Whether you’re in the middle of a heat wave or feeling the first cool warmth of early autumn blow in, the ass-end of summer is the perfect time to return to Ozark. The blue water and gray skies, green trees and leafy ground, the misty morning docks and streets — there’s an end-of-season vibe to pretty much everything you see in the Ozark Season Two premiere. That’s the storyline, after all: Cartel accountant Marty Byrde and his wheeler-dealer wife Wendy have successfully bargained for their lives by spending the summer laundering millions of dollars in drug money by turning a sleepy lakeside tourist town into a cradle of enterprise for less-than-legal businesses. Unfortunately for them — and this is a paraphrase of the tagline for the second season itself — heroin has no off season.

Directed by star Jason Bateman, who’s turned the show into something of an auteur project, the premiere (“Reparations”) revisits many of the strengths displayed in the series’ first go-round last year. First and foremost, it delivers the kind of stoic savagery by chilly killers that people pretend not to enjoy about the show’s most direct antecedents (and likely inspirations, if Netflix’s algorithm-dictated creative model is anything to go by), Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

[…]

I don’t think this amounts to much in terms of a moral message that applies to anyone’s daily lives in anything but the most broad-strokes allegorical way, but hey, not every prestige-format show has to actually have prestige. Sometimes atmosphere, a handful of enjoyable performances, and some murders are enough.

I’m back on the Ozark beat for Decider, starting with my review of the Season 2 premiere.

Saying this episode continues the show’s hot streak isn’t telling the whole story. It doesn’t rely on the introduction of world-building sci-fi/fantasy concepts like “The Schisma” and “The Filter,” nor is it carried on the back of an Academy Award winner given an entire hour to herself. It simply expresses the horror of sublimated violence and the ability of the supernatural to unleash it — the stuff that drives so much of the Master’s work — in its own voice.

If you’ve ever watched a show like Boardwalk Empire or The Americans, you might recognize the vibe. Like the Prohibition-era mob in the former and Cold War espionage in the latter, the particular strain of horror on display here is the mannequin that writer Mark Lafferty and director Ana Lily Amirpour (of the modern horror classic A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), as well as showrunners Dustin Thomason and Sam Shaw, can position into new shapes of their own devising.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It was my favorite to date.

It’s Thanksgiving Day on Succession, and you know what that means: Logan Roy knocking a child to the ground by hitting him across the face with a metal can.

Wait—what?

Generally I find complaints along the lines of “who wants to watch a show about assholes” either misguided, in the sense that assholes generate conflict and conflict is the stuff of drama, or childish, in the sense that large segments of the modern audience want problematic characters depicted Goofus & Gallant–style with unmistakable indicators that good behavior is good and bad behavior is bad, or not depicted at all, which is the stuff of shows made for literal toddlers. I presume that you, dear reader, are neither so squeamish nor so juvenile in your tastes. And neither am I!

Yet “I Went to Market,” the fifth episode of Succession‘s first season, sorely tests even the patience of a guy who lists The Texas Chain Saw Massacre as one of his favorite films. Another episode of everyone in the Roy family and its orbit (with the slight exceptions of ostensible heir Kendall, his estranged wife Rava, and corporate consigliereFrank) acting like complete monsters, culminating in actual physical child abuse of the sort punishable by law, with no end in sight?

I reviewed episode five of Succession, a show I’m having a harder and harder time getting anything out of, for Decider.

“He wanted me to talk. I talked.” God, did he ever.

Titled “Talk” after this characteristically terse bit of dialogue from Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), the fourth episode of Better Call Saul‘s fourth season continues the show’s ongoing study of how vivid a picture it can paint of the moral collapse of its characters in as few brushstrokes as possible. Mike, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk), Nacho Varga (Michael Mando), and even Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) spend the episode essentially taking turns sliding a few more rungs down the ladder toward their respective eventual fates. For Jimmy and Mike, this means a life of crime that will end in disaster when they’re drawn into the orbit of one Walter White a few years later. For Nacho and Kim… well, we don’t know what happens to them, not yet. But this installment makes the case that they’re just as broken down as their Breaking Bad co-star counterparts, and seemingly just as unlikely to be able to put the pieces back together.

I reviewed this week’s doom-laden episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide.

This week (technically several weeks ago, but you get the point) on Succession…well, a lot of stuff happened that I’m gonna race through because four episodes into this series and the joke is getting a bit old, isn’t it? All of the Roys and all of their employees, with the possible exception of Kendall, are pieces of shit who’d trip over their dicks on the way to the soda machine, let alone attempting to run a major international corporation and all its attendant charity balls and political campaigns and what have yous.

I’m up to episode four of my Succession for Latecomers review series at Decider, and I’m kind of over it. There’s an interesting bit with Kendall, though, that I go over in some detail. See what you think.

The most striking thing about the performance is, well, that it isn’t that striking at all. Eschewing straight-up tear-down-the-sky “tour-de-force” emoting, the veteran actor keeps Ruth’s reactions well within the range of normal human experience. When she’s sad, she cries rather than wails. When she’s angry, she yells rather than screams. When she’s frightened, she’s furtive and trembling rather than panicked and flailing.

It’s a rewarding approach. By rooting her performance in recognizable everyday reactions and emotions, Spacek avoids playing Ruth’s dementia as a source of horror itself. What’s happening to her brain isn’t treated as somehow creepy or gross, the way mental illness often comes across in projects like these. She is still a “normal” person, just one who’s no longer in control of how her mind processes space and time. Sure, it’s a frightening condition to suffer from. But both series co-creator Sam Shaw’s writing and the acting emphasize that it’s mainly emotionally exhausting.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s a straight-up showcase for Sissy Spacek that she underplays beautifully. I remain at arm’s length from the show as a whole for reasons I get into later in the review, but across the board the performances are thoughtful and quiet.

If experiencing anxiety-induced nausea while watching is the mark of a great television drama, then Better Call Saul is an all-timer. Bearing the bittersweet title “Something Beautiful,” this week’s episode feels like writer Gordon Smith and director Daniel Sackheim issued themselves a challenge before filming: Just how many different ways can we drop our viewers’ hearts into the pits of their stomachs? I, for one, am having a hard time recovering long enough to write about it. So, y’know, great job!

I reviewed this week’s alternately scary, surprising, and sad episode of Better Call Saul for TV Guide.

SPOILER WARNING

“Everybody’s so crazy,” says Helen Solloway in the final minutes of the final episode of the extraordinary fourth season of “The Affair.” O.K., she employs an uncouth adjective unfit for this publication when she says it, but you get the idea.

And why wouldn’t she think so? The woman her ex-husband Noah left her for has (they all believe) committed suicide, just days after Helen gave her what seemed like a life-changing pep talk. Noah, who attended the funeral, has just told Helen that Alison’s other ex-husband, Cole Lockhart, disrupted the service by stealing her ashes and running away with them.

Helen and Noah are having this conversation outside the hospital where her partner Vik is dying after refusing to seek treatment for his pancreatic cancer, a decision he now regrets. At that very moment he’s being told by their neighbor Sierra that he’s the father of her unborn baby. Helen, whose attempts to have a baby with Vik herself were prevented by the onset of menopause, is less mad about this than you’d think, since she also slept with Sierra. And oh, Vik’s helicopter parents are up there too, excited because the oncologist treating him is a woman he used to date in med school. When it rains, it pours.

Though it’s broken into three different segments — the first from Noah’s perspective, the second from Cole’s and the third from Helen’s — this maddening messiness of adult life is the episode’s unifying thread. Speaking plainly, I adore it.

I reviewed the moving season finale of The Affair for the New York Times. It’s been such a pleasure writing about this show for this publication this season. I remain convinced it’s doing work about actual adulthood few if any other shows have ever dared try.

This reveals the limits of the sitcom as a form as far as investigating human nature is concerned. (And that’s what really concerns me as a critic, I’m sad to say.) Simply put, characters in sitcoms are not characters as we understand them to exist in dramas. They are joke delivery mechanisms, and their prime directive is to be funny. If that comes at the expense of recognizable human behavior, it’s all in the game, man. (To be clear, being funny is itself a recognizable human behavior, but not when it requires all other concerns to bend to that goal.)

The problem arises when people, many critics among them, ignore this basic structural tenet of the genre and start looking to comedy for life lessons and moral instruction.

My Succession Reviews for Latecomers series for Decider continues with a look at episode three, in which I realize you people have tricked me into watching a sitcom.

Castle Rock has just leveled up.

That’s the big takeaway from this week’s episode (“Filter”). From the start, the show had a baseline level of quality — talented cast, understated writing, a keen eye for everyday American evil and a willingness to aim for “eerie” rather than “over the top” — that’s a step up from most Stephen King adaptations (and also several prestige dramas in their shaky early episodes). Yet it’s never quite gelled into anything more transcendent than the sum of its competent parts. This installment was the first time it felt like you could see the series as something closer to a cohesive whole.

I reviewed this week’s Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. It’s getting there.

Kim Wexler’s turn in the spotlight, meanwhile, sees actor Rhea Seehorn turn in her best work on the series to date. At the start of her sequence of scenes in the episode, she quietly watches Jimmy’s manic new morning routine, and the question of whether the man she loves is trying to put on a brave face or has genuinely been broken by his brother’s death plays out silently behind her eyes.

Next, she travels to the offices of Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill, the firm to which she, Jimmy, and Chuck alike once belonged. She’s there on Jimmy’s behalf, to sign off on the final details of Chuck’s estate, for which his old partner Howard (Patrick Fabian) is the executor. After she exchanges awkward but sincere pleasantries with Chuck’s ex-wife Rebecca (Ann Cusack), you can see her slowly build up and then release the energy to have a full-fledged freakout on Howard for his behavior.

It’s not just Howard’s participation in laying out the terms of Chuck’s will — which as far as Jimmy’s concerned amount to a kiss-off payout of five thousand dollars, a chance to claim any objects of sentimental value from the wreckage of his burned-out house, a seat on the board for a scholarship fund she accurately asserts Chuck would never have been caught dead awarding to his baby brother himself, and a posthumous letter for Jimmy’s eyes only — that bothers her. It’s his post-funeral visit to their home, when he laid out his theory that Chuck committed suicide. “I thought I owed it to Jimmy to tell him,” Howard says in his own defense… but as Kim points out, he didn’t extend this same dubious courtesy to Rebecca.

Tears in her eyes, voice breaking, and covered in visible bruises from her car accident that make her look as beat up physically as she is emotionally, Kim bellows that Howard told Jimmy that his brother deliberately burned himself to death “to make yourself feel better, to unload your guilt.” “Kim, I don’t think that’s fair,” Howard says, taken aback. “Fair?” she all but screams in response, before laying out all the extremely unfair pain that both the terms of the will and Howard’s (in her eyes) self-centered handling of Chuck’s death would put Jimmy through.

“What can I do to make it better?” Howard asks, all but begging to be told what to do, as Fabian gets teary and shaky-voiced himself, his sincerity obvious. “Nothing,” Kim spits. “There is nothingyou can do. Just stay away.” She leaves him standing alone in the office, looking for all the world like a man who’s just been given six months to live by an oncologist. Which, perhaps, isn’t that far from the mark. The deadly battle between Jimmy and Chuck is slowly killing them all.

But the most moving moment from Kim and Seehorn alike comes at the end of the day, when Jimmy returns from his farcical job hunt, bearing takeout and churning out smiley platitudes about getting solid leads and even rejecting an offer that “wasn’t a perfect fit.” As they sit down on the couch to eat and watch an old movie, she shoots him a look that is pure love, pure pity, pure desire to see a person she cares about come through his current ordeal intact. When she moves in suddenly to kiss him and have sex, it feels like the only way she can express how much she wants him to feel better. Words simply aren’t up to the task. It’s one of the realest moments of acting I’ve seen on television all year.

I reviewed this week’s excellent Better Call Saul for TV Guide. The show is digging deep into its core cast right now, and TVG is letting me go long on it, bless them.

SPOILER WARNING

I have a confession to make. Why not, right? Confessions are in the air tonight.

My confession is this: “The Affair” just aired the most conceptually ambitious, emotionally painful episode of its entire run, and at the moment of truth it went someplace I could not bring myself to follow.

I was so riveted that when I look over my notes for this episode — a showcase for Ruth Wilson and Ramon Rodriguez, the only two people on camera for the entire hour — they read less like jotted-down thoughts and more like a fully annotated transcript. But when the truth is revealed and the worst case scenario happens, you won’t find that in my notes at all. Ben’s attack on Alison, her collision with the wall, the blood pouring from her head, the light going out in her eyes — it’s just a blank space in the document. Words and words and words, and in the middle, a rupture.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It knocked me flat.

Castle Rock is burning. Not just because of the wildfires raging across the hills that surround the town, either, although their hazy orange glow, reflected in the skies above, gives this new episode — “Harvest” — an appropriately infernal vibe. Consider the opening flashback, in which Henry Deaver seeks treatment for the unexplained ringing in his ears that’s plagued him on and off since he was a teenager. “I guess everyone thinks they grew up in the worst place in the world, huh?” the doc asks with a smile. In the lawyer’s case, of course, the answer is a resounding yes. But the implication, via a smart script from Lila Byock, the dreamy direction of Andrew Bernstein and the inclusion of real-life, ripped-from-the-headlines horror that’s become part of this show’s dramatic schematic, is clear: Everyone did grow up in the worst place in the world. The world is not a nice place to grow up in at all.

I reviewed episode five of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. There’s a lot I think is admirable about this show—it handles the Everyday All-American Evil that’s King’s specialty in a way that feels current and urgent rather than nostalgic and corny, and the cast of fine actors is taking the material seriously. But in the end, it comes down to what kind of villain the Skarsgård character is, doesn’t it? And we don’t know that yet.

Naturally, Kendall’s ability to keep needs other than his own in mind leads his siblings — even the relatively disengaged literal brother from another mother, Connor, who spends most of his time either spouting New Agey bullshit or making out with a girlfriend young enough to be his daughter — to label him weak. To them, and to his father as well, looking out for anything or anyone but Number One is weakness. As my partner put it to me, no wonder Kendall’s the one with the drug problem. He’s the only member of the family who seems to feel any emotional toll from their insane wealth and responsibility.

He also gets a boner when his ex-wife gives him a hug to comfort him. Pobody’s nerfect!

My Succession for Slowpokes series at Decider continues with my review of episode two, focusing on the so-far surprising humanity of theoretical chosen son Kendall.

Cinnamon rolls, stacked one spiraling wad of dough on top of another, shot in black and white like something out of modern-art museum’s permanent collection. An overhead shot of an ailing man getting wheeled through a mall on a gurney, dissolving into bright white as they pass through the doors to the outside world. The uncomfortable tedium of lying in a hospital bed as unfamiliar people poke and prod your body in an unpleasantly intimate way. The feeling that you’re just one fake ID or bogus social security number or nosy cab driver away from finally taking the fall you’ve deserved to take for years. Then a transition into the present day that begins with burning cinders, floating across the screen like snowflakes from hell.

Right from the jump, Better Call Saul‘s fourth season demonstrates why this ain’t your average crime show or anti-hero prestige drama — not even the highly acclaimed one to which it serves as a prequel. Yes, it tells the origin story of Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) — aka Saul Goodman, the lowlife lawyer doomed to play a pivotal role in the rise and fall of Breaking Bad’s leading monster, Walter White. And yes, it pivots off many of the artful cinematic techniques that elevated Bad to greatness: nearly abstract closeups, wild shifts in angles and colors and techniques, an unrivaled use of montage and music, to name a few.

But there’s one big difference. We know where Saul is headed: to a Cinnabon in Omaha, Nebraska, via complicity in dozens of murders orchestrated by his client, the dreaded Heisenberg, in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The brilliance of episodes like the Season 4 premiere “Smoke,” written by series co-creator Peter Gould, is how much time BCS is willing to take to get us there.

Very excited to be making my TV Guide debut with my review of the season premiere of Better Call Saul. I’ll be writing about it there all season long!

There’s no way to prepare for an episode like this week’s installment of “The Affair.” That’s as true for the audience as it is for the characters involved. Perhaps that’s why so much of this devastating hour of television is spent being not particularly devastating at all.

I reviewed today’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times. It was very hard to do.

Just how bad will Jimmy McGill break this season? That’s the big question for viewers as “Better Call Saul” returns to AMC for Season 4 on Monday, Aug. 6. Created by Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould as a prequel to “Breaking Bad,” “Saul” stars Bob Odenkirk as its title character … sort of.

“Saul” tells the story of Jimmy McGill, a small-time lawyer and part-time con man who devolves into the criminal attorney we first met on “Breaking Bad,” Saul Goodman. Figures from both his past and his “Breaking Bad” future push and pull him toward that grim destination, their own stories playing out in parallel.

Given the fiery, tragic finale of Season 3, can Jimmy pick up the pieces and set a straight course? We already know the answer, but the journey is fascinating to watch. And if you need a quick road map ahead of the season premiere, this character-by-character guide should get you caught up.

I wrote a Better Call Saul refresher/cheat sheet thing for the New York Times. Can’t wait for the show to return.

Succession is a very funny television program. That’s a relief, since it was created by Peep Show and The Thick of It‘s Jesse Armstrong and directed by Anchorman‘s Adam McKay (working in his Big Short vein); it weren’t funny, that would be kind of troubling. But I’d like to start this Succession Episode 1 review of its premiere by discussing a scene that isn’t funny at all.

Which I do, at length, as I start my coverage of Succession for Decider. I know, I know, we’re getting a late start. But so are a lot of viewers, it seems. Climb aboard!

The sex scene between Helen and Sierra isn’t particularly explicit. But what Sierra says leading up to their liaison certainly makes a lasting impression. She enjoys sleeping with women, she tells Helen, because their shared struggles make the connection more intimate. She feels “primal admiration” for seeing a fellow woman in bed, “naked and confident and hungry for orgasm.” And she feels a greater degree of control — “control is really hot,” she concludes, before they finally kiss. By the time she’s finished talking, the temperature in that yurt has surely risen several degrees.

[…]

While we’re on the subject of Janelle, it has to be said that the chemistry between Sanaa Lathan and Dominic West is considerable. Granted, that’s par for the course on this show, which has yet to serve up a lukewarm sex scene (except on purpose) in three and a half seasons. But when Noah and Janelle finally get into bed together, there’s an easy, joyous intimacy to it — my favorite bit is when she jokingly moans “Does it turn you on that I’m your boss?” and then immediately starts laughing — that’s so convincing I almost felt bad watching. Almost.

In that regard, it’s a lot like the intense buildup to Helen and Sierra’s hookup earlier in the episode, which made their encounter, for all its problems, seem like the proverbial “consummation devoutly to be wished.” Seems to me that if sex were less fun, people wouldn’t risk all these complications to their lives in order to have it with each other. This is yet another aspect of adult life that “The Affair” shows it understands, week in and week out.

I reviewed last weekend’s episode of The Affair for the New York Times.

SPOILER WARNING

This leads directly to the show’s most disturbing sequence to date. Trapped in his hellish prison job for the foreseeable future, helpless as his fellow guards beat and dehumanize the prisoners — and quite possibly tainted by the touch of the Kid — Dennis Zalewski snaps. Grabbing his gun, he methodically marches through Shawshank, murdering every officer and official he finds. When he finally reaches the warden’s office, he finds Deaver there. “I wanna testify,” he says … before a flashbang grenade drops them both to the ground and a shotgun-wielding bull blows him away.

It’s a gorgeously fucked-up sequence, in large part because it’s just so very Stephen King-ish — and not in a way we’ve really seen before on screen. This kind of killing spree is a staple of the Master’s work: Seemingly ordinary men just lose it one day. They pick up a rifle or an ax, slaughtering their way through as many people as possible, offering one final deadpan non sequitur before someone puts them down like a rabid dog. (The town history of Derry, where It takes place, is full of rampages like this.)

And there’s nothing about Zalewski’s affect here to suggest that if he’d gotten away clean, he wouldn’t have just gone down to the bar for a drink, complaining about a rough day at work. It’s not quite the banality of evil, but there’s a workmanlike quality to it that gets right under your skin. Murder is so routine it barely registers.

Isn’t that what Zalewski himself tells Deaver? “Bad things happen here because bad people know they’re safe here,” the guard warned the lawyer when he tried to downplay the potential to open a prison-wide investigation. “How many times can one fuckin’ town look the other way?” In his desperation to expose Shawshank’s horrors, the man turned himself into one of those horrors. He had to become the prison in order to destroy it.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Castle Rock for Rolling Stone. The ending was impressive.