Friday Check-In: Three Emmy wins I'm rooting for

Listen to the newsletter 9 11 26

0:00

/798.093125

This week's Friday Check-In newsletter coming up just as soon as Burning Man has a lot of great stories about me...

Catching up

Here's what I've published since last Friday's newsletter:

I recapped the latest episode of Lanterns, in which we appear to have learned the Manhunter's true identity:

In a new episode of the TV Is Good podcast, Kathryn VanArendonk and I went to the dogs, with talk about Colin From Accounts and the classic Nineties PBS kids series Wishbone:

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Star Trek, I looked at the many, many, many kinds of stories Gene Roddenberry's creation has been able to accommodate over the decades:

I recapped a New Year's Eve episode of Ted Lasso, which brought back Jamie Tartt, but still seems wildly imbalanced in how much time the returning characters get versus the players on the new team:

I also put some of my Colin From Accounts thoughts into written review form:

I recapped a refreshingly old-school Star Trek episode, guest-starring Joe Morton as a legendary admiral who gives the Enterprise crew an order that Jim Kirk doesn't want to follow:

What's next?

Get ready for a busy, busy, busy week. Among the things to keep watch for:

The Emmys (which we'll get into more in a minute) are on Monday night. I'll be writing up my reactions to the big winners and losers either later that night or Tuesday morning.
Tuesday is also the first anniversary of this newsletter becoming my main professional home. I'll be looking back over the past year, and looking ahead at what's to come for subscribers.
It's the 10th anniversary of Fleabag arrived on Prime Video (after debuting in the UK a few months earlier). I'll be looking back on Phoebe Waller-Bridge's amazing comedy.
Slow Horses is back for its sixth season, and it's joining what will temporarily be a crowded recap rotation, along with thoughts on the next episodes of Lanterns, Ted Lasso, and Strange New Worlds.
Slow Horses will also be the lead topic of the next TV Is Good. Kathryn and I will pair it with a look back at the pilot of Alias, which you can stream on Disney+ if you want to enjoy Jennifer Garner, TV's greatest runner.
I may not be able to write about it until a bit later in September, but we have a less noble anniversary coming up week: 20 years since the debut of Aaron Sorkin's infamous Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, aka the other backstage at SNL show that NBC launched the same fall as 30 Rock. I'll have thoughts on that disaster. Many thoughts.
Also hopefully coming at some point in September, if not exactly next week, will be thoughts on Jon Hamm's latest show, the MGM+ miniseries American Hostage (co-created by The Shield's Shawn Ryan), and Sharon Horgan's new HBO comedy Youth.

Lots to watch, and lots to write about. Doing what I can, when I can.

Submitted For You(r) Page

This Sunday, September 13 will mark exactly one month left until the release of Serling: A Journey Into the Twilight Zone with TV's First Visionary. (Still available for preorder, and you can still get the free bonus essay on my favorite Twilight Zone episode.)

Sunday also means I'll be starting my 31-day countdown of the 31 best Twilight Zone episodes. Every morning from then through pub day, I'll be posting a new video to my TikTok, my Instagram, and my new YouTube channel, where I will talk about what I love about one of these 31 episodes. The book itself only contains a top 20 list, and a few of the episodes on that list barely get discussed elsewhere in the book. So if you want some deeper thoughts, these videos are an easy way to get them.

I've been periodically posting some other Serling-related video content to my socials, like a video about three Twilight Zone episodes that proved eerily prescient:

@alan.sepinwall
Three Twilight Zone episodes that predicted the future. #TV #TwilightZone #TheTwilightZone #RodSerling
♬ original sound - Alan Sepinwall

Return to Lonesome Dove (not to be confused with Return to Lonesome Dove)

An unexpected piece of news hit my inbox earlier this week: Zoe Kazan and Jeb Stuart have signed with Netflix to make a new series adaptation of Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry's Pulitzer Prize-winning epic novel about a cattle drive led by two retired Texas Rangers looking for one last big adventure.

The book is one of my two or three favorites ever(*), and it was already adapted into a beloved, megahit 1989 miniseries, with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones in the lead roles. Why try it again?

(*) Along with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Empire Falls.

Some of you might recall that, three years ago, during one of my extended hospital stays, I rewatched the Duvall miniseries, and found that while several of the performances remain incredible, the entire project doesn't hold up as well as my memories suggested. There's a lot of room for improvement, especially given the sprawl of the book. Besides that, Kazan and Stuart are doing this after teaming up with Netflix to adapt another famous literary property that already had a famous screen adaptation: John Steinbeck's East of Eden, which they made into a miniseries starring Florence Pugh, debuting later this fall, and following in the footsteps of Kazan's grandfather Elia's 1955 movie take on the material, starring James Dean.

It seems worth a shot. And since McMurtry wrote three other books with these characters, all of which were adapted into miniseries, it's not as if the new actors playing Gus and Woodrow are following immediately in the footsteps of Duvall and Jones. In between, we've gotten James Garner, Jonny Lee Miller, David Arquette, Karl Urban, and Steve Zahn. (Plus Jon Voight in the quite terrible Return to Lonesome Dove, which was rushed into production without any McMurtry source material, just to capitalize on the success of the first miniseries.)

This is not a review: The Paper Season Two

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 had mixed feelings about the first season of The Paper, a quasi-Office spinoff where the old documentary crew begins following employees at the company that bought Dunder-Mifflin, focusing on attempts to revive a once-proud Toledo newspaper. On the one hand, there were some appealing supporting characters (including Oscar Nunez as our lone Office holdover), and the show had fun in depicting how wildly unqualified most of the paper's "reporters" — most of them employees from other corporate divisions helping out in between their regular duties — were. On the other, the show's attempt to make its hero, Domhnall Gleeson's Ned, into a spiritual descendent of both Michael Scott and Jim Halpert never quite worked. And the character of Ned's narcissistic, grossly incompetent, colleague Esmeralda (played by Sabrina Impacciatore) was so off-putting, I nearly stopped after a few episodes just because of her. There was a brief window where the writers seemed to be making the familiar Michael Scott "he's an annoying moron, but he's our annoying moron" pivot with her at midseason, but by the finale, her behavior was somehow more obnoxious than ever.

Both The Office and Parks and Rec famously course-corrected between their first seasons and their second, though that hasn't been true of every Greg Daniels show. (See Space Force. But only if required by law.) So I went into The Paper Season Two with the hope that Daniels and company might figure things out once again.

Instead, The Paper more or less remains The Paper. Esmeralda is annoying, Ned vacillates between sensible audience surrogate and delusional — ultimately, it's his love interest Mare (played by Chelsea Frei) who's the closer Jim analogue — but the vibes with the supporting characters are pleasant enough. I watched the first four episodes, but felt comfortable moving onto other things. The whole season is streaming on Peacock.

Odds and/or ends

Wednesday was the 25th anniversary of the debut of HBO miniseries Band of Brothers. In the fall of 2001, the World War II epic had the unfortunate timing to debut two days before 9/11, so it drew less notice when it first aired than it would have in a less tragic moment in American history. But through repeated airings, DVDs, and now streaming, it's become one of the cornerstones of Dad TV, and inspired two other Spielberg/Hanks-produced miniseries: the great (but much harsher) The Pacific and the unfortunately muddled Masters of the Air. Back in 2009 on the original version of What's Alan Watching?, I did retro recaps of all 10 episodes, if you're feeling nostalgic.
Apropos of nothing, a conversation the other day about the Eighties family sitcom Mr. Belvedere reminded me that it inspired this incredible, mostly-forgotten SNL sketch from the era when every Tom Hanks-hosted episode was a banger. Enjoy, particularly Phil Hartman's monologue near the end:

People will come, Rhea

It's NBC's turn in the Emmy telecast rotation, and since NBC has Sunday Night Football, the awards again get bumped to Monday night. I've become increasingly disengaged from the Emmys over the years. For a long time, the problem was that great shows like The Wire would get ignored altogether. More recently, it's been the Emmy voters' lazy penchant for bloc-voting in various genres, so only a handful of shows win all the awards in a given night. I'll nonetheless be watching on Monday, and offering thoughts later that night or the next day. But I don't feel hugely invested.

That said... one of the reasons I have always cared about the Emmys, even when they've frustrated me, is the way that they function as a historical record of TV greatness. The aforementioned Rod Serling still holds the record for the most Emmy wins for dramatic series writing, with six. He's also one of the greatest to ever do the job. In that case, people looking back over the list of Emmy winners will see his name again and again and, even without watching Twilight Zone or "Requiem for a Heavyweight," have the thought, This guy was a big deal, huh?

So from time to time, I still allow myself to care deeply about all this self-congratulatory silliness. This year, there are three categories where my heart would feel particularly glad about a specific result. All three are, coincidentally, all from Apple shows. Let's start with the person whose photo is at the top of this post:

Kate O'Flynn from Widow's Bay for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series

I don't have a great read on whether the comedy categories on Monday night are going to be a coronation of Widow's Bay, a farewell salute to Hacks, or some combination of the two. If I were a betting man, I'd probably make it a coin toss between O'Flynn and Hannah Einbinder in this category. But as the high-strung, thirsty, weird AF Patricia, O'Flynn gave the breakout performance of the year so far in television, after being a virtual unknown in American TV. Again, if we're talking history, you can't talk about 2026 in television without her name being very prominent.

Harrison Ford from Shrinking for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series

Look, nobody needs to cry for Harrison Ford. He's played some of the most iconic characters in movie history, and been paid handsomely for it. He seems to love his life. But it nonetheless feels insane that he has never won a major competitive acting award. He got a lifetime achievement award from SAG earlier this year, to go with similar honors from the AFI and the Golden Globes. But somehow, not even the Globes — the most movie star-pandering awards show of them all — has never given him a competitive trophy.

I would love to see that change on Monday, because Ford is doing the best acting of his career on Shrinking, and the most recent season seemed designed to finally get him up to the big stage — in a good way. In the process, he would be defeating Stephen Root, who's wonderful on Widow's Bay; and Nick Offerman, who's great on Margo's Got Money Troubles. But Offerman has an Emmy already, so I wouldn't feel that bad if he went 0-for-2 between this and Death By Lightning. (He lost the latter award to David Harbour at last weekend's Creative Arts Emmy ceremony.)

Rhea Seehorn from Pluribus for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series

Pulling for Seehorn here means I'm rooting against two of my other faves, both of whom should have Emmys by now: The Diplomat's Keri Russell (somehow never a winner for The Americans) and The Gilded Age's Carrie Coon (somehow never even nominated for giving one of the great TV performances on The Leftovers). But it's gotta be Seehorn. Pluribus is at times basically a one-woman show, or has Seehorn playing opposite other actors who are by design not fully engaging in the moment the way scene partners normally would on a show without this complicated a premise. She holds the screen, is funny, tragic, heroic, and incredibly watchable at all times. Plus, we can all pretend that it's partially a make-up win for Seehorn and everyone else on Better Call Saul getting shut out for that series' entire run. (We'll hopefully have to do that one day soon for Russell and/or Coon, whenever Emmy voters get their acts together about one or both of them.)

That's it for today! What does everybody else think?