Four episodes in and I’m willing to stake a claim: You’re not going to find a better show this strange September than Raised by Wolves. Using hoary old sci-fi concepts—androids, aliens, harsh desert worlds, war-torn dystopias—it seems to have tapped into deep new veins of vitality in each, something I wouldn’t have thought possible in a prestige-TV format. But I suppose that just goes to show you that the death of prestige TV has been greatly exaggerated.

I reviewed episode four of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

In some ways this is Lovecraft Country‘s most effective use of genre to date. Largely stripped of horror’s mandate to terrify—this is comfortably the least Lovecraftian of the four episodes so far—it’s free to have some fun with swashbuckling, treasure-hunting tropes instead. These date back to the same period of pulp fiction as Lovecraft, or even before to the likes of Treasure Island and The Count of Monte Cristo, but being a citizen of turn-of-the-21st-century America I recognize more modern sources of inspiration: the Indiana Jones series (booby traps, perilous bridges, stolen artifacts, a beam of light revealing a treasure’s location), The Lord of the Rings trilogy (more perilous bridges, moonlight revealing a secret, a choice between subterranean tunnels), even stuff like The Goonies (the madcap energy of much of the episode, the watery tunnels). It’s not the most exciting use of this stuff, I guess, but it’s still a fun way to spend some time.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider. At least this one isn’t really even trying to be scary?

Can you trust someone who’s been programmed to lie to you? It’s a simple question with a complicated answer, at least as far as Raised by Wolves is concerned. The show’s third episode (“Virtual Faith”) is deeply concerned with the issue of honesty at odds with people who are programmed—whether technologically, religiously, biologically, or by virtue of their role in a family—to be less than honest. When do their lies cease to be white and start to be actively destructive?

I reviewed episode three of Raised by Wolves for Decider.

Well, this is a relief: Episode two of Raised by Wolves is really, really good, too.

And thank goodness. After the effusive, even bombastic praise I heaped on the pilot, boy oh boy would there have been egg on my face if the show were a one-hit wonder that fell apart immediately thereafter! Fortunately, there’s no such problem. Smart, surprising, tense, austere, and still rooted in remarkable performances, “Pentagram” lives up to the promise of the premiere.

I reviewed episode two of Raised by Wolves for Decider. Another winner.

First, an exclamation: Holy shit.

Second, an explanation: I had low expectations for Raised by Wolves. No, scratch that: I had no expectations for Raised by Wolves. You have to understand that I went into this show almost completely cold—no trailers, no advance reviews, nothing. All I knew is that it was an android show directed by Ridley Scott…and that’s where my expectations started to crater. Android-based science fiction is, for me, a big fat zero; I’ve never understood the compulsion to examine What It Means to Be Human over and over and over when we all experience exactly what it means all day every day for our entire lives. Love, joy, fear, suffering—like, we get it. I don’t need Alex Garland to serve me a sexy robot to figure this shit out.

More specifically, I’m deeply indifferent at best to the work of Ridley Scott, the big-time film director and now fairly frequent television producer who directed the series premiere from a script by creator Aaron Guzikowski. With very few exceptions (primarily Alien) I find Scott’s style simultaneously fussy and flaccid, its slovenly storytelling overcompensated for by strange aesthetic flourishes (think of his shaky frame-rate action/horror scenes from the likes of Gladiator and Hannibal) that convey no useful information or emotion. He’s had his name on some stuff I like a great deal, executive producing the masterful first season of AMC’s extraordinary survival-horror show The Terror for example, but that’s about it.

So. A show from one of my least favorite sci-fi subgenres, from a director in whom I have no faith as a rule? I’ll be honest: If I hadn’t been getting paid to watch it, I would have given this one the proverbial hard pass.

Boy, am I happy to be wrong.

I’ll be covering the new HBO Max series Raised by Wolves for Decider all season, starting with my review of the Ridley Scott–directed series premiere. All I can tell you is go into this as cold as you can, because wow.

So, it’s a monster of the week show.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I suppose. Episodic storytelling has been a mainstay of genre fare since television’s early days. You can rattle off a perfectly respectable list of shows ranging from watchable schlock to deliberate camp to proto-prestige that used this format: Lost in Space, the Star Trek franchise, Batman, Kolchak, Doctor Who, The X-Files, Buffy, Supernatural….Some have more connecting tissue between their adventures than others—The X-Files famously vacillated between the long-term storytelling of its mythology episodes and the short-term payoffs of its one-offs—but that’s the deal that fans of genre TV have made for decades.

I just expected Lovecraft Country to be something more, is all.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Courtney B. Vance is one of the most watchable actors on television. And listenable, too: His voice is a mellifluous thing, waxing and waning with his emotional tide. Lovecraft Country boasts a compelling lead in Jonathan Majors, and a high-energy co-lead in Jurnee Smollett, but Vance is where the show’s gravitas and its primary human interest comes from. You believe this guy is a guy, a fully dimensional person. You want to see what happens to him.

So naturally, they kill him in the second episode.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Lovecraft Country for Decider.

Lovecraft Country is about a horde of ravening, bloodthirsty white monsters who prowl the backwoods at night, terrorizing the innocent. Also, there are some multi-eyeballed Lovecraftian entities in it.

I reviewed the series premiere of Lovecraft Country for Decider, where I’ll be covering the show all season.

Looking back on this refreshingly ambiguous season of whodunit television, I think I’ll revisit Perry’s reunion with Sister Alice quite a bit. Before he gives up on the case entirely, before he takes out the stitch he saved from baby Charlie’s eyes and blows it into the Pacific Ocean, he tells Alice about her mother’s new ministry and wonders who removed Charlie’s body.

But however much she has questioned her own gifts, Alice is still a woman of faith. What comfort has digging for proof of the truth ever given Perry, she asks? In the end, both of them, with their diametrically opposed views of how the world works, will be alone. (She’s more right than she realizes; Perry has officially called off his relationship with Lupe, though he has finally admitted that her asking price for his family farm was a fair one and given her the land.)

Which leaves Perry with one final question: “Did you really think you could bring Charlie back?”

“I did, didn’t I?” Alice replies. As far as her mother and Charlie’s mother are concerned, the answer is, for all intents and purposes, yes. It’s not true, of course. But maybe it’s right.

I reviewed the season finale of the excellent Perry Mason reboot for the New York Times.

What follows is admirably ambiguous. Bloodied from the chaos at the grave site, Sister Alice watches her mother proclaim Alice’s success in resurrecting the baby — and runs away, by herself, blood streaming from her broken nose, silk garments catching the wind behind her. Is she smiling in the episode’s final shot? Is it a smile of triumph or, more likely, one of bitter recognition of her mother’s skulduggery in producing a fake miracle in lieu of a real one?

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

One of the gifts this episode gives us is a side of Matthew Rhys we’ve rarely seen before: absolute fury. Perry explodes in anger at Emily after the courtroom revelation that she took her baby to a motel assignation with her lover — and Charlie’s eventual co-kidnapper — George Gannon, a fact she failed to divulge to him as her lawyer. He loses it again after Emily’s jailhouse matron perjures herself by claiming Emily admitted to the crime while behind bars: First, he imitates his dead mentor E.B. Jonathan (read: Matthew Rhys doing his best John Lithgow), excoriating himself for thinking he could catch the killer while working as a defense attorney. Then he vents his rage at E.B. for killing himself instead of upholding his duty to his client.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Perry Mason for the New York Times. What a pleasant surprise this show has been.

It begins with the death of a lawyer and ends with the anointing of a new one. In between, this episode of “Perry Mason” covers a good deal of ground with nearly all of its characters, from the fed-up Black cop, Paul Drake, to the true-believer evangelist, Sister Alice, to the dogged legal secretary, Della Street, to the title character. It’s the hour when “Perry Mason” stops being an origin story and starts becoming the first proper Perry Mason case.

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

“Cops investigating cops? That’s a trip for biscuits,” E.B. says at one point.

Which leads me to my final point about this episode: E.B. Jonathan’s way with words. Aging, he tells Perry at one point, is a matter of finding “a nose hair half the length of your arm, half your friends in the cemetery and a million strangers on the street.” Truth, he says, “won’t move wind chimes.” George Gannon’s faked suicide note? “Donkey dust.”

I reviewed the fourth episode of Perry Mason for the New York Times.

One of the best science fiction shows ever made, and one of the finest dramas of the Peak TV era, Dark ended thoughtfully, emotionally, beautifully, brilliantly.

I reviewed the series finale of Dark for Decider.

Welcome to Dark: The Lost Years.

In a way, “In Between Time” (that’s the episode title as translated by the subtitles; Netflix bills the episode as “Between the Time,” a more literal but also more nonsensical translation) is an answer to “An Endless Cycle,” Season 2’s tour de force. While that episode broke from the usual structure in order to depict a single, pivotal day in the Winden saga, the day of Michael Kahnwald/Mikkel Nielsen’s suicide, this one bounces around time and space much like most others do—but it’s the times to which it bounces that are the key. We visit the years in between the pivotal years, the years that fall outside of the show’s 33-year time-traveling cycles. It’s a way of showing us how the characters grow and develop when the threat of apocalypse isn’t imminent, and when Adam and Eva’s plans to alter or facilitate that apocalypse aren’t operating at a fever pitch.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Dark Season Three for Decider.

It’s a bold choice to end the episode this way. But on this show, bold choices abound. There always seems to be some new weirdness around the corner, something stranger or sharper or gorier or more romantic or more unpleasant than what is strictly called for by the standards of a whodunit.

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

It probably goes without saying after all that that we’ve reached the most science-fictional point in the narrative thus far. You have to have a pretty tight grasp on the cast and the overlapping, sometimes contradictory timelines and alternate realities to have the first clue what much of the action of the episode is even about. If people were to accuse the show of disappearing up its own ass, I couldn’t really blame them.

But in the end, what you have here is a story of people being ground down by forces they can barely comprehend and cannot control. There’s a universality to that sentiment; dig past the twelve different versions of Martha or whatever and you’ll see it plain as day.

I reviewed episode six of Dark Season Three for Decider.

We haven’t even heard the opening line of dialogue in Dark Season 3 Episode 5 by the time we witness the disposal of its first dead body. The body belongs to Regina Tiedemann, buried by her time-traveling mother Claudia after dying of cancer. The first line of dialogue is “Why do we die?”—and it’s a question this episode answers in detail. One of the most melancholy and death-haunted hours of Dark to date, and boy is that saying something, “Life and Death” continues to add new wrinkles to the series’ complex spacetime-travel plot, while rooting itself deep in the fears and resentments of everyday people.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Dark‘s increasingly wild third season for Decider.

It really is a minor miracle that a show this dense and this loaded with science fictional plot devices works as a character-based drama. And vice versa, I suppose. I’m glad I get to bear witness.

I reviewed episode four of Dark‘s final season for Decider.

The flashbacks occur at intervals throughout the episode. They take us to the trenches of World War I — still without its even more savage sequel by the time “Perry Mason” takes place — where our title character is an American military officer, leading his men in a charge over the top. In the chaos of the no man’s land, the charge breaks down. Those who’ve survived German machine guns and flame throwers now must contend with a huge wave of enemy troops mounting a counterattack … and the lethal poison gas clearing their way.

As Perry flees, ordering his men before him, he sees that some are too badly wounded and maimed to move. Unwilling to let them suffer or leave them at the mercy of the gas, he takes his handgun and shoots them to death himself, one after another. When one of them begs — whether for death or a reprieve from it isn’t entirely clear — Mason murmurs, “Forgive me,” and pulls the trigger.

If it accomplished nothing else, this week’s episode of “Perry Mason” established why the private detective seems so perpetually ground down. With memories like that playing in your head every time you take a cigarette break, wouldn’t you look and feel exhausted? Moreover, it accounts for his dishonorable discharge from the military — and, according to his wealthy backer Herman Baggerly, his bloody nickname: “The Butcher of Monfalcone.”

Even for a private eye, a career for which an unsavory reputation kind of comes with the territory, it’s a lot of weight to bear.

I reviewed the second episode of Perry Mason for the New York Times.