It's Monday, which means it's time for another episode of the TV Is Good podcast, where Kathryn VanArendonk and I look at notable television shows from the present and the past. This week, we have a double dose of prestige miniseries deconstructing myths of America's westward expansion, starting out with a look at Netflix's new East of Eden with Florence Pugh, Hoon Lee, Christopher Abbott, and Mike Faist.
Alan Sepinwall
East of Eden was primarily adapted from John Steinbeck's novel by Zoe Kazan, whose grandfather Elia already turned the book into a 1955 film with James Dean. Shortly before the show debuted, Netflix announced another project where Kazan would adapt another beloved novel that already had a famous adaptation for the screen: Larry McMurtry's epic Western Lonesome Dove, which was previously turned into a beloved 1989 CBS miniseries starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. I've read the book and seen the miniseries multiple times, but the story was new to Kathryn. So we dug into all of that. (It's streaming practically everywhere if you want to check out some or all of it.
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Next week, we'll be talking about the return of Ethan Hawke and company in The Lowdown, and pairing it with a discussion of a guy named [checks notes] Rod Serling, who was kind of a truthstorian in his own right. It will be a relatively wide-ranging discussion of Serling's life, my book about him, etc., but we'll be focusing some of it on "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" from Season One of The Twilight Zone, which is streaming on Paramount+, Pluto, and Tubi.
We've also got a bit of Serling talk sprinkled into our newest Patreon episode, where we talk about "Treehouse of Horror IV" from The Simpsons, which features Homer selling his soul for a donut, a gremlin trying to destroy Bart's school bus, vampires, and a tribute to Rod Serling's Night Gallery. And that episode opens with us discussing The New York Times' list of the 100 best TV shows of the century so far. You can also look later today for our poll of potential topics for our November episode, at Patreon.com/TVIsGoodPod.
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To quote the hosts of every show you listen to, please remember to subscribe, rate/like, and review, because the algorithm uses that data to decide what shows to promote to people who don't already know about them. Please help us beat the algorithm at its own game. You can also write to the two of us specifically at tvisgoodpod@gmail.com.
