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.

If there’s a chink in Mindhunter‘s armor right now, it’s Nancy Tench. That’s not the fault of actor Stacey Roca, mind you; her performance is sharp and vibrant. But between Catelyn Stark–style “You have a choice, and you’ve made it” dialogue, shopworn stage business like lying secretly awake with her eyes open as her husband climbs into bed, and a relationship with the two other characters with whom she comes into contact, Bill and Brian, that consists solely of reprimanding them, she’s a reactive and predictable character. A type, even.

Being a concerned parent, or a concerned mother specifically, doesn’t suddenly rob you of the potential for a rich emotional life—it might even enhance it—but you wouldn’t know it from watching this. Where’s the Behavioral Science Unit when you need it?

I reviewed the sixth episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. It’s not perfect.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m finding all of this rather compelling this time around. Without that weird clipped dialogue from last season dragging it down, Mindhunter is able to live its authentic self: a smart period crime drama asking questions about human behavior that its characters don’t have the answers to.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Mindhunter Season 2, which feels almost like a new show, for Decider.

Even as Bill investigates a series of child murderers, the investigation of the child murder that was discovered in his wife Nancy’s real-estate listing takes a disturbing turn. Their son Brian, it seems, was part of a group of children who killed their toddler playmate; it was he who found the key to the vacant house, and he who suggested arranging the boy’s body on a makeshift crucifix. The episode ends almost the moment the disconsolate Nancy reveals this information to her husband, as it probably should. Nothing more can be said.

Except that the real-life Bill Tench, Robert K. Ressler, never went through this with his own son. By all accounts, the show made this storyline up from scratch.

The question is whether this large a leap from the reality of the situation is worth the effort. It wasn’t on, for example, Masters of Sex, a similarly high-minded period piece about cutting-edge research on human behavior. Michael Sheen and Lizzy Caplan’s Masters & Johnson had their family lives changed around to give them obnoxious teenagers with screentime-devouring personal problems, an infamous prestige-TV pitfall the show actually went out of its way to create for itself.

We’ve already sat through a season-plus of Dr. Wendy Carr, Lesbian, with minimal difficulty. Her queerness is a solid method for establishing her as different from the straight and narrow (in every sense of the words) FBI world, and the pathologization of homosexuality commonplace at the time is a way of demonstrating the blowback bad research can have on innocent people; both of these are important aspects of the BSU for the show to tackle. Plus, it simply gives Wendy, and actor Anna Torv, a bit more to do than show up and be smarter than everyone else—nice work if you can get it, but hardly enough to make a character out of.

The situation with Bill’s son strikes me as very different, and potentially very detrimental. If it turned out that one of the founders of the serial-killer concept had a child murderer for a son—well, that would come up in virtually everything every written about the study of serial killers, right? America’s Most Wanted founder John Walsh’s son fell victim to serial killer Ottis Toole, and that gets talked about every time Walsh and his program are discussed, to cite a comparable situation. There will be a marked drop-off in verisimilitude unless this is made central to the saga of the BSU going forward.

Perhaps even more crucially, it has to be central to the show as drama. Maybe this is just me repeating my oft-cited principle, via Mad Men‘s Matthew Weiner, that when you kill a child on your show, your show must then be about that death, since life itself would be, too. This has to go double if the child is killed by another child, triple if that child is the son of your main character, quadruple if your main character studies killers. Anything less would throw off the emotional machinery of the entire show.

A good procedural needs to be taught, tight, and relentlessly logical in how its characters think and act. Is Mindhunter Mach 2 a good procedural? We’re about to find out.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Mindhunter Season 2 for Decider. This is an unusually long excerpt because I think everything it discusses is vitally important.

This isn’t wisdom from on high, doled out to us in the audience by mad-genius investigators. It’s more like seeing Bill and Holden and Wendy slowly clean out a messy room until only the important things remain. Watching the hard work and leaps of intuition that go into what we now take as common sense is what sets Mindhunter apart from the rest of the procedural pack.

I reviewed episode 3 of Mindhunter for Decider.

In Mindhunter Season 2 Episode 2, we pay a visit to a Mr. David Berkowitz. This enterprising young man brought the largest city in America to its knees and sent cryptic communiqués to the press and police before finally getting caught over a parking ticket. He’s one of the most famous serial killers of all time, known to one and all as the Son of Sam. And he’s damn lucky that’s the self-applied nickname that stuck, as opposed to alternate choices like “The Wicked King of Wicker” or—well, let’s hear it from Bill Tench.

Oliver Cooper guest stars as Berkowitz in the latest of Mindhunter‘s series of serial-killer cameos. His waxen features and schlubby, slouching posture in the role are perfect for illustrating the disconnect from these creeps’ delusions of grandeur and their often pathetic reality. Indeed, by fluffing up his ego, FBI Agents Bill Tench and Holden Ford are able to gain insight not only into their current quarry, Son of Sam wannabe BTK, but into Sam himself, getting him to admit that his demonic-possession story is bullshit. With a smirk, even!

It’s enough to make you fantasize about a version of Mindhunter that’s just these sit-down face-to-face interviews, like In Treatment with the Boston Strangler.

I reviewed the second episode of Mindhunter for Decider. This is a much better show than it used to be.

Never let it be said that Succession doesn’t know its audience. Effusively chattered about by New York’s downwardly mobile professional media chatterers, the series this week served up an inside look at its fictional BuzzFeed/Gawker equivalent, “Vaulter.” (The company name doubled as the episode title.)

The fake headlines generated in the storyline about the gutting of a once-promising new media company display the kind of laser-focused contempt that the phrase “it takes one to know one” is meant to cover; whoever came up with “Meet the World’s Richest People Trafficker (He’s a Surprisingly Nice Guy),” “5 Reasons Why Drinking Milk on the Toilet Is Kind of a Game-Changer,” and “Is Every Taylor Swift Song Secretly Marxist?” has a devotée’s, or perhaps even a veteran’s, familiarity with the milieu.

[…]

The thing about the Vaulter storyline is that all the jokes are the obvious ones if you follow the media business at all. Clickbait, SEO, Facebook algorithm changes, unionization, almond milk in the cafeteria, a lot of good-looking twentysomethings with glasses, pivot to video, middle-class marxism, union busting … yes yes, we all get it.

What I don’t get is why jokes so accurate they barely qualify as jokes require such a slovenly wind-up. The looseness of Succession—the improvisatory stop-start feel of the dialogue with all its repetitions and “um”s and “yeah”s, the amount of time spent watching people just walk into rooms, the handheld shakicam and its innate inability to stay steady for long—better befits more nuanced material, where giving the audience the time and freedom to interpret and focus as they will is a necessary component to the filmmaking. Here it just feels…lazy. Like, all this just to say that rich people fuck over the poor(er) people who work for them, especially in digital news media? Billions would do this in a two-sentence exchange between Wags and Dollar Bill and have plenty of room left over for Paul Giamatti in a bondage harness. (Billions is also way too tightly written a show to generate joke headlines like the above, which as funny as they are undercut the vital-to-the-story notion that this might be a business worth saving.)

I wrote about Succession‘s pander-fest of an episode this week for Decider.

The killer is already inside the house. The woman doesn’t know it yet. She puts down her groceries and calls out, but only the sinister sound of Roxy Music’s nightmarish song “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” can be heard in response.

That, and the sound of a door shaking under the strain of a rope tied to the knob.

She makes her way down the hall, calling out “Honey?” She sees the door shake. She opens it, and a man collapses forward—rope around his throat, a cheap kewpie-doll mask on his face, a woman’s slip on his body.

She runs away, gasping, in slow motion. He calls after her, saying he was just playing around. He’s not her killer, then. He’s her husband.

This is how Mindhunter returns after nearly two years—though only a week has passed in the world of the show. Right away we see the series, created by Joe Penhall and directed here by David Fincher, is leaning into its strengths.

Season One was an aggressively mixed bag, its deeply compelling serial-killer scenes interspersed with interpersonal drama that you’d need a Behavior Science Unit to try and make sense of. So opening things up with a visit to the BTK Killer, who for the first time is brought to the attention of the pioneering agents of the BSU later in the episode, makes sense.

What’s exciting is how the interpersonal stuff seems to have played catch-up during the time off. For the first time, Holt McAllany’s Agent Bill Tench, Jonathan Groff’s Agent Holden Ford, and Anna Torv’s Dr. Wendy Carr all feel like thoughtfully drawn characters whose problems, and responses to those problems, are those of real people, not just styrofoam packing peanuts shoved into the story at random to pad out the time between visits to psychopaths.

I’m covering Mindhunter again for Decider this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a step in the right direction.

Setting a ghost story against the backdrop of a major historical atrocity is a high-risk, high-reward proposition. As to the risk, no one can fault the filmmakers for a failure to take this troubling subject seriously, even personally. Promotional materials for the show indicate that lead actor Derek Mio’s grandfather was imprisoned at Manzanar, as was director Lily Mariye’s. Her grandfather died there, while her father’s family was killed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima; director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s grandfather survived the blast. And supporting actor George Takei, who also serves as a consultant to the show, was interned in two camps himself. So I believe the show is interested in chronicling and decrying this historical crime in and of itself, not merely as a backdrop for J-horror shenanigans, nor even as an easy allegory for the present-day horrors of the Trump Administration’s immigrant gulags.

But good intentions only get you so far. As a work of horror filmmaking, this doesn’t go very far at all.

I’m covering the new season of the anthology show The Terror, titled The Terror: Infamy, for the AV Club, starting with my review of the premiere. It’s not promising.