If there’s a throughline that connects every aspect of this episode — which is Adeline’s more than it is Ed’s — it’s misogyny. Adeline flees her hometown because its only future for her is as a housewife and mother. The women’s circle is a punishing group of judgmental hypocrites who question Adeline’s womanhood even as they make excuses for their rapist sons. She’s half-forced, half-intrigued into indulging Ed’s blue balls like they’re a matter of life and death, going so far as to help dig up a corpse to take care of them.

After Weegee indulgently looks at Adeline’s photography, he first mocks her as a no-talent, then makes crude sexual comments about her until she flees. Even the landlady she savagely beats suggests finding a man is her main option. When she finally returns home, her mother — in a magnificent monologue by Weigert, one of our very best — viciously berates her, suggesting Adeline’s in some way defective because she threw herself down the stairs multiple times in an effort to end the pregnancy. 

The legal lack of reproductive freedom, like contemporary anti-trans measures that seem a million miles removed from the friendly newsreel footage of Christine as a compelling curiosity, is the ultimate state expression of woman-hatred, turning women against one another in the process. In many ways this is the most grim thing about watching The Ed Gein Story right now. Across the country, and at the highest levels of government, men are working to return the country to the benighted state it was in when Ed and Adeline went insane because of it. 

I reviewed the fifth episode of Monster for Decider.

Now, obviously, “Ed Gein, Babysitter” is a world-historically awful idea. To paraphrase The Big Lebowski, say what you will about John Wayne Gacy, but at least the man was a semi-professional clown. Ed’s idea of a magic show is to take the children he’s babysitting — with Adeline’s strong recommendation — to his house of horrors. There, he plays a game of three-card monty with skulls and a human finger. He tells the kids he can change into a lady, then hides his head in his flannel shirt and puts a woman’s severed head on top of his own. When the kids protest that it’s stupid and fake, he pops his real head out, revealing a mask of human skin.

The sequence works as black comedy, however, because at no point does it seem like Ed is actually going to hurt these kids. That’s the weird thing about Ed: When he’s being sweet and good-natured, he kind of means it? Gein lives fully in the grips of delusion, one with no real seams between the everyday world of saying hello to neighbors and the nightmare world of having a house full of human body parts. This is how he can easily lie to the sheriff one second, then make the insane decision to invite him inside to meet Mother the next. Fortunately for Ed, the sheriff declines.

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

The irony is that Psycho really doesn’t make people “look at something like this.” It seems like it does, people feel like it does, opening-night audiences have a series of health scares in this episode because it does, but it doesn’t. There’s no nudity, for example, but the shower scene and the peeping-tom routine by Norman Bates that precedes reveal nothing. (A dark sort of credit here belongs perhaps to Hitchcock’s own penchant for peeping: He’s shown spying on an actress getting changed earlier in the episode, just as both Norman and Ed do.)

There’s no graphic violence in the mother of all slasher films, either. The knife wielded by Norman Bates dressed in Mother drag never visibly pierces the naked flesh of Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane. It’s all movie magic — the foley art of a knife sinking into a melon repeatedly, the meticulous storyboarding of title designer Saul Bass, George Tomasini’s precision editing, the famous screeching strings from composer Bernard Hermann, Leigh’s panicked performance, Hitchcock’s near-peerless mastery of filmmaking’s dark arts.

So Winkler and writer Ian Brennan do what they’ve been doing across both episodes, right down to a lengthy look at the fake vulvas: They make you look at it.

With Suzanna Son’s Adeline standing in for Leigh and Marion, and Ed dressed as his own mother rather than Norman Bates as his, the episode cross-cuts immaculately between the shower stabbing and the opening-night audience’s horrified reaction. This time, however, you see the knife stab and slice away at the victim’s naked body, over and over and over again. 

The brilliance of this move lies in how it relies on you, the viewer, to help make it work. That sounds wrong — it’s all right in front of you — but the better you know the original shower scene, the worse the scene is for you. You can probably already hear those horrible knife-in-melon squelching sounds, hear Marion’s gasps and cries and grunts, see the knife rising and falling, see the blood running endlessly down the shower drain. Your brain has already conjured that horror, however many times you’ve seen the movie. 

Once it becomes apparent what the show’s incredibly gutsy, borderline blasphemous act of revealing the violence carefully hidden within Hollywood’s most famous murder is doing, it dawns on you: Oh my god, I’m going to have to see the whole thing. I’m going to watch this man butcher this woman for half a minute. As the dream-Hitchcock says to Perkins during that strange hallucinatory sequence in the fake Gein house, “You’re the one who can’t look away.”

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

I just want to state for the record that the least interesting thing you could possibly talk about regarding Task is the accents. Are they good, bad, indifferent? I honestly can’t imagine caring! Think of how many shows set in England or some fantasy equivalent thereof you watch, with actors from America and Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Ireland or just other regions of England on them. You think all of them are constantly nailing it? I doubt it! But if you made me list the 300 most interesting things in Game of Thrones, “Peter Dinklage’s accent was so-so” wouldn’t make the cut. Believe it or not, they’re not actually stabbing each other with swords either. Go with the flow a bit!

What is more interesting to talk about than that? Oh, I don’t know. Robbie insisting they listen to the radio during an abduction. Perry slamming the door in his girlfriend’s face to hide the wounds he incurred during the struggle with Eryn hard enough to give her a lump on the head. Director Jeremiah Zagar spotlighting some of the local flora and fauna like this is a season of The White Lotus set in Delaware County.

The grin on Freddy Frias’s lying face. The way Tom poorly fakes peeing by pouring the remnants of a half-drunk can of Pepsi into the toilet, one plop at a time. Robbie pulling over to piss in an echo of the earlier scene. The closeup on Eryn’s eyes as she sees Jayson come home covered in blood. Everyone, including the bad guys, seemingly genuinely interested in making sure Sam doesn’t get killed. Kath pigging out during the hunt for Tom, getting called on it, and claiming to be “an emotional eater.”

My favorite? Tom literally finding his way out of the woods and back to civilization. No, not civilization — community. What he finds at that beach are families and couples laughing, playing, enjoying nature and each other. When you abandon your calling for love, then that love is ended by your own adopted son, then you find solace in a bottle, then you’re called out of semi-retirement to find a missing kid, then you’re held at gunpoint fully expecting to die — when all that happens, imagine how hard the sight of a child laughing in her mother’s arms in the sunlight would hit. Because Task is the show it is, you don’t really have to imagine.

I reviewed last night’s Task for Decider.

Fans of Game of Thrones and George R.R. Martin’s source novels A Song of Ice and Fire, no doubt, see plenty they recognize about Westeros and its inhabitants in Caligula and his macabre misadventures. Caligula has the pale blond hair of House Targaryen, a dynasty that, as Herod says of the Claudians, produces either great men or madmen. He’s in an incestuous, blasphemous relationship with his sister Drusilla (actually the other sisters too), another hallmark of the Targaryens and their native Valyrian culture. A blonde queen fucking her brother immediately puts one in mind of Cersei and Jaime Lannister, too. Caligula himself, of course, is the archetypal Mad King.

Anyone, however, can recognize the prodigious gifts of John Hurt, whose Caligula is one of TV’s greatest villains, on a show that’s given us one already in Livia. Indeed, it’s worth reflecting that with the deaths of Tiberius and Antonia, Herod and Claudius are the only characters left alive from fully the first five episodes. In many ways we’re watching a brand new show, and for now at least, it’s a one-man show at that.

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

When a crime is so monstrous it defies imagination, imagination sometimes strikes back. To understand the calamity that has befallen the world, to process it in such a way that the mind can move forward, it can enlarge the problem, embellish it, twist it into even more lurid and fantastical forms. Thus the obscene horror of the Holocaust is transmuted into taboo sexuality in the form of Nazispolitation, BDSM-themed books, comics, and movies in which blonde-bombshell SS officers sexually torment their prisoners. And thus fully three of, conservatively, the 20 best horror films ever made — Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs — can be said to originate from the same single, sad, sordid source: Wisconsin farmer and necrophile Ed Gein.

Work as extreme as what Ryan Muphy and creator-writer Ian Brennan have been doing across the Monster series — its first installment tackled Jeffrey Dahmer, its second Lyle and Erik Menendez and their abusive parents — is rare on the small screen. Seeing it done this well is rarer still. Between the two Monster/s seasons and the American Crime Story seasons on O.J. Simpson and Andrew Cunanan, Murphy, whatever his other faults as a filmmaker and impresario, has brought us the four best true-crime dramas I’ve ever seen. Will Monster: The Ed Gein story give us more of the brutal, vital same? 

I’m covering the new season of Monster for Decider, starting with my review of the series premiere.

But beyond that, what’s the meaning of Alice in Borderland’s finale? Love. That’s always been the meaning of this show. While there are many dystopian life-and-death game shows and movies out there — from Squid Game to The Running Man to Battle Royale to The Hunger Games — they typically stand as commentary on a malevolent force at work in our own world: capitalism, fascism, conformity, the class system, culture-wide callousness towards suffering and death. 

Alice, by contrast, has never struck me as political in this way. The meaning of this show has long been that people should love one another and take care of one another, because it’s the right thing to do. Time and again, people who’ve only just met put their lives on the line, often sacrificing them, for each other. Arisu is granted his final “win” because he volunteered to stay behind so that others might live. 

Since we now know all of this is taking place on the border between life and death, the Borderland now really does feel like some kind of final testing ground for people’s character. Are you gonna go feral and launch a one-person war against everyone in your quest for victory? Or are you gonna create a real community and help it survive? Even the games are structured so that cooperation is key. The Borderland is a harsh judge, and an unfair one, but in its own weird way it’s enforcing the Golden Rule. The basic human dignity of the people around you is worth fighting for, even dying for.

Huh, maybe this show is political after all.

I wrote a servicey piece explaining the Alice in Borderland Season 3 finale for Decider, and as usual I get a little philosophical.

What kind of man is Sir Arthur Guinness? That’s the question being put before the people of Dublin in this eighth and final installment of House of Guinness’ first season. (After that cliffhanger, it had better be only the first season.) Is he the great conciliator between Republican and Unionist, determined to save lives through his family’s charitable work regardless of denomination, or is he a Conservative wolf in sheep’s clothing? Is he the scandal-plagued politician who barely escaped jail after attempt to fix his last run for office, and around whom rumors no doubt swirl regarding his nocturnal activities? Is he the secret funder of Fenians at home and abroad? Is he a peddler of damnation in a bottle? Does he just make a really good beer?

But thanks to the work of actor Anthony Boyle, who is mesmerizing in the role, “What kind of man is Sir Arthur Guinness?” is one of the most interesting questions on television this year. 

I reviewed the season finale of House of Guinness for Decider.

What am I gonna do, complain about that Tokyo Tower sequence, or about characters like Rei and Tetsu and Ryuji, or about A HUNDRED MILLION FLAMING ARROWS? I am not. Even if Alice S3 is the definition of an inessential sequel, “inessential” is not a synonym for “bad” or “not worth watching.” The bottom line is that I like these people a lot, and I like the way Shinsuke Sato puts them through the wringer. That’s enough.

I reviewed the Alice in Borderland finale for Decider.

House of Guinness is a show on which Jack “King Joffrey” Gleeson makes his triumphant return to Ireland in a fur coat and bowler hat, riding triumphantly down the Liffey in a rowboat accompanied by a swan, while Kneecap plays. There, I’ve done my part. That sentence right there either sells you on this show, or it doesn’t. 

I reviewed the penultimate episode of House of Guinness for Decider.

That’s the other thing about the script: It’s really good at showing these people to be alright guys. From “The Beluga Brothers,” who just want to make a living, stick it to the man, and hopefully heal Marlon’s broken heart; to Ray, a shameless gossip with no off switch who nevertheless braved the disapproval of his Bible-thumping mother to come out as a teenager, which impresses Francis a great deal; to Francis herself, a kid doing her best with her unconventional parent, adjusting for adult foibles the way children are sadly so good at doing; to Marty, or Chubs as his old friends Donald and Betty Jo call him, a man who would clearly rather be doing anything with his time than Donald’s dirty work; to Lee himself, a mess but a mensch. That’s a combination I think a lot of us find aspirational.

I reviewed this week’s The Lowdown for Decider.

House of Guinness is the damnedest show. There are times when the ultra-moderne needledrops, the surfeit of straightforwardly attractive young people in the cast, and the reliance on upstairs/downstairs across-the-tracks attraction for the soapy stuff makes it all feel a bit old-school CW Network. It’s like The Vampire Diaries if they all drank stout instead of blood. 

Then along will come a line of dialogue like this:

“Out there in the darkness beyond the baronial halls there is laughter all night long, and those birds always sing too soon.”

Or this:

“To see you love inappropriately…it’s like opening a window for fresh air!”

Or this:

“You can wear your Sunday suit, but there will be no hymns, no prayers.”

And suddenly you’re not watching Gossip Cailín, you’re watching Deadwood: Dublin. You’re watching Boardwalk Republic. You’re watching a period piece with something to say, and the skill to say it well.

I reviewed the sixth episode of House of Guinness for Decider.

Alice in Borderland has always been about human relationships first and foremost. It doesn’t have any grand statement to make about capitalism, conformity, wealth inequality, fascism, or anything else you might expect a show in this genre to explore. It’s about coming up with cool, complicated murder games, then watching normal people fight like hell to save strangers they’ve come to care about during the course of the game, or get back to the people they’ve left behind. It’s about the human spirit under adversity — random-ass sci-fi adversity, but adversity nonetheless — and what becomes of that spirt under those circumstances.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Alice in Borderland for Decider.

Despite its often nonsensical plotting and first-draft dialogue, The Hunting Wives is surprisingly provocative with this understanding of MAGA in mind. In the hands of more adept filmmakers, a Trumpian fantasy of total freedom at the expense of others’ submission could be made both compelling and revolting. But now, at least, I think I get how the art filmmakers of the future will depict the libidinal appeal of American fascism: a high heel, jammed into a human mouth, forever. 

I wrote about The Hunting Wives, Erotic MAGA, and the literally libidinal appeal of fascism for Welcome to Hell World. Works cited: The Night Porter, Sàlo, Seven Beauties, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, “Nude Africa.”

I look forward to a lot about this show. Some of its most satisfying moments, like Ellen’s hookup with Edward, feel so inevitable you can see them coming several episodes away. Others, like the very real question of whether or not Lady Christine was going to kill herself or Aunt Agnes, you don’t know how they’ll go until they’ve gone. (Having the gun go off accidentally was a really deft touch.)

And you just never know when someone’s going to drop everything and start profanely paraphrasing Shakespeare. “I could be bounded in a nutshell,” Arthur tells his father Sir Benjamin’s portrait, “and still count myself the king of infinite space, were it not that I had these bad fucking dreams, Father.” Friends, have you ever felt yourself on the cusp of happiness, only to have yourself held back by forces completely beyond your control? If so, Arthur Guinness is singing your song.

I reviewed the fifth episode of House of Guinness for Decider.

On a happier note, Grasso and Stover finally fall into bed…sorta. After drinking and dancing to Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape,” with Stover relentlessly hammering away at the far smoother Grasso’s anti-cringe reflexes, they go back to her place. But when Grasso realizes they’re about to have sex in her “marital bed,” he can’t go through with it. The good Catholic boy strikes again.

The use of found music is realistic and astute throughout the episode, actually. No one’s trying to impress anyone with cratedigging here; the idea is to show you the musical taste of a bunch of regular people. When Robbie and Billy take their families down to the swimming hole, in a flashback that’s positively glowing with the characters’ affection for one another, they listen to “Melissa” by the Allman Brothers. When Robbie wants to play suave and charming for his daughter on the even of a father/daughter dance he knows he’ll never make, he plays “More Than This” by Roxy Music. 

The throughline for all these songs is a sweet, smiling romanticism that the characters themselves have to fight tooth and nail to reach in their real lives. And when they do — boy, with this cast you’re really pulling for them, aren’t you? Robbie, Billy, Eryn, Grasso, Stover — they’re all charming and beautiful, and seeing them happy is infectious, however fleeting that happiness is.

I reviewed this week’s Task for Decider.

I’m calling it right now: If you’re afraid of heights, and I sure am, this episode of Alice in Borderland is the scariest hour of television you’ll see all year. I’d say it’s scarier than the similarly heights-based games in this year’s Squid Game, for the simple reason that none of us have ever seen a colossal game arena in real life. All of us, however, have seen towers and bridges and under-construction skyscrapers that are nothing but a pile of bolted-together metal for hundreds and hundreds of feet in the air. Hell, if you’ve ever looked up at the catwalks in a basketball arena and freaked out a little bit, you know what I mean. 

Anytime I even think of this stuff I get the shivers and shakes. Making me watch this nightmarish episode, in which half of our heroes are forced to climb Tokyo Tower by hand? Let me see what I wrote in my notes: “THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE FUCKING NIGHTMARE FOR ME” — boldface and all caps in the original — followed by “oh i hate it, oh i hate it so much lol.”

The “lol” is the give away. I hated it so much! I loved it!

I reviewed episode four of Alice in Borderland for Decider.

Let’s hear it for Jack Gleeson. The Irish actor cemented his place in television history in his first major role: the smug, sadistic, sociopathic, cowardly, completely insufferable boy king Joffrey Baratheon on Game of Thrones. He returned to his studies after that, acting only sporadically until very recently. 

God, am I glad to see him back. His character here, the archetypal Irish trickster Byron Hedges, makes use of many of the same traits that made Gleeson’s portrayal of Joffrey so menacing — the twinkle of glee in his eye, the tight-lipped smile of someone harboring a secret — but harnesses them for good instead of evil. Well, if not good, then at least Guinness.

I reviewed the fourth episode of House of Guinness for Decider.

There’s something quite humbling about having your nation’s number well and truly gotten by a television show aired in Britain in 1976, based on novels published in 1934 and 1935. But humbling isn’t the right word at all. Humiliating is closer to the mark. Two thousand years after the events of I, Claudius, the United States of America — the richest and most powerful empire in the history of the world — is crumbling before our eyes due to the every combination of greed, ambition, sadism, and degeneracy that brought mighty Rome low centuries ago. We, as a species, have learned nothing.

But that’s not quite fair, is it? You’ve learned something. I’ve learned something. People who have kept their minds and souls intact amidst the fascist onslaught, people who have remained human as the entire warship of the state and technology and capital aims its cannons at anything remotely human and fires — people like that, people like us, we’ve learned our lesson. We know that gerontocratic perverts like Emperor Tiberius, gibbering young psychopaths like Caligula, and scumbag secret police chiefs like Sejanus have been put in charge of our country, our future, our world — our children’s country, our children’s future, our children’s world. I think what we’d like to happen to these people in return is clear enough.

I, Claudius isn’t about everyday people like us, though.True, everyday people come into the story every now and then — in this very episode there’s a lengthy, hilarious aside in which a scribe passive-aggressively instructs his employees to erase the beautiful elephants they’ve drawn on Claudius’ manuscript about Carthage, seething about his rich client’s bad taste all the while. Even Sejanus is, in his way, closer to the masses than the Julio-Claudians, into whose ranks he’s been scheming to climb for years.  But like George R.R. Martin (more on him in a moment) writing A Song of Ice and Fire, author Robert Graves and adapter Jack Pulman made a conscious choice to center royalty and aristocracy in their narrative. 

But it’s the powerful who move the plot here. And look where they’ve moved it to. Justly titled “Reign of Terror,” this episode of I, Claudius is a cavalcade of cruelty — and I defy you to find a single reason why it couldn’t happen here tomorrow.

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

I can’t say that House of Guinness is firing on all cylinders. Ellen, for example, feels altogether too broad a caricature of a fiery Fenian redhead, down to chugging a pint o’  Guinness with her flaming tresses curling hither thither and yon. I could do with Rafferty getting a little more seasoning than “sexy swaggering tough-guy company man, too; his scene with Ellen suffers as a result of neither quite feeling like people the way Arthur or Anne or even the type-A Edward do.

I think it’s Arthur’s show, frankly. It’s like the man’s callowness — “What the fuck do I care about the people for? I’m a Conservative!” he says at one point, indignant — is in a constant tug of war with actor Anthony Boyle’s soulfulness, with neither side emerging the victor in full. (Also, you see his penis.) That said, Jack Gleeson stole every scene he was in as Joffrey, and he’s already a blast as Byron, so there are other contenders for the crown. Or the harp.

I reviewed the third episode of House of Guinness for Decider.