A Look at "Lazarus"

I admit that I was only interested in watching the newest anime from Shinichiro Watanabe, "Lazarus," because it's so obviously trying to evoke the look and feel of "Cowboy Bebop," one of the best animated series ever made.  The opening sequence in particular uses the same visual style and a similarly bombastic opening instrumental.  Several of the primary "Bebop"  voice actors also pop up here and there in smaller roles.  Another selling point is the participation of Chad Stahelski, best known as one of the directors behind "John Wick," as a consultant for the show's fight choreography.  The "Lazarus" premiere features a jaw-dropping prison escape sequence that is tremendously fun.

"Lazarus" was a joint production with Adult Swim, and it's clear they wanted another "Cowboy Bebop."  In fact, it often feels like Watanabe had an entirely different show in mind and just grafted all the "Bebop" aesthetics on it in order to get the thing made, down to every episode taking its title from a song or album, and ending with a white text fragment on a black background.  "Lazarus" takes place in the near-future, where a wonder drug called Hapuna has been created by Dr. Deniz Skinner (Koichi Yamadera).  Hapuna eradicates pain and quickly becomes popular recreationally.  However, it turns out to be a Trojan Horse, and everyone who took Hapuna will die three years later unless Skinner and his antidote can be found.  Who can get the job done?  If you guessed a ragtag group of criminals coerced into becoming a superteam team by a shady governmental figure with access to way too many resources, you're right.

So meet Axel Gilberto (Mamoru Miyano), a petty criminal and escape artist, Chris Blake (Maaya Uchida) a sexy mercenary, Leland Astor (Yuma Uchida) a teenage drone pilot, Elena (Manaka Iwami) a hacker prodigy, Doug Hadine (Makoto Furukawa), the guy in charge of keeping them all on track, and finally Hersch Lindemann (Megumi Hayashibara), the aforementioned shady governmental figure.  One of them is a former Russian spy, one of them is a former secret test subject, one is a former cult member, one is a double agent, and one is secretly filthy rich.  They have thirty days to find Skinner before people start dying, and somehow every place they look results in the team getting involved in gunfights, chases, and improbable action sequences.  Axel, a parkour expert, is positioned as our lead character and gets all the showiest scenes.  

For the most part, "Lazarus" looks pretty good.  There's a predictable drop in the animation quality after the first episode, and the character designs are incredibly derivative, but if all you're after is a slick piece of entertainment, "Lazarus" fits the bill just fine.  After the introductory episodes lay out the science-fiction premise, the show mostly falls into the pattern of a mission-of-the-week action show.  I kept wanting to compare it to "The A-team" or "Mission: Impossible" television programs, where the gang ends up in all sorts of improbable situations.  This is the kind of show where an insecure male character ends up in drag trying to suss out a drug dealer's potential connection to Skinner.  Axel eventually gains an evil psychopathic stalker, because we have to have an evil psychopathic stalker, don't we?   

The premise is a good one, but largely goes to waste.  I assumed that "Lazarus" was going to lean into its dystopian vibes, showing how the world would react to an apocalypse on the horizon.  They could have targeted the pharma industry like "Common Side Effects" or the culture of distraction, like "Paranoia Agent."  Instead, anything too serious is only addressed obliquely.  A handful of episodes have one of the main characters explain why they took Hapuna via somber opening narration, but this has little to do with the plot itself.  There's almost no attempt to have the main characters grapple with the morality of any of their actions, and the mood is always very light.  There's some material showing how Skinner gradually lost faith in humanity, but it's always kept peripheral.   

What's more disappointing is that Axel and the rest of his team stay pretty flat characters.  We eventually learn more about everyone's backgrounds, and there are a few tragic backstories, but there's never a sense of much character growth.  The characters bond as a team, but they never feel like they form individual relationships with each other.  For instance, when Elena makes a friend it's with a fellow hacker.  And when Chris gets into trouble with ex-employers, the rest of the team decide to use up precious time to rescue her, but there's next to no discussion of why.   

As a result, "Lazarus" ends up feeling generic and disposable.  There were clearly a lot of resources poured into this project, but I don't think I can recommend more than the first episode or two, and really that's just for the fancy animation.  Everything else here has been done better by other series, including the "Cowboy Bebop" homages.  

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"The Librarians" and "Mr. Nobody Against Putin"

More spotlights of recent documentaries today, this time focusing on films about the politicization of education systems.

"The Librarians," directed by Kim A. Snyder, profiles several librarians and former librarians from Texas and Florida, who were at the center of the book banning controversies in their states in the post-COVID years.  From the opening frames, it is a film that had my blood boiling, because of the subject matter.  The bans are documented in great detail, shown to be based on the flimsiest pretexts and being pushed by bad faith actors from the very beginning.  Eventually, they are revealed to be the result of a concerted campaign by a handful of extremist Christian Nationalist groups to try and demonize the LGBT community by spearheading a witch hunt of inclusive educators and librarians.  

When we look back on this period in American history, "The Librarians" will provide one of the clearest examples of how the culture war was propagated through fearmongering and misinformation, and the deleterious effects on some of our most vital educational and informational systems.  The film is structured around the interviews with the librarians, who make it very clear that the losers in this fight are always the children who lose vital access to books.  While a portion of the film is spent tracing where the money is coming from that is funding the hate campaigns, I appreciate that little time is wasted on the aims of the Christian Nationalists, whose viewpoint is based entirely in ignorance and intolerance.  Instead, the focus stays on the heroic efforts of the librarians, who do their best to resist not only against their single-minded harassers, but against the complacency of the administrators who often try to appease the mob.  Some of the most uplifting moments I've seen in any film all year are the clips of the students who are inspired to speak out against the bans.

A very stark example of what happens when you don't push back against this kind of politicization of education comes in "Mr Nobody Against Putin," a documentary largely put together by Pavel Talankin.  Talankin is the former videographer and events coordinator of a primary school in the Russian industrial town of Karabash.  Due to his position, he was able to document what happened to his school and its students after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, when the government made drastic changes to the curriculum and instituted new measures to spread propaganda and nationalist fervor.  Talankin narrates and provides context to his footage, which is very rough and piecemeal, but does a good job of capturing a very personal view of Russia's propaganda tactics in a very specific context.

"Mr. Nobody" benefits from the POV of Talankin, who is exactly the kind of energetic, optimistic personality you'd expect to be working as part of the staff of a primary school.  He spends the early part of the film situating us in Karabash and showing us the ins and outs of school life before the government's disruptive edicts start coming in.  The propaganda itself is fascinating, progressing from heavy-handed justifications for the war being delivered by the teachers, to showy demonstrations of loyalty to the state, and lessons where both the teachers and the students have scripted parts.  Significant efforts are expended on looking the part of Russian patriots, and performing for the cameras, as video documentation of their efforts has to be regularly uploaded to a government website.  It's a fascinating, sobering look at the way old totalitarian tactics and new technology have intersected.

I wish we'd gotten a better look at the lives of some of the individual students, but Talankin is only able to include a very few glimpses of young men bound for the front lines and the families they leave behind.  Considering that Talankin was forced to flee Russia by mid-2024, however, I'm not inclined to look a gift horse in the mouth.  

   

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"The Alabama Solution" and "Perfect Neighbor"

All the better documentaries I've watched lately are about social issues that are deeply infuriating, and require more emotional bandwidth to process than I normally have.  It's taken me a while to work up to writing about them, but I definitely want to spotlight these films.  I've got several that I want to talk about, so I'm grouping them by subject matter.  Today, we're going to look at two recent docs that look at the state of the American justice system.

First up, "The Alabama Solution," directed by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman.  This is an examination of the Alabama prison system, which is in such a horrific state that it prompted a federal investigation in 2016.  Much of the footage of the appalling conditions inside the prisons was captured by the inmates themselves on smuggled cell-phones.  The film follows the lives of multiple incarcerated men, including activists Robert Earl Council and Melvin Ray.  We also see the progression of the investigations over multiple years, and an inmate strike that took place in 2022.  Most damningly, the directors also dig into the financial incentives for the terrible treatment of the prisoners, who are exploited as a labor force and fuel the lucrative incarceration industry.    

What is so effective about "The Alabama Solution" is that it is giving a rare voice and platform to the inmates.  The cell-phone footage in particular is acutely disturbing because it shows the world as the inmates view it, unvarnished and uninhibited.  Some of the same subject matter was covered in Ava Duvernay's excellent documentary "The 13th," but "The Alabama Solution" is far more direct and visceral, because we see the abuses up close.  Probably the most important thing that "The Alabama Solution" accomplishes is humanizing its subjects, providing a portrait of the prisoners that stands in direct opposition to the political narrative being used to justify the indefensible actions of those in power.  As with all documentaries about the American justice system, race may not explicitly be a central theme, but the divide between the predominantly black and brown inmates and the almost all-white Alabama politicians is obvious.

A smaller scale, but no less engrossing film is "The Perfect Neighbor," from director Geeta Gandbhir.  In 2023 Ajike Owens, an African-American mother of four, was murdered by her white neighbor Susan Lorincz, in a case that became a subject of debate related to Florida's "stand your ground" laws.  The majority of the film is composed of bodycam and other law enforcement footage, along with audio from 911 calls, documenting the two years worth of incidents involving Lorincz that led up to the killing.  We learn that Lorincz was isolated and paranoid, constantly calling the cops on the neighborhood kids who played on her street.  We learn that she and Owens had had confrontations before, leading Lorincz to claim she felt fearful and persecuted.  From her interactions with law enforcement, we see that she's manipulative, selfish, and holds grudges.    

Susan Lorincz makes for an infuriating subject, who seems to live in her own, miserable closed-off bubble where everyone is out to get her.  However, what's more interesting is how she's treated by the police, especially in the final round of interrogations, which the director includes lengthy, uninterrupted portions of.  The authorities seem to have endless patience with her in every interaction, always polite and giving her the benefit of the doubt, even when her claims are ridiculous.  It's clear that this deference is a tactic in the interrogation scenes, which do not end well for her.  However, it's still striking to compare the treatment of Lorincz to the prevalent image of overzealous policing we see with African-Americans and other racial minority groups.  Director Gandbhir offers little commentary, allowing the footage to speak for itself.  However, an exception comes at the very end of the film, where it is stated plainly that "stand your ground laws" are disproportionately used by white perpetrators against black victims.

Next time, we're going to look at two films about education.  Stay tuned.

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On "Task"

The latest crime miniseries from Brad Inglesby, best known for "Mare of Easttown," is "Task," about a law enforcement task force investigating a series of violent robberies in rural Pennsylvania.  The narrative is split about evenly between the two men who embody the two sides of the investigation.  FBI Agent Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) is charged with heading up the task force by his superior Kathleen McGinty (Marth Plimpton).  This is a ragtag group that includes a city cop, Aleah Clinton (Thuso Mbedu), a state trooper, Lizzie Stover (Alison Oliver), and a county detective, Anthony Grasso (Fabien Frankel).  Brandis is a widower, and we also look in on his complicated home life, involving his grown daughters, Emily (Silvia Dionicio) and Sara (Phoebe Fox).

Then there's Robbie Prendergast (Tom Pelphrey), who has been committing the robberies with his friend Cliff (Raul Castillo), specifically targeting trap houses run by a local motorcycle gang, the Dark Hearts.  Robbie has a grudge against Dark Hearts leader Jayson Wilkes (Sam Keeley) and his mentor Perry Dorazo (Jamie McShane), who don't take kindly to their drug running operations being disrupted.  Robbie's home life is also complicated, as he's currently living with his adult niece Maeve (Emilia Jones), who is looking after Robbie's young kids for him, but wants out as soon as possible.  For most of the series, the law enforcement and criminal characters don't interact, each pursuing separate goals and dealing with several smaller subplots.  Robbie's past and grudge against Jayson is dissected over multiple episodes.  Meanwhile, the task force soon discovers they have a mole in their midst.

Directed by Jeremiah Zagar and Salli Richardson Whitfield, "Task" is one of the best crime miniseries I've seen in a while.  It doesn't particularly strive for authenticity regarding law enforcement procedures, but rather it's aiming for a more genuine picture of the wider community.  This is a fairly rare thing in mainstream media.  Like "Mare of Easttown," most of the characters speak with Delco accents, nobody is very well off, and broken families are a major theme.  The cast is full of familiar names, and it's no wonder, because the material is fantastic and the characters are unusually nuanced and well written.  Tom Pelphrey and Mark Ruffalo give excellent performances as struggling fathers, but Emilia Jones is the one who really impressed me.  I've seen her in several other projects before this, including as the lead in "CODA," but "Task" is where she really got my attention, playing a young woman trying to hold her disintegrating family together, to her own detriment. 

What I value most about "Task" from a more meta standpoint is that it's not afraid to be a character drama about real people, and specifically real people who are not good at what they're supposed to be doing.  Robbie is a terrible criminal who botches a robbery so badly in the first episode that he instigates a manhunt.  Tom isn't a very good FBI agent either, and two of his team are downright incompetent at times.  However, these are all interesting, realistic people whose actions  do follow a sound internal logic when you get to know them.  Several of the storylines unfold like Greek tragedies or episodes of "The Wire," where wider systemic issues or personal flaws are what doom the characters.  I'll warn here that "Task" is a bleak story, featuring many deeply damaged people, and several of the deaths that occur are upsetting.  However, the ending is a hopeful one.  

I was initially hesitant about watching "Task," because I haven't had much interest in terrible stories about terrible people lately.  And that's not what "Task" is at all.  Yes, it's about crime and criminals, and there are scenes of violence.  However, its outlook is very humane and sympathetic to nearly everyone involved in the story on both sides.  And I find that a very valuable thing.  

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At Last, "The Long Walk"

An adaptation of Stephen King's "The Long Walk" likely would have been more effective a few decades ago, when the spectres of past wars loomed larger in the American collective memory.  However, the film that finally did get made is one that could have only been made now, by director Francis Lawrence, after helming four "Hunger Games" movies that proved that there was an audience for movies about dystopian death games featuring children.  However, none of the "Hunger Games" movies are anything close to as dark and violent and emotionally wrenching as "The Long Walk."  

Set in a dystopian United States suffering deep poverty in the wake of a major war, we watch fifty young men and older teenagers participate in a yearly endurance contest where they walk until only one is left.  If they fall below the speed of three miles per hour too many times, they are eliminated permanently.  Contestants include Ray Garraty (Cooper Hoffman), our major protagonist, Pete McVries (David Jonsson), who he becomes friends with, the troublemaker Gary Barkovitch (Charlie Plummer), unflappable Billy Stebbins (Garrett Wareing), and others played by Tut Nyot, Joshua Odjick, Ben Wang, and Jordan Gonzalez.  Overseeing their progress and providing encouragement via megaphone is the Major (Mark Hamill), a grizzled representative of the totalitarian government.

This audience for this kind of movie is  limited, naturally, so "The Long Walk" is a fairly low budget affair.  There are no particularly showy effects sequences and the crowds of onlookers from the Stephen King story are largely absent.  However, this allows "The Long Walk" a rare amount of freedom to be as graphic and vulgar and as unapologetically existential as it should be.  The deaths are very explicit and realistically brutal.  The walkers interact the way we expect a group of teenage boys to interact, conversing with constant profanity, crude humor, and slights against each other's masculinity.  We watch them deal with every physical challenge, including how to urinate and defecate during the contest.  But perhaps what's most surprising is that much of the movie is built on conversations that Ray and Pete have about their lives, the state of the world, and how to survive their ordeal both mentally and spiritually.  The pace of the film is never slow, but it is very deliberate, with a lot of long, lingering shots, and resulting in a mood that is often more meditative than I was expecting.      

It's strange to have to point out that "The Long Walk" is as much of a character drama as it is an action or horror picture, but this is probably the best major film about male camaraderie we've had in years.  Despite being competitors, most of the kids in "The Long Walk" almost immediately band together to help and support each other, with only a few outliers.  The deaths are horrible every time, and we see the boys risk their lives again and again to save each other, or try to stave off the inevitable.  There's a particular timelessness to this version of the story, where the characters don't talk like modern American teenagers, but the behavior feels universal and very immediate.  There are echoes of older war movies, naturally, since Stephen King originally wrote "The Long Walk" in the Vietnam War era, but the messages about young men dealing with violence and resistance and futility are still painfully relevant right now.      

Those familiar with the original King story will notice that there are some changes, some small and some large.  Some are just to make the story more filmable - slowing down the pace of the walkers, cutting down on the body horror, and reducing the number of participants.  Some are far more substantive.  Ray Garraty is given much more material, including a new character arc that might raise some eyebrows.  However, as someone who has been waiting for this adaptation for a couple of decades now, I'm happy to report that none of the changes in any way tone down the content of the original story, and the adaptation is ultimately true to King's work in all the ways that matter.    

Finally, the cast is excellent and the best reason to see the film.  Hoffman and Jonsson are fantastic as the leads, but many of the most memorable kids are the ones in the minor roles.  Judy Greer appears briefly as Garraty's mother, and adds so much.  The earnestness of the characters  and relative lack of satirical elements may feel old fashioned at times, but the performances are anything but.  "The Long Walk" joins that very short list of projects that escaped development hell after far too long, and it turns out that it was worth the wait.

  

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Digging Into "The Lowdown"

From FX and Sterlin Harjo, the co-creator of "Reservation Dogs," comes "The Lowdown," a comedic crime series about a Tulsa investigative reporter loosely based on Lee Roy Chapman.  It is highly entertaining, and easily the best new show I've seen all year.

Ethan Hawke plays our hero, a scruffy writer and bookstore proprietor named Lee Raybon, who is always low on funds and habitually pushing his luck.  However, his most defining trait is that he styles himself a "Truthstorian," who is doggedly committed to uncovering the truth.  His latest article, about the powerful and influential Washberg family, appears to have led to the suicide of Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), but Lee thinks it was murder.  Suspects include Dale's widow Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn), his brother and gubernatorial candidate Donald Washberg (Kyle McLachlan), and some other suspicious characters played by Tracy Letts, Paul Sparks, and Scott Shepherd.  Among Lee's allies are a sympathetic private investigator named Marty (Keith David), an antiquities dealer named Ray (Michael Hitchcock), a reliable employee, Samantha (Kaniehtiio Horn), an unreliable employee, Waylon (Cody Lightning), and Lee's thirteen year-old daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Arnstrong).

"The Lowdown" has the air of a throwback for a lot of reasons, as it belongs in both the neo-western and crime fiction genres, and centers around a man with the nearly extinct profession of independent writer for a long-form print publication.  More than that, it's about a self-aggrandizing, barely functional dreamer with a lofty moral code, who seems to be patterning himself off of the pulp heroes of the Jim Thompson paperbacks that he cherishes.  Ethan Hawke plays Lee Raybon with relish, a charming scarecrow of a man who is always sticking his nose where it doesn't belong, and always making excuses for his utter inability to be a reliable father, employer, friend, or partner.  He consorts with a parade of eccentrics, who all grumble about his flightiness, but clearly enjoy his company.  As someone who avoided Ethan Hawk movies in my youth after finding him insufferable in "Reality Bites," Lee Rayburn strikes me as a natural extension of the pretentious young slacker he played in that movie, if he were from Oklahoma and got a lot funnier and more undignified with time.

And "The Lowdown" being set in and around Tulsa is a big part of the show's appeal.  The city is portrayed as an eclectic melting pot with major Native-American and African-American populations.  As Lee digs into the death of Dale Washberg, he keeps coming across old issues of stolen land, ugly bigotry, and those in power having too many secrets.  Eventually a Native street artist named Chutto (Mato Wayuhi) and his grandfather Arthur (Graham Greene) are caught up in the mystery, and Lee has to acknowledge his own privilege as a white man carelessly blundering into other people's business more than once.  The culture clashes are often played for laughs, but the show does quietly make a point of keeping several minority characters at the forefront, and forcing the hero to weigh his own need to tell the truth against what is best for the community he values and depends on.  

I like that "The Lowdown" isn't in a big hurry to solve its central mystery.  Several episodes have an appealing hangout vibe, where a guest star or two drops in for some shenanigans.  Peter Dinklage's episode is a fun one, for instance.  I especially appreciate the looseness of the show's format, where there's room for humorous digressions, a romance or two, and even opportunities for Lee to learn to be a better father. Lee's life is complicated, and keeping on top of everything means constantly switching gears from one situation to the next.  We're constantly hearing snippets of people telling stories and enjoying stories that we'll never have the full context for.  It's a good sign when minor characters keep surprising you with new dimensions every time they reappear, and you wish that there was time to get to know all of them better.  Even some of the villains come off as surprisingly well-rounded and relatable.  

It's interesting timing that "The Lowdown" premiered pretty close to the release of "One Battle After Another," which doesn't really share much in the way of genre or subject matter, but has a very  similar vibe.  You have a constantly floundering white guy, playing at being much cooler than he actually is, chasing after a romanticized ideal of heroism.  Both ultimately discover that they are at their best when they're part of a multi-racial community fighting against a common enemy, and supporting the next generation.  "The Lowdown" may not have the feature film fireworks of "One Battle After Another," but I'd argue it gets its points across just as well, and is definitely just as entertaining.  

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"A Big Bold Beautiful" Bust

Negative reviews are harder for me to write than positive or mixed ones, because I don't like dwelling on disappointments.  However, I think it's important to examine why certain projects don't work onscreen, just as it's important to examine the ones that do.  Our case in point today is Kogonada's "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey," which is a fantasy fable where two people follow the instructions of a magic GPS to go on an impossible existential road trip into each other's psyches.  And I'm the kind of movie watcher who's usually very receptive to heartwarming nonsense like this.  

Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie play David and Sarah, two very attractive people who each separately rent cars from a strange rental service being run by cryptic, mysterious people played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline.  They attend a wedding together, feel an initial spark, and are ready to leave it at that.  However, the rental car's magic GPS voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith asks David if he wants to go on a "big, bold, beautiful journey," which leads the pair to a series of magical doors that send them to the past, to impossible liminal places, and of course, inevitably, to each other.

I've liked director Kogonada's previous films, "Columbus" and "After Yang," but those were very small scale, meditative art house films, designed for very limited audiences.  "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" is aiming for a bigger, broader audience, but retains the same sort of slow-paced, melancholy atmosphere and deeply introspective storytelling.  There are attempts to jazz up the proceedings with a few brief action sequences, a musical number, and plenty of picturesque cinematography, but in the end the narrative is a gloomy slog that isn't entertaining.  David and Sarah are supposed to fall in love, confront their pasts, and heal their wounded hearts so they can go on to live happily ever after together as better human beings.  However, neither of them come off as particularly genuine or interesting human beings, and it's tough to care about what happens to them.

Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie are lovely, winning performers who have no chemistry together onscreen.  They also frequently feel adrift when trying to navigate scenes where they're supposed to be revisiting episodes from their pasts.  There are a few discrete sections that I liked, late in the film, where David and Sarah are forced to confront their exes to discuss their failed relationships, and later have an honest heart-to-heart about their personality flaws.  These actually feel substantive and push the characters towards new emotional territory.  However, most of the time the film feels meandering and far too self-serious.  The magical GPS and rental car employees are clearly fantasy creatures, but seem wary of being too whimsical.  The few attempts at abrasive humor aren't funny, and I was surprised that the pushy GPS never became an actual character, who might have lightened up the mood a bit.

This magical realist premise might seem like a challenge, but I can think of several similar films that figured out how to make it work.  "All of Us Strangers" and "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" also had love stories that unfolded in metaphysically dubious circumstances.  The Ben Stiller version of "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" was less successful, but still managed to generate a kind of propulsive emotional momentum that's utterly missing from "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey."  With movies like this, you have to wholly embrace being in a fantasy story, and "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" displays far too much trepidation to have any fun with itself.  I suspect that Kogonada was trying to ensure that this wouldn't be mistaken for a children's fantasy film, and ended up undercutting himself.

And on that note, one interesting aspect of the film is that it appears to be taking a lot of inspiration from Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai anime, specifically the way that some of the fantasy and transitional elements are handled.  Note that "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" is longtime Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi's first score for a Hollywood movie, which adds to the effect. There are multiple scenes that I felt would have worked better in animation, and I can't help wondering what  "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" would have looked like as an anime.  Or with non-movie star leads and more go-for-broke fantasy sequences.  Or with a director a little more seasoned and a little less closed-in.

The best thing that I can say about "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" is that it's big and beautiful.  Let's work on being a little more bold next time.

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A Trip To "11.22.63"

Before we get started, I'd like to point out that this Hulu produced miniseries, one of the earliest original titles to premiere on the platform, is no longer on Hulu, but is currently streaming on Tubi.  How's that for a sign of the times?  

2025 was been a banner year for Stephen King projects, so I thought I'd catch up on one that I'd missed - the adaptation of King's time travel novel "11/22/63."  Students of American history will recognize that this was the date when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.  "11.22.63." follows the attempts of a man named Jake Epping (James Franco) to stop the assassination after he discovers a way to go back in time to the 1960s.  

So, we have a popular "What if?" scenario being treated with a rare degree of seriousness, but this is still a genre show that requires some genre conventions.  There are a lot of narrative shortcuts in play, such as much of the research being handed to Jake from the start by another, older time traveler named Al (Chris Cooper), who failed at the same mission.  There's also the idea that the past resists being changed by pushing back against major disruptions in any way that it can.  This means that one of the major villains of the piece is an unseen force creating literal deus ex machina plot twists every time the heroes get too close to accomplishing certain goals.  A major new character was also created for the show, Bill Turcotte (George McKay), a young man who becomes Jake's ally in the past and gives him somebody to explain things to.   

The major criticism of the show compared to the novel that I've seen is that it plays up the melodrama while being much less detailed in its examination of the Kennedy assasination.  Initially Jake has to confirm a lot of information, such as whether Lee Harvey Oswald (Daniel Webber) was set up, whether he acted alone, and whether there was a conspiracy behind the assassination.  However, the focus quickly shifts to interpersonal conflicts.  The show wisely spends a good deal of time showing Jake's difficulties adjusting to life in the 1960s, and his romance with a librarian named Sadie (Sarah Gadon), who is in a troubled marriage.  The pacing is good, however, and there's no issue with filling eight episodes, or coming to a satisfying conclusion.

"11.22.63." is at its best in its earliest episodes, where it's setting up the rules of the universe and following Jake's initial exploration of life in the '60s.  This is also where we have the most involvement from Chris Cooper, who is easily the best actor in the ensemble.  I like that the series immediately creates a sense of paranoia and discomfort about living out of one's time, even if Jake is well suited to his new life and finds certain aspects of the past better than 2016.  While any supernatural elements are kept fairly low-key, and "11.22.63." avoids the tropes of many other Stephen King adaptations, it's still got enough of an unnerving sensibility that it feels of a piece with the rest of King's work.   

James Franco has retreated from the spotlight since certain allegations came to light in 2019, and I'd forgotten how ubiquitous he was for a few years in the 2000s and 2010s.  While I'm fairly cool on his performance here, he does fine in "11.22.63.," and the vague resemblance to James Dean certainly helps thematically.  He manages to balance Jake Epping being an intelligent schoolteacher with also being a dramatic hothead who is prone to impulsive decisions.  However, I was more impressed with Sarah Gadon, who doesn't usually get roles this prominent, and certainly makes the most of it. 

Of all the Stephen King event miniseries, this is definitely one of the better ones.  I recommend giving it a look, especially if you're apprehensive of King's usual horror stories.  However, history buffs may want to  stick to the book.        

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The News is Worse

I was working on a post for the beginning of January titled "The Posts I Didn't Write This Year," hoping to sum up the industry news that had happened over the previous months that I hadn't written anything about for the blog.  I generally like to give big news stories some time and distance before I say anything, because I am not a journalist, but a third-rate commentator, and throwing in my barely-informed two cents is a lot less helpful than pointing people toward the actual discourse being conducted by smarter people.  Also, frankly, it takes me longer than most to get a handle on what is actually going on.

However, I do have an interest in keeping track of how the media landscape and technology are changing and transforming with the times, especially where the news is concerned.  And in the past few months, things have gotten very bad very quickly.  I kept delaying the post as more kept happening, and having to rejigger the analysis.  I'm at the point where if I don't post something now, I'm just going to keep rewriting the post forever, beyond any shred of topicality.    

So, I wrote a post, roughly a year ago, titled "The News is Bad," where I talked about the rightward shift of CNN and the Washington Post curbing political opinions.  At the time of writing, former CNN contributor Don Lemon and other members of the media were just arrested for reporting on a protest in a church in Minneapolis.  How did we get here?  Well, here's a quick rundown of the biggest media-related items from the past five months:

After the death of Charlie Kirk in September, "Jimmy Kimmel Live" was suspended for a week over the host's innocuous comments about the MAGA response, and Nexstar and Sinclair stations further preempted the program for a few additional days.  This was part of an ongoing campaign by extremists to turn Kirk into a martyr figure, and use his death as an excuse to silence his critics and target his perceived enemies.  The backlash against Kimmel's suspension was swift and the financial fallout to the broadcasters was apparently significant enough to stave off any similar censorship attempts.

Things really ramped up in October, when David Ellison appointed right-wing news commentator Bari Weiss, who has no journalism experience, as the editor-in chief of CBS News.  There was a showdown in December over her attempt to pull a "60 Minutes" segment called "Inside CECOT," which quickly leaked, and was finally aired a month later.  Ratings have dropped for all CBS News shows, as Trump has sought to use the organization as a propaganda outlet, and Weiss was recently caught encouraging staffers to quit.  As for Ellison, he's currently trying to buy Warner Brothers, despite a deal already in place for an acquisition by Netflix.  The Trump administration has signalled that they're willing to help him.     

The major American newspapers continue to be in pretty dire straits.  The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post is undergoing massive layoffs, and the DOJ seized documents from a Post reporter's home a few weeks ago.  The Trump administration has continually been hostile to the press, threatening editors and reporters over any perceived negative coverage.  The chilling effect on reporting has been apparent across the board, especially with the recent coverage of the extrajudicial ICE killings in Minnesota, where the White House pushed a false narrative that blamed the victims for their deaths.  

Over on the platform formerly known as Twitter, owned by Elon Musk, the Grok AI was found to be generating lewd pictures of real minors in December, and no meaningful action was taken to curb this.  What's worse, despite some hand-wringing and threats, almost no major private or governmental organizations did anything in response.  There have been some signs of a user exodus, but this seems to have been spurred mostly by content creators trying to protect their work from being fed into the AI grist mill.    

Tik-Tok passed into the hands of Trump-friendly new owners this month, and immediately started censoring topics and banned a prominent Palestinian reporter.  This deal was so that Tik-Tok wouldn't be banned in the US outright.  A Kafkaesque new terms of service agreement has users looking for a replacement, but none have emerged yet.  

Finally, due to the Trump administration clawing back funding, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is officially shutting down.  So far, this is affecting weekend news broadcasts and access for rural stations.  And if you haven't heard yet, production of "Sesame Street" is moving from HBO to Netflix starting this year.      

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"Dangerous Animals," "Together," and "Him"

This is a post where I want to spotlight three of last year's summer horror movies.  They are getting awkwardly bundled together, because I didn't have enough titles for a ranking post the way I did back in 2024 - I really don't have anything to say about the "I Know What You Did Last Summer" legasequel or the last "Conjuring" movie.  On the other hand, trying to pair these leftover titles up thematically with other movies kept falling apart, so I'm just going to write bullet reviews for all three now, before they get any staler.  Some minor spoilers ahead.  

Let's start with "Dangerous Animals," which is a horror movie starring Hassie Harrison and Josh Heuston as Zephyr and Moses, a nice young couple who end up on a boat with a maniac.  The maniac is a man named Tucker, played by Jai Courtney, who likes feeding people to sharks and filming the results.  "Dangerous Animals" is a co-production of Shudder and the Australian Kismet Films, and directed by an Aussie, Sean Byrne.  This means that it's set on the coast of Australia and Jai Courtney gets to use his native Australian accent.  And Jai Courtney with an Australian accent is so much better at acting than when he's trying to sound American.  He's properly menacing in this movie!  There's even nuance!

So, despite what the poster would have you believe, this isn't so much a shark movie as a serial killer movie that also involves some shark attacks.  And it's good enough that I don't think anybody will mind too much about the confusion.  As a survival thriller it's a lot of fun, with plenty of twists and turns and fairly smart heroes to root for.  The tension is terrific.  People also get eaten by sharks.  However, the main events in psycho killer movies are always inevitably the psycho killers, and Jai Courtney acquits himself very well in the role.  This was a pleasant surprise, and I'll look forward to Courtney's future endeavors.  Well, as long as he's not trying to sound anything but Australian.   

On to "Together," the body horror movie starring Alison Brie and Dave Franco, and directed by another Australian, Michael Shanks.  Brie and Franco play Millie and Tim, a couple in a long term relationship who have decided to move to a rural community together, but are now having doubts about their further commitment.  While hiking in the woods nearby, they encounter a mysterious cave that causes their body parts to start sticking to each other whenever they get physically close.  This is also the movie that got pulled from Chinese distribution after digital alternations were made to one of the minor characters to change a gay couple into a straight one.

"Together" has a couple of interesting visual concepts, which are executed very well.  However, the material around the big effects-heavy sequences is half-baked, with a central metaphor that doesn't really work.  The relationship anxiety taking on a physical manifestation is a good idea, but it doesn't quite sync with the way Millie and Tim's relationship is progressing, and the challenges they face.  Nothing about their issues seem to be about losing individuality or autonomy, which this brand of body horror would suggest.  Also, the worldbuilding is very haphazard, with a cult in play, seemingly at random.  I feel some patience and encouragement is appropriate because this is a small film being helmed by a first timer, but "Together" really fell apart by the end.

Finally, a few words on "Him," which put out a fantastic trailer a few months ago.  This is the horror movie set in the world of professional football, directed by Justin Tipping.  An up-and-comer named Cam Cade, played by Tyriq Withers, attends a weeklong training event hosted by the current reigning champion, Isaiah White, played by Marlon Wayans.  However, Isaiah's methods are extreme, and his behavior is concerning.  Also, since Cam suffered a traumatic injury, he's been seeing visions of demonic and disturbing figures.  Isaiah's incredible success as a player couldn't possibly be because of supernatural forces, now could it?

I seem to like "Him" more than the average viewer.  I suspect that it's because I'm not put off by artsy, esoteric horror like "Berberian Sound Studio" and "Infinity Pool" that don't have a whole lot of coherent story, but do have a lot of surreal, abstracted, disturbing imagery and sound design.  "Him" is trying very hard - perhaps too hard - to be as showy and stylized as possible, with very aggressive visuals that convey a lot of intensity.  At times it's aping music videos and  NFL commercials, while pulling out a ton of visual tricks - pulsing lights, X-ray vision, Kubrickian symmetrical compositions, religious and folk horror imagery, and more.  The trouble is that very little of this is scary or compelling.  The performances are good and the concepts are interesting, but the skill level in the execution isn't there yet.  

"Him" gets frustratingly close to being something special - close enough that I hope everyone involved with this movie gets more chances in the future to try again.

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My Top 25 of the Last 25: Villains

I've thoroughly enjoyed all the "Best of" lists celebrating the superlatives of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. And I'm going to be fashionably late to the party and make some of my own lists this year, looking at movies and television from 2001 to 2025.  However, I'm not going to make "Best Movie" or "Best Show" lists.  No, I'm going to do the fun stuff, starting with my favorite villains.

Each list will get 25 entries, but only the top ten will get write-ups.  Of course, I plan to cheat, but no antiheroes will be forthcoming.  Minor spoilers ahead.

1. Homelander ("The Boys," 2019) - One of the criteria for inclusion on this list was that these villains had to be a reflection of their time, in some way.  The 70s birthed serial killers, the 80s brought corporate creeps, and the superhero age gave us a new kind of supervillain - the superhero gone bad.  Though similar to Omniman, Sentry, and other evil Superman-type supervillains, Homelander stands out from the crowd for his utter lack of empathy and morals, despite being held up as a symbol of patriotism and justice.  His most defining trait is his smile, provided by Anthony Starr - empty, joyless and disturbing.

2. Joker ("The Dark Knight," 2008) - Heath Ledger's performance in "The Dark Knight" was so good, his Joker instantly became iconic.  The initial reaction to publicity stills and sneak peeks was fairly negative, but once we got to see the full effect of the anarchic, repulsive Ledger Joker in the haphazard clown makeup who just wants "to watch the world burn," he was undeniable.  It influenced every subsequent Joker interpretation - and there have been several.  Recent films also gave us Joaquin Phoenix's Arthur Fleck from "Joker," but this version strikes me as more of an anti-hero than a villain. 

3. Villanelle ("Killing Eve," 2018) - One trend I'm glad to see in recent years is the rise of the female villain - more specifically the self-possessed and self-aware villainess who is acting of her own accord.  Female serial killers were fairly rare in fiction for many years, and fun female psychopaths the heroes can banter with are a pretty recent development.  Villanelle is easily the most prominent example, a twisted manic pixie dreamgirl with a knack for dispensing violence.  "Killing Eve" steadily went downhill after a strong first season, so it's easy to forget the impact she had when she was first introduced to the world.

4. Anton Chigurh ("No Country For Old Men," 2007) - It feels like cheating to include a Coens brothers movie, but Anton Chigurh remains one of the most instantly recognizable villains of the 2000s.  Like the Joker, he's symbolic of uncontrollable forces of anarchy, almost like a natural disaster in human form.  It's hard to remember sometimes that this was many people's first introduction to Javier Bardem, whose screen persona is usually so charming and urbane.  Chigurh, by contrast, is brutal and implacable, somehow both animalistic and mechanically impersonal as a killer.  And he's scary as hell too.    

5. Amy Dunne ("Gone Girl," 2014) - Amazing Amy, the overachieving "cool girl" turned psycho, is an avatar of modern feminine rage.  Fueled by entitlement and resentment, she weaponizes the media and society's fascination with true crime against her cheating husband, going to insane extremes to get what she wants.  You could have framed this as an uplifting empowerment story if Amy's revenge weren't so out of proportion with her perceived victimhood, and if her narcissism and vindictiveness weren't so apparent.  The horror is so potent, because Amy's brand of evil is both personal and familiar.  

6. Killmonger ("Black Panther," 2018) - Killmonger is here as an example of the righteous villain - someone who has a very good reason for doing terrible things, but is trying to right the wrongs through harmful and unacceptable actions.  Killmonger is a dark mirror to King T'Challa, a charismatic warrior who is deeply concerned with the injustices done against his people.  It doesn't hurt that he's played by Michael B. Jordan, who instantly steals every scene he's in.  Other MCU villains I considered were Loki, who evolved into an anti-hero, and Thanos, a solid threat, but rarely compelling.  And then there's… 

7. Killgrave (Jessica Jones," 2015) - It feels like you can't classify Killgrave as a comic book villain.  He's so much more intense and deeply disturbing than the usual superpowered baddies, a man who uses mind control to turn people into his personal playthings.  Jessica's past with him is treated as analogous to an abusive intimate relationship, and she's still deeply traumatized from the experience when we meet her.  David Tennant, best known for playing everyone's favorite The Doctor, made my skin crawl every time he showed up onscreen.  It's no wonder many people treated "Jessica Jones" like it was over when he left.

8. Gus Fring ("Breaking Bad," 2008) - The "Breaking Bad" universe had a lot of great villains, but the one everyone remembers is Gus Fring.  Portrayed with unflappable menace by Giancarlo Esposito, Gus has many admirable qualities - he's unfailingly polite, a smart businessman, inspires loyalty from his underlings, and he worked his way up from nothing.  However, if you cross him he can make your life a nightmare.  There were many points in "Breaking Bad" where I was rooting for Gus as much as I was rooting for Walt and Jesse.  Eventually, he had to go, but at least he went out with a fantastic exit.  

9. Dolores Umbridge ("Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix," 2007) - I wanted a "Karen" on the list, someone to represent all the privileged, entitled busybodies that seem to exist to make everyone around them miserable.  The "Harry Potter" franchise provided me with Dolores Umbridge, who is easily the most hated "Potter" villain after the evil Dark Lord Voldemort - who is pretty generic as genocidal overlords go.  Umbridge, however, is very specific and very memorable in her villainy.  And as a bureaucrat and administrator, she taps into real world frustrations like no one else on this list. 

10. Cersei Lannister ("Game of Thrones," 2011) - Finally, Joffrey was on this list for a long time, but when you look at the "Game of Thrones" villains, the one who got the most done was really Cersei, Joffrey's mother.  She instigated many of the main conflicts of the series, and took out more than her share of other power players.  However, what lands Cersei a place on the list is how complicated and interesting she is as a character - a natural schemer born to privilege, but constantly stymied by societal expectations, and doomed to endless heartache because she genuinely cares about her family. 

The next fifteen, in no particular order:

Kingpin ("Daredevil," 2015) 

Hannibal ("Hannibal," 2013)

Alonzo Harris ("Training Day," 2001)

The Trinity Killer ("Dexter," 2009)

Alice Morgan ("Luther," 2010)

Stringer Bell ("The Wire," 2002)

Hans Landa ("Inglorious Basterds," 2009)

King Joffrey ("Game of Thrones," 2011)

Phoenix Buchanan ("Paddington 2," 2017)

Pennywise ("IT: Chapter One," 2017)

Red ("Us," 2019)

Terence Fletcher ("Whiplash," 2014)
Edmund Kemper ("Mindhunter," 2017)

Princess Azula ("Avatar the Last Airbender," 2005)

Mother Gothel ("Tangled," 2010)

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"Only Murders," Year Five

After two years of showbiz capers, this year's "Only Murders in the Building" murder sticks closer to home.  Lester (Teddy Coluca), the beloved doorman of the Arconia is found dead in the courtyard fountain, and someone's severed finger is found in Oliver's shrimp cocktail.  This means the "Only Murders" gang gets to dig into the history and secrets of the Arconia.  Potential suspects include Lester's widow Lorraine (Diane Wiest), new doorman Randall (Jermaine Fowler), local mobster Nicky Caccimelio (Bobby Cannavale) and his wife Sofia (Tea Leoni), a trio of billionaires, Bash (Christoph Waltz), Camila (Renee Zellweger), and Jay (Logan Lerman), Mayor Tillman (Keegan Micahel Key), and a pop star named The (Beanie Feldstein).  With Meryl Streep and Da'Vine Joy Randolph still making occasional guest appearances, you don't need to have won an Oscar to be in this season, but it certainly helps.

There's a lot going on this year, which means that none of our intrepid trio really gets much of a personal subplot, and I think that's for the best.  Oliver is a newlywed, but Loretta's career keeps her busy without much time to have any relationship issues.  Charles has a new love interest in Sofia, but she's not a very serious one.  Mabel knew The back when she was known as Althea, and spends most of the season trying to get over their past falling out.  It's all very low stakes, familiar territory, and our leads don't spend quite so much time feeling gloomy or in crisis, which is nice.  There is a bigger, looming threat that affects all of them in the second half of the season, but it's a threat to the Arconia rather than any of them personally.   And arguably, it's the Arconia that gets the most fleshing out this time.  Last season revealed the lives of the tenants living on the west side of the building, and this year reveals other secret parts of the Arconia that we haven't seen yet.  The second episode, which covers Lester's entire time as doorman over three decades, is easily the highlight, especially as it gives us glimpses of many familiar characters before we knew them, sometimes in surprising circumstances.  

It feels like the show is getting more gimmicky.  There's an episode told from the POV of a robot.  There's an episode that suspiciously resembles a "girls' night out" episode.  However, "Only Murders" remains consistently entertaining, and it always feels like everyone involved is having a blast.  Other highlights of this season include a spoof of the rich billionaire getaway weekend plot, and everything involving Sofia Caccimelio's pack of overgrown, cheerfully lunkheaded sons.  I'm a little surprised it took "Only Murders" this long to dip a toe into "The Sopranos" territory, but they did it right.  The Caccimelios  are involved just enough that they're a fun break from the norm every time they appear.  I expect that if the whole season had been built around them, it wouldn't have worked half as well.  

The performances remain the best part of the show, and this year's guest stars are a great bunch.  You've got Christoph Waltz and Logan Lerman as two different versions of rich egomaniacs, with Renee Zellweger as the evil Martha Stewart in their midst.  You've got Tea Leoni radiating untrustworthiness as the mob wife, but understand immediately why Charles is attracted to  her.  Teddy Coluca as Lester is wonderfully warm and charming, and I wish we could have gotten more of him. However, he's not the only performer I wish got more screen time.  There definitely wasn't enough Diane Wiest, Jermaine Fowler, or Bobby Cannavale.

I'm already looking forward to next year's mystery, which is supposed to take place in London and will hopefully give some UK acting talent the opportunity to join in on the murder mystery hijinks.  As is tradition, next year's murder happens at the end of the current season, and it's delightfully silly, self-aware, and tongue-in-cheek in all the right ways.  Just like the rest of the show.

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"Caught Stealing" Caught Me Off Guard

I was expecting very little from "Caught Stealing," the latest Darren Aronofsky film.  The discourse around this one has been very, very quiet, and I completely missed the initial release.  It was at the tail end of my "To Watch" list for a while, because while I recognize and appreciate Aronofsky's talent as a filmmaker, his work is generally so bleak and nihilistic that I rarely enjoy his films.  Well, I enjoyed "Caught Stealing."  This might even be my favorite Aronofsky film.

Written by Charlie Huston, and based on his book of the same name, "Caught Stealing" follows a bartender named Hank (Austin Butler) who inadvertently becomes embroiled in a conflict involving at least two New York criminal organizations, when he agrees to watch a cat belonging to a disreputable neighbor, Russ (Matt Smith).  Set in Lower East Side Manhattan in 1998, "Caught Stealing" features a New York that is grungy, dirty, largely ungentrified, and full of people of every ethnicity living on top of each other.  It is also a very violent film, with Hank constantly on the run from terrible people, and his own life marked by the memory of past traumas.  Because it's Darren Aronofsky, the violence is graphic and upsetting.  Yet somehow, the movie avoids being bleak, and might even qualify as intermittently fun by the time the credits roll.

This is accomplished largely due to two things.  First is the performance of Austin Butler, playing a baseball-loving, hard-drinking, but generally decent guy who keeps trying to do the right thing, keeps getting knocked down for it, and gives us someone to root for.  He's got plenty of charisma, and yet he also fits the nastiness of the surroundings.  He credibly gets into very physical fights, and does a great job of adjusting to each new phase of the story as it keeps morphing into different things.  And the film's unpredictability is its other major strength, where Hank keeps being thrown into one unlikely situation after another, with a parade of colorful characters.  One minute he's in the middle of a ridiculous car chase with Russ and a corrupt police officer, and the next he's having dinner with a nice Jewish lady played by Carol Kane, the mother of  the Drucker brothers (Liev Schreiber, Vincent D'Onofrio), a pair of Hasidic mobsters.  

Darren Aronofsky manages to juggle a lot of disparate elements and some serious tonal whiplash.  This is a story where Russian thugs send Hank to the hospital in the first act, and several nasty deaths occur, and yet there's room for Hank being cute with his girlfriend Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz) and several appearances by the grouchy cat.  It has all the uncomfortable subjective tactility and emotional intensity of Aronofsky's earlier, more paranoid films, but it sidesteps the existential horror.  Hank experiences tragedy, but unlike most of Aronofsky's other protagonists, he's not a tragic character.  His jaunts into subjective introspection reveal that he's got his reasons for angst, but he's perfectly redeemable and I was pleasantly surprised to see him successfully work through a lot of his personal baggage.      

It feels strange, spotting all of these stylistic flourishes that I associate with Aronofsky's grimmest work being used to tell a story that feels so un-Aronofsky.  There are a few places where the dissonance was too much for me, but in the end I found that I liked "Caught Stealing" very much.  It's chaotic while still being perfectly coherent, and pulls off some great surprises, especially when it comes to the cast.  I didn't recognize Schreiber or D'Onofrio at all in their Hasidic regalia.  Matt Smith delivered my favorite performance, sporting a massive mohawk and studded leather jacket, and seemed to be having a ball playing a total reprobate.  Regina King, Bad Bunny, Action Bronson, and Griffin Dunne also appear in roles I will not spoil.  

After "mother!" and "The Whale," I was resigned to cringing my way through all future Darren Aronofsky projects, but "Caught Stealing" gives me hope that this doesn't have to be so.  I'd like very much for this this is a new direction for him, and not just a brief digression from his nihilistic norm.  

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My Top Ten Episodes of 2010-2011

Below, find my top ten episodes for the 2010-2011 television season below, in no particular order.  And a few spoilers ahead, including that one episode of "Mad Men."  I've decided to adjust my personal rules for this series a bit, and allow the inclusion of two episodes from  a show that happens to be having a very good year.

The Walking Dead, "Days Gone Bye" - It started so well, didn't it?  Frank Darabont directed the pilot of AMC's long-running zombie action series, where Deputy Rick Grimes begins his long journey through dystopian America.  "The Walking Dead" was one of a handful of ambitious genre shows that helped to fuel the rise of television series with higher production quality and more risky content.  Fifteen years and seven spinoffs later, I'm not surprised it's still going.

Game of Thrones, "Baelor" - However, if you want to talk about game-changing genre shows, nothing matches the first season of "Game of Thrones" for cultural impact.  The HBO fantasy series was perhaps the final major television show that just about everyone watched and used as a point of common reference.  It broke so many narrative rules the first year, especially in this episode, which concludes with killing off a major character who nobody expected to die.  

Parks and Rec, "Flu Season" - "Parks and Rec" continued to steadily improve in its third season, and spends most of this episode maneuvering various romantic partners closer into each other's orbit, and helping to squash some minor squabbles.  And it's the episode where everyone is sick, loopy, and off their game, which is always great for the comedy.  Amy Poehler shines, but Chris Pratt's "network connectivity problems" ad lib is surely one for the ages.  

Community, "Cooperative Calligraphy" - "Community" was also regularly delivering great episodes as part of the same Thursday lineup, often rife with metatextual commentary.  So we have to have the bottle episode that popularized the term "bottle episode."  And what an episode, where everyone being stuck in close proximity quickly devolves into madness.  A close runner up was "Paradigms of Human Memory," the clip show featuring clips from episodes that don't exist.

Mad Men, "The Suitcase" - No surprise that this episode is here, where tensions between Don and Peggy boil over when Don forces Peggy to work late on her birthday.  It's such a joy to watch Jon Hamm and Elizabeth Moss let loose, revealing so much about their characters' priorities and worldviews as they clash and reconcile.  I especially appreciate that the scope of the show narrows down to focus almost entirely on Don and Peggy, giving them the space to really make an impression. 

Sherlock, "A Study in Pink" -  This is where we were first introduced to Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson, reimagined as modern day sleuths by Stephen Moffat and Mark Gatiss.  The show had its ups and downs, but the premiere was so much fun because Cumberbatch nailed the character, and Moffat did a fantastic job of getting the tone right, doing an updated version of "A Study in Scarlet" with nicotine patches and texting.

Futurama, "The Late Philip J. Fry" and "The Prisoner of Benda" - The Comedy Central era of "Futurama" had some of my favorite episodes of the show's entire run, including these two.  I couldn't pick between them.  You've got a time travel episode that runs through a dozen major metaphysical and philosophical concepts (most notably eternal recurrence), and the body-switching episode that Ken Keeler created a new mathematical proof for.  This is the kind of absolute nerdery I adore.

Top Gear, "Series 15 Premiere" - First aired in June of 2010, this is the episode where a Bentley Continental Supersports is reviewed, a Chevrolet Lacetti is retired, and a Toyota Hilux is driven up an Icelandic volcano.  It is also the episode that features the segment on the three-wheeled Reliant Robin, which is still one of the funniest things I've ever seen on television.  The sight of Jeremy Clarkson rolling that car over and over again never fails to make me guffaw with glee.

Louie, "Bully" - Finally, I want to give a little love to the first season of "Louie," which really felt like something fresh and unusually creator-driven at the time it was released.  With a tiny budget and not many resources, Louie C.K. was able to deliver an insightful, delightfully unvarnished look at life in New York from a very personal point of view.  I'm picking "Bully" as the standout for its casual disregard of the rules of time and space, and pitch perfect writing.  

Honorable Mention: "Luther" Season One 

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