The real difference now is that the dialogue and performances line up with the relatively linear plot. Mahershala Ali, Carmen Ejogo and Stephen Dorff may play characters tied to a major crime investigation, but other than that they act like normal people. They drink a bit too much when they want to have a good time, or when they want to forget bad ones. They fall out of touch when they take different jobs (“Once we stopped working together, we just … stopped,” as Roland puts it) but are happy to reunite. They complain about the size of big-box stores, racial disparities in the state police, whether or not they spend enough time with their kids. West even holds Tom Purcell’s hand to pray as part of the recovering alcoholic’s surrender to his Higher Power. It’s hard to imagine Marty Hart or Ray Velcoro doing anything of the sort. Never mind the flat circles of time; what you’ve got now is a True Detective that’s shooting straight instead of weaving spirals.

I reviewed episode three of this straightforward season of True Detective for Rolling Stone.

In 1995, the Emmy nominees for Best Drama were Chicago Hope, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The X-Files. In 1996, the Emmy nominees for Best Drama were Chicago Hope, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The X-Files. In 1997, the Emmy nominees for Best Drama were Chicago Hope, ER, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The X-Files. That is: two cop shows set in New York, two medical shows set in Chicago, and some aliens, spread across four networks, represented the height and breadth of the art form for three years running.

In 1995, the Emmy nominees for Best Comedy were Frasier, Friends, The Larry Sanders Show, Mad About You, and Seinfeld. In 1996, the Emmy nominees for Best Comedy were Frasier, Friends, The Larry Sanders Show, Mad About You, and Seinfeld. In 1997, the Emmy nominees for Best Comedy were Frasier, 3rd Rock from the Sun(surprise!), The Larry Sanders Show, Mad About You, and Seinfeld. Three shows about neurotic well-off New Yorkers, one show about neurotic well-off Seattleites, Garry Shandling, and some (other) aliens, concentrated almost solely on NBC with one lone outlier represented the height and breadth of the art form for three years running.

By 1999 that lone outlier was airing The Sopranos and Sex and the City, and the story from there is familiar to pretty much everyone. The Wire and Deadwood, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, HBO, AMC, FX, DVDs, DVRs, the New Golden Age, new voices, shorter seasons, higher standards, bigger stars, superstar showrunners, more choices, the widely pronounced death of monoculture and the waning of the Big Four broadcast networks—an embarrassment of riches, an art form in its ascendancy at last.

In this quest-narrative of progress through increased options, streaming services were supposed to toss the One Ring of monoculture into Mount Doom for good. They’d offer virtually limitless viewing options. They’d enable viewers to cut the cord that bound them to cable and broadcast networks, allowing those viewers to watch those endless options whenever and wherever they wanted. When the biggest of those services, Netflix, entered the original-programming fray in earnest, it kicked off the arms race of production known as Peak TV. In this content-rich environment, creating a culture-unifying hit is a war for the throne that only one or two shows could win, but finding the right show for your personal subculture of one was easier than ever. No more TGIFs, no more Must See TVs: Television was the art form of the future, and Netflix was the future of television, and the future was here at last.

And now we know what it looks like. In 2018, 14 of Neflix’s top 20 shows, and all 10 of its top 10 shows, were broadcast-network reruns. Friends, which received its first Emmy nomination while Bill Clinton was president, is number one.

So begins my essay on Netflix’s recreation of TV monoculture and what that means for people who watch television, whether professionally or recreationally, for my Deadspin debut.

The dumb handsome dirtbags. The heart-on-sleeve performances by the actors (Alessandro Borghi, Giacomo Ferrara, and Eduardo Valdarnini) who play them. The action, romance, tragedy, and extravagant cynicism. The lush lighting, lavish scenery, aching score, and sharp cinematography. The use of betrayal, backstabbing, and devastating shocks—crime-fiction staples all, for obvious reasons—as ways to explore their polar opposites: love, loyalty, and the natural human desire to be able to depend on others, and to be depended on in turn. Everything good about Suburra: Blood on Rome in general is good about its second season finale in particular.

Indeed, the rapid clip at which gobsmacking, heartwarming, and heartbreaking developments take place in “Tell Me the Truth” make this that rarest of beasts: a Netflix season that should have been longer.

I reviewed the season finale of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season Two for Decider.

The dumb handsome dirtbags. The heart-on-sleeve performances by the actors (Alessandro Borghi, Giacomo Ferrara, and Eduardo Valdarnini) who play them. The action, romance, tragedy, and extravagant cynicism. The lush lighting, lavish scenery, aching score, and sharp cinematography. The use of betrayal, backstabbing, and devastating shocks—crime-fiction staples all, for obvious reasons—as ways to explore their polar opposites: love, loyalty, and the natural human desire to be able to depend on others, and to be depended on in turn. Everything good about Suburra: Blood on Rome in general is good about its second season finale in particular.

I reviewed the season finale of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

In one of the most momentous episodes of Suburra Season 2 to date—an episode in which one member of our core trio is crowned king and another is tortured till he’s a broken man—a little detail in the first minute or two after the opening title sticks with me. It’s morning, and Aureliano and Nadia have slept off their narrow escape of the previous night. She wakes up first, and pads over to the couch where he’s sleeping, seemingly just to get a look at him. She turns and walks toward the window, not realizing that for a brief moment he’s opened his eyes, just to get a look at her too. Storied television romances have been built on much less subtle and solid a foundation.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season Two for Decider.

In one of the most momentous episodes of Suburra Season 2 to date—an episode in which one member of our core trio is crowned king and another is tortured till he’s a broken man—a little detail in the first minute or two after the opening title sticks with me. It’s morning, and Aureliano and Nadia have slept off their narrow escape of the previous night. She wakes up first, and pads over to the couch where he’s sleeping, seemingly just to get a look at him. She turns and walks toward the window, not realizing that for a brief moment he’s opened his eyes, just to get a look at her too. Storied television romances have been built on much less subtle and solid a foundation.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

Famous last words, Aureliano.

I reviewed the sixth episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s Suburra!

When you kiss but feel bad cuz you just killed her dad, that’s Suburra!

When you free / several refugees / just so there can be / unrest in the streets, that’s Suburra!

When you roast dudes like ribs then go shopping for cribs, that’s Suburra!

Yes, romance, parenthood, racism, and the smell of burning flesh are all in the air in this episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome. Named “The Crib” after the hilariously gaudy baby furniture Spadino and Aureliano buy for the former’s forthcoming bundle of joy—at the end of a long night during which Aureliano burned the abusive cousins of his new right-hand woman Nadia to death and then dumped the corpses in front of the heads of all the Ostia crime families as a warning never to do business with “gypsies” again—this one is jam packed with everything that makes this show so goddamn good to watch.

I reviewed the fifth episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s Suburra!

When you kiss but feel bad cuz you just killed her dad, that’s Suburra!

When you free / several refugees / just so there can be / unrest in the streets, that’s Suburra!

When you roast dudes like ribs then go shopping for cribs, that’s Suburra!

I had a little fun reviewing episode five of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

The dream of the ’90s is alive in Suburra. That’s one of the many, many, many things I find endearing about this show, I realize now. Sexy, cool-looking dirtbags cruising around in a late-night city to late-night electronic music, like if The Sopranos starred the cast of Trainspotting. It’s beautiful, man, just beautiful. If I could ensure I wouldn’t get shot, or wouldn’t have to sit someplace crying because someone I love got shot, I’d move there in a heartbeat.

Speaking of the ’90s, a decade during which I did a lot of crying, men cry a lot on Suburra, too. Maybe more than in any other show I’ve watched, when you factor in the small number of episodes to date and the short running time of each? That’s another attractive element. Again, I always call this show “emotional,” and this is why.

I reviewed the fourth episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

The dream of the ’90s is alive in Suburra. That’s one of the many, many, many things I find endearing about this show, I realize now. Sexy, cool-looking dirtbags cruising around in a late-night city to late-night electronic music, like if The Sopranosstarred the cast of Trainspotting. It’s beautiful, man, just beautiful. If I could ensure I wouldn’t get shot, or wouldn’t have to sit someplace crying because someone I love got shot, I’d move there in a heartbeat.

Speaking of the ’90s, a decade during which I did a lot of crying, men cry a lot on Suburra, too. Maybe more than in any other show I’ve watched, when you factor in the small number of episodes to date and the short running time of each? That’s another attractive element. Again, I always call this show “emotional,” and this is why.

I reviewed episode four of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider.

How confident in its storytelling is Suburra: Blood on Rome at this point? Confident enough to introduce purple as a signature color for Livia Adami during the episode in which she dies, then paint the whole world with it as her brother Aurelio gives her a burial at sea.

Confident enough to reunite its three main characters early in its second season’s run for the express purpose of doing something long overdue: teaming up to kill Samurai, the taciturn Roman crimelord who’s been screwing with all their lives like a capricious deity from the start. Not just planning to do it, either—deciding to do it, tonight.

And confident enough that even though it seems unlikely that our three amigos would succeed in taking out the show’s number-one villain in episode three of Season Two, the death of Livia in the previous episode (at Samurai’s hands, no less) is enough to make us in the audience believe that anything could happen. In other words, it’s exactly as confident as it deserves to be.

I reviewed the third episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

How confident in its storytelling is Suburra: Blood on Rome at this point?…Exactly as confident as it deserves to be.

I reviewed episode three of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season Two for Decider.

One of Suburra‘s many strengths, and the one most responsible for making it such a strangely endearing show regarding its dirtbag characters —other than the fact that they’re all played by incredibly beautiful actors I mean— is how emotional it is. I think I’ve used that word every time I’ve discussed the show at any length, but it’s the only one that fits. There are so many shots of so many people quietly crying about losing other people while that lush, mournful theme hits in the background that you can’t help but feel something like what they’re feeling, you know? It’s the contrast between everyone’s affected tough-guy personas and their tendency to melt into sobbing puddles when they’re rejected or bereaved that makes you care.

“Consequences” (Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2, Episode 2) counts on this. It drills right down into one of the series’ closest and most volatile relationships, and then ends it.

I reviewed the second episode of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

Judging from this fast-paced premiere—which despite a three-month gap since the Season One finale seems to pick up right where we left off—Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 will offer all the pleasures of its initial outing.

The moody and often beautiful score by Canadian electronic musician Loscil is there, lending grandeur and pathos to the high points of the squalid proceedings. Cinematographer Arnaldo Catinari and director Andrea Molaioli serve up one stunning bit of portraiture after another, and collaborate on a color scheme unlike anything else you’ll see in the genre, with bright blues and lurid greens you won’t see either in the ice-blue/sickly-green palette of the usual prestige-adjacent crime shows or the bisexual lighting that’s dominated tales of slick and attractive people who kill other people for living on the big screen for several years. The plot is a tangled web of hastily formed alliances that keeps you alert but remains easy to follow so long as you pay attention, despite the language barrier. There’s a theme of generational and familial conflict that rings true whether or not your family is involved in organized crime.

And at the heart of it all is a suite of performances from skilled and (this must be stressed) extremely attractive actors. Particularly the core trio of newly minted local Roman crime boss Aureliano Adami (Alessandro Borghi), his Sinti Roma opposite number Alberto “Spadino” Anacleti (Giacomo Ferrara), and drug dealer turned double agent turned cop Gabriele “Lele” Marchilli (Eduardo Valdarnini). Whether killing each other’s fathers to giving each other mudbaths, these three crazy kids are impossible to take your eyes off of. Why would you want to, anyway?

I reviewed the premiere of Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 for Decider. 

(NOTE: These review summaries will remain brief while I play catch-up with links. I guess you’ll just have to read the reviews!)

Judging from this fast-paced premiere—which despite a three-month gap since the Season One finale seems to pick up right where we left off—Suburra: Blood on Rome Season 2 will offer all the pleasures of its initial outing.

The moody and often beautiful score by Canadian electronic musician Loscil is there, lending grandeur and pathos to the high points of the squalid proceedings. Cinematographer Arnaldo Catinari and director Andrea Molaioli serve up one stunning bit of portraiture after another, and collaborate on a color scheme unlike anything else you’ll see in the genre, with bright blues and lurid greens you won’t see either in the ice-blue/sickly-green palette of the usual prestige-adjacent crime shows or the bisexual lighting that’s dominated tales of slick and attractive people who kill other people for living on the big screen for several years. The plot is a tangled web of hastily formed alliances that keeps you alert but remains easy to follow so long as you pay attention, despite the language barrier. There’s a theme of generational and familial conflict that rings true whether or not your family is involved in organized crime.

And at the heart of it all is a suite of performances from skilled and (this must be stressed) extremely attractive actors. Particularly the core trio of newly minted local Roman crime boss Aureliano Adami (Alessandro Borghi), his Sinti Roma opposite number Alberto “Spadino” Anacleti (Giacomo Ferrara), and drug dealer turned double agent turned cop Gabriele “Lele” Marchilli (Eduardo Valdarnini). Whether killing each other’s fathers to giving each other mudbaths, these three crazy kids are impossible to take your eyes off of. Why would you want to, anyway?

I’m covering Suburra: Blood on Rome for Decider again this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. I love this show.

(Note: I’m playing catch-up so these review descriptions will be brief. You’ll just have to read the reviews, I suppose!)

True Detective season three is about the fate of the Purcell children, yes. But it’s also about the prejudice and PTSD that drove Native American Vietnam vet Brett Woodard to spark a lethal firefight after his neighbors tried to lynch him for a crime he didn’t commit. It’s about the mysterious one-eyed man who gave the Purcell kids a doll he purchased from a racist parishioner at the local Catholic church, then resurfaced a decade later to harangue Amelia for profiting off other people’s suffering. It’s about the black neighborhood that understandably reacts to a visit from the police like an invasion by outside occupiers. It’s about the three random metalhead teenage assholes who nearly get jammed up for murder because they’re surly and wear Black Sabbath shirts in a God-fearing southern community. It’s about Tom Purcell, driven to alcoholism to dull the pain of life in the closet. It’s about his wife, Lucy, who employs drugs, drink, and promiscuity in much the same self-medicating way after a childhood of abuse and incest. It’s about the contemporary true-crime boom, and how well-meaning filmmakers and podcasters and writers can get us closer to the truth but do a lot of damage on their way there. It’s about the way wealthy men and their allies in government and law enforcement can collude to treat the communities they rule with the kind of impunity that would make a feudal lord envious. It’s about an old man with Alzheimer’s, whose own life is fast becoming as big a mystery to him as the case he could never quite solve, and whose loved ones are slowly slipping into anonymity the same way the real killers and kidnappers did.

In this respect, True Detective season threehas learned lessons not only from its own direct predecessors, but from the ne plus ultra of small-town murder mystery television: Twin Peaks. And it’s learned the right lessons, too.

I wrote about True Detective Season 3 in the context of Twin Peaks–style small-town sadness and horror for Vulture.

When was the last time you walked away from a season of a Marvel/Netflix show with basically no complaints? The final bullets of The Punisher Season 2 have flown and I’m just freaking delighted to report that pretty much all of them hit the bullseye. Other than that one episode spent playing for time early in the season, this was…great, just great, just a terrific interpretation of the character of Frank Castle and how to tell stories with him. It avoided all of the usual pitfalls of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s TV end, like doubling up on villains but then not knowing how to balance them, or reaching an obvious endpoint about three-fifths of the way to the finale and then concocting some absurd plot contrivance to keep the story moving. It played to the general strengths of superhero stories, using violence and action to convey outsized emotion and treating the fallout as a metaphor for psychosexual vulnerability. The specifics of the violence and action were brutal, as befits the character. The politics were, in the main, sharp and counterintuitive given the Punisher’s often reactionary fanbase. Every major actor in it was good. Some (Amber Rose Revah, Annette O’Toole, Josh Stewart, Ben Barnes, and especially guest star Deborah Ann Woll) were fascinating. And one, Jon Bernthal, was an all-timer.

I reviewed the season finale of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

Take Officer Frank here, for instance.

Has the Blue Lives Matter Flag Punisher Skull found its human avatar at last? Hardly. Frank’s wearing a uniform he stole from a crooked cop who was going to kill him both for money and out of loyalty to a gangster relative. He’s pictured here sometime between resisting arrest and kidnapping a Republican senator whose industrialist parents are covering up the fact that he’s gay by murdering teenagers. I’m not sure this will stop the meatheads from misappropriating the image, but it will mark them as the morons they are, that’s for sure.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.

The Punisher Season 2 Episode 11 (“The Abyss”) is basically another one of those placeholder episodes. You’ve had a bunch of action, a bunch of violence, and now you’re gonna get an hour of filler before we hit the next stretch of rapids. But unlike the previous dreary episode the season has aired in that vein, this one has Karen Page going for it. Reuniting the Daredevilcostar with her other vigilante platonic-romance partner makes for must-see viewing.

Deborah Ann Woll is so goddamn good in this role at this point. She’s turned Karen into some kind of vulnerability vortex, sucking everyone within a ten foot radius into her maelstrom of pain, care, comfort, and psychosexual entanglement with men who get beat up all the time. Combine that with Jon Bernthal, who’s basically her male equivalent, and…just…man.

Oh man.

Man oh man.

I reviewed the eleventh episode of The Punisher Season 2 for Decider.