This week's What's Alan Watching? Friday Check-In newsletter coming up just as soon as you do an eight ball to make me feel better...
Greetings from beautiful Austin, Texas, where I'm getting ready for the second day of the ATX Television Festival. I'll be moderating a screening and Q&A for the classic Homicide episode "Three Men and Adena" later today. Tomorrow, Dan Fienberg and I will screen a Twilight Zone episode and talk about my Rod Serling biography. And on Sunday, I'll be sitting down with the creators of FX's fun Gen Z hangout comedy Adults. I'll also be eating a lot of tacos and BBQ, most likely. If you happen to be in Austin and see me, please say hi!
Catching up
Here's what I've published since last Friday's newsletter:
In the latest episode of TV Is Good, Kathryn and I talked about For All Mankind, its new spinoff Star City, and another Ronald D. Moore show, Outlander:
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I also reviewed Star City, and talked about the complications of revisiting an earlier period in the FAM timeline:
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I concluded my series on TV shows that get turned into movies, and vice versa, with a look at films that, like The Mandalorian and Grogu, were continuations of television series, with the original actors reprising their roles:
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I recapped this week's Widow's Bay double-feature, and wrote about how I much preferred the episode set in the present to the Betty Gilpin-led flashback:
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What's next?
ATX travel has cut into my screener-watching time, so we'll see what I have time to get to. But definitively coming are:
- I'll be reviewing AMC's The Vampire Lestat, aka Season Three of Interview with the Vampire.
- A recap of the next Widow's Bay.
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus subscribers, a look back at my 30th anniversary as a professional journalist, and how things worked back in ye olden days.
- TV Is Good episode 3, where Kathryn explains Love Island USA to me, and then we talk about an episode about love on an island: "The Constant" from Lost. (Subscribe here.)
- We are also launching our TV Is Good Patreon on Monday, with an hour-long conversation about one of our favorite TV episodes, "The Suitcase." You can sign up for that at Patreon.com/TVIsGoodPod.
- As a bonus-bonus, there will be a short extra Patreon episode later in the week, with me explaining the Hacks finale to Kathryn, who hasn't watched this season yet. Her response will be on Patreon, but you can find my own thoughts below.
There are some other notable premieres next week, including Apple's Cape Fear show with Javier Bardem and Amy Adams, and Hulu's Mindy Kaling-created Not Suitable for Work. Again, travel makes it hard to watch screeners (you can't even download them for the flight), so I can only do my best.
Hacks series finale recaplet: Dying for laughs?
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Finally, it's time for spoilers about this week's Hacks series finale. Back away now if you haven't watched but intend to.
Last season ended with TMZ mistakenly reporting Deborah's death. Season Five acts like it's going to conclude with the real thing: Deborah's cancer is in an advanced stage, she has no interest in suffering through treatment, and wants Ava to come with her for one last European holiday, with the final destination being an assisted suicide clinic in Zurich.
Two things can be true. On the one hand, Hannah Einbinder, whose performance on the show has at times been underrated because of the vast shadow cast by the great Jean Smart, acts the hell out of this story. Though Ava has started to build a career for herself, she has turned Deborah into her entire emotional life. The thought of losing her — and of this indomitable woman giving up, rather than doing everything she possibly can to stay on the stage — is agonizing for Ava, and Einbinder makes all of that palpable.
On the other hand, this is the schmuckiest of schmuckbait. There is no way a show with this tone is going to end with one of its two main characters dying in such a manner. So the whole thing feels like blatant, clumsy manipulation of the audience, no matter how good Einbinder is. You know Deborah will eventually change her mind. And given how much the show has devoted to the passion Deborah feels when she's writing with Ava, it seemed almost inevitable that she would rediscover the will to fight by getting a brainstorm for a new special. (Maybe it's her version of Tig Notaro's star-making one?)
The thing is, the penultimate episode more or less offered the perfect conclusion to the series: Deborah figures out how to outmaneuver Bob Lipka and get her career-capping moment, not at MSG, but in Central Park. As Kathryn (who moonlights as a comedy critic) discusses in that Patreon episode, outdoor venues are notoriously terrible for comedy. But since we barely see any of the concert, it doesn't matter. The team comes together, Deborah shines, the crowd roars, roll credits, say goodbye, everyone is happy. You move a few finale scenes about the state of Ava, Jimmy, and Kayla's careers into that one, and nothing else needs to be said. And the audience certainly doesn't have to roll its eyes at this concluding idea, no matter how good the performances are.
As always, remember that I'm someone who generally liked but didn't love Hacks, so I imagine people's mileage varied.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
