Are you feeling 'Lucky Hank'?

'Ted Lasso,' more strike fallout, 'Succession' conspiracy theories, and a tale of many headshots

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I build another India…

WGA strike, week 2

I am not a reporter, nor am I on the ground in LA or NY, so I can’t offer much insight on the strike, save that it seems as if the guilds representing the writers, the directors, and the actors seem to be much more unified than they were back in 2007-08, when the studios were able to negotiate a deal with the DGA that then forced the writers back to the table. If the three guilds — who are all concerned about some of the same issues (AI, lack of transparency about streaming ratings, residuals), but not all of them —  remain aligned, that could either force the AMPTP’s hand, or ensure this thing will drag on significantly longer than the last strike.

In terms of my job, the most notable change so far is that WGA members have stopped doing interviews to promote their shows. This makes sense as part of the ongoing dispute — doing promotion means working in partnership with the very people you are striking against — but it means I’ll have to do without showrunner post-mortems for the time being. I had several lined up as various big shows come to an end (or end of a season) this spring, and I’m assuming none of them will happen. Such is life. I support the WGA, and I’ll find other ways to cover those series as they conclude.

What’s Alan writing?

We’re in the Emmy-bait home stretch, which is making it impossible to keep up with everything. A new season of The Great is out now on Hulu. It is a show that continues to make me very happy, but I’ve only had time to watch the first episode so far. So no review. Meanwhile, here are some of the things I actually did get to write about this week:

• Brian Tyree Henry and Kate Mara star in Class of ‘09, a new timeline-hopping FBI drama that’s not necessarily bad, but is generic enough that I turned a good chunk of my review into a commentary about the ongoing confusion about shows that are made for FX while also streaming on Hulu, shows that are made by FX but are available only on Hulu, and shows made by Hulu’s own development team. This is a classic case of TV Critic Problems, but the branding confusion may become even greater now that Disney has announced plans to offer Hulu — and, thus, all of Hulu’s sub brands like FX and Onyx Collective — as a hub within a higher-priced Disney+.

• This week’s Barry was the one episode of this season that I didn’t really like. I’m generally a sucker for departure episodes, but this one was a wallow. The comp Bill Hader made (before, again, he stopped doing press) was to some of the Cinnabon Gene episodes of Better Call Saul, but those still managed to be fun and/or dramatically compelling in a way this really wasn’t. Sarah Goldberg, though, continues to kill it.

• In addition to linking to my Succession recap, I want to talk about something I’ve seen a lot on social media: the conspiracy theory that Lukas Matsson’s numbers in India are not fake, and that Matsson and his comms chief Ebba are setting a brilliant trap on the Roy family. I find this level of over-analysis frustrating. Some shows absolutely present themselves as puzzles to be solved, like Westworld. But too many viewers now seem to apply that approach to every series — trying to guess what they think is secretly happening, rather than engaging with what the show is doing(*). Succession is not a show that plays with narrative trickeration. It is a character piece that tells you exactly who all these people are and what they are doing, and allows you to see exactly how each mistake gets made by Kendall and the others. Allowing Matsson to be a master conman would fly in the face of both the storytelling approach Jesse Armstrong has used from the start, as well as everything Succession is trying to say about toxic, entitled, socially maladjusted tech bros. Matsson being unable to stop himself from alienating his comms chief feels true to the themes of the show. Ebba allowing herself to be publicly humiliated again and again for the sake of aiding Matsson’s latest grift is not.

(*) I saw this all the time with Sopranos — “We didn’t actually see Adriana get shot!” and that kind of thing — even though that was another show that played its cards face-up. In a way, Mad Men and Breaking Bad are as much to blame for this phenomenon as the actual puzzle box shows like Lost. Because Mad Men did the Dick Whitman story early on — a story, by the way, that AMC loosely suggested to Matthew Weiner, rather than something that was in his initial pitch — plus the Peggy secret pregnancy thing, fans kept assuming that every season would have similar big twists, and thus began speculating that Don was D.B. Cooper, that Megan would be murdered by the Manson Family, etc. Breaking Bad, meanwhile, played virtually everything straight, but then there was the poisoning of Brock subplot, and for the rest of that show’s run and most of Better Call Saul’s, viewers kept looking for the hidden wheels within wheels. Oh, well.

Time to get ‘Lucky’

You may recall that, in a newsletter from March, I said I begged off of reviewing Lucky Hank in part because AMC had only given critics the first two episodes, which had their moments but mostly seemed to be struggling to figure out how to incorporate the wry comic tone of Richard Russo’s book Straight Man (which I love). At the time, I said “Maybe I’ll write something longer later in the season after I’ve seen more.” Well, the season concluded a few days ago, so this qualifies as me having seen more.

I’ll admit to sometimes being unable to let go of my passion for a particular source material, like my conviction that even though the guy on Amazon’s Reacher is the right size, he’s not right at all for the part otherwise. (Hot take: the Tom Cruise movies are truer in spirit to the books, even though he’s only slightly taller than Kristen Bell.) In general, though, I’m of the belief that source material is fine as a simple jumping off point if the direction in which you jump is interesting. And I think the more Lucky Hank tried to jump away from Straight Man, the better it tended to be. The show never figured out how to recreate Russo’s voice, which is so much of what made the book work. So instead, it leaned more into his messy relationship with his wife (and boy, was Mireille Enos a treat in this; cast her more in things where she gets to smile, TV business!) and his father. It fleshed out the other professors more, which at first felt unnecessary, and by the dinner party bottle episode felt essential. It found its own ways to be funny and sad — two tonal areas in which we know Bob Odenkirk excels — and figured out its own path. The dinner party episode was genuinely excellent, the rest turned out to be very good. The conclusion to the season was one of those expert balancing acts where it works as an ending if AMC doesn’t order more, but also clearly establishes what the conflicts would be in a second season. The whole thing’s available to binge now On Demand or on AMC+, and I will gladly watch more of Odenkirk, Enos, Shannon DeVido, and company should a renewal happen.

Ted talk

Since I complained about Ted Lasso a couple of weeks ago, I thought it only fair that I sing the relative praises of this week’s episode.

Yes, the Nate story continues to be written by people who seem not to have watched Season Two, since they keep presenting him as a lovably naive young underdog who just needed the love of a good (if completely nondescript) woman to be fulfilled. And, yes, the Keeley subplot, while minimal this week, was utterly baffling, since it had Keeley pining desperately for the woman who slutshamed her. So that was bad.

But I’ve been desperate for most of the season to see Rebecca acting as a boss, and to see Roy get more to do than growl and deliver one-liners. Their shared subplot this week gave us both, and not coincidentally featured Hannah Waddingham and Brett Goldstein’s best work of the season. I continue to fear that the show is setting up Nate to take over Richmond when Ted goes back to America. (By the way, how weird is it that everyone seems to know that the show is either ending after this season, or it will continue without Jason Sudeikis, but Apple has managed to avoid confirming any of this? We’re all just assuming!) After seeing how good the Roy material was this week, it would be even more maddening if he didn’t inherit the job. (Coach Beard should remain a supporting player no matter what, doing oddball things like his Joe Walsh > Jimmy Page hot take.)

How’s Alan looking?

Finally, some photographic silliness for you. Across my career as a writer, I have had to have many headshots. Here, for instance, are the two different official photos I had as a columnist at The Star-Ledger, starting with me at my skinniest, next to the All TV graphic that made me and Matt Zoller Seitz resemble conjoined twins:

At HitFix and Uproxx, I never had an official mugshot of any kind, but I started publishing books during that era. For the most part, I just used photos of myself taken by friends who were good amateur photographer, though Matt and I did hire someone to shoot this one for TV (THE BOOK):

Right before I started at Rolling Stone, I had to swing by their offices to get a new headshot taken, which they then turned into a caricature to use for both my column in the print magazine and the top of my author page at RollingStone.com. Because I happened to be attending a network upfront event the same day, I was much dressier than normal by Rolling Stone standards, which led to photos like this, and then a caricature like this:

Recently, I decided to bite the bullet and get a real professional headshot taken (by my old Star-Ledger colleague John O’Boyle) for any future books or other projects, which led to these two alternate Canadian tuxedo pics:

And around the same time, TPTB at Rolling Stone decided that everybody needed updated headshots. I did not realize they would be shot against a black background, which is why I wore clothes that make me look like a floating head:

All of which is to say that there is a reason I am a writer and not a model.

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