A late 'Welcome to Wrexham' welcome

Plus, 'I Saw the TV Glow,' ATX, good 'Homicide' news, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I hire Pasek and Paul to write a song explaining how to pronounce my name…

Bring on the Deadpool, and Rob McElhenney

The best thing I did for myself over the past week was to binge all three seasons of Welcome to Wrexham, the wonderful FX docu-series about Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds’ purchase of a down-trodden Welsh football club. But it was also the worst thing I did to myself, because I spent a good chunk of the binge wondering why in the hell it took me this long to watch something so clearly micro-targeted to me.

As you might imagine, I had a whole lot of thoughts on the experience, including an acknowledgment of some of the limitations the third season created for itself with a much shorter episode total. In that way, I was probably better off seeing all three seasons at once, since I didn’t need these eight episodes to satisfy my entire Wrexham appetite for the year. I’m hopeful the fourth season will go back to something resembling the length of the first two years, where there was more room for the show to stretch out and focus on the community as much as the team, which resulted in amazing episodes like the one about Super Paul Mullin and Wrexham superfan Millie. (Excuse me, the room just got very dusty as I typed that previous sentence.) Hell of a show. Better late than never!

I saw I Saw the TV Glow

I’d been excited about Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow ever since I heard the early buzz from Sundance. While horror isn’t usually my tempo, a tale of two suburban Nineties kids who grow obsessed with a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-esque TV drama(*) felt made almost as specifically for me as Welcome to Wrexham.

(*) And, yes, I know that show-within-the-movie The Pink Opaque is also modeled on Nineties Nickelodeon series like Are You Afraid of the Dark?, but since I was a bit too old for them, I watched the whole film through a Buffy lens.

It more than lived up to the hype when I finally got to stream it this week. Rolling Stone movie critic David Fear did a great job of conveying how well Schoenbrun captures the experience of having a pop culture obsession at an impressionable age, and our colleague Brenna Erlich wrote an outstanding feature on Schoenbrun and the film. I highly recommend reading both of those, as well as my great friend Emily St. James’ essay on it for Vulture. (Save the latter two til after you’ve watched.)

Emily writes beautifully about how the Buffy pastiche is really a cover for Schoenbrun to tell a story about being trans. This actually adds another layer to the whole thing, since the genius of Buffy came from how it used familiar horror tropes as metaphors for various rites and traumas of adolescence. Here, Schoenbrun is using Buffy itself as the trope, and to devastating effect.

It’s a movie that’s going to stick with me for quite some time, I suspect.

Fargo, Phil, and a very fun Fest

As promised, videos from the 13th annual ATX TV Festival have begun appearing on the ATX YouTube channel. They’ve already posted two of the ones I was involved in. First up, here’s me and Noah Hawley talking about Fargo Season Five:

And here’s me with Phil Rosenthal, his brother Richard, and his children Lily and Ben, to discuss how Somebody Feed Phil has become a family business:

Links to my other two panels as they become available. If you only have time to watch a few highlights, over at Rolling Stone I posted a clip of Hawley discussing the final scene of this Fargo season, plus one of Somebody Feed Phil somehow turning into Succession.

Ho-ho-ho-Homicide?

Sometimes, good things can still happen here in the world of TV! Earlier this week, David Simon tweeted that the music rights to the soundtrack for Homicide: Life on the Street had been untangled, paving the way for it to finally wind up on a streamer. (My guess is Peacock.) I used this very welcome development as an excuse to preach the Gospel of Frank Pembleton, talk about its long run as The Best Show You Can’t Stream, and speculate on what the new titleholder would be. You can see what I picked in the article, but the floor is open to your own suggestions.

Odds and/or ends

• The Doctor Who finale drops tonight, so I’ll have some thoughts on the season in next week’s newsletter. But as with Welcome to Wrexham, eight episodes proved to be much too short for a season of Doctor Who, especially since two of them (“73 Yards” and “Dot and Bubble”) were reportedly filmed while Ncuti Gatwa was wrapping up his time on Sex Education, and thus both episodes are relatively light on the Doctor himself. While each Do ctor Who season has some serialization, it’s the Monster of the Week episodes — and the way we see the relationship between the Doctor and their companions evolve — that makes it all work. As I said a while back about Deep Space Nine, more episodes usually means more of a variance in quality, but the sheer time spent with the characters is ultimately more important than consistency. I’d have preferred a lot more of getting to know the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby than was offered this year, but I suspect the 13-episode seasons we got with Eccleston, Tenant, and Matt Smith just aren’t coming back.

• Among the reasons I made time for a Wrexham binge is that I found a lot of the mid-late June premieres uninspiring. I watched the first episode of Orphan Black: Echoes and felt no reason to keep going, especially when other critics who had watched more seemed even less enthused. Admittedly, I never made it to the end of the original show’s run, because the convoluted nature of the mythology eventually overwhelmed my ability to enjoy the genius of Tatiana Maslany.

• My oft-mentioned ER binge has entered the final season, which means I need to start figuring out what show will next accompany my daily treadmill time. Part of me is inclined to just loop back to the beginning, since this particular binge began late in the John Carter years, with the seasons I either watched only part of, or none of, in the original run. But I already binged most of the earlier seasons when ER first came to streaming back in 2018, so maybe it’s time for something different. Ideally for me, the treadmill show would 1)Be something I know at least a bit, even if I haven’t seen all of it, so I’m not lost if I’m not always 100% focused on it while keeping up my pace; 2)Be something with some kind of action or other high adrenaline component, which again helps keep me moving (otherwise, I’d just move my Halt and Catch Fire rewatch over to that window); 3)Have lots of episodes, so it’s easy for me to stick with it for a while before I have to make this decision all over again. I’m at least a little tempted to do Grey’s Anatomy, which I stopped watching regularly sometime before its first decade was over. Its medical stuff isn’t quite as slam-bang as ER, but I know enough about it to be able to follow even once most of the original crew is gone, and it certainly qualifies in the “lots of episodes” department. But the floor is now open for suggestions. It has to be streaming, obviously; if I can’t easily watch it on my phone, I can’t do it in this context. I don’t have to stick to hospital dramas, but what if Chicago Med has secretly been awesome (or even just at the level of ER’s John Stamos period) all these years?

• Finally, I’ll be a guest on the Blank Check podcast this weekend to talk about Midnight Run, a film you may have heard I have some affection for. In addition to an excuse to ask why someone’s not popular with the Chicago Police Department, I wound up dropping a bit of news during the recording, though I’ll have more about that in a newsletter next week. I believe this is what people in show business refer to as a tease?

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