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Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I name all the Oscar winners for Best Supporting actress...

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What's next?

Among the stories coming up over the next week or so for paid subscribers:

Because of the Super Bowl, the next episodes of HBO's Sunday night shows are already streaming on HBO Max, so look for my recap of the fourth A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode sometime this afternoon or early evening.
A recap of the third episode of Shrinking Season Three.
A recap of the sixth episode of The Pitt Season Two.
Thoughts on the return of AMC's Dark Winds.

A tear at the end of the rainbow

A couple of freelance pieces of mine published since the last Friday newsletter. The first is one I really wish I didn't have to write: for The Ringer, a tribute to Catherine O'Hara, who died at the age of 71 after a brief illness.

I've gotten a bit of pushback on my thesis that it took until Schitt's Creek for O'Hara to finally become as famous as her vast talents deserved. My counter is that anyone who's either following me or reading pop culture stuff on The Ringer is part of a self-selecting sample that would of course know who she was. She was a genius! She was in a million great things. I wrote about a bunch of them in that piece. But to the general public, she was at best "Kevin's mom from Home Alone" until Moira Rose came along.

Among the many tragic parts of this is that, as I wrote, O'Hara's higher profile was giving her opportunities to do things she had rarely done before. She was so great on The Studio, playing a more human-scale character than she usually was asked to play in comedies. (I believe filming on the second season was about to begin, which will surely be pushed back a while as the writers figure out how to fill the massive hole she just left.) And she was excellent in a purely dramatic role on The Last of Us. Though that one wasn't a surprise to the real O'Hara-heads, who watched how brilliant she was playing fully sincere amidst the absurdity of A Mighty Wind. Grab the tissue box and enjoy her and Eugene Levy bringing down the house, along with the tension of whether the former lovers will kiss one more time:

Rest in peace, Catherine. Thank you for everything.

Decades of dreams

This week's other freelance piece is one that's been in the works for a while. The Wall Street Journal is doing a series on America's 250th birthday, looking at different aspects of our nation's history. I was asked to contribute to the pop culture part of the project, by breaking down the most representative shows from every decade of television from the 1950s through today.

Some of these choices were gimmes, and I'm sure it will shock you to learn that a couple of them were series I've written books about. Others were more complicated. The choices for the 2010s and 2020s in particular could have gone a lot of different ways, and my pick for the 2020s is a show probably identified more with the previous decade than this one. But I wanted to use the story to try to tell the history of TV as a medium, so I needed a reality series and a streaming hit. And after trying various combinations, this is the one that made the most sense to me.

Catching up

In addition to those freelance pieces, I wrote a bunch for this here website over the past week, including:

My recap of the third A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode, where we learned an important piece of info about Egg's past, but only after Dexter Sol Ansell put on a massive charm offensive as Egg:

In a new Ask Alan video mailbag, I took questions about what makes a good TV plot twist, who would make a good Jim Rockford (or Jen, I suppose) in NBC's planned reboot, and which Walton Goggins character could defeat all the others if locked in a room together:

I reviewed Seth Rogen's The Muppet Show revival special (more on that shortly), which did the thing we've all been asking for forever, in just redoing the original Muppet Show:

I recapped this week's Shrinking, which said goodbye (for now, at least, and only on-camera) to Emmy Winner Brett Goldstein (more on him in a minute, too) as Louis:

I wrote about how this week's Starfleet Academy paid tribute to my favorite Star Trek show and its underrated captain, Ben Sisko from Deep Space Nine:

I recapped this week's The Pitt, where two of Dr. Langdon's patients took a turn for the worse:

More Muppets? No problem!

The Muppet Show was an important part of my childhood. I identified with Fozzie Bear more than any other fictional character for quite a while. My first celebrity crush was Debbie Harry based on her appearance in the fifth season. I know way too many mid-century standards only because Kermit or one of the other Muppets sang it. So I had a lot more to say about this week's special than could fit into that review, including a few spoilers that aren't really spoilers, plus a wishlist of actors I'd love to see host the show if it turns into an ongoing concern.

Among the more glaring flaws of the Muppets is that the only notable women are Miss Piggy, Janis, and Camilla. Piggy's one of the stars of the show, but Janis rarely does anything, and Camilla is a chicken who doesn't talk. Muppets Tonight tried to make Spamela Hamderson a thing, kind of, and side projects like Muppet Babies have introduced other girl Muppets like Skeeter. But mostly, it's guys. So it felt notable to me that, in the special's subplot about Kermit's struggle to get everyone on stage at the same time, there was an extended bit where Janis tried to help Kermit meditate to calm his jangled nerves. I wonder if she'll be more prominent going forward (if we go forward), just to try to balance things out even a little.
While the special features Muppets from almost every era, at least in the background (Johnny Fiama and Sal Minella from Muppets Tonight are in most of the backstage shots, for instance), Walter from the 2010s films was nowhere to be seen. It could be that Rogen and company decided Walter was too closely tied to Jason Segel, or maybe they just didn't find him funny enough to keep him around in an already overcrowded roster. I'm reminded of interviewing Bill Prady about the misguided ABC sitcom. I asked him if Walter would appear. He gave me a skeptical look and asked if I really wanted to see Walter again. (More notable: Prady said that he thought Lew Zealand and his boomerang fish were too weird for the kind of show they were making, which to me was a very big warning sign that the kind of show they were making wasn't the right one. It's not that Lew is a great character; just that his presence sums up what the Muppets are about, as a strange throwback ensemble.)
Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" was a good choice for the closing group number, not only because the title underlines everyone's hope that this isn't a one-shot deal, but because the Muppets' viral cover of "Bohemian Rhapsody" was their first real sign of life after that long fallow period when The Muppets' Wizard of Oz nearly killed the franchise.

Finally, my daughter (also a Muppet obsessive) and I brainstormed some potential very special guests for a regular iteration of the show. Too many to list here, but some of our favorites:

If Daniel Craig guests, it fulfills everyone's dream of having Benoit Blanc solve a mystery with the Muppets, without breaking the continuity of the films themselves. (Not to be confused with Beignet Blanc on Sesame Street.)
Emmy Winner Brett Goldstein has talked about his own desire to revive the Muppets. Rogen beat him to the punch, but he'd nonetheless be fun interacting with Gonzo and the others.
Rachel Zegler and David Dastmalchian are also self-professed Muppet fans who would be great. Zegler sings and does comedy, and Dastmalchian has done an incredible Gonzo impression in a series of live Muppet movie script reads.
Assuming The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins is still on the air if/when the Muppets return, Daniel Radcliffe is a do-it-all performer who has sung on Broadway, played Weird Al, and seems game for anything.
Just picture the mostly very short Muppets all having to look way, way, way up to interact with Jacob Elordi, who could also probably play Frankenstein again in a sketch. For that matter, Zendaya has done enough different kinds of things in her career that she'd be a match. (On the other hand, probably not the ideal Sydney Sweeney venue.)
If Christopher Reeve could guest on the original show, why not David Corenswet? Or, for that matter, Rachel Brosnahan?
Gilda Radner guested way back when, while she was still a Saturday Night Live castmember. So even though it feels a bit like cheating, Rogen and Goldberg could just call in any or all of their SNL friends like Bill Hader. Maybe it's just because I've been listening to The Lonely Island/Seth Meyers podcast lately, but I wouldn't mind Andy Samberg coming on and rapping with Rowlf or The Electric Mayhem.
Chappell Roan's worn a pig nose in public a time or three. She'd surely be a great duet partner for Miss Piggy.