Y tu drama tambien

Alfonso Cuarón, Gael Garciá Bernal, and Diego Luna have new shows. Plus, 'Bad Monkey' and 'Slow Horses' finale thoughts, 'Saturday Night Live' at 50, an alternate 'Better Call Saul' history, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as my texts have a lot of exclamation points and an eggplant emoji…

Choose your own adventure

This week has turned into an unexpected Y Tu Mamá También reunion of sorts, with three of the four key figures from the 2001 Mexican film classic debuting new streaming shows this week. One premiered on Apple today: Disclaimer, written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, adapting a Renée Knight book with a delicious premise: what if someone sent you a novel where you were not only a main character, but the villain? It stars Cate Blanchett, Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, and I really liked it. Lots of the expected Cuarón visual flair, Kline and Blanchett both essentially giving multiple performances while sticking to their respective roles, intriguing twists, etc. And at 7 episodes, it doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Boxing buddies

Meanwhile, two of Cuarón’s three Y Tu Mama stars, Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna, act onscreen together for the first time in a dozen years with Hulu’s new Spanish-language miniseries La Máquina, in which Bernal plays an aging boxer and Luna his longtime manager. In terms of story and tone, this one is wildly all over the map, yet individual pieces of it work very well, and whenever the two old friends share a scene, it feels like magic. You can read much more about it in my review.

Monkey mayhem

The Bad Monkey finale dropped earlier this week, and as I promised back in August, we should talk more about it, with random thoughts from across the season, and especially in the finale. Spoiler warnings of course apply.

• As I said in my review of the show, there simply wasn’t enough story to fill up 10 episodes. That said, the finale offers ample closure, and sticks with the general moral arc of Carl Hiaasen’s fictional universe, where bad guys like Eve and Nick get their painful comeuppance, good guys like Yancy and Rosa live to fight another day, and characters who occupy more of a gray area get mixed results. (The Dragon Queen dies, but at least reclaims her soul first, while Bonnie is enjoying fugitive life.)

• One opinion from that review that’s shifted the more I’ve thought about things: the sea captain’s narration is overdone. Some of it’s necessary just to try to make sense of the sprawling plot, but I ultimately think less would have been more. It’s clear model seems to be Sam Elliott’s cowboy in The Big Lebowski, and his narration is in much less of that movie than you might remember.

• Everyone in the cast is used really well, and none of it works if Bill Lawrence and company don’t get such a pure and uncut distillation of Vince Vaughn’s whole thing. That said, the two performances I feel like I’m going to remember most out of this are Meredith Hagner as Eve and Jodie Turner-Smith as the Dragon Queen.

• Despite “monkey” being in the title, Driggs seemed largely besides the point of things, no?

• As a Tom Petty fan, hard to pick a favorite use of one of his songs (original or cover) in this, but I did enjoy them playing “Won’t Back Down” at the moment when Yancy realizes that he has to, in fact, back down from this case in order to survive. Yes, it’s on the nose, but so is a lot of this show.

• Though the show adapts the entire book, the finale ends with Rogelio bringing another potential mystery to his ex-partner, suggesting the possibility of future Andrew Yancy adventures. There’s another Yancy book, Razor Girl, though I have no idea if any of the parties involved here have the rights to that. But this season was so much fun that I’d be on board with everyone trying another season, whether it’s based on Hiaasen’s work or simply inspired by the tone of it.

More from the big Apple

Bad Monkey was only one of three notable Apple shows with a finale this week, with Slow Horses and Pachinko wrapping up their fourth and second seasons, respectively. Maybe I’ll save more detailed Pachinko thoughts, beyond what I wrote earlier this season, for another week (though feel free to weigh in in the comments), but I’ve got a couple of spoiler-y Slow Horses thoughts I could only vaguely include in my column from before the season premiere:

• First, RIP to Marcus Longridge, whose death was one of those periodically necessary reminders that, for how silly so much of Slow Horses can be, there are serious life and death stakes at work. He and Shirley made a good duo the last couple of seasons. And since the show is now beyond the books that I’ve read, I have no idea who the newbies will be, how the dynamics will work, etc., but I trust the show to do it right.

• Prior to ensuring Marcus’ killer would never harm anyone else, new guy J.K. Coe didn’t have a lot to do this year, around more for weird atmosphere, courtesy of actor Tom Brooke’s arresting screen presence. Hopefully, there’s more of him soon.

• Even beyond Marcus’s death, this felt like a slightly darker season than previous ones. Perhaps it’s because the stakes were more direct and personal for River and his grandfather, including the late season revelation that Hugo Weaving’s character was River’s long-lost dad. Or perhaps it’s simply that the increased emphasis on River left Jackson Lamb a bit more on the sidelines than usual, and Jackson is the more overtly comedic character. As a change-of-pace, I felt it worked, but I could use more flatulence whenever next season rolls around.

I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverines

I haven’t yet seen Jason Reitman’s new film Saturday Night, about the frantic lead-up to the very first episode of what would eventually be known as Saturday Night Live. I do, however, know the history of the sketch comedy series itself very, very well. So I wrote an essay about the anarchic spirit of that messy but revolutionary first season, where nobody quite knew what the show was, ideas like the Muppets and Albert Brooks’ short films were tried and discarded, and the lack of effort Chevy Chase put into resembling President Ford became a joke in and of itself. That first season is rough in a whole lot of ways, but it also did such an effective job of branding SNL as an outlaw comedy outpost that it somehow still feels like a crucial pop cultural bellwether 50 years later — practically twice as long as the medium of television was when John Belushi and Michael O’Donoghue sat onstage together at the start of that very first episode.

Odds and/or ends

• I fear I’ve been remiss in mentioning recently that my Better Call Saul book, Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul, will be out in February, and is available for preorder now, via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop, and more. Fortunately, Saul co-creator Peter Gould — subject of a new and wide-ranging interview in the aforementioned book — put the show back in the news recently, sort of, by finding an early draft of his script for “Granite State,” the penultimate episode of Breaking Bad. In the final version, Saul speculates to Walt that he’ll probably be managing a Cinnabon in Omaha once Ed spirits him out of Albuquerque. In the original draft, though, it was a Hot Topic — a plan that was nixed when someone realized that Hot Topic sold Breaking Bad merchandise, and everyone worried it would “look like a cheap promo.” "I’m relieved on this front, and not just because Cinnabon proved so crucial to one of the final Gene Takovic episodes — which I write about at length in that book that I really hope people consider preordering.

• Finally, it occurs to me that, because some of the reviews I link to here are for shows that have yet to debut, it’s not always conducive to discussion in the comments. So I’ll try from time to time to remind you of things that are out, just so you have an obvious opportunity to weigh in. Let’s start out this small experiment with The Franchise. You know I didn’t care much for it, but maybe you did? If so, this is your moment! Which leads us to my exit line…

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?