Stay 'Golden Bachelor,' 'Sunny' boys
'Always Sunny' caps a fantastic season, plus 'Task,' the TCA Awards, 'Andor,' 'Alien: Earth,' and more
This week's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as Doug is her nickname...
SepinPayWall?
I've settled on What Else Is Alan Watching? as the name for the paid tier, which is going to launch on Tuesday, September 9, so it doesn't get caught up in everyone's recovery from Labor Day debauchery. As a reminder, there will be a bonus newsletter every week for paid subscribers, and later that month I'll also be launching a Discord where members of that tier can chat with me and each other about whatever TV they're into. This free Friday newsletter isn't going away, but there's going to be more material, and more variety, in the Tuesday version. Sign up now!
They can't keep getting away with this!!!
Alan Sepinwall
Earlier this year, when I wrote my tribute to how It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has somehow stayed funny — and in some ways gotten funnier — over an astonishing 20-year lifespan, I hadn't yet seen any of the episodes of the show's new season. If I had, the superlatives in that column would have been even grander, because this was the best concentrated stretch of Sunny episodes in quite some time.
Season 17 was bookended by a premiere that was structured as an episode of Abbott Elementary, and a finale that was meant to be an installment of The Golden Bachelor. I love Abbott and have zero interest in any Bachelor-related show, yet these were equally good, because they felt unmistakably like Sunny, with the other formats being filtered through the Gang's warped sensibilities. (This extended to Janine swearing in the Abbott episode.)
And the thing is, I'm not sure I'd put either of those in my top 3 for this season! "Mac and Dennis Become EMTs" was so full of lunacy, and so intricately plotted, that it felt like it could have been written during the show's first decade, and "The Gang Goes to a Dog Track" and "The Gang Gets Ready for Prime Time" weren't too far behind in how extreme they got and how perfectly each joke and story beat built on one another.
There have been recent seasons that felt a bit like latter-era Simpsons, with a handful of great episodes apiece, plus a bunch of others that are good but not up to the standards of the peak years. This one was pretty much all bangers, in a way the show has no business doing after so much time. Amazing.
Does Task master?
Alan Sepinwall
We did some embargo-chasing with Task, the high-profile new HBO miniseries that doesn't debut until next weekend. It was created by Mare of Easttown's Brad Ingelsby, so would it shock you to learn that it features both abundant Delco accents and even more abundant misery? Somehow, this one is even more dour than Mare, which I didn't think was possible. That said, I largely liked Mare by the end, and I felt the same way about Task, particularly thanks to the performances of Tom Pelphrey, Emilia Jones, and Mark Ruffalo. But my goodness does it feel like a chore at times to get there. There are some storytellers who confuse intense seriousness with profundity, when even a smattering of lightness makes the heavy moments land more effectively. Other than Martha Plimpton tearing into various unhealthy cuisines, this is largely the glummest of the glum.
Dance dance revolution
Alan Sepinwall
We're a couple of weeks into the new season of Peacemaker, and I'm curious both about how people are feeling overall so far, and how you're feeling specifically about the new opening credits dance number. The new title sequence swaps out Wig Wam's "Do You Wanna Taste It?" for Foxy Shazam's power ballad "Oh Lord," which is more sincere than its unapologetically sleazy predecessor, just as the choreography this time feels a bit less ironic. It feels appropriate for a season that so far has been more dramatic, particularly regarding the title character. But like the season itself, it's a change. To this point, I prefer Season One on both levels, but the new intro grew on me over the five episodes I've watched, and I'll reserve fully comparing the two seasons until I've gotten the rest of this one.
The happiest place on Earth (other than Tijuana)
I spent last week at Disneyland with the family, and had a smashing time. This was my third visit there, and the only multi-day trip, which meant I got to see the California Adventure park for the first time. Fun was had by all, and here are a few thoughts on the experience:
- As the picture above suggests, I went on the Guardians of the Galaxy-themed drop tower ride that once upon a time was The Twilight Zone-themed Tower of Terror. The original version is still at Walt Disney World, and I might need to go down to ride it before finishing up the manuscript for my Rod Serling biography. But having researched Tower of Terror, watched YouTube walkthroughs, and spoken to several of the people involved in creating it, I spent a lot of time on the very fun Guardians version identifying how elements of it mapped onto The Twilight Zone material from before it got remodeled.
- Much like George Costanza could never shut up about finding a good parking space, I will be insufferable for a while about the morning where we managed to go on the two Star Wars rides in Galaxy's Edge without having to wait in line for either one, even without having the special Lightning Lane passes. It was a combination of getting to the park right as it opened, and a bit of luck: Rise of the Resistance was closed when we got there, so we went on Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run first, then walked over to Rise just as it was starting back up again. Rise was definitely my favorite thing at either park, combining lots of different types of rides into one ambitious mega-ride.
- Disneyland has much better overall food options than Disney World did the last time I was there over a decade ago. Best thing I ate was probably the fried chicken bao at Docking Bay 7 in Galaxy's Edge. Best meal experience was sitting out on the water at the Lamplight at California Adventure, watching the Incredicoaster whiz by every couple of minutes.
- Avengers Campus is meant to be the California Adventure equivalent to Galaxy's Edge, but there's no comparison between the two as immersive experiences. Every corner of Galaxy's Edge reinforces the illusion that you're on a Star Wars planet, and being able to stand next to a full-sized recreation of the Millennium Falcon itself is fantastic. Avengers Campus has Marvel characters wandering around, but otherwise doesn't look or feel like anything from the MCU or from the comics. Even the area that's meant to be Dr. Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum is pretty skimpy.
- With all the walking I did each day, I have never had more appreciation for this moment from The Simpsons episode where Aunt Selma takes Bart and Lisa to Duff Gardens:
Odds and/or ends
Alan Sepinwall
- After having mixed feelings about last week's Alien: Earth, I was all-in on this week's installment, which gave us more of the eyeball monster, and finally started taking the Xenomorph material into a new and fascinating direction.
- The 2025 TCA Awards were handed out while I was away. There are some years where the Television Critics Association spreads the wealth, and others where one show dominates and wins the maximum four awards possible. This was one of the latter kind, with The Pitt as the big winner. As you know, I love The Pitt, so I have no objection in that sense. And spreading the wealth is harder than it looks for a group vote, since you can't exactly coordinate with everybody about which categories to use to honor which shows. And even with that, the group also celebrated some other great stuff like Adolescence, The Studio and Somebody Somewhere. My only real objection was giving Kathy Bates the Career Achievement Award, when her resume as a TV series regular consists of Harry's Law, a show that critics disliked; multiple Ryan Murphy shows, but primarily several seasons of American Horror Story; and Matlock, which is good but feels like it inspired a wave of recency bias in a category that the membership has generally struggled with over the years.
- Jerry Adler, probably best known as Hesh Rabkin from The Sopranos, died last week at the age of 96. He was one of the few significant Sopranos actors that I never crossed paths with, much less interviewed, so I unfortunately don't have any anecdotes to share. That said, he was one of the series' many late-blooming actors, since he spent the first four decades of his adult life working behind the scenes in theater before becoming a performer in his 60s. But once he got that late start, he was everywhere almost instantly, with recurring roles on Mad About You, Sopranos, The Good Wife, and more. A guy who showed up and brought an instant sense of verisimilitude to whatever show was lucky enough to have him.
Odds Andor doesn't end?
I'm in the middle of an Andor rewatch with a member of the family who had never seen it. You might recall that I was an agnostic at best when the series debuted in 2022, before being converted to the cause by the end of the first season. On this rewatch, I still found the first arc pretty sluggish, in part because it's so Cassian-centric and he remains one of the show's less interesting characters. But as soon as we got to the heist arc, I was locked in. I've particularly enjoyed watching scenes with characters like Kleya, whom I didn't pay much attention to the first time through that season, and who later became favorites in Season Two.
One thing that's stuck out so far is how few non-human characters there are. Some of this is budgetary, but a lot of it feels like Tony Gilroy didn't want people to be distracted from his material about the rise of fascism and revolutions. The allegory is clearer if no major characters are buried under makeup, or CGI-generated.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recaplet: "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans"
I'll be quick on this one: "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans" was not only the low point of Strange New Worlds Season Three, but possibly of the whole series to date. It was way too broad, particularly in Anson Mount's performance. And it felt way too rushed in setting up the idea that Pike, Uhura, La'an, and Chapel were so overwhelmed by their new Vulcan DNA (or Romulan, in La'an's case) that they essentially became different people. And then it largely skipped over the process of turning them back to normal. Yes, the great majority of non-series regular Trek Vulcans are canonically arrogant and lacking in social skills, but this felt wildly over-the-top. And, again, when there are only 10 episodes a season, it becomes more glaring when too many of those episodes are leaning in similar directions. We didn't need two different Vulcan comedy stories this year. Patton Oswalt's scenes as Una's horny, human-loving ex were fun, but most of the rest was eye-rolling.
That's it for this week! What did everybody else think?
