What Them does believe in is evil, manifested in white supremacist racism. The supernatural element merely recreates, as a parable, the evil that men do. You might be able to walk away from that alive, but you can’t walk away from it unscathed, or unchanged. The same can be said of the show itself. Them marks the arrival of a major new talent in showrunner Little Marvin and a staggering achievement in television horror. It’s vital as it is violent. It’s one of the best shows I’ve ever seen.

I reviewed the season finale of Them for Decider.

I’ve joined my illustrious co-host Stefan Sasse for a brief, Patreon-exclusive conversation about the depressing discourse surrounding Game of Thrones Season 8. It’s sure to make us a lot of friends and it’s available right here!

Directed in stark black and white by Craig William Macneill (Channel Zero) from a script by Dominic Orlando, “Covenant II” is reminiscent at turns of The Witch, The Lighthouse, Hereditary, There Will Be Blood, episode eight of Twin Peaks: The Return. Like its predecessor “Covenant I,” is one of the most brutal things I’ve ever watched in a lifetime of watching horror. It, like Them, is a masterpiece.

I reviewed episode nine of Them for Decider. Please note that Amazon swapped the running order episodes eight and nine after screeners were sent out, so you may notice artifacts of the previous running order.

Clocking in at just over half an hour, not counting the closing credits, this is a short, throat-clearing episode, a squall-before-the-storm. The details are, as always, impeccable: George’s casually sexist insistence that his prisoner Betty wear more pink; the masks on Marty’s shirt and the Iron Cross on the car he tries and fails to fix in his garage; the brooch on the doctor’s lapel that matches the one worn by Helen the real estate agent and, I think, the flowers plucked by Livia to put in that awful bloody pillowcase; the parallel fucking chicken dinners consumed by George and Betty on one hand and Marty and Earl on the other. And maybe it’s foolish to have hope when watching a show like this, but that excruciating basement scene did end with Ruby retrieving that axe from the corner of the basement. It’s going to get buried in someone before this all ends—if it ends for the Emorys at all.

I reviewed episode eight of Them for Decider. Please note that the running order of episodes eight and nine was switched by Amazon after screeners were sent out, so you may notice some weird artifacts of the previous running order.

In dedicating his book The Stand to his wife Tabitha, Stephen King referred to it as “this dark chest of wonders.” “Wonders,” in this case, is a euphemism: The Stand is a catalog of horrors from its first page to its last. Episode seven of Little Marvin’s masterful Them (“Day 7: Night”) can be seen in a similar light. Each storyline, each scene, feels like retrieving some fresh nightmare from the recesses of a box long forgotten in an attic, or a basement. When, in the end, an actual box is revealed to contain something truly horrific, it feels both surprising and inevitable.

I reviewed episode seven of Them for Decider.

Livia achieves a momentary catharsis—and I do mean momentary, the payoff lasts about 15 seconds before cutting off abruptly—when, after returning home with Gracie, she gets sick of Betty’s racist taunts and slaps her across the face. James Brown’s “The Big Payback” plays for a few seconds, ceasing suddenly when Livia and Gracie go inside their house. Betty, too, goes back inside, and promptly destroys nearly everything she can get her hands on—including the wallpaper (this show practically doubles as a wallpaper gallery), behind which is the black mold she metaphorically warned about in her speech at the Home Owners Association meeting. She finally calms down enough to call her milkman, asking him to do her the favor he promised after mentioning to her that he did the things in Korea that most men could not.

Betty warned Livia a while back that things were only going to get worse for her. I’m worried she’s right.

I reviewed episode six of Them for Decider.

It’s rare to think “I will never forget watching this episode of television,” rarer still to mean it. Even within the sphere of horror, a genre dedicated in part to searing imagery into your brain, the truly unforgettable is thin on the ground.

Not this time, though. Not this time.

I reviewed episode five of Them for Decider.

Finally, the Emorys return home. With the kids in bed, Livia and Henry begin to make love. Neither of them sees the voyeur in the corner: the Black Hat Man (Christopher Heyerdahl). It’s a scare, yes. But at the end of this long day, in which so many attempts to escape have gone sour, it’s hard not to see this figure as a sign that this form of escape won’t save the Emorys either. As Major Garland Briggs, a character from another great horror television series, Twin Peaks, once said, the most frightening thing is the possibility that love is not enough.

I reviewed episode four of Them for Decider.

“The woman was holding her baby.” “A man came to the house.” Those are my notes on Them Episode 3 (“Day 4”), which revolves around the nightmare from which Livia Emory awakes on the morning of her family’s fourth day in their new home, a nightmare about her baby Chester and…whatever happened to him in North Carolina. Simple statements, conveyed with simple shots, all the more menacing for their simplicity. Whatever did happen on “that day,” as her husband Henry refers to it—and from the show’s first scene there’s been a dreadful, growing certainty that we’ll be forced to bear witness to it at some point—there’s no distance far enough to move from it, not even all the way across the country. It’s always there.

I reviewed episode three of Them for Decider.

This is the story being told by Them. This is what creator/co-writer Little Marvin, co-writer David Matthews, director Nelson Cragg (previously the cinematographer for Ryan Murphy’s masterpiece American Crime Story), director of photography Xavier Grobet, and editor David Kashevaroff (not to mention executive producer Lena Waithe) convey with every tool at their disposal—the relentlessly downbeat script, the breathtaking use of every camera trick in the book from Dutch tilts to split screens to Vertigo shots, the disorienting staccato editing, and the uniformly thoughtful and precise performances of both the Emory family and their enemies up the block, led by the increasingly unhinged Betty. Them is a ghost story, yes, and the specter of Miss Vera and the blood pouring from the poor dog’s grave at the end of the episode promise more in store along those lines. But in terms of where the atmosphere of terror and dread this show maintains actually come from, it is about being sane in an insane land, never knowing whether, say, the kindly old white man at the hardware store is going to reveal himself to be an inveterate racist (he doesn’t, though in Livia’s mind he encourages her to buy an axe off the wall display just in case she has further trouble with the neighbors), or whether the teacher at your school will punish you when your classmates make monkey noises at you because you answered a question. It’s about putting your best foot forward in a world intent on cutting you off at the knees. It’s about choking down that goddamn pie, choking down every last bite.

I reviewed the second episode of Them for Decider.

Them is about the real-life horror of racial covenants, which excluded Black families from home ownership in certain neighborhoods and towns. Harold chose to move to Compton despite its covenant past because covenants are, at this point, illegal. But there are other ways to enforce the racial hierarchy, as Betty and company realize very quickly. In essence, Livia and Henry are inverting the fundamental, foundational myth of America—the myth of the pioneer, moving into a land that doesn’t welcome them—only it’s the white people who are the true savages. One need look no further than the 1/6 insurrection or the new Jim Crow voting laws in Georgia or the anti-trans bill in Arkansas or the union-busting zeal of the well-to-do spokespeople of Amazon, the company airing this show, to see the truth in this.

But cinematically, Them is about more than that. It’s about the way the light looks on a sunny California afternoon, and the way the night looks in the well-lit home of a family that loves each other’s company. It’s about framing Livia and Henry up against the edge of the screen as they talk to each other, conveying their intensity and intimacy. (There’s a closeup on the two of them after kissing that’s just achingly, ferociously romantic.) It’s about the kind of staccato editing that represents Livia’s terrible memories, and the brutality of her current predicament. It’s about sparing the audience a bunch of getting-to-know-you bullshit and moving right to the stuff that’s frightening and unpleasant and vital. It’s about how sometimes the pain and fear we face is so overwhelming that the vocabulary of the quotidian fails us, and we must reach for the supernatural for recourse. It’s beautifully shot. It’s thoughtfully edited. It’s mercilessly written. It’s the best new show I’ve seen this year.

I’ll be covering Them‘s entire first season for Decider over the next few days, starting with my review of the series premiere.

The most powerful tool in Clarice’s arsenal is right there in the title. At this midway point in the show’s debut season, Rebecca Breeds’s lead performance is holding up remarkably well. Never once when I’m watching her do I think, Oh, that’s a Jodie Foster impersonation; I think, Oh, that’s Clarice Starling, and move on. There was never any guarantee that this process would take place, but Breeds brings the right combination of fragility and steel to the role, and her accent is impeccable (especially when you consider her Australian background). With so much riding on this central role, the show would have collapsed almost instantaneously had Breeds not brought so much to the table. She makes it seem seamless, and that’s no small feat.

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

“The desire to become a superhuman cannot be separated from supremacist ideals.” So says Baron Zemo, the self-appointed scourge of the world’s super-people. Does he have a point? Decades of angry message-board debates between superhero fans and the genre’s detractors would at least indicate that he has a constituency. Is there something inherently fascistic about stories in which superpowered übermenschen fight crime and battle foreign menaces, stories in which might quite literally makes right? Or is it all in the application, and can superhero stories reflect progressive ideals, however retrograde their vigilante violence might seem on the surface?

I’m not here to litigate this question, frankly. There are plenty of superhero stories I like just fine, and plenty I think are reactionary garbage, and even more—like much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe—that I think cloak militarism and jingoism in palatably colorful costumes, so deftly that people don’t realize what they’re actually being served. If there’s a right answer, you have to pull apart a whole tangle of conflicting threads to find it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

This week’s episode of Clarice presents us with a meal and a mystery. From where I’m sitting, both are equally compelling. The first episode of the show that has felt like an organic extension of previous plotlines rather than the introduction or continuation of a procedural-style case of the week, “How Does It Feel to Be So Beautiful” seems to find Clarice finding its footing. I’m hoping it continues down this path indefinitely.

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

At a certain point, it starts to feel like the plot holes outnumber the plot threads. One minute, Bucky’s so concerned about Baron Zemo’s hatred for the Avengers that he won’t even allow Sam to speak to him; the next, he’s breaking Zemo out of jail and presenting a team-up with him to Sam as a fait accompli. Sharon Carter has been on the run for the better part of a decade for a crime for which everyone else involved has long been forgiven, including various enormously famous and beloved superheroes. (Once again, I just don’t buy the lack of clout Sam commands as a member of the world-saving Avengers who has an ongoing relationship with the U.S. military.) Sharon just so happens to be on the scene when Sam, Zemo, and Falcon need rescuing; bounty hunters spontaneously appear in the hidden location to which the foursome have traveled to find the evil doctor; Ayo appears to have arrived at the group’s destination before they even got there. Stuff keeps happening, seemingly just to keep things moving, regardless of whether it happening makes any sense.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider.

There’s something so dreary about taking Redwing, the comic-book Falcon’s telepathic, bright-red bird sidekick, and turning him into a drone. An explicitly military one at that, property of the United States government, as this episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (“The Star Spangled-Man”) dutifully informs us. When one of those sinister border-hating Flag-Smashers knocks the damn thing from the sky, it felt like a mercy killing on behalf of imagination.

Can’t say I’m enjoying The Falcon and the Winter Soldier very much! I reviewed this week’s episode for Decider.

Stefan and I enter the town of Twin Peaks in this episode on David Lynch and Mark Frost’s landmark series. It’s geared to newcomers, so hopefully everyone can listen and enjoy!

Gretchen Felker-Martin and I reunite for a second two-hour deep dive into television’s storied recent past! This time, the Original Bad Boy and the Filthcore Queen tackle shows they didn’t touch on before or only touched on briefly. Beginning with a trinity of canonical dramas—The Wire, Deadwood, and Mad Men—they then make the jump to anthology TV—Channel Zero, American Crime Story, and Fargo—with plenty of surprises along the way. It’s better than your most recent Netflix binge—available here or wherever you get your podcasts!

I have a confession to make: I have been known, from time to time, to make mine Marvel. I’ve read hundreds of their comics over the years (and even wrote one once myself). I enjoyed the Marvel/Netflix shows Daredevil and The Punisher, as I’ve chronicled at length on this very site. As for the movies…well, Robert Downey Jr. as Tony “Iron Man” Stark was casting so strong it essentially made superheroes the dominant genre nearly singlehandedly (give or take a Hugh Jackman or a Heath Ledger), and the fight scene that opened Captain America: The Winter Soldier however many years back was a pip.

The rest I can take or leave. Mostly leave.

I say all this in the interest of full disclosure. But if I’m gonna cop to being indifferent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole, I also want to state for the record that I’m in the liking-things business, and I go into every new series I watch hoping to enjoy what I see. It’s true that I may not have caught a new Marvel movie since the underbaked and overrated Guardians of the Galaxy—after a dozen servings of pistachio ice cream, it’s okay to decide pistachio ice cream isn’t for you and stop eating each new serving just in case this one’s the good one. But I was certainly prepared to enjoy The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the latest series to take characters from the blockbuster movies and plop them down on the small screen for several extra hours of screentime. It shares half a title with the one Marvel movie I can actually remember anything about—that’s promising, right?

Wrong, as it turns out! I’ll be covering The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for Decider all season long, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Thus concludes this stage of the investigation into the so-called River Murders. I assume there will be hell to pay for Clarice, who once again went off investigating on her own and fell into the clutches of a killer without having told any of her colleagues where she was going or what she was doing. “Alone is safe for her,” Ardelia tells the ViCAP boys — safe in a psychological sense perhaps, but physically it’s a pretty damn dangerous state for someone in Clarice’s line of work, and two women are dead because of Clarice’s actions. It’s a conundrum: Her investigative instincts are brilliant, but her risky propensity for going solo threatens to undo much of the good she’s otherwise capable of doing. I’m glad the show crafted this compelling little horror story to emphasize this central conflict. Here’s hoping they keep on turning the screws until something snaps.

“Lurid” may be the best zone for Clarice judging from last night’s episode, which I reviewed for Vulture.