Friday Check-In: Can Jon Hamm rescue an 'American Hostage'?

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This week's Friday Check-In newsletter coming up just as soon as I topple into the marshmallows I'm roasting...

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Catching up

This week marked a year since I left Rolling Stone and began running this newsletter/site as my full-time job. Coincidentally, this was also probably the busiest single week I've written at the site, which included a piece about how fulfilling these last 12 months have been, some previews of what's coming, my gratitude for those of you who have become paid subscribers, and a few words of encouragement for free subscribers who might be on the fence:

Meanwhile, the Emmys were on Monday night, and they offered a mix of extremely satisfying winners and extremely aggravating production choices:

Fleabag celebrated an anniversary of its own: 10 years since Phoebe Waller-Bridge's masterpiece arrived in America. I wrote about the surprising and ultimately moving way that Waller-Bridge managed to turn the audience into one of her show's most important characters. If you'll allow me to too my own horn, this is one of my favorite things I've written for this version of the site to date:

I reviewed Neagley, the new Reacher spinoff that raises the question of whether the cheeseball Reacher formula works if the main character isn't really, really, absurdly large:

In the latest TV Is Good podcast episode, Kathryn and I discussed the new season of Slow Horses and then looked back at another show about to have an anniversary: Alias, which debuted 25 years ago next month:

Speaking of Slow Horses, it returned to the recap rotation, as I offered thoughts on all the farting and killing in the Season Six premiere:

Elsewhere in recapping, I wrote about Lanterns bringing the 2016 phase of the story to a close:

This week's Ted Lasso was by far the most any episode this season has focused on the women's team. Not coincidentally, it was by far the episode I've enjoyed the most this year:

The penultimate Star Trek: Strange New Worlds of Season Four went back to silly gimmickry, with La'an traveling to a fairy tale land to learn a very simplistic lesson about balancing her light and dark sides:

What's next?

Here's what to expect over the next week or so:

More recaps of Slow Horses, Ted Lasso, Lanterns, and Strange New Worlds (the season finale).
A new TV Is Good episode where I attempt to explain Reacher and Neagley to Kathryn, followed by a discussion of the Taxi Season One episode "Louie Sees the Light."
For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, the long-awaited third entry in my "If They Swapped Roles" series, where I take two actors with overlapping careers and speculate who would do better in the other's signature role.

There are also several notable premieres next week. I'm still getting to screeners for Sharon Horgan's new HBO comedy Youth, Netflix's A Different World revival, and Apple's Matthew McConaughey/Woody Harrelson comedy Brothers. Look for thoughts on one or more of them in some form.

The promised Studio 60 piece may be a few weeks away, because it expanded into something a bit bigger than just me sharing memories of that weird, weird show.

In The Twilight Zone Zone

We're now less than a month away from the release of Serling: A Journey Into The Twilight Zone with TV's First Visionary, which is still available for preorder (which in turn gets you the free bonus essay on my favorite Twilight Zone episode).

As promised last week, I've been doing a daily countdown of the 31 best Twilight Zone episodes on my TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Here, for instance, is me on number 23, "Living Doll," where the adorable Talky Tina really wants to kill Telly Savalas:

I won't be doing a cross-country book tour, but we're starting to schedule events in and around the New York/New Jersey area. On October 14, I'll be at Words bookstore in Maplewood, NJ for a conversation with someone named [checks notes] Kathryn VanArendonk?

And on October 15, I'll be at The Paley Center in New York — a place where I spent a lot of time watching various Serling teleplays and other obscurities — to talk with curator Jason Lynch.

Getting very excited for all of you to see the fruits of all this labor.

In honor of the first full year of What's Alan Watching?, get 20% off an annual subscription to the What Else Is Alan Watching? tier, which gives you access to everything on the main tier, plus bonus content and access to the What's Alan Watching? Discord

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TV's Jon Hamm on the radio

Jon Hamm's post-Mad Men career has not for the most part given him another role as high-profile as Don Draper — some people may best know him from his many commercials, and/or for being the wet blanket commanding officer from Top Gun: Maverick — but the guy works all the time, and usually picks interesting projects. He was so funny parodying himself in the summer in Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, and he's terrific in his latest role, in MGM+'s American Hostage.

This is an adaptation — by The Shield creator Shawn Ryan and veteran TV writer Eileen Myers — of a scripted podcast Hamm starred in back in 2022. It dramatizes a true story from the late Seventies, where an embittered Indianapolis man named Tony Kiritsis (played by Giovanni Ribisi) takes local banker Dick Hall (played by Kristoffer Polaha, who once upon a time was Don Draper's friend and neighbor Carlton) hostage, then demands that Indy radio news anchor Fred Heckman (played by Hamm) interview him live on air.

It's a seemingly straightforward situation that proves incredibly complicated because of how unusual it is in 1977. The police(*) aren't prepared for a stunt as elaborate as Tony's. Fred, a revered local radio institution, is completely at sea as he realizes that at some point he has stopped covering the story and become a part of it. (William Jackson Harper is really good as a radio colleague who keeps trying and failing to point out the ethical lines Fred is crossing in his attempt to keep Dick alive.)

(*) One situation where I couldn't get an actor's former role out of my head: the Indy police chief is played by Mark McKinney, and whenever he's on screen in uniform, all I could think about was the bumbling cops he and Bruce McCullough used to play on Kids in the Hall.

Ribisi is an actor prone to making very big choices in his performance, but it works here for this irrational man, especially because he's often doing all the talking in a scene while his victim tries keeping quiet to avoid agitating him. And the role of a beloved straight arrow who's not at all prepared for this situation, fits Hamm like a glove.

I haven't seen the last two episodes (out of eight) yet, though I know a bit about how the real story ends. It's not perfect: Mireille Enos is mostly underused as Fred's supportive wife, and the inevitable flashback episode provides background on Fred, Tony, and Dick that's already mostly clear from what we've learned about them by this point. But despite being made on what looks like a shoestring budget, American Hostage has so many good performances (including Jonathan Tucker as an early FBI profiler), and such a solid sense of pacing and theme, that I was engaged throughout what I watched. It turns out that when you let TV people make a TV show — even an intensely serialized one like this — they know how to structure it.

This is one of these annoying things where MGM+ has some business reason to continue to exist as a cable channel (formerly known as Epix), but doesn't need to be its own streaming service when it's owned by Amazon. (In international markets, American Hostage will be on Prime Video.) I know everyone has subscription fatigue, so I wouldn't tell anyone you have to sign up for another. But if you already subscribe, if you have cable and get MGM+ with your package, or can get a free trial, it's definitely worth checking out.

That's it for today! What does everybody else think?