The What's Alan Watching? Friday Check-In newsletter coming up just as soon as the woman on my book cover has no head...
Catching up
Here's what's happened since last Friday's newsletter:
- The biggest news of the week is that I'm back in the weekly podcasting game, with the launch of TV Is Good, a new show I'm co-hosting with Vulture's Kathryn VanArendonk. You can subscribe on all podcast platforms, stream the teaser episode on YouTube, and find many more details here:
Alan Sepinwall
- I continued the series on TV shows adapted from movies, and vice versa, with a look at some of the better films based on series, with new actors reinterpreting famous roles:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the latest episode of Widow's Bay, a spotlight on scene stealer Kate O'Flynn as Patricia:
Alan Sepinwall
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, I did another Ask Alan video mailbag, covering memorable TV character names, actors doing double duty on comedies and dramas at the same time, and more on movie/TV intersections, with a look at TV shows ripping off films under a new name:
Alan Sepinwall
What's next?
Coming up over the next week or so:
- The first full TV Is Good episode, where Kathryn and I discuss our early impressions of Apple TV's Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, starring Tatiana Maslany as a mom who gets mixed up in camboy-related crime; followed by a discussion of one of the classic Moms Do Crimes series, Showtime's Weeds. Subscribe here, so it will be in your podcast player as soon as it's published.
- I will hopefully also write a full Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed review.
- I'll be reviewing The Boroughs, the new Netflix series that's a kind of senior citizen Stranger Things, starring Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters, and Denis O'Hare as retirement community neighbors investigating a supernatural mystery.
- A review of The Mandalorian and Grogu, which will be next week's entry in the movies/TV series, before it finishes the following week with looks at other movies that are continuations of TV shows, with the original actors reprising their roles.
- Thoughts on the finale of Margo's Got Money Troubles.
Alan Sepinwall
Go, New York! Go, New York! Go!
The New York Knickerbockers, the basketball team I have irrationally rooted for for much of my life, are improbably playing the most beautiful form of the game that the franchise has seen since before I was born. Because the team has the week off while waiting to find out whom they'll face in the Eastern Conference Finals, my favorite Knicks podcast, Knicks Film School, needed to fill time with some Knicks-adjacent content. So that show's host, Jonathan Macri, asked me to come on and find TV character analogues for all 10 players in the team's rotation. You can, like TV Is Good, listen to it wherever you get your podcasts, or you can watch the YouTube version here:
Rob and Ryan go to the Championship
Welcome to Wrexham returned to FX and Hulu this week for its fifth season. The sports docuseries, in which Rob Mac and Ryan Reynolds team up to buy a struggling Welsh football club and attempt to get them all the way up to the Premier League, has been one of my favorite comfort watches of the past few years. Again and again, the show finds great human interest stories from both the team and the people of Wrexham. And the actual squad has continually generated results that would seem corny if they happened in fiction rather than reality, including the team earning back-to-back-to-back promotions in three consecutive seasons.
Now Wrexham is in the Championship, one rung below the Premier League. (It's where AFC Richmond got relegated for a while on Ted Lasso.) I've seen the season's first two episodes, and they're very much concerned with how much has to change for the club to compete on that level. Many of the players we've been following for multiple seasons are shuttled out in favor of new guys who are in theory more talented and definitely more expensive. It's a bit like watching a TV show turn over the majority of its cast after several seasons — to keep it in the sports realm, like the later seasons of Friday Night Lights — and much of the time in the early episodes is spent on Rob, Ryan, and everyone else worrying about whether their fans will be as emotionally invested in this more mercenary squad. They're talking specifically about the fans of the club, but it's also a fair one to wonder about regarding people who love the show.
The good news is that, while the new players haven't come into focus yet, the other parts of Welcome to Wrexham continue to work incredibly well. I got choked up a couple of times in each of the first two episodes, with stories about parents trying to move past the death of their young adult Wrexham fan son, and about the death of one of the most legendary players in Wrexham history, Joey Jones.
At this point, the show is so popular that it was impossible for me to miss a few headlines about how the club did in their first Championship season in decades. If you've managed to avoid them, no spoilers, but it does put a different spin on some of the internal debates about the move than it would if I knew nothing. It's also notable that there are multiple times where manager Phil Parkinson asks the camera crew to leave because he has to tell Rob, Ryan, and the other executives some unpleasant truths that he would rather not be recorded. The higher the stakes, the harder it is to maintain the fairy tale, "we're all a big family" vibe of the earlier seasons. So far, though, I'm very glad to have it back.
Rooster season finale recaplet: 'Songs for Raisa'
Alan Sepinwall
Finally, let's talk a little bit about the end of Rooster Season One. I shared a lot of my thoughts on the show back in March, when it premiered a few days after the similarly-structured Vladimir. (Remember Vladimir?) That was based on the first six episodes. The remaining four didn't massively change that take. On the one hand, seeing more of it builds more affection for the characters, both individually and in different combinations, which is where the Bill Lawrence hangout show magic is at its most potent. On the other, the show didn't get any less shaggy in its concluding stretch. If anything, it felt even more like a lot of significant emotional things were happening in between episodes, or scenes. I don't entirely buy, for instance, that Greg became quite this beloved this quickly; Steve Carell's innate charm has had to do a lot of heavy lifting for the character, since the writers can't entirely sell as both a pathologically awkward introvert and the most popular guy on campus.
But the cast was wonderful well beyond Carell. In a smaller role as the alcoholic hockey coach, Scott MacArthur kills every scene he's in. Charly Clive is wonderful. (And now I want to see her and Kate O'Flynn from Widow's Bay play weird sisters in something.) John C. McGinley, Danielle Deadwyler, all of them. And the idea that Greg's ex is pushing out Walter so she can run the school creates a lot of good conflict for the second season, while also giving us more Connie Britton. Win-win.
I enjoyed it, will be back for next season. The whole just didn't quite add up to the sum of the parts, though.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
