Have a quick pint
'House of Guinness,' 'Wayward,' 'Chief of War,' and more
Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I dance through the streets to "Simply Irresistible"...
Settling into a rhythm in week two of our expanded operation here. We're going to start each of these Friday newsletters with a preview of what's coming next week, then quickly look back at my other writing for this week, then move onto a few other subjects. In this case, that's very brief thoughts on some new shows I didn't review, followed by a few spoilers about last week's Chief of War season finale.
What's next?
Upcoming writing here at What's Alan Watching? will include:
- My take on last night's eventful Peacemaker, coming sometime later today, for all paid subscribers. UPDATE: Here it is:
Alan Sepinwall
- Recaps of next week's episodes of The Lowdown, Slow Horses, and Peacemaker, for all paid subscribers.
- A review of Hulu's Glen Powell sports comedy Chad Powers, for all paid subscribers.
- An Ask Alan video mailbag, for paid subscribers on the What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier.
- A crossover conversation with Myles McNutt from Episodic Medium about how our choices of what to watch and recap have evolved over the years, for free.
- A spoiler look back at Platonic Season Two (whose finale drops October 1), either late next week or early the following, for all paid subscribers.
- A Friday newsletter with various odds and/or ends, for free.
Catching up
While the Peacemaker recap is coming later today, I published three other recaps earlier in the week:
- For paid subscribers, here's my take on the Alien: Earth Season One finale, which presented many of the season's strengths and weaknesses in microcosm:
Alan Sepinwall
- Free this week (though all upcoming recaps of it will be for paid subscribers) is my look at the delightful two-part series premiere of FX's The Lowdown, starring Ethan Hawke as a reporter who is both the most exasperating and most charming lead character TV's had in quite some time:
Alan Sepinwall
- For paid subscribers, my recap of the Season Five premiere of Slow Horses, in which an act of domestic terrorism improbably but effectively leads into a very funny hour in which we discover that Roddy Ho is... hot?
Alan Sepinwall
These are not reviews
At various professional homes, my buddy Dan Fienberg used to have an annual summer series called "Take Me to the Pilots," where he would write his initial impressions on that fall's broadcast network TV pilots. He would stress every time that these were just stray observations, and not reviews, since pilots in that stage could change substantially by the time they aired. As I recall, some publicists nonetheless got salty that he was expressing any public opinions at all about those rough cut versions.
I'm going to attempt something similar but not identical from time to time, with brief looks at new shows where I watched maybe a couple of episodes before moving on. There are three shows like that this week(*), all of which I sampled but decided not to continue with for various reasons. Because I had the entire seasons of each available, I'm not calling these reviews. There's too long a history of series with underwhelming starts that became good or even great by the end of their first seasons for me to dismiss these out of hand. But for one reason or another, these were ones I didn't want to continue with past the first episode or two.
(*) Initially, there were four, including Apple's The Savant, starring Jessica Chastain as a woman who specializes in infiltrating online communities that foment hate and violence, to try to head domestic terrorism off at the pass. Apple has shelved it for now, apparently fearful that it would feel overly incendiary at this delicate moment in time. That said, 1)Given the state of America right now, it feels like there will never be a good time, just like whenever TV episodes featuring mass shootings often get delayed by actual mass shootings; 2)Most of the people who would object to such a show would be telling on themselves; and 3)Like most Apple originals, nobody would have noticed this one if it actually debuted — especially since the three episodes I watched were pretty low-energy, in spite of the subject matter — where now the streamer has brought Streisand Effect-style attention to it. It's also kind of insane that Apple would do this while not delaying the Slow Horses premiere, which covers extremely similar territory. Which just goes to show that if you're a hit, you get way more latitude than if you're a new show that few people are likely to be excited about.
- Netflix has Steven Knight's latest period drama, House of Guinness, set in Ireland in the late 1860s, as the death of the Guinness brewery's founder kicks off conflict among his heirs, his employees, and various forces in Dublin looking to take advantage of this chaos. It is, as you might expect from the man who created Peaky Blinders, full of anachronistic music and attention-seeking stylistic flourishes. Mostly, the two episodes I watched made me think that I really ought to get back to Peaky Blinders at some point, as I watched a few first season episodes and then never kept going for reasons I don't recall. Your mileage will vary on how compelling you find the four Guinness siblings, but James Norton is definitely having a fun as the brewery's swaggering, violent manager.
- Also on Netflix: Wayward, a Canadia miniseries created by and starring Mae Martin as a trans cop who moves to his pregnant wife's small Vermont hometown and uncovers a conspiracy involving a creepy private reform school, which is run by Toni Collette. Those of you with long, TV nerdy memories might recall that M. Night Shyamalan produced a 2015 Fox show called Wayward Pines, also about creepy doings in a small town — and the town on the new show is even called Tall Pines! I really liked Martin's last Netflix series, the semi-autobiographical rom-com Feel Good. This one's more ambitious, but also a very slow burn. I watched two episodes and liked the atmosphere, but wasn't engaged enough by the story to continue. (And Fienberg's actual review suggests I would have grown more frustrated the further I got into it.)
- Prime has Hotel Costiera, with Jesse Williams as an ex-Marine who now works as a fixer for a high-end hotel on the Amalfi Coast. It's very much in the vein of the USA Network's "blue skies" shows of the late '00s and early '10s, full of beautiful scenery, beautiful people, pleasant vibes, and low-stakes conflict. This would be on the less substantial end of that spectrum, as I found myself forgetting what was happening even as I was watching my first and only episode.
Rumble at the volcano
Finally, a note on Chief of War, whose first season finale dropped on Apple last Friday. As I wrote about prior to its premiere, I liked the scope and specificity of the Jason Momoa-led historical drama, but found the first season too repetitive to sustain nine episodes. The finale, though, was easily the highlight, with an epic battle at the base of an active volcano, which was preceded by Momoa's character and his rival standing in front of their respective armies and essentially cutting wrestling promos while steam and lava burbled behind them. That's the stuff. I don't expect it to become narratively more efficient in a hypothetical second season, but the finale at least will get me to sample the premiere if Apple orders more.
That's it for today! What did everybody else think?
