Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I give my toothpaste to my math tutor...
What's next?
Coming up over the next week or so:
- Recaps of the next episodes of Shrinking and The Pitt;
- Thoughts on the second season of Daredevil: Born Again, and whether the show is any better, now that it has a single creative team for a whole year;
- A check-in on the fifth season of For All Mankind;
- An Ask Alan video mailbag for What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, so send in those questions;
- Depending on time and interest, a review of something else (Riz Ahmed's James Bond-adjacent meta comedy Bait? Netflix's horror series Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen?) debuting in what's a busy week as we get deeper into Emmy-bait season.
Catching up
Here's what I published since last Friday's newsletter:
- I wrote about the many highs and lows of this year's Oscar telecast, including a win that felt particularly resonant as I keep working on a book about The Wire:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped this week's Shrinking, where Gaby struggled in the face of losing a patient, and Jason Segel and Cobie Smulders continued their How I Met Your Mother reunion chemistry:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped this week's The Pitt, where the arrival of a couple of ICE agents and their detainee disrupted everything Dr. Robby and friends were doing:
Alan Sepinwall
Odds and/or ends
- RIP, Eric Overmyer. Acclaimed as a playwright, he had a long and impressive TV career. He wrote on The Wire, Homicide, St. Elsewhere, and Law & Order. Co-created Tremé. Created Bosch. One of the few writer/producers, both working with David Simon and on his own, who actually knew how to make the "every season of our show is a Novel For Television" structure work.
- Also on the subject of The Wire: yesterday, I finished my rewatch of the series as I prepare to wrap up my writing of the aforementioned book, set to come out next summer around the series' anniversary. Hot take: a pretty good show! I'll obviously have a lot more to say about it next year as we get closer. But I'm always struck by this contrast between Marlo near the end of the fifth season and Vondas near the end of the second. Among the many incredible aspects of The Wire is its institutional memory.
This is not a review: Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat
Periodically, I'll watch only an episode or two of a show — enough for me to form an opinion, but not enough of a sample for me to feel strong enough in that opinion to write a real review. This is one of those instances.
Back when it still existed as Amazon's free, ad-supported companion to Prime Video, Freevee produced some terrific shows, like the Tegan and Sara-inspired drama High School and Shea Serrano's family comedy Primo. But the only Freevee shows to make any kind of splash were Bosch: Legacy, which was a spinoff of a popular Prime series (featuring the main character of that series), and the out-of-nowhere smash hit Jury Duty. A combination of mockumentary and prank show, it placed an oblivious but seemingly very nice non-actor named Ronald onto a fake jury with a group of improv actors, plus James Marsden playing an exaggerated version of himself. The world seemed incredibly charmed by it. It got four Emmy nominations, including for Marsden and for Outstanding Comedy Series.
Other than Marsden's embrace of every cliche about narcissistic movie stars, Jury Duty unfortunately never really clicked for me in the handful of episodes I watched. For me, the show's two halves were in complete opposition to each other. The comedy had to be designed in a way that Ronald could interact with it. It wasn't especially funny on its own, and because Ronald's response to most things was to be an empathetic good sport, he wasn't adding any laughs to it. And by having the actors stay in character even in moments when Ronald wasn't around, we didn't even get the behind-the-scenes fun of the similar early 2000s The Joe Schmo Show, which was constantly showing the actors and producers scrambling to respond to whatever their mark was doing. Ronald seemed like a good hang, but very little of it made me laugh.
Because that season became such a phenomenon, I decided to give the follow-up, Jury Duty Presents: Corporate Retreat, a shot. This one leans even more into The Office, with a temp worker named Anthony taking what he thinks is a one week job assisting the HR director of a small family-owned hot sauce company run their corporate retreat. My reaction was almost identical: the show around Anthony felt incredibly thin, and Anthony himself was genial but not really helping the comedy. I stopped after the first one, marking the series down as Not For Me.
If it's also a smash hit? Well, consider me Seymour Skinner:
Into every generation, a revival is born... until it isn't
If you're a TV nerd of a certain age, odds are that one or more of Joss Whedon's TV shows once means a lot to you. And if you're someone who pays attention to what we've learned in the years since about Whedon as a toxic boss, odds are you now have complicated feelings about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, et al. I certainly do. When you add those misgivings to my general skepticism about TV revivals and reboots — where you barely need all 10 fingers to count the good ones — it was a strange week of news regarding Whedon IP.
First, there was Nathan Fillion's Instagram announcement that all the surviving castmembers of Firefly would be reuniting for an animated series — assuming a distributor can be found. Then Sarah Michelle Gellar took to her own Instagram to reveal that Hulu's planned Buffy revival wouldn't be going forward. In various post-mortem articles, blame has been placed on Chloe Zhao's direction, on the decision of writers Lila and Nora Zuckerman to not show Buffy herself until the final scene of the pilot (which was primarily focused on a new Slayer, Nova, to be played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong), and/or on Hulu executive Craig Erwich for not caring about the title in the first place.
Whedon will not be involved in the Firefly cartoon if it gets made, nor was he in any way active with the new Buffy. The Zuckermans are talented writers (they were showrunners on Poker Face Season One), and I've liked work by both Tara Butters (Reaper, Agent Carter) and longtime Arrow-verse boss Marc Guggenheim, who are set to run Firefly. Armstrong is so good on The Lowdown that I'm excited to see what she could do as the center of a show. The chemistry among most of the Firefly cast — on reunion panels, podcasts, etc. — has remained strong for nearly 25 years. There are lots of reasons to want to see either revival.
But as I often say, great TV shows are a product of a very specific moment in the lives of the characters, the people making the show, and the audience watching. Change even one of those elements, and it rarely works as well years later. Whedon, for all of his many reported failings as a person and manager, had a creative voice that was palpably a part of both series. Just look at, say, the final season of Gilmore Girls, which didn't have the time problem, but was being made without the similarly distinctive voice of Amy Sherman-Palladino; it resembled Gilmore Girls, but it didn't feel like Gilmore Girls.
Obviously, this isn't always the case. To use an example from comics, Marvel's Jessica Jones was created by a writer named Brian Michael Bendis, whose dialogue is as distinctive as Whedon's or Sherman-Palladino's, yet other writers have done very well with Jessica — some arguably better than him.
But even revivals that bring back key creatives from the original runs usually struggle to recapture that old magic. These are beloved shows, even if their legacies are trickier because of the guy who dreamed them both up. And familiar IP remains the hottest currency in Hollywood. I wouldn't be surprised if the Firefly cartoon finds a home, and I would be shocked if Disney didn't take another stab at Buffy within a few years. I'd just like to see more great new things, you know?
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
