Bad Bunny at the Superb Owl

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Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as my movie trailer doesn't include a title...

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What's next?

Coming up in the next week or so for paid subscribers:

My recap of the penultimate episode of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season One;
My recap of the next episodes of Shrinking and The Pitt;
Thoughts on at least one, if not all, of these: the return of Shoresy to Hulu, Netflix's new adult animated comedy Strip Law; and the second season of Hulu's Paradise.
For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, a look back at one of my all-time favorite short-lived shows, the FX detective drama Terriers.

Catching up

Here's what I've published since last Friday's newsletter:

I recapped last week's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, where the tone effortlessly shifted from light-hearted buddy adventure to something more serious and inspiring:

I recapped the latest Shrinking, which managed to find new angles — some funny, some poignant — on the very familiar trope of the sitcom childbirth episode:

I reviewed the fourth season of Dark Winds, which shifts some of the action to Los Angeles and brings in Franka Potente as a very weird German assassin:

I recapped this week's The Pitt, where the entire emergency department was rocked by a bad patient outcome:

James Van Der Beek, R.I.P.

James Van Der Beek died earlier this week at the age of 48. Fuck cancer.

Though Dawson's Creek debuted early in my career, at a time when I was watching a lot of WB dramas, it was never entirely my tempo. That was because, through no fault of Van Der Beek's whatsoever, Dawson was an insufferable character whom the Dawson's writers, at least at first, didn't seem to recognize was insufferable. So I don't feel like the guy to write a lengthy tribute to the man. Fortunately, my old pal Dan Fienberg was the guy for the job, and his essay covers a lot of Van Der Beek's later-career work that I found terrific, from playing an exaggerated version of himself on Don't Trust the B in Apt. 23 to his oily work as a Trump executive in the first season of Pose. So go read that:

And to reiterate: fuck cancer.

Odds and/or ends:

You know how I love to make digressions in my reviews and recaps, right? Well, every now and then, something feels like too much of a digression even for me, but is worth a bullet point here. Writing about Franka Potente's creepy villain performance in the new Dark Winds season, I was reminded of a day I spent on the set of The Shield, while they were in the midst of production on Season Six. During a break in filming, I was sitting on a bench with Shawn Ryan, enjoying some California sun, when one of the show's other writers approached to ask a question about a new character they were introducing, a female representative of the Armenian mob that had caused so much trouble for the Strike Team. I asked who was playing her. Shawn said Franka Potente. Thinking back to her various roles, from Run Lola Run to the Bourne films, I asked, "Is she going to say 'Scheisse' at some point?" Shawn and the other writer looked at each other like a lightbulb was going off and Shawn said, "She is now!" Alas, it never actually happened on the show, but I would have been amused if it had.
A bit of housekeeping: A day or two after last week's Ask Alan published, there was a Ghost glitch that prevented the videos from that — or from any previous Ask Alan video mailbag — from playing. Similarly, the audio narration for the Friday newsletters (which appears at the top of each of these) wasn't working. Those issues have been fixed, so feel free to go back and watch or listen.

In a recent Ask Alan video mailbag, I talked about some possibilities that would excite me to play the lead in a Rockford Files reboot. I didn't mention David Boreanaz, who's the guy who actually got the job. Boreanaz has built himself a fine TV career — far better and more durable than anyone who watched him in Buffy Season One could have possibly expected. He'll be able to do a decent approximation of James Garner. But he's about the safest, most uninspired choice possible for this gig. Oh, well. I wasn't expecting anything too adventurous, but this is even less than that. There just seems to be no point in redoing Rockford Files if you're not trying to do something even slightly different from maybe the best version of that kind of show ever made.

Bunny makes people go bugs

I'll admit that a part of me was sorely tempted to skip the Super Bowl altogether. My interest in football, outside of my dysfunctional New York Giants, has largely dissipated, and my interest in the possibility of seeing the Patriots win another title was less than zero. Plus, the whole idea that the Super Bowl is worth watching just for the commercials feels at least 15 years out of date, if not longer. It's not just that all the ads get released in advance. It's that the ads have largely been bad for a very, very long time. So there was serious discussion in my house of just eating all the appetizers we bought while watching a movie. But inertia found us watching what was a mostly terrible game, and a mostly terrible slate of ads, mostly because we wanted to see the Bad Bunny halftime show.

The big trend in ads this year was more AI cheerleading, from companies trying to force this terrible product on a populace that by and large doesn't want it. Almost as annoying were the ads that digitally de-aged various celebrities. This Dunkin ad parodying Good Will Hunting was an atrocity, particularly the attempt to turn Ted Danson back into early Nineties Sam Malone:

Coincidentally, we had just rewatched Jurassic Park the day before, so this Xfinity ad's attempt to make Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum look 30 years younger felt even worse:

All that being said, our instinct to make sure we saw Bad Bunny was worth it. His performance was one of the best halftime shows ever — and almost certainly the most ambitious. The sheer scale of the production, which recreated various touchstones of Bunny's childhood growing up in Puerto Rico, was jaw-dropping. Just the ability to get all of that set up while NBC's football talking heads were droning on about the first half? That's the work of serious professionals. But even beyond that, there was so much clear thought and love put into which aspects of his vision for his home would be featured, how, when, and why. I know less than a dozen Spanish phrases, and thus couldn't follow the lyrics. It didn't matter. The effect of the sets, the dancing, the various tableaux, and the sheer charisma of Bad Bunny was enough.

Prince's 2007 halftime performance in the rain will likely always be the standard for sheer musicality and star power, and my favorite halftime show. U2 performing only a few months after 9/11 seems to have a lock on the number two spot. But I don't think it's just recency bias that this one has at least an argument for third place, competing with the likes of Beyonce (whether her own show or her stealing Coldplay's show), Lady Gaga, or Kendrick Lamar last year. And he has set the bar staggeringly high in terms of the scope of what you can do in that 13-minute window. While he was on the field, the Super Bowl actually lived up to the hype. Everything around it, much less so. And, of course, all of the worst people that you know have jumped on it as the latest bit of fuel for their outrage machine, even if they couldn't understand a word — or, more likely, because of that.

That's it for today! What are your favorite Super Bowl TV moments, both from this year's game and any of the previous 59?