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.

“I was always too gullible.” No kidding, Adam! Back when you were referred to as Jonas and weren’t yet horribly scarred, you followed a whole line-up of would-be time-travel gurus: Claudia Tiedemann, your own future self Adam, and now the elderly self of an alternate world’s Martha, named Eva. And guess what? Every single one of them lies to and manipulates you to their own ends. But don’t blame yourself. Skipping and jumping across time and space probably takes a toll on your internal lie detector.

I reviewed episode three of Dark Season Three for Decider.

But for all its plot density, for all its tangled family trees and multiple timelines and now multiple worlds, it doesn’t feel like boring sci-fi bullshit for a second. It’s too warm towards its characters for that. And no, warm in this case does not mean kind or soft—it means respecting their essential humanity and putting that at the forefront of the story, not the mind-teasers.

Katharina is a terrific example of this. As played by Jördis Triebel, she’s embittered and worn out from suffering, and that can entail lashing out, as it does when she practically assaults the teenaged Hannah. But the tenderness with which she greets Ulrich is heartbreaking, as are the tears in her eyes when she meets her mother, a nurse at Ulrich’s psychiatric facility. Like Jonas and Martha and Elisabeth and Claudia and Regina and everyone else, she’s a person, not a plot device.

This mentality has a ripple effect on the filmmaking as well. You see it in throwaway establishing shots, even, like when a nurse lights a cigarette and you can see the orange glow of the ember outside the psych hospital. There’s no reason for that to be there; it just is, because sometimes people step outside for a smoke. Dark never loses sight of what people do by virtue of just being people. The time traveling doesn’t change that. To borrow a phrase from another spacetime-warping show, humanity is Dark‘s constant.

I reviewed episode 2 of Dark Season 3 for Decider.

There’s no easy reentry into the world of Dark. Netflix’s twisty time-traveling psychological thriller, created by Baran bo Odar (who directs this episode, entitled “Deja-vu”) and Jantje Friese (who wrote it), has no shallow end of the pool to step into. You’ve got to plunge in head first where it’s deepest and, yes, darkest. That’s where the show’s sophisticated, character-rooted approach to one of science fiction’s most shopworn devices shines the clearest.

So let’s dive in, shall we?

I’m covering the final season of Dark for Decider, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a hell of a show.

I can’t think of another television show as contemptuous of commercial culture as “Awesome Show.” Using the fictional Cinco brand of products as a touchstone, Heidecker and Wareheim mercilessly attacked the snake-oil salesmen, disposable junk and corporate double-talk of a culture that treats people first and foremost as consumers — a frequent target of sketch comedy, to be sure, but rarely one assaulted with this level of crass vitriol.

A recurring series of ads promoted products that, almost as an aside, required all of the consumer’s teeth to be pulled out. Another line of products, called “Cinco Brown,” was designed to either stimulate, contain, or impede the bowels. One ad urged viewers to save money on eggs by hatching their own.

The most vicious satire of all: an ad for Cinco Boy, a child mannequin marketed to bereaved parents. “Isn’t he pretty?” coos the guest star Peter Stomare with sinister callousness. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Cinco’s founders are murderers.) In moments of loss, when I’m as mad at the world for exploiting my grief as I am at the source of the grief itself, the garish gallows humor of “Awesome Show” makes it one of the few works of art up to the task of helping me express and exorcise my feelings. It may not be free real estate, but it’s worth a lot to me.

I wrote about my favorite comfort viewing, Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (???), for the New York Times.

What an episode. Emotional, unsparing, thrilling, and horrifying in turns, it displays all of the strengths of the season that led up to it. And it never loses sight of the fact that this excellent series is, in the end, a character piece—a show that uses its action and suspense sequences to reveal who the characters really are, not simply provide some thrills between dully revelatory monologues. 

I reviewed the season (series?) finale of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

Beautifully shot, compellingly plotted, and gorgeously acted, this is yet another excellent episode of the most surprising crime drama of the year. I’m sad there’s only one hour to go.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

Corruption, torture, murder, full-frontal nudity, foul mouths, a dead baby: “Perry Mason” boasts the full complement of HBO’s genre-revisionist techniques. But Rhys is the glue holding it all together. I can’t recall the last time I saw a lead performance this embodied, for lack of a better word; Rhys’s every glance, expression and gesture seems made of weariness the way Abraham Lincoln’s cabin was made out of logs. Credit must also go to the costume department, led by Emma Potter, who dress him exclusively in clothes that look as if they were pulled out of the hamper into which they were tossed three days earlier. When we discover that Mason bribes the mortician in order to steal clothes worn by people who have died in them, Yeah, that sounds about right is the only appropriate response.

And Rhys’s performance as Perry isn’t just empty, woe-is-me sad-sackery. Perhaps it’s his alluded-to experiences in the Great War bleeding through, but he comes across like a man who is the way he is because the awfulness of the world really, really gets to him. (“Worst thing you’ve ever seen,” the mortician tells him about the dead baby. “What do you know what I’ve seen?” comes the reply.) When Perry examines the baby’s mutilated corpse, delicately extracting a thread used to stitch the infant’s eyes open, the camera lingers on his face as he chokes back horror and sorrow. A slight tremor of the lower lip is the only physical catharsis his body allows him.

It’s that shot, more than anything else, that sold me on this version of the character and his journey through Los Angeles’s 1930s underbelly. Any show that kills a child owes it to its audience to take that killing seriously; this sounds like a truism, but such killings can provide cheap pathos and shock value in unscrupulous hands. Despite its Hollywood glitz and Perry’s Murphy’s Law antics, “Perry Mason” is, at first blush, a show that understands the gravity of what it has chosen to present to both its protagonist and its audience.

I’ll be covering the new Perry Mason show for the New York Times, starting with my review of the series premiere.

Two scenes, two minutes: That’s all you’re getting of the Lynwood family saga in ZeroZeroZero Episode 6. The fate of their cocaine shipment and the money owed on it? The subject of two or three lines of throwaway dialogue half a world away. The Italians who purchased it to begin with? Not present at all.

For this episode, it’s Manuel’s world, and we just live in it.

Directed by Pablo Trapero from a script by Leonardo Fasoli and Max Hurwitz, “En El Mismo Camino” is a breathless nightmare journey into the life—I hesitate to say “mind,” since he remains so sociopathically opaque—of Manuel Quinteras, the special forces soldier turned chief muscle for the Leyra Brothers cartel. Only he’s much more than that: He’s the commander of an entire army of young men he’s training to become perfect killers, just like himself and his squad mates. Though known to the outside world as the Firm, they take their internal name from Manuel’s old callsign: They’re the Vampires.

I reviewed the extraordinary sixth episode of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

From its title, “Sharia,” on down, the fifth episode of ZeroZeroZero is nominally concerned with the fundamentalist militia that becomes the latest obstacle in the path of the show’s ill-fated cocaine shipment. The way it handles the group is…tricky. Much is done to humanize them, particularly their leader, and to portray them as just another gun-toting subculture, like the Italian mob and the Mexican cartel. That said, there’s a degree of stereotyping that American eyes and ears will impose on such characters almost automatically; having a bunch of them cheer “Allahu Akbar!” when a bomb goes off in a hotel on a live news broadcast isn’t doing them any favors, that’s for sure.

But there’s a throughline for this episode, and it’s not jihad—it’s family.

I reviewed episode five of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

“When did it start?” Emma Lynwood asks her brother. Silence. “Chris,” she says for emphasis. “When did it start?” Again, silence. There’s no choice; she has to come right out and say it. “When did the spasms start?” she asks, her tone that of a statement: The spasms have started.

A pause. Then, Chris, quickly: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

That’s how this episode of ZeroZeroZero (“Transshipment”) ends, as Mogwai’s melancholy score plays us out over a shot of the Senegalese coast. And there’s an ocean of character in that brief, terse exchange. It tells us that with everything else she has to worry about—the cargo stuck in international limbo, the cocaine she’s desperate to move from Mexico to Italy, the new Senegalese partners Chris cut in on the deal in exchange for their help in offloading the coke—she’s worried about her kid brother’s disease.

I reviewed episode four of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

A pig gets slaughtered and men drink its blood. A man is set on fire as his friend is forced to watch. The heir to a business is betrayed by his father’s close friend. A rogue soldier barges into the halls of power even though he’s the most wanted man in the country. This is an action-packed episode of ZeroZeroZero, filled with gruesome deaths and daring escapes—and yet we learn so much about the main characters in the process that it’s like we sat down with each one and interviewed them about themselves. That’s quite a trick.

I reviewed episode three of ZeroZeroZero for Decider.

As a critic, I consider myself to be in the liking-things business. I go into every show I watch with as few expectations as possible, save one: I expect that what I’m watching will be good, until proven otherwise. That’s it! I’m never like “Oh brother, this looks awful, but here we go”; even in cases where I suspect a show might not be for me, I hold out the hope of being pleasantly surprised. Some of the shows I’ve had the most fun writing about—The Leftovers, Halt and Catch Fire, Billions—took the better part of a whole season to get to that point, but when they got there, whoa baby, I sure became a fan. I’m always open to starting to like something, from the moment the premiere begins until the credits roll on the last episode I’ve been assigned to review.

I say all that to say this: The second episode of ZeroZeroZero kicks twelve kinds of ass. Hallelujah!

I had my problems with the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, but the second episode of ZeroZeroZero basically blew me away. Wild. I reviewed it for Decider.

I’m a broken record on this anytime it comes up on a television show, but here goes: Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner once told an interviewer he’d never consider killing one of Don Draper’s children, because any show in which a child dies would need to become about the death of that child, the way people’s real lives reshapes themselves around that tragedy.

Is ZeroZeroZero going to wrestle with this? Is it going to dig down deep into how it feels to know you caused the death of a kid? Or is this just a kind of detail intended to add instant gravitas and then given no more thought? I have my suspicions, yes I do.

At the very least I don’t need television’s umpteenth narco series to show me a little girl whimpering in pain and fear as blood pulses out of a hole in her neck, until eventually she dies, all on camera, which is exactly what ZeroZeroZero does. The main goal of a show like this is, let’s face it, to entertain people who want to watch people get whacked in expensive location shoots, and tossing the brutal on-screen murder of a child into the mix just so the cop character can have a sad about it is an ugly, ugly impulse. “Rules are for men”? Alright, then—that’s my rule. Break it again at your peril.

I had very strong reservations about the pilot of ZeroZeroZero, the Amazon crime show I’m covering for Decider. But stay tuned…

Directed by David Costabile (who plays Wags) from a script by Emily Hornsby and the co-showrunners Brian Koppelman and David Levien, this episode of “Billions” is replete with punchy plotlines and payoffs. Schemes are cooked up and pulled off in rapid-fire succession, ending with a declaration of all-out war. Thanks to a Covid-19-necessitated hiatus, the episode stands as an ersatz season finale, and as such it stands tall.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Billions, the last for some time I’m afraid, for the New York Times.

Fakes, forgeries, phonies, fugazis — they’re all very much on the brain of this week’s crackerjack episode of ‘Billions.’ For some characters, faking it is all they know how to do

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

As a music cue, [Neil] Young’s plaintive ballad [“Old Man”] makes emotional sense, even if crosscutting between the two old men in question drives the point home a bit too hard. Young’s old-before-its-time voice erases any edge of condescension his youth might have brought to the material at the time he recorded it — he was 24, amazingly. It’s the sound of a young man trying to find common ground with one of his elders, and the song never reveals whether the effort is successful. Chuck and Bobby, two complicated men with difficult fathers, could surely relate.

I reviewed tonight’s Billions for the New York Times.

White Lines‘ first season tried to do a lot of things, and that kind of ambition is worth praising. Zoe’s midlife crisis, her romance with Boxer, the Calafat family drama, Marcus’s third-time loser routine, David and his spirituality and drugs, Anna and her sexuality and drugs, raising teenage children, the sideplot about Zoe and Axel’s dad, Ibiza, house music—it’s all in there, and all of it is handled more or less well. But the whole isn’t so much less than the sum of its parts as it is a jumble of them thrown together, all of them prominent but none of them truly emerging as what this show is about. Its hedonistic pleasures are undeniable. But like many of its questing characters, I want more.

I reviewed the season finale of White Lines for Decider.

Wendy Rhoades stares at the man opposite her. And stares. And stares. And stares some more.

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