Paul Levinson

I'm enjoying His Dark Materials, most of all the nature, behavior, and variety of the Daemons. As I understand them, they're some sort of external manifestation of the humans they're connected with, including their human sensibilities, with perhaps some other things that Daemons have on their own.

That was the best thing about the insane episode 1.5 of the insano Watchmen on Sunday—"Some Enchanted Evening"—sung first by Sinatra at the beginning of the episode and at the end by some group unknown to me. But my favorite rendition of the song that Ezio Pinza first sang in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific all those years ago has always been this one by Jay and the Americans.

I've been saying ever since Trump began running for President with his anti-immigration polices that The Man in the High Castle and its alternate reality of literally Nazi America had special relevance to the reality in which we now all reside, in which the Allies not the Axis won the Second World War. In the final season of this extraordinary adaptation of Philip K. Dick's extraordinary 1962 novel, immigration plays a major role in the story, especially in the very last scene of the series.

So I saw an odd, little, strangely compelling movie on Netflix the other night, just as our clocks were slipping back an hour. Turns out that that timing, for want of a better word, was just right.

Watchmen checked in with a clarifying, excellent episode 1.3 this week, introducing Jean Smart as FBI honcho and super good-guy killer Laurie Blake, and giving us a nice extended rendition of Desmond Dekker's "Israelites," one of my many all-time favorite songs (in fact, I'm listening to it on YouTube right now).

His Dark Materials debuted on HBO Monday night. It was good to see—especially Ruth Wilson as the mysterious and alluring Marisa, the very night after The Affair concluded, splendidly, on Showtime, where Wilson played the alluring Alison, of which I'll say no more in case you haven't seen it.