Stars of the 'Royal Kingdom'
How is one mobile game getting so many celebrity endorsements? Plus, 'Alien: Earth,' 'Platonic,' 'Eyes of Wakanda,' and more
This weeks's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I dip a fruit pie into some tuna fish...
They can never be 'Royal'
I used to make fun of my buddy Brian Grubb for how crazy he gets about the Jardiance commercials. That was before I developed my own advertisement bête noire, the celebrity-laden spots for the mobile game Royal Kingdom. It was one thing when I saw one of the ones with Jimmy Fallon. Fallon will do just about anything. But then they did a mini-Friends reunion with Courteney Cox and Lisa Kudrow, a Big Bang Theory reunion with Kaley Cuoco and Johnny Galecki, and ones with Shakira, Kevin Hart, and LeBron freaking James.
How is this happening?
There are two separate questions here: 1)Why are these mega-famous people agreeing to do ads for what seems like a pretty lame product, and 2)How are the owners of Royal Kingdom able to afford them? The latter question is the easier one to answer, because it's something I tell members of my family all the time when they're confused about a seemingly illogical thing in show business: "When you don't know why this is happening, the answer is almost always 'money.'" Just because Cox and Kudrow have that Friends syndication money, while LeBron has earned more than $1 billion dollars in salary and endorsement money, doesn't mean they would object to taking more. And the days when it was considered damaging to a star's brand to do ads, and especially ads for less glamorous products, are long gone. Everything is a hustle, and everyone respects the hustle.
As for the latter, I don't understand much about business, the tech business especially, even after watching all of Silicon Valley. But I know enough to assume that the game's parent company is getting a lot of money pumped into it right now, and that somebody decided the best bang for that buck is to get a bunch of famouses to tell people that this game has no ads, and can be played offline. Which... is true of many mobile games? Will this presumably huge investment pay off? We'll know more if/when the next round of these ads land, and the celebs in it are Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul, or the cast of Work It!
On TV, everyone can hear you scream
Rolling Stone's coverage of Alien: Earth is rolling out in phases. Last week was my profile of Noah Hawley. This week brought my review of the show, which for the most part lives up to Hawley's extremely self-confident descriptions of it:
Alan Sepinwall
There are some flaws, particularly when it comes to the Xenomorph as part of an ongoing story with continuing characters. But Hawley packs the show with so many ideas — and so many other fascinating/disgusting monsters — and has such a great lead performance from Sydney Chandler, that most of it works.
Starting next week, I'll be recapping every episode for Rolling Stone, and linking to those recaps here for further discussion.
The best/worst of friends
I didn't have time to review the first season of Platonic when it debuted a couple of years ago, though I wrote about it briefly in that week's newsletter. With the second season premiering this week, I didn't want to miss my chance to praise the charming and funny Seth Rogen/Rose Byrne comedy.
Alan Sepinwall
The review evolved into something that's half about the new season — which does some smart things in evolving the dynamics ever-so-slightly to avoid getting too repetitive — and half about how the collapse of the movie comedy business allows something like this (or Rogen's The Studio) to wind up on television instead. Where dramas that clearly began life as movie scripts are often insufferably padded, this is not only a comedy, but one where one of the co-creators (Nicholas Stoller) got his start writing for another Seth Rogen show (the late, great Undeclared). Glad to have this one back, even if, like so many of these shows that take multi-year hiatuses, it took me a while to remember all the relationships and story developments from Season One, even though it's a pretty small and plot-light show.
Wakanda for now, at least
There's not a lot to say about Eyes of Wakanda, a four-episode animated Black Panther prequel anthology series that Disney+ recently dropped as a binge release. The stories in each episode are pretty straightforward, but the animation is gorgeous and the action is fantastic.
Alan Sepinwall
My review gets into all of that, but also looks at the impact the shocking death of Chadwick Boseman has had on the entire MCU over the last five years. If Boseman were somehow still with us, other recent Marvel/Disney mistakes would still exist. But having a beloved character and actor to center the franchise around post-Tony Stark would have at least made things feel more cohesive than they have without him.
Does the 'King' stay the king?
Last week, I spoke with showrunner Saladin K. Patterson about the King of the Hill revival, which ages up all the characters by about a decade, and takes place in our more fractured present-day America:
Alan Sepinwall
Hulu dropped the whole season at once, which makes episode-by-episode breakdowns tough. Instead, I'll run through a few thoughts about the season, and then I'm curious how you've felt about the attempt to fit Hank and company into modern life. Spoilers ho...
- "Bobby Goes Nuts," the episode where Bobby took a women's self-defense course and learned the immortal defensive phrase, "THAT'S MY PURSE! I DON'T KNOW YOU!" is probably the funniest episode of the original series. So I appreciated that the season's most prominent callback came during the subplot about Peggy getting an MRI, where the doctor could somehow tell that once got kicked in the crotch by a 12-year-old.
- Though the premiere has a few jokes about how much the world has changed since Hank and Peggy moved to Saudi Arabia, there are only two stories that really lean into the idea of Hank no longer representing what Patterson called the "common sense middle." One is the subplot where Hank, Peggy, Dale, and Nancy visit George W. Bush's presidential library and Hank grows exasperated that everyone is so eager to believe Dale's conspiracy theories. The other is the episode where Hank and half-brother Good Hank attend a weekend seminar that turns out to be a toxic masculinity-themed hustle. Both worked very well, the latter especially, but it does feel like the writers only wanted to go so far with the changes. Patterson told me they were aiming for "cultural commentary, not political commentary." Which, given how much of politics is now cultural, and how much of culture is now political, is a tough thing to do. So the show mostly tries to sidestep it altogether, or to deal with it in smaller ways, like Hank agreeing that renaming a Girl Scout cookie to be more respectful to Samoans is a good change. But there are good gags here and there, particularly Hank having developed a love of soccer during his time overseas. (And that love in turn triggering Dale's worst conspiracy theories yet.)
- Even more than the change in the world around the Hills, I was curious how the series would work with an adult Bobby, since so much of the original show was driven by father/son conflict, Hank struggling to understand Bobby, Bobby trying to work around his dad's limitations, etc. Because Bobby's not only grown up, but is a responsible grown-up, there's not as much overall conflict between them, though the beer brewing and charcoal stories were both fun. Mostly, though, the Hill men wound up in separate stories, with Bobby getting his own supporting cast, mixing in returning characters like Connie, Joseph, and Chane, with newer ones like Emilio. Even though he's older and smarter and harder-working, though, he still feels like Bobby.
- I wish we could have gotten more of Brian hanging out in the alley with the guys, but it sounds like the great Keith David is unsurprisingly a busy man. Also, I like the idea of Bill having this other group of friends at a Black barbershop, though that subplot being primarily about his unrequited love for Peggy felt like it didn't take enough advantage of the setting. If there's another season, hopefully we'll spend more time there.
- Much as I enjoyed the "Bobby Goes Nuts" reference, the season's single funniest bit of dialogue comes very early on, when Hank discovers that Bill has become a shut-in, and Bill says, "I finished Netflix, Hank! Did you know when you get to the end of Netflix, you get something called 'a wellness check'?"
Oh, brother
While I'm too much of a wimp to go see Alison Brie and Dave Franco's body horror movie Together, I'm pleased that the reviews are so strong, and that the box office returns so far are decent. Brie, like most of her co-stars from Community and/or Mad Men, should be a much bigger star by this point, and I've always liked Franco. But seeing their names pop up so often on my social media feeds reminded me of one of the all-time weirdest bits of TV cross-promotion. Back in 2009, James Franco was doing one of his obnoxious performance art stunts where he began playing a recurring role on the daytime soap opera General Hospital. I watched his first episode out of morbid curiosity, and was struck by the use of an onscreen bug promoting Dave Franco's new role on the final season of Scrubs (or, if you prefer, the only season of Scrubs Med). That one ABC show was promoting another wasn't the weird part. It was that the promo specifically used the phrase "James Franco's brother Dave Franco," as if that alone would get people to tune in. And even though Dave's acting career is thriving far more these days, and even though he doesn't have any of the baggage of James, it's hard some days to shake the phrase "James Franco's brother Dave Franco."
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recaplet: "Through the Lens of Time"
"Through the Lens of Time" is the fifth episode of this Strange New Worlds season, and the last one I got to see before I wrote my essay on the current state of Star Trek. In some ways, it was the most frustrating of the five. It's the exact kind of story I've been hoping the series would do more of — your standard Adventure of the Week where the Enterprise comes to a planet to learn more about its culture, the crew runs into danger, and problems are solved. It's just not a particularly interesting version of that.
Alan Sepinwall
"Through the Lens of Time" makes a few missteps. The first is placing so much emotional weight on M'Benga's relationship with Ensign Gamble. Gamble appeared briefly a few times earlier in the season, but was so non-descript that I'm not sure his name was ever uttered until midway through this one. Babs Olusanmokun is so good that he almost is able to make the mentor/protege dynamic feel real despite the complete lack of a foundation. But this one desperately needed more Gamble screen time to make any of this feel like it mattered. Instead, it's mostly just setup for whatever's coming in the back half of the season, tied to the vision Spock and Batel shared in last week's episode.
The away team A-plot, meanwhile, didn't do much with the idea of splitting up the group into pairs, and having to solve the puzzle that would bring them back together. Just felt like going through the motions, to set up the point where Chapel has to choose between Spock's idea and her boyfriend's, and of course chooses Spock's. (I assume Spock knows Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade by heart, and thus knows about the leap from the lion's head.) Which, again, gets back to my recent complaint that the season is now prioritizing romance plots above all else.
This is the kind of story that on paper the show should be doing way more of. But it definitely plays like the creative team is much less excited about doing them than the stunt episodes.
I recently got screeners of the rest of the season and will be diving into them soon. Hopefully, there's an upswing coming?
That's it for this week! What did everybody else think?
