Winding our way 'Down Cemetery Road'
Apple tries to recreate some 'Slow Horses' magic with Emma Thompson and Ruth Wilson, plus 'Pluribus' plans, Taylor Sheridan relocates, 'Doctor Who' news, and more
Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I'm a psychopath...
Happy Friday! And Happy Halloween! Later in the newsletter, I'll offer up a review of Apple's new comic thriller Down Cemetery Road, but first we have to run through upcoming stories and revisit recent ones.
What's next?
Coming up soon for paid subscribers:
- The big TV event of next week — and, depending on how much Stranger Things affection you do or don't have at this point, the big TV event of the rest of the year — is the debut of Apple's Pluribus, reteaming Vince Gilligan and Rhea Seehorn. I'll be reviewing it. I will also be recapping every episode. I'm embargoed from giving you my opinion on it until the first two episodes are literally available to stream. But perhaps you can read between some lines here.
- Before that, I'll be recapping the fourth episode of The Chair Company.
- I'll have many thoughts on The Lowdown season finale.
- I'll be reviewing the Netflix miniseries Death By Lightning, about the assassination of President James Garfield by Charles Guiteau, with a cast including Michael Shannon, Matthew Macfadyen, Nick Offerman, Shea Whigham, and many more of your favorites.
(The Rafael Bob-Waksberg interview I mentioned last week is still coming at some point soon-ish, but has been delayed by some other things that have unexpectedly cropped up.)
Catching up
Here's what I published since last Friday's newsletter:
- I recapped the third episode of The Chair Company, where we found out who was in the closet, while Ron's light and dark sides did battle:
Alan Sepinwall
- I looked at Season Two of Nobody Wants This, which improved on certain aspects of the first season (writing for the supporting cast, writing for Jewish women), while stumbling to keep the romantic comedy plot moving forward:
Alan Sepinwall
- For What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier subscribers, I took inspiration from Allison Janney and Bradley Whitford playing spouses on The Diplomat to look back at some other memorable instances where former co-stars reunited as new characters on a different series. (One big omission, as pointed out in the comments: Justified worked its way through half the Deadwood cast, usually making sure to have those actors appear in at least one scene with Timothy Olyphant.)
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the penultimate episode of The Lowdown, where Lee got called out for being a "caring white boy," with all the good and bad connotations that come along with such a title:
Alan Sepinwall
- I recapped the Slow Horses season finale, and marveled once again at the show's ability to balance the ridiculous and the tragic:
Alan Sepinwall
Odds and/or ends
- Different networks and streamers have different press lists and rules regarding who does and doesn't get screeners. My screener access has mostly remained the same since I left Rolling Stone, but occasionally I don't get episodes in advance now. Case in point: I Love LA, the new HBO comedy created by and starring Rachel Sennott (Bottoms). Because I'd rather not review a show off a single episode like I did way back in the days of Veronica's Closet and Homeboys in Outer Space, I want to give it a few weeks before deciding whether I want to write about it.
- Earlier this week, the BBC announced three key details about the future of Doctor Who: 1)Disney is ending its partnership role on the series; 2)The BBC is nonetheless going to continue without a partner, as it did for all but these two recent seasons; and 3)The next new episode will be a Christmas special... in 2026. So it's going to be a long wait. The hope is that the extra time will allow Russell T. Davies — or, if he's not continuing, his successor — to look back at what didn't work in the Disney seasons and figure out how to get back to the core of what was so successful in the early years of the revival.
- Hulu just ordered a 16th and 17th season of King of the Hill, tacked onto the 15th season that the creative team is already working on. Given how great — and relevant — the 14th season was earlier this year, this is excellent news.
- I'm not a big Taylor Sheridan fan, for reasons I got into a bit in my recent New York Times essay. But he's one of the most successful, prolific showrunners in the business at the moment, with only Ryan Murphy and Shonda Rhimes in his vicinity at the moment. (And Dick Wolf, though he hasn't been a hands-on showrunner in a long time.) So it's notable that Sheridan has opted to leave Paramount, where he created Yellowstone and the rest of his empire, for NBCUniversal when his contract is up. Reportedly, Sheridan's unhappy that new Paramount boss David Ellison laid off some of his favorite executives. And it's also a bit ironic that he'll be going to the parent company of Peacock, which is the streaming home of Yellowstone because Ellison's predecessors chose quick cash over long-term revenue in selling those rights away. That said, Sheridan's current deal runs for several more years. He clearly has his finger on the pulse right now. Will he still by the time 2028 rolls around? Some showrunners (including the ones mentioned above) can keep churning out hit after hit over multiple decades. But TV history's also littered with producers who had a concentrated burst of success that they couldn't maintain forever. Few producers have ever had as strong a hold on the zeitgeist as Norman Lear did in the Seventies, for instance, but nothing he created or produced from 1980 on had nearly the same impact. This NBC deal starts around the 10th anniversary of Yellowstone's debut. Will Sheridan's new bosses be getting what they're paying for?
This is a review: Down Cemetery Road
The same week that Apple wrapped a season of one show adapted from a Mick Herron book brought the debut of another: Down Cemetery Road, based on a the first entry in a different Herron book series. This one stars Ruth Wilson as Sarah, an artist who unwittingly uncovers a conspiracy — not involving chairs, but a missing girl and secret government experiments — and Emma Thompson as Zoe, the sardonic private investigator who reluctantly helps her look into the case.
I haven't read these books the way I did Herron's early Slough House novels, so I can't speak to their tone. But the show is very much aiming for the same blend of absurdity and menace that Slow Horses hits so regularly. As I said in my Slow Horse finale recap, when a show has those elements in balance, it's wonderful. And when a show can't keep the two in harmony, each part undercuts the other: the comedy defangs the threats, and the heavier material makes it harder to laugh.
I've seen the full eight-episode season. Eventually, the creative team (led by showrunner Morwenna Banks) leans more into the comedic half of things, and the show improves a bit as a result. But it takes a while to get there, and until then, the series feels confused rather than confident.
The story also splits up the two leads early on, not reuniting them until late in the season, and it suffers for that — particularly in the Ruth Wilson end of things, since she has a harder time shifting between emotional intensity and whimsy. Emma Thompson glides through those transitions as effortlessly as you would expect from her after all these years, but Zoe also feels more tangential to the plot for a long time. Even if this is how the book was structured, there's so much more energy whenever Wilson and Thompson are together that Banks and company might have been better off deviating from the source material to turn it into more of a two-hander.
Though some Slow Horses seasons (like this latest one) are stronger than others, in general it makes translating Herron's stories, and toggling between moods, look effortless. Down Cemetery Road has its moments, but overall is a reminder that what Slow Horses does is a lot harder than it appears.
That's it for today! What does everybody else think?
