The biggest problem facing Tokyo Vice is the matter of its leading man. I’m not even talking about the sexual abuse and misconduct allegations swirling around Ansel Elgort, although yes, that too. But even as a simple matter of casting the right man for the job, something feels off here. Elgort’s affect is too flat, his eyes too blank, his semi-permanent sneer too pronounced. You can’t exactly do “wide-eyed idealistic rookie reporter learns the ropes in a strange land’s seedy underbelly” when the actor involved couldn’t be wide-eyed to save his life. (It’s possible the show leaned away from the more traditional approach to the part on purpose, but where Elgort’s concerned it comes across more as a matter of necessity.)

It’s worth comparing and contrasting Elgort’s casting to that of Miles Teller in Nicholas Wending Refn and Ed Brubaker’s Too Old to Die Young, another stylish cop thriller directed by a major talent, over on Amazon Prime Video. Teller’s character is supposed to be a dead-eyed, flat-affect sociopath, so selecting a fundamentally unlikeable actor and playing up his emptiness makes a lot of sense. (Hell, Tom Cruise has made a career out of it, including in collaboration with Michael Mann!) There’s none of that logic present in Elgort’s use in Tokyo Vice.

I’ll be covering Tokyo Vice for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

After watching Moon Knight Episode 1, I wrote on Twitter that “I kind of hope every episode has this same basic tone of Oscar Isaac bumbling around, blacking up, waking up, and realizing he just killed six guys or whatever.” I’m pleased to report that, after watching Moon Knight Episode 2 (“Summon the Suit”), this appears to be the direction in which Moon Knight is headed!

I reviewed the second episode of Moon Knight for Decider.

Chuck refers to Prince as “Greg Stillson from ‘[The] Dead Zone,’” a reference to the Stephen King book in which a psychic sets out to stop a wildly dangerous presidential candidate by that name. Prince may be fictional, but take a look around the political landscape: Greg Stillsons are one thing this country still manages to produce in bumper crops.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Billions, aka the one with the big reveal, for the New York Times.

Written by series creator Jeremy Slater and directed by Mohamed Diab, “The Goldfish Problem” is a fun little diversion. Again, its success largely hinges on Oscar Isaac, who plays the Steven Grant persona as a more chipper and scatterbrained British version of his loser character in the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis. Whether he’s missing a date, taking part in a high-speed chase, getting yelled at by his boss, receiving strange phonecalls from an unknown woman on a burner he found hidden in his wall, or waking up surrounded by people he’s beaten the crap out of, he treats everything with the same sense of mild-mannered “oh, bugger” confusion. He’s a fun secret identity to watch, and that goes along way.

So does that final reveal of Steven/Marc/whoever in full Moon Knight regalia. It’s no exaggeration to say that the character has had the staying power he’s had in the comics world because that costume design—Batman at P. Diddy’s white party, basically—is so bitchin’. Based on the glimpse we get of him in this episode, the show has made no concessions to superhero-movie kevlar-uniform “realism” in translating it to the screen. He really does look like he teleported in directly from the funnypages, and that’s good to see.

I’ll be covering Moon Knight for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere. It ain’t bad!

When you put all the pieces together, you’re left with one of the strangest and most unsettling, and unsettled, episodes of “Billions” in quite some time. Chuck, Prince, Taylor, Wendy — they all seem to be “at the precipice of a crossroads,” as “The Sopranos” would put it. For all its complexity, this episode is essentially a holding pattern, a brief reprieve before the masters of the universe at its heart select their next lines of attack.

Here’s hoping they let the power go to their heads. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have much of a show, would we?

I reviewed tonight’s odd episode of Billions for the New York Times.

Gretchen Felker-Martin and I return to the airwaves after many a moon to discuss, of all things, the Season 8 finale of Little House on the Prairie. Yes, you read that right! You can find it on most any platform via our anchor.fm page, and here it is on Apple Podcasts.

“We need Chuck dead, not wounded and angry.” Wise words, those, from Governor Bob Sweeney. He has intuited something Chuck himself failed to, when Chuck yanked the Olympic Games away from Mike Prince without delivering a killing blow. In retrospect, it was obvious that a wounded, angry Prince, for all his self-avowed graciousness in defeat, would strike back. It just wasn’t clear that his retaliation would, in fact, be a death blow.

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

There’s an old short story by Clive Barker, the creator of Pinhead and the writer-director of Hellraiser, that I think about a lot. It’s called “Pig Blood Blues,” and you can read a pretty beautiful comics adaptation by Chuck Wagner, Fred Burke, and Scott Hampton right here. Go ahead, take a few minutes, I’ll be here when you get back.

Anyway, old Clive, he wrote a line in this story that was frequently on my mind while watching this final episode of Raised by Wolves’ extraordinary second season. The line goes like this—

“This is the state of the beast…to eat and be eaten.”

I won’t get into who in the story says it and why—that’s for you to discover—but I will say that there’s something so perfectly fatalistic in that line, something that sums up so much of what goes on in this season finale. The beast, of course, is humankind, and it’s their—our—fate to kill each other until some larger force comes to kill us all.

I reviewed the season finale of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

When dealing with the Olympics honcho Katerina Brett (Jennifer Roszell), Chuck embarks on a lengthy analogy involving “high-grading” bears, which before hibernation eat only the choicest parts of the salmon they catch, leaving the rest to rot. To Chuck, billionaires like Prince are the bears, and we civilians are the salmon. I’m not quite sure what that makes Chuck.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.

So we’re left with a ragtag band of survivors, adult and child, android and human, atheist and believer, running around trying to figure out how to save themselves from a giant tentacled serpent, an acid sea full of humanoid creatures, and an ancient alien intelligence that seems to want them all dead. I can’t be the only person reminded of Game of Thrones (and not just because of the similarities between the two shows’ scores), in which various fabulously wealthy families carried on killing each other while a threat to all life grew more and more powerful, the danger more and more urgent. Good thing these are only stories on TV, right?

Right?

I reviewed last week’s episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

You know, it’s funny: Before I watched this episode of “Billions,” I’d been thinking to myself, “It’s been too long since Chuck Rhoades went to a dungeon.”

Seriously! The series launched with an image of Chuck in flagrante, and his so-called “arousal template” played a major role in the show on and off for quite some time. A calculated admission of his predilections helped him win the attorney general’s office. And a failure to service his kink spelled the end of his relationship with last season’s romantic interest, played by Julianna Margulies.

In this very episode, in fact, Rhoades says regarding sex workers, “I’m out of that game.” An almost entirely sexless sixth season, at least as far as Chuck is concerned, just didn’t sit right.

So it was with some pleasure that I greeted Chuck’s descent into his old dungeon, on a quest to uncover the current location of the high-end brothel where Wags illegally entertained the bigwigs who select the host city of the 2028 Olympics. It was great to see Clara Wong as Troy, Chuck’s one-time dominatrix, and even better to see Paul Giamatti squirm as Troy painfully tweaked Chuck’s ear.

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

Raised by Wolves is, among many things, a work of ferocious body horror. The human—and android—body is a grotesque battlefield on this show—bleeding white goo, erupting into hideous tumors, sprouting growths that surround the victim like a cocoon, giving birth through multiple orifices, removing and consuming weaponized eyeballs, evolving and devolving into terrifying creatures, you name it. At the climax of this episode, aptly titled “The Tree,” it seems like we have a brand new body-horror image to add to the list: Sue’s transformation into a fucking tree.

I reviewed today’s episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

There are few things on television I enjoy more than a good “Billions” fake-out. The sine qua non comes from the stellar Season 2 episode “Golden Frog Time,” in which a Chuck Rhoades who at first appears to be sobbing is actually laughing hysterically because his plan to undermine his enemy Bobby Axelrod worked like a charm. (At the expense of his best friend and his father, but still!)

The sleight-of-hand that occurs in this week’s episode isn’t nearly as momentous, but it provides that thrilling frisson nonetheless. For a moment, it looks as if Chuck has put the screws to Mike Prince’s alma mater, Indiana A&M, to prevent it from investing in his firm. How? By blackmailing the university’s endowment chair, Stuart Legere (Whit Stillman alum Chris Eigeman), who has been embezzling.

But it turns out that the opposite is true. Chuck is blackmailing Legere and the endowment into investing with Prince by threatening to expose the embezzlement. Having previously rejected his father for the role as too obvious a choice, Chuck wants an inside man who will report back on Prince’s every move, and now he has found one. The needle drop of the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” that accompanies the maneuver is no mere music cue. It’s a mission statement: No matter what Mike Prince does, the watchful eyes of Charles Rhoades Jr. will be on him, whether he knows it or not.

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

And there you have it! A narratively and emotionally complex episode, filled with far-out sci-fi imagery, fueled by powerful performances from Amanda Collin as Mother and Aasiya Shah as Holly (my God, the way she sobs when Marcus returns to her) among others, raising far more questions than it answers yet still delivering the goods from a storytelling and image-making perspective—all amid a bestiary that seems to be growing by the day. Raised by Wolves, folks. Isn’t it something?

I reviewed the most recent episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

When reviewing a particularly bizarre episode of television, you always run the risk of blowing things out of proportion. The breathless prose you might adopt in order to describe what you’ve watched is a cliché unto itself at this point, and it’s a safe bet that someone out there is making genuinely outré work that puts any given hour of a streaming drama to shame. So I’m going to try and restrain myself when talking about “Control,” the fourth episode of Raised by Wolves’ second season, once I get past saying this: holy Jesus, that was bat-guano crazy.

I reviewed the second episode of Raised by Wolves‘ increasingly odd and percussive second season for Decider.

Six hundred dollars for coffee with Kate Sacker; $46,863 for Wendy Rhoades’s wardrobe; $162,500 for a night at a Covid-free bordello with Wags; $300 million for Mike Prince’s new yacht, plus an extra $300 million to neutralize its carbon footprint. We’ve said before in this space that the credo of the pro wrestler Ted DiBiase (a.k.a. the Million Dollar Man), “Everybody’s got a price,” holds sway in the world of “Billions.” Never before has the show made it quite this literal.

In one of the boldest stylistic choices ever made by the show — you could argue the boldest, and I wouldn’t object — this week’s episode of “Billions” repeatedly freezes the action and superimposes graphics that show you the cost of all the name brands, grand plans and illegal indulgences enjoyed by Michael Prince and his employees. Did you know that a private hog roast with the restaurateur Rodney Scott costs $25,000? That a batch of quaaludes and a courier to deliver them runs you $8,400? That multiple characters’ personal wardrobes and grooming routines on a given day cost more than this country’s yearly per capita income? You sure do now!

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

In the latest episode of the BLAH podcast, Stefan Sasse and I discuss Amazon’s adaptation of The Wheel of Time from the perspective of TWoT neophytes. Available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

[Morrisey voice] “Robot with a chainsaw, I know, I know, it’s serious.”

Actually, it’s not serious at all. It’s fucking wild, is what it is! Like, show of hands: Who thought Raised by Wolves would one day show Father, the clinically mild-mannered caretaker android responsible for the fate of the human race, battle a robot with a chainsaw for an arm to the death amid a cheering crowd? Hmmm…I’m not seeing any hands raised!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

If you thought Raised by Wolves was going to be shy about showing us its big snake, think again. The second episode of the show’s second season—released simultaneously with the premiere—delivers on the batshit promise of the Raised By Wolves Season 1 finale in a big way. Not only does the giant flying snake return, it becomes the central focus of the entire plot, as the whole atheist Collective sets out to seek and destroy the beast. I’m guessing that this will be a taller order than they’ve anticipated, but hey, this is Raised by Wolves—I’ve been wrong before, and I could be wrong again.

I reviewed the second half of Raised by Wolves’ two-part Season 2 premiere for Decider.

“I look at every competitor as a potential partner … right up until I can’t anymore.” As far as one-sentence encapsulations of the Mike Prince Method go, it’s hard to beat this statement by the billionaire coprotagonist of the sixth season of “Billions.” In this week’s episode, titled “S.T.D.” (it’s not what you think), Prince drives one such competitor — one of the more odious figures in the “Billions” legendarium — to the edge of defeat, then rides in to save his bacon and enrich them both.

It’s a feat of bargaining so impressive that it literally drives Prince’s enemy Chuck Rhoades into the street, wielding a bullhorn instead of his authority as Attorney General. In the end, Chuck may find the former more effective than the latter.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Billions for the New York Times.