With Kingdom, no one is tuning in tomorrow, same Chang-time, same Chang-channel. Gratification must be delayed until Season 2. And while the show is to be commended for steering the genre away from The Walking Dead‘s reactionary “us against them” politics in favor of a story where the real heroes are those who risk their own safety and comfort to defend the lives of the less fortunate, what are you really gonna get in the second go-round besides a mashup of your favorite genre franchises but with very nice robes. In the end, that’s Kingdom for you. Decent politics and lovely wide shots aside, it never delivers more than the minimum it needs to.

I reviewed the season finale of Kingdom for Decider.

“The Dark Hearts of Men.” That’s the title of The PunisherSeason 2 Episode 10, and as they say across the pond, it does what it says on the tin. Juxtaposing the usual one-on-one heart-to-heart conversations the show is built on—this time focusing on what really makes Frank Castle and Billy Russo tick—with all-out savagery and depravity, it’s as extreme a statement as the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made to date.

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

Kingdom is doubling down on its The Lord of the Rings vibe. Does this shot of three heroes running across the fields in pursuit of their quarry look familiar to you, for instance?

How about this supreme badass hacking his way through the monstrous hordes arrayed against him?

Or perhaps the giant column of heavily armored warriors marching toward a fortified location to seal the doom of everyone inside?

And that’s not all! There’s starving peasants, flaming arrows, last-minute rescues by wise men with beards, a kingdom overthrown from within by an evil advisor, a descendant of royalty who’s prepared all his life for one final confrontation with his arch-enemy. If you ever wanted to know what The Two Towers would look like if everyone had better hats, Kingdom has you covered.

There’s no reason to believe this isn’t sincere admiration on the part of the filmmakers, if indeed it’s even deliberate. (I have a hard time believing the beacon-lighting thing that’s appeared in two episodes is the handiwork of people who haven’t watched LotR, but I have the White Tree of Gondor tattooed on my arm, so my mind tends to go there regardless.) But there’s still a whiff of cynicism to the whole thing. Like Stranger Things before it, Kingdom is a mash-up of the world’s most popular entertainment. It’s a layup.

I reviewed the penultimate episode of Kingdom Season 1 for Decider.

Goddammit, they’re still killing kids in this thing. And I just…I just don’t think the material quite justifies the extremity.

[…]

I’ve listened to multiple little girls scream in terror about their impending death, and I’ve seen an adorable kid lie dead with an arrow in her back from a government soldier and then get gently laid to rest by the woman she spent about one day viewing as the replacement for the mother she watched eat her sister alive. And for what? A six-episode Netflix zombie thriller? Doesn’t The Walking Dead abuse serious tragedy for cheap sentiment in much the same way? You can count apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic stories that put the suffering of children at the center and deal with it in a worthwhile way on two hands,maybe. Could Kingdom possibly be headed anywhere worth that journey?

I reviewed the fourth episode of Kingdom for Decider.

The storytelling flaws that keep The Punisher from being even better than it is still linger. With the exception of a very strong cold open in which Frank admits to his small circle of friends that “This is always who I was” and says his wife knew and loved him for it, so said friends should just “Let me be what I’m meant to be,” pretty much every conversation happens in the exact same way. Two people stand or sit together, usually after one of them arrives where the other has been waiting. After that there are two options: Either one character demands to know something and the other character tells them, or one character spills their guts and the other character does so in turn. Billy and Dumont, Anderson Schultz and John Pilgrim, Anderson Schultz and his closeted son David, Pilgrim and some guy who knows a crew of hitters, Curtis and Amy, Frank and a bartender who knows Billy’s location, Madani and Billy, Amy and her old friend and future betrayer Sean, Frank and Amy over the phone, Billy and Dumont again, Madani and Dumont after the latter lures the former to her place, Pilgrim (formerly known as “Robbie, apparently) and his old boss in whatever Nazi gang he used to run with, Amy and Frank after she shoots a person for the first time…you get the picture. You can tweak it around the margins a bit—Curtis and Amy are both in the same place when they start their little chat, Dumont and Billy are in bed during one of theirs, at one point Curtis talks to multiple veterans instead of just one—but virtually every human interaction on this show could be staged like My Dinner with Andre.

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

A few seasons into the run of Mad Men it was briefly voguish to speculate that one of Don and Betty Draper’s children would die. (People also thought that about Megan Draper, and Roger Sterling, and Don himself I believe. They also thought Don Draper was legendary airplane-heist perfect-crime architect D.B. Cooper. TV criticism gets weird sometimes.) I can never find the quote when I’m looking for it, but creator Matthew Weiner said something in response that has stuck with me for years. He said he’d never kill off a child on Mad Men, because any show in which children die must, in the moral-imperative sense, become a show about children dying. Anything less, he argued, is not commensurate with the life-remaking magnitude of such an event on the survivors. To do it for shock value, or for an individual story arc in a show that remains about, like, advertising or working in an office or whatever, is insufficient justification.

Weiner, it should be said, has not always taken his own advice on ethical issues, but on this one at least he practiced what he preached. In the episode of The Romanoffs that came closest to centering on such an event, in which an American couple had to decide whether to adopt a promised Russian infant who turned out to have severe developmental disabilities or abandon her to the orphanage system, was about the momentousness of that choice, and the cruelty of a world that makes such choices possible. To the extent that series ranging from Breaking Bad to Game of Thrones have involved the murder or attempted murder of children, the specter of those crimes informs everything that comes afterward. They are meant to demonstrate the inhumanity against which such stories warn us.

Whatever noises Kingdom makes about the evils of the aristocracy or the cruelty of the class system—and in this episode it makes plenty—are seasoning, not the main ingredient. The rich and powerful villains are so feckless and cowardly as to serve primarily as comic relief; their maltreatment of the poor is sledgehammer-subtle. What Kingdom really is is a show in which zombies eat people and people behead zombies with swords while wearing cool costumes, because these things are exciting and fun to watch.

You know what’s not exciting and fun to watch? You know what’s the kind of thing your period-action-horror-fantasy swashbuckler shouldn’t do unless it plans to dig way, way deeper into the subject that it clearly has any intention whatsoever of digging? Putting a terrified little girl on camera and having scream “Mommy, what is wrong with you? You’re scaring me! Stop it!” before her mother eats her alive.

I reviewed the third episode of Kingdom for Decider.

The Punisher’s chief weapon is surprise. Surprise, and fear. Fear and surprise. His two weapons are fear and surprise, and ruthless efficiency…His threeweapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to his slain family…His four—no. Amongst his weapons— amongst his weaponry—are such elements as fear, surprise….I’ll start again. Amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements as: fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to his slain family, and a nice black uniform—oh, damn.

All praises due to Monty Python, of course, but the Spanish Inquisition has nothing on Frank Castle. He shares pretty much all of their weaponry, plus one that goes unlisted but is the whole point of the thing: humor. No, really! Hardly for the first time this season —Billy Russo had a laugh-out-loud moment last episode when he talks about how he’s learned lost “my company…apparently,” the latter tacked on as a can-you-believe-I-can’t-remember-this-shit afterthought— The Punisher Season 2 Episode 8 (“My Brother’s Keeper”) kept me entertained as much with well-executed moments of comedy as with guns and psychopathy.

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

A six-episode season is too short to delve deep into character and give them room to breathe, the way a longer run would allow; and it’s too long to get away with having slight, sketched-out characters (likeable or loathsome though they may be, as befits their status as faces and heels). Without getting to know them all—and I mean see how they act when the cameras are off, so to speak, not just “here’s a scene where they have some camaraderie, now here’s a scene where they argue, etc.” With all-out zombie warfare on the horizon, I don’t see the show pulling that off. In addition to human flesh, zombies devour screentime.

I reviewed the second episode of Kingdom for Decider.

You know how I spent the last review comparing the relationship between Billy “Jigsaw” Russo and Dr. Krista Dumont to the one between the Joker and Dr. Harleen Quinzel?

Yeah. If you need me, I’ll be over here, awaiting my Pulitzer Prize for criticism.

Episode 7 of this season of The Punisher is titled “One Bad Day.” I know, I know: one bad day? Do any of these characters have any other kind of day? But the title references a key component of the definitive, if not technically canonical, Joker origin story, Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke. The thesis there is that all it took is one awful, awful day (albeit one that culminated in an acid bath) to turn a down-on-his-luck family man and wannabe standup comic into the deadliest serial killer on the planet. The Joker, who only vaguely remembered the details of his own life pre-Clown Prince, was determined to test this thesis on Commissioner Gordon, whom he kidnapped, stripped naked, and forced to look at gigantic photos of his daughter Barbara “Batgirl” Gordon, also stripped naked, after the Joker shot her in the spine, paralyzing her from the waist down.(It’s a problematic fave.) So it’s hardly like the show is trying to hide its homage to the Distinguished Competition’s supervillain supercouple.

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

If you like this sort of thing, here’s the sort of thing you’ll likehas been Netflix’s mantra for a minute now. It’s not just the original programming that works this way, either. When ’80s nostalgists run out of Stranger Things or ’90s nostalgists run out of Maniac or people who love Pablo Escobar run out of, like, five different shows about Pablo Escobar, they can always watch the Big Red Machine’s library of the most popular shows on broadcast network television from the past couple decades, which not coincidentally are also the majority of the most popular shows on Netflix.

I’m not saying this approach never pays off creatively. Narcos is a fun show with a great theme song, a great performance in Wagner Moura, and an occasional Great Episode. The troubling German science-fiction show Dark snuck in on a wave of “It’s kinda like Stranger Things” early press (tonally they’re worlds apart but plotwise, yeah, a bit) and became its own engrossing thing. The Punisher, the best of the Marvel/Netflix shows, is a direct Daredevil spinoff from a line of six interconnected series set in the most popular franchise of all time. Still, if you’re looking for something to kick down the doors the way The Sopranos did…well, here are some cooking shows!

But you’ve gotta hand it to them with Kingdom, this sweeping new original Korean-language series. Plenty of networks and plenty of shows have tried and failed to capture the magic of Game of Thrones, the show on TV that is the sort of thing the most people like out of pretty much all the shows on TV at this point, and bellyflopped. (MTV’s The Shannara Chronicles, anyone?) But for whatever reason, none of them isolated one of the most instantly appealing elements of George R.R. Martin, David Benioff, and Dan Weiss’s baby, a concept so brilliant in its simplicity that it shows up before the opening credits of the pilot even roll and will be the subject of the entire final season. Yes, Game of Thrones is “The Sopranos with swords,” as the early buzz hailed it. But it’s also, and on a much larger and more immediately, nerdily impactful scale, The Lord of the Rings with zombies.

Kingdom has cracked the case.

I reviewed the series premiere of Kingdom for Decider.

(NOTE: These review summaries will be brief while I play link catch-up. Just read the reviews!)

Now this is a weird one. Alternating between some of the series’ most vicious writing and some of its corniest, between passages of silent and dark visual poetry that suck you in and out-of-character moments that knock you right back out again, The Punisher Season 2 Episode 6 (“Nakazat”) is a viewing experience as fractured as Billy Russo’s psyche and Jon Bernthal’s prizefighter nose.

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

There should be a term for the “now that’s more like it” episodes every Marvel/Netflix show busts out after the ones that would be better off not existing. Maybe they follow a tonal miscalculation, or a filler episode, or a sudden turn for the implausible even by superhero standards. But they’re usually there somewhere, at least once per season, getting things back on track like a three-year-old realigning Thomas the Tank Engine’s wheels in the grooves of their wooden railroad playset. “One-Eyed Jacks,” the The Punisher Season 2 Episode 5, is exactly that kind of course correction.

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

Before we get to the specifics, here’s my thinking on this, see if you agree. Superhero stories are a subgenre of multiple genres, depending on the character and the approach; there are elements of science fiction, fantasy, crime, sometimes mystery, sometimes war, usually a soupçon of character-based drama, often some comedy, and the basic template of heroism that you can map everything from Greek mythology to professional wrestling onto. But the key component is action, and great action films and shows employ action to convey emotion. They set up a closed system where conversation is insufficient to vent the turmoil beneath the surface, so it comes out in punching and lasers and so on, the same way that in opera or musical theater it comes out in singing, or in horror it comes out in demonic possession or people getting their faces torn off.

Now, a really good superhero story can manage the conversation bit too, of course. Or it can express intimacy in other ways, like we’ve talked about in this space before—tending to injuries, physical closeness, etc. But what it cannot afford to do is stop everything for an hour of samey two-person dialogues that a show with a smaller episode order could easily eliminate and lose absolutely nothing of value.

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

The Punisher is a murder machine. He’s not a gunslinger or a samurai, there to dazzle the audience with brio or technique. To the extent that his lethal maneuvers are impressive at all it’s down to how casual and calculated they are, especially when contrasted with the expression actor Jon Bernthal wears on his face for such scenes. Close-quarters hand-to-hand shit is one thing—that’s where he goes beastmode, growling and bellowing. But when it’s a firefight and his job is to advance on and kill his enemies until none are left, he has the attitude of a person tasked with a difficult but eminently doable task, like mowing the lawn. He puts people down like he’s using a hedge trimmer. Got it, next.

The most interesting thing about “Trouble the Water” (The Punisher Season 2 Episode 3) is how it shows the cost this ruthless efficiency extracts in human suffering.

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

In this episode of The Punisher, a lady uses tweezers to take a bullet out of Jon Bernthal’s bare ass.

There. Never let it be said that I’m one to bury the lede.

But if there’s one thing the Marvel/Netflix shows, even the ones I’m not crazy about, have been good at, it’s tying their superhero/vigilante violence to moments of physical intimacy. Sometimes this involves the main characters having sex, and from Jessica Jones and Luke Cage to Luke Cage and Misty Knight to Matt Murdock and Elektra Natchios, those scenes have been hot across the board. That’s certainly true on this show as well, from Agent Madani and Billy Russo to David “Micro” Lieberman and his wife Sarah to “Pete Castiglione” and Beth the bartender just last episode.

At other times the violence itself is intimate. This naturally tends to be the case more for the characters who lack super-strength than for those who do, but it’s true. Watching mortal men like Matt Murdock and Frank Castle be made vulnerable by the infliction of violence on their bodies is a display of intimacy. To quote myself quoting Barbara Kruger regarding another show, “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” Hallway fights are an intricate ritual indeed.

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

Have we—as a nation, a society, a people—done enough for Jon Bernthal? No, that’s not even the right thing to ask. What viewers of The Punisher, and all other media, must do is take a fearless personal inventory on the Jon Bernthal Question: What have I, personally, done to show respect and gratitude to this great man? If nothing else, The Punisher Season 2 will give all of us the opportunity to look inward and see if we’ve done right by the Last Action Hunk. You hear that, America? Fix your hearts or die.

I reviewed the season premiere of The Punisher for Decider. Jon Bernthal is perfect in this role.

(Note: These episode review summaries will be short while I play link catch-up. You’ll just have to read the reviews!)

Already you can see that this isn’t just Season One Redux. Like McConaughey’s tortured cop, Wayne is lonely. But he’s just a bachelor, not a guy who sleeps in a bare room with a crucifix above his mattress. He’s a drinker, but just ties one on a few times a month rather than pounding a six pack during a deposition. He suffers from mental illness as an older man, but it’s not, uh, whatever makes you see spirals in the sky and say stuff like “time is a flat circle” to homicide detectives.

Wayne’s partner Roland is a less well-defined figure at this stage in the season than Woody Harrelson’s Marty Hart was during his. But so far, despite playing the straight man/good ol’ boy role in the partnership, he isn’t half the sexist shitkicker his predecessor proved to be. What’s more, Roland trusts his mercurial counterpart implicitly, defending the unorthodox tracking technique he picked up in ‘Nam when the local fuzz takes issue with it. That whole “one guy says something insanely profound (or profoundly insane) and the other guy tells him to shut the fuck up” dynamic is nowhere to be found.

Nor are the one-dimensional, do-nothing female characters from Season One. Ejogo’s Amelia is a full-fledged person, a welcome development that follows McAdams’ talking point last season. The show still isn’t perfect on this score — the documentarian character is an oblivious do-gooder whose talk of intersectionality and oppression we’re clearly supposed to find baffling and laughable — but we’ll take it.

I’m back on the True Detective beat for Rolling Stone, starting with my review of last night’s two-episode season premiere.

I returned to Elana Brooklyn’s Graphic Policy podcast to talk about The Punisher Season One from the perspective of the Left (and goths). Give it a listen!

We had a small, very passionate writer’s room, and everybody in it brought their own fears to each story. And we just we had certain guidelines: Keep it personal. Draw from character. If something feels right then explore it, even if you don’t know what it means right away. That, to me, is what great horror does. It makes you dig deeper, makes you explore the parts of yourself that you’re afraid of, that you’re traumatized by.

I was thrilled to conduct a deep-dive interview on all four seasons of Channel Zero, one of the most frightening TV shows I’ve ever seen and as good as anything in the recent horror renaissance, with creator Nick Antosca for Polygon.

Polygon: The first scene of the first episode of the first season of your show scared me more than other horror shows have during their entire runs.

Nick Antosca: You mean the interview at the beginning of Candle Cove? Sooo frequently, we were told to cut that scene. I’m not going to disparage, at all, the people who’d give us notes; we have a really supportive network and studio. But every round of notes on that, we were told “Cut that scene, cut that scene, it’s bad!” I knew that we were going to be asked to do that when I wrote it, so I put all of the exposition that would be necessary to understand the show in that scene so you couldn’t cut it.

The scene is like the opening of David Cronenberg’s The Brood, when Oliver Reed is having that weird therapy session onstage. Everything is dark and you have no idea what’s going on.

Antosca: You know, our show references The Brood in multiple seasons in other places, but that was not a deliberate reference to it. In the script, that was written as being interviewed by Dr. Phil at one point, then it was written as being interviewed by Charlie Rose and then Matt Lauer. We asked them both to do it and they wouldn’t do it. Thank God.

As frightening as that first scene was, the series basically never lets up.

Antosca: The idea of the show was always to capture a sense of dread, and we felt it was very important to establish that in the first scene, in a way that was different from other horror shows that I’m familiar with.

I interviewed Nick Antosca about his phenomenal horror anthology series Channel Zero for Polygon.