In a way, storytelling is The Wheel of Time’s biggest storytelling problem.

The world Rafe Judkins has brought to the screen feels boundless, replete with different cultures and subcultures, sects and sub-sects, thousands upon thousands of years of history, of wars won and lost, kingdoms risen and fallen, songs and languages learned and forgotten and learned again. (Dip your toe in the book series’ wiki, I double-dog dare you — you might fall in and never come out again.) From an epic-fantasy perspective, this is an impressive feat.

However, from the perspective of a television drama, it’s almost an obstacle because virtually every new development requires someone to tell someone else a story about it. Every time a character sees another character praying, a conversation must ensue as to what the prayer means and to which deity or ancestor or metaphysical concept it’s directed. Each time a phrase from a lost language is uttered, someone has to explain what it means, who originally said it, and what context it was said. Each new enemy requires one of the heroes to tell one of the others what the enemy is and what its powers might be, and how best to defeat or defend against it. And so on, and so on, and so on, for fifteen novels and however many seasons of those novels’ adaptations Amazon deigns to make.

In short, The Wheel of Time is a show that’s almost all fantasy worldbuilding, at least so far. If you’re a mark for that sort of thing — as, frankly, I am — then hey, great! Worldbuilding out the wazoo!

If you’re not into it, though, hoo boy, I can imagine this is quite a slog. For every recognizable moment of human connection — Rand struggling to communicate to his best friend Mat that he doesn’t need to keep any secrets, Nynaeve’s raised-eyebrow reaction to the polyamorous lifestyle of some of the Aes Sedai — there’s great gobs of exposition about the Way of the Leaf or the Song before the Breaking or the Kingdom of Minethrin or the will of the Amyrlin Seat or what have you.

To paraphrase I Think You Should Leave, suffice to say, The Wheel of Time is a lot.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

On the latest episode of our TV podcast Cut to Black, Gretchen Felker-Martin and I discuss John C. Reilly’s remarkable performance as the title character in Tim & Eric’s Check It Out! With Dr. Steve Brule.

Also, after some discussion, Gretchen and I have designated my Patreon as the official Patreon of Cut to Black. If you’d like, a $5/month pledge will earn you our eternal gratitude. Thank you!

What does it all mean for the future of this show, thought? That, I’m less certain about. It’s already been renewed for a second season, so you don’t need to worry about that. However, there still is a certain lopsided quality to it all, with the Cleon material standing head and shoulders above the Gaal/Salvor/Hari stuff. The burst of action that punctuated the first season’s last few episodes mitigated this somewhat, but now that Gaal and Salvor are simply adrift together on the surface of a drowned world, it seems like things may get tilted in favor of the Cleons yet again. The missteps involving Hari’s big speech and the secret of Salvor’s parentage certainly don’t help.

But I think there’s much to be enjoyed and admired in Foundation overall. The commitment to far-out ideas about the flow of history (punctuated though it might be by individual actions), the emphasis on grand science-fiction vistas, the performances of Lee Pace and Terrence Mann and Cassian Bilton as the Cleons—there’s room to grow a very good show around these component parts, even as the Lou Llobell/Leah Harvey/Jared Harris segments remain hit or miss. A decent chance—isn’t that all Foundation is asking for, in the end?

I reviewed the season finale of Foundation This show wound up being much better than it had any right to be, sometimes despite itself.

The Wheel of Time will be compared to Game of Thrones for as long as it lasts, and for good reason: It wouldn’t exist without HBO’s blockbuster serving as a sort of proof of concept for Jeff Bezos’s bottomless pockets. But Wheel is an unapologetic and effects-heavy epic fantasy from the jump. While GoT’s initial cold-open sequence featured a White Walker, that was pretty much it in terms of magical stuff until the dragons hatched in the season finale; Wheel has already shown us more of the admittedly awesome-looking Trollocs than we’d see of the White Walkers in, like, three seasons.

Wheel is also marching us through a lot of exposition about many different lands and cultures in very short order, as opposed to the comparatively easy-to-grasp “Seven Kingdoms governed by Great Houses” world-building of early GoT. The filmmaking follows suit. No sooner are our heroes split up in that shadow city in the last episode than they wind up in three completely different landscapes, facing completely different threats and encountering completely different allies. What it lacks in recognizable human emotions and drives, it makes up for — or tries to, anyway — in sheer storytelling scope. Will this ploy be successful? Only (the Wheel of) time will tell.

I reviewed the third episode of The Wheel of Time—the last in the batch of three that went live today—for Vulture.

It’s not always the case — no piece of Hollywood visual shorthand is truly universal — but in general, a close-up on a character’s mouth as they eat with gusto is shorthand for evil. It’s a way to communicate a character’s acquisitiveness or hedonism. (Sometimes it’s just plain old fatphobia.) In the case of Eamon Valda (Abdul Solis), the Whitecloak “questioner” who gives this episode of The Wheel of Time its cold open, it’s intended to show his indifference to human suffering.

As he tucks into what is, for all intents and purposes, the Billions/Succession/Hannibal forbidden delicacy ortolan, a woman dies in front of him. Her hand has been chopped off, and she’s being slowly burned at the stake. Her crime? Membership in the Aes Sedai, the powerful order of magic-wielding women whose representative Moiraine is leading our heroes off into the unknown. Clearly, they’ve got some dangerous rivals in the do-gooding department; the collection of stolen Aes Sedai rings Eamon wears on his belt indicates that he’s been down this bloody road many times before.

Solis’s chillingly cheery portrayal of this Captain of the Whitecloaks appropriately introduces Wheel’s second episode. Much more so than its predecessor, it’s concerned with the question of what it really means to be one of “the good guys.” In the war against the dark that both the Aes Sedai and the Whitecloaks consider themselves waging, are “good guys” even a thing?

I reviewed the second episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

There’s a Monty Python bit from Holy Grail — and forgive my presumptuousness, but there once was a time where if you were a person familiar with The Wheel of Time, the chances were good that you knew your Monty Python — where a sparkling-clean King Arthur trots past the heavily soiled peasantry.

“Who’s that then?” asks one man.

“I dunno,” responds a collector of dead bodies. “Must be a king.”

“Why?”

“He hasn’t got shit all over him.”

The premiere episode of The Wheel of Time isn’t quite this direct in terms of its visual signifiers. From background extras to leading ladies, everyone gets their hands dirty in this thing. But still, there’s a definite sense that the episode, titled “Leavetaking,” exists primarily to let the main characters know they are, in fact, the main characters. By the end of the hour, written by showrunner Rafe Judkins (who wrote for Agents of SHIELD) and directed by Uta Briesewitz (one of The Wire’s ace cinematographers back in the day), four lowly peasants have been told by a powerful sorceress that one of them is a messianic figure and that they must accompany her on a journey away from home as she tries to figure out which one it is. In essence, the protagonists of the show, adapted from Robert Jordan’s eponymous series of fantasy novels, are also the protagonists of the world it depicts. King Arthur, eat your heart out.

I’ll be covering The Wheel of Time for Vulture, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Is it just me, or is Foundation getting better and better with each episode? Maybe it’s simply a case of familiarity breeding admiration rather than contempt, as more time spent with each of its storylines equals more chances to appreciate the unique things that each is doing. Maybe those storylines are legit improving week to week, particularly as the flatter elements, like the chosen-one heroes Gaal (absent this week) and Salvor, draw closer to their plotlines’ denouements and excitement builds as a result. Maybe it’s a matter of the overall Foundation aesthetic—the grand space vistas, the depiction of far-future civilizations, the cool-looking spaceships and costumes and tech and whatnot—winning us over as we get used to it. Whatever the case, the penultimate episode of the show’s first season, portentously titled “The First Crisis,” is entertaining viewing from start to finish.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

Directed by Michael Uppendahl from a script by showrunner Sarah Burgess, the finale of ACS Impeachment, “The Wilderness,” is a brutal denouement for an excellent season of television. It entertains the idea that repulsive people can have repulsive enemies, who do the right things for the wrong reasons. It maintains a studied agnosticism about the worst of Bill Clinton’s crimes, while suggesting that their failure to be brought to light and punished in an efficacious manner is due to the puritanical nature of his enemies. It allows Linda Tripp to be seen as she wished to be seen, and demonstrates that this does her no real good at all. It gives Monica Lewinsky the last word, which does her no good at all either. For all the president’s women, it essentially offers their choice of patriarchal poison. It’s an escape room with no way out. If that escape room comes in the shape of the Oval Office, it is no less inescapable for that.

I reviewed the finale of ACS Impeachment for Decider. This was a hell of a show. I don’t know how Ryan Murphy managed to bottle lightning three times with three different teams on the same anthology, but he sure did.

SPOILER WARNING

Frankly, I’m still processing how I feel about writer and showrunner Carlo Bernard’s choice to go down this road. In dramatic terms, ending the episode on Walt’s scummy sting operation—at first we’re led to believe he’s confessing his personal failings and the evil he’s done in the DEA to his ex-girlfriend Dani, but he’s just lulling a target into a false sense of security—is a much more impactful choice. Moreover, it fits in better with the bitter tone of the show overall, which has always been about how the War on Drugs is waged by criminals on both sides, though it just so happens that some of them carry badges and bear the blessings of the United States government. 

Teasing the idea that Amado lives on? That turns him from a cartel boss—a more likeable and genteel cartel boss than any of the others we’ve encountered since the Escobar days, but still, a cartel boss—into a living legend. It’s fitting that a narcocorrido about Amado accompanies this final scene: Like that genre of music, this ending portrays Amado as a sort of folk hero, a guy who saw that there was no happy ending for anyone who stayed in the game, and who boldly chose to get out on his own terms, to live happily ever after. 

But maybe that’s as fitting an ending, in its way, as Walt’s squalid fate. It’s hardly a controversial statement to say that Narcos and Narcos: Mexico, which ends its own three-season run here, have capitalized on the glitz and glamor of its drug traffickers’ lives, from the Arellanos’ rich narcojunior allies all the way to Pablo Escobar’s imported hippopotami. Is there life after death for a narco? Look no further than the existence of this show for your answer.

I reviewed the season/series finale of Narcos: Mexico for Decider. How about that ending, huh?

“Narcos is always at its best when it’s simultaneously at its most elegiac and most cynical.” I wrote those words about the Season One finale of Narcos: Mexico, an alternately languid and brutal episode in which Félix Gallardo sold out his friends, the American government in the form of Walt Breslin doubled down on their disastrous drug war, and DEA Agent Kiki Camarena turned out to have died for nothing, nothing at all. It was confident, engrossing filmmaking designed to destroy the myth of the War on Drugs by any means necessary.

I think many of the same things can be said about this penultimate episode of the show’s third season. Narcos: Mexico Season 3 Episode 9, titled “The Reckoning,” does not settle all of the show’s accounts—there’s still one more episode to go, after all. But there’s something genuinely mournful in the way it chronicles the failures of so many of its main characters: Walt, Victor, Amado, General Rebollo. Representing nearly every side and level of the War on Drugs, they’re all revealed to be grim-faced failures in the end.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Narcos: Mexico for Decider.

Without an episode-ending shootout to anchor it, this episode’s real highlight is simply the performance of José María Yazpik as Amado. For my money, with the possible exception of Alberto Ammann’s Pacho Herrera, he’s the most interesting narco since Wagner Moura’s Pablo Escobar, with his signature all-black ensemble and lanky frame a mirror image of Pablo’s dorky sweatshirts and doughy physique. Pablo was a terrorist who dressed like a guy running to the store at 10:30pm for groceries; Amado is a daring narcobillionaire whose cool and confident exterior masks how ill at ease he is with his success. You get the feeling some part of him wishes he’d gotten in that plane on that long-ago airstrip and simply flown away.

I reviewed episode eight of Narcos: Mexico Season 3 for Decider.

One plot point I did not relish was the inevitable breakup of Walt and his Long-Suffering Girlfriend, Dani. As I’ve written many times before while covering the Narcos franchise, Long-Suffering Significant Others are the only kind the lawmen on this show have—or the only kind the writers know how to write. Maybe I was foolish to think there really was a chance that Walt would finish his Mexican mission and rejoin Dani in Chicago, but either way, the whole storyline is wasted time, and Dani existed just so Walt could have something to be sad about.

I reviewed episode seven of Narcos: Mexico Season 3 for Decider.

In a plot- and action-heavy episode such as this, Narcos: Mexico rarely has time to let things breathe, cinematically. It relies heavily on the careworn faces of actors Luis Gerardo Méndez as Victor, Scoot McNairy as Walt Breslin, and José María Yazpik as Amado to convey emotion and depth beneath the slick, violent surface. In that respect, the show succeeds, as the camera lingers on each face as they process the dilemmas in which they find themselves: These guys really are able to anchor the action in recognizably human ways. When the world is coming unraveled around them, that’s no mean feat.

I reviewed episode six of Narcos: Mexico Season 3 for Decider.

You have to hand it to Emperor Cleon. Most all-powerful galactic overlords would have a hard time suppressing a heretical sect of their star-spanning realm’s most powerful religion, led by a priestess who’s basically called him a soulless abomination. Most would also struggle to prove her wrong by completing a religious pilgrimage that kills 50% of its pilgrims through heat, thirst, and exposure. And most would probably keep their shirts on while doing so.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Foundation for Decider.

The action ends with a lingering shot of the ranking member of the Arellanos now that Benjamín is on the run—not Ramón, not Francisco, but their sister Enedina. The Narcos franchise has seen its fair share of would-be women crime bosses, but few if any of them were given the resources and the blessing of their predecessors that Enedina now enjoys. Along with the matter of whether Amado Carrillo Fuentes’s grand plans for the Juárez cartel will work out (a matter deferred entirelyl for this episode), the question of Enedina’s leadership is one of the show’s more intriguing storylines at this point. For her sake, and for the sake of the story, let’s hope her own merger of crime and business goes better than her brothers’. After all, there’s a lot more Narcos: Mexico left to come.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Narcos: Mexico Season 3 for Decider.

To me, the Narcos franchise is only rarely a series that offers up thought-provoking imagery, though when it does, it tends to connect in a major way. I mean, I still think regularly of the signature shot associated with Pablo Escobar, a semicircular spin around the druglord as he gazes off into the distance, plotting his next move, and the last one of those happened four seasons ago. So the episode-closing closeup on Amado, quiet and confident, is lingering with me. Amado’s a killer, no doubt—but so is, like, every president America has ever had. Could it be possible that there’s a kinder, gentler way to profit off the cocaine trade? And could Amado hold the key?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Narcos: Mexico Season 3 for Decider.

You can file this episode of Narcos: Mexico in the “boys will be boys” department. Entitled “Los Juniors” (and directed by none other than Wagner “Pablo Escobar” Moura himself), this ep of the long-running crime franchise officially introduces us to the clique of rich kids who’ve formed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Arellano Félix brothers in Tijuana—the “narcojuniors,” as our narrator, dogged reporter Andréa Nunez, dubs them. These pampered princes of the city get to taste the life of a gangster, while the narcoseniors gain access to their rich parents. When her newspaper editor asks her why the parents would get in bed with cartel bosses when they’re already rich, Andréa cheekily replies “Rich people always want more money—that’s why they’re rich.” Truer words, Andréa, truer words.

I reviewed episode three of Narcos: Mexico Season 3 for Decider.

I love it when Narcos goes Casino mode. Remember how Martin Scorsese’s mob epic opens with a full first act explaining the ins and outs of the mafia’s Las Vegas operation in general and Ace Rothstein’s casino in particular? The Narcos franchise became a Netflix stalwart, I believe, in large part because of how well it apes that format, right down to the voiceover narration. 

We’re not quite at that point in Narcos: Mexico Season 3 Episode 2—there’s not some new method of coke distribution to detail, or some brand-new faction whose rise needs chronicling, at least not yet. But in this episode (“Como La Flor”) we’re treated to a narrated who’s-who of the cartel world. And though the cast of characters is a bit dizzying to keep track of—lots of familiar faces returning, several new ones emerging—the plot is simplicity itself. 

I reviewed episode two of Narcos: Mexico Season 3 for Decider.

That’s kind of the thing about the Narcos franchise: It’s an aggressively mixed bag. At times, specifically the opening two seasons of the original Narcos, centered on actor Wagner Moura’s portrayal of Pablo Escobar, it’s been as good as anything Netflix has aired. It also maintains a bitterly cynical view of the War on Drugs, a view that this misbegotten and murderous policy has well and truly earned over the decades since its launch. There really aren’t any good guys on this show; even the noble DEA agents who’ve anchored it since its inception are complicit in ruining lives, and sometimes ending them outright. This is a welcome departure from your average cops-and-robbers show, even if it still has cops and robbers as its beating heart.

And to be sure, this episode has a handful of impressive cinematic moments. The opening car chase, the raid on the drug house, and the murder of Aguilar are all shot in single takes, alternately immersing us in the action and giving us a god’s-eye view of the violence. I could get used to a show that’s this thoughtful in its deployment of “oners,” in industry parlance.

On the other hand, it can sometimes feel that, like Amado’s crashing plane, the franchise is coasting on fumes. Narcos’ third season, focused on the Cali cartel in Colombia, never reached the heights of the Escobar material; Narcos: Mexico’s first two seasons focused on Diego Luna’s Guadalajara cartel founder Félix Gallardo, a character who never amounted to much more than the sum of his suit-wearing, chainmoking, unsmiling parts. 

But Félix is gone now, powerless and imprisoned, while his former capos like Amado are free to make their moves (and plunge Mexico into bloodshed). If the original Narcos suffered when the charismatic crime boss at its center was removed from the playing field, there’s an equally good chance that Narcos: Mexico will benefit from Gallardo’s exit, as power grows diffuse and more interesting bosses emerge. Here’s hoping that a more powerful show emerges as well.

I reviewed the season premiere of Narcos: Mexico, which I’ll be covering all season, for Decider.

Still, it’s Monica’s ordeal that centers the episode. It’s the enumeration of every encounter she had with the president, the details of every sexual liaison, the painstaking descriptions of who touched which body part with which body part or outside implement, the idea of who did what to whom with the intent to arouse and gratify. After spending an entire season largely hiding the actual sexual connection between Bill and Monica from view, ACS Impeachment suddenly rubs our faces in it, making us a party to Monica’s protracted public humiliation. It’s an excruciating choice on the part of showrunner and writer Sarah Burgess—and a smart one. An entire nation hungered for the salacious details of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Impeachment serves them to us until we can’t stand it any longer, then serves us more, and more, and more, until choking it down becomes all but unbearable. And even then, Monica is still human and humane, asking her interrogator if she’s expecting a boy or a girl. What did we do to this woman? And what does it say about ourselves that we did it?

I reviewed last night’s episode of ACS Impeachment for Decider.