Doesn’t this get tiresome for people other than me? Like, don’t you want a little more variety in your comedy-drama hybrid than fucking dick jokes an average of once every ten minutes like clockwork? Is that really and truly the only way the venality and machismo of the ultra-rich can be conveyed via humor? Dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick? (“How many dicks is that?” “A lot.”)

I reviewed episode seven of Succession Season 2 for Decider.

I’ve got my media-consumption hands full. I’m a full-time freelance critic who spends pretty much every free moment watching some show or movie or listening to some album or reading some comic I’m getting paid to write about. I’m a parent of two kids who have their own faves, for which I come along for the ride. My partner, the smartest person I’ve ever met, is a cartoonist and aesthete, adding another set of artistic reference points for me to follow. I don’t watch “real” sports, admittedly, but I play the occasional video game while high, and I think that counts.

Which is why I can tell you without fear of contradiction that wrestling — freaking professional wrestling — is as exciting and engrossing and life-affirming and generally excellent as all of the above. I enjoy it with a purity I didn’t think possible. I think you might, too. Because here’s the thing about being a wrestling fan today: 20 years’ worth of advances in technology, representation, and pure athleticism have made the sport smarter, better, and more fun than ever before.

I wrote about why this is such a great time to get into wrestling for Vulture. This piece was months in the making and means the world to me. I hope you like it, and if you like it I hope you share it!

Perhaps by now you’ve seen the problem with all this: The allegory at work here is an absolute muddle. The prisoners in this internment camp are being stalked not by some punishing avatar of the crimes of American empire or even those Imperial Japan, but by…a spiritual representation of their own community’s small-mindedness and provincialism, derived from their own mythology and belief system. Horror logic does not have a strict one-to-one relationship with reality—and you shouldn’t trust any polemical horror story that does—but essentially, they brought this particular horror on themselves. Why set the story in an internment camp when you run the risk, unintentional but still very much a factor, of implying that internment is punishment for some original sin?

Indeed, by divorcing the central supernatural premise so totally from the show’s sociopolitical framework, The Terror: Infamy effectively argues itself right out of its historical context. After all, had Japanese Americans never been rounded up and held in concentration camps, wouldn’t Yuko still have risen from the grave to seek Chester and extract revenge against those who wronged her? She’d be just as much the ghost of his suicidal mother if the war never broke out and they were all back home on Terminal Island happily fishing, or even if they’d been permitted to get on board with the war effort like every other American subculture instead of being treated like the enemy within. Why bother with the internment camp setting at all?

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club. Despite showing some life in the supernatural department, it’s a mess.

This morning I appeared live of SiriusXM Volume‘s Feedback to talk about the Do’s and Don’ts of Needle-drops with hosts Lori Majewski and Jim Shearer. If I find a way to listen to it online I’ll let you know!

As satire, this is pretty thin gruel. Succession has precisely one target audience: The kind of people who know enough about what Aspen and Davos are to want to make fun of them, but who are never going to be at any risk of actually attending them. Perhaps you’ve seen these people all the way up and down your Twitter feed. Perhaps you are one of these people! If so, pat yourself on the back, because someone finally invited you to see how the other half lives. God, look at these assholes, amirite? Pass the vape pen.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Succession, which was actually better than most despite my continued reservations about its overall quality, for Decider.

“I don’t want to be looked at anymore,” Whitney Solloway says. “I want to be the one that does the looking.”

“That is where the power lies,” agrees the wealthy gallery owner to whom she is speaking. Soon she will tell him all her dreams — owning her own gallery, where she can foster new artists whose work shows her things she’s never seen before. Soon after that, she’ll be making love to her abusive ex-boyfriend while the owner looks on and masturbates. The quid pro quo is explicit, in every sense.

But Whitney’s initial exchange with her would-be benefactor speaks to more than their arrangement. What is “The Affair” if not a five-season-long exploration of the power of looking? Noah and Helen Solloway; their departed counterparts, Cole and Allison Lockhart; Cole and Allison’s daughter, Joanie; the odd boyfriend or girlfriend; and now, at long last, Noah and Hellen’s daughter Whitney: Whatever humiliations and calamities befall them, they have been given the ability, in turns, to make us see it all through their eyes. That is power. And on this week’s episode, “The Affair” wields that power beautifully and provocatively.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair, which finally gave us a Whitney segment, for the New York Times.

It always feels small-minded to go all Cinema Sins on fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Such stories depend on the impossible occurring, and the impossible requires a few leaps or gaps in logic. It’s only when the surrounding story falters that those gaps become distracting. If Chester’s supernatural misadventures were better scripted and better acted, or if the monster at their center felt more conceptually sound, I doubt I’d be wondering why no one on the transport plane smelled the rotting zombie in the new translator’s rucksack.

I reviewed the latest episode of The Terror: Infamy, which is still not very good, for the A.V. Club.

The confab between the broods does afford a few members of the cast an opportunity to stretch their acting muscles, in some cases for the first time…maybe ever? I’m thinking in particular of Brian Cox as Logan. As formidable an actor as it gets—have you seen what he did with Hannibal Lecter in Manhunter? because if not, stop the fucking presses and get on that—Cox does nothing on this show but growl in the same cadence a few dozen times an episode.

But in this scenario, he can’t bully and bluster his way through things; if the Pierces are determined to make him eat a shit sandwich, and they are, he must do so with a smile and say “thank you” in his gentlest tone of voice. Getting caught off guard when Rhea (Holly Hunter), his ostensible go-between with the Pierces, drives up the price they’d already agreed to is the most interesting thing I’ve seen happen with the character to date.

The other acting highlight, and this should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention since his character is the only one who’s written like a human being, is Jeremy Strong as Kendall. As usual, he comes across as painfully pensive, as if he has to examine every syllable he utters for razor blades like candy from a stranger before he lets it slip from his mouth.

Kendall quickly strikes up a…let’s say a kinship with Naomi Pierce (Annabelle Dexter-Jones, rueful and soulful), the Pierces’ equivalent addict. They snort some rails, pound some vodka, nearly take off in the Logans’ helicopter, and fuck in its back seat. Their connection feels sad, sexy, and true.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Succession for Decider. It’s a little better than the norm in places, but it’s still a sitcom with delusions of grandeur.

DO: Use well-known songs in unexpected ways that still resonate with the original intent.

Recorded pseudonymously under the Derek & the Dominos moniker, “Layla” is Eric Clapton’s finest moment as a songwriter — an admittedly low bar to clear, since nearly all his best stuff was written by Jack Bruce, George Harrison, or JJ Cale, and also Duane Allman’s contribution to the song should not be underestimated. But still! It’s an outpouring of unrequited love for Pattie Boyd, the wife of his best friend and frequent collaborator Harrison, a way for this guy to reforge his broken heart into a merciless series of interlocking riffs and shout-sung choruses. It concludes with a movement that’s as gentle as the body of the song is frenzied, though it’s no less desperate-sounding for that.

Naturally, Martin Scorsese used it to soundtrack the discovery of half a dozen dead bodies.

Why does it work in GoodFellas? Because it gets right at the heart of the mournful, elegiac feel of the original without simply rehashing its overt emotional content. No one is heartbroken over finding poor Frankie Carbone frozen solid inside a meat truck, except perhaps Mrs. Carbone. But there’s still a sense that something has been lost, that the promised happy ending will never arrive.

More than that, “Layla” plays the same role in Clapton’s career that the murders that result in this sequence play in the career of Robert De Niro’s Jimmy Conway. The song is Slowhand’s masterpiece, and the Lufthansa heist, literally the biggest robbery in American history at the time, was Jimmy the Gent’s. Both Jimmy and Eric were at the top of their very different games here.

Put it all together and it’s a complex, captivating song choice that elevates both the scene it accompanies and the song itself, without the former relying on the latter to do all the dirty work. Scorsese’s library is full of this kind of music cue —as is GoodFellas itself.

SEE ALSO:
• Fargo, “War Pigs” by Black Sabbath
• American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, “Easy Lover” by Philip Bailey and Phil Collins

This one was months in the making: I wrote about how and how not to use music cues in TV and movies for Vulture.

War is hell, particularly when you’re reasonably certain a demon has followed you to the front. Such is the predicament facing Chester Nakayama in “The Weak Are Meat,” the strongest episode of The Terror: Infamy yet. It’s far from a perfect episode: The voiceover narration, taking the form of letters sent between Chester and his pregnant girlfriend Luz back home, is frequently creaky, and the nature of the horror facing the characters is irritatingly amorphous. But it’s the first installment to deliver on the core promise of any show calling itself The Terror: It’s creepy.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club. This was an improvement for sure.

Is Succession a TV show, or just a summary of stuff you’ve read on Twitter? This is the unpleasant question each new episode forces us to ask ourselves. “Safe Room,” so called because of the locations to which the Roy family are spirited after a shooting incident at the ATN news network (turns out it was just some guy committing suicide because working there is so awful), is a collection of topics you’ve seen blue-checkmark accounts tut-tut about, wired together by dick jokes.

[…]

Logan and Gerri panic over antifa, Connor and Willa attend the funeral for a thinly veiled Jeffrey Epstein analogue, white nationalist talk show hosts, mass-shooting paranoia, the collapse of legacy news media into the maw of reactionary conglomerates, yes yes yes, we get it. It really does feel like Twitter: The Television Show, because in the end, Succession doesn’t have anything interesting to say about any of these phenomena other than “Look, these phenomena exist.” At this point, that’s almost all there is to be said about, Succession, too.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Succession for Decider. I don’t care for this show.

In its closing minutes, this week’s episode of “The Affair” shows us a vision of Montauk, N.Y., a few decades from now. It’s nothing short of post-apocalyptic. Gutted buildings, flooded parking lots, shattered streets in which nothing moves but salt water fish brought in by the tide.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

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

We open in the Wild West, where everything is black and white and the cowboys speak Japanese.

We’re watching a movie screening in the internment camp where Chester Nakayama and company are being held prisoner by their government for the crime of their ethnicity. The star is John Wayne, but the voices and sound effects (a tambourine doubles for the jingle-jangle of spurs) are being provided live and in person by other residents of the camp. But it’s a strange effect, seeing this bit of American mythology remade by the circumstances of ugly American reality.

And it gets stranger when the Duke starts speaking directly to a member of his audience. “You have to go, Chester,” his dubbed voice proclaims. Now the footage of a shootout in the town square transforms into a black-and-white replay of the death of Chester’s family friend Mr. Yoshida, who himself warned Chester to go before he charged the guards and got himself gunned down.

Taking the advice perhaps too literally, Chester gets up and leaves the makeshift theater to relieve himself. As he does so, one of the camp’s blinding and intrusive searchlights sweeps over him, like the light from a movie projector. It renders him momentarily as ghostly and unreal as the phantasmagorical cowboys themselves.

This opening sequence proves that there’s a smart, restrained work of horror residing somewhere deep within The Terror: Infamy. Peel away enough corny dialogue and spooky clichés and you can work wonders with this premise and setting. But it’s the exception that proves the rule, and the rest of this episode (“Gaman,” which translates to “Persevere”) is more of the wearying, disappointing same.

I reviewed the third episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club.

“Ma,” says Chester Nakayama to his mother, “this may not be the best time to tell you this, but I’ve been going with someone.” All around them, Americans of Japanese origin or ancestry are being frog-marched by armed soldiers. “Her name is Luz.” These soldiers, or soldiers like them, had previously forcibly evicted all these people from their homes, and now they’re being forcibly evicted again. “Her name is Luz Ojeda.” The troops had already taken all men born in Japan and whisked them away to parts unknown. “Ma, look at me.” Everyone with so much as “a drop of [Japanese] blood” is subject to this discriminatory relocation regime. “Luz is pregnant.” Chester and his mother and everyone they know who hadn’t already been disappeared by the government are now being herded onto a racetrack. “She’s going to have my baby.” They’re going to live in horse stables.

Yeah, Chester, this may not be the best time to tell your mom all of this. Actually, let me put it a different way. Yeah, makers of The Terror: Infamy, you were right, this is most definitely not the best time to have your main character tell his mom all this.

Unless the point is to demonstrate why this iteration of AMC’s anthology series isn’t working, in which case the timing is perfect. Titled “All the Demons Are Still in Hell”—it’s taken from a characteristically stiff line about evil spirits, which in context indicates the opposite of what isolating the phrase as the title implies—the second episode of The Terror’s second season is a lot like the soldiers in that ridiculous scene. It marches the characters from place to place, forces them to make various declarative statements, and then whisks them onward for the next round. Subtlety, nuance, and (god forbid) scares are all in short supply.

I reviewed the second episode of The Terror: Infamy for the A.V. Club. What a bummer.

Resilience is a trait “The Affair” shares with its leading lady. The show spent four seasons chronicling the tumultous lives of Noah (Dominic West), Helen (Maura Tierney) and the other couple drawn into and destroyed by the series’s central affair, Alison Bailey (Ruth Wilson) and Cole Lockhart (Joshua Jackson). Then it weathered the departures of two of its four leads, first Wilson (her character was killed off) and then Jackson (his character’s fate is unclear), under circumstances about which the involved parties have been … less than forthcoming.

Other series might not be up to the task of continuing after so severe an alteration to their basic make-up. But it’s a challenge to which “The Affair” is uniquely well suited. The series’s co-creator and showrunner, Sarah Treem, who wrote this season’s premiere, has never been interested in the neatly plotted arcs many viewers demand of their TV dramas. (Try talking to an angry “Game of Thrones” fan about Daenerys Targaryen or Jaime Lannister if you don’t believe me.)

Rather, the messiness of “The Affair” has always been its greatest strength. Its defining theme is the messiness of adult life, and all the forces — including love, lust, money, class, race, gender, parenthood and divorce — capable of laying waste to our best-laid plans. Birth and death rank right up there, too, and it is with these topics that the premiere concerns itself, using the shifting, sometimes contradictory point-of-view structure that has always set the show apart.

I’m thrilled to be back covering The Affair, one of my favorite shows, for the New York Times this season, starting with my review of the season premiere.

Jokes? Succession’s got jokes, are you kidding? Succession fuckin’ loves jokes! Succession’s like a big fuckin’ joke-shaped dick, squirting out hot loads of joke sperm, you dumb bastard. “No one is gonna wanna tackle a big angry pufferfish bristling with dick.” “I don’t wanna get into a dick-measuring competition, but I have a better, more powerful dick than you.” “This is about as choreographed as fucking a dog on roller skates.” Jokes, Greg!

“Hunting,” the wearying third episode of Succession’s second season, goes on much like that for the duration. Which is how the whole series has gone on, pretty much: overwrought obscenity delivered as the punchline to a slow and winded setup. No matter who’s talking—that’s Tom, Roman, and Logan above respectively, not that it matters—the jokes come out the same.

This is true even without the crutch of inventive cussing to lean on. Here’s Greg, for example, enthusing about his first flight on a private jet: “It’s like I’m in a band! A very white, very wealthy band. It’s like I’m in U2!” Here’s the windup…and the windup…and the windup…aaaaand the pitch. The idea, I suppose, is that by the time the jokes get where they’re going you’re caught up in the huff-and-puff rhythm and primed to receive whatever they throw at you. I’m mostly just bored.

I reviewed the third episode of Succession for Decider.

As Mindhunter Season 2 winds down—as Bill returns to an empty home and finds his wife and son have moved way without him; as Wendy throws out her ex-girlfriend’s trashy magazines; as Holden tends to a spaghetti stain on his shirt while Atlanta officials officially close the book on the so-called Atlanta Monster; as BTK poses for masked bondage photos with his souvenir gallery on full display—I feel it tried to do those 29 murders, those 29 victims, justice. It had to work as an engaging television story to do so, not just a current-events report or a Wikipedia article. And it did.

I reviewed the season finale of Mindhunter for Decider. This season was a tremendous step up from its predecessor.

Did you know: This season of Mindhunter is just nine episodes long. If you’re reading this, it means the chances are good that you’ve just watched the penultimate hour of that season. Did it feel penultimate to you? Have things been building to a head? Or is it more like, I dunno, you followed a whole bunch of false leads and wash-out strategies, only for the climax to fall into your lap pretty much out of nowhere? If you’re like me, it’s the latter scenario. That tells me Mindhunter Season 2 is doing its job very well.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. I really think this show has turned around.

If you’ve been reading these reviews of Mindhunter Season 2, you know one of my main (or really only) complaints about this season has been the lack of interesting things for Nancy Tench to do. Not the lack of interesting things done with her—when your little boy crucifies the dead body of another little boy in hopes of bringing him back to life, you’ve got a lot on your plate, to understate the case to an absurd degree. But her reaction has consisted mostly of fretting that everyone else, from his case worker to his father, is doing more harm than good, and only she can see it. My term for this character type is “mama bear,” and my go-to example of the syndrome is Catelyn Stark during the first season of Game of Thrones. (The book version of the character was far livelier and slipperier.)

I’m not leveling this complaint anymore, not after this episode. For one thing, Nancy is evincing unspoken feelings at last, when she is clearly but (and this is key) not vocally perturbed that even the goddamn caseworker investigating her child’s welfare after a goddamn killing is as spellbound by hubby Bill’s stories of serial killers as your average small-town cop or D.C. bigwig.

But more importantly, she denies the mother of a victim closure, and we’re made to sit with this decision, and we’re forced to live with it. I can’t tell you how much good it does a show to have this kind of faith in its audience, to let a character do something seemingly unsympathetic and ask you to sympathize anyway.

I reviewed the seventh episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider.