After watching the first episode of Last Samurai Standing, one thing becomes apparent very quickly: This show rules. I mean it is mint. I mean I walked around my apartment after it was over, saying “Holy shit, that was fuckin’ great” to myself, confusing my cat. Gorgeously shot, emotionally written, with serious things to say about the destruction of a way of life and breathless action choreography by producer and star Junichi Okada, it reminded me favorably of modern classics like 13 Assassins, or, strangely, Godzilla Minus One. There’s really no sense in beating around the bush here: I enjoyed the hell out of this episode, and my only hope is that the remaining six are exactly the same.

I’m covering a cool show with a goofy title, Last Samurai Standing, for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

I have to admit, I didn’t expect to find myself suddenly bearish about a new Vince Gilligan show by episode three. It’s true that neither Better Call Saul nor Breaking Bad were anywhere near as smart, tight, bleak, and brilliant in episode three as they were by Season 5, and I’m certainly not writing off Pluribus, because I’m not stupid. But both BB and BCS, even the prequel series, felt like they were doing something new to TV. This post-apocalyptic dystopia simply does not. 

I reviewed this week’s disappointing (!) Pluribus for Decider.

“Who killed Laura Palmer?” is a question that drips with a pain that Lynch and Frost admirably refuse to clean up and wipe away. Whatever their original intent regarding the resolution of her murder, Laura Palmer is no MacGuffin, no glowing briefcase or unobtainium or Maltese Falcon. She is, or rather was, a real person. She was complicated, obviously, and led multiple secret lives, lives even Donna and James, her best friend, knew nothing about. She was likely an addict. She may have been trafficked. She was a child — Leland and Sarah Palmer’s child. She was Laura Palmer.

Now she’s gone. Through all the surreality and silliness, as suspect after suspect is introduced and dismissed, Lynch and Frost never lose sight of Laura. They never silence the cries of those who loved her, to the point where I found it impossible not to cry along with them all. They never take their eyes off that empty desk. They never let you forget what it means.

I’m reviewing all of Twin Peaks — Season 1, Season 2, Fire Walk With Me, The Missing Pieces, The Return — for Pop Heist, starting with this essay on the series premiere. Twin Peaks is my favorite show, the best ever made, and I’m going to give my heart and soul to this.

Please note that while this is a gift link, Pop Heist is a worker-owned site that makes algorithm-free pop-culture coverage with no big-money backer. No other place would let me do this (or I, Claudius, or The Prisoner). It’s $7/month or $70/a year to subscribe, and it’s worth it.

I reviewed the second episode of Pluribus for Decider.

Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are two of the best television shows ever made. Both created by Vince Gilligan, the latter with Peter Gould, they use crime-drama frameworks for lengthy, thoughtful, ultimately melancholy examinations of the way humans choose expediency over morality. 

At least that’s how we critics tend to think and talk about them. Equally important to their success and well-deserved reputation: They were scary as shit! That whole multi-episode Breaking Bad arc pitting Walter White against Gus Fring in a lethal stand-off? The white-knuckle scene in which Nacho Varga must either poison his boss or die trying? Todd Alquist? Lalo Salamanca? Breathtaking suspense and thrilling action involving best-in-class TV psychopaths was as big a part of the BB/BCS appeal as the slow spiritual deaths of Heisenberg and Saul Goodman.  

So when Pluribus, Gilligan’s new show for Apple TV, starts off with a harrowing depiction of the apocalypse, localized in Albuquerque, New Mexcio, maybe I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. In addition to his own two stone-cold masterpieces, Gilligan also worked on The X-Files, so this nucleotide was within him all along, just waiting to be activated.

I reviewed the series premiere of Pluribus for Decider.

Wow. Wow. It’s a pretty good sign for a season finale when you have to repeat the word “wow” for emphasis to describe it, right? But I don’t know how else to put it. This episode of The Lowdown, by my estimation, contains one of the year’s funniest scenes and one of the year’s most ruthless and unflinching endings. It’s got a shootout AND a cookout. It shows a bad man having a change of heart, and a good man having a change of heart too. There are some fun wedding outfits, even. And it contains a quote from the Bible that needs to be drilled into the head of every man, woman, and child in America: “A poor man is better than a liar.”

I reviewed the season finale of The Lowdown for Decider.

As for Jack Pulman and Herbert Wise’s 1976 TV series? To call it a masterpiece is to understate the case. With a cast that turns over completely mid-series, it keeps churning out compelling new characters, brought to life with performances that feel rivetingly true to life yet grandiose enough to burn Rome down around them. Brian Blessed, Siân Phillips, George Baker, Patrick Stewart, Patricia Quinn, John Hurt, Sheila White, and Derek Jacobi alone sear themselves in your memory with their terrible energy; they are the glistening tip of a spear made of ace supporting players seemingly without end.

With a budget and design aesthetic more attuned to live theater than broadcast television, it uses deft camerawork and industry-best blocking of its actors to draw the audience into a conspiracy of make-believe. Long takes that allow you to sink into the acting and thus inhabit a world you know is not real; you may not be there, but you are there. Since so much of the work is done in-camera, when the series does resort to visual effects or striking editing choices, they hit like a freight train. Try shaking the feeling of all those characters talking directly to you in this episode, I dare you.

What emerges paramount from it all, from those spectral faces looming in the lens on down, is the feeling of ancient history speaking to the present. It is madness, madness, to trade away hard-learned, hard-fought moral and political principles for the expediency of autocracy. The lives of first Augustus and then Claudius himself prove there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship; surrender your rights and you have no right to complain when you are forced to surrender far more. 

I reviewed the series finale of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. What a show!

Instead of a haunted house, what if there were a haunted city? What if the troll lurking under the bridge hid beneath the entire municipality? What if small-town America’s racial, sexual, gender and class divisions could be exploited by a billion-year-old cosmic shape-shifter that has taken the form of a child-eating clown?

These propositions are fundamental to “It,” Stephen King’s 1986 doorstopper of a horror novel, which for my money is his most frightening book. Derry is not just a setting, it’s a secondary antagonist. The real horror of “It” is that the presence of the evil entity beneath that quaint Maine town has warped the place’s inhabitants.

No one in Derry ever seems to notice when bad things happen — when outcasts are bullied, Black people tormented, L.G.B.T.Q. people bashed, women assaulted, children abused. The good people of Derry stare, dead-eyed, and do nothing. The second episode of “Welcome to Derry” conveys this pervasive sense of wrongness by fleshing out the city, with the Main Street shopping district, the Black side of town and the nearby air base all taking their turns in the spotlight. Derry feels like a real place, where real children live and grow and, frequently, vanish.

I reviewed this weekend’s It: Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

That The Lowdown, like Andor before it, can now be called “a show for our times” is mightily depressing, at least if you are predisposed to care about the kinds of things it cares about. (If you’re not, why are you reading this?) It’s a show for people who see that bad things are happening and just kind of instinctively react against it, the way your body rejects poison. It’s about someone who goes beyond shuddering and vomiting, and tries to turn himself into a one-man vaccine.

“If I see an injustice, and I don’t do anything,” Lee says to his one-eyed editor Cyrus’s lawyer cousin, “what’s that make me?” You know what that question is? The sound of a functioning conscience. Some people still fucking have them in this country! 

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

It should be noted here that Sheila White, the beautiful actor playing Messalina, is frequently shown nude throughout this episode, as are her male lovers. Her fuckathon battle with Scylla is described with shocking frankness, and when you see the aftermath – Scylla, her hair mussed, her chest slicked with sweat or saliva or, well, you know – there’s no question what has taken place. I kept reacting like Tim Robinson in that one I Think You Should Leave sketch: “I don’t know if you’re allowed to do that.”

I reviewed the penultimate episode of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. Gift link!

Full disclosure: This episode made it hard for me to get a good night’s sleep. There are horrific images, excruciating moments, and an overall tone of queasy cruelty in this hour of television that I simply couldn’t shake. To me, that’s the mark of great horror.

I recall getting that feeling from reading the 1986 novel “It,” Stephen King’s epic portrait of a small town in Maine called Derry that is haunted by a demonic, shape-shifting, child-eating clown. I first read it in middle school, when I was the same age as its young protagonists — I’m closer in age to their adult selves now — and it hit me like a possessed car. Beyond being King’s scariest book, and his grossest, it is also his cruelest: a nightmare dive into the horrible realities of child abuse and small-town closed-mindedness, transmuted into the supernatural.

I did not get that welcomely awful feeling from the two films to which this series serves as a prequel, “It” (2017) and “It Chapter Two” (2019), both from the director Andy Muschetti. Which is why I’m happy, if that’s the right word, to report that the first scene of this first episode of “It: Welcome to Derry” is scarier and more disturbing than everything in the two movies combined. With Muschetti once again behind the camera for the premiere, he and the showrunners, Jason Fuchs and Brad Caleb Kane, serve up a perfect nightmare of mounting panic and terror.

I reviewed the series premiere of the It prequel Welcome to Derry for the New York Times. (Gift link!)

Watching this episode in October 2025, when there are open Nazis and Christian Nationalists at the highest levels of government and the rule of law is being rewritten to favor white people and punish everyone else more or less openly, is…bittersweet. Nevertheless, it is bracing and necessary for art to address these people for who and what they are. Lee Raybon and his compatriots are up against people who prattle about an imaginary America, even as they attempt to replace it with the Confederacy, Jim Crow, the Third Reich. A story in which fractures in the right-wing coalition can be exploited like rap beefs until, hopefully, someone emerges from the fascist cipher a clear-cut loser is a story worth telling.

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

It’s so easy to write of the wrong done to others as just that, wrong done to others. But evil doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every stone thrown at goodness and justice and love has ripples that spread out over the surface of the whole of society. This is what makes living in times like these so agonizing: So many are suffering, and so many more will suffer because of that suffering, and there’s so little any one of us can do beyond stilling the waters that directly surround us. Brad Ingelsby’s project is dramatizing this ripple effect in the form of cop thrillers set in Pennsylvania. After this engrossing, moving season of television, it’s a project with my full support. 

I reviewed the finale of Task for Decider.

In retrospect, there was one clear warning sign. Yes, Messalina, the sweet, beautiful, precociously competent and intelligent teenage girl to whom Claudius was forcibly wed by his demented uncle Caligula, makes the newly crowned emperor happy. Yes, she helps him immeasurably in his work. Yes, she’s the mother of first one, then two children by him. Yes, it seems like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Until she says this: “My darling, I want to be Livia to your Augustus!”

Oh dear.

I reviewed the eleventh episode of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. Gift link!

There are two sides to every story, and that’s certainly the case with this week’s episode of The Lowdown. Side A: a raucous road-trip one-crazy-day buddy comedy, starring Ethan Hawke and Peter Dinklage as two very different flavors of aging radical brought together in the memory of a fallen comrade when hijinks ensue. Side B: a terrifying journey into the rage and licentiousness of contemporary law-and-order fascism, in which men who threaten women preside over lawless gangs protected by a badge. In other words, it’s of them half-empty, half-full type of glasses we’re drinking from today.

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

Eighteen minutes of cat-and-mouse action open this episode of Task. Actually, it’s more like cat-and-mouse-and-cat-and-mouse-and-cat-and-mouse-and-cat-and-mouse action. Working from creator Brad Ingelsby’s script, director Salli Richardson Whitfield expertly maneuvers a dozen armed and dangerous players through dense woods and empty cabins as they chase each other down, beat each other up, blow each other’s brains out, stab each other’s guts out, and run each other down in the road. Two of the show’s kindliest characters don’t make it out alive — but man, what a run.

I reviewed this weekend’s Task for Decider.

It is, of course, the last hurrah of the spectacular John Hurt as Caligula, which means it’s the last time we’re going to hear one of the most distinctive, melodic, terrifyingly powerful voices in the history of cinema. The way Hurt lets his raspy delivery sink into a purr, flitter into flights of laughter, or rise in volume and intensity until it sounds like he really is an angry god, is all-timer work on a show full of all-timer work.

Will I miss him? Oh, absolutely. But I also missed Augustus, Julia, Livia, Livilla, Sejanus, and Tiberius, and we’re getting along fine without all of them, aren’t we? I’ve never seen a show that goes through its core cast at this rapid a clip — Claudius is the only character in this episode who appeared in any of the first five — and never suffer a drop in quality, or the sense that the writing is flailing around looking for the next thing to do. I don’t see any reason why Caligula’s death should deal more of a blow to the show than any of the others, Livia’s in particular.

I reviewed the tenth episode of I, Claudius for Pop Heist. Gift link!

In a sequence that dropped my jaw with its sheer audacity, a dying Ed is wheeled towards the light down a corridor full of people from the hospital, along with a gaggle of mass murderers — Speck, Brudos, Ed Kemper, Charles Manson. While the killers express their admiration and the onlookers cheer Ed on, nurses and orderlies and doctors dance to, of all things, “Owner of a Lonely Heart” by Yes. (It was the song playing on MTV when he lost consciousness. Yes, Ed Gein wanted his MTV.)

So here’s the thing. I adore that song. I adore a novel use of it that doesn’t simply signify “Hey, it’s the 1980s!” I adore dream dance sequences, especially ones accompanying a person’s final moments — see also All that Jazz and the seventh season of Mad Men. And while it’s been many years since I was really in that dark place, I know an awful lot about those awful men. Seeing them as part of this joyous sequence is the exact note of discord it needed. There’s something awesome and terrible, in the old-school senses of those words, in watching Ed transcend in this way. It reminds me of how the show aims straight for the most indelible images from the three films it references: the shower scene, Leatherface twirling with his chainsaw, Bill in front of the mirror — just going right for it. I fucking loved it.

I reviewed the finale of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider. I thought this was a very impressive and troubling show.

“It’s like your mind is a mirror that somebody dropped on the floor. So everything you’ve ever seen or heard or read or imagined — there are all these shards reflecting back at you, and you can’t tell what’s real and what’s a fantasy.”

This is how the psychiatrist (Randall Newsome) treating Ed Gein at the mental hospital where he has been institutionalized describes Ed’s condition. It’s schizophrenia, he says, and it’s caused him to remember commiting crimes he never committed — like killing the new head nurse for bullying him, in a scene that may or many even have been real itself — he didn’t do, as well as forget ones he did — like killing Bernice Worden and Mary Hogan, the latter of whom at least he considered a friend. (He does eventually remember killing Bernice and Mary, the only two victims every officially linked to Gein, and he’s devastated to realize it.)

It’s also writer-creator Ian Brennan’s approach to this material. The titular story is only partially about Ed Gein the man; it’s largely about Ed Gein the myth. Covering both his official victims and those he is suspected of killing, it’s working through the entire American Gein gestalt. As such it ricochets back and forth from the past to the future, from fiction to reality. 

I reviewed the seventh episode of Monster: The Ed Gein Story for Decider.

What did Ed Gein know, and when did he know it?

It sounds like a ridiculous question: Unlike Richard Nixon, who did not conduct the Watergate break-in himself, Ed Gein did a whole bunch of crimes and violated a whole bunch of corpses. But when he is inevitably discovered, arrested, and brought in for questioning, he passes a polygraph test with flying colors even when asked about crimes there is zero evidentiary basis to believe he didn’t commit. But even in the case of Bernice Worden, whose mutilated corpse is found trussed up and decapitated in his barn, Ed sounds like a defendant in the Iran-Contra scandal: He just doesn’t recall.

Is he lying? Boy, it sure seems like it, doesn’t it? Now that he’s busted, that aw gee aw shucks dag nabbit cheese and crackers demeanor sounds not just out-of-place but disingenuous, even smug. This sick son of a bitch thinks he can please and thank you and may I his way out of multiple homicides and a charnel house of human remains that will ring through the ages as one of the worst-ever places to set foot?

But that’s just it: Maybe he does. Monster: The Ed Gein Story writer-creator Ian Brennan has been consistent in his portrayal of Ed as so deep in the grips of delusion that he can dissemble easily one second, then invite the literal police to go see the dead body he has in the upstairs bedroom the next. He seems to have no idea why some people who find him agreeable eventually get squicked out. For god’s sake, when he’s getting the living shit beaten out of him by Deputy Frank Worden (Charlie Hall), Bernice’s loving but lonely son and the poor bastard who discovers her body, Ed seems genuinely confused and upset. They’d always gotten along before, you see.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Monster for Decider.