Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as my next of kin is Barbie...
What's next?
It is going to be a very busy week here at What's Alan Watching?, with far more new and/or notable TV than I've got time to watch, let alone write about. (More on that at the end of the newsletter.) But paid subscribers will be getting the following:
- Thought on the new season of the animated action epic Primal, which returns to Adult Swim on Sunday night and to HBO Max on Monday;
- My review of HBO's latest Game of Thrones prequel series, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, which I will be recapping beginning next Sunday;
- A few thoughts on the two-part debut of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (more on that in a minute); and
- My recap of the second episode of The Pitt.
There will also be a review of the Netflix cozy mystery Agatha Christie's Seven Dials, though I'm not sure exactly when and in what format. It might just be in next Friday's newsletter, depending on how much time I have. There are other shows I'm trying to find time to watch screeners of, like BritBox's Riot Women, but that might have to wait for a slower week, whenever such a thing comes in the slightly less-than-peak TV landscape.
Catching up
Here's what I wrote since last Friday's newsletter:
- I reviewed the second season of The Pitt. Spoilers: It's still great!
Alan Sepinwall
- I stuck a toe back into the broadcast network waters to review Fox's small town medical dramedy Best Medicine, with Josh Charles and Abigail Spencer:
Alan Sepinwall
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, I answered questions about the saddest TV finales ever, shows that were famous in their day and have largely been forgotten, and a day in the life of a TV critic:
Alan Sepinwall
- I got to break an exclusive piece of news — for all of two minutes, anyway — in revealing that FX had ordered a second season of The Lowdown. In the process, I tried to convert more people to the cause of the delightful Ethan Hawke comic mystery:
Alan Sepinwall
- To help deal with the crush of content for next week, I published my Starfleet Academy review timed to yesterday's embargo date, and talked about how the attempt to blend Star Trek with teen drama does and doesn't work:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped The Pitt Season Two premiere, where Dr. Robby clashed with the hospital's new attending, while Langdon made an awkward return to work:
Alan Sepinwall
- Meanwhile, I was interviewed by Pete Croatto for this Poynter article about how, as the headline says, critics have a love-hate relationship (but not a love-8 relationship) with top 10 lists:
Pete Croatto
These are not reviews
After a pretty slow December, especially when it came to premieres of new and returning shows, January has come out of the gate very strong, which means I couldn't have written about every notable thing even if I wanted to. As it is, I'm multiple seasons behind on one of the month's more high-profile premieres: HBO's Industry. I liked that show's first year, and when it returned for its second, for whatever reason I wasn't in the mood to dive back in. Now it's 16 episodes later, plus many new screeners to get through before I could potentially write about it again. So that goes on the "maybe one day" pile, along with Interview with the Vampire and several others.
Meanwhile, I did check out at least one episode of multiple shows premiering this week. In all three cases, the sample size was so small that I don't feel comfortable calling any of what follows a review. These are just my impressions, along with the reasons why I didn't go further.
- Do you remember The Night Manager, the John LeCarré adaptation whose first season aired on AMC [checks notes] 10 years ago? The producers of the spy thriller, which moves to Prime Video on Sunday for its belated return, are sure hoping that you do! The premiere brings back Tom Hollander and Olivia Colman, but not co-star Elizabeth Debicki. Its plot is also inextricably tied into the first season's plot involving Hugh Laurie's late arms dealer. I found it impossible to engage with a story that leaned so heavily on decade-old events from a season of TV on which I was mixed at best. So I checked out after the premiere.
- His & Hers already debuted on Netflix earlier this week. It's a murder mystery set in a small Georgia town, starring Jon Bernthal as a cop and Tessa Thompson as his reporter ex-wife. I love Bernthal and Thomspson, and the supporting cast includes other strong actors like Pablo Schreiber and Chris Bauer. (Who unfortunately don't have a Wire Season Two nephew/uncle reunion in the first episode.) But the premiere felt pretty generic, and didn't leave me interested in finding out what actually happened with the murder. (FWIW, Dan Fienberg found most of it dumb and then hated the finale.)
- Speaking of Wire Season Two alums with new streaming seasons, Idris Elba returns next week with more Hijack for Apple TV+. I thought the majority of the first season — basically, anything where Elba was negotiating with terrorists on a commercial flight — was terrific, though the material on the ground felt like the worst kind of non-Jack Bauer 24 subplots. But the three episodes of Season Two I watched don't work at all. First, it's a lot harder to justify a businessman being involved in different terrorist incidents for season after season, versus a counter-terrorism agent like Jack, or even a cop like John McClane in the Die Hard films. Second, in order to make this work, Season Two leans hard on big plot twists, constantly pulling the rug out from under the audience, where the first season largely played fair with what it was telling us. I kept going for a bit with this one, just out of affection for the first season, and because I was hoping that at some point things might start to click into place. But when I finished the third episode, and realized there were five more screeners to go, I moved on.
By the way, any time Jon Bernthal has a new TV show, it gives me an excuse to remind you of this punchline from the short-lived CBS sitcom The Class, which I, my wife, and Dan still use variations of to this day:
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
