’s My Weed At?” and “An Unsympathetic Gentlemen” are more episodic in nature. Sure, our heroes’ adventures in both are connected by their deepening, evolving business relationship, as well as by an unknown player using a good old-fashioned honeytrap to get the dirt on their operation. But the two capers are otherwise self-contained, almost villain-of-the-week affairs.

I reviewed episodes three and four of The Gentlemen for Vulture.