No &!*#'s given away
'The Pitt' goes uncensored on basic cable, plus a surprising 'Poker Face' development, 'Pluribus,' 'Alien: Earth' news, and more
Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as as your son is also your prime minister, a guy you dated in high school, and your gynecologist...
What's next?
Coming up in the next week or so for paid subscribers:
- My recap of the next episode of The Chair Company;
- My recap of the next episode of Pluribus;
- A long conversation with BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg about his new Netflix comedy Long Story Short;
- A look at the second season of Netflix's A Man on the Inside;
- My take on Blue Lights, a cop drama set in Northern Ireland whose third season debuted this week on BritBox.
Catching up:
Here's what's been published since last Friday's newsletter:
My look at the fifth episode of The Chair Company, which was so full of bizarre moments — particularly the final image — that I had to break out my second dayenu recap of the fall:
Alan Sepinwall
I reviewed The Beast in Me, a Netflix cat-and-mouse thriller starring Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys, which has a lot of familiar elements, but also the unusual image of a Matthew Rhys character... smiling?
Alan Sepinwall
For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, I was inspired by the close proximity of The Diplomat Season Three and The Beast In Me to imagine a world where Danes and Keri Russell swapped their 2010s cable spy drama roles, and then went from there to explore other theoretical switcheroos:
Alan Sepinwall
I recapped the third episode of Pluribus, where Carol discovered just how far the Others will go to make her happy:
Alan Sepinwall
Odds and/or ends
- Speaking of Pluribus, here's video of the PaleyFest panel I did with Vince Gilligan, Rhea Seehorn, and Karolina Wydra last Friday night. Yes, Vince is now clean-shaven. No, we did not discuss that. Among my favorite parts: 1)Rhea, on the spot, coming up with a long, thoughtful answer to a question about Helen that had never occurred to her until I asked; 2)The discussion of Carol as a romantasy author; 3)Rhea and Karolina's utter befuddlement as Vince and I talked about Twilight Zone for several minutes. Enjoy!
- Earlier this week, FX announced a new long-term deal with Noah Hawley that includes a second-season order for Alien: Earth. That will begin filming next year in London — as opposed to Bangkok, whose oppressive heat made filming the first season a challenge — and would most likely mean we don't see the new episodes until either late 2026 or sometime in 2027. The press release doesn't mention any plans for a sixth Fargo season, though that's long seemed like a Curb Your Enthusiasm situation, where Hawley and FX have an understanding that he doesn't have to worry about it until/unless he feels inspired to make another season.
Deal in a new hand?
Yesterday came a piece of news that was simultaneously sad and confusing. First, Peacock isn't ordering a third season of Poker Face. This in and of itself is a bummer but not a shock; Season Two ended in July, so if a renewal was coming, it would likely have come by now.
The predictable part is that Rian Johnson now wants to shop it elsewhere, which happens with pretty much every canceled TV show these days. But the confusing part is this: if Johnson can find a new home for the series, Charlie Cale would now be played by... Peter Dinklage?
Deadline, which broke the story, said, "Long term, Johnson’s hope is for the franchise to evolve with a new actor to play the lead character every two years." Obviously, there's precedent in pop culture for this. We're about to get our seventh James Bond — assuming Amazon execs can get over their confusion over how to reboot the series when the last movie ended with Bond's death — and Doctor Who replaces its lead every three seasons or so. But that's a sci-fi show with timey-wimey excuses for why the Doctor looks like Peter Capaldi one minute, and Jodie Whittaker the next. We've seen sitcoms replace supporting actors before (the two Darrins on Bewitched, the two Aunt Vivs on Fresh Prince), but having a new actor — and a very different one from the original — take over playing the only character on a single-lead drama is... odd.
Dinklage is a great and versatile actor. Johnson is one of the few multi-hyphenates out there who I think could pull off something this audacious, assuming he can find a new home for the show. Gender flipped casting happens all the time, often to great effect. But on what's otherwise a continuation of the preexisting show?
I hope Johnson can sell this elsewhere, both because I really enjoyed Poker Face, and because I really want to see how, or if, this works.
Keeping it bloody
One of my favorite couch potato pastimes growing up was looking and listening for obvious edits of R-rated movies when they arrived on commercial television. In The Blues Brothers, for instance, Joliet Jake Blues suddenly develops a Southern accent when he tells a nun that she's "up the creek" instead of "up shit's creek." (Probably the most famous example of this is when Walter Sobchak's "This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!" rant from The Big Lebowski becomes "This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps!") This bowdlerization was necessary for two reasons: 1)Over-the-air channels are governed by the FCC, which has rules about what can be said and shown; 2)Over-the-air channels have advertisers, who don't want their products associated with certain content.
Gallery Books
The FCC doesn't have the same power over cable, and when the cable drama revolution happened around the turn of the century, the early shows were being made for HBO, which also had no advertisers to appease. So Samantha on Sex and the City could complain about funky spunk, while one of the main locations of The Sopranos was a strip club where the dancers were topless.
As those shows became hits, HBO tried to follow a traditional TV model of selling their reruns into syndication, this time to basic cable channels. This was at a moment when basic cable was trying to follow in HBO's footsteps, but because they were advertiser-supported, their execs willing to go only so far with adult content. (The Shield creator Shawn Ryan, for instance, fought in vain for permission to have Corinne Mackey say "fucking autism!" when dealing with one of their kids being on the spectrum.) So the HBO shows were an uneasy fit.
A&E acquired the rights to show early Sopranos episodes, and TBS did the same for Sex and the City. Since those were advertiser-supported channels, they quickly began making edits. Most of the profanity was stripped out of Sopranos, and it turned out that — anticipating this exact scenario — HBO had instructed David Chase to film alternate versions of scenes at the Bada-Bing where the dancers were fully clothed. The Sex and the City repeats, meanwhile, had to scale back most of the Samantha subplots, which were usually the most explicit content in every episode. Nobody was satisfied with this, as audiences who hadn't seen these shows before realized quickly that they weren't getting the full experience. HBO largely abandoned the syndication plan, and instead leaned into selling DVD box sets of their shows. We've seen similar things on occasion — during the 2007-08 writers strike, CBS aired edited versions of Dexter, where Deb Morgan's flair for profanity was the main victim — but infrequently enough to suggest that audiences want the real thing, or not at all.
I bring this up because HBO Max hit The Pitt is coming next month to corporate sibling TNT. And it was announced earlier this week that the episodes will air completely uncut. It's a mark both of how successful The Pitt seems to be, and how much the basic cable industry has evolved over the last 20 years. FX shows regularly feature the kind of language and other explicit content that The Shield had to carefully work around, and when R-rated films play on basic cable, often the only real difference is the commercial breaks. As audiences have become more used to adult content — and as the majority of people who still have cable are older adults — advertisers have clearly accepted that this is the way of the world.
That said, I do miss the amusement of the bowdlerized versions of classics. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to find a stranger in the Alps.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
