Today's free What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I go to a drag brunch as Lady Goo Goo Ga Ga...
What's next?
Coming up in the next week for paid subscribers:
- My take on this weekend's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms season finale.
- Thoughts on the return of Paradise to Hulu.
- Thoughts on ABC's revival of Scrubs. (The Ringer will also be running a feature I wrote about this, which I'll link to next week.)
- Recaps of new episodes of Shrinking and The Pitt.
- Depending on available time, thoughts on NBC's new Tracy Morgan comedy The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, which officially premieres next week after its first episode debuted after football last month.
Catching up
Here's what I've published since last Friday's newsletter:
- I recapped the latest A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms episode, which found a non-annoying way to fit into the recent trend of penultimate flashback episodes:
Alan Sepinwall
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, I looked back at one of my favorite brilliant-but-canceled shows, the FX private eye drama Terriers:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the latest Shrinking, which brought back Michael J. Fox, as the series continues to make an incredible push for Harrison Ford to finally win an Emmy:
Alan Sepinwall
- I reviewed the new season of Shoresy on Hulu, and discussed how interesting it is to see how, between this and Heated Rivalry, the two main Letterkenny writers have split up to create such different hockey series:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped this week's The Pitt, where Jack Abbot returned, Robby said something awful, and Dana took her trainee through one of the most difficult parts of her job:
Alan Sepinwall
Odds and/or ends
- When I wrote a Ringer story about the best TV coaching trees, I gave Rick and Morty an honorable mention, since it feels like every writer who has worked on that show at some point has wound up with a development deal to create their own series. Netflix has another of those this week with Strip Law, an adult animated comedy starring Adam Scott as an uptight, low-rent Las Vegas lawyer and Janelle James as the street magician who helps him glam up his courtroom persona to succeed in a town where everyone expects flash. Created by Cullen Crawford, and featuring a supporting cast of voice acting ringers like Keith David and Stephen Root, Strip Law is hit-or-miss, but has a good amount of fun treating Sin City as a place where the rules of decorum or even physics don't apply.
- The trailer for The Mandalorian and Grogu looks fun — and like Pedro Pascal was on set for at least a couple of days. As we saw at the start of the TV show, before it turned into both a seeding ground for spinoffs and an exploration of the deeply boring Mandalorian culture, simple fun in Star Wars can work really well:
- Reverend Jesse Jackson passed away earlier this week. One of my earliest Saturday Night Live memories is the episode he hosted in 1984, and the game show parody "The Question is Moot" has lived rent-free in my head ever since. That said, his most memorable TV moment — outside of appearances in the news for his activism and political campaigning — is probably this incredibly lovely 1971 Sesame Street appearance, where he taught the kids on Sesame Street, and at home, to feel proud of themselves no matter who they were or where they came from:
- Another big loss: character actor Tom Noonan died. He's best known for playing Francis Dolarhyde, aka the Tooth Fairy, aka the Red Dragon, in the very first Hannibal Lecter film, Michael Mann's Manhunter. It is one of the scariest, most mesmerizing performances I've ever watched on screen. But he did a good amount of TV work over the years, with extended stints on Damages and the AMC Western Hell on Wheels, and did memorable guest appearances on everything from The X-Files (as another serial killer) to The Leftovers (as one of Holy Wayne's followers).
RIP, Robert
Robert Duvall died earlier this week at 95. You don't need me to tell you he had one of the great film acting careers: The Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, Network, Tender Mercies, and on and on and on. Even in silly stuff like Days of Thunder and Deep Impact, he gave his all.
Once he broke through in the Seventies, he largely worked on the big screen. But at the start of his career, he paid the bills doing episodic TV guest work. In the course of my Rod Serling biography research, I came across one of these: "Miniature," a Twilight Zone Season Four episode where he plays a shy man who becomes obsessed with the figures in a museum's antique dollhouse, to the point where he imagines them coming to life:
The fourth season gets a bad rap, much of it deserved, for expanding episodes to an hour, when Serling and the other writers worked best at half that length. But "Miniature," written by Charles Beaumont, is a real highlight not only of the season, but the series. And it works because Duvall makes you believe that this man cares this much about these tiny toy people.
After a 1969 appearance in an episode of The Mod Squad, Duvall only returned to the small screen for big event movies and miniseries. The most famous, and best, of these was in CBS' 1989 adaptation of Larry McMurtry's Western epic Lonesome Dove, which I rewatched a couple of years ago during one of my hospital stays:
Alan Sepinwall
As the behind-the-scenes story goes, the Lonesome Dove producers wanted Duvall to play the cold, taciturn Woodrow Call, taking advantage of the actor's gift for saying a lot with barely any dialogue at all. Duvall felt he had played too many characters like this, most notably in The Great Santini, and asked to play Call's longtime partner, the loquacious, wisecracking Gus McCrae. The producers agreed — Tommy Lee Jones played Call instead, outstandingly — and in the bargain got not only one of Duvall's best performances, but his most superhumanly charming.
Lonesome Dove has had one of the longer tails of any of the prestige network miniseries of the Seventies and Eighties, including four different sequel and prequel projects. Somehow, though, neither it nor Duvall won Emmys that year: War and Remembrance (a sequel to The Winds of War) took home the Outstanding Miniseries trophy, and Duvall lost to James Woods for playing the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous in My Name is Bill W.
As I said a couple of years ago, some aspects of Lonesome Dove have aged better than others, but Duvall's work will always feel timeless. It's currently streaming in a whole lot of places, including Pluto, Tubi, Prime Video, and Peacock.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
