Sweet and 'Lowdown'
Ethan Hawke and the creator of 'Reservation Dogs' reunite for one of the year's best new shows, 'The Paper' kind of spins off 'The Office,' 'Alien: Earth' embraces its roots, and more
This week's What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I drink from your thermos...
Bonus, baby!
Just a reminder that, while the free Friday newsletter will continue, the new paid bonus tier newsletter — What Else Is Alan Watching? — launches this Tuesday, with the behind-the-scenes story of the never-released second season of my podcast Too Long; Didn't Watch. As a reminder, there will be at least one new additional newsletter a week for paid subscribers, though the publication day may vary depending on what day notable series or episodes are premiering that week. I have lots of fun stuff planned for this, plus later this month, I'll be launching a paid subscriber-exclusive Discord, where y'all can chat with me and/or each other about all things TV. Subscribe now!
You can't handle the truthstorian!
Several notable new TV series are having their world premieres this week at the Toronto International Film Festival, which means review embargoes for them are lifting much earlier than usual. We're not chasing all of these embargoes, so you'll have to wait til closer to premiere for my thoughts on Black Rabbit and some others. But we didn't want to wait to get the word out on FX's The Lowdown, starring Ethan Hawke as a reporter in Tulsa trying to expose a political conspiracy — and thoroughly annoying both his friends and enemies along the way. My review:
Alan Sepinwall
The series was created by Sterlin Harjo, making it a reunion from the penultimate episode of Harjo's Reservation Dogs. (Just as a reminder, Rez Dogs was one of the very best shows of the last decade, and all its episodes are streaming on Hulu.) It works as a mystery, a wry comedy, and a character study of a man who's as charming as he is exasperating. There are echoes of Terriers, The Big Lebowski, and lots of Seventies mystery books and movies in there. It's the best use in quite some time of Hawke's capacity to play a dirtbag you can't help but like, despite ample reason not to.
Expect me to be writing about this one a lot over the course of its first season (of hopefully many). Unless the season completely spins out at the end, this is a strong contender for my best of 2025 list.
Limitless Paper for an Office-less world?
Alan Sepinwall
This week's big premiere is The Paper, a quasi-spinoff of The Office where the documentary crew that filmed Michael and the gang from Scranton begin following the staff of a struggling Toledo newspaper, where Oscar works as an accountant. (The newspaper is owned by the same paper products company that acquired Dunder Mifflin.) Mostly, it's a new cast, headed by Domhnall Gleeson and White Lotus Season Two co-star Sabrina Impacciatore. The show, co-created by American Office creator Greg Daniels, pretty transparently mixes and matches character types from the original, so that Gleeson is simultaneously the Jim and the Michael — or maybe the Andy? — and Impacciatore is somehow also the Michael? I found it likable in spots, especially as it went along, but Impacciatore's over-the-top character just irritated me, outside of a brief window at mid-season where the show attempts the same kind of character pivot The Office did with Michael in Season Two.
Peacock already ordered a second season, so Daniels will in theory get to course correct the same he did with Office and Parks and Rec. But the fact that he did course correct here and then abandoned it makes me less optimistic.
I scream, you scream?
Alan Sepinwall
This week's Alien: Earth should play as an act of complete, self-destructive hubris with all of the ways it invites comparison to Ridley Scott's original Alien film, down to a title, "In Space, No One Can...," that evokes the 1979 marketing campaign for the movie. Somehow, it works, in large part by using the familiar structure to give us a stronger sense of who Morrow was before the crash, and what's motivating him in his campaign against Boy Kavalier and the rest of Prodigy.
(Also, I'm told that on the official show podcast, Noah Hawley said that the eyeball monster — aka Mel from The Pitt's biggest competition for TV Character Of The Year — was trying to distract Chibuzo, not help her, during the scene I wrote about in the recap. Oh, well. Win some, lose some.)
It's not easy being Graham Greene
The great Graham Greene died earlier this week. He was 73. He worked essentially non-stop from the time of his Oscar-nominated supporting performance in Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves, and had arguably the most successful film career ever of any Indigenous North American actor. (It's either him or fellow Dances alum Wes Studi.) But holding that unofficial title was a double-edged sword. A lot of the time, Greene was asked less to play a character than to lend some dignity and/or credibility to a project that hadn't put in the proper work in its portrait of Native people and issues.
Back in 2001, Norman Lear produced a live special where a group of big movie stars read different parts of the Declaration of Independence. Greene was brought in to recite the distasteful section on "the merciless Indian savage." Later that year, I ran into him at a press tour event, and he joked that he was always being asked to do jobs like that — "And besides, I'm Canadian."
But the thing was, Graham could make something even out of nothing parts. When given even a sliver of daylight towards something more interesting — like playing one of John McClane's fellow NYPD detectives in Die Hard with a Vengeance — he popped off the screen. And when handed real material, look out. Like a lot of non-white actors who get trapped playing noble authority figure types, Greene was much funnier than he was often allowed to be, and some of his best work involved him gleefully puncturing the wise Native elder cliches he was so often hired to play. See his supporting turn in Maverick, or, in his incredible performance in the final season of Reservation Dogs as Maximus, a man who was mentally ill, touched by alien visitors, or possibly both.
I was about to refer to that as one of his final roles, but, between things that have been released and things that already finished filming, he has close to 20 post-Rez Dogs credits. The guy worked constantly. He was great. And, again, all of Rez Dogs is streaming on Hulu.
This... is... streaming Jeopardy!
Alan Sepinwall
My Jeopardy! behind-the-scenes story from earlier this year mentioned that the show would finally come to first-run streaming in the fall. Well, fall is here, as are the details. In America, Peacock and Hulu will share streaming rights to the five most recent episodes that have appeared on over-the-air TV. In addition, both streamers will have a curated collection of past episodes, including Ken Jennings' entire run as champ. (Crave will the the dedicated Canadian streamer.) I still miss the 24/7 Jeopardy! channel on Pluto, but even that cycled through only so many episodes, and this will nicely scratch that itch again. Mostly, I just wanted an excuse to link to that feature again, which was so much fun to report and write.
This is how I remind you
Because I imagine a lot of you were focused on things other than TV reviews over the last few weeks, I wanted to remind you about a few new shows I recently covered. First up is HBO's Task, from the creator of Mare of Easttown, which I wrote about last week to chase the embargo, but which doesn't debut until this Sunday night:
Alan Sepinwall
Then there's the charming and inventive Netflix animated comedy Long Story Short, from the BoJack Horseman team, which has been available since late August, and which I highly recommend:
Alan Sepinwall
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recaplet: "Terrarium"
"Terrarium" was a substantial step up from "Four-and-a-Half Vulcans," because almost anything short of "Spock's Brain" from the original series or "Threshold" from Star Trek: Voyager would have been. But even separated from the context of what's mostly been a mess of a third season, "Terrarium" was a solid episode, with an interesting core idea, a good showcase for a relatively underserved character, and a sharper focus than SNW often has when it's basically remaking a Sixties episode.
Because this was, more or less, the Strange New Worlds take on "Arena," the classic episode where Jim Kirk and the captain of a Gorn ship are forced to do battle on a desolate planet by a member of a mysterious alien race called the Metrons. "Arena" was all about action, even if it ends with Kirk deciding to show mercy towards the Gorn. This is a more thoughtful tale, where Ortegas has to work through her PTSD by realizing that not all Gorns are the kind of savage, seemingly mindless monsters like the one that traumatized her.
(That said, it also feels like the episode is having to course correct for just how much the show has presented the Gorn as nearly mindless savages. They have to be intelligent to have built all the tech we see them using, but until now, they've been largely treated as indistinguishable from the Alien Xenomorphs.)
So there's a lot of "Arena," mixed in with bits of The Martian, Enemy Mine, and other sci-fi survival stories that are either about making it through an ordeal solo, or with the help of a former enemy. Familiar, basic stuff, but the simplicity of it gives the episode a focus we haven't gotten a lot of this season. It's the sort of largely standalone character spotlight episode that Eighties and Nineties Trek did all the time, in part because there were so many episodes that had to be made each year. Even with its shorter seasons, Strange New Worlds has managed to do this for pretty much the rest of the cast, other than Melissa Navia, and she really gets to shine. We know Ortegas as the cocky pilot who can make a starship go any way she wants it to. Robbed of a working ship, supplies, and crewmates, she has to find a way to endure on her own, and then with help from an unlikely friend. So it's not only putting Ortegas front and center, but in a context where she can't do what she does best. And she does okay, anyway.
The gradual evolution of her friendship with the Gorn plays out effectively, particularly once they cobble together a translator that allows the Gorn to say "agree" and "disagree." You can see the tragic ending coming from a few light years away, as it's the inverse of "Arena" — instead of one combatant allowing another to live, this one has one friend die thanks to the well-meaning but ill-informed actions of other friends. But it hits hard, nonetheless.
It's not an all-time episode, by any means, particularly with the ending having to work around Starfleet encountering the Metrons for what seems like the first time in "Arena." But the Vulcan episode set the bar so low that even basic competence feels like a huge triumph.
[Note: while I'm doing future recaplets over in the bonus tier, my finale discussion will be here next Friday, sine the rest of the season's coverage has been that way.]
That's it for this week! What did everybody else think?
