Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as my Spotify age is 62...
What's next?
Emmy-bait season will continue to keep me as busy as I'm able to be. Among the stuff definitely coming up:
- My recap of The Pitt Season Two finale;
- My review of Apple's new comedy Margo Has Money Troubles, starring Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nick Offerman;
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus subscribers, some more thoughts on the underrated industry legacy of Malcolm in the Middle; and
- My review of Season Two of Beef, as the Netflix anthology drama brings in a new cast led by Oscar Isaac and Carey Mulligan.
I'll probably also weigh in on the belated return of Euphoria (for which I'm still screener-less at this writing), and potentially check in on the season finale of the Scrubs revival.
Catching up
Here's what I've published since last Friday's newsletter:
- I recapped the season finale of Shrinking, which felt much more like the series finale of Shrinking, and wondered how the show will work now that so many of the characters have gone through so much emotional catharsis:
Alan Sepinwall
- I reviewed Big Mistakes, the dark new Netflix comedy starring Dan Levy, who co-created it with Rachel Sennott:
Alan Sepinwall
- I reviewed Hulu's revival miniseries Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the penultimate Pitt Season Two episode, where Robby and Al-Hashimi both made major confessions:
Alan Sepinwall
Odds and/or ends
- Easily the best Scrubs revival episode this week. What started out seeming like a next-gen version of the original run's "My Old Lady" turned into something more complicated, that played well off of all we know about the returning characters. The show has mostly weathered John C. McGinley's absence since the end of the premiere, but boy was it good to have him back.
Alan Sepinwall
- I'm curious what everyone thought of the end of Dark Winds Season Four. As I said in my review, I thought Zahn McClarnon vs. Franka Potente was wonderful, and I enjoyed the change of pace of the Los Angeles interlude, but felt the season maybe leaned a little more on Jim Chee than it should have. Also, this show is the first I'd ever heard of the Winnetou books, which inspired Potente's character's obsession with Native culture in general and Joe Leaphorn in particular.
- The streaming wars have been over forever. Netflix has run HBO content like Band of Brothers, and Hulu originals like Castle Rock. Disney+ now carries Jessica Jones and the other Netflix Marvel shows. Streaming exclusivity isn't what it used to be. Yet I was still thrown to see The Man in the High Castle as the featured show when I opened the Netflix app earlier in the week. The adaptation of Philip K. Dick's story, set in a world where the Allies lost World War II, debuted on Prime Video 11 years ago, early in the arms race waged by every other streamer in a futile attempt to beat Netflix at its own game. It was one of Amazon's buzziest early originals. Maybe it wasn't a hit on the level of Reacher or Jury Duty, but it still feels wrong to me to see it on Netflix. It would be like if HBO Max, pre-Paramount merger talks, had started streaming old episodes of Dexter.
- CBS has announced its plan for what to do with the Late Show time slot once Stephen Colbert and company are given the heave-ho in a couple of months. The network is going to lease the hour to comedian-turned-mogul Byron Allen, who will move his talk show Comics Unleashed there. Leaving aside the embarrassing reasons behind CBS' decision to cancel Late Show, it's still sad that this is what's happening to what was once one of TV's more esteemed pieces of geography. I suspect a similar inglorious fate awaits NBC and ABC's late night hours whenever Seth Meyers and the Jimmys either step down or are nudged out in the coming years. That said, there are surely old-school ABC News viewers still bitter that Kimmel eventually replaced Nightline. And I've been around long enough to recall CBS' longtime struggle to program late night prior to David Letterman's arrival, including the "Crimetime After Primetime" bloc that included Silk Stalkings and Sweating Bullets, which may have the most quintessential opening credits sequence in TV history:
Survive and add Vance?
Finally, this week saw the return of Hacks for the start of its fifth and final season. I've always had a mixed relationship with the Emmy-winning comedy.
On the one hand, I find Jean Smart and Hannah Einbinder wonderful together — to the point where I don't even mind how much the show invokes the Studio 60 rule, which says that while it's pretty easy to make an actor into a convincing fake music star, it's much harder to make an actor into a convincing fake comedy star, or even a convincing fake comedy writing genius. Deborah and Ava are almost never remotely as funny as the show tells us that they are, yet it works anyway due to Smart and Einbinder’s chemistry.
On the other hand, the show's creative team seemed determined to waste a chunk of every season showing Deborah and Ava being on the outs for one reason or another. And I don't really care about any of the characters other than those two, even though I enjoy many of those actors. So on the whole, I've tended to like but not love the series, though its highs could be very high.
There are two notable aspects to the final season, but one of those is how it ends, so I'll save that for a few months ago, when the finale drops. The other is that after five seasons, the writers finally realized they don't have to devote multiple episodes at the start of each year to their main characters not getting along. The two return from their Singapore trip — which included TMZ misreporting Deborah's death — completely in lockstep. Deborah sacrificed her talk show dreams for Ava, and as a result, Ava’s loyalty to her is now absolute, no matter how harebrained a particular Deborah decision might be.
The storytelling as a whole feels shaggier — this is very much a show getting off the stage ahead of a complete narrative collapse — but it's much more satisfying to watch them working as a team, even though they often disagree on what to do, how to do it, and why.
Again, more after the finale
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
