Andy Andersen

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

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Vulture •

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 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: 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 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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Sugar Series-Premiere Recap: Find the Missing

The lost finding the lost. What’s a hard-boiled detective story if not that? Every case is the case: one lost soul hired to solve the mystery of another. If you’re a movie buff like me or John Sugar (Colin Farrell), and you’ve spent enough time in Los Angeles, chances are you’ve driven past some Hollywood landmark or another and found yourself caught between the real world and the movie world, if only for the briefest of moments.
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Tokyo Vice Finale Recap: A Different Kind of Justice

“I want to report on what really happens. That’s it.” That’s what Jake Adelstein told Samantha Porter in the first episode of Tokyo Vice. They were both cast as vintage Michael Mann protagonists, then — driven outsiders with an insatiable lust for greatness in a subterranean field. Navigating the complex underworld of Tokyo crime, politics, finance, and violence has brought its fair share of consequences to both of them.
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Special Ops: Lioness Series-Premiere Recap

Special Ops: Lioness, the latest Paramount+ show from the prolific cowboy whisperer extraordinaire Taylor Sheridan, opens cold on a job gone wrong. Joe (Zoe Saldana), head of a covert CIA operation tasked with flipping the mothers, wives, girlfriends, and acquaintances of male terrorist leaders, is trying to get her undercover operative out of a terrorist compound in Syria before the whole thing goes up in smoke. Her team, locked and loaded, circles the compound in a chopper, awaiting orders.
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Perry Mason Recap: Today’s Newspaper Wraps Tomorrow’s Fish

Wowwww folks, we finally got some big reveals in the penultimate chapter of our little Perry Mason mystery here. That moment when you find out who the big baddie is and what exactly they have been scheming on this whole time, and you’re left with that “Oh, shit, now what?” feeling. I love that for us. Holcomb wasn’t kidding when he said Brooks McCutcheon was into something “bigger than anybody this town’s even thinking about,” and I dunno about you all, but I saw this one coming about as clearly
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Perry Mason Recap: Lucky Me

Nothing like an unlikely ally or secret foe to come in and shake up a mystery, huh? In tonight’s episode, we get both, and they bring some serious heat to the case. Our unlikely ally comes in the form of Detective Gene Holcomb (Eric Lange), a real “better the devil you know” job for Mason & Co. And we know Holcomb: a heavy-hitting dirty cop out to get his bag and improve his station and eke out his own healthy share of the American Dream.
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Perry Mason Season-Premiere Recap: The Illusion of Justice

In every great mystery, the world is an onion. And somewhere, slumped in an office chair behind a moving wall of light, shadow, and cigarette smoke, there’s a “detective” slowly peeling back its putrid layers. Each one reveals a fact or clue or piece of violent aftermath that, in turn, reveals some nasty hidden truth of the world. And when we finally get to the center, all we’ve got to show for it is the full view of a grand illusion.
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Under the Banner of Heaven Series-Premiere Recap: What We Find Broken

Based on Jon Krakauer’s 2003 book, Under the Banner of Heaven is the true-crime story of a double murder in Utah in 1984, perpetrated by one of Mormonism’s many fundamentalist splinter groups, that’s juxtaposed with the early frontier-justice days of the LDS Church. For your humble recapper, a lapsed Mormon born and raised in Provo, Utah, this miniseries is sure to be one helluva prolonged “TRIGGERED” meme, so let’s get right to it, eh, brothers and sisters?
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