Much like many (but not all) of its main characters, The Gentlemen is, above all things, clever. For six episodes, it places one proverbial Chekhov’s gun after another on the mantle, to the point where there are more guns than the mantle. Do any of these guns go off in the end, leading to the explosive conflagration we all knew (and admittedly hoped) was coming?

I wrote about the final two episodes of The Gentlemen Season 1 for Vulture. What a pleasure this show turned out to be, no less so for that pleasure being simple.

This ain’t your mother’s Dreamhouse. Or yours, most likely. In fact, until Greta Gerwig came along to escort Barbie to Oscar territory, I’m not sure they ever made a Dreamhouse like this one.

Created at the zenith of the Obama era, the animated web series Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse anticipated the fourth-wall-breaking, consumerism-lampooning, Ken-mocking comedy of 2023’s Barbie by over a decade. It’s smart, it’s funny, it has a 12-episode run on Netflix right now, and if you’re looking for more of the movie’s cheerfully subversive magic, it’s all right here.

Written primarily by David Wiebe and Robin J. Stein and produced by Mattel as a series of web and YouTube shorts — collected by theme into the 12 Netflix episodes — from 2012–15, Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse has little in common with the glut of other CGI Barbie animated shows littering the big red streaming service. This isn’t a straightforward comedy-adventure kids’ cartoon, though it’s certainly kid-friendly (no jokes about Ken’s flesh-colored bulge in this one). Much like the movie, it’s an admittedly gentle but extremely sharp satire of the doll it’s supposed to be marketing. I’m not sure what Barbie creator Ruth Handler would think of it, but Don Draper would be pleased.

Wiebe, Stein, and their crew of talented writers, animators, and voice actors (led by Kate Higgins as Barbie herself) mined decades of Barbie iconography and stereotypes to get adult-size gags out of the children’s toy. In the process, they wrote a partial playbook for the approach the film would take years later. At this point, you may be looking at the shocking pink plasticity of the series and thinking I sound crazy. Trust me, ever since my kids found the series ten years ago, I’ve been getting that on a regular basis. Until people watch, that is. Life in the Dreamhouse, like the Matrix, is something you have to experience for yourself. If you liked the movie, you’ll see the two have a lot in common.

It’s a dream come true for me: I finally got to write about one of the funniest kids’ cartoons I’ve ever seen, Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse, for Vulture!

And just like that, we’re back on track. Not that The Gentlemen took a severe dip in quality in its third and fourth installments, which were good for plenty of fun crime hijinks. It’s just that once you introduce Hitler’s testicle into the equation, things may have gotten a bit too fanciful, even for a show that’s like a Narcos parody set in Downton Abbey.

But with episodes five and six, The Gentlemen comes down to earth, and resumes the breakneck pace of its first two installments. They introduce major new players who look to stay involved for the duration rather than villain-of-the-week types. They feature a startling revelation that completely upends the relationship between Eddie and Susie we’d known. They get surprisingly serious about the human consequences of their telegenic gangsterism. And they remain a ton of fun.

I reviewed the fifth and sixth episodes of The Gentlemen for Vulture.

Under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t watch a pair of episodes in which a woman hacks a man to death with a machete and a machine-gun battle over the future of Hitler’s testicle gets decided with a vintage hand grenade and say the television show in question is taking its foot off the gas a bit. After all, either event would be the most exciting thing that ever happened in, I don’t know, This Is Us. But this is The Gentlemen we’re talking about here, and in its first two episodes, writer-director Guy Ritchie set the mayhem bar pretty high.

But if the show’s third and fourth outings don’t clear that bar, they glide pretty confidently right underneath it. The main issue is simply a structural one. The first two episodes were one long daisy chain of escalating close calls, narrow escapes, and victories snatched from the jaws of defeat (only to be dropped immediately into a new, larger pair of jaws), connected by the Freddy shotgun-murder cliffhanger. These are the kinds of tricks Breaking Bad and even Ozark used to keep things cooking.

By comparison, “Where’s My Weed At?” and “An Unsympathetic Gentlemen” are more episodic in nature. Sure, our heroes’ adventures in both are connected by their deepening, evolving business relationship, as well as by an unknown player using a good old-fashioned honeytrap to get the dirt on their operation. But the two capers are otherwise self-contained, almost villain-of-the-week affairs.

I reviewed episodes three and four of The Gentlemen for Vulture.

Does crime pay? It does if you watch television in 2024. Before the end of February, the tube served up the end of Fargo season five, the fourth season of its fellow anthology series True Detective, the long-awaited second outing of Tokyo Vice, Sofia Vergara’s dramatic breakout Griselda, and the shockingly good Sexy Beast prequel series. Your mileage and/or preferred body count may vary, but even the worst of these shows (which is True Detective, sorry) has a whole lot to recommend it, and the best (Fargo and Sexy Beast) are among the best of the decade. Surely lightning can’t strike half a dozen times, right? Especially not if entry number six is Guy Ritchie, the quintessential acquired taste, remaking one of his own movies as a TV show for some reason, right? Right?

Wrong! Riffing on a concept — druglords using the vast estates of broke English aristocrats to grow weed — from his 2019 film of the same name, The Gentlemen sees co-writer and director Ritchie more or less remake everything else from the ground up. The result, so far, is a scream.

I’m covering The Gentlemen for Vulture, where I reviewed episodes one and two.

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THIS WEEK’S EPISODE OF FARGO AHEAD

Danish falls victim to one of the central schisms of this season, which is the split on the political right wing between the true believers, like Roy Tillman, and the rich people, like Lorraine, who think they’re just using the true believers to keep their taxes low. Danish thinks he knows which side is really in charge, but Roy is the man with the gun, and he thinks otherwise.
You definitely have a sense with Jennifer’s character, Lorraine, that there’s still humanity in her. She cares about her family, and wants to protect them, so it’s at least as far as that. Obviously she’s willing to destroy other people’s lives in service of that goal without any real compunction.

But then you have Jon’s character, who believes he’s empowered by God, and therefore infallible. And can commit murders, randomly, constantly! He believes that if a man’s intentions are pure, everything he does is right, which is a much more dangerous mindset. It’s a psychopathy: You are incapable of feeling empathy, feeling any guilt or remorse for any of your actions, no matter how heinous, because you know, for a fact, you’re right in everything you do.

It reminded me of this fascinating little moment earlier in the season, where Danish is trying to leave Lorraine’s compound, but one of the security guards he himself hired won’t let him leave until he shows ID. It doesn’t make any sense, but the guard has the gun, so he makes the rules.
The power Danish thinks he has is illusory. All his power stems from Lorraine, he doesn’t have any power that’s vested in him, but he thinks he does. When the guard blocks him, it’s a little taste of what’s coming with Sheriff Roy.

When he sees Roy’s gun, in my mind, Danish is just disbelieving, because usually people are afraid of him. He’s like, “No, people are afraid of me! This isn’t gonna happen! He’s not gonna do this.” Right up until the moments the shots are fired, he still believes he has a fearsome presence.

Danish’s disbelief is so convincing that for a minute I didn’t believe it either. Roy pulls out his gun and I’m just like, Hmmm, what’s he getting at here?
[Laughs.] Then the misdirection worked! Good!

I interviewed Dave freaking Foley about Fargo for Vulture! Holy cow!

Speaking of Lanfear, did you have any idea that she was going to get this kind of reaction from viewers?
Yes, we have been stanning Lanfear since the writers’ room; there’s one writer in particular who would do her best Lanfear all over the room. As soon as Natasha O’Keeffe got to Prague and started playing the character, everyone could tell that something really special was happening. On set, we use the drag-queen dial. I’ll be like, “You’re kind of like 80 percent drag queen in this scene right now, and we need you dialed down to a 70.” That’s the shorthand we use for Lanfear.

But Natasha can deliver all of the layers of Lanfear at once. “You’re in bed talking about your past relationships, but you were actually in love with him 3,000 years ago and he broke up with you, and that’s why you joined the Dark, so you’ve always hated him, but you still love him.” She could do all that and make it feel simple.

I interviewed The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins about the show’s exceptional second season for Vulture.

But what it really ends with is a sense of possibility. The Wheel of Time is blazing a new path for fantasy on television — unmistakably epic, yet with markedly different influences and interests and emphasis than its predecessors. There are more cultural variables in play, there are more major heroes and villains at work, and the whole concept of, essentially, superheroes leading armies to save the world is a fun one. So too is a fantasy story in which most of the main characters are women and where women call the shots without much question. This is not at all to say that other approaches to gender in fantasy are invalid; the idea that this approach is superior to, say, House of the Dragon’s approach, instead of simply different, is dumb. But it is different, and that’s exciting!

I reviewed the season finale of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

It’s these human moments that make The Wheel of Time compelling television. Think also of the complex enmity between Egwene and Renna; Moiraine and Siuan, torn between love and their secret duty; Rand and Lanfear, each playing with the other’s emotions while knowing their own aren’t safe; Mat and his bone-deep conviction that he’s a no-good piece of shit; Nynaeve finally realizing, despite her ego, that Elayne’s really a better commander of their mission than she is; Ishamael’s relatable desire simply to close his eyes one day and never open them again, with the cycle of reincarnation ended forever. From Game of Thrones to Foundation, the best science-fantasy spectacles on television know that prophecies and sorceries only get you so far. Human desire is the real magic here.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Obscenity in art is a powerful thing. Not cussing and fucking, though they’re pretty great too, and thankfully in some abundance during this season of The Wheel of Time. True obscenity — the profaning of the sacred, the desecration of the holy, the soiling of the pure — is a powerful thing when you want to depict what evil really looks like.

Think of the Avatar movies and how gross and vile it feels when the human soldiers destroy that big Hometree or slaughter that poor mother whale. They’re not just committing a crime against some blue aliens but against life itself. They’re making a mockery of what we hold dear. It feels more than wrong — it feels filthy, like we’re seeing something disgusting that should never have happened. An obscenity.

That’s how I felt watching the Seanchan commander, High Lady Suroth, command her new Ogier slave Loial to “sing.” This is no mere command performance for the courtiers; this is profound magic, an obviously sacred and meaningful sonic ritual through which the Ogier can persuade the earth’s plants to grow before our very eyes. To Suroth and her cronies, it’s a party trick, like bringing a toddler out to recite the alphabet or making your dog sit with a Milk-Bone on his nose. It’s one of the most beautiful uses of magic we’ve seen so far, and they laugh at it like it’s a mere amusement. To Loial, it’s clear he couldn’t be more humiliated if they’d forced him to whip his dick out. It’s grotesque, shameful, obscene.

I reviewed this week’s brutal episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

Which is good, because TWoT is at the point now where, after two very good episodes, a merely decent episode like this one feels like a step in the wrong direction. In part, this is because of the decision of the filmmakers (the episode was written by Rohit Kumar and directed by Maja Vrvilo) to stage half the episode at night, when the show has demonstrated approximately zero capability of making nighttime scenes look anything other than dim and lifeless. Not even the big fight scene between the Children of Light and Perrin and Aviendha, which is too rapidly edited to really convey the physicality of the battle, can overcome this handicap. It’s really wild: I was watching today’s episode of Billions, which at various times turns Manhattan alleyways into portals of danger and mystery, and wondering, “How the hell can a financial drama about Wall Street make the night look brighter and more magical than a megabudget fantasy spectacle?”

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Wheel of Time for Vulture.

A bird’s eye view of the city of Tar Valon spread out in all its splendor around the great White Tower. A vampiric being of an ancient evil called back from beyond the grave while while dripping Hellraiser quantities of blood from her nude body. Moiraine Damodred futzing around in her childhood room, the ghost of a smile on her face as she remembers who she used to be. The ornate latticework covering every column within the tower of the Aes Sedai, a simple design flourish that communicates their beauty and skill on the one hand, their preoccupation with ritual and their decadent splendor on the other. The attempted murder of a demigoddess.

There are many things, large and small, that I could single out as the highlight of this episode of The Wheel of Time, the second very strong one in a row. You know what I’m going to go with, though? A’Lan Mandragoran, the handsome and tormented Warder, pissing on a tree trunk.

I reviewed The Wheel of Time‘s second terrific episode in a row for Vulture.

There’s poetry there, right? Potentially, anyway. A neutralized wizard bids farewell to her warrior protector. A messiah can’t be with the one he loves, so he loves the one he’s with. A young student makes a new friend at the potential expense of the old. These are the kinds of relationship dynamics a show can really dig into — and should, if it knows what’s good for it.

I reviewed the second episode of The Wheel of Time Season 2 for Vulture.

There are times when the show that results from all this business feels less like a story, like a lived-in world, and more like a very large box purchased at the cost of a few hundred million dollars into which various story — and lived-in-world-shaped objects can be dropped. I’m a big partisan of the ornate White Tower as a set and location design; its pristine snow-colored latticework filigrees mark it as a place too powerful to be touched and sullied by the wars its residents constantly wage. The show has a kind of ostentatiously poly-couple sex positivity that distinguishes it from the pack, if nothing else. Pike and Henney are transcendently attractive. The Trollocs are perfect monsters under the bed. Beyond that, I’m not sure we’re getting anything here we can’t get more of, or better, elsewhere.

But sometimes that’s enough, you know? I tend to see The Wheel of Time through the eyes of my 12-year-old, a fantasy nerd to whom live-action epic fantasy is still so novel that virtually anything corresponding to that description is a home run. I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t still enough of a 12-year-old fantasy nerd left within me that I myself didn’t react that way to the show, at least part of the time, even if Jordan’s books weren’t part of my personal repertoire. Sometimes you just wanna see people in tunics fire waves of magic at people in monster suits, maybe with some swords thrown in the middle. The Wheel of Time gives you that, and if you like that sort of thing, it’s the sort of thing you’ll like.

The Wheel of Time is back and so am I, covering it for Vulture. It’s mid, but in a basically good way? Here’s my review of the Season 2 premiere.

But take heed of Joy’s words to Simone, who tracks her down thanks to that repetitive glitch we kept hearing when she’d talk to the app via proxy, culminating in that big serenade of “Electric Avenue.” (That’s where Joy lives.) Mrs. Davis isn’t a she, Joy says, but an it. Algorithms aren’t a form of life; they’re code. They don’t have subconsciouses; they have subroutines. They don’t have mothers; they have coders. It’s not just that the quest Mrs. Davis assigned to Simone is dumb; it’s that all algorithms are “super dumb.”

This is the kind of energy we need in 2023, as our tech and business overlords try to convince us that AI is learning, growing, and experiencing organisms capable of replacing virtually all human endeavors. They’re just moronic computer programs that plagiarize Wikipedia and make pictures of fake people with 17 fingers. That’s it! Algorithms are not inevitable, and they don’t have intelligence, not any more than Pong was an Olympic table-tennis champion.

The episode’s problem — the whole show’s problem, in fact — is that its valuable insights kind of begin and end there.

I reviewed the season (series?) finale of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

Hold on, I’m getting a message from a hidden resistance cell dedicated to thwarting the onslaught of AI. A top-secret organization called the WGA? Anyway, they say that Jason Ning and Jonny Sun wrote this episode of Mrs. Davis and that without union screenwriters, everything any of us have ever read, written, or posted about television shows like Mrs. Davis would not be possible. Huh, sounds like those writers should be paid and treated fairly. Something to consider!

I reviewed last week’s episode of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

It can be said without fear of contradiction that this is the least zany episode of Mrs. Davis yet. Except for the part when David Arquette goes undercover as a nun. Or the scene where Jesus permits Simone to fuck her ex-boyfriend. Or the deal when a copy of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged unlocks a secret chamber with a Star Wars trash compactor–style security mechanism. Or the reveal that there’s a fully accurate replica of the office with the secret chamber and trash compactor on a soundstage in Altadena. Or the lengthy animatic depicting how Simone’s dad rigged a corpse to be dissolved in acid and ooze a wave of viscera all over the set of a local morning show in Reno. Or the way good sex warps you to Jesus’ restaurant right in the middle of it — no matter how half- or fully naked you are at the time.

But yeah, other than that? Pretty straightforward stuff!

I reviewed today’s episode of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

“Would you two prefer to keep on wildly theorizing, or may I continue on with the story?” I get the impression this question, asked by Dr. Schrödinger of his visitors Lizzie and Wiley, has been on Mrs. Davis co-creator Damon Lindelof’s mind for a long time.

On the one hand, wild theorizing has kept him in business. Large portions of the fanbases of Watchmen,The Leftovers, and especially Lost spent week after week frantically guessing, even passionately arguing, what would happen next. From water coolers to internet forums to social media to speculative articles on, well, websites like this one, theorizing generates buzz and maintains interest.

At any rate, Mrs. Davis is a wildly theorizing kind of show. Lindelof and his co-creator and showrunner Tara Hernandez have, in this respect at least, truly committed to the bit. From episode to episode, from storyline to storyline, from scene to scene, occasionally from line to line, the show is a constant deluge of “everything you thought you knew was wrong,” much more so even than Lost.

But it’s also much funnier in how it does this than Lost was. On that show, the mysteries were serious business. On Mrs. Davis, by contrast, the whole thing is one big metatextual tap dance atop the fourth wall. This isn’t a show that simply has big twists and turns, nor even a show about having big twists and turns — it’s a show about how its big twists and turns are inherently ridiculous.

I reviewed episode five of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

As a final side note, and speaking as a very lapsed Catholic, I’m also grateful for how this enables the show to sidestep a nagging question: Why become a nun, of all things? Without getting into the weeds about it, the Catholic Church’s actions and beliefs are real things that have had real pernicious effects in the real world. Yes, it’s fun to watch a beautiful woman in a nun’s habit ride motorcycles and kick ass, but it’s less fun when you consider what the church she belongs to believes in and/or has covered up. Lindelof already played fast and loose with a problematic institution, policing in the United States, to the detriment of Watchmen; I’m happy to see him and his colleagues write their way out of doing something similar this time around by making Simone’s commitment romantic rather than ideological in nature.

I reviewed the third and fourth episodes of Mrs. Davis for Vulture.

I wish Mrs. Davis had the courage to just be the thing, not be a thing about being the thing.

I’m covering Mrs. Davis, the new series co-created by Damon Lindelof, for Vulture, starting with my review of the first two episodes.