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Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as twins confuse and frighten me...

A note from your scheduler

I have to care for an ailing loved one for a good chunk of my time, at least in the immediate future. So I'm going to have to be more selective with what I write about for a minute. My philosophy is going to be that if something isn't really exciting me after an episode or two, I'll stop, and either mention it briefly in the Friday newsletter — look for a few of these down below — or just skip altogether. I always prefer to write and talk about shows I feel passion for, so this will just force me to really lean into that for a while. There also may be more evergreen content — both on the main paid tier and some on the bonus tier — simply because it's a lighter lift if I'm writing about shows I've already seen everything of.

Doing my best over here, and I hope the quality over quantity approach will be to your liking. Thanks for your continued support.

What's next?

Again, see above. There will definitely be recaps of The Pitt and Shrinking. If I find the new Jury Duty season more interesting than I found the first, perhaps I'll write about that, perhaps the Oscar-cast will be interesting enough to merit a discussion, or perhaps I'll be able to catch up on Deadloch ahead of the Australian comic mystery series' second season debut on Prime. Or something else. We'll see.

Catching up

Published here since last Friday's newsletter:

An Ask Alan video — for all paid subscribers this week, and not just ones on the bonus tier — where I talked about broadcast shows that would have been better off on streaming, and vice versa; successful backdoor pilots; and shows I'd love to rewatch if I could find the time (more on that in a minute):

I recapped this week's Shrinking episode, which was loaded with poignant and/or hilarious moments, yet felt a little too crowded to be as effective as it could have been:

I wrote about the Starfleet Academy season finale, and how satisfying the mashup of Star Trek and YA tropes felt by the end of this run:

I recapped this week's The Pitt, where Robby's behavior was both appalling and unrepentant:

Odds and/or ends

Other than Ethan Hawke, we don't know if any actors from The Lowdown Season One will return. But FX has announced that both Betty Gilpin and Tommy Lee Jones will be in Season Two. It's been 15 years since Jones did television (in an HBO movie, The Sunset Limited), but his return to the small screen gives me an excuse to once again share my favorite weird Bunheads subplot:

Answering that final Ask Alan question about shows I want to rewatch made me realize that I really really wanted to rewatch Mad Men. I don't know how far I'll make it this time, due to both the reasons discussed in the video and the family stuff alluded to above. But I at least got to watch the pilot episode, which reminded me of two things. The first is that, as a longtime analyst of TV drama, I wasn't surprised at all to see Don go home to a wife and kids at the end of the hour, but I wonder how many of you were. The second is that, in an early scene in Pete's office, he picks up a photo of his fiancée Trudy, and it is very much not Alison Brie. Then after she was cast, they swapped in a pic of Brie a few episodes later:

These are not reviews

Here are some brief thoughts on a few recent new series where I watched an episode or two — enough of a sample size for brief impressions, but not nearly enough to consider these any kind of definitive opinion:

Hollywood has been trying to adapt Patricia Cornwell's mystery novel series about medical examiner Kay Scarpetta practically since the first one was published decades ago. Scarpetta finally arrived on screen this week in the form of a Prime Video series starring Nicole Kidman in the titular role, Jamie Lee Curtis as Kay's sister, Simon Baker as Kay's FBI agent husband, Ariana de Bose as Kay's niece, and Bobby Cannavale as Kay's longtime police ally. Well, technically it stars two different actors in each of those roles — including Bobby's son Jake Cannavale — since the first season bounces back and forth between the plots of two different novels. One is set early in Kay's career (where she's played by Rosy McEwen), the other after she's returned to work in Virginia following a long hiatus. Though I love a lot of crime books of a similar vintage, I've never read Cornwell's, so I can't speak to how faithfully Lost and Deadwood alum Elizabeth Sarnoff is in adapting them. But the split timeline, and the way events in the past are constantly echoed by events in the present, left me frustrated. Plus, serial killer stories have to be told at an incredibly high level these days for me to invest in film and television's most exhausted trope. Even Bosch, the best of all of Amazon's single-title mystery book adaptations, almost drowned in Awesome Serial Killers Are Awesome tropes in its own first season. I watched two episodes of Scarpetta and wasn't engaged by enough to continue, even with that cast.
MGM+, the cable channel formerly known as Epix, has tried lots of shows over the years that sounded intriguing on paper but didn't quite click for me, like Godfather of Harlem or the Get Shorty series. (It also gave us one of the most amusing series titles of all time, in Pennyworth: The Origin of Batman's Butler.) Still, I keep trying when I can, and I watched a couple of episodes of American Classic, a new comedy starring Kevin Kline as a narcissistic Broadway star who returns to his New Jersey hometown after a public disgrace, and attempts to help save his family's acclaimed local theater company. I love Kline, and I liked the fact that the supporting cast would include Laura Linney (in a Dave reunion with Kline) and Jon Tenney (in a You Can Count on Me reunion with Linney). Kline's character is a lot to take, however, and the two episodes I watched didn't quite have things dialed in so that I had fun watching him make every moment be about himself.
While NBC is developing a Rockford Files reboot starring Davie Boreanaz, ABC already has a very Rockford-esque private eye show starring an alum of a classic WB drama: R.J. Decker, with Scott Speedman playing an ex-con working as a detective in Ft. Lauderdale. I'm forever a sucker for this kind of show. Cobie Smulders' recent presence on Shrinking reminds me of how much I enjoyed her own ABC version of this, Stumptown, and I'm holding out hope that Rian Johnson is able to bring back Poker Face in some form down the road. The two episodes I watched of R.J. Decker felt like a decent enough version of the genre that mostly made me want to go back to some of the others. Maybe I'll try again down the road, or maybe I'll just wait until next season to see if Fox's private eye comedy with Jake Johnson and Keith David does a more effective job scratching that itch.