'Welcome to Derry,' girls and boys
An 'It' prequel series, 'Nobody Wants This' returns, plus 'The Diplomat,' 'Task,' 'Slow Horses,' and more
Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as they float — they all float...
Happy Friday, everybody! Before we get to everything else, a bit of housekeeping. The ramped-up operation here demands a dedicated URL, so now you can just come to WhatsAlanWatching.com for all your recapping, reviewing, and other TV newsletter needs. The old URLs still work, if you happen to have linked to something I wrote prior to this change. This is just easier to remember (and Google).
What's next?
Coming up in the next week-plus:
- Thoughts on the third episode of The Chair Company, for paid subscribers.
- I'll be briefly discussing Nobody Wants This Season Two below, but we'll get more into spoiler territory on Monday, for paid subscribers.
- New on the What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier: Inspired by The Diplomat reteaming Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford, I'll be looking at other cases where former co-stars came back together on a later series.
- Some thoughts on Down Cemetery Road, the new Apple Series based on a book by Slow Horses author Mick Herron, starring Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson. (This might be a full review or might just be an item in next Friday's newsletter, depending on how much time I have.)
- My recap of the penultimate episode of this season of The Lowdown, for paid subscribers.
- My recap of the Slow Horses Season Five finale, for paid subscribers.
- An interview with BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg about his most recent Netflix animated series, Long Story Short, for paid subscribers.
Catching up
- In addition to everything I'm writing here, I've been taking the odd freelance assignment, starting with an essay for The New York Times Opinion section about the different ways that Task, The Lowdown, and the various Taylor Sheridan shows dramatize the lives of people with blue-collar jobs and/or who live in Red States. That was one of two Sunday pieces I wrote about Task, the other being my recap of the finale, which completed my conversion from Task skeptic to Task believer:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the second episode of The Chair Company, where Ron made like a wannabe private eye, with mixed success:
Alan Sepinwall
- I wrote about The Diplomat Season Three, which I enormously enjoyed until Kate made a wildly out of character decision in the finale:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped this week's episode of The Lowdown, where Lee journeyed into Tulsa's Native community to find the secret at the heart of the conspiracy:t
Alan Sepinwall
- I was a guest on The Ringer's Prestige TV Podcast to talk with Joanna Robinson about this season of Slow Horses so far, and I recapped the penultimate episode, where we found out who the bad guys really are and why they're doing all of this:
Alan Sepinwall
Odds and/or ends
- Like I said above, I'll have a lot on Nobody Wants This Season Two on Monday. But if you didn't already start watching when the episodes dropped yesterday, and are curious, I can say a few things. The first is that Kristen Bell and Adam Brody remain criminally adorable together. The second is that new showrunners Jenni Konner and Bruce Eric Kaplan have done a good job addressing the complaint that the first season presented all the Jewish women on the show in the most stereotypically negative fashion possible; Jackie Tohn in particular gets much better material this year as Brody's sister-in-law. The third is that it's very strange at first to watch Succession alums Justine Lupe and Arian Moayed play a lot of scenes together, but their dynamic is fun. The fourth is that, regardless of who's running the show, nobody seems to have given much thought to how Bell and Lupe's podcast is supposed to work. And the fifth is that making an ongoing TV show primarily focused on a romance is very tricky to pull off, even with stars who have as much chemistry as Bell and Brody. More next week.
- I'm a week behind on Abbott Elementary, but the episode where Ava took (some of) the staff to a Phillies game was one of the better examples of a sitcom filming on location. Parks and Rec was usually very good at this (the London episode, the bachelor parties episode), but the stunt itself often winds up undercutting the humor. In this case, not even the kismet of designated hitter Kyle Schwarber — who was already scheduled to cameo in the episode — hitting four home runs on the night the show was filming could get in the way of various good running gags, like Melissa getting Jacob drunk just to shut him up, or O'Shon becoming convinced that Mr. Johnson was secretly the Phillie Phanatic. But the luck of them happening to film an episode featuring Schwarber on that, of all days? Nothing will ever be better than Larry David clearing a man of a murder charge because he was at a Dodgers game being filmed for Curb Your Enthusiasm, but that's pretty amazing.
This is not a review: It: Welcome to Derry
Alan Sepinwall
A few weeks back, I said that from time to time, I would offer thoughts on new shows where I watched a few episodes, but not enough to qualify for a proper review. HBO's It: Welcome to Derry qualifies.
Stephen King's novel was a favorite when I was a teenager; like fellow King doorstop The Stand, I read it multiple times. I also really enjoyed its TV adaptation, with Tim Curry as Pennywise, and John Ritter, Seth Green, Annette O'Toole, Richard Thomas, and others playing the Losers Club as either adults or kids. Or, at least, I really enjoyed the miniseries until its climax, which mostly amounted to Beverly defeating Pennywise with her slingshot. (In fairness, King is generally not great at endings himself, and the one in It didn't lend itself to easy translation for the screen.) But as I've gotten older, my appetite for horror has mostly dwindled, and I didn't feel compelled to watch either of the recent film versions. So take what follows with however many grains of salt you want.
Welcome to Derry comes from the creative team behind those movies, and is both a prequel to them and something of a more direct adaptation of the books. Because the films moved up the book's timeline so that the Losers Club could be adults in the present day, Welcome to Derry gets to situate its own equivalent in the early Sixties, which is where King's story was originally set. We know, from both It and from other King books that mention Derry, that the town goes through cycles of supernatural violence, followed by many years of peace. Welcome to Derry is about the start of one of those violent cycles, going back and forth between a group of kids who are being most directly affected by the rising evil around them, and an Air Force team — which includes Jovan Adepo as the grandfather of It's Mike Hanlon, and Chris Chalke as a young version of The Shining caretaker Dick Halloran — investigating the region's paranormal qualities.
There are parts that are memorably scary and/or gross. The story wasn't hard to follow even though it's been decades since I was immersed in this fictional world. And the kid half of things moves at a reasonable (if not quick) pace and feels very King-like. But the adult stories are slower and less focused. After the second episode, I just decided that I'd done my time in Derry, Maine. I didn't hate it, but it no longer felt like my thing. Your mileage will obviously vary, especially if you liked one or both of the films.
That's it for today! What did everybody else think?
