Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I have an immaculate infection...
What's next?
Alan Sepinwall
Coming up over the next week or so for paid subscribers:
- My recap of the series premiere of A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms;
- My review of Riot Women, which arrived on BritBox earlier this week;
- My recap of The Pitt Season Two's third episode;
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, a sequel to my "If They Swapped Roles" post from November; and
- A review of FX's latest Ryan Murphy series, The Beauty, if I have time to finish all the screeners before it premieres; otherwise, I'll have something the following week for a show that will inspire a lot of Discourse.
Catching up
Here's what I've published since last Friday's newsletter:
- I sang the praises of the animated action epic Primal, which returned from a long break by turning its late caveman hero into a zombie caveman hero, who still kicks ass with an even more limited vocabulary and range of emotions:
Alan Sepinwall
- I reviewed A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, and praised the latest Game of Thrones prequel for finding ways for less to be more in the world of Westeros:
Alan Sepinwall
- I reviewed the Netflix miniseries Agatha Christie's Seven Dials, which scratched a cozy period murder mystery itch I didn't realize I had:
Alan Sepinwall
- I had a few additional thoughts on the premiere of Starfleet Academy beyond what I wrote in last week's review:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped this week's The Pitt, where Dr. Al-Hashimi is still struggling to adjust to her new workplace — or else The Pitt is still struggling to incorporate its new attending:
Alan Sepinwall
Something that's been bugging me
I had a HitFix reunion with former colleagues Dan Fienberg and Josh Lasser last month to see Carrie Coon star in husband Tracy Letts' play Bug in previews on Broadway. It officially opened last week, and Coon's performance has justifiably drawn rave reviews. It's incredible to watch her on stage, and there are a couple of moments — one scenery change in particular — that left the audience gasping in a way that only live theater can create.
Coon plays a divorced woman who lives in a motel and gradually gets sucked into the paranoid delusions of a drifter (played by Namir Smallwood). I haven't seen previous productions, nor the 2006 movie version with Ashley Judd and Michael Shannon, so I can't speak to how effective they were. But this version is tonally odd, toggling back and forth between relatively light domestic comedy and this much darker story about how easy it is for people in modern life to begin to believe in things that are clearly untrue. The latter mode is where Bug works best — and feels most timely — but the quippier parts don't fit with that, and undercut at least some of the drama. Still, I'm glad I finally got to see one of my favorite performers in the theater, where she seems happiest, and where she was as emotionally raw as you would expect.
What's been simultaneously fun and maddening about the press cycle around Bug's debut is how much emphasis there is on Coon's most recent work on The White Lotus and The Gilded Age. Her performance in The Leftovers — a Mt. Rushmore-level TV drama piece of acting — either doesn't get mentioned at all, gets mentioned briefly, or, in one profile I read, gets mentioned as something the author was stunned to see once they finally got around to watching it.
At the risk of being the guy who liked that band before they became popular, where were all these people a decade ago?!?! I was trumpeting Coon's work as Nora Durst back then. So was Dan. So were so many of our peers. But nothing. She didn't even get an Emmy nomination for it. (The year Leftovers ended, she was instead nominated for her work on Fargo, which was very good, but not close to her as Nora.)
Yes, The Leftovers was a cult show even when it was airing. (And not just because several characters were actually members of a cult.) Yes, the first season can be really really hard to get through (though it was my number one show of that year). Yes, it's a hard series to both describe coherently and in a way that makes newcomers want to sit through it: "It's, um, about a world where the Rapture happened, only it wasn't exactly the Rapture, and all the people who didn't vanish are consumed with grief and/or having a nervous breakdown?"
But good lord, people writing about Bug. Fire up HBO Max immediately, so you can put this actor's work into its proper, staggering context. And if you're reading this and I haven't yet converted you, just know that the second and third seasons are some of the greatest television I've ever watched, and there's enough greatness in the first — particularly in the Nora-centric "Guest" — to pull you through the rough patches.
I did, however, appreciate that as part of this press tour, Coon did a Sunday Morning interview where she noted that, even after her recent commercial success with Lotus and Gilded Age, Leftovers is still by far the thing she most often gets recognized for when she's out and about:
If you know, you know.
That's it for today! What did everybody else think?
