SPOILER WARNING

Many, and perhaps most, prestige television shows traffic in death. Name your top five dramas right now and chances are good the majority are about people who kill other people for a living, or at the very least on a pro-am basis. Yet for all their fixation on mortality, violent or otherwise, few shows bother attempting to answer the unanswerable question of what death feels like. The one that (maybe) gave it a serious try wound up doing something so strange by the standards of its peers that we’re still talking about it eleven years later.

Which makes “The Ladder,” The Terror’s horrific third episode, one of the year’s most impressive hours of television. Climaxing with the surprise death of a major character—a shock tactic you’ve almost come to expect from high-profile dramas—it takes the opportunity to root the viewer in the experience of dying, and dying horribly. Using dizzying camerawork, surreal editing, brutal gore, and a simple but staggering performance by Ciarán Hinds, the episode makes the killing of Sir John Franklin a real voyage into the unknown: the mind of a man who suddenly finds himself in the grips of panic and pain from which there will be no return.

Episode three of The Terror featured one of the best death scenes I’ve ever seen on television; I wrote about why in my review for the A.V. Club.

You don’t need to get clocked on the head by a hailstone the size of a grapefruit to think that there was something playful about The Terror this week. For one thing you wouldn’t have much of a head left, but it’s more than that. Titled “Gore,” the episode creates a sense of anticipation that something terrible, or at least disgusting, is going to happen from the start. This isn’t wrong, but it also isn’t the whole picture. In shades of the series title’s double meaning, Gore is the surname of the lieutenant to whom the horrible thing happens. What’s more, his death and disappearance at the claws of a huge, elusive bear takes place after eight months of nothing happening, apparently: Between the final shot of the premiere and the first shot of this installment, eight months have elapsed. A series with the confidence to take such a huge narrative leap this early in its run, and to make gallows-humor puns about the inexorable doom approaching all its characters, is a series worth watching.

I reviewed episode two of The Terror for the A.V. Club. It’s an impressive show.

“I utterly believed him.” So said director Danny Boyle of Brendan Fraser‘s role as an abusive prison guard on Showtime’s dark kaleidoscope of a drama The Affair. It’s an odd compliment to receive when you’ve just played an utter bastard, but Boyle — the Academy Award winner behind Trainspotting, 28 Days Later, and Slumdog Millionaire — knows his way around bastards, and in the curious case of Brendan Fraser, it was entirely well deserved.

Boyle told GQ earlier this year that after watching Fraser’s work on the show hired the actor to play the oddball ex-CIA officer turned private investigator James Fletcher Chace on his new anthology series Trust, chronicling the outrageous fortunes of the Getty oil dynasty. More than just a henchman, Fraser’s Chace is a fourth-wall breaking narrator — the liaison between the audience and the stranger-than-fiction world he himself inhabits. It’s a smart choice, one that centers an actor already known and loved by millions from his roles in blockbusters like The Mummy and Journey to the Center of the Earth, as well as goofy comedies like George of the Jungle and Encino Man, and even Oscar fare like Gods & Monsters and Crash. We all like Brendan Fraser. And it’s because he played a hateful character on The Affair that we all get the chance to like him again.

A while back I read that Brendan Fraser got his current gig starring in Danny Boyle’s Trust because of his work on The Affair, one of my favorite shows. So I dove deep into his performance, the memes that resulted from an interview he gave about it, and the comeback that began because of it for Decider.

Live like a king. It’s a phrase that connotes wealth, luxury, excess, a life of unlimited possibility and security. How easy it is to let the sparkle of the crown jewels blind us to the dead enemies and discarded undesirables through which they were purchased. This week’s episode of “Billions” reminds us, as bluntly as the show ever has, that the games played by Bobby Axelrod and his billionaire boys club in order to remain comfortable on their thrones can have as steep a cost to bystanders as to any player in the game.

I reviewed the second episode of Billions’ third season for the New York Times. This one leaned into the cruelty of both the billionaire class and the Trump regime real hard.

Elizabeth Jennings sits in a cafe in Mexico City and learns that the leader of the Soviet Union will be murdered if he agrees to deactivate his country’s top-secret plan for retaliatory nuclear annihilation. She learns this not in a warning, but in a demand for her assistance. Making an end-run around her superiors back home, a man from the Soviet army has come to recruit her to spy on Gorbachev’s team at a disarmament summit. Her job is to make sure that the Strangelovian project — codenamed “Dead Hand,” because why fuck around — is not on the bargaining table. If it is, she is to report back, and history will change forever.

As she learns this information, which will culminate in her receipt of a necklace with a poison pill hidden inside in order to protect the sanctity of Dead Hand should she ever be captured, Peter Gabriel’s “We Do What We’re Told” rises in volume on the soundtrack, higher and higher, until the only reason we can make out her contact’s words is because we can read their subtitled translations. It’s a clever callback to The Americans‘ first episode and its use of “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins — another eerie solo standout from a Genesis alum that was famously used in the soundtrack for Miami Vice some thirty years ago. But it’s also away to focus our attention not on the mission, but the shock of receiving it. The Americans deploys quiet and wordlessness as effectively as any show on TV; so many of its standout performers (Noah Emmerich, Brandon J. Dirden, Costa Ronin) are strikingly soft-spoken, and many of its best moments consist of characters just standing and staring at something they can only just bear to see. This isn’t an option in the middle of receiving your marching orders, so the show does the next best thing: It drowns them out. Elizabeth herself is quiet, but there’s a tumult in her head.

[…]

Watching The Americans in 2018 is a much different experience than watching The Americans in 2013 — not just because it’s much better show than it was during that first season (a reasonably enjoyable thriller and not much more), nor because during the 2012 election liberal pundits treated Mitt Romney describing Russia as our enemy as a gaffe while now many of those same pundits are out to start a new Cold War against the country and its ex-KGB leader. You get a little closer when you start talking about why — Russian meddling in 2016 election and influence peddling with its Electoral College–appointed winner Donald Trump and his minions — but only if you treat that as the starting point rather than the finish.

Should even the worst of the allegations against the Putin and Trump governments turn out to be true, they’re basically just tit for tat if you go back to what happened after Gorbachev, when America helped establish an oligarchy by kicking off a capitalist fire sale in the country, and intervened directly and more or less openly to ensure Putin predecessor Boris Yeltsin presided over it. A slightly, but only slightly, less dramatic looting of the commons by corporations, their wealthy viziers, and their paid representatives in the United States government took place here at home. And there’d be no Trump on whose behalf to meddle if our own grotesque racism, sexism, xenophobia, gutting of the social safety net, and worship of money hadn’t made him possible.

In short, it’s much, much harder than it used to be for all but the most blinkered patriots, liberal or conservative, to look at America and Russia’s recent history and see good guys and bad guys. History is a palimpsest, rewritten as we go. And as with Elizabeth in that cafe, things that used to be sound perfectly clear are getting harder and harder to hear.

I reviewed the final season premiere of The Americans for Decider, where I’ll be covering this very special show until the end.

“And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?” —Country Joe and the Fish, “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die-Rag”

If there’s one thing that struck me about “The General,” the seventh episode of The Looming Tower, it’s that the answer to Country Joe MacDonald’s musical question is, as it always was, “not much.” Not much of value, anyway. Ostensibly depicting the investigation into the bombing of the USS Cole off the Yemeni coast, the episode is in fact about how interagency and international strife made a halfway decent investigation impossible. Most of the fighting that gets done here is between people who are supposed to be on the same side. Why are they doing it? As Country Joe put it, “Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn.”

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Looming Tower, the first one where I started to think maybe they’re gonna run out of fuel for this story long before they run out of story to fuel, for Decider. The Looming Tower does not have the spark. It does not have the magic.

“Past hope. Past kindness or consideration. Past justice. Past warmth or cold or comfort. Past love. But past surprise? What an endlessly unfolding tedium life would then become!” —Francis Wolcott, Deadwood

The men of the Royal Navy about whose lives and deaths The Terror concerns itself have set out on an expedition into the unknown, but the show itself is not. Carefully researched, meticulously art-directed dramas about the evil that heavily accented, infrequently bathed men did back in the olden days are as common across the TV landscape as ice in the Arctic. (At least, as common as ice in the Arctic used to be.) In too many of these cases, hitting that one note of grim, grimy gloom seems to have been viewed as sufficient by the filmmakers involved.

What The Terror gets right, and so many other works of period miserabalism—including executive producer Ridley Scott’s own Taboo, starring a soot-encrusted Tom Hardy—get wrong, is that you have to feel bad that the characters are so miserable in the first place. If you start them all at the same glowering, fundamentally mean-spirited place and just make things worse from there, that empathy can’t be generated; you’re left with the “endlessly unfolding tedium” that the granddaddy of the genre once described. Deadwood never fell into that trap, and neither, based on this opening hour, does The Terror.

I reviewed the crackerjack premiere of The Terror for The A.V. Club, where I’ll be covering the show all season. Most people I know who read Dan Simmons’s source novel enjoyed a lot of it a whole lot but have major problems that kept them from declaring it a truly great book, and I’m in that camp myself. When I heard they were making a show of it, I got excited not because the book is perfect, but because it isn’t, and a good show might be able to excise those imperfections. I’m happy to report that The Terror is, indeed, a good show. Remember that spark I said The Alienist doesn’t have? The Terror does. It’s got the magic.

It’s in those final steps of the hunt for the killer that the problems really begin. Kreizler bamboozles Roosevelt and his men so that Kreizler and Moore, already under close watch by Byrnes, could sneak away to the child-killer’s new lair unnoticed. How do they know that this lair is in the Croton Reservoir? How does Sara, whom Kreizler also dupes (reasons unclear), figure out that same thing in turn, arriving at the reservoir just in time to save their lives? There’s some hand-waving about interpreting the killer’s map of the water and sewer systems, a change in his modus operandi, and his apparent obsession with John the Baptist. But that’s all wild guess work, and New York was a really big city — on an island, no less — even during the Gilded Age. Water, water everywhere, yet they know exactly where to go.

The episode ratchets up the tension by including Byrnes and Connor as factors in the final showdown, from a poorly explained scene in which Byrnes monitors our men at the opera house to Connor’s almost comically dogged pursuit of the alienist’s team. But while their acute interest in the case made sense while one of their high-society patrons was under suspicion, it made considerably less sense once that patron was killed by Connor. His involvement in the murder of Laszlo’s beloved Mary seems to be an open secret as well, although this, too, is poorly explained. Now Connor goes to all this trouble just because the police object to the doctor’s newfangled methodology? It simply doesn’t hold up as a motive.

Put it all together, and it feels rushed and forced, as if the filmmakers looked at the clock, realized they were running out of time and did a speed run through the final hour of what until now had been a very meticulous, patient detective story.

I reviewed the finale of The Alienist, a show I never really liked but also kind of enjoyed (??), for the New York Times. Charming performances by Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning, and a slightly harder-to-swallow but still endearing turn from Daniel Brühl, buoyed the proceedings considerably. Still, it never had that spark, you know? That magic. Some shows do and some shows don’t.

“There’s a new sheriff in town,” drawls Attorney General Waylon Jeffcoat to an assemblage of United States attorneys now under his employ, “and you are my deputies. Gonna be one hell of a turkey shoot!”

Well, yes and no. After watching the Season 3 premiere of “Billions,” Showtime’s amusement-park ride of a financial drama, it is clear that the show’s creators and characters are indeed coming out guns blazing. But the new sheriff, known as Jock, hasn’t changed the series’s old winning ways. A boots-on-the-desk Texan played by the dulcet-toned character actor Clancy Brown, Jock Jeffcoat announces he’s pulling the Justice Department away from Wall Street’s white-collar crimes. Elsewhere, the revelation that the unctuous hedge-fund creep Todd Krakow (Danny Strong), previously the show’s comic-relief antagonist, has been named Treasury Secretary is perhaps the best gag of the episode, in that funny-because-it’s-true sort of way.

The premiere is the most direct reference to the advent of the Trump era we’ve seen so far, if not explicitly so. And yet “Billions” is still the story of the hedge-fund billionaire Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) and Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti), the crafty, crusading prosecutor out to take him down. The two remain uncomfortably connected by Wendy Rhoades (Maggie Siff), Axe’s on-staff therapist and performance coach who’s also Chuck’s wife and dominatrix. Each man is the other’s Ahab, with Wendy playing Ishmael to them all, complemented by one of the strongest supporting casts on television. Trump may have changed the playing field, but the players and the game remain the rollicking, entertaining same.

I’m very excited to be covering Billions for the New York Times this season, starting with my review of the season premiere. It’s a terrifically fun show in which the writing just gets tighter and the performances cannier with each passing episode, it seems, so it’s a delight to write about anyplace of course. But writing about it for the Times, where a) the readership could not possibly be more Billions’ target demographic, and b) my reviews will almost certainly be among the most left-wing things the paper publishes, is a little something extra.

You don’t want to reduce an actual human being to an avatar of impersonal forces at work in the world, but Andrew is in one sense the weaponization of all the obstacles that have been placed in all those people’s way by homophobia. Even at Versace’s funeral, the priest performing the ceremony refuses to take his partner’s hand in comfort.

Yeah. All of that is real. We’ve got the footage of the priest pulling his hand away from Antonio. That’s not an inference — we can see it. That priest knew he was on camera, knew he was in front of thousands of people, knew he was at the funeral for this man, and still couldn’t control his hatred. He still felt no need to control it. Versace was so successful he managed to overcome that, which was what was so extraordinary about him. But the whole point of Andrew’s personality was that he wanted to impress people, and he’s born into one of the most marginalized groups in society. That paradox — How can you impress someone when they find you disgusting intrinsically before you even open your mouth? — that’s the conundrum of Andrew.

I think it’s tricky. The most homophobic person in this story is Andrew, by far. When he becomes this killer, he becomes a horrific homophobic bully. It’s like he’s soaked up everything and unleashes it on Lee and Versace. He’s like, “I’m going to shame you. You’ve achieved success and I’m going to rip it down, both through physical destruction, but also through the act of scrutiny and having the world look down upon you.”

Even when he was younger and acting as a welcoming figure in the gay community, he was pushing his racial identity as an Asian American to the side. That’s a stark contrast.

You know, he kind of did both. He wanted to change his name from Cunanan to DeSilva so he could say he’s Portuguese rather than from the Philippines. Then he was saying he was Israeli. So yeah, he would push the racial thing to one side. But the sexual thing is interesting, if you look at the way his life tracks. He can’t deal with anyone who might be critical. If he met someone who was homophobic and he wanted to be friends, he would say that he was straight, or that he had a wife and a daughter. He would play the audience. Eventually he went into an audience of these older men that he didn’t have to play to, because he was instantly impressive. He was younger and witty and clever and appreciated. Once he lost that audience, he hit rock bottom.

There’s this moment we never managed to get into the show which I’ve always thought captured something about Andrew. He was at a party when his descent was really accelerating, and no one was paying attention to him; in fact, someone had already reprimanded him for being really annoying. He just went over to this table and set fire to a napkin. He needed people to run over and notice him.

I interviewed Tom Rob Smith, the writer of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, for the New York Times. Again, ACS Versace is a great show.

Andrew Cunanan walks through Miami Beach toward death as “Vienna” by Ultravox plays on the soundtrack. That New Wave masterpiece is both a celebration and rejection of glamour. Sequentially so, in that vocalist Midge Ure sings of “a man in the dark in a picture frame, so mystic and soulful” and “haunting notes, pizzicato strings, the rhythm is calling,” only to follow up by proclaiming “the image is gone…the feeling is gone…this means nothing to me.” Simultaneously so, in that when he sings “this means nothing to me” the song soars as if nothing has ever meant more to him. Inextricably so, in that it wedges “only you and I” between each declaration of faded emotion and emphatic meaninglessness; in that the title comes from the chorus’s climactic phrase “Ah, Vienna,” a cry of joy and a sigh of loss all at once. The first time that chorus hits in the ninth and final episode of The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Andrew Cunanan assassinates Gianni Versace. The second time, he’s standing in a stranger’s kitchen, rummaging through a fridge in a house he’s burglarized, pulling out a bottle of champagne and fiddling with the foil around the cork. His lonesome toast to himself is not timed to the music. The feeling is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

[…]

Andrew Cunanan is dead and gone when The Assassination of Gianni Versace, one of the best dramas of the decade, concludes. Its final scenes focus on the family of the title character, not his killer; even this choice is a deliberate disconnection from what’s come before. Estranged though they are, both his sister Donatella and his partner Antonio struggle to connect what they had with what they have now. Donatella, who has coolly presided over Antonio’s excision from his late partner’s estate, sobs, because her brother annoyed her on the day of his murder to the point where she refused to pick up the phone when he called. Antonio has been rejected not only by Donatella but by the priest at Gianni’s funeral mass — where rich and famous friends from Princess Diana to Elton John to Naomi Campbell to Sting were present, but where Antonio himself did not merit a mention as a part of the family, nor a kiss from the cleric, whose institution spent the decade denying the humanity of homosexuals while systematically destroying the humanity of so many children in its charge. Like Andrew, he attempts suicide; unlike Andrew, he is unsuccessful.

Gianni Versace ends the series as a photo in a shrine where his sister goes to grieve and lament what could have been had she picked up the phone. Donatella is a distorted reflection in glass embellished with the House of Versace’s Medusa head emblem, monstrous in her mourning. Antonio lies cradled in the hands of the help, who save him from his effort to die with the love of his life. Andrew is just a name on a wall in a mausoleum, one of countless others, nothing special. It’s all so unglamorous, so unceremonious, so blunt and short and ugly. The beauty Versace worked all his life to create, that Andrew tried all his life to recreate, has no place here at the end. The image is gone, only you and I, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me.

I reviewed the season finale of ACS Versace for Decider. This show is an all-timer.

Andrew Cunanan was cool.

Like, really cool.

Sincerely, legitimately awesome.

That’s the tragedy of “Creator/Destroyer,” the penultimate episode of this extraordinary season of television. By the time we see Andrew in his full glory as one of the wildest guys at his high school, we’ve also seen his father Modesto, who debuts in this episode, get his hooks deep into the kid. Andrew has seen his father harangue and assault his mother. He’s borne the weight of all his dad’s dreams, knowing this comes at the expense of his siblings, sensing on some level it’s not right to have this kind of pressure placed on him but, because the pressure is couched as praise, not knowing how to fight back. He’s been…well, the show is cagey on this, but saying he’s been molested by his father would not be out of bounds.

And even now, as an ebullient and confident teenager, he’s begun certain behavior patterns that will get him in trouble in the end: he has a sugar daddy, and he becomes fast friends with Lizzie, his future bestie, because she shows up at a high-school house party pretending to be a kid rather than the married adult she really is. (“I’m an impostor.” “All the best people are.”) He’s picking up little tidbits on how to deceive (including his go-to pseudonym, DeSilva, the name of the people who own the house where the party takes place) and why (because “when you feel special, success will follow” as his father teaches him).

But for a brief time, he’s just a cool, slightly weird, slightly obnoxious, slightly closeted teenager, and if you weren’t at least two of those things during your high school career I don’t wanna know you. He stands up to homophobes in a familiar way, by camping it up even further, going so far as to pose for his class photo with his shirt all the way unbuttoned to show off his (impressive!) torso. He’s prophetically chosen to be “Most Likely to Be Remembered,” and equally prophetically selects “Après moi, le déluge” as his yearbook quote. He rolls into the parking lot like a refugee from Less Than Zero (complete with that movie’s soundtrack staple, the Bangles’ cover of “Hazy Shade of Winter”; the film was his IRL fave) and shows up at the house party in an Eddie Murphy red-leather jumpsuit. (Finally it’s clear why so many of his music cues over the course of the ‘90s portion of the series were anachronistically ’80s: The ’80s were his time.) This Andrew could be loved. This Andrew could be saved.

I reviewed last week’s episode of ACS Versace for Decider. What a show.

“We must be talked about, or we are nothing.” —Donatella Versace, to the Versace staff

“For me, being told ‘no’ is like being told I don’t exist. It’s like I disappeared or something.” —Andrew Cunanan, to Jeff Trail

“Is this normal? Is this normal enough?” —Gianni Versace to his sister Donatella, on creating a less unique ready-to-wear version of the haute couture dress they designed together for her

“It’s just a name they made up to sound special.” —Andrew Cunanan to his mother Mary Anne, on Häagen-Dazs ice cream

“It needs confidence.” “It gives confidence.” —Donatella and Gianni, on the dress

“So you can hold your own at a dinner table conversation.” “I am the dinner table conversation.” —an escort agency owner and Andrew Cunanan, on Andrew Cunanan

“I want the world to see you in a way that you have never been seen before.” —Gianni to Donatella

“Oh, if they could see me now.” “Who?” “Everyone.” —Andrew Cunanan to Norman Blachford

“This dress is not my legacy. You are.” —Gianni to Donatella

“He’s a good boy. He’s always been a good boy.” —Mary Anne on Andrew Cunanan

“Ascent,” the seventh episode of ACS Versace, is the one where my admiration for what writer Tom Rob Smith has accomplished with his scripts and structure for the series shifted into something approaching awe. Returning to the Versaces’ world of high fashion for the first time since Episode 2 (their appearance in Episode 5 centered on Gianni’s coming out, not their work as designers), it creates a series of parallels between the the artist and the man who would murder him that are all the more striking for how different they are in intention and affect.

I reviewed episode seven of ACS Versace for Decider a couple weeks back. (I apologize for all the catch-up linkblogging tonight.) I remember going through my notes on this one and thinking “Christ, this is a well-written show.”

Fittingly, director Michael Slovis and writer/showrunner Dan Futterman crafted a cinematically memorable version of the Cole bombing. After a long, slow, even placid build-up, the actual attack maintains the same feel and rhythm; if you didn’t know any better, you’d think this really was just a couple of guys and their nephew or something, out for a pleasant cruise, waving to the smiling sailors nearby. This isn’t some Euron Greyjoy–style pirate assault — it’s a sneak attack that no one saw coming even when they literally saw it coming. The cinematography is so fitting that it almost feels complicit.

The show’s done the character work to make the sequence stick in that respect, too. All those scenes of the bombers being friendly and joking around with one another are obviously reminiscent of what the FBI agents we’re also following around do, too. They’ve even got a kid sidekick whom they can playfully surprise and delight with their video camera, a bit of technology he’s never had the chance to experience before; the way they all repeat the word “zoom” and laugh when they use that feature to get a closer look at the Cole is genuinely funny and endearing if you put the context aside. But the show’s not really asking you to do that, since it provides its own context for what they’re doing: the murder of the kid’s family and friends by the United States, in an attack so senseless and unstoppable that the only way he can make sense of it is by magically attributing it to Shaytan himself. (The only hiccup is the Shaytan monologue, which overstays its welcome and drifts too far into otherizing “strange foreigner invokes demons and deities” territory.) Put it all together and you get that these are basically normal people, traumatized by injustice, and driven to kill for their countries and ideals in ways we too could understand.

When you’ve done all that, what does putting the kid on the boat add? We don’t need it for cinematic impact, for pathos, or to illustrate the human cost, since we’ve gotten all that already. It just feels indulgent, and oddly disrespectful of the facts to boot. Dramatic license is fine if you wanna create believable composite characters like Schmidt and Marsh in the CIA or Chesney and Stuart in the FBI, or even the kid himself. If you’re inserting a character in such a way that his presence would materially change the world’s understanding of the event that’s occurring, as the use of a literal child to suicide-bomb the U.S Navy surely would have done, that’s a whole different story. That it was all unnecessary only makes it worse. Have faith in the tragic truth.

I enjoyed writing about this week’s episode of The Looming Tower for Decider, one of those episodes that really helps you understand why what works works and what doesn’t doesn’t. This particular sequence was good to explore in light of the creative success of The Assassination of Gianni Versace, another true-crime series that takes necessary liberties and inferences, yet always feels on-point.

The Looming Tower is a cop show set in a world very much like our own: a world full of scumbags, banding together in little clandestine groups with a self-awarded licensed to kill on behalf of their scummy ideologies. Unlike the real world, however, the world of The Looming Tower has a magic-realist tinge to it. In Towerworld, there exist Cassandra-like oracles capable of seeing the future and its ocean of blood but utterly incapable of doing anything about it. In fact, to the characters, these unheeded, impotent prophets of doom are completely invisible. After all, they’re not characters themselves. They’re the audience.

I reviewed last week’s episode of The Looming Tower for Decider. It was the first one where the lethal folly of this War of the Shitheads really started getting to me.

It all leads to the grimmest discovery of the season, coupled with its goriest onscreen moments. While John’s young friend Joseph listens in horror, the murderer butchers one of his friends in the public baths, dragging his bloody corpse down the hall and off to whatever urban aerie will become this latest victim’s chosen resting place. At the same time, in the killer’s bedroom, Sara opens a heart-shaped box and discovers an actual human heart, while Marcus Isaacson uncovers a jar filled with human eyeballs — many more, it’s clear, than the known victims could have provided.

It’s an awesome, awful image, one that easily transcends its B-movie-prop connotations because of what it enables both the investigators and the audience to truly see. Each of these gross little chunks of nerve and tissue, floating in a jar stuffed away under bed, represents the life of a child, plucked out at the root. What’s more, each of the victims came from the immigrant underclass; the killer groomed them all by commiserating over their abusive, hated fathers. (In the victims’ cases, many of their dads were also neglectful gambling addicts, which Beecham was in a position to know through his gig as a debt collector.) In a grotesque sense, the murderer values them more than anyone else ever has.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It’s not a particularly good show, but Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning are very watchable in it, and in moments like the one described above it proves gore can still be communicative.

To its credit, “The Alienist” always treats the deaths of the children upon whom its serial killer preys as a series of tragedies. It is equally respectful, and properly outraged, about the grotesque class inequities that help enable the murderer to operate with impunity, or even under outright protection. The conditions to which the mentally ill are subjected by the institutional options of the day, the routine dismissal and degradation of women by men, the barbarity of white America’s genocidal war on the indigenous population, the cycle of sexual abuse that turns victims into victimizers ad infinitum: This episode alone exhibits fist-on-the-table fury about all of it. The PG-13 “Perils of Pauline” routine can only cloud this moral clarity.

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Alienist for the New York Times. It can be hard to make a crime show about how murder is tragic when the threat of murder is also supposed to be exciting.

Despite earning the respect of his bosses for his correct call against making the attacks, and lining up much-needed help cracking the CIA’s vault of secrecy from the Justice Department, John O’Neill’s a fuckin’ mess, man. Belying his on-top-of-the-world swagger, his lavish lifestyle of fine dining and $400 shoes (in 1998 money!) combined with the need to travel between three different romantic partners has buried him in debt. His credit cards get declined. He’s out of town for so long all the time that his wife and children barely tolerate him when he returns. Catholic cardinals fail to give him a reprieve to divorce his religiously devout missus and marry his equally devout (and deceived) girlfriend Liz, no matter how many Cohibas he smokes with them. Just to top it all off, his other other woman is planning a move to New York to be near him. He’s, uh, not thrilled.

And even when he’s right in this installment, he’s right about stuff that makes him seem prurient, rather than prophetic. In place of his many killer one-liners about how bin Laden wants us to go to war, maaaan, he’s pontificating about the “72 virgins” issue with his star agent Ali Soufan, who tells him it’s all bullshit. “Blow yourself up and win the pussy sweepstakes—it’s like consumer fraud,” O’Neill concludes. “And ironically, so fuckin’ American.” He’d know!

This is how Jeff Daniels can work: as a guy who seems to have all the advantages a wealthy white straight cis Christian man who’s got a high-ranking job in a law-enforcement agency in America’s cultural and political capitals can get, yet seems incapable of not pissing those privileges away. People keep trying to cast him as Wyatt Earp or Walter Cronkite, while his potential to portray a reasonably popular governor forced to leave office after getting caught using the state education fund to pay his mistress’s son’s orthodontist bill was right there all along.

Hey gang—I figured out Jeff Daniels’s strengths as a dramatic actor and wrote about them in my review of this week’s episode of The Looming Tower for Decider! What do you think of that, Jeff?

The third episode of The Looming Tower was struck by two coordinated explosions. No, not the al-Qaeda-orchestrated embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, nor the CIA-orchestrated tough-guy retaliatory strikes on an AQ training camp in Afghanistan and its, ahem, “chemical weapons facility” in Sudan. As if invoking the “two-for-two” principle that led American intelligence and defense officials to launch the latter attacks, writer Bash Doran and director John Dahl teamed with their actors to set off a double detonation of their own: the interrogation-room outburst of FBI investigator Robert Chesney, played by Bill Camp; and the furious freakout over being kept out of the loop on the airstrikes, potentially lethally, by his boss John O’Neill, played by Jeff Daniels. The first of these hit its target. The second was a dud. The difference between them says a lot about what these two actors, each likeable in his own way, have to offer.

[…]

I don’t blame Daniels for failing to deliver the dynamite that Camp cooks up in his similar scene, not entirely anyway. But it’s certainly true that Daniels is a far broader performer than Camp, even when the latter is screaming at the top of his lungs. His recent career has seen him repeatedly cast as ostensibly convincing figures of authority, be they good (his blustery Real News anchorman from Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom, whose name I can’t remember but whom I now always think of as “Jeff Newsroom” thanks to a vocal anti-Sorkin contingent on Twitter) or evil (his extravagantly bearded one-armed mass murderer in Netflix‘s Western series Godless, which feels like the part of a Broadway show’s run where a new actor takes over for the lead who originated the role, in this case most likely Jeff Bridges).

Yet these authority figures never actually convince. Again, the writing is often to blame, but either way it’s impossible to imagine a ham like his Newsroom character saving the moral heart of the journalism industry, or his pretentious, bible-quoting gunman becoming the most feared figure in the West in a show where Michelle Dockery and Merritt Wever both displayed more, ahem, true grit. His O’Neill commands respect insofar as we know he was right and his enemies were wrong, but Daniels is just the guy whose job it is to inhabit that suit of rectitude. He doesn’t wear it particularly well. (His secondary characteristic — an irresistible ladies’ man whose ruddy middle-aged machismo is irresistible to half a dozen different women half his age — is an even worse fit.)

I did a satisfyingly close read of the performances of Jeff Daniels and Bill Camp in my review of The Looming Tower’s third episode for Decider. Camp is the most underrated actor on television.

“We’re at war.”
“Only if we want to be.”

Welp, there you have it. That’s the game right there. That’s the whole megillah. “Losing My Religion”, Episode 2 of The Looming Tower, may have a too-cute-by-half title. (It’s a reference to our lapsed Catholic and observant Muslim FBI heroes dealing with his own sins in the former case and those of his correligionists in the other — relatively minor issues in the scheme of things). But that nine-word exchange between the CIA’s Strangelovean, bearded boffin Martin Schmidt and the FBI’s hard-drinkin’, hard-lovin’, law’n’order straight-shooter John O’Neill encapsulates the great debate that would shape the next 20 years of American history because of who winds up winning.

[…]

I’m a bit perplexed by complaints that the show is a sentimental look back at 9/11 with little to tell us about what happened afterwards. In the pilot, all the sniping and name-calling and backstabbing between agencies made me think it possible, even likely, that by showing us FBI, CIA, and DoD morons staging a pissing contest while people die, The Looming Tower would be more useful to us today than a deep dive into Islamist extremism would be. Now I see that while that element continues, so too does a blunt, bare-essentials critique of the War on Terror. Put it all together, and you’ve got a portrayal of an intelligence community that’s overworked, underinformed, and lacking in basic human empathy, helping to usher in America’s dying-empire phase. Again, look at today’s headlines and tell me this isn’t a valuable perspective.

I reviewed episode two of The Looming Tower for Decider. It’s a very straightforward show, but it certainly isn’t hidebound.