HBO

I watch House of the Dragon for the dragons. I watch for the swords and the pitched battles and the kind of CGI that only...

Season 3 of House of the Dragon continues to be about big moments almost exclusively. The premiere, which revolved around the Battle of the Gullet, killed off...

Giant battles full of dragons and destruction are all well and good, but the heart of a story like House of the Dragon lives in the aftermath. It beats to the rhythm of bodies washing up against the rocks of a shoreline and hides in the wreckage of naval fleets razed to matchsticks.

House of the Dragon Season 3 got off to a pretty chaotic start, and with all the action going on in the Gullet and King’s...

House of the Dragon opening Season 3 with the Battle of the Gullet seems like something of a mission statement. Considered to be one of...

As well as starting with a slightly new opening tapestry and a rework of the classic Game of Thrones theme, Season 3 of House of the...

You have to hand it to Sam Levinson, Euphoria’s Season 3 finale was not what I expected it to be, in several ways. In hindsight,...

I’m not sure how it happened. I’ve been making fun of Euphoria Season 3 since the beginning, and it really did look to be running...

Here I was, claiming that Euphoria doesn’t have a great deal going on in Season 3 beyond the obvious viral sensationalism of Sydney Sweeney’s kaiju boobs. With very credible arguments floating around that this show has exceeded the purpose of its existence, Episode 6 is reassuring in its way, since it’s the first chapter that feels less designed to court controversy and more intended to offer a sliver of hope to these woebegone fools.

Euphoria is a strange series – I know that’s an obvious thing to state now that it has reached Season 3, but as rumors swirl...

I will confess to not having enjoyed Rooster as much as I expected to. First impressions were good, of course, but its ideas and characters...

It probably says a lot about the state of contemporary society that two big shows on two major streaming platforms have delivered episodes in less than a week, each offering two different takes on the same scene. And that scene is a major character’s OnlyFans persona taking on outsized proportions and stomping Kaiju-style through a fake cityscape.

To say the show is called Rooster, it’s very much not about Rooster for depressingly large stretches. And given we’re right on the cusp of...

Euphoria is a very literal show, often too literal for its own good, so the whole enterprise isn’t partial to metaphor. This has been as...

At the risk of repeating myself, I’m not sure Rooster is really going anywhere. I keep giving it a chance to, and Episode 8 is...

Call me naïve, but I assumed that Nate and Cassie’s wedding was going to be something that Euphoria spent all of Season 3 building up...

I didn’t expect the most meaningful sentiment of Rooster thus far to come from Walt, of all people, but here we are in Episode 7, three half-hours removed from the finale, and the hothouse has become a source of surprising pathos.

The key question that will likely define the short-term future of Euphoria is whether Sam Levinson is attempting to satirise the facile horniness of the American Dream, or if he truly believes that the most anyone can aspire to these days is sucking on a pacifier while dressed as an adult baby.