Lemon, it's Friday
Looking back at an, um, eventful week
Today's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I hide the man with the face-hugger under my bed...
Catching up
If you're someone who only pays attention to the newsletter on its traditional Friday morning schedule, hoo boy did you miss a lot this week. Let's speed-run through all of the recent stuff.
First, my last day at Rolling Stone was Monday. For the time being, What's Alan Watching? will be the sole home for my reviews, recaps, industry analysis, and pretty much all of my non-book writing. Though these Friday newsletters will remain free, most of the content will go behind the paywall. I hope anyone who’s a free subscriber and has the means will consider upgrading to one of the paid tiers. Details on all of that here (free post):
Alan Sepinwall
News of Robert Redford's death broke not long after I announced this new plan. I wrote about some TV appearances that bookended his acting career, and also discussed some of my favorite Redford movies. This post is also free:
Alan Sepinwall
More on Redford near the end of the newsletter. Meanwhile, I reviewed Black Rabbit, the new Netflix limited series starring Jude Law and Jason Bateman as brothers — one a successful restaurateur, one a recovering addict and all-around screw-up — who get in trouble with gangsters. This is for paid subscribers.
Alan Sepinwall
Also, anyone who signed up to be a paid subscriber this week can go back to read last week's first paid tier post, where I went behind-the-scenes on the never-released second season of my Too Long; Didn't Watch podcast:
Alan Sepinwall
Coming soon, to a newsletter near you
Next week will be an extremely busy one around these parts, with perhaps five newsletters, between free and paid ones. Look for these, and possibly more:
- Tuesday night: My recap of the Alien: Earth Season One finale, for paid subscribers.
- Also Tuesday night: my recap of the series premiere of FX's fantastic new Sterlin Harjo/Ethan Hawke comic mystery series The Lowdown. That one will be free, though going forward, my weekly coverage of that show will be for paid subscribers. (Related: on Thursday night, I moderated a conversation with Harjo and Hawke. Few things in this role I enjoy more than talking with really smart people about great work.)
- Wednesday night: my recap of the Slow Horses Season Five premiere, for paid subscribers.
- Friday morning: the free newsletter, including very brief discussions of those three episodes, plus quick thoughts on a few shows debuting next week that I'm not reviewing.
- Sometime Thursday night or Friday, for paid subscribers, I hope to write something about next week's episode of Peacemaker, the first one of Season Two that critics weren't given in advance. I'm expecting something big to happen.
Lots to read, so, again, consider upgrading to a paid subscription if you can.
Cheaters never prosper?
In the aforementioned Redford piece, I was so focused on his iconic acting work that it never even occurred to me to delve into him having directed one of the best movies about TV ever made(*), 1994's Quiz Show. Bad job by me!
(*) Mental note: "Best movies about TV ever made" would make a fine subject for a paid newsletter.
Quiz Show (which is available for digital rental, and also on Hoopla if your local library offers that service) looks back at one of the biggest scandals of the original Fifties golden age of television. It turned out that the game show Twenty-One, basically the Jeopardy! of its day, was feeding answers to contestants to extend their stays and impress the audience with how smart certain people seemed. It's incredibly astute not only about the artificiality of television itself, but about a lot of aspects of American culture that resonate as much today as they did at mid-century, like how the handsome and WASPy Charles Van Doren was considered a far more palatable contestant than the sweaty and Jewish Herb Stempel. Knockout performances by everyone (even if I do enjoy imitating Rob Morrow talking about Reuben sandwiches in his bad JFK-style accent), and beautiful to look at, too. Redford was an excellent director in general — Ordinary People gets a bad rap because it beat Raging Bull for Best Picture, but it's fantastic (and far more rewatchable than Raging Bull) — and this is his masterpiece.
Old business
Before what turned out to be my last day of work, I wrote several Rolling Stone stories. I'll admit to feeling some ambivalence about spotlighting them this week. That said, I was very proud of the first two stories, and the third fills a gap in my ongoing coverage of a show. So if you're still curious:
- I attempted to write the world's hardest Sopranos trivia quiz. The initial draft was substantially harder than this, with many questions where I would not have known the answer without intensive Googling. A few on that level survived to the published version, but I wanted it to be possible to score well on it.
- I wrote about the Emmy telecast, which on the one hand featured a lot of winners that made me happy (yay, The Pitt!), and on the other featured an utterly disastrous running gag from host Nate Bargatze that wrecked everything else that was happening.
- I recapped the penultimate episode of Alien: Earth, which raced through the Xenomorph birthing process in order to put things in place for the finale, but at least had some cool stuff with our friend the eyeball. In full candor, it was a recap I struggled to write, because it felt like a piece-mover episode. I'll have much more to say about the finale on Tuesday night.
That's it for today! What did everybody else think?
