Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I swim with a tortoise...
What's next?
I'm playing things very by ear at the moment as I scale Virtual Screener Mountain. Next week, you'll definitely get some spoiler thoughts on the Daredevil: Born Again Season Two finale. I might check in on Rooster again ahead of its finale, or possibly wait until the following week to discuss the whole thing. Netflix has a Lord of the Flies miniseries, Starz has an Amadeus miniseries, there's a new season of The Terror on AMC+ and Shudder, plus other things. If something thrills me, I'll write about it. If not, I'll find something else to do that's hopefully interesting.
Catching up
Here's what I published since last Friday's newsletter:
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, I did a new Ask Alan video mailbag, with questions about the evolution of how often TV features sex and nudity, whether it's fair to start watching a show you've never seen before and skip ahead to where you've heard it gets good, and who else besides Rod Serling qualifies as a TV visionary. (Have I mentioned that I wrote a book about Rod Serling, available for pre-order now?)
Alan Sepinwall
- I reviewed Widow's Bay, Apple's fun new horror comedy starring Matthew Rhys, which basically asks, "What if the mayor of Jaws was the main character, and he wasn't willfully ignoring shark attacks, but the fact that the whole island is supernaturally cursed?"
Alan Sepinwall
- I reviewed Netflix's Man on Fire series, with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II stepping into shoes previously occupied by Scott Glenn and Denzel Washington:
Alan Sepinwall
Hey! Ho! Amy Jellicoe!
The week's most interesting TV news at this writing involves a bit of last-minute recasting on The White Lotus Season Four, which is currently filming in France. Helena Bonham Carter exited over reported creative differences about her character. On short notice, Mike White had to call in an old collaborator: Laura Dern, who co-starred in his 2007 film Year of the Dog and starred in and co-created with White one of the most underrated HBO series of them all, Enlightened. (Because Dern and Carter don't exactly have the same comic energy, she's reportedly playing an entirely new character that White is writing on the fly.)
For those who don't know, Dern played Amy Jellicoe, a mid-level corporate executive who suffers a mental breakdown after being demoted. After two months at a holistic retreat in Hawaii (that looks not too dissimilar to the resort in White Lotus Season One), Amy returns to work with a new perspective on life, and a desire to be an "agent of change" in a world buckling under the weight of corporations like hers. But there are two problems. First, her company has zero interest in changing anything about the way it does, and would just fire Amy if it wouldn't risk a lawsuit. And second, Amy is among the most emotionally needy, socially awkward people to ever be the main character on a television show. She makes almost everyone around her deeply uncomfortable, all the time. It was a show that basically asked, "What if the most well-meaning person on Earth is also the one you would least want to spend even 30 seconds with?"
Because of this, I had great difficulty getting into the series at first. I've always had issues with second-hand embarrassment in my entertainment. I've only ever watched the famous "Dinner Party" episode of The Office once, and even that felt like an endurance challenge. So a show told from the POV of such an abrasive character was a tough ask for me, even though Dern is always incredible, and White had a really interesting, varied filmography (Freaks and Geeks, School of Rock, Chuck and Buck) by the time he and Dern made this show in 2011.
But late in that first season, White wrote a pair of episodes told from the perspective of other characters: a nerdy coworker (played by White himself) and Amy's mother Helen (played by Dern's real-life mother, Diane Ladd). Both were incredible. And in showing how each of them viewed Amy, Enlightened made clear that it wasn't blind to how both viewers and other characters might feel about its heroine. On an intellectual level, I understood that White and Dern knew how Amy comes across. But it took seeing her through other characters' eyes to fully click with that. From there, I was all in — not just for later departure episodes, but regular Amy-centric ones. By the time the second and final season ended, I was grateful I had stuck with it and gotten to appreciate this beautiful, weird, darkly hilarious, and, yes, deeply uncomfortable show.
Though White has said he had ideas for a third season, Season Two concludes on one of the more appropriate notes I've seen for any series, ever. I wouldn't have objected to him and Dern continuing, but I didn't feel the sense of loss I often do when a show that good ends after only a couple of years.
Dern had a voice cameo in White Lotus Season Two, as Michael Imperioli's wife, talking on the phone with him while he was in Italy and she was back home. But this is the first time she'll be on-camera in one of his projects in 13 years. I've found each White Lotus season after the first to be very up and down, even when they've featured actors I love like Walton Goggins and Carrie Coon. But this reunion — even as hastily-conceived as it is — has me genuinely excited to see what they can do together after all this time.
Oh, and Enlightened is still streaming on HBO Max.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
