Today's Friday Check-In newsletter coming up just as soon as it's a contest about who knows Steinbeck better...
Once again, thank you for all the well wishes. It's going to take longer to get back to full strength than I would like, and recovery isn't linear. One day at a time!
Catching up
Here's what's been published since last Friday's newsletter:
- Kathryn's Vulture colleague Roxana Hadadi subbed in for me on the latest TV Is Good podcast episode, where they talked about The Lowdown, followed by Roxana cleverly deciding to compare it to Gilmore Girls — which is another show set in a weird small community, with a hero who is both awful and incredibly charming.
Alan Sepinwall
- I wrote about the latest season of The Diplomat, and wondered if perhaps there were a few twists too many this time around:
Alan Sepinwall
- I invited a group of comedy writers to share their thoughts on the beautiful disaster that was Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, 20 years after it debuted:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the Slow Horses finale, which had a lot of fun and/or emotional material, but still felt like the season was doing too much by trying to squeeze multiple books into six episodes:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the latest episode of The Lowdown, where Lee's relationship with his father, his daughter, and the truth were all challenged:
Alan Sepinwall
What's next?
Still sorting things out, in part because it's easier to focus some days than others. But you'll definitely be getting the following next week:
- I'll be back behind the mic for the next TV Is Good episode, a super-sized one that will feature discussion of The Diplomat, The West Wing (focusing on the Season One finale and the two-part Season Two premiere), and The Twilight Zone (focusing a bit on Season One's "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street").
- I'll be writing about the new season of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, with Tracy Morgan, Daniel Radcliffe, and Erika Alexander;
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? subscribers, I'll be doing a new Ask Alan mailbag, so send questions to alan@whatsalanwatching.com.
- I'll be recapping next week's The Lowdown.
In The Twilight Zone zone
Alan Sepinwall
I had the very good timing to do the bulk of my Serling promotion in advance. I had already recorded every video from my countdown of the best Twilight Zone episodes. I did lots of interviews weeks ago, etc. So while it's not the most fun thing in the world to celebrate publication of your book from a hospital bed, I had at least done all of what I could ahead of time to get the word out.
One of those pre-recorded appearances was on the Guide for the Film Fanatic podcast, where we talked about Rod Serling's very uneven resumé as a screenwriter, then focused on by far the best movie he wrote: the 1964 political thriller Seven Days in May, about a military plot to overthrow the U.S. government and its pacifist president. Enjoy this incredibly long trailer that gives away the entire plot of the movie:
Some writers who excel in TV can do just as well on the big screen. Others find that their skills don't translate from one to the other. Serling was a writer who needed two things to succeed in film: a subject he felt passionately about, and a director with a strong visual style who could liven up the extremely talky nature of a Serling script. With Seven Days in May, he had both. He was a big proponent of nuclear disarmament, and he had director John Frankenheimer, among the best ever at finding the most interesting way to shoot every frame of a film.
The podcast was a fun conversation:
As a reminder, I'll be at Words in Maplewood, NJ on November 11 with Kathryn, and then at the Paley Center in Manhattan on November 13 with curator Jason Lynch. I hope to see some of you there!
What is dead may never die
This week, in IP fever, Hulu announced plans for a Glee revival, which will reportedly bring back some original castmembers like Lea Michele and Heather Morris, while NBC is attempting to reboot the Nineties sitcom hit Coach, with Ty Burrell stepping in for Craig T. Nelson(*). Glee is among the most cursed television shows ever made, and I hope things go better for everyone involved with this new version. And this is actually the second attempt to bring back Coach, though the 2015 version was going to be a revival with Nelson and other original castmembers.
(*) As legend has it, Nelson was the first choice to play Jay on Modern Family, but wanted more money than was being offered. Ed O'Neill got the job instead, and made a small fortune, while Nelson had to content himself to being in a more modest success at the same time on Parenthood. Had history gone a little differently, Burrell would now be attempting to succeed his TV father-in-law.
Glee was a phenomenon for a hot minute in the early 2010s, so you can see why there might be an appetite to revive it and have a new generation of young actors performing covers of Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter songs. Coach is more a case of a conglomerate remembering that they own the rights to a familiar title that was once fairly popular, even if odds are small you can find anyone who will insist that Coach is their favorite show ever.
Odds are against either one working, commercially or creatively, but we're going to keep getting these kinds of announcements. And every now and then, IP mining pays off. Which brings us to...
Good medicine
It can be a strange thing watching medical shows, or scenes about medicine, from a hospital bed. I still have a vivid memory of having an IV changed while watching Ed the disappearer do the same for Walter White in the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad. And in past hospital stays, I've sometimes found myself diving into old episodes of St. Elsewhere or ER as a way to liven up the tedium of my own situation.
This time out, I mostly stuck with movies, including a period of a couple of days where I couldn't focus on anything but watching Top Gun: Maverick on a loop. But I was also very happy to consume episodes of the new season of the Scrubs revival. It remains one of the better examples of how to exploit old IP and have it feel worthwhile. Why is it succeeding when so many others are failing?
In large part, it's because it has a creative reason to exist. The original show begins with J.D., Turk, and Elliot on their first day as interns, with a ton to learn about being both a doctor and an adult. In the revival, they're all middle-aged, and in relatively senior positions at the hospital, struggling to mentor a new generation. Too many sitcom revivals try to pretend like everything is exactly as it was when we last saw these characters, and have nothing new to say. But the passage of time is the whole point of this new Scrubs. The writers have done a good job of figuring out which aspects of our heroes' twentysomething behavior still makes sense for them to be doing in their 50s, and which just makes them look stupid.
But a lot of it is just simple execution. Braff, Faison, and Chalke are all fully engaged with the material. The writers have managed to zero in on the tone of the early NBC seasons, when the whimsy and the realism were in relative balance. When other original characters like Dr. Cox or Carla turn up, they still feel like themselves. And while the interns are still not nearly as defined as our heroes were at this stage of the original show, the second season has been smarter about deploying them. Tosh is the only newbie who's in every episode, with the others appearing only when there's a story to tell about them.
And it's funny! The thing that separated original recipe Scrubs from a lot of other single-camera comedies of its era is that its primary focus was making the audience laugh. The more serious moments were changes of pace, and even they often existed very close to jokes. There's a lot of contemporary comedy that makes me smile, but after all these years, Scrubs is good for genuine belly laughs each week — even at times when my physical condition can make laughs slightly uncomfortable.
I still wish ABC had ordered more episodes, but what we're getting is working — really well.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
