To safely go where everyone has gone before?
The state of 'Star Trek' on TV, plus Colbert gets canceled, Emmy nominations, 'Superman' and more
This week's new What's Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I picture you in a boys choir...
Ask me anything?
First up, some housekeeping. Last week's migration to Ghost seems to have gone smoothly for most of you. Some people's emails went into their spam folders, and a few others had to resubscribe, but hopefully everyone who was on Substack has made there way over to here. (And if you're reading the web version of this and haven't gotten any of the Ghost emails, try one of the two previous options.)
We're still at least a week or two away from the launch of the new bonus paid tier. As I said last week, it will include a dedicated Discord for ongoing conversation, and at least one bonus newsletter a week, featuring a rotation of different features, including but not limited to: 1)Recaps of current shows (like the Strange New Worlds premiere discussion you'll find below); 2)Looks back at classic series and episodes; 3)More timely and/or in-depth discussion of TV news; 4)Tales from the TV criticism game, including a discussion of the lost second season of my Too Long; Didn't Watch podcast; and 5)A return of my old Ask Alan video segments, which I used to do for HitFix. For the last one, I'd like to build up a good stockpile of questions, so please either ask your question in the comments here, or email me at the newsletter's new dedicated inbox: whatsalanwatching@protonmail.com
Another late shift
Alan Sepinwall
Apologies for the slight delay in this week's edition, but news broke last night that I wrote about, and I wanted to be able to link to it today rather than waiting a week. CBS announced that the next season of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will be the last — both for Colbert as host, and for Late Show as a franchise. It's a messy situation, speaking to the ongoing attempt for Skydance Media to buy CBS, the federal government's role in that, and Colbert's criticism of the current presidential administration, and said administration's contentious history with CBS as a whole. But it also speaks to the precarious place that the late night talk show finds itself in. If the merger weren't a factor, CBS was eventually going to find a reason to shutter Late Show, just as NBC and ABC probably will with their own late night shows within the next decade. Strange times.
These are the voyages
Alan Sepinwall
We'll be discussing the Season Three premiere of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds in a bit. But I used the show's return as an excuse to take a broader view of Star Trek as a franchise at the moment. We're in a weird spot for Trek. It's been nine years and counting since the last film, the longest gap between any movies since we got Star Trek: The Motion Picture back in 1979. Strange New Worlds is the only current series, and Paramount+ has already announced that it will end after Season Five. There's only one other show officially in the pipeline right now, in part because the proposed Paramount/Skydance merger has put a lot of things on hold. And while there have been some creative successes like Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, it feels like the keepers of the streaming era of Trek are leaning way too much on familiar characters and/or time periods. Lots to talk about with that. If you're a Trekkie, how are you feeling about the health of Gene Roddenberry's creation overall?
It's an honor to not be nominated?
Alan Sepinwall
The Emmy nominations were announced on Tuesday. As has been the case for a while now, members of the TV Academy did a lot of straight party line ticket voting, nominating as many people from their favorite shows as possible. Severance alone got 26 nominations, including the great majority of the regular cast. With 23 nominations, The Studio set a record for the most nods a first-year comedy has ever gotten, passing the 20 for Ted Lasso Season One. (And yet there was no room to nominate my favorite of the season's guest stars who played themselves, Sarah Polley.) The Penguin got 24 nominations, etc.
There were some unexpected things in terms of who was nominated — including a Pitt supporting performance I was rooting for but nervous about — or in certain cases where they were nominated, and also some shows and people whose omission left me once again exasperated with the voting body. My Brilliant Friend, for instance, now ranks very highly on the list of the best shows to never get a single Emmy nomination. (This is harder to do than you'd think. The Wire, famous for being shunned by the Emmys, still got two writing noms. Ann Dowd was nominated as a guest star one year for The Leftovers. Halt and Catch Fire was nominated for its amazing main title sequence. Etc.)
So I wrote about some of the surprises and snubs that stuck out to me the most, and still didn't have room for all of them. (The entire Andor cast being ignored was a big one, for instance.)
For those of you who still care about showbiz awards, what Emmy things from Tuesday excited or annoyed you the most?
Odds and/or ends
- I usually save movie discussion for my Letterboxd account, where I already wrote about Superman. That said, it's the number one movie in America, it's the start of an attempt to relaunch DC as both a film and television property, and it features a couple of actors with TV pedigrees (Rachel Brosnahan from Mrs. Maisel, David Corenswet from a couple of Ryan Murphy's The Politician and Hollywood) in what should be roles that turn them into movie stars. (Though it doesn't always work that way, as we once saw with Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder.) So I'm curious how everyone else who went to the theaters to see it felt about this sincere, strange, overstuffed film.
- If you took a few days to get to the Poker Face season finale, you can still go read my deep-dive conversation with Rian Johnson, which covers not only this season, but Last Jedi, Looper, Johnson's work on Breaking Bad, and more.
- Also on the reminder front: I reviewed Too Much the day after its whole season dropped on Netflix last week. If anybody has watched some or all of it, what did you think?
- Also on the summer movie front, because there's interest among my family in The Naked Gun legasequel, I decided it was time for a rewatch of the original film, which one of them hadn't seen. Like I said in my Letterboxd review, it's a movie that has dated more poorly than some of the other Zucker Brothers films, but when it works, it's painfully funny. (Seeing the baseball sequence again, I regret not trying to play it in the '80s Sports Movies episode of Screen Drafts.) That said, as great as some of those gags are, none of them will top this joke from the first episode of Police Squad!, the short-lived ABC comedy that introduced the world — or, at least, the tiny portion who were watching before it got canceled after a few weeks — to Frank Drebin:
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recaplet: "Hegemony Part II" & "Wedding Bell Blues"
As I said in the larger Star Trek column, I was a bit underwhelmed by the five episodes I've seen so far of Strange New Worlds Season Three. That said, this week's two installments contains my favorite of that group, "Wedding Bell Blues." While it's become a key piece of the show's formula to do a Spock comedy episode every year, this was a very good one, with an unsurprisingly excellent guest performance by Rhys Darby as a character who was maybe meant to be a Q, and/or meant to be another take on Trelane, the villain from the classic Sixties episode "The Squire of Gothos." He wears a coat like Trelane's, and his father is voiced by none other than John DeLancie. Does it make sense within Trek continuity? Almost certainly not. Was Darby so entertaining in his bitchy, immature obsession with matchmaking that I didn't care? Of course. Am I giving the episode bonus points for the scene referencing the "It's a Good Life?" episode of Twilight Zone while I'm in the midst of writing a Rod Serling biography? Maybe?
The season premiere, wrapping up the "Hegemony" two-parter, was more uneven, but also very much in the Star Trek tradition of the conclusion to a season-ending cliffhanger usually underwhelming. Even "Best of Both Worlds Part II" is much less interesting than the first part of that story. This one actually borrows part of the "Best of Both Worlds" resolution, as the Enterprise realizes that the only way to defeat a tactically superior foe is to use a cheat code to put them all to sleep for a while.
Mostly, it's just trying to do a lot of things, and to service every regular and recurring character all at once. Some of those beats work, like Pelia realizing that Scotty works best with a deadline, or a badly-injured Ortegas once again doing her "I fly the ship" mantra. Others are less successful. Even though I enjoyed "Wedding Bell Blues," I'm feeling a bit burnt out on Spock/Chapel romantic drama in general. Ethan Peck and Jess Bush are so good together that I don't blame the creative team to writing more towards them with each passing season, but it feels like this has now overtaken the larger sociological questions that make Star Trek special. On the other hand, the Pike/Batel material in both episodes felt richer, because it now puts Christopher and Marie onto equal footing, as they're both living on borrowed time; he knows about the accident he can't prevent, and she knows her Gorn infection could come back at any time(*).
(*) By the way, Una's super blood is something the series needs to be really careful with going forward, or else we'll get one of those situations where they will constantly need to technobabble their way through explanations of why it can't solve every single medical problem. (See also how often Geordi or Data on Next Generation had to point out that the transporter can't fix everything.)
The mid-budget Alien elements of the show's take on the Gorn as r, and the blood and guts that come with that, also aren't my favorite, though that's more a matter of personal taste than a suggestion that Star Trek shouldn't be this. (The Borg parts of First Contact are basically a zombie movie in space.) But I was very glad to see them go into hibernation for a while, and to see the show move onto other ideas, and also allowing La'an to move at least a little past all the trauma the Gorn put her through.
There's some good stuff coming in the next few weeks, and also some middling stuff. And I still haven't seen the back half of the season, so I'll borrow the pice of Pike's own advice that Una quotes at him in the premiere: "Focus on hope."
That's it for this week! What did everybody else think?
