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Anarchy in the U.K.

'The Diplomat' returns, 'Alien: Earth' hits Comic-Con, Diane Keaton on TV, 'The Chair Company,' and more

Alan Sepinwall

17 Oct 2025 — 8 min read

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Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I'm proud of my freckles...

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What's next?

Coming up in the next week or so:

Later in the newsletter, I have some brief unspoilered thoughts on The Diplomat Season Three. But we'll get into spoilers early next week, after some of you have had a chance to watch the whole thing. (paid subscribers)
Going to keep playing it by ear with covering The Chair Company, but I'll have a few thoughts on the second episode on Sunday night. (paid subscribers)
Thoughts on the Task finale, and Task as a whole. (paid subscribers)
Recaps of next week's episodes of The Lowdown and Slow Horses. (paid subscribers)
A few non-spoiler thoughts on Nobody Wants This Season Two in the free Friday newsletter, followed later by spoiler thoughts for paid subscribers
At some point, a few thoughts on It: Welcome to Derry, depending on how many screeners I get through, and when

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Catching up

Here's what I published for paid subscribers since last Friday's newsletter:

My take on the frustrating Peacemaker season — and possibly series — finale, which was a mess even before James Gunn decided that he was most concerned with using the season to set up plot points for Man of Tomorrow:

I recapped the first episode of The Chair Company, where a seemingly minor office embarrassment sent Tim Robinson down a conspiracy rabbit hole:

In the latest What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier post, I took a look at TV Shows That Don't Exist — ones that arrived with some fanfare, and then were almost instantly forgotten:

I recapped the fifth episode of The Lowdown, featuring fantastic buddy comedy work from Ethan Hawke and very special guest star Peter Dinklage:

I recapped the fourth episode of Slow Horses Season Five, which climaxed with an incredible bit of physical comedy:

I also published one free review, of Mubi's new Hal & Harper, where Cooper Raiff and Lili Reinhart unusually close siblings, with the actors playing the title characters as both young adults and children:

Odds and/or ends

I was at New York Comic-Con last week to moderate an Alien: Earth panel for FX. I got there a few hours early so I could walk the show floor for a while, which was as delightful but overwhelming as always. Fortuitously, the first two cosplayers I saw were dressed as Alien: Earth characters — specifically, Wendy and the eyeball. That felt like a nice lead-up to talking with Wendy herself, aka Sydney Chandler, along with Babou Ceesay, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, and producer David W. Zucker, who read a statement from Ridley Scott praising the show and marveling that the movie he made almost 50 years ago is still yielding exciting work. FX has yet to announce a second season, but the crowd of 3800-plus people in the ballroom were full-throated in their desire for more of Morrow, Wendy, and the rest.

At NY Comic-Con to moderate an Alien: Earth panel, and glad to see that the eyeball showed up early.
— Alan Sepinwall (@sepinwall.bsky.social) 2025-10-09T18:35:45.300Z

Earlier this week, Apple announced that Apple TV+ would be renamed to, simply, Apple TV, with "a vibrant new identity." I'm just not sure what to believe in anymore. How do I even know it's a streaming service if it doesn't have a plus sign at the end of its name? And how are we supposed to differentiate Apple TV the streaming service from Apple TV the device you use to watch multiple streaming services, one of which is also called Apple TV?

Diane Keaton, who died last weekend at 79, was rightly remembered for her iconic big screen work, including all three Godfather films, Reds, Baby Boom, The First Wives Club, Something's Gotta Give, and, yes, her early comedies with Woody Allen, where she's perfection in movies that few of us want to watch anymore. Her TV resume was much skimpier. She did some episodic guest work at the start of her career; one of her first jobs was in an early episode of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, albeit not in one of the stories Serling wrote. In 2011, she signed on to play a thinly-disguised version of Deadline founder Nikki Finke in an HBO comedy called Tilda (the name was a riff on Finke's "TOLDJA!" catchphrase), but it never went to series. So her only regular TV role was a season as a basketball-playing nun on The Young Pope, which inspired one of my pal Brian Grubb's favorite gifs:

RIP Diane Keaton
— Brian Grubb (@briancgrubb.bsky.social) 2025-10-11T21:25:23.338Z

What I do in the shadows

Earlier this week, I went to The Diplomat premiere screening at The Metrograph in Manhattan, which was followed by a cocktail reception. I've been doing this long enough to be jaded about pretty much any celebrity. And then Eriq LaSalle randomly walked past me, and it was all I could do to not squeal like 12-year-old ER fan.

As the party continued, I looked over at an alcove with a mirror, and I realized that I had been there once before, to moderate a panel for Netflix's Maniac, with Emma Stone, Justin Theroux, and the show's creator, Patrick Somerville. Right before the panel, they had a photographer take a picture of the three of them. I was then invited to join, and I remember the photographer being very specific about where he wanted me to stand. I didn't understand why, until I saw the finished photo:

Not quite as creepy as me stalking Keri Russell, but in a similar vein.

The next night, I was at the 92nd Street Y to moderate a panel for Hal & Harper, and this time the area was so well-lit that there was no way I could be hidden. I'm much happier with this result:

Diplomatic community

Like I said above, I'll have a lot more to say about The Diplomat Season Three early next week. But here are a few non-spoiler thoughts:

The shift from six episodes back to eight is extremely welcome. The main flaw with Season Two was that everything felt rushed. The stories unfold at a much more satisfying pace this year, and there's even room for a small time jump at one point, so that the entire series isn't unfolding over the space of about a month.
The parts of the show that worked all still work, particularly Keri Russell's gift for verbal, reactive, and physical comedy. She is just a live wire throughout the season, particularly whenever Kate is responding to the latest stunt being pulled by Hal.
Deborah Cahn does some interesting and exciting things to shake up the series' status quo, well beyond having Allison Janney take over as POTUS, and doing a West Wing reunion, with Bradley Whitford playing her husband.
For nearly all of those eight episodes, this felt like my favorite season of the series so far. But something happens in the finale that left me very frustrated, which we can talk about a few days from now. If you've already binged the whole thing, I imagine you know what I'm talking about.

Unrelated to the story of the season, but very much related to the story of the making of the show: you absolutely must read Emily Nussbaum's profile of Keri Russell in The New Yorker, which includes Russell and Matthew Rhys being extremely candid about how they started dating while filming The Americans. At one point, Nussbaum talks to Americans director Thomas Schlamme about the scene where Philip has to extract Elizabeth's tooth, and how everyone involved realized they had to basically play it as a love scene. That happened to be the only day I ever visited The Americans set. Watching TV and film production is boring most of the time; lots of starting and stopping, lots of reshooting the same moments again and again, so that even the special ones begin to feel rote after a while. But while watching Schlamme and the actors film that scene, I could not only tell something magical was happening, but I felt a bit uncomfortable, as if it was so intimate that I should be watching this at home, and not 20 feet away in Video Village.