Friday Check-In:'Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass' dares to be stupid

Listen to the newsletter 7 24 26

0:00

/467.957625

Today's Friday Check-In coming up just as soon as I go smear mud on my ass...

Catching up

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

I recapped The Vampire Lesat finale, an ambitious but flawed conclusion to what was overall a wildly entertaining season:

In a new TV Is Good podcast, Kathryn and I went for an Anya Taylor-Joy double bill, talking about her new Apple show Lucky and revisiting her breakout in The Queen's Gambit:

After watching Christopher Nolan's remarkable The Odyssey, I wrote about how he's the only filmmaker with enough juice to get it made as a movie, rather than a prestige streaming miniseries — and how much better off we all are for that:

I reviewed Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, an unpleasant, low-energy, sci-fi Big Bang Theory spinoff that debuted on HBO Max this week:

For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, I wrote about some of the more memorable bits of promotional swag I've received over the years:

I recapped the fourth season premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds:

What's next?

Coming up over the next week or so:

There will be more Stuart Fails to Save the Universe talk on the next TV Is Good episode, which we're pairing with a discussion of some other memorably weird TV spinoffs, like The Brady Bunch Variety Hour and Mrs. Columbo. Plus, Kathryn and I work through our Vampire Lestat finale feelings together.
I'll be reviewing Hulu's Furious, a remake of the Eighties movie thriller Black Widow, this one starring Lola Petticrew as a woman cozying up to and murdering powerful men, and Emmy Rossum as the emotionally damaged FBI agent pursuing her.
More Strange New Worlds recapping.
Another collection of swag stories.
If there's time, hopefully thoughts on the second season of Diarra From Detroit, a detective show moving from BET+ to Paramount+ for its second season, after a first season I really liked.

Go with Rod

A couple of Rod Serling bio-related things:

First, just as a reminder, anyone who pre-orders the book in any format (print, ebook, audiobook) and submits a proof of purchase at this link will get a bonus essay by me about my favorite episode of The Twilight Zone.
Second, I previously said that I expected the book to be available overseas either at the same time or not long after it's published here in the United States on October 13. It turns out this particular situation is slightly different from it was with many of my previous books, and international availability won't be sorted until sometime after its domestic publication. (Though Amazon.ca is selling it.) Apologies for the confusion. Writing, I can do. But other people handle the logistics.

At the movies: Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

One of the most memorable moviegoing experiences I ever had was in the smallest room in which I ever watched a commercially-released film.

It was mid-summer of 2001, and I took my wife to see Wet Hot American Summer, a parody of Seventies and Eighties summer camp movies made by and featuring much of the cast of The State, a Nineties MTV sketch comedy show I adored. (All the episodes are on Paramount+, albeit with replacement music.) By the time we went, the only theater in the area showing it was the AMC Empire in midtown Manhattan, and Wet Hot was being shown in a screening room waaaaaay up at the top of the building, which felt like it could barely seat all eleven original members of The State itself. But the size of the room, or screen, didn't matter. The movie, directed by David Wain and written by Wain and Michael Showalter, was a pitch-perfect spoof. It called out tropes I had been watching throughout my childhood without ever realizing how often they came up. It identified a whole bunch of future stars before anyone else did, including Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Paul Rudd, and Elizabeth Banks. It gave Chris Meloni an astonishingly funny role as the camp's perverted cook, Gene. And it had this spectacular montage where a trip into town goes awry in a very, very short period of time, for both the viewers and the counselors:

Wet Hot is easily my favorite of the various projects written and directed by some combination of Wain, Showalter, and Ken Marino. Almost all the other ones — even the wildly uneven Netflix prequel and sequel seasons to Wet Hot — have hilarious moments, but they don't have quite as firm a grip on the tone, and they often feel on the brink of being a little too satisfied with the satirical points they're making.

Wain and Marino's newest collaboration is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Zoey Deutch plays the title role, an upbeat Kansas hairdresser, working alongside her best friend Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley). Reverse the order of Gail's name, rearrange the letters of Otto's name, and consider what state they're from, and you might realize what classic movie is being paid homage to. That homage just happens to come in the form of a story where Gail discovers that her longtime fiancé has had sex with his celebrity sex pass, and thus the only way to repair their relationship is for her to go to Los Angeles to sleep with her own pass: alt-comedy nerd (and Wet Hot TV alum) Jon Hamm. Along the way, she picks up a trio of misfit friends: a junior-junior-junior talent agency employee (Ben Wang), a down-on-his-luck paparazzo (Marino) and Hamm's even more down-on-his-luck former co-star John Slattery, very gamely playing a pathetic version of himself. There's a parallel story in which a trio of stereotypical mobsters (played by Sabrina Impacciatore, Mather Zickel, and another State alum, Joe Lo Truglio) are trying to kill Gail. And along the way, we run into a lot of the other faces you might expect to see hanging out with this particular creative collective. (Some of those cameos were not only blatantly filmed while no other principal actors were present, but shot in a way that seems designed to emphasize that fact, to make it part of the joke.)

Gail Daughtry doesn't quite hit the comedic highs of some of its predecessors. But it feels more of a piece than most of the others, and is somehow able to lace all the spoof material with some genuine sweetness, and then make fun of that sweetness without actually undermining it. It's proudly stupid and silly. Some of this is a credit to Zoey Deutch, but the balance of innocence and utter cynicism is well handled by all involved.

I was very happy I got to see it in a theater — and not just because there were several jokes in it (one involving a Rolling Stone story I worked on) that, like parts of Wonder Man, briefly created the illusion that this was a movie made specifically for me. (Gail's fiancé is even played by Michael Cassidy from The O.C.!)

The number of screens it's playing on is shrinking — at this writing, it's no longer anywhere in my home state — but you can still find it in theaters in many parts of the country. And if you can't get to it, it'll be on digital video practically in less time than it takes to say its full title.

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