Today's newsletter coming up just as soon as I launch my new streaming service, Sepinwall+...
Catching up
Here's what I've published since last Friday's newsletter:
- In the latest TV Is Good podcast episode, Kathryn and I went all-in on weird spin-offs, starting out with Stuart Fails to Save the Universe, followed by talk about past oddities like The Brady Bunch Variety Hour and Mrs. Columbo:
Alan Sepinwall
- I reviewed Furious, the new Hulu crime thriller starring Emmy Rossum as an emotionally damaged FBI agent chasing a female serial killer:
Alan Sepinwall
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus subscribers, I continued my trip down swag memory lane with more pictures of more weird promotional items I've been given over the years:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the latest Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode, a haunted house story that put this show's version of Jim Kirk at the forefront again:
Alan Sepinwall
What's next?
Next week will be a bit lighter on written content, for reasons I'll get into in a moment. Here's what to look forward to, nonetheless:
- The next TV Is Good episode will feature Kathryn and I comparing Furious with the very different TV show that put its creator, Elizabeth Meriwether, on the map: New Girl.
- We'll also be dropping our third Patreon episode, where we talk about "Axis Mundi," the Season Two premiere of The Leftovers (aka "The One With the Cavewoman"). You can subscribe at Patreon.com/tvisgoodpod
- Another Strange New Worlds recap.
- Ted Lasso is somehow back, and I'll be recapping every episode.
- A review of Sterling Point, a new YA drama on Prime Video from My Old Ass writer/director Megan Park, produced by The O.C. team of Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage.
A man. A plan. A microphone. Serling?
The reason the writing will be light in the short-term is that, starting today, I'll be spending much of the next week sitting in a booth in a recording studio to narrate the audiobook for Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone with TV's First Visionary.
I split audio duties with Matt Zoller Seitz for TV (THE BOOK), and I recorded all of my narration from Welcome to The O.C., but this is the first time I'm doing a whole audiobook all by myself. Serling — with its biographical narrative, and with the many, many, many people quoted within its page — feels like a big challenge on top of the length. I've been rehearsing a lot to hopefully get it all right. A few weeks ago, I showed off my attempt at recreating one of Serling's Twilight Zone monologues. I thought that would be the hard part. Instead, it turns out that Alan Sepinwall the writer is incredibly inconsiderate to Alan Sepinwall the audiobook narrator. These sentences are so long, and feature so many em-dashes and semi-colons and parentheticals and other digressions that make it all twisty-turny and timey-wimey.
Here's my attempt at another excerpt, from the part of the prologue where I discuss Mike Wallace's now-infamous interview with Rod that aired about a week before The Twilight Zone debuted:
That excerpt is a little under 500 words. The full manuscript is, last time I checked, over, um, 113,000 words. Wish me and my voice luck. This is going to take a minute.
Also? Preordering the audiobook qualifies for getting the free bonus essay about my favorite Twilight Zone episode, just as easily as preordering the print or digital version.
Also also? Who has two thumbs and a book that just got a starred review from Publisher's Weekly? The guy in the video you just watched!
Susan Neiman
Not so Wonder-ful news
Alan Sepinwall
As I was putting the finishing touches on the newsletter Thursday afternoon, the frustrating news broke that felt both sad and sadly appropriate: Disney, after improbably renewing Wonder Man for a second season, reversed course and canceled it.
This stinks. It was the best Marvel show in quite some time — one of the best of them all, which I acknowledge is something of a low bar, but this was genuinely good, weird, funny show, with sensational chemistry between the two leads. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II somehow got an Emmy nomination for it! I have no idea what the viewership numbers were, but they were somehow good enough weeks ago to merit another season, and now they're... not?
I will say that it's unfortunately on-brand for Wonder Man as a character to have this happen. Among the things he's best known for in the comics is being a jobber who usually gets his ass kicked by the bad guy before his teammates get the victory, and for dying multiple times and being resurrected years later. Having a surprise resurrection (the unexpected renewal) turn into death (the un-renewal) seems about right, dammit.
That this obscure, C-list character, who was also my favorite superhero ever, got his own show feels like a miracle. Alas, the miracle ends now. But the one season tells a complete story, so if you haven't watched it, you still can.
Early Adults-ing
Remember how confused everybody was by the unannounced release of a Very Special episode of The Bear — which at the time was maybe not considered an episode of The Bear, but a standalone special called "Gary" — back in May? Well, FX is at it again, kind of. Later today, a bonus episode of Adults will be available on Hulu and FXX, nearly a month before the August 27 premiere of the Gen Z hangout comedy's second season.
This one's called "Marathon Day," and has been billed as the episode that explains how Paul Baker joined the friend group. It certainly does that, but "Marathon Day" really feels designed to work as an introduction to Adults itself. It provides more context for how Samir is able to let all his friends live rent-free in his parents' house, gives a bit more context to Billie and Anton's work lives, and in general plays as a very Adults 101 kind of thing with a simple story that lays out how everyone gets along with one another, and why they're a funny group. It reminds me of how, back in the days of broadcast network supremacy, executives would sometimes insist that creators make a second pilot that will serve as a cleaner entry point. (Freaks and Geeks did one of those, with the episode about fake IDs.)
It plays so much as an introduction to the show that FX is now treating it as the first episode of Season One. If you go to Hulu to watch Adults for the first time — or try starting the series On Demand — "Marathon Day" is where it begins. Conversely, if you watched and liked the first season and fire up Hulu on August 27, it will jump you straight to the Season Two premiere, and you can only know to watch "Marathon Day" if you're already aware it exists and know to go back for it.
Clearly, there's a feeling that there's a great untapped audience for this show that can be more easily swayed by "Marathon Day" than by the series' original premiere episode (the one where Paul Baker actually moves into the house).
It's a very funny, charming show, which I'll be writing/talking about more in late August (Kathryn and I have already earmarked it for a podcast episode). If this helps bring more people to it, great. But it's yet another bit of FX-on-Hulu weirdness.
Motor City mayhem
Just as the amount of original scripted drama and comedy being produced at the tail end of the Peak TV era was unsustainable, so was the sheer number of niche streaming services, often from conglomerates who already owned at least one additional streamer. At one point, for instance, Paramount was running individual services called CBS All Access, Showtime, and BET+. The first one changed its name to Paramount+, the second one changed names multiple times before also being absorbed into Paramount+, and the third one ceased operations last week, with much of its content also moving over to Paramount+. There's merit to the idea of people only paying for the specific content they care about. Someone who's really into Dexter may not care about the latest Yellowstone or Star Trek offshoot, you know? But people can also only handle so many individual subscriptions, and the business model just didn't make sense.
One of the BET+ shows that just moved over is one I happened to enjoy a lot when it debuted a little over two years ago: the seriocomic detective show Diarra from Detroit. Created by and starring the very appealing Diarra Kilpatrick, the series has her playing a Michigan schoolteacher who turns gumshoe when her Tinder date appears to ghost her after they seemed to really hit it off. What starts out as a seeming joke about a wildly unqualified private eye quickly finds surprisingly deep emotional layers, and some genuine thrills. I raved about it in a review at my old gig, but it felt a bit like spitting into the wind. The instant people heard that it was on yet another streamer they don't subscribe to, they lost all interest in learning anything else about it.
Not only is that very fun first season now on Paramount+, but the first two Season Two episodes dropped a few days ago, with additional ones releasing weekly. I've only had time to watch those first two. The series' strengths — particularly Kilpatrick's charisma, vulnerability, and keen awareness of how to write for herself — remain on display, and the show continues to bring in a murderer's row of great Black character actors in supporting roles. For instance, Phylicia Rashad, who was the mother of the missing boy that Season One centered around, is back, now joined by the likes of Anna Maria Horsford and Glynn effing Turman.
My only real concern is one that I imagine won't be an issue for most of you reading this. Because this is yet another streaming show that went more than two years between seasons, and because a lot of what happens is continuing on things set up back then, there were times during these episodes — the first especially — where I really lost the thread on what was happening. But the second one mostly focuses on a new mystery, introduces some interesting new players (like Method Man as another of Diarra's exes), and feels light on its feet even as it's once again trying to untangle all of its heroine's emotional dysfunction.
Like a very old TV saying goes, if you haven't seen it, it's new to you. If you blitz through that first season and go straight into the new ones, I suspect you'll have an easier go of things. And if you don't, it's kind of a hallmark of the genre that the audience — and sometimes even the writers — can't keep track of all this stuff. I think there's enough there to enjoy even if the plot loses you now and then.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
