Today's Friday Check-In newsletter coming up just as soon as my trusty sidekick is The Reupholsterer...
Before we dive into things, I want to thank everybody for both your kind words and your patience as I've been very slowly getting back up to speed. Doing better each and every day, and hopefully my writing output will soon be back up to what it was a few weeks ago.
In The Twilight Zone zone
Alan Sepinwall
We're now past the publication date for Serling: A Journey Into The Twilight Zone with TV's First Visionary. It's been really cool to see people send me photos of their copies arriving, and I'm glad you seem to be enjoying it so far.
I'm not going to run through a full list of links, but wanted to highlight a few things:
- The Words bookstore event in Maplewood, NJ with me and Kathryn has been pushed back to November 11.
- My Paley Center conversation with curator Jason Lynch has been pushed back to November 13.
- In case you missed it, I posted the entirety of the book's second chapter in front of the paywall, just in case anyone is still on the fence and wanted more of a sample to read:
Alan Sepinwall
- As I said, I've been doing a lot of podcast appearances. One of the big ones for me was to visit The Twilight Zone Podcast, whose host Tom Eliot is a master of the subject, as well as a tremendous entertainer:
Tom Elliot
More Serling stuff to come when I'm a bit more myself. Thanks to everyone who already got a copy.
Catching up
Here's the non-Serling-related material that's published since last Friday's newsletter:
- Kathryn brought in a very special guest co-host for this week's TV Is Good podcast in the form of my old friend Dan Fienberg. They talked about Cupertino and an obscure CBS legal procedural about tech from 2004 called Century City.
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the season's penultimate Slow Horses, where Sid's role in Taverner's plan came into clarity, and River got to genuinely play hero for once:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the two-part Season Two premiere of The Lowdown, which added Betty Gilpin and Tommy Lee Jones to the fun:
Alan Sepinwall
What's next?
As I start ramping up again, here's some of what to look forward to over the next week or so:
- A new TV Is Good episode, where Kathryn and another special guest co-host will discuss The Lowdown;
- Another Lowdown recap;
- Spoiler thoughts on the new season of The Diplomat, which dropped earlier this week;
- A look back at Aaron Sorkin's infamous Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, through the eyes of a group of comedians and comedy writers who can't stop obsessing over it.
What is dead may never die
Two fascinating bits of TV revival or reboot news this week. The first is something that's been long-discussed: Hulu officially ordered a new X-Files series, created by Ryan Coogler and starring Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel. The other came completely out of the blue: Lena Dunham is going to make a five-part Girls reunion project bringing back the four female leads, plus Andrew Rannells.
You know that I'm deeply, deeply skeptical about returning to familiar TV IP. For every Scrubs or Party Down, there are far more like Frasier or Mad About You, which exist solely because an executive somewhere realized they had the rights to a familiar title.
That said, I'm at least intrigued by both of these. I loved Girls most of the time, and though I've run hot and cold on Dunham's other work, this one clearly matters a lot to her. She wouldn't go back to Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshannah unless she felt she had a genuinely good idea for what to do with them after all this time. And the miniseries aspect of it limits the potential for overstaying its welcome. (That said, see Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. Or, better, don't.)
It's unclear if Coogler's show will share continuity with the Chris Carter version. But if any creator in Hollywood has earned the right to do whatever they want, particularly when IP is involved, it's the guy who gave us Creed and Black Panther, but also Sinners(*). And Deadwyler and Patel are tremendous actors, in something of a Station Eleven reunion. (Their characters never directly interacted on the show.) The format of the series lends itself more to a return than most, especially if we're getting a new creative angle on the idea, versus whatever Chris Carter was flailing his way through with the mid-2010s revival seasons. Color me intrigued.
(*) The second I heard Coogler cite The Twilight Zone episode "The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank" as one of the biggest influences on Sinners, he became one of my white whales for the book. It didn't quite work out. But if he's doing a TV show, hopefully I can wrangle a conversation with him.
This is not a review: VisionQuest
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.
For a minute there, it seemed as if VisionQuest would be the last original live-action Marvel television show for a long time. Wonder Man got unrenewed, the next season of Daredevil: Born Again has already been announced as its last, and very little seemed to be in the pipeline. At New York Comic-Con, though, Marvel announced a new series, ZODIAC, with minimal info on exactly what it will be about. (In comics, the name is most commonly associated with a group of D-list SHIELD/Avengers villains with an astrology gimmick.) So something will follow both VisionQuest and Born Again.
That said, VisionQuest — at least, the three episodes I watched before losing interest — very much feels like the end of something. It's not just that it's the conclusion of an unplanned trilogy about the Maximoff family, to go with WandaVision and Agatha All Along. It's that, like a lot of Marvel's live-action Disney+ shows, VisionQuest seems to exist less because someone had a compelling take on a character than because someone in Marvel corporate realized they had some characters who wouldn't be needed on the film side anytime soon. There are some interesting ideas here, and James Spader (as former Avengers villain Ultron) and Todd Stashwick (as Marvel Z-lister Paladin) are having themselves a lot of fun. But through three incredibly exposition-laden hours of TV, it never felt like anyone had bothered to come up with a story beyond, "Well, we know what happened to Wanda and Billy, so what about Vision and Tommy?" There are also opportunities for various A.I. creations of Tony Stark to get emotional closure — if you wondered how Friday felt about Tony dying in Avengers: Endgame, boy is this the show for you! — and lots of variations on now-familiar themes about identity, grief, and loss.
WandaVision remains the best of the Disney+ era of Marvel shows, and Agatha is way up there. But despite my affection for many of these characters and/or actors, there just wasn't enough substance to the story to go along with VisionQuest's abundant style.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
