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More 'Party Down' talk, the best 'Poker Face' yet, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as there's a horse loose on the premises...

What’s Alan writing?

A slightly lighter online load this week due to Rolling Stone magazine obligations, plus a ton of things debuting next week that I needed to get ahead on, but there’s still some notable stuff:

• I got so much good stuff from the interviews for my return of Party Down feature that, as with Poker Face in January, we decided to publish two bonus Q&As. The first of these is Paul Rudd, who co-created the show and was going to play Henry, until his film career grew so busy that he was no longer able to. Did I insist on that being one of the breakouts just so the world could know his Neil Diamond story? Well, I didn’t not choose that for the Neil Diamond story.

• The second Party Down Q&A comes from the man who actually plays Henry, Adam Scott. We got into a lot, particularly the truth about what happened when he was offered the Parks and Rec job while Party Down was still technically in limbo. Adam’s a smart guy whom it’s always interesting to interview.

• And as a reminder, the new season debuts tonight on Starz. I didn’t write a separate review, but I really enjoyed these new episodes. (I’ve seen five of the six.) As discussed in the feature, this is a rare TV revival where it doesn’t feel off, or too sad, to be revisiting these characters many years later, because the sadness is kind of the point of the whole show. The new additions fit in well, the returning vets all still know what makes their characters funny, and there are various amusing complications every week. So glad it’s back.

• Finally, we’ve got my latest The Last of Us recap, in which I sing the praises of Pedro Pascal. It’s amazing how easily the show can shift from the carnage of the Kansas City two-parter to one as relatively quiet and peaceful as “Kin.” Some of that owes to the creators commitment to the characters first and foremost over the mushroom zombies. But a lot of it comes from just how great Pascal and Bella Ramsey are.

What else is Alan watching?

I’ve been wary of using this newsletter to comment on shows I haven’t reviewed for Rolling Stone, in large part because that usually means I only watched an episode or two, and it doesn’t seem entirely fair to weigh in on a small sample size. But then again, this is how the job used to work for decades and decades, including most of the first 10 years of my career. And occasionally (as happened a few months back with Netflix’s The Recruit), I watch the whole season and then other things get in the way of a full review. I’ve got shows that fit both those circumstances this week, so let’s hit them very quickly:

• First up, we’ve got The Consultant, which premieres today on Amazon Prime Video. Christoph Waltz plays the title character, a strange and menacing man who steps in to run a video game company after its CEO is murdered. I watched the first three episodes before tapping out. It’s created by Tony Basgallop, the man responsible for Apple’s Servant. Like that show (at least, in the one season I watched), there’s a lot of creepy atmosphere and not much else, other than Waltz doing his usual thing. If you enjoy that thing a whole lot, perhaps it’s worth your time. I just didn’t care about anything other than that performance.

• Also today, Apple’s got Liaison, which I watched one episode of. It’s an international show, primarily set in England and France, starring Eva Green and Vincent Cassel. It feels like there have been at least a half dozen shows like this over the last several years: globe-trotting thrillers trying to get by on their scope and on a couple of name actors as the leads, but that seem like B-movie scripts stretched out to TV length because nobody makes these kinds of films anymore. I love Green, who was absolutely incredible on Penny Dreadful, but very little grabbed me here, including the twist at the end of the first episode, so I moved on.

• Finally, I not only didn’t get a chance to review Apple’s Hello, Tomorrow last week, but I also didn’t mention it in last week’s newsletter. The elevator pitch: it’s set in a “retro future” world that seems like the 1950s, but where people live on the moon, cars can fly, robots tend bar and deliver packages, etc. Billy Crudup plays a smooth-talking, Don Draper-esque pitchman for affordable lunar timeshares, though the deal isn’t quite what he claims. On the one hand, it is an absolute triumph of production design and world-building. On the other, it’s a show about the lies we tell ourselves and others, but it gets so deep into that theme that it’s impossible to tell what’s really motivating any of the characters, and none of them feels especially human. Cool to look at, but ultimately hollow.

Poker Face Recaplet: “The Orpheus Syndrome”

I’ve been excited to see “The Orpheus Syndrome” ever since I heard about it, for two reasons: 1)Nick Nolte and Cherry Jones are an especially high class of guest star, even for a show like this; and 2)Natasha Lyonne directed it, and as Rian Johnson has said, directing is even more of her passion than acting, and her work directing Russian Doll was really special.

The episode not only lived up to my hopes, but exceeded them. It’s Poker Face doing Hitchcock, down to composer Nathan Johnson doing his damndest to evoke Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score (as well as various Universal TV and film scores of the 1960s and early 1970s). It looks great, it sounds great, and Charlie’s friendship with ruined special effects wizard Arthur felt even deeper than the other bonds she’s forged over the course of this season.(*)

(*) And it’s a nice touch that she discusses Natalie’s murder with him. It’s a hard balance to keep the show — which is going to be submitted to the Emmys as a comedy — light and fun, yet also make us invested in the idea that Charlie cares about these victims. So it would ring false if she’d completely moved past the loss of her best friend.  

The downside of spending so much time on Charlie and Arthur’s friendship, I suppose, is that it leaves only about 15 minutes for her to actually investigate Cherry Jones’ Laura. Even in one of the show’s longer episodes, that feels a bit skimpy. But the episode manages to pack a lot into those 15 minutes, from Laura inadvertently phrasing things for a while that will not trigger Charlie’s superpower, to the belated appearance of the great Luis Guzman as the film archivist, to Charlie taking the Trojan horse concept quite literally. I don’t know that the damning behind-the-scenes film clip would so instantly ruin Laura, unless the incident is so infamous that everyone in Hollywood knows every single detail about it. But the replica heads and Cherry Jones’ performance combine to make it believable that Laura would completely lose it at this point, and deliberately hurtle to her death to avoid dealing with the emotional and criminal guilt of what she’s done.

Absolutely crackerjack entertainment, that was.

That’s it for this week! Don’t forget to subscribe, share, and all the things people running newsletters ask you to do.