In honor of The Bear's final season, get $20 off an annual subscription to What's Alan Watching?, from now through June 28.
This week's Friday Check-In coming up just as soon as I go penguin sledding...
You're entering... the discount zone?
As I might have mentioned once or twice, my book about the life, work, and legacy of Twilight Zone creator and star Rod Serling is available for preorder ahead of its October 13 release, wherever you get your books. But if you're a Barnes & Noble member who wants to save extra on preordering, you can get it for 25% off with the code PREORDER25. (An additional 10% off if you're a B&N Premium member.)
Barnes & Noble
In addition to telling the story of Serling's life and work, the book has modern writers and directors like Gullermo del Toro, JJ Abrams, Steven Spielberg, Ben Stiller, Rian Johnson, Pamela Adlon, and many more talking about the huge influence Serling and Twilight Zone had on what they do.
Catching up
Here's what I've published since last Friday's newsletter:
- Legendary sitcom director James Burrows died at the age of 85. I paid tribute to the career of the very best to ever do that job.
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped an incredible episode of The Vampire Lestat, for which only one word seemed to suffice: dayenu.
Alan Sepinwall
- On a new episode of TV Is Good, Kathryn and I talked about our mixed House of the Dragon feelings, then revisited the shockingly dark series finale of the Nineties puppet family sitcom Dinosaurs.
Alan Sepinwall
(I also guested on the podcast of my longtime TCA pal Bill Brioux to talk about the year in TV so far, Rod Serling, old press tour stories, etc.)
- Ahead of last night's debut of the fifth and final season of The Bear, critics were given all but the series finale. I wrote a no spoiler review based on what I got to see in advance.
Alan Sepinwall
What's next?
We're heading into a holiday week, but you'll be getting:
- Tomorrow morning, spoiler-filled thoughts on the entire The Bear season.
- Sunday night, my recap of the next Vampire Lestat.
- Monday morning, a new TV Is Good where Kathryn and I talk about The Bear and I chat with our first guest, Tatiana Maslany, about a TV show she loves.
Depending on time, you may see thoughts in some form on any or all of Prime's Legally Blonde prequel series Elle, the return of X-Men '97 to Disney+, or the final season of Netflix's Survival of the Thickest.
This is not a review: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Periodically, I'll watch only an episode or two of a show — enough for me to form an opinion, but not enough of a sample for me to feel strong enough in that opinion to write a real review. This is one of those instances.
I feel like I was higher than the consensus on the first season of Netflix's live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender show — not just the consensus among critics, but among members of my own household, who adored the animated series but found the new version pointless. A part of me was admittedly just relieved that the new show was so much closer to the original than the disastrous M. Night Shyamalan film — because what wouldn't be? I did genuinely enjoy parts of it, though, particularly the way everyone's powers were on display in the action sequences, and several of the performances, most notably Dallas Liu as the disgraced Prince Zuko. It felt at times like the creative team was a little too in love with the fight scenes, though, that they had geared the new show to be darker and more "adult" than the cartoon, and that the pacing was inevitably rushed as 20 half-hour episodes were adapted into eight hour-long installments. But enough of it worked that I was curious to see the show's eventual return two years later.
I don't know that anything is substantially different about the start of the new season, other than that several of the younger actors have noticeably aged since we last saw them. (As Aang, Gordon Cormier seems to have shot up two to three feet.) The new season opens with an impressive set piece where Aang puts his new waterbending skills on display, and Miya Cech has a fine introduction as young earthbending master Toph. But watching the first two episodes mostly made me want to queue up their animated equivalents. The aspects I liked before were still good, but the sum of the parts added up to something I found pretty lifeless this time around, and I put it on pause after the second episode. Maybe I'll return later, but I already know where the story goes — and how well it's been told before.
This is not a review: Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness
See above, re: me writing based on a small sample size.
Speaking of knowing where things are going, I had a sinking sense of overfamiliarity early in the first episode of HBO's Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, a new sketch comedy series produced by Barack and Michelle Obama and starring and written by Larry David (with longtime Curb Your Enthusiasm collaborator Jeff Schaffer). Each sketch looks at a crucial moment in American history and essentially asks, "What if Larry David was there?" He's technically playing other characters (some famous, some fictional), but they're all in some way Larry doing and saying Larry things — more often than not, things he's done and said on Curb, that he had Jerry or George say on Seinfeld, etc. There's a sketch set in the Great Depression built around the Curb concept of the Chat-N-Cut, for instance
Even when the jokes aren't exactly repurposed from David's earlier work, the shape of them is so familiar that you'll see almost every one coming well before it's delivered — and then repeated, and repeated at least two to three more times. I watched two episodes before stopping. Between this and the later seasons of Curb — where I spent much of each episode watching with a blank expression, waiting for the laughter that the 2000s and early 2010s episodes gave me in droves — I fear that I'm not going to get much out of David's new material at this stage of his incredible career. To quote Jerry Seinfeld — one of the new show's many, many guest stars — that's a shame.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
