Still, as Clarice is waylaid by yet another killer whom only she seems able to detect and stop, it’s hard to ignore the show’s liabilities as a narrative. The Silence of the Lambs works because Clarice investigates only one case and has only one brush with death. In Clarice, she’s already had three near-death experiences in four episodes total. This is standard cop-show shit, for sure, but don’t you want your Silence spinoff to be more than standard cop-show shit? If, multiple times a season, Starling’s going to come within a hair’s breadth of being killed before the killer gets thwarted, its painstaking realism will become a liability right quick. Hannibal could get away with Will Graham & Co. bagging killer after killer because it was pointedly disinterested in realism from the start. Clarice has no such ambition and no such luxury.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

And it’s a decent episode, all told, and for all its faults. I’m not sure if the conspiracy story line has legs, or if it’s the kind of story fans of The Silence of the Lambs Cinematic Universe are interested in seeing; if this show doesn’t serve up a new serial killer with a cool nickname and a horrifying M.O. by the end of the season, I’ll eat a census taker’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. I’m also not wild about recasting Martin and Krendler as Clarice’s surrogate work-mother and work-father.

But that close-up device from Clarice’s therapy sessions, and her surreal visions of those moths, point to a potentially more visually imaginative show than what we’ve seen so far. Clarice’s ability to bulldoze institutional obstacles with her powers of observation is another positive trait for the show. I think that’s the real tension underlying Clarice: Can a show on CBS, a network replete with Good Police catching the bad guys, ever be as interesting as the hugely and deservedly acclaimed film on which it’s based? That a “yes” is even possible at this point has to be counted as a victory. And like Clarice and the VICAP team, you take your W’s when you can.

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

Last week, Clarice Starling uncovered a series of murders targeting whistleblowers. For now, at least, that case is off the docket. Instead, she and the rest of the FBI’s VICAP team are off to Tennessee, where local and federal law enforcement are in a tense standoff at a heavily armed militia compound. The confrontation, which began when an unknown member of the group opened fire on an ATF agent, threatens to become “another Waco”—something Attorney General Martin, a Tennessee native, wants to avoid at all costs. There’s dingy local color, there’s flashbacks to Clarice’s Appalachian childhood, and there’s a bunch of generic cop-show stuff that raises some uncomfortable questions about what, exactly, we’re doing here.

For starters, why is Clarice tagging along on this mission, considering the insubordinate way she went off-script and described the whistleblower killings as coordinated and targeted rather than the work of a serial killer last week? Her boss, Agent Krendler, has in fact already requested her transfer off the VICAP team as a result. “The only reason you’re here,” he says to her, “is I don’t trust you out of my sight.” That creaking sound you hear? That’s the writers strrrrrrrrrrretching to keep Clarice at the center of the action despite behavior that ought to sideline her. Not a good sign, this early in the series!

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

Maybe that’s the single biggest problem with this version of The Stand: It pulled all its punches. There was really no internal struggle going on among any of the characters other than Harold and Nadine—Larry didn’t repeatedly second-guess his own habitual shittiness, for example, nor did Lloyd Henreid realize he’d sold his soul to the devil, nor did the Trashcan Man struggle to reconcile his pyromania with his desire to fit into Vegas society and do right by Flagg, the man who elevated him from captivity to the height of power. Vegas itself is pure fantasy and spectacle; it never makes the vital point that people willing to serve a sadistic authoritarian look and sound like normal people more often than not. The demands of Mother Abigail’s very Old Testament God are never properly struggled with either; the idea that the forces of Good can be cold and uncompromising in their Goodness never gets communicated. The freaking plague itself was an afterthought!

I reviewed the series finale of The Stand for Decider. What a disappointment.

There is one very live issue on which the pilot appears to have closed the book already: How much of a presence will Hannibal Lecter’s absence occupy in the show? Clarice’s legally mandated inability to mention him by name — in one of the episode’s funnier moments, Clarice’s shrink refers to him as her former therapist — did not necessarily mean he wouldn’t still be there, exerting unseen influence.

Consider, for example, the way Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone became a sort of structuring absence in The Godfather Part II, a void around which the whole story implicitly orbited, with Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone attempting to live up to the old man’s legacy while the flashbacks to Robert De Niro’s young version of Vito depicted how he became the larger-than-life presence he was in the first film. A bit closer to home, Laura Palmer was just a prom photo and a few seconds of videotape footage for the bulk of Twin Peaks. However, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never lost sight of how her absence, caused by her murder, continued to affect her family and friends, even after the circumstances of that murder were uncovered and solved. (Well, more or less — particularly by the show’s third season, it was clear that nothing in Twin Peaks was ever truly solved).

By contrast, Clarice devises a bold and, to my mind, successful work-around for the Hannibal issue: It prioritizes Clarice’s experience confronting and killing Buffalo Bill, the murderer whom Lecter helped her track down, rather than her experience with the good doctor himself. The decision actually makes good sense, from a character perspective. Sure, Clarice’s conversations with the Cannibal were harrowing; granting a psychopathic psychiatrist a deep dive into your childhood trauma is gonna leave a mark. But Clarice implicitly argues — with ample justification, as far as I’m concerned — that killing a man before he kills both you and the young woman he intended to be his seventh victim is a much bigger deal, leaving much deeper wounds. Clarice’s constant flashbacks (emphasis on flash; they pop up for split seconds) to Bill and his moth-infested house of horrors ground the show in that experience, not in Clarice’s comparatively tame quid-pro-quo relationship with Lecter.

(That Lecter is currently at large in the show’s time frame, having escaped during the course of the events of the film, does not appear to enter into its calculations at all; as Clarice herself said in the movie, she’s not worried about Lecter coming after her, because “he would consider that rude.” Case closed!)

I’m covering Clarice for Vulture, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Now consider the Trashcan Man. Arguably the series’ single biggest misfire from a character standpoint, he has no arc or growth or interesting personal journey to speak of. When he first appears in the series, he’s a gibbering crazy man with a penchant for firestarting. When he next appears, he’s retrieving a nuclear warhead, at the express orders of Randall Flagg. And for his final appearance, he delivers the bomb, as requested; the only hiccup is that he brings it to the wrong place, and considering his overall level of sanity it would have been a minor miracle if he hadn’t brought it to the wrong place.

If you’ll permit one last contrast with the novel, this is a case in which nearly every choice made by the show was the wrong one. In the book, Trash is crazy, yes, but he’s capable of coherent speech, coherent thought, and actual attachment to other human beings. He feels friendship with the people he gets to know under Flagg’s command in addition to puppylike devotion to the Dark Man. But his compulsive pyromania gets the better of him after someone unthinkingly ribs him about his fiery habits, and he winds up killing several men and destroying much of Flagg’s nascent air force before fleeing. Desperate to make amends, he does the only thing he feels is big enough to make up for his crime: He retrieves a nuke all on his own, without Flagg’s orders to do so, and delivers it to the Dark Man’s doorstep as an offering of penance. It’s a whole lot more complex, interesting, and ultimately human than just hooting and hollering his way from Point A to Point B to Point C the way he does in the show.

(In a way, Trashcan Man is as underdeveloped as Mother Abigail. In her case, we’re never really made to understand what’s so magnetic about her, or how close a relationship with God she really has. She’s just kind of…there, and it’s like the good-guy characters coalesce around a random old woman, not the Voice of the Almighty on Earth. Similarly, Trash is just a firebug, not the complicated individual with a near-supernatural expertise in weapons, incendiaries, and explosives that he is in the novel.)

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Stand, in which many of its overall weaknesses are made manifest, for Decider.

The smartest thing this adaptation of The Stand has done yet is to stand aside. The convoluted, shifting timeframes, the need to balance the apocalypse with its aftermath—that’s all gone now. In its place is a very, very straightforward story: The man in black lives in the desert, and four people (and one dog) are walking to meet him.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand, which I pretty much liked, for Decider.

I hate to do this, but I hope you’ll permit a book-to-TV comparison just this once. In Stephen King’s novel, this traumatized pyromaniac, née Donald Merwin Elbert, is a central figure, one of the core characters we follow across the country in the aftermath of the plague. If Lloyd Henried is the Stu Redman of Las Vegas, the main man in the new society Randall Flagg has founded just as Stu is the head honcho of Mother Abigail’s, Trashcan Man is roughly equivalent to Nick Andros, an outcast from society allegedly destined for a key role in the new world, or Tom Cullen, a man whose mental disabilities allow him more unfettered contact with forces beyond our understanding. (That element of Tom’s personality appears to have been dropped by the show.)

Yet for some reason, instead of following Trash from the outset, The Stand‘s 2020-2021 iteration just sort of plops him down at the start of the sixth episode out of nine episodes total. We’ve barely gotten a glimpse of him blowing up oil tanks somewhere and receiving a psychic communiqué from Flagg when bam, the next thing you know he’s already in Vegas, getting the lay of the land from Lloyd and receiving the blessing of the Dark Man himself. Why didn’t the show sprinkle Trashcan Man scenes throughout the season, starting no later than episode two or three? I legitimately have no idea. Was it simply to shield us from Ezra Miller’s performance in the role—a high-pitched, gibbering caricature of a neurodivergent person? Again, I got nothing, man. I enjoyed the creepy Willy-Wonka-tunnel evil psychedelic montage he envisions when Flagg psychically contacts him, and I appreciate that he alone out of everyone in Vegas seems to recognize that Flagg is effectively a demigod worthy of worship, but otherwise nearly every decision involving this character is baffling to me right now.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

Stefan Sasse and I discuss the impact and legacy of cop shows in the post-BLM world in this patreon-exclusive podcast. Check it out!

It’s as if on the Vegas Strip did Randall Flagg a stately pleasure dome decree. People in fetish gear fuck freely in public. Everyone’s drunk, and some are doing blow right out the open. It’s a bacchanalia—and it’s being staged around a gladiatorial pit where slaves are made to fight each other with chainsaws.

In other words, it’s the nightmare scenario of people who used to want parental advisory stickers on Marilyn Manson records. Is it a plausible setup for a dystopian society run by a demon in denim? I’m not so sure. Where did he find all the hardbodied models, male and female, who are gyrating and pole-dancing and having sex out there? Does no one find the blend of hedonism and ultraviolence a little much? Could a new society really coalesce around that particular kernel?

The funny thing, and I use funny very loosely here, is that we’ve scene what an American dystopia would look like just last week. And while there is a certain cathartic venting of violent desires, it’s against perceived enemies to the desired order of things, not randos dumped into a thunderdome scenario while onlookers hump each other. It seems to me that the pitch Randall Flagg made to Lloyd Henried in prison—don’t you want the chance to get even with the kind of people who did this to you?—is a much more compelling and plausible way to structure New Vegas. Everyone there is attracted to the darkness Flagg embodies, so promise them the chance to extinguish the light (specifically in Boulder)! Turning the place into a sex club with a death-match arena in the middle just rings hollow. It’s a Hollywood idea of what fascism looks like.

I reviewed this week’s less-than-promising episode of The Stand for Decider.

I get the feeling that this iteration of The Stand is meant to focus on the whole life-in-the-aftermath aspect of the story, to the near-exclusion of the pandemic, and relegating the dark vs. light conflict—the titular stand!—to second place, at least for now. But it’s running out of road for this approach. Sooner or later, and probably sooner than later, it’s going to come down to Mother Abigail and her crew against Randall Flagg and his own. (A crew we simply have not seen at all yet, aside from that one episode when he rescued Lloyd Henried from prison.) I think the tone it’s struck for the material on which it’s concentrating its efforts is appropriately elegiac and surprisingly gentle. But if you’re gonna knock the house down again, it pays to have sturdily built it, and that I’m not sure the show has done at all.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

It is kind of a feat, when you think about it: an audience in 2020 not knowing what’s going to happen in The Stand. This unusual, mix-and-match adaptation of one of the best-known horror novels in the English language continues to unfold in non-linear fashion, making familiar characters and plot points seem strange and unexpected. Sometimes this is very effective, like how it allows Nick-the-outsider and Nick-the-high-priest-of-Mother-Abigail to be directly contrasted with one another in the episode where we get to know him in the first place. Sometimes it doesn’t work as well, like how it races through the creation of the “committee” established by the survivors to govern Boulder; here it’s all the work of Mother Abigail, who picks them to be her emissaries first and a governing body second (if at all).

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

The annual holiday tradition returns: I wrote about ten of the year’s best TV music cues for Vulture.

If I felt like His Dark Materials was going to grapple with Asriel’s crimes and weigh them against his liberatory potential, a la Game of Thrones forcing you to confront Daenerys Targaryen’s bloodthirstiness even after she’s fought against an existential threat to humanity, or even a la The Lord of the Rings showing you the horrible shit that went down in the Shire while Frodo and friends were off questing, that would be one thing. But there’s no sign that this is the case, any more so than it was in the novels, in which Asriel and Coulter alike are given a free heroism pass more or less for being sexy — and how can you trust this show to wise up when, as seen in this episode, it’s capable of fucking up so many fundamentals?

If it seems like I’m being hard on a basically well-intentioned and well-made show… well, I probably am. Because I want to like the damn thing! I’m in the liking-things business, I wouldn’t even be a critic if I weren’t. As a matter of preference, I’m particularly in the liking-fantasy and liking-killing-God business, so you’d think this would be right up my alley. You almost have to try to screw that up… and yet screw it up His Dark Materials has. This despite lively and game performances from Dafne Keen, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Amir Wilson, Ruth Wilson, Will Keen, and Simone Kirby. This despite — and I can’t stress this enough — being about one randy British aristocrat’s mission to find and kill God. To get an enthusiastically lapsed a Christian as me to root against this clown is an achievement in and of itself. But that’s the story of His Dark Materials, I think. It makes the impossible feel far more laborious than any fantasy worth its salt ought to do.

I reviewed the season finale of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte.

Overall, this episode functions less as a successor to the premiere and more as a part two. Showrunners Josh Boone and Benjamin Cavell are still introducing characters, weaving their pasts and presents together in that same dreamy way—a million miles from Stephen King’s relentless forward pace at this same stage in the story in the book version. In effect, we’re just seeing pieces of the puzzle at this point, and waiting for the final picture to take shape. Until then, it’s hard to judge the show as a success or failure, though the game cast, impactful score, and occasional flash of post-apocalyptic imagery (like the George Washington Bridge covered from one end to the other by stalled cars filled with dead passengers) are keeping my interest. It’s kind of like we’re in the early stages of the superflu, before it’s had a chance to really take off. We’ll see what kind of world we’re inhabiting when we reach the other side.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Stand for Decider.

“They consume what makes us human, so I just hid that from them,” Mrs. Coulter says of the spectres who eat people’s souls. “I suppress myself.” Would that we were all so lucky. Less an episode of television than a staccato succession of individual scenes — a series of unfortunate events, you might say—the penultimate installment of His Dark Materials’ second season puts all of the show’s characters through their paces, marching them relentlessly from one plot beat to the next over the course of its relatively brief 45-minute running time. Precious little humanity, in the form of the emotional and intellectual forces that actually drive people to do what they do, remains.

I reviewed this week’s oddly paced episode of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte.

So that’s what The Stand 2020 is. I can tell you what it isn’t, though: It isn’t anything like Stephen King. I mean, the characters are all there, sure, and the story beats too, albeit shuffled; what I’m talking about is (paraphrasing Barton Fink here) That Stephen King Feeling. King, as he himself has written about extensively in his treatise on horror Danse Macabre, nearly always establishes a situation-normal status quo, then introduces some world-ending catastrophe or soul-eating demon-thing that overturns the whole Apollonian apple cart. You have to see little George Denbrough make his toy boat, kiss his big brother goodbye, and head out into the rain in his yellow slicker before you can meet Pennywise the Dancing Clown, you know? It’s the most King-feeling thing in all his work: You set up the house of cards, and then you knock it down.

In the book version of The Stand, the house of cards was the entirety of human society—specifically the American subsection thereof—and the knocking down was performed by Captain Trips. And boy, was it ever! For my money there’s no more thrilling section in all the King books I’ve read than the opening quarter or so of The Stand, where we meet all our main characters as civilization stumbles, crumbles, and completely collapses around them. Hell, they don’t even need to be main characters at all: There’s a chapter that simply follows the virus across the country from one random person to the next, establishing the virus as history’s most lethal chain letter, that’s just gleefully dark and frightening. It’s as good as King gets.

And The Stand’s 2020 TV adaptation will not be going there at all, it seems. It is, to put it mildly, a bold choice. And you know what? I like bold choices where adapting Stephen King is concerned! The most slavish recreations of his work tend to be the most boring; even in a case like the recent Hulu series Castle Rock, which was not a straight adaptation at all but an attempt to do for King’s oeuvre what Noah Hawley’s Fargo did with the Coen Brothers’ filmography, the effort to nail all those little King-isms came at the cost of doing anything actually memorable, let alone frightening. (I’m old school in that I think horror TV shows are supposed to be scary. Go figure!) Compare and contrast with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: It’s very much Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, not Stephen King’s, and it just so happens to be one of the greatest movies ever made; King, of course, despises it.

So no, a lack of fidelity isn’t going to get on my nerves per se. It never does! So I’m not interested in comparing chapter and verse, describing what the series got “right” and “wrong” about the details or even the broad strokes. In the end, it’s all in the execution. And in this early going at least, the execution is intriguing enough to keep me watching. The fading between times and places, the freeform mixture of “now” and “then,” gives the show the feel of a dream, or a nightmare (several of which punctuate the action, after all). The lush, traditional score (no John Carpenter knockoffs here) by Nathaniel Walcott and Mike Mogis contributes beautifully to that dreamy feeling. Will it last? Or, in the absence of the harrowing rise of the superflu plague, will the flashback/flashforward device wear out its welcome before the real action kicks in? These are open questions, but compared to “Why the hell am I watching this?”, they’re questions I don’t mind asking at all.

I’m covering The Stand for Decider, starting with my review of the premiere. It’s bold, I’ll give it that!

Take a pandemic. Add the paranormal. Make it a uniquely American story of survival horror. The result: “The Stand,” Stephen King’s epic post-apocalyptic novel from 1978, a new mini-series adaptation of which debuted Thursday on CBS All Access.‘The Stand’ Review: Stephen King’s Pandemic Story Hits TV AgainDec. 16, 2020

Conceived in the pre-Covid era, the show has taken on new resonance since, telling the story of a weaponized virus that wipes out 99 percent of the population. But that’s only the beginning. The real battle happens afterward as supernatural forces of darkness and light — embodied by the demonic dictator Randall Flagg (Alexander Skarsgard) and the holy woman Mother Abagail (Whoopi Goldberg) — duel for the souls of the plague’s survivors.

Since the original novel’s original release, King’s saga has entered the pop-culture consciousness in many different incarnations, including an expanded edition of the book and an earlier mini-series adaptation. In anticipation of the show’s arrival, we’re tracing the story from its point of origin to its latest mutation.

I wrote about the many inspirations and iterations of Stephen King’s The Stand for the New York Times.

Watching Mrs. Coulter navigate this brave new world and the people she encounters in it is the episode’s greatest pleasure. Coulter herself, however, is not any sane person’s idea of a pleasure. She’s so openly and obviously vicious and deceptive that Lord Boreal’s hamfisted attempts to impress and seduce her with his (other)worldly ways make him look more like an out-and-out moron than an overambitious suitor.

But it does engender some fun reactions on Coulter’s part: choking back boredom as she sits curled up on his couch in bare feet while he plays world music to set the mood; marveling at the presumption it took him to buy her a change of clothes in order to make her look more at home in Will’s world; silently bristling at his unthinking sexism regarding the women of this world’s perceived arrogance; responding to the pass he makes at her with “If you actually got me, you wouldn’t begin to know what to do with me.” He’s so eager to ignore all this that when she asks him for information about the spectres haunting Cittàgazze, he seems to believe the game is afoot once again. No subtle knife required here — the line between horny and stupid is pretty thin.

I reviewed last night’s episode of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte.

The knife business is well and good, and it obviously will be a major factor in Lyra and Will’s adventures moving forward. But as is so often the case with this series, it’s stronger television when humans make sincere contact with other humans, not when knives make contact with interdimensional planes. You can see Will’s trauma over accidentally killing a burglar last season written all over his face when he’s forced to fight Tullio. You can feel the frisson of unarticulated attraction and affection when Lyra’s daemon Pantalaimon violates her world’s taboo and brushes up against the injured Will to comfort him.

You get the sense that for all her prophetic destiny Lyra is still just a kid trying to do the right thing when she walks backwards up the stairs in their hideout so she can drop off some towels for Will without spying on him in the bath. When they say goodnight to each other using their full names, it’s like the verbal equivalent of doodling your crush’s name on your notebook. It’s a small, endearing bit of business that, in terms of emotional impact, puts all the angels and witches to shame.

I reviewed last night’s episode of His Dark Materials for Fanbyte.