The sci-fi element of this story isn’t a black hole that warps time for nothing, you know? The most generous read that one can give Outer Range is that it’s a story about the inescapability of small towns — small town people, small town living, small town thinking. Royal, Cece, Wayne, and their children are all effectively trapped in Wabang: Royal and Cece by family ties and poverty, Wayne by mania and greed. Rhett and Maria try to run away but chart a course that runs right back through town at the first obstacle. (Granted, the first obstacle was a herd of time-traveling bison, but still.) Perry has now fallen through the time portal twice and still winds up back on the Abbott family ranch each time. Even Autumn, the wildest and most widely traveled of the characters, is ultimately a refugee who comes back to the only place where she can truly find herself: home. They all get sucked in as surely as spacetime itself.

The challenge facing the show is the one you and I discussed above: A lot of things take place on Outer Range, but not enough happens. With a few exceptions, most of them Perry-related, Season 2 didn’t advance any of its major mysteries nor answer any of its big questions. This is an extremely dangerous game for a mystery-box show to play with its viewers. At a certain point, if all you find in the box is either more boxes or nothing, you’re just gonna put that box down and catch an NBA game or rewatch Shōgun instead.

I wrote an explainer of the end of Outer Range S2 for Decider. I had a lot of fun riffing at the show’s expense, but I also feel I gave it a pretty fair read here.

Unfortunately, the hoped-for Sophomore Surprise that would have made Outer Range must-watch never materialized. The revitalization of Joy and Luke as characters, that magnificent episode in the 1880s — these were the exceptions to Outer Range’s water-treading second season, rather than the rule. Watching this show feels like jumping in a hole in time, only to wind up right back where you started.

I reviewed the season finale of Outer Range‘s disappointing second season for Decider.

The problem with airing a really, really good episode of an otherwise mediocre show is that people will raise their expectations accordingly. This what The Wire would refer to as one of them good problems. Of course you want your audience to respect and enjoy the work you do and eagerly anticipate more of the same, if not better. 

It becomes one of them bad problems when you fail to deliver on that forward momentum. The all-too-aptly titled “Do-Si-Do,” which believe it or not is the penultimate episode of Outer Range’s second season, shows that last episode wasn’t a breather, but a return to the status quo, even if it makes little storytelling sense to head back there to begin with.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Outer Range Season 2 for Decider.

If the fifth episode of Outer Range’s second season fails to deliver the thrills of the fourth, it’s hard to get that upset. That fourth episode, after all, was really freaking thrilling. Its saga of a time-displaced Joy Hawk and her kill-or-be-killed escape from white settlers blended human drama, time-travel genre shenanigans, and riveting action for the show’s best outing yet. Episode five, by contrast, is mostly aftermath. I certainly hoped we’d be off to the races, but it’s not necessarily a bad sign that we’re taking a breather.

I reviewed episode five of Outer Range S2 for Decider.

Hell yeah, brother! It took eleven episodes to get here, but Outer Range has finally, truly, knocked it out of the park. Set entirely in 1886 until its final moments, the cheekily titled “Ode to Joy” is exactly that — a showcase for the time-displaced Sheriff Joy Hawk, and for actor Tamara Podemski. Both the character and the performer take that spotlight and make it a star turn, transforming Joy into one of the show’s best characters and cementing Podemski as, perhaps, the equal and opposite reaction to Josh Brolin’s Royal Abbott. 

I reviewed the outstanding fourth episode of Outer Range S2 for Decider.

Sometimes I feel less like I’m watching Outer Range and more like I’m rooting for it. Somewhere within “Everybody Hurts,” the third episode of the show’s second season, director Deborah Kampmeier and writers Dagny Atencio Looper and Glenise Mullins have the makings of the fun, surprising show Outer Range can be. It’s like tracking a promising team’s progress, hoping this is their year.

I reviewed the third episode of Outer Range S2 for Decider.

God bless James Cromwell, man. The look on his face, the tone of his voice as looks up at Sugar and says he says what he says: “Grace and sensitivity. To the end.” In that look and in that voice there is admiration, resentment, gratitude, skepticism, and awe, all wrapped up. That’s the effect the thoroughly decent can have on the rest of us. We may not suspect that they’re literal aliens, but we still know there’s something very unusual about them. They can make us feel worse about our own shortcomings, but they can also make us want to try harder when we realize they walk among us.

I reviewed the finale of Sugar, a charming show, for Decider.

When a show switches showrunners, the temptation to play armchair analyst about the results is strong. How much of what we’re watching is how the story was always intended to play out? How much is the revision or invention of the new guy in town? 

In the case of Outer Range, I can’t help but give into temptation and say that the seams of the switchover from the Brian Watkins era to Charles Murray era are showing a bit. But that’s okay, I think. Outer Range doesn’t have the benefit of the case-of-the-season structure utilized by the late, great Perry Mason reboot, which switched out showrunners from one season to the next without missing a beat. But when (for example) you make a big dramatic showing of sending Rhett and Maria out of town in the Season One finale, only to have them back in town permanently by the second episode of Season Two, it’s safe to say a beat has been missed. 

I reviewed episode two of Outer Range Season Two for Decider.

A lot of people make their home, home on the Outer Range, where the bison and the time portals play. The biggest problem facing the show, created by Brian Watkins and now helmed by Charles Murray for its second season, is that some of those people are way more interesting than others.

I reviewed the premiere of Outer Range Season 2 for Decider.

So what kind of show is Outer Range, then? A neo-Western befitting Josh Brolin? A science-fiction mystery box in the Westworld mode? A meemaw-and-papaw-friendly melodrama in cowboy boots?

In preparation for the recent second season of Outer Range, I wrote about the challenges it faces for Decider.

In our SECOND Boiled Leather podcast of the day, Stefan and I have an in-depth discussion of Fallout, which is not a thing either of us thought would happen. It’s up now for our Patreon subscribers!

Okay, so he’s an alien. By now we’ve had a week to digest that John Sugar is a blue superhuman who can stop bullets with his bare hands — a sort of combination Dr. Manhattan/Ozymandias from Watchmen (the comic; we do not speak of the others here). Sure, I’ve been wondering what will happen next, but it was how it would happen that had me worried. Would Sugar still feel like the same offbeat, upbeat neo-noir suggested by Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Adrian Younge’s smoky theme music and Colin Farrell’s impeccable tailoring?

Yes and no. Sugar’s unraveling of the conspiracy against him feels like the Sugar we know. But there’s an element of the resolution of the Olivia mystery — which does get resolved, though there’s a whole episode left for aftershocks and final twists — that rings phony, even in a show about alien private investigators with fists of steel, a heart of gold, and eyes of electric blue. 

I reviewed the most recent episode of Sugar for Decider.

Well, that settles that question!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Sugar for Decider.

I’ll note here that Deborah Ayorinde has delivered one of my favorite performances of the year, amid competition that’s already very stiff. The dynamic range of emotional intensity she can convey with the way she holds her eyes, her nose, her mouth alone is astonishing, all the more so for how simple she makes it look. At the drop of a hat she can be a mother driven to reckless anger, an abuse survivor seeing the true story of her young life play out, a doppelgänger embodying only her worst qualities, a horror-movie character watching as a malevolent creature slowly approaches.

I reviewed the finale of Them: The Scare for Decider.

Whatever else it is, the penultimate installment of Them: The Scare is one of the most visually accomplished episodes of television to air this year. Directing a script by Scott Kosar, creator Little Marvin employs a variety of striking visual techniques to create the sense that for Dawn Reeve and her family, the walls are closing in; Marvin makes this all but literal by adjusting the frame to the comparatively claustrophobic dimensions of an old TV screen. 

But limiting the characters’ room to maneuver is just one of Little Marvin’s tricks. He tints the screen blood red for the characters’ nightmarish visions. He breaks out a split diopter shot straight out of classic Hollywood to heighten the painful melodrama between Athena and Dawn. He uses dissolves, overlays, and slowly spinning images to fade us from one image and scene to another in a hypnagogic rhythm. There’s a Vertigo shot, a camera attached to a car door, static horrors placed at the center of the frame in  monumental horror-image style. Why settle for just being scary when you can be scary and gorgeous, too?

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Them: The Scare for Decider.

When the showdown comes, who will be there? Who can you count on to have your back? In episode six of Them: The Scare, our heroes find out the hard way. 

I reviewed the sixth episode of Them: The Scare for Decider.

In the season’s riveting fifth installment (“Luke 8:17”), the riffs come fast and furious. A sequence involving Edmund ringing the doorbell and Dawn answering it deceptively cross-cuts between two separate incidents to make them seem like they’re the same scene when they aren’t, as Jonathan Demme did in The Silence of the Lambs. Edmund’s Raggedy Andy doll talks to him in voice that’s somehow both absurd and incredibly menacing at the same time, the way the neighbor’s dog talks to David Berkowitz in Spike Lee’s overlooked Scorsese-style serial-killer drama Summer of Sam. A supernatural killer who stalks the sleeping, folds children up in their beds, and kills while invisible to everyone but his victims is on the loose, like no less august a slasher than Freddy freaking Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. A murderous asshole beats a man to a pulp in the middle of nowhere as he begs for mercy, then ditches the battered and mutilated body, like something out of Scorsese’s own Casino — a gangster flick, sure, but one that dips deeper into horror than all but a few of the modern master’s movies.

The reason all of this actually works, rather than feeling like someone’s horror Pinterest board, is because creator Little Marvin, director Guillermo Navarro, and writer Tony Saltzman are filtering all this previous work through a sensibility and a story very much of its own. Folding the aesthetics of Demme, Lee, Craven, and Scorsese — the horrors of Buffalo Bill, Son of Sam, Freddy Krueger, and Frank Vincent — into the framework of turn-of-the-‘90s Black Los Angeles culture makes a powerful statement. It’s a way of wresting existing culture into a shape of one’s choosing, which is what the greats do.

I reviewed episode five of Them: The Scare for Decider.

In an episode that involves the discovery of a vast network of Nazis inside the LAPD and the birth of a bone-mangling serial killer in the back of a Chuck E. Cheese, I’m not sure how much attention anyone will be paying to needle drops. But under the dreamy direction of horror specialist Axelle Carolyn and the superb music supervision of Christopher T. Mollere, a crate-digging music cue provided the backdrop for my favorite shots of the Them: The Scare Episode 4. The song is “Free” by Deniece Williams, and as its gossamer introduction floats over the soundtrack, the faces of Dawn Reeve and Edmund Gaines as they drive through the lights of the Los Angeles night fade in and out, to and fro. It doesn’t advance the story. It isn’t scary. It’s merely beautiful.

I reviewed episode four of Them: The Scare for Decider.

The way I see it, there are three theories as to who, or what, is killing people in Them: The Scare, and all three get a turn in the spotlight in the season’s third episode.

I reviewed episode three of Them: The Scare for Decider.

On a completely different note, Reeve is a character with some zip to her. There’s a marvelous moment in the first episode where she throws away a birthday card from her ex-husband, the father of her kid, without reading it. She doesn’t seem furious or jilted or anything like that. It’s more that she’s like, well, okay, he remembered my birthday, that’s nice, it’s the thought that counts, I’ve now acknowledged the thought, let’s move on. She’s neither a pushover nor a grudge-holder. She’s just living her life.

I reviewed episode two of Them: The Scare for Decider.