Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I think a random bald guy is Moby...
What's next?
Here's some of what's coming in the next week:
- A review of The Pitt Season Two, and my recap of the premiere;
- A new Ask Alan for What's Alan Watching? tier subscribers (so send in those questions).
In addition, I thought I'd offer a preview of what's to come for paid subscribers over the first couple of months of 2026 here at What's Alan Watching?
- As mentioned above, I'll be recapping HBO Max's The Pitt — aka my favorite show of 2025.
- I'll be recapping HBO's A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a Game of Thrones prequel that promises to operate on a much smaller scale than either the original show or House of the Dragon.
- I'll be recapping the third season of Apple's Shrinking. And, depending on how I feel once I've seen some episodes, I'll be going back to the original Blogger days by recapping ABC's Scrubs revival.
- Some other shows I'll be writing about in some form — and maybe doing weekly coverage, which will, like Scrubs, depend on whether I feel there's enough there for regular recapping — include Season Two of Hijack, Season Four of Dark Winds, Starfleet Academy, Wonder Man, and whatever else catches my fancy as I start digging into my virtual pile of January and February screeners.
This raises a larger question: What 2026 shows are you most excited to see, whether they're new or returning? Leaving aside the stuff I've already watched for the start of the year, I'm awfully curious to see what Damon Lindelof and company do with Lanterns, and I'm morbidly fascinated to see what Euphoria has become after so much time has passed (in the real world and for the characters), and after various behind-the-scenes weirdness. (The Hollywood Reporter has a good curated list of notable upcoming series; Metacritic's premiere calendar is always useful, though it largely sticks to shows that already have official premiere dates.)
Catching up
I closed out superlatives season, and my 2025 writing in general, with a look at more great episodes of TV that I loved last year, most of them from shows that made my Top 10 list, plus some wildcards:
Alan Sepinwall
I wrote about The Stranger Things finale, which had some strong moments that got buried under the bloat that's unfortunately typified these final seasons:
Alan Sepinwall
For The New York Times, I wrote about the creative ramifications if Netflix succeeds in acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery, and why I hope Netflix learns a lot more like HBO than vice versa (gift link):
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeit!
For the second week in a row, we have to say goodbye to an actor most famous for his association with The Wire. Isiah Whitlock Jr. died at 71 after battling a short illness. He had an impressive career as a late-blooming character actor — his Random Roles for The A.V. Club covers a lot of that, including a super-charming story about how he got a small role in Goodfellas — and was really funny as recently as last year as the D.C. chief of police in The Residence. But he was obviously best known for playing corrupt Maryland politician Clay Davis on The Wire, and for how artfully he could elongate the word "shit" until it sounded like a symphony.
My Wire rewatch for the book is almost at the end of Season Two, which means the state senator has barely appeared so far. It's a testament to the joy of Whitlock's performance that Clay is one of the first characters people think of when they think of that show, given that he didn't really become a notable piece of the action until Season Three. I'm looking forward to getting to all of his greatest hits in context, including Clay getting his day in court:
Should old TV episodes be forgot...
Alan Sepinwall
Finally, to return to an idea I used at the end of last year for Thanksgiving (twice!), I wanted to look at memorable TV episodes set around New Year's.
The episode that gave this section its lead image comes from The O.C., a show that — as discussed in the fine book Welcome to The O.C.: The Oral History — turned holidays into its own version of a workplace franchise. The first season's New Year's Eve episode climaxed with one of the series' most iconic combinations of images and music:
The most memorable bit from the multiple Friends episodes involving New Year's is Ross and Monica recreating their childhood dance routine in hopes of getting on camera for Dick Clark's New Year's Eve special:
A fun early How I Met Your Mother episode finds the gang spending the holiday riding around New York in a stretch limo, adding and dropping passengers along the way. One of the temporary additions is a guy who looks like Moby, but is perhaps not Moby:
"A War for All Seasons" from MASH actually features multiple New Year's celebrations, in an episode that follows what it's like at the 4077th over the course of more than a year. In doing so, though, the episode does some major retconning to the series' history, since original characters like Henry Blake and Trapper John would be the ones at the first New Year's, rather than Colonel Potter and BJ:
Remember Y2K madness, when everyone was worried that the internet would crash as the clock struck midnight at the end of 1999? A lot of comedies did Y2K episodes that year, with the subject proving particularly apt for King of the Hill conspiracy theorist Dale:
Where most shows about the holiday focus on December 31, the brilliant-but-canceled My So-Called Life did an episode concentrating on what happens after that, as Angela and her friends and family struggle to keep their New Year's resolutions:
Back to Y2K, The X-Files did an episode called "Millennium" that was something of a backdoor series finale, with Frank Black from Millennium joining forces with Mulder and Scully to wrap up the main story from his canceled series. With all due respect to the great Lance Henriksen, the part of the episode that's most remembered involves our traditional heroes, who celebrate midnight in the traditional way:
A few years earlier, Seinfeld also did an episode called "The Millennium," though its actual New Year's plot, involving Kramer and Newman hosting dueling parties, isn't that great. But the episode also features one of the great George Costanza subplots, as he goes to extreme lengths to get fired by the Yankees so he can take a better job in Queens with the Mets:
Happy New Year! Those are some of my favorites. What are yours?
