Andy Andersen

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

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Vulture •

Sugar Premiere Recap: The Spaceman Always Rings Twice

“The tides of television turn fast in Los Angeles. For now, it’s as good a place as any to say farewell to the lovely John Sugar.” I wrote that two years ago when this little Apple TV neo-noir series about a space-alien P.I. ended its initial eight-episode run. Chances of a second season seemed slim on account of the broader mixed reception to the series’ late-season twist: the old-school-noir-obsessed John Sugar is actually an alien sent to Earth with a bunch of other aliens to blend into hu...
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Black Rabbit Series-Finale Recap: A Two-Man Pandemic

By the time we get to Black Rabbit’s final flashback intro — the show’s go-to narrative framing device — the lore of how the original Black Rabbit crew came together is well established. The scene of the team assembling plays out pretty much as that lore would suggest. Jake is sweating bullets, having just quit his job and signed a $30,000-a-month lease on the new restaurant. Vince is telling him, “It’s not a prison sentence.” Wes and Estelle are conveniently having their meet-cute by the jukebo...
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Black Rabbit Recap: A Bowling-Ball-Size Hole in Your Heart

The last piece of the Friedken brothers’ origin story comes together when we flash back to the night Vince dropped a bowling ball on his dad’s head to save his mom. Vince has carried this event like a home-cooked original sin through a lifetime of gambling, addiction, crimes, and misdemeanors. Was it necessary to wait until the second-to-last episode for this reveal? Hard to say on a show with a story that feels slightly mismatched to its episode count (like many a modern streaming series), thou...
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Black Rabbit Series-Premiere Recap: To Live and Die in New York

Black Rabbit begins in media res, zooming out from a wallpaper full of rabbits — some mid-hop, others staring fearfully into the abyss with wide, dark pools for eyes. Jake Friedken (Jude Law) comes into focus, running water over his face and sighing with the weight of the world on his shoulders. And an ever-present, mounting clock you can feel ticking before the scene shifts to the car outside where two masked robbers are gearing up to lift a heavy bundle from the safe inside.
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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...
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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 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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