Which brings us back to The Silence of the Lambs, the still-controversial masterpiece from which Clarice springs, and the legacy of transphobia that emerged in its wake. People understandably focus on the scene in which the serial killer Buffalo Bill puts on his makeup and tucks in front of the mirror — but that’s not the real Bill, just a self-aggrandizing fantasy. No, the real Bill comes out when he’s taunting Catherine Martin by mocking her screams in the bottom of that well, pulling at his shirt to mimic having breasts in a cruel pantomime of womanhood, one meant to insult and injure. (I mean, in that tucking scene, he is wearing a dead woman’s scalp as a wig.) As both Hannibal Lecter and Clarice herself say in The Silence of the Lambs, Bill isn’t trans. He’s just a dime-a-dozen misogynist, killing women because he hates and resents them, not because he is one himself.

But within the world of Clarice, the discourse around Bill’s crimes is no more nuanced than the one around The Silence of the Lambs was when it came out 30 years ago. Transphobic shitheads are always going to use Bill as a cudgel; given that Clarice is built around Bill much more so than around even Hannibal the Cannibal, it behooves the show to address this head-on. Giving voice to these concerns, hiring a trans actress to play a trans woman in order to articulate them, making the point that the silences (pun almost certainly intended) around Bill and his place in popular culture are as damaging in their own way as an affirmative assertion of his illusory trans-ness would have been — these are worthwhile moves to have made.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

This week’s episode of Clarice finds the show at its most Hannibal-esque, and I mean that in both senses of the word. First, you have some of the show’s most boldly aestheticized shots: a roast duck filmed in disorienting, slow-moving close-ups designed to make it look like something out of The Texas Chain-Saw Massacre, the appearance of Clarice Starling’s memories in a glass orb on her therapist’s end table, a slow-motion suicide off a bridge that ends with a scream and an artful blood splatter on the frozen river below. I don’t think Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet’s show is going to be mistaken for Bryan Fuller’s anytime soon, but it’s willing to borrow a few tricks from Hannibal’s bag now and then.One Great StoryThe one story you shouldn’t miss, selected by New York editors

In this episode, Clarice also proves willing to invoke the H-man himself — not by name, since that’s contractually verboten, but at least by reputation. “I am not worried about him,” Clarice tells her therapist when the woman mentions the famous serial killer who had previously taken an interest in the workings of Starling’s mind. When the therapist presses, Clarice insists, “He is not coming after me. For him, hunting me wouldn’t bring relief. It would only articulate his own unspoken self-loathing.” I’m still holding out hope that Clarice gets a season-ending phone call from her old friend — hey, this is Hollywood, miracles happen — but this’ll do for now.

I reviewed last night’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

Is it real or is it fake? Is it a sport or is it an art form? Is the story what goes on inside the ring or what happens behind the scenes? These questions animate any serious discussion of professional wrestling; the key to understanding this American pastime is that the answer is yes, on all counts.

No series has understood this better than Dark Side of the Ring. Billed as the most-watched show in the history of Vice TV, Dark Side digs into the history of professional wrestling for its most controversial and criminal moments, which it portrays with genuine style and considerable compassion. Returning for its third season on May 6, it’s a must for true-crime junkies and wrestling aficionados alike. You don’t need to be a pro-wrestling scholar to find it a gripping, moving watch.

I wrote about Dark Side of the Ring for Vulture in anticipation of last night’s season premiere. I put a lot into this one and I hope you enjoy it.

The most powerful tool in Clarice’s arsenal is right there in the title. At this midway point in the show’s debut season, Rebecca Breeds’s lead performance is holding up remarkably well. Never once when I’m watching her do I think, Oh, that’s a Jodie Foster impersonation; I think, Oh, that’s Clarice Starling, and move on. There was never any guarantee that this process would take place, but Breeds brings the right combination of fragility and steel to the role, and her accent is impeccable (especially when you consider her Australian background). With so much riding on this central role, the show would have collapsed almost instantaneously had Breeds not brought so much to the table. She makes it seem seamless, and that’s no small feat.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Decider.

This week’s episode of Clarice presents us with a meal and a mystery. From where I’m sitting, both are equally compelling. The first episode of the show that has felt like an organic extension of previous plotlines rather than the introduction or continuation of a procedural-style case of the week, “How Does It Feel to Be So Beautiful” seems to find Clarice finding its footing. I’m hoping it continues down this path indefinitely.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

Thus concludes this stage of the investigation into the so-called River Murders. I assume there will be hell to pay for Clarice, who once again went off investigating on her own and fell into the clutches of a killer without having told any of her colleagues where she was going or what she was doing. “Alone is safe for her,” Ardelia tells the ViCAP boys — safe in a psychological sense perhaps, but physically it’s a pretty damn dangerous state for someone in Clarice’s line of work, and two women are dead because of Clarice’s actions. It’s a conundrum: Her investigative instincts are brilliant, but her risky propensity for going solo threatens to undo much of the good she’s otherwise capable of doing. I’m glad the show crafted this compelling little horror story to emphasize this central conflict. Here’s hoping they keep on turning the screws until something snaps.

“Lurid” may be the best zone for Clarice judging from last night’s episode, which I reviewed for Vulture.

Still, as Clarice is waylaid by yet another killer whom only she seems able to detect and stop, it’s hard to ignore the show’s liabilities as a narrative. The Silence of the Lambs works because Clarice investigates only one case and has only one brush with death. In Clarice, she’s already had three near-death experiences in four episodes total. This is standard cop-show shit, for sure, but don’t you want your Silence spinoff to be more than standard cop-show shit? If, multiple times a season, Starling’s going to come within a hair’s breadth of being killed before the killer gets thwarted, its painstaking realism will become a liability right quick. Hannibal could get away with Will Graham & Co. bagging killer after killer because it was pointedly disinterested in realism from the start. Clarice has no such ambition and no such luxury.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

And it’s a decent episode, all told, and for all its faults. I’m not sure if the conspiracy story line has legs, or if it’s the kind of story fans of The Silence of the Lambs Cinematic Universe are interested in seeing; if this show doesn’t serve up a new serial killer with a cool nickname and a horrifying M.O. by the end of the season, I’ll eat a census taker’s liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. I’m also not wild about recasting Martin and Krendler as Clarice’s surrogate work-mother and work-father.

But that close-up device from Clarice’s therapy sessions, and her surreal visions of those moths, point to a potentially more visually imaginative show than what we’ve seen so far. Clarice’s ability to bulldoze institutional obstacles with her powers of observation is another positive trait for the show. I think that’s the real tension underlying Clarice: Can a show on CBS, a network replete with Good Police catching the bad guys, ever be as interesting as the hugely and deservedly acclaimed film on which it’s based? That a “yes” is even possible at this point has to be counted as a victory. And like Clarice and the VICAP team, you take your W’s when you can.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

Last week, Clarice Starling uncovered a series of murders targeting whistleblowers. For now, at least, that case is off the docket. Instead, she and the rest of the FBI’s VICAP team are off to Tennessee, where local and federal law enforcement are in a tense standoff at a heavily armed militia compound. The confrontation, which began when an unknown member of the group opened fire on an ATF agent, threatens to become “another Waco”—something Attorney General Martin, a Tennessee native, wants to avoid at all costs. There’s dingy local color, there’s flashbacks to Clarice’s Appalachian childhood, and there’s a bunch of generic cop-show stuff that raises some uncomfortable questions about what, exactly, we’re doing here.

For starters, why is Clarice tagging along on this mission, considering the insubordinate way she went off-script and described the whistleblower killings as coordinated and targeted rather than the work of a serial killer last week? Her boss, Agent Krendler, has in fact already requested her transfer off the VICAP team as a result. “The only reason you’re here,” he says to her, “is I don’t trust you out of my sight.” That creaking sound you hear? That’s the writers strrrrrrrrrrretching to keep Clarice at the center of the action despite behavior that ought to sideline her. Not a good sign, this early in the series!

I reviewed this week’s episode of Clarice for Vulture.

There is one very live issue on which the pilot appears to have closed the book already: How much of a presence will Hannibal Lecter’s absence occupy in the show? Clarice’s legally mandated inability to mention him by name — in one of the episode’s funnier moments, Clarice’s shrink refers to him as her former therapist — did not necessarily mean he wouldn’t still be there, exerting unseen influence.

Consider, for example, the way Marlon Brando’s Vito Corleone became a sort of structuring absence in The Godfather Part II, a void around which the whole story implicitly orbited, with Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone attempting to live up to the old man’s legacy while the flashbacks to Robert De Niro’s young version of Vito depicted how he became the larger-than-life presence he was in the first film. A bit closer to home, Laura Palmer was just a prom photo and a few seconds of videotape footage for the bulk of Twin Peaks. However, creators David Lynch and Mark Frost never lost sight of how her absence, caused by her murder, continued to affect her family and friends, even after the circumstances of that murder were uncovered and solved. (Well, more or less — particularly by the show’s third season, it was clear that nothing in Twin Peaks was ever truly solved).

By contrast, Clarice devises a bold and, to my mind, successful work-around for the Hannibal issue: It prioritizes Clarice’s experience confronting and killing Buffalo Bill, the murderer whom Lecter helped her track down, rather than her experience with the good doctor himself. The decision actually makes good sense, from a character perspective. Sure, Clarice’s conversations with the Cannibal were harrowing; granting a psychopathic psychiatrist a deep dive into your childhood trauma is gonna leave a mark. But Clarice implicitly argues — with ample justification, as far as I’m concerned — that killing a man before he kills both you and the young woman he intended to be his seventh victim is a much bigger deal, leaving much deeper wounds. Clarice’s constant flashbacks (emphasis on flash; they pop up for split seconds) to Bill and his moth-infested house of horrors ground the show in that experience, not in Clarice’s comparatively tame quid-pro-quo relationship with Lecter.

(That Lecter is currently at large in the show’s time frame, having escaped during the course of the events of the film, does not appear to enter into its calculations at all; as Clarice herself said in the movie, she’s not worried about Lecter coming after her, because “he would consider that rude.” Case closed!)

I’m covering Clarice for Vulture, starting with my review of the series premiere.

We’ll never know, and that’s the beauty of the thing. The Third Day is a show about the mysteries of faith that lets them remain mysterious. The point — aside from being scary, which the show frequently was — is to probe at our own feelings of exclusion and belonging, whether in a community or a family or both. What are we willing to sacrifice for that sense of belonging, and is it worth the sacrifice? The Third Day doesn’t answer that for us because it can’t. Only we know, and it’s up to us to tell our secrets; or to keep them until the day the world forces our hand.

I reviewed the finale of The Third Day for Vulture. This was really well-done folk horror, and Jude Law is tremendous.

I’ve written before that Jude Law’s face is the real star of The Third Day. After tonight’s episode, it’s safe to say that Naomie Harris’s face shares top billing. Watch how director Philippa Lowthorpe’s camera holds a closeup as Harris’s character Helen learns that the baby she just delivered, for a woman she spent all night trying to locate and help, was fathered by her missing husband Sam—who’s still alive and well and living on the island of Osea, despite everything she’s heard to the contrary.

It’s subtle, but you can almost see the exact moment at which the tears of joy pooling in her eyes for the beauty of this mother-and-child tableau turn to tears of shock and sadness. You can just barely see her smile tighten, the love and happiness it connoted twisting around in her mind to betrayal and confusion and anger. But Helen has to keep it together, she has to maintain the serene and peaceful front. Even when Jess, the woman whose baby Helen helped bring into the world, tasks Helen with walking to the island’s “big house” and summoning Sam to see his new daughter, Helen doesn’t break. But you can see everything she’s holding back, written all over her face.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture.

One thing that is clear? The Third Day has not missed a step despite the creative changeover. (Series co-creator Dennis Kelly remains aboard, it should be noted, co-writing the episode with Kit de Waal and Dean O’Loughlin.) The causeway is still an evocative visual signature for the show. John Dagleish’s Larry is still an intimidating heavy; somehow he’s even scarier being friendly than he is being surly. The Martins remain maddening and menacing despite their surface friendliness and their ability to explain away every weird thing that happens—your missing car? Stolen, not towed! The screaming woman? She’s gone into labor! The abandoned house with a fully equipped operating theater? It’s for the birth, since the woman refuses to go to the mainland! The frightening iconography you see everywhere you look? “We’ve had our customs for years,” says Mrs. Martin; “They ain’t pretty, but I’m not fucking apologizing for them.” See? There’s a too-perfectly logical explanation for everything!

I reviewed last night’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. A fine start for the folk-horror series’ second half.

Moreover, what I said in my review of the series premiere remains true: Jude Law’s face alone tells the story. His pores are choked by dirt and grime. His temple is caked with blood, both dry and wet. His cheeks are streaked with tears for himself and, eventually, for his son. There’s something … I dunno, almost thrilling about seeing a handsome male actor subjected to the final-girl indignities of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Aliens or Marilyn Burns’s Sally in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Florence Pugh’s Dani in Midsommar. To watch someone so beautiful be physically and emotionally broken down is like witnessing a human sacrifice of a sort.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture.

I promise you there’s a good reason so much of this review is just the breathless recitation of the plot. It’s like that because the plot has reached that magical point that horror movies, the good ones anyway, arrive at midway through. So much is happening, so many threats are emerging, so many false leads are being tried and rejected, that the resulting feeling borders on intoxication. Your heart and mind race even as you remain glued to the spot, trying to keep up, trying to identify the danger — and worrying, on some lizard-brain level, that the danger has the ability to reach out and identify you. This is thrilling filmmaking, raw and weird and alive, like the rituals it chronicles.

I reviewed tonight’s episode of The Third Day for Vulture. If “The Wicker Man, starring The Young Pope” appeals to you in any way, you need to watch The Third Day.

The Third Day doesn’t star Jude Law so much as Jude Law’s face. Expressive, careworn, and, in the words of The Young Pope, “incredibly handsome,” Jude Law’s face weaves in and out of focus as he makes a frantic phone call to his wife while in a panic over a burglary at his office (which winds up costing him 40,000 pounds meant to bribe an official). Jude Law’s face peers through the windshield of his car, mouth slightly agape with concentration as he wends his way across a twisty, waterlogged causeway. Jude Law’s face is swollen with the tears of uncontrolled grief. Jude Law’s face stares with narrowed, disgusted eyes at the carcass of a brightly colored cricket stuffed with dozens if not hundreds of tiny black beetles. Jude Law’s face beams with boozy delight as he and his fellow pub patrons, thrown together by circumstance, party the night away. Jude Law’s face stares at itself in the mirror, all the fun of the evening drained out of it as he realizes just how lost he is emotionally, let alone physically. Using a script by series co-creator (with Felix Barrett) Dennis Kelly, director Marc Munden knows what an incredible instrument his leading actor has, and he composes the whole episode around it like a symphony.

Somehow I forgot to mention that I’m covering the new Jude Law/Naomie Harris folk-horror drama The Third Day for Vulture! Here’s my review of the premiere.

Gripping? Yes. Great? Though it’s often talked about in the same breath as the likes of Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, two other shows about family men behaving badly, those comparisons don’t quite fly. Ozark is like those shows, sure. But prestige-TV analogies fail to recognize the difference between this series and the others: This is a Netflix show, designed by creators Bill Dubuque and Mark Williams, showrunner Chris Mundy, and producer-director-star Jason Bateman, with Netflix’s binge model in mind. You’re meant to get onboard quickly and stay onboard for the duration. As such, Ozark’s creative decisions make it the Platonic ideal of a Netflix drama. It is its own unique beast.

I wrote about Ozark and the Netflix drama model for Vulture.

That episode begins with this scene of Ben alone in a taxi, talking to the driver a mile a minute, walking up to the edge of lucidity about his predicament but unable to do anything about it. I’ve read that you stuck to the script in that sequence, but your performance, it felt improvised in the best way.

That was written by Miki Johnson, and I’m sure we’ll all be hearing her name for years to come. Having finally seen what they used, I noticed that there were a few times where I was repeating lines; that must’ve been a certain take where I was just looking for a purchase.

But it was, in my opinion, some of the best writing that I had ever read. Even though on one level, objectively, you’re like, This is kind of rambling and doesn’t fully make sense, I thought that the writer did an amazing job of giving it this flawless emotional logic. Once you can find that, then it’s just a matter of, I want to show up word-perfect because I cannot make this writing better. There’s not a version of me improvising that scene that makes it better. The only thing that could happen with me improvising that scene is making it worse. She’s the writer for a reason, and she’s where she is for a reason, and so you just show up as prepared as possible.

So I spent weeks just going over and over and over the lines because that’s my job. When you know the lines that well, you do really give yourself the freedom to relax and play and let the words work through you, and you go for this ride where you’re not exactly sure what’s going to happen. I just can’t overstate this: It’s the kind of freedom and opportunity that is only possible when the writing is that good, and I really think it was that good.

I interviewed actor Tom Pelphrey about his phenomenal work as Ben in Ozark Season Three for Vulture.

Are professional wrestlers just the world’s most muscular theater kids? To quote wrestling legend “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, who appeared on last night’s episode of WWE’s Monday Night Raw: Hell yeah.

Broadcast live without an audience for the first time in history, both Monday Night Raw on the USA Network and last Friday’s episode of Smackdown on Fox stripped wrestling down to its bare essentials: a ring, a microphone, and wrestlers to use both. The result was less like the WWE’s usual played-to-the-rafters gladiatorial spectacle and more like tech week for a black-box production. It showcased the performers at their weirdest, wildest, and most, well, theatrical.

I wrote about the strangeness of wrestling without crowds for Vulture.

When it finally happens, the meeting of the Young Pope and the New Pope is an anticlimax. It’s not the confrontation, the clash, the climax promised by the opening credits, which feature Sir John Brannox leading a procession from the right-hand side of the screen while Lenny Belardo strides across the beach in his skivvies from the left, presaging a showdown in the center that never arrives. It’s just Pius XIII in the garb of a simple priest, walking into a room where John Paul III waits for him. It happens so simply and so quickly I didn’t even realize what I was looking at.

And that’s just one of the ways that the season finale of The New Pope, one of the best television shows I’ve ever seen, defies expectations.

I wrote about the finale of The New Pope for Vulture. It was a pleasure and a privilege to write about this extraordinary show, the best thing about which I can say is that it was worthy of its predecessor.