Back on her 'bullshit'

'Poker Face' returns, plus a classic 'Rehearsal,' 'Forever,' 'Hacks,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I win the Latvian critics award for Best Intergenerational Kiss five times in a row…

This week’s biggest and happiest TV development was the return of Poker Face, but since Peacock dropped three episodes only yesterday morning, we’ll save the spoilers — including my interview about them with Rian Johnson — for the end of the newsletter. In the meantime, let’s go rapid-fire through many other topics…

Recap corner

• I had mixed feelings on this week’s The Last of Us. The quiet scenes with Ellie and Dina were terrific, but the action feels a bit too much like watching someone else play a video game. It feels like we’re getting the wrong amount of new characters like Jeffrey Wright as Isaac. And the sheer stupidity (or, if we’re being generous, naivete) of Ellie continuing to stay in Seattle when she now has abundant reasons to just go home is frustrating, even if it’s consistent with her character so far. You can keep talking about it in the chat, or in the comments here. As always, please avoid discussing where the game goes from here.

• This week’s Andor was easily the highlight of Season Two, and among the best stretches of the entire series. I wish that Syril had not spotted Cassian when he did, for reasons I explain in that recap, but otherwise, magnificent. Similarly, you can talk about it here or in the chat. In this case, the events of Rogue One do not count as spoilers, for obvious reasons.

Sullying his reputation

You might recall that I had mixed feelings about Season Two of The Rehearsal. Parts left me cold, while other parts left me simultaneously howling with laughter and stunned that anyone would even think to attempt something, let alone actually do it. The most recent episode qualifies for that latter group, at least for the long sequence where Nathan attempts to experience the entire life of heroic pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger in a short span of time.

To me, The Rehearsal is at its best, and funniest, whenever Fielder and company are metaphorically using an atom bomb to kill a mosquito. In this case, the absurd scale of the problem-solving was literal, since to play Sully as a child, Fielder had to navigate a world of oversized furniture, and actors on stilts playing Sully’s parents. I still can’t quite believe the moment where Nathan-as-Sully nearly drowned in milk while “nursing” from his giant-sized mother. It’s insane, and hilarious, and easily the high point of the season for me. I’ll have more to say after the finale — which is huge in its own way — but how are you all feeling about Season Two so far?

Odds and/or ends

• I’ve only had time to watch the first four episodes of Netflix’s new YA series Forever. I’ve never read the Judy Blume novel on which it’s based, so I can’t speak to how much Mara Brock Akil has changed the source material, beyond making the characters Black athletes and setting the story in 2018. I was mixed on it. On the one hand, Michael Cooper Jr. and Lovie Simone are excellent as the two leads, who are former kindergarten classmates reconnecting as teens, and dealing with various obstacles both within and outside their relationship. And the tone and atmosphere are really engaging. On the other, the episodes I’ve watched lean way too much on misunderstandings that should be easier to clear up than they wind up being, even for high schoolers. I know it’s a trope of the genre, but this degree felt like overkill. If I get a chance to watch the rest, I’ll report back.

• The Many Saints of Newark is on the list of movies and shows leaving Max later this month. On the one hand, The Sopranos prequel film was largely greeted with indifference even by the show’s most ardent fans. (I think there are great things in it, especially Michael Gandolfini’s performance as the young Tony, but it’s trying to squeeze in way too many stories and characters, and David Chase’s insistence that it be shorter than two hours really hurts it.) On the other hand, even in the David Zaslav era, it’s shocking that anything connected to the series that to this day defines HBO would get disappeared from the streamer. I wouldn’t be surprised if it eventually winds up on another service, like how Westworld is now on Tubi. And even if not, it will at least be rentable, rather than getting the Full Zaslav like Batgirl.

• Speaking of Max, this week’s Hacks, “Mrs. Table,” was my favorite of the season so far. Not coincidentally, it’s also the episode that finally ends the latest feud between Deborah and Ava. Like I said at the start of the season, it’s exasperating that the Hacks creators insist on beginning each year with their leads being at odds, when the show is always better when they’re working together. That said, I’ve seen the rest of the season, and without spoiling, it ends in a way suggesting a fifth season would not make us go through this routine again — not at the beginning, anyway.

• And one more from what’s turned into Max Corner: I belatedly caught up on Season Five of Harley Quinn this week. I remain amazed by just how blasphemous it’s able to be with DC characters and continuity, and moving the action to Metropolis was a nice change of pace, especially with lots more of Natalie Morales as Lois Lane. Mostly, though, I have to applaud that the season’s penultimate installment — where Lena Luthor uses Brainiac technology to shrink Metropolis and put it in a glass bottle — was titled "Bottle Episode (But Not a 'Bottle Episode')." No word on a sixth season yet (and even less word on the future of spinoff Kite Man: Hell Yeah!), but I’ll keep my fingers crossed for this filthy, fun show.

Poker Face changes its game

Finally, let’s talk Poker Face, with spoilers. Peacock once again dropped multiple episodes to start the season, which is annoying and counterintuitive for a Case of the Week show. That said, it’s slightly less annoying than last time because it’s only three episodes versus four, and there are 12 episodes this season instead of 10.

I want to start at the end of the third episode, actually, in part because I interviewed Rian Johnson about it. After the first season’s format leaned so heavily on Charlie being a fugitive from both Ron Perlman and law-enforcement, and after the Season One finale went out of its way to set up a different R. Perlman chasing her, I was surprised that the new season so quickly eliminated that problem. Beatrix Hasp calls off the hit, and Charlie decides that she’ll keep traveling anyway, because she’s come to enjoy this itinerant lifestyle. Johnson had a lot to say on the subject, and how he feels it does and doesn’t change the series moving forward. Also, I think I am now the showrunner for Season Three?

As to the individual episodes, let’s go in order:

• The punnily-titled “The Game Is A Foot” has fun with jokes about cheesy Nineties high-concept shows like Kid Cop Nights, where four of the five Cynthias Erivo starred as children. But it’s a clever case of the show having its cake and eating it, too, since the idea of having Erivo play quintuplets — four who grew up together, one who’s a total stranger — is itself the sort of gimmicky thing TV did a lot more of in decades past. Some of the quints are broader than others, but Erivo drills in effectively on the two main ones, and does a nice job playing Amber playing Felicity. That sequence also has one of the show’s better examples of how Charlie’s superpower can be rendered useless, since the way Amber describes her role as Felicity is basically true. And the scene where Charlie gathers all the suspects into the drawing room, and Natasha Lyonne leans more into her Peter Falk impression than ever before, felt like a very satisfying way to begin the season.

• “Last Looks” is one of this season’s two reunions between Lyonne and a former Slums of Beverly Hills costar, with Kevin Corrigan in a small role as the movie crewmember who rents Charlie’s Barracuda for the shoot. There’s more of the show pushing the limits of the lie detector ability here, since Giancarlo Esposito’s character keeps inadvertently saying true but innocent-sounding things about what happened with Katie Holmes. (That said, it might have been a fun twist to make Esposito a victim for once, and Joey Potter the killer.) And then we conclude with Charlie in the most physical peril she’s been in since Season One’s “Escape From Shit Mountain.” Lyonne is really good at playing a more vulnerable Charlie, but it’s also a place that the series needs to be judicious about going to. She can be threatened by the killer in most episodes, but it has to be rare for her to seem this close to death for those moments to have weight. This one did, and it led into a rare cliffhanger, with Beatrix appearing in the back of the Barracuda, a gun at the ready.

• My only real disappointment with “Whack-a-Mole” is how little interaction there is between John Mulaney and Richard Kind. After seeing them together in their Netflix talk show, I just want them to be a comedy duo for the rest of their lives. This one’s fascinating as an inverse of the show’s formula, where we see how Charlie is involved first, and only after do we find out who the murderer is and how they pulled off what they think is the perfect crime. But it still works, and it’s nice to have Simon Helberg back as Luca, whose career keeps soaring on the back of cases that Charlie gift wraps for him. Plus, I would bet a lot of money that whoever decided to have Mulaney repeatedly quote Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along has watched Mulaney in the Sondheim parody episode of Documentary Now! a few dozen times.

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