Andy Andersen

Creative copywriter and media critic, reporting from Long Beach, CA. 

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Vulture •

Dope Thief Series-Finale Recap: Do You Want to Be Alive?

Try as I might to keep my default-movie-guy bias in check when swimming in the waters of TV — blurred as the lines are between the things we used to call “television” and “cinema” in the 21st-century “content” colonization of art and categories — sometimes you gotta bite the bullet, dig your heels into what you know, and call a thing what it is. And Dope Thief’s final episode proves that some crime stories are better suited for a feature-length investigation. This may come as a surprise to an...
Vulture •

Dope Thief Recap: Taking the Hit

So far, I’ve been feeling ambivalent about Dope Thief’s efficient but visually generic use of black and white when cutting to Ray’s flashbacks. The show excels in so many other areas, so could we not have gone a little farther in the visual language here? But my ambivalence is greatly tempered by how much this episode excels at using that established language to clearly meet its own thematic ends. “Fear of God” is bookended by a father and a son in a car. Fighting for survival. The opening fi...
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Dope Thief Premiere Recap: Let Me Tell You a Bedtime Story

Philly’s looking extra-cold and gray for a cold open that puts the heat under us fast as Ray Driscoll (Brian Tyree Henry) and Manny Carvalho (Wagner Moura) — a couple of small-time Philadelphia crooks posing as DEA agents to rip off a humble drug operation — rush a house of unsuspecting drug runners and make out with a modest take. Henry and Moura argue about the necessity of hiring a third guy to watch the door with all the locked-in charisma we’ve come to expect from two of our greatest modern...
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Lioness Season-Finale Recap: Wasteland of the Free

However demented its boomery mix of red- and blue-coded signifiers of institutional distrust — never without a little dose of militant-cowboy dark-Brandon patriotism — Lioness is the perverse and fractured imperial drama our perverse and fractured empire deserves. Its second season ends with another bang that hits like a diabolical whimper. “All we did was change oil prices,” Cruz had told Joe at the end of the season-one special op. By the end of this year’s finale, the Lioness team has wrought...
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The Penguin Finale Recap: Man of the People

Come see Gotham’s newest baddie at Vulture Festival, November 16 and 17 in Los Angeles, where we’ll be talking to Cristin Milioti. It was all for the penthouse view. An ivory tower to climb, conquer, and breathe the rarefied air of the Falcones, Bruce Wayne, Bella Reál, and every other Gotham City elite, cop, or criminal. In conversation with Andy Serkis for Interview magazine, The Batman director Matt Reeves described Oz Cobb’s rise as a “dark American dream story.” At a young age, Oswald co...
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The Penguin Recap: The Monster Show

Come see Gotham’s newest baddie at Vulture Festival, November 16–17 in Los Angeles, where we’ll be talking to Cristin Milioti. The Penguin’s penultimate episode asks: What’s inside a monster? Whether it’s in the campy Pop Art satire disguised as normie children’s entertainment or Christopher Nolan’s Michael Mann–larping Dark Knight trilogy, the most resonant tales of Gotham City are the ones that tap into the triangulation of noir films, B movies, and EC horror comics that, midway through the...
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Lioness Recap: Lie Craft

Joe doesn’t trust the new lioness. For all her time and experience behind the intelligence curtain, she still insists on running her operation in good faith. For the love of country, warts and all. But, as resident queen of pragmatic CIA ghoulism Kaitlyn Meade reminds her, Joe “shouldn’t trust any of them.” Trust, in other words, is not a luxury available to anyone who serves the Agency. Spycraft is “lie craft,” and Joe suspects Josephina Carillo’s story isn’t her whole story. The trick is figur...
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Lioness Recap: Just Do It (Brought to You by the CIA)

Now that we’re officially back with a bang, the new season of Lioness (dropping its Special Ops moniker this year as a demo of confidence in the show’s personality) is ready to set us up with its new … uh, lioness. The apparent move to get away from espionage plotting in the Middle East — rife as the region is with the atrocities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which the full might of U.S. military aid is currently embroiled with no apparent end in sight — lands us in a “closer to home”...
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The Penguin Recap: A Tailgate Party in Gotham

The two great houses of organized crime in Gotham lie in rubble. Their wounded figureheads, Sal Maroni and Sofia Gigante, are consolidating their remaining powers to take back the city before it falls into the grubby fins of Oz Cobb and his underground band of misfit drug runners. It’s hardly a spoiler to point out that The Penguin is about Oz Cobb’s rise to power, and “Gold Summit” shows us what’ll get him to the top of the Gotham heap in the end. Every crumbling institution of the city — from...
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Lioness Season-Premiere Recap: Trophies … Big Ones

You wanted the best? You got the best! The hottest special-ops band in the land: Lioness! That’s right, folks: The world is a sunspot on one of Taylor Sheridan’s ranch-tanned, rippling biceps, and we’re just living in it. Hey, cool with me. The future was uncertain for this little Sheridan side project that could’ve been at the close after its first season. But with an apparently sizable audience on Paramount+ and the will to make it happen on the part of Sheridan, the exceptionally stacked cast...
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The Penguin Recap: The City Took Them

Underestimate The Penguin at your peril is the resounding message coming out of Gotham City. Initially, this series felt like a placeholder for Matt Reeve’s Batman movies, keeping the brand awareness out there, but with each new episode, the show eclipses that mandate because it’s getting quite good — it’s feeling more at home in the HBO Sunday night slot. All that said, it was inevitable that the episode following “Cent’anni” (Sofia’s “Hangman origin story” and triumphant family annihilation) w...
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The Penguin Recap: Men Have Called Her Crazy

If you’ve been basking in Cristin Milioti’s performance as Sofia Falcone the last few weeks, this origin story (within an origin story) will be a major highlight of the series. “Cent’anni” makes the most of the show’s secondary villain, flipping the script on Sofia’s “Hangman” origins in Tim Sale’s Dark Victory comic (in which she’s revealed to have killed high-profile members of the Gotham P.D.) to paint a portrait of a victim of a cruel, conspiratorial world and her father’s sins. With the...
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The Penguin Recap: This Is Gotham

All the great Batman stories pitch the villain (more often, villains) as largely sympathetic humans driven to criminal insanity by some combination of the default cruelty, economic desperation, and social injustice that plagues American life. Think Alan Moore’s The Killing Joke, where the Joker is given the backstory of a blue-collar factory worker turned failed stand-up comedian who turns to crime to support his pregnant wife and winds up falling into the fabled primordial chemical vat as a res...
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The Penguin Recap: No One’s Untouchable

Our sophomore episode of The Penguin puts us through the first real phase of Oz Cobb’s plan to take over the Falcone empire. If you’re coming into this thing looking for a quality Sunday-night HBO crime show, the proceedings will prove efficient, if not underbaked. But where “Inside Man” may come off as paying thin gangster-cosplay lip service to its The Sopranos/Boardwalk Empire–baiting HBO time slot, The Penguin continues to make inspired use of the comic-book IP torch it’s been tasked with ca...
Vulture •

The Penguin Series-Premiere Recap: Wrong Guy, Wrong Night

Gotham City is underwater. For those who breathe the rarified air high above her streets — folks like Bruce Wayne and the Falcones — the aftermath is only felt in the power vacuum left behind by a fallen father. For the many who live on Gotham’s street level, chaos reigns. To anyone who’s spent any amount of time in any version of this city, the succession of news voices and flashes of chaotic footage that orient us in the maelstrom of urban decay will be all too familiar.
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