Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I sweat all that chocolate out...
Home renovation
Alan Sepinwall
If you're someone who primarily reads the emails, you may not have seen that the site redesign went live last week. The goal was to not only make it look better, but easier to navigate. This includes the return of something from the original Blogger version of the site: a list of shows I've covered extensively on either What's Alan Watching? incarnation. Obviously, it only includes material from 2005-10 (the Blogger years) and then the fall of 2022 through now (the Substack/Ghost years). Down the road, there may be a series of links to my coverage of the big shows from HitFix, Uproxx, and Rolling Stone, but that's a vastly more ambitious project.
Take a look, and let me know (either in the comments or by email) if anything is confusing, not working, or a feature you'd like to see added.
What's next?
Among the things in the works for paid subscribers over the next week or so:
- On Monday, my list of the 10 best shows of 2025. I'll be doing several other superlative lists throughout December — others will include best episodes (in two parts, because I had so many) and a list of new shows I liked that didn't make the top 10 cut — but felt I should start out with the primary list.
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? subscribers, it's time for another Ask Alan video mailbag. I've got a good backlog of questions but am always happy to take more.
- My review of Percy Jackson Season Two.
- My recap of the next episode of Pluribus, which may be my favorite one yet.
- Some questions I have about Netflix's acquisition of Warner Discovery, which was announced today but has a lot of regulatory hurdles to clear before it becomes official. (This may take longer, depending on what news drips out over the coming days.)
Catching up
Since last Friday's newsletter, I've published:
- My recap of The Chair Company season finale, which took the conspiracy to many strange new places in an attempt to set the series up for the long haul. I felt it mostly worked, but I know some viewers were thrown:
Alan Sepinwall
- My spoiler-filled take on the first four episodes of Stranger Things Season Five, which had some exciting moments but also wrestled with balancing the emotional reality of years of battling the Upside Down with the Duffer's love of light YA adventure.
Alan Sepinwall
- A very special guest review from my pal Maureen Ryan on one of her TV passions: the Starz gladiator drama Spartacus, which returns with the spinoff Spartacus: House of Ashur:
Alan Sepinwall
- My recap of this week's Pluribus, which quickly resolved a cliffhanger that left some viewers frustrated the week before, then put Carol on the road for several big revelations:
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The great Muppet pie caper
Fans of the Knives Out films who are very online often plead for Rian Johnson to make a sequel where Benoit Blanc interacts with Muppets. Johnson has on multiple occasions dismissed the idea, saying that while he loves the Muppets, putting Kermit and Daniel Craig in the same frame would break the reality of the franchise.
But to promote the Netflix release of Wake Up Dead Man, Johnson appears to have relented — sort of. He apparently allowed a Muppet version of Benoit Blanc — or, rather, Beignet Blanc — to solve a Sesame Street mystery involving Cookie Monster's missing pie. For now, I'll take it.
Also? Wake Up Dead Man is another excellent entry in the series, with a fantastic lead performance by Josh O'Connor. My only complaint is that it doesn't use the supporting cast as well as the previous films, with several of the actors who play suspects getting very little to do, and/or hitting the same character beats over and over. But O'Connor, Craig, and several others are terrific, and its also a thoughtful and lovely examination of both the light and dark sides of organized religion. With Poker Face in limbo, I hope this isn't the last we've seen of Mr. Blanc, either the Benoit or Beignet versions.
Not so Mad about 4K
When Matthew Weiner was a writer on the later seasons of The Sopranos, he pitched his Mad Men pilot script to the bosses at HBO. Infamously, they said no to the series that would have been a great spiritual successor to the Mob drama, and enabled the rise of AMC as a TV power for more than a decade. On Monday, that historical wrong was somewhat put to right, when HBO Max not only added all seven seasons of Mad Men, but presented brand-new remastered 4K versions of the episodes.
But what should have been a triumphant day instead turned into an embarrassment, as screencaps began circulating on social media of a scene from Season One's "Red in the Face" where Roger vomits in front of a group of clients. In the HBO Max version, two guys from the production crew are clearly visible, running a vomit hose up John Slattery's suit:
Wired asked me to write about this, as well as the larger problem of classic shows getting mangled in some way when making the transition from SD to HD, from a 4:3 aspect ratio to widescreen, or in this case from HD to 4K:
Alan Sepinwall
It was a fun rabbit hole to go down, and pointed me to some examples I had never known. I was aware, for instance, that Buffy the Vampire Slayer also inadvertently showed crewmembers when it went widescreen, but I'd never seen the widescreen version of The X-Files' "Gender Bender," where in one shot you can see one actor lingering at the edge of frame, waiting to swap in for one of the other guest stars.
HBO Max somehow also mislabeled a number of episodes, "Red in the Face" included, though that was fixed a few hours after people started complaining about it on Tuesday. The proper version of the scene took several more days to arrive, but it's there now. However, on Thursday, someone discovered a new, much worse glitch:
Season 2 episode 8 has the audio for episode 9 for some reason lmao??? And episode 9 has the audio for episode 8 https://t.co/K7D8ZrJmFz pic.twitter.com/2TGXKE5D3G
— tara (@proletarat) December 4, 2025
(For what it's worth, the whole series is still on AMC+, only in HD rather than 4K, but nonetheless looking and sounding great without any of these other problems.)
As I said above, Netflix and Warner Discovery announced that they had made a deal for the former to buy the latter. Corporate consolidation is terrible for the industry, and for consumers. But this whole Mad Men mess almost plays like a symbol of HBO Max's need to be absorbed by another entity. Ted Sarandos comes with plenty of baggage of his own, but he's nonetheless better than David Zaslav, because who wouldn't be?
They're all connected
In that Wired story, I also note that David Simon had ambivalent feelings about remastering The Wire for both HD and widescreen, since he and producer Robert Colesberry declined to shift while filming the show because they preferred the gritty look of SD and the 4:3 aspect ratio. But Simon also oversaw much of the remastering process, so there definitely aren't any flubs like the Mad Men one.
Those remastered versions are how I've been rewatching The Wire of late. With my Rod Serling biography moved to the editing stage, I've shifted to work on my book about the adventures of Omar, Stringer, Bubbles, and The Bunk. And bingeing it on HBO Max makes the task much easier than busting out my old DVD sets. (Among other things, I'm now down to one disc player in the whole house, whereas I can watch the streaming versions anywhere, even when I'm on the road.) It's a different look, but it still feels like The Wire.
Among the pleasures of doing projects like these is that it gives me the excuse to rewatch some of the greatest television ever made. I just finished the first season, which remains spectacular, and am excited to get reacquainted with the gang at the docks from Season Two.
One of the things that's obvious on rewatch is the astonishing depth of the cast. There are dozens of significant speaking parts every season, and I could probably count on one hand the number of performances over the entire series that ring false in some way. (And at least a few of those were non-actors that Simon or Ed Burns were friendly with.) The show produced a few stars in Idris Elba (though an argument could be made that Luther had more to do with his ascension), Michael B. Jordan (an argument could definitely be made that Friday Night Lights gave him more of a bounce than this), and to a lesser degree Dominic West. And a lot of cast members like Michael Kenneth Williams, Lance Reddick, and Wendell Pierce, to name just three, became busy character actors, if not household names like Elba or Jordan. (Williams and Reddick have since passed away, but Pierce just played Perry White in Superman.)
But what's frustrating is to see so many terrific performances from people for whom this was by far the biggest role of their career. Often, an actor will pop up — to use one example, Wendy Grantham as Shardene, who works at Orlando's nightclub and dates D'Angelo — and I'll think, What did I see her in recently? Because their work is so good and lived-in that it seems obvious they've been working steadily ever since. But this is literally Grantham's last IMDb credit. There are plenty of other Wire actors who are just as strong who made it a bit further, but whose careers got no appreciable benefit.
In some cases, these were local Baltimore actors, and/or theater actors, who had no designs on continuing to work in TV or movies. But mostly, you can ascribe it to two things. First, The Wire wasn't a hit in any way during its original run. It may have the most impressive afterlife of any American show ever, at least relative to its ratings when it first aired, but in the early-mid 2000s, very few people were watching. So executives at the time weren't exactly yelling at their casting directors to get them actors from The Wire. And second, while things have improved in recent years, the television and film businesses generally don't offer the same kinds of opportunities for Black actors as for white ones. (You can add Chris Bauer and Aidan Gillen to the list of Wire alums who have worked pretty steadily ever since the show ended.) And this is a show where the majority of the cast was Black.
But if the industry failed them, The Wire very much didn't.
That's it for today! What did everybody else think?
