Hollywood is not Ryan Murphy‘s first television series about Hollywood. It’s not his first series about fame, or performance, or the desire to remake oneself. From American Crime Story to Nip/Tuck, from Glee to Feud, these topics have been the prolific writer/director/producer’s bread and butter since his own Hollywood career began. But this new Netflix miniseries gives him a chance to flex his dream-factory muscles at the absolute apex of the Hollywood studio system, its true Golden Age, and still involve both his bawdiest and most high-minded storytelling obsessions: sex, identity, performance, what stories get to be told and who gets to tell them. And judging from this pilot episode (“Hooray for Hollywood”), it’s Ryan Murphy done right.

I reviewed every episode of the new Netflix series Hollywood for Decider, starting with my look at the series premiere. This is both the most cornily earnest and gleefully filthy show I’ve seen in a long time. I enjoyed it!

Thandie Newton and Evan Rachel Wood have a sword-and-knife fight. If you take away nothing else from this episode of Westworld (“Passed Pawn”), let it be the sight of these two badass women kicking the living shit out of each other.

It’s the episode’s highlight — even if it’s never quite clear why they don’t work together instead of trying to tear each other apart. (It’s got something to do with Maeve’s alliance with Serac, and Dolores’ control of the key to the robot heaven called the Sublime … but these seem like problems that could be resolved over a cup of coffee rather than a rumble.) Sometimes you just want to see two talented, beautiful actors have a Matrix style knock-down drag-out fight, and on that count, this week’s installment did not disappoint.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone.

Gripping? Yes. Great? Though it’s often talked about in the same breath as the likes of Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, two other shows about family men behaving badly, those comparisons don’t quite fly. Ozark is like those shows, sure. But prestige-TV analogies fail to recognize the difference between this series and the others: This is a Netflix show, designed by creators Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, showrunner Chris Mundy, and producer-director-star Jason Bateman, with Netflix’s binge model in mind. You’re meant to get onboard quickly and stay onboard for the duration. As such, Ozark’s creative decisions make it the Platonic ideal of a Netflix drama. It is its own unique beast.

I wrote about Ozark and the Netflix drama model for Vulture.

Weirdness is where art lives.

I wrote about the season finale of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

That episode begins with this scene of Ben alone in a taxi, talking to the driver a mile a minute, walking up to the edge of lucidity about his predicament but unable to do anything about it. I’ve read that you stuck to the script in that sequence, but your performance, it felt improvised in the best way.

That was written by Miki Johnson, and I’m sure we’ll all be hearing her name for years to come. Having finally seen what they used, I noticed that there were a few times where I was repeating lines; that must’ve been a certain take where I was just looking for a purchase.

But it was, in my opinion, some of the best writing that I had ever read. Even though on one level, objectively, you’re like, This is kind of rambling and doesn’t fully make sense, I thought that the writer did an amazing job of giving it this flawless emotional logic. Once you can find that, then it’s just a matter of, I want to show up word-perfect because I cannot make this writing better. There’s not a version of me improvising that scene that makes it better. The only thing that could happen with me improvising that scene is making it worse. She’s the writer for a reason, and she’s where she is for a reason, and so you just show up as prepared as possible.

So I spent weeks just going over and over and over the lines because that’s my job. When you know the lines that well, you do really give yourself the freedom to relax and play and let the words work through you, and you go for this ride where you’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen. I just can’t overstate this: It’s the kind of freedom and opportunity that is only possible when the writing is that good, and I really think it was that good.

I interviewed actor Tom Pelphrey about his phenomenal work as Ben in Ozark Season Three for Vulture.

‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’

You can’t swing a dead parrot on Netflix without hitting content from comedy’s answer to the Beatles—all four seasons of their Flying Circus series are on there, along with a bunch of documentaries, greatest-hits comps, and the religious satire Life of Brian. But you can’t beat the granddaddy of them all, the midnight-movie masterpiece that put John Cleese, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam et al in the world of King Arthur and his Knights Who Say “Ni!”—no, wait, his Knights of the Round Table, sorry. The movie’s laconic pace and legendary bits (“Just a flesh wound!”) make for the baked equivalent of comfort food. And don’t forget to stick around until the very end of the closing theme for the best sketch of the bunch!

Celebrate 420 Day with this list of ten perfect stoner movies and shows on Netflix that I wrote for Decider. Comedy, drama, action, horror, musicals, documentaries, you name it!

Add it all up, and what do you get? An episode exciting and jam-packed enough to help us put some of our reservations about the course of the show aside, at least for the time being. Is it still a bit glib with the violence? Yes. Is Serac still a bit too much of a one-note supervillain? Yes. Did a gigantic riot-control robot pulp a bunch of redshirts as part of a war between beautiful murder androids? Yes. Does that last bit trump the rest?

Maybe it does, folks. Maybe it does.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone.

This episode of Better Call Saul focuses on Jimmy’s trauma after witnessing his first murder, an important and necessary thing for the show to do. But because of the skill of actor Rhea Seehorn, the story of the episode can be told almost entirely by a series of looks on her face.

I wrote about the penultimate episode of Better Call Saul Season Five for my Patreon.

Look, sociopathic tech gurus are a dime a dozen, and it’s not a stretch to believe that Serac would orchestrate some extremely shady shenanigans in order to preserve their fortunes, further their visions for society etc. But getting their hands dirty directly by murking someone themselves? That’s a bit harder to swallow — the stuff of comic-book supervillains like Lex Luthor, not real-life oligarchs. It’s like watching a version of The Social Network in which Mark Zuckerberg beats the Winklevoss twins to death with his bare hands.

[…]

It’s worth noting here that all of this might have gone down a bit more smoothly had his story been a gradual reveal from episode to episode. This installment is basically a data dump — literally and figuratively — in which his life story, raison d’être, and mad plans for the future are all delivered in big clunky chunks of exposition. Compare that to the mythic sweep and power of the comparable Akecheta spotlight episode from last season, and the Serac arc comes up short. Think about the leisurely pace with which the show got us up close and personal with Dolores, Maeve, Bernard, the Man in Black — a much better approach, no?

I reviewed this week’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone. It’s the first of the new batch that has left me wondering if there’s insufficient gas in the tank for the show’s latter-day switch to straightforward pulp.

A traditional bottle episode limits the action to one location, usually closed, and a small number of actors, in order to both create a sense of intimacy/isolation/claustrophobia and save money. “Bagman” manages to be an episode that’s mostly about two guys doing things mostly by themselves, but upends the rest of the logic of a bottle episode, smearing blood and piss across the desert landscape. It has a lot in common with its bottle-episode antecedents in the Breaking Bad/Better Call Saul universe, like the (overly?) acclaimed Rian Johnson–directed “Bug,” but it does what it’s doing by turning the bottle episode inside-out. That shredded jug of water Mike finds in the car of the final sicario he kills makes for a decent stand-in. You might call this an open-bottle episode.

I wrote about this week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

“I travel in worlds you can’t even imagine! You can’t conceive of what I’m capable of! I’m so far beyond you! I’m like a god in human clothing! Lightning bolts shoot from my fingertips!”

Jimmy McGill is right about all of this in at least two respects I can think of. For one thing, he’s probably right: Howard Hamlin would not believe what Jimmy McGill is capable of—helping a murdering cartel boss walk free, for example. To borrow a phrase from Lloyd Henreid in The Stand, “small-time shit” is the extent of the trouble Howard can likely imagine Jimmy getting into. Little does he know.

I wrote about last week’s episode of Better Call Saul for my Patreon.

It’s Doloreses all the way down.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone.

The Delos corporation has created a monster. Yes, another one.

This particular robotic beast isn’t an eerily accurate android replica of humanity. It’s a towering riot-control robot, one that looks more like Optimus Prime or Robocop‘s ED-209 than Evan Rachel Wood. There are hundreds more just like it, just waiting for a buyer. But the host-pretending-to-be-Delos bigwig Charlotte Hale has other ideas. “I’m sure we can find some use for them,” she deadpans. Consider Chekov’s mantle-placed gun officially locked and loaded, humankind.

I reviewed last week’s episode of Westworld for Rolling Stone.

And so passes a season of Ozark that largely, if not quite entirely, did away with the previous season’s writing tics—the timed ultimatums, the ultraviolence during the cold opens—and dug us deep into a brand new character, only to yank him away from us by the end, Sopranos-style. It may not be a canonical drama, no matter what the awards shows say, but it’s an entertaining one, and one that isn’t afraid to aim high now and then. At the end of last season I speculated that the show might be on the verge of greatness, and said I’d be thinking about it for a long time. I don’t think either of those predictions quite played out, but the show kept me engaged and never insulted my intelligence in the process. Sometimes, that’s plenty.

I reviewed the season finale of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

There’s a Sopranos episode, maybe you remember it, called “Long Term Parking.” In that episode, [CHARACTER A REDACTED] reveals to [CHARACTER B REDACTED] that they’ve been working with the FBI, in hopes that Character B, too, will want to flip on the mob. The two separate, and then Character A receives a phone call from [CHARACTER C REDACTED] that Character B has attempted suicide, and that [CHARACTER D REDACTED] will come pick Character A up to visit Character B in the hospital. As Characters A and D take that ride together, your brain reels back and forth from relief to dread to relief again, since it seems Character A is in the clear. Only they’re not, not by a long shot. Character D isn’t there to give them a ride—at least not the ride they wanted. Character D is there to drive Character A out into the middle of nowhere and murder them, which Character D does. All these characters who seemed to love Character A are revealed as charlatans, or at the very least as people who put their own safety ahead of every other consideration. If you pose a risk to the family, you will be killed. It’s that simple.

Anyway, the cinematographer for that episode of The Sopranos is Alik Sakharov. Sakharov also directed Ozark Season 3 Episode 9 (“Fire Pink”). Why do I bring that up? Oh, no reason.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

What we have here is a chickens-come-home-to-roost episode. Ozark Season 3 Episode 8 is titled “BFF” for reasons that I must say elude me at the moment; it’s the antepenultimate installment of Ozark‘s third season which sees a lot of long-delayed reckonings, as characters wake up to truths that should probably have been self-evident. And the truth hurts.

I reviewed episode eight of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

The thing I keep returning to while watching this show is how taxing it must be for Marty and Wendy to constantly have to think at maximum brain capacity, all day every day. Like, that casino license business—what must it take to keep stuff like that in line and still find the time and energy required to, I dunno, eat dinner or go to the bathroom or schedule a doctor’s appointment? It must be enormously draining for everyone involved. I think Ozark may be an experiment in seeing how far and how taut a string can be pulled before it finally snaps.

I reviewed episode seven of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

So, let’s talk about running times. As has been customary in previous seasons, Ozark Season 3 routinely presents us with episodes that run right up to, and sometimes cross, the full 60-minute mark. In the past I might have called this “Netflix Bloat,” part and parcel of the same mindset that led the Netflix/Marvel collaboration series to run, oh I dunno, four to six episodes too long each season.

In Ozark‘s case, at this point anyway, I don’t think that’s a fair criticism. I never feel bored during an episode, never wonder why we’re spending time watching the cinematic equivalent of paint drying—the way I often did on Jessica Jones or Luke Cage, when characters would be shot just walking to the places where actual scenes were happening, as if the show needed to clear its throat before actually getting down to business.

What Ozark‘s lengthy runtimes do produce is a sense of disconnection between what happens at the start of an episode and what happens at the end of it. For example, Ozark Season 3 Episode 6 (“Su Casa Es Mi Casa”) ends when Ben Davis, off his meds for a previously undisclosed bipolar disorder, and his nephew Jonah Byrde track Ruth Langmore to a cash dropoff that goes south when unknown parties in black SUVs show up and gun down the Kansas City mob grunts tasked with the dropping off before blowing up the truck they were driving.

I was so engrossed by the whole business—by seeing how Ben’s condition was manifesting itself, by Jonah’s use of his drone, by the evident care and tenderness Ben feels towards Ruth, by Ruth’s relationship with the KC assholes, by whether they were going to fuck with her again, by whether Ruth would get out of there in time when the shit hit the fan—that I completely forgot how the episode began.

I reviewed episode six of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

I believe that covers everything? This is an eventful show, with a real gordian knot’s worth of plot threads. It’s to the point where it can be hard even to remember where we were this time last season. (Remember Rachel and the Blue Cat? They haven’t even been so much as mentioned.) One moment you’re digging up dirt on an FBI agent and the next you’re apologizing to a horse breeder for cutting an animal’s nuts off for no good reason. Then again, I suppose this is how life feels for the Byrdes, perhaps the busiest main characters in any prestige drama I can remember. Every time Wendy asks Charlotte to put something on her schedule I cringe a bit inside. How much more can these people take?

I reviewed episode five of Ozark Season Three for Decider.

In the end, Marty gets dropped back off at home after his forcible sojourn to Mexico, and all is right with the world, more or less. But there are ominous signs for the future. (Aren’t there always?) I’ve got no idea how his scheme to corrupt a federal agent is supposed to play out. And Helen’s warning to Charlotte (who knows nearly everything about her family’s dirty deeds) that no one must ever tell her daughter Erin (who’s in the dark) anything lest they face dire consequences is a Chekov’s gun if ever there was one. This is not a show in which people succeed in keeping secrets; indeed, constant revelations are the very engine that powers the entire story. Poor Erin Pierce is gonna find out soon enough what her mother’s real job entails, and I wouldn’t want to be in the blast radius when that particular bomb goes off.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Ozark Season 3 for Decider.