Blessed is the 'Peacemaker'
John Cena gets serious, 'Alien: Earth' begins, 'China Beach' is finally on streaming, and 'Strange New Worlds' puts James T. Kirk in the captain's chair
This week's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I give you a supercomputer brain so I can have an interesting fucking conversation...
Welcome to the dog days of both summer and summer TV, everybody. There are still a few interesting shows to come before August is out (two of which I discuss below), but things are quiet enough that What's Alan Watching? is going into low-power mode until after Labor Day while I take some time off for family fun. My hope is to still put out a new newsletter every Friday, even if it's a brief one, before we get busier in September, including the launch of the paid tier, which for the moment has the terrible working title of What's Alan Watching?+. (I'm open to suggestions!) As a reminder, if you intend to sign up for the paid tier and get weekly bonus newsletters, access to the WAW Discord, etc., you can still email Ask Alan questions to whatsalanwatching@protonmail.com. (You can also email me anything even if you're staying a free subscriber.)
Let's dance!
Alan Sepinwall
Three years after we last saw him wearing the stupid shiny bucket helmet on his HBO Max show, John Cena's Peacemaker made a cameo in James Gunn's Superman. Now Gunn and Cena have finally given us a second season of Peacemaker, which I reviewed for Rolling Stone. Though I've only seen part of the season so far, it feels a lot like Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, where Gunn decided to take his once-ridiculous main character more seriously, and parceled out the comedy load to the second bananas. I still enjoyed it overall, and am happy to get a new dance number for the opening credits sequence, but it's not quite as giddy a feeling so far as I got from Season One.
Odds and/or ends
- Here's the great news: China Beach, the late Eighties/early Nineties drama about Vietnam War nurses, which took over the title of Best TV Show You Can't Stream once Peacock added Homicide: Life on the Street, is finally available to stream. Here's the less thrilling news: for the moment, it's only on Howdy, Roku's new paid (albeit only 3 bucks a month) subscription service. Here's the annoying news: as happened with Homicide, in order to finally make the jump into streaming, much, if not all, of the show's original music was stripped away and replaced with much less famous or expensive tracks. China Beach had perhaps the greatest soundtrack in TV history, but it was produced in an era where home video for TV shows was barely a thing, and streaming had never occurred to anyone. So the rights to all those classic rock and Motown hits would have to be renegotiated for each new format. There's a fantastic out-of-print DVD box set that has the original songs. But if you watch on Howdy (and hopefully on other streamers, in time), you get the Motown-at-home versions. There's a great scene, for instance, where Dana Delany's Colleen McMurphy dances with a wounded Vietnam vet to "Whiter Shade of Pale" by Procol Harum; now it's set to Ray Zeiner's vaguely similar "I Had a Girl." That being said, Delany is jaw-droppingly great in an inner circle TV Hall of Fame performance, and the show around her is often spectacular, too, which I wrote about back in my HitFix days. So I highly recommend watching, even without the original music. And I guess now the best to never be streamed title goes to... SCTV? thirtysomething? Murphy Brown? Ed?
- I gave up on hate-watching And Just Like That... after the most recent season premiere, but news that this week's episode would be the end of the series — and, probably, the end of Carrie, Miranda, and Charlotte as ongoing TV and film characters — made me slightly curious to see how it wrapped up. But it in no way plays like a series finale. Instead, it's like they finished filming the season, and then Sarah Jessica Parker and/or Michael Patrick King decided they were over it. So the story doesn't so much end as stop. It's also just a terrible, cringe-inducing episode of TV, including some of the most mean-spirited caricatures of Gen Z and/or gender non-conforming characters I've seen in a while, from a franchise that once upon a time was celebrated for how progressive and open-minded it was on matters of sex and gender. Oh, and there are a bunch of literal turds on screen at one point. Every TV show that does one of these revivals risks tarnishing the memories of the original; And Just Like That... just tarnished memories of Sex and the City more than usually happens in this case.
Return to Neverland
Welcome to phase three of Alien: Earth coverage. First came my profile of creator Noah Hawley. Then came my review. Now, I'm recapping the series, starting with this week's season-opening double feature, which introduces a whole lot of characters, several new and disgusting monsters, and much more detail about life on Earth in the future than the films generally have had time for.
Alan Sepinwall
Not all of it worked for me — the Xenomorph material in episode two, especially — but most of it's pretty fascinating, and at times stomach-churning. Curious for reactions so far.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recaplet: "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail"
Last week, I expressed hope that the second half of Strange New Worlds Season Three would improve on the disappointing first half. "The Sehlat Who Ate Its Tail" is a step in the right direction, in that it was a more exciting episode than what we've gotten since the premiere, and a good showcase for much of the ensemble. And it was the first episode where the Paul Wesley version of Jim Kirk felt in any way beyond name like either the Shatner or Pine versions. And the revelation that the bad guys were the descendants of a pre-First Contact deep space mission that went horribly awry was an interesting one, even if the episode didn't do a lot with it. On the whole, it was the most entertained I've been by any episode since at least the wedding one, and that was carried largely by Rhys Darby. So that was all good.
At the same time, though, building an episode about Kirk's first mission as (acting) starship captain, and making sure that he was surrounded with the Strange New Worlds characters who were most prominent in the original series, was a reminder of the dangers of leaning so hard into Muppet Babies versions of the TOS crew. I like most of the actors playing these characters, and even Wesley was substantially better this time out. But the more Strange New Worlds focuses on its TOS characters rather than the newbies like La'an, or the relative newbies like Pike, the more it invites unflattering comparisons. Uhura and Chapel were underdeveloped enough in the Sixties that there are exciting things to be done with them, but Scotty and especially Kirk and Spock are so well-established that even doing origin stories about them often feels thin. (It's the one area where I understand why SNW has leaned so hard into romance: Spock and Chapel's relationship feels nothing like anything Nimoy ever played, and only a little like what Quinto got to do with Zoe Saldaña in the Kelvin films.) The idea of Spock helping his future best friend develop his command style is the kind of thing that seems better suited to novels and comics than to the franchise's only current live-action series. None of the scenes on the Farragut were bad, but I found myself much more engrossed in what what was happening back on Enterprise, including Pellia using 1980s landline phones and video game controllers to save the day.
Kirk is the subject of the episode's single best scene, where Pike talks to him about how to live with your actions causing the deaths of other people. James T. Kirk's ability to compartmentalize the hard parts of the job is just as much at the core of the character as his famous lack of interest in following roles, or the way he sits in the captain's chair, and it felt interesting to hear him get some advice on the subject from his predecessor. But the conversation works primarily because Anson Mount is so good, and because Strange New Worlds has turned Pike into a character who feels specific to this show, even if he's appeared in other forms before. Even after Paul Wesley found a way to seem more Kirk-like without outright doing a Shatner impression, he still feels like an inferior copy of a copy.
Still, this was probably the strongest episode of what's been a bump season so far. Let's hope the upswing continues.
That's it for this week! What did everybody else think?
