And to make this 'Long Story Short'
The 'BoJack Horseman' team is back with a new show, plus 'Alien: Earth' and a 'Strange New Worlds' mockumentary
This week's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I have nightmares about space dragons...
Family business
There's not a lot happening in TV at the moment, but what there is is awfully good. In addition to this week's long-awaited return of Peacemaker, Netflix has Long Story Short, the latest animated comedy from the team of Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Lisa Hanawalt, who in various roles previously gave us BoJack Horseman and Tuca & Bertie. My review:
Alan Sepinwall
No anthropomorphised animals this time, just an extremely human, argumentative, Jewish-American family, played by a cast that includes Lisa Edelstein, Paul Reiser, Ben Feldman, Abbi Jacobson, Max Greenfield(*), Angelique Cabral, and Nicole Byer. Like their previous work together, it's a potent mix of sadness and silliness, with some extremely melancholy material about family trauma mixed in with utterly inspired slapstick and other comic set pieces. Highly recommend.
(*) Greenfield, by the way, was one of the guests in the never-released second season of my Too Long; Didn't Watch podcast, and will be discussed when I launch the newsletter paid tier next month with the story of what you didn't get to hear.
Alien: Earth 2: Die Harder?
This week's Alien: Earth was my least favorite of the eight episodes of Season One. It has some intruiging ideas, and does some necessary work in building out the supporting cast. But there's a bunch of awkwardness around the Xenomorph, and Noah Hawley can't quite disguise the fact that he's much more interested in other aspects of the world than the title character. More in my recap:
Alan Sepinwall
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recaplet: "What Is Starfleet?"
Most of "What Is Starfleet?" works other than the scene where Ortegas confronts her brother about why he chose this angle for his documentary. Gene Roddenberry conceived of Starfleet as a more benevolent futuristic version of the British Royal Navy, which acted as a military force but were also explorers to a degree. So Star Trek has to juggle action and suspense stories with ones where our heroes get to be scientists, diplomats, etc. Every fan has their favorite mode of Star Trek, as do some of the people who have shepherded the franchise. (The two J.J. Abrams movies, for instance, are almost entirely action.) That can create a degree of whiplash, and it's easy to imagine the average Federation citizen wondering whether all these starships are meant to make the Alpha Quadrant a better place, or simply gun down their enemies.
The episode offers a mission that winds up being a mix of all things Starfleet. The Enterprise has been assigned to help one planet gain an advantage in a war with another. But Pike and the crew soon figure out that the "weapon" they're escorting is a sentient being that wants no part of its assigned task. Ultimately, they choose to follow the Jikaru's wishes, allowing it to die peacefully rather than live as a weapon, and moving to protect its children, even at the risk of offending the Federation's new allies on Lutani. It's among the better Mission of the Week stories the show's ever done, and badly needed in a season that's been flailing about in most of its tasks. And using Beto's documentary as the framing device gave it just enough of a Very Special Episode vibe without getting in the way of the meat-and-potatoes Star Trek storytelling.
That said, it felt like a cop-out to reveal that Beto's motivation wasn't really genuine concern about Starfleet's mission — a legitimate question, and one the franchise has only occasionally explored — but rather bitterness and worry that the organization has taken his sister away from him and repeatedly endangered her. Giving characters a personal stake in a story is often a crucial dramatic ingredient; here, it felt like a way to shrug off most of what Beto was asking Erica, Uhura, and the others.
On the whole, though, it's been a good couple of weeks for Strange New Worlds.
That's it for this week! What did everybody else think?
