Friday Check-In: GO NEW YORK, GO NEW YORK, GO

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Today's What's Alan Watching? Friday Check-In coming up just as soon as Ben Stiller films me from his courtside seat...

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Catching up

Here's what I've published since last week's Check-In:

I began recapping The Vampire Lestat with my take on the shockingly funny and weird season premiere:

In the latest episode of the TV Is Good podcast, Kathryn and I went for an undead love double feature by talking about Lestat and the classic Buffy the Vampire Slayer two-parter "Surprise" and "Innocence."

I picked my 10 favorite shows of 2026 so far. (Editor's note: my biggest omission, even from honorable mentions, was the very funny The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins.)

I recapped the penultimate Widow's Bay of the season, where Dale Dickey finally got a chance to strut her stuff:

What's next?

Coming up over the next week:

My recap of The Vampire Lestat episode two;
A TV Is Good podcast episode where Kathryn and I discuss our thoughts on Widow's Bay through these first nine episodes; plus a sidebar about Gilligan's Island and the unspoken horror of static high-concept TV premises;
A recap of the Widow's Bay season finale;
My review of House of the Dragon Season Three;
A new Ask Alan video for What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, so send in those questions.

We'll see if there's time for thoughts on the new season of Kathryn's favorite TV show, Apple's Sugar.

Next stop... The Twilight Zone Podcast

I went to my first SerlingFest while the ink was practically still drying on my contract to write my Rod Serling biography. There was a guy there who many of the fans treated like a rock star. Curious, I introduced myself, and learned that he was Tom Elliot, host of the long-running, smart, imaginative The Twilight Zone Podcast. Even though Tom was an expert on the subject and I was someone clearly still in the shallow end of this particular knowledge pool, he was really welcoming to me — as were all the Serling fans I met — and eventually gave me some great insights for the book.

Tom had me on this week's episode to talk a bit about the process of researching and writing it, and I'll be back on in the fall sometime around the October 13 publication date for a deeper dive into what I wrote.

The Doctor is out

Big nerd news from the UK earlier this week. Russell T. Davies is out as Doctor Who showrunner. This year's planned Christmas special has been canceled. It's unclear when the sci-fi institution will return, who will be in charge behind the scenes, or who will be playing the Doctor whenever it comes back.

So many things about this new Who era seemed promising on paper. Ncuti Gatwa was an inspired choice as the Fifteenth Doctor. The BBC's partnership with Disney would inject some real cash into a show historically made on a shoestring budget. And if the return of Davies — who brought the series back from the dead in 2005 — as showrunner wasn't as exciting a move as finding completely new blood would have been, the hope was that he would at least restore a baseline level of quality after the often inert Chris Chibnall era.

Gatwa was wonderful, albeit just as underused as Jodie Whittaker was under Chibnall. The rest was a disaster. Davies is an uneven writer by nature, and it felt like he was mostly channeling his worst instincts upon his return to the big chair. (His first proper episode was called "Space Babies" and leaned on a pun about snot, for goodness' sake!) Episodes often seemed more concerned with taking advantage of the increased VFX money rather than coherent storytelling. Seasons were too short, the show switched companions between seasons, and it never felt like we got to know any of the main characters as well as we did their predecessors. Gatway was given isolated scenes where he seemed like he could be an all-time Doctor, but not nearly enough of them, and then he was gone. So was Disney, which pulled out of the partnership after these two seasons were produced. Now Davies has followed them out the TARDIS door.

So what now? It feels like we need some fresh blood. at least one of two things: 1)A showrunner who loves the series but hasn't been involved with it before, to see if a new perspective can reinvigorate what's been codified over the past 20 years by Davies, Steven Moffatt, and Chibnall; and/or 2)A longer layoff than we've gotten since the first Davies season, to make the heart grow fonder through absence. Hopefully, the BBC makes the right decision on who can keep the TARDIS running properly.

(Also, will the new showrunner feel beholden to deal with the cliffhanger ending of Davies' final episode, where the Fifteenth Doctor appeared to morph into Rose Tyler? Or will that be ignored or years, and then explained in a comic book or radio play or somesuch?)

The tip-in heard round the world

The best TV show I've watched in the past two months isn't Widow's Bay. It isn't Lestat. Hell, it probably isn't even the Mad Men episode "The Suitcase" that Kathryn and I revisited for our first Patreon episode. Okay, it's probably "The Suitcase," but it's closer than it should be. Because the experience of witnessing the New York Knicks stampede their way through the NBA Playoffs has been unreal television.

Obviously, some of this is me being a long-suffering Knicks fan. I watched John Starks' potential title-winning shot in Game 6 of the NBA Finals get deflected by Hakeem Olajuwon's fingernail, then watched Starks have an epically awful Game 7. I watched Michael Jordan tear the team's heart out again and again. I spent most of the 21st century watching the franchise become so inept and toxic, I wondered over and over why I was watching at all. And now they are one win away from winning their first championship since before I was born.

But it goes beyond my own personal investment. What the Knicks have been doing since the playoffs began has been an astonishingly good narrative, whether you root for them or not. For those of you who don't know or care, let me try to hit the bullet points quickly:

Again, the team was an absolute clown car from roughly 2001-2020. Disaster after disaster, both on and off the court. They were a punchline, and nothing else.
The team finally got back to respectability in the 2020s, but in a weird way. They hired Leon Rose, a former agent who had never run a team before, to take over basketball operations. Where most bad teams have to amass a bunch of high draft picks in order to become great — as we've seen with the Knicks' opponents, the San Antonio Spurs, whose three best players were selected 1st, 2nd, and 4th overall in their respective drafts — Rose instead acted like the guy whose only asset is a paper clip, trades it for something more valuable, and keeps doing that until he's turned the paperclip into a house. None of the Knicks' starters were drafted by the team. Jalen Brunson, their point guard, was viewed as a nepo hire, since his dad is an assistant coach and Rose is his godfather. Instead, he turned out to be one of the top 10 players in the NBA, and the very best player in the clutch. Karl-Anthony Towns was viewed as something of a disappointment as a number 1 overall pick — a guy with all the talent in the world but not the discipline to make full use of it. Three of our current players were all on the same team together in college. Their current coach, Mike Brown, appeared to be the team's fourth or fifth choice to fill the position. It's a whole Island of Misfit Toys situation.
For most of this season, the toys were not playing well together. It was a "the sum is way smaller than the sum of its parts" situation. It didn't seem like most of them even liked each other. Knicks fans were talking openly about wanting to break up the whole team in the offseason. Hell, even three games into these playoffs, they seemed like an utter catastrophe. Knicks fans everywhere resigned themselves to another lost season, and another revamp.
Then, starting with the fourth game, something seemingly impossible happened: the Knicks turned into one of the greatest teams to ever play the game. This is not an exaggeration, not hype from a Knicks fanboy. They had a 13-game winning streak — second-longest in the history of the playoffs — with combined stats that were off-the-charts. They couldn't lose. Towns completely reinvented his game on the fly — after a decade of inconsistency in the NBA, abruptly turning into the best possible version of himself — and Brown completely reinvented the team's offense to allow that to happen.
On some nights, they boat-raced other teams out of the gym. On others, they fell into deep holes and still calmly dug their way out, always trusting that they can. The team made multiple comebacks from being down 20 points or more in games. On Wednesday night, they came back from being down by 29 points, for the biggest comeback in NBA history, taking the lead for good with 1.2 seconds left on an astonishing tip-in shot by OG Anunoby, who flew in out of nowhere when Brunson missed a shot from deep:

The Knicks have been doing this against Victor Wembanyama, a 22-year-old Frenchman who stands 7'4" — making the 7' Towns look like a middle schooler — is a one-man defense unto himself, and can handle the ball like someone much closer to Jalen Brunson's size. Every NBA pundit has been assuming that the Spurs will dominate the league for years to come, and that whichever team won the Western Conference Finals between the Spurs and Oklahoma City Thunder would make quick work of the Knicks. Instead, outside of a Game 3 letdown (more on that in a second), the Knicks have figured out how to maneuver around Wemby, and to make him seem human, and not an alien sent from another planet to conquer Earth through basketball.
Celebrity Knicks fans have been losing their mind all playoffs. Ben Stiller, Spike Lee, Fat Joe, and Timothee Chalamet have shown up courtside for away games. Taylor Swift was partying with Mariska Hargitay on Wednesday night, and Jerry Seinfeld with Larry David. Stiller has been shooting gorgeous videos with his phone. There's entertainment outside the game itself. Enjoy this video of Cynthia Nixon and a bunch of other Gilded Age actors — all in full period costume — losing their damn minds watching OG's tip-in. And Game 3 brought the sights and sounds of almost all 18,000 fans at Madison Square Garden thunderously booing Donald Trump — booing during the National Anthem, no less — when his face appeared on the big screen. (The vibes that night were way off, which may have contributed to the Knicks letting their feet off the gas and letting the Spurs beat them up.) It's absolute mayhem.

All of this is the kind of thing that would be dismissed as unbelievably corny if it happened on a scripted show — even on an unapologetically feel-good one like Ted Lasso. As a thing that's actually happening, though? It's just beautiful. There's narratives for days, highlights that will live forever, no matter what happens in the remaining games of the series.

I love scripted television. I've built my whole life and career around it. But every now and then, real life, and real sports, manage to improve upon anything that could be written.

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