Gretchen Felker-Martin and I discuss the brilliance of the “Coffin Flop” sketch from Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave and the dreadfulness of the television money-making machine in the latest episode of our television podcast Cut to Black—available here, here, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Chuck Rhodes has shaved off his beard. But he wants to be clear: It’s not that big a deal.

“You look ready to toss your cap in the air at West Point!” exclaims his underling Karl Allard (Allan Havey).

Rhodes’s weary reply? “Don’t make a whole thing of it.”

My guess, and it’s just a guess, is that this new clean-shaven Chuck Rhodes has more to do with the vagaries of scheduling talent for the back half of this Covid-scrambled season than a decision made in the writers’ room. If your show stars Paul Giamatti, and if he has gone beardless sometime during the many months since you were last able to film, then by God, your main character will go beardless as well.

But “Don’t make a whole thing of it” doubles as a mantra for the entire … what should we call it? A half-season premiere? Season Five version 2.0? However you slice it, the writers have taken a steady-as-she-goes approach to the show’s return. No hard reset, no launching point for a slew of brand-new story lines — this is a standard “Billions” episode, which is to say it simply advances its pre-existing plotlines in dense and dizzying style, through crackling dialogue and confident performances.

I’m back on the Billions beat for the New York Times, starting with my review of the show’s big return last night.

Alongside money, sex and social justice are this iteration of Gossip Girl‘s currency. This is our last episode before a mid-season hiatus, so go ahead and spend it all, I say!

I reviewed the final episode of the new Gossip Girl‘s first batch for Decider.

Gretchen Felker-Martin and I discuss the role of the smallfolk—peasants, soldiers, slaves—in Game of Thrones in the latest episode of our TV podcast, available here, here, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Spotted: Serena van der Woodsen! Blair Waldorf! Dan Humphrey! Chuck Bass! Nelly Yuki! Well, kind of, anyway. The last original Gossip Girl character on that list makes an appearance in the flesh courtesy of returning actor Yin Chang, playing the all-grown-up editor of New York magazine. The other four? You’re going to have to settle for cosplay. It’s a Halloween episode of Gossip Girl 2.0, you see, and the GG originals are the hottest costumes in town.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Gossip Girl for Decider.

 The show is smart in showing how the ultra-rich perform virtue for the hoi polloi—dredging up old social posts strictly to punish someone under a woke smokescreen (wokescreen?), turning the party designed solely to spite someone into a fundraiser, denouncing bullying immediately after bullying the shit out of someone, and so on. These kids learn about privilege, cancel culture, et cetera only because they can use it to their advantage. For people who were worried Gossip Girl would be humanizing its characters by making them more socially aware than their predecessors, you can stop worrying. It’s just given them a new set of weapons.

I reviewed this week’s episode of the new Gossip Girl for Decider.

Full frontal male nudity! Enthusiastic same-sex make-outs! Underage analingus! Folks, this is not your father’s Gossip Girl! Unless your father is extremely rich and sending you to an elite private school in Manhattan, in which case I suppose it’s very much your father’s Gossip Girl. I wouldn’t let him watch it, though!

I reviewed episode three of the new Gossip Girl for Decider.

In this week’s episode of the Cut to Black podcast, Gretchen Felker-Martin and I discuss the bravura episode of The Leftovers “International Assassin,” with digressions into critical groupthink and the need to let the mystery be. Available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

Spotted: Gossip Girl changing the parameters of its own show. According to the traditional Kristen Bell voiceover narration that opens each episode, GGv2.0 is now about “the scandalous lives of New York’s elite,” rather than the previous iteration’s focus on Manhattan specifically. Congratulations to Brooklyn, I guess? And maybe Queens, depending on the neighborhood?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Gossip Girl for Decider.

Full disclosure: I watched every single episode of the original Gossip Girl, from the pilot to the finale. I loved pretty much every moment of it, too, the climactic and nonsensical revelation of Gossip Girl’s secret identity aside. (Seriously, if that’s enough to put you off the scandalous misadventures of Manhattan’s elite, you need to calm down.) I even wrote a fanfic comic about the origin of Chuck Bass, for crying out loud. It was my ideal primetime soap. I am what you might call a Gossip Man.

But that was years ago, and we’re all very different people now than we were then, are we not? So I greeted the news that HBO Max was reviving the show for a sequel series with some trepidation. Without the original characters—to say nothing of the cast, all of whom seemed to have names that sounded even snootier than those of the Upper East Siders they were playing (seriously: Leighton Meester! Taylor Momsen! Chace Crawford! Ed Westwick! Blake Lively! Penn Badgely!)—and without its original sociopolitical setting, could a revival thrive?

Based on this pilot episode (“Just Another Girl on the MTA”), I’d say the answer may well be yes. Written by series creator Joshua Safran (a veteran of the original version) and directed by music-video ace Karena Evans, it replaces Serena van der Woodsen, Blair Waldorf, Chuck Bass, and the rest of the original group with a new crew of the young and the consequence-free, then uses a simple but twist-filled structure to set up the big-money backstabbing that’s sure to follow.

Spotted: me, covering the new Gossip Girl reboot for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

In the new episode of our new podcast Cut to Black, Gretchen Felker-Martin and I discuss that one time on Mad Men when a guy got his foot run over by a lawnmower, as well as horror and violence on Mad Men more generally. Go listen at the link or wherever you get your podcasts!

All that being said, I think Clarice’s heart was mostly in the right place — that place being the extraordinary lead performance of Rebecca Breeds as the title character. Her Clarice Starling is a rare thing indeed, a cop character with deep psychological wounds who never once uses them as an excuse to cut moral corners. If anything, they drive her to become more stringent, more empathetic, and more compelling as a protagonist. Whatever problems I had with the show’s denouement don’t outweigh my disappointment that we’re unlikely to see more of it.

I reviewed the season, and unfortunately series, finale of Clarice for Vulture. I’m sorry to see it go.

There’s something about the sight of a gaggle of FBI agents standing around looking at a painting like students at an art critique that tickles the funny bone — for me, anyway. Crime-scene photos? Conspiracy walls? Evil Big Pharma execs giving press conferences before getting perp-walked? That’s the kind of stuff you’re used to seeing the Feds gawk at. Somebody’s commissioned modern-art masterpiece? It feels like someone’s pulling a prank. Which, in effect, somebody is.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Clarice for Vulture.

With two episodes to go, and thankfully no more weeks-long breaks between them, Clarice is closer than ever to its core mysteries’ denouements. I don’t know that we’ll get anything as transcendent as The Silence of the Lambs’ riveting closing act. But what we’re getting — especially with Rebecca Breeds’s fantastic performance at the center of it all—is reason enough to keep watching until the case is closed.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

“Everybody thinks it’s cool or funny,” Catherine Martin says of the serial-killer phenomenon. “These monsters, they leave human beings behind — like you and me.” She’s saying all this to the mother of the serial killer who nearly made her one of his victims, but she could just as well be saying it to the audience of Clarice. From the start, the show has steadily steered away from the sort of supervillain glamour that gets attached to serial murderers in the public consciousness. Buffalo Bill is just an asshole who dies coughing up his own blood on the basement floor in flashback after flashback; Hannibal Lecter isn’t even mentioned by name. That last bit is legally mandated, of course, but from this episode, you almost get the sense that Clarice might have kept him at a distance anyway. This is less a show about the evil that men do than it is about the trauma left in their wake.

I reviewed the tenth episode of Clarice for Vulture.

The third episode of the new podcast on television from myself and Gretchen Felker-Martin is on the best fight scene ever filmed, the street fight from season three of Deadwood. It’s available at the link or wherever you get your podcasts!

The second episode of the new podcast on television from myself and Gretchen Felker-Martin is about the explosive finale of Breaking Bad Season 2. It’s available at the link or wherever you get your podcasts!

Mare of Easttown may ultimately go down in history, for me anyway, as “the one where Kate Winslet did a Philly accent,” the same way that a previous prestige-procedural like the acclaimed The Night Of is “the one where John Turturro puts ointment on his feet.” Deliberately de-glamorizing character bits like those will do that sometimes. (Her work has been excellent throughout regardless.) There are some weird lacunae in this episode, too—like, couldn’t it have found the time to catch up with Kenny, the father of the slain girl, to see how he took the news about the identities of Erin’s abuser and killer? What kind of teenager has a physical hard copy of an incriminating photo in the year of our digital Lord 2021? Did Mare really “need” to arrest Ryan, or was this grim bit of symmetry—having lost her son, she now takes away her best friend’s—unnecessary and cruel, just as Lori said, with the show counting on our faith in the institution of policing to carry the weight? And the final shot of Mare going up the attic stairs to confront her grief over her late son Kevin looked a bit more Hereditary-style spooky than it was probably supposed to; one last not-quite-right move from a show that made plenty of them.

That’s a lot of caveats, I know. But in this episode, at least, the series left me feeling moved, rather than ripped off. Folks, I’ll take it.

I reviewed the finale of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

With one episode to go, many mysteries remain. What was in that piece of paper or photograph that Erin’s beleaguered friend Jess showed to the Chief of Police? Why was it urgent for him to get in touch with Mare immediately thereafter? Why is there a gun in the Ross brothers’ tackle box, and who plans to use it on whom? Why the hell did the show confuse the whole issue by giving their cousin Kenny—not brother, all previous appearances to the contrary—a different last name? Why is the murder-mystery event of the season, stacked top to bottom with talent, so frustrating to watch?

I reviewed the sixth episode of Mare of Easttown for Decider.

And in the end, The Underground Railroad‘s titular, fictional, fantastical version of the real world’s underground network wound up being a bit player in its own story. Cora is transported from place to place by the Railroad and its offshoots several times, yes. But the story is found in the crimes that drive her from one destination to the next, always seeking safe harbor, finding nothing but an uncertain future—a hopeful one, yes, especially compared to where she’s come from and where she’s been, but still an uncertain one. We know now, decades and decades after Cora’s story, that there really is no safe harbor from the horrors of American racism—not in St. Louis, not in California (ask Them about that one), not in any given place.

No, to the extent that a better place exists, it’s in the uncertain hopes of people, people like Cora and Polly then and everyone involved struggling against what the late, unlamented Arnold Ridgeway referred to as “The American Imperative” today. “Are you kind, mister?” Cora asks Ollie when she approaches his wagon. “Most times, yes,” he says, before adding “Of course, like anybody, I falters, of course.” Of course, of course—he repeats it for emphasis, taking it as a given that no one can be their ideal self all the time, not in this world. But you can try, damn it. You can try.

I reviewed the finale of The Underground Railroad for Decider.