Bring out your undead!

The 'What We Do in the Shadows' vampires say goodbye, plus 'Arcane,' the year's best episodes, Stephanie Hsu gets 'Laid,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as you find me in the comments on Deadline, TV Guide, and Den of Geek...

Me and my Shadows, one last time

While I’ve led recent newsletters with my best-of lists, attention this week must first be paid to the end of one of the funniest TV shows I’ve seen in a very long time: What We Do in the Shadows, which bowed out on Monday night.

To commemorate the series’ conclusion, I gathered together a bunch of Rolling Stone writers to pick 15 of the show’s all-time funniest moments. All lists are subjective and imperfect in some way, and looking back at this one, it’s a little too light on Nadja. That said, just reading the entries my colleagues wrote made me want to go back and binge the whole series again.

You will be unsurprised to learn that I had a lot to say about the finale itself, which was titled, simply, “The Finale.” When I wrote that review, I thought I was making a joke when I implied that “my” hypnosis ending was different than what everyone else saw. I had no idea until the following morning that team Shadows had filmed multiple “perfect ending”s, and that the one I saw wasn’t even the one that would appear on the Hulu version. (Though it was the one that first aired on good old-fashioned FX proper.) If you want to see all three, you have to click on the “Extra Hypnosis Features” tab on the show’s Hulu page. Yes, it’s more effort. But it’s worth it.

I’m having an episode (again)

Another week in December, another superlatives list for 2024. This time out, I picked 10 of my favorite episodes from this year. Again, I’m trying to share the wealth as much as possible, so while a couple of shows from my overall Top 10 wind up here, it’s mostly shows I haven’t spotlighted yet this month — some of them great overall, some of them that just leveled up for a specific episode. (As with my best performances list, it would have been easy to fill most of it with stuff from the top 10; other candidates would have included the penultimate Shogun, the Man on the Inside episode with the tour of San Francisco, and “Sleep Hypnosis,” among others.)

Games people watch

As you might expect, the TV dynamic in my household tends to involve me introducing series to my wife and/or children. (I’m currently mid-Moffat Doctor Who with one of them, having just gotten to the Clara Oswald episodes.) Every now and then, though, one of them will come to me and insist that they have to show me something that they love. The most recent, and among the best, examples of this: Arcane, the recently-concluded Netflix adaptation of the insanely popular League of Legends video game.

I went into Arcane knowing nothing, other than that it had a very passionate fan who shares a roof with me. And I came away nearly as big a fan of it. The animation is jaw-droppingly beautiful, the action sequences are masterful, and many of the characters — particularly sibling rivals Vi and Jinx, played by Hailee Steinfeld and Ella Purnell — vividly-etched. The second season struggles trying to squeeze what feels like four seasons worth of plot into a one season bag — perhaps a result of a reported shift in business philosophy at Riot Games? — but even in that busier group of episodes, there’s some astonishing work. Very glad I let myself be talked into watching this one.

This bed is on fire with passionate love(*)

Barring something unexpected, I should have a Squid Game Season Two review out next week. But the last new series of 2024 that I reviewed is Laid, a Peacock comedy that released its 8-episode first season yesterday. It’s a high-concept blend of black comedy, romance, and fantasy, where Stephanie Hsu plays a woman with a long list of former sexual partners who discovers that everyone she’s ever slept with is dying — all in different ways, and in the order in which they hooked up.

It’s adapted from an Australian series by Nahnatchka Khan and Sally Bradford McKenna, who have worked on lots of series (Khan recently did Fresh Off the Boat and Young Rock, in addition to directing Always Be My Maybe), but who first worked together on the tonally similar Don’t Trust the B—— in Apt. 23. More than anything, it’s a terrific showcase for Hsu, and for the always-reliable Zosia Mamet as Hsu’s best friend, a true crime obsessive who of course has to set up a sexual murder board to figure out what’s happening, and whether it can be stopped before this curse gets to Hsu’s most recent conquests. It’s a high-concept show that feels like it explores its premise pretty thoroughly and doesn’t need a second season, then ends on a cliffhanger anyway. But these eight episodes are amusing and pretty satisfying, regardless of whether there’s more, and/or what the future quality might be.

(*) And, yes, the show uses a cover version of the Nineties song “Laid” by James, and if I have to have the lyrics stuck back in my head again, then so do you. I don’t make the rules.

Odds and/or ends

• I’ve never had much fondness for the Taylor Sheridan Televisual Universe. I pulled the ripcord on Yellowstone midway through its first season, which felt way too much like the tedious later seasons of Sons of Anarchy to me. I found Landman laughably bad at times, and wasn’t enthralled by what I’ve sampled of some of his other shows like Mayor of Kingstown and Lawman: Bass Reeves. Still, the guy is such a commercial phenomenon that it’s hard not to pay attention, even second-hand. So it’s been very entertaining to read my friend Kathryn VanArendonk suffering a nervous breakdown in real time while writing about the post-Kevin Costner home stretch of Yellowstone. First, she checked in on how Sheridan was dealing with Costner’s departure, and the answer turned out to be “not well.” Then there was a midlife crisis-type episode focusing on the character Sheridan himself plays on the series, followed by what sounds like one of the most half-hearted, low-energy series finales in recent memory. I highly recommend reading all three pieces, even though I kept trying to talk Kathryn out of watching this at all.

• Speaking of my friend Kathryn, this time involving a show we both watch and obsess over, earlier this week came two huge pieces of Bluey-related news. The first is that Bluey creator Joe Brumm has written a feature film, to be released a couple of years from now. The second is that Brumm, who has been conspicuous in his silence about the shows’ future in the aftermath of “The Sign” playing like a series finale, published an open letter to fans, in which he wrote, “I’ve decided to take a break from my involvement in the TV series” and “To be clear, this is not an announcement about the end of the show, but it is an acknowledgment that my focus will be on the film.” Though it doesn’t seem as if a fourth season is anywhere close to being made, this sure reads like Brumm has made peace with the idea that his incredibly lucrative creation will eventually continue without his involvement. (For what it’s worth, I think he has the contractual power right now to pull a Bill Watterson with the show and ensure that nobody makes additional seasons without his involvement. So either I’ve misunderstood, or he’s okay with letting other people keep working on it, while also distinguishing “his” Bluey from the version that follows.)

• We got renewal news on two What’s Alan Watching?-approved series this week. Netflix ordered a second season of A Man on the Inside, while Apple did the same for Bad Monkey. Both of them told complete stories within their first seasons, and Bad Monkey adapted the entirety of its literary source material. (Another Carl Hiaasen book, Razor Girl, features some of the same characters, but the renewal announcement pointedly didn’t mention it, so I would assume this will be an original story.) But when you have gifted creators and appealing stars, starting over from scratch is easier than it can be in other circumstances. Ted Danson just needs a new environment to go undercover in, and Vince Vaughn just needs to fall into some new trouble that he has to bullshit his way out of. I’m pleased. Though I wouldn’t object to supporting characters from the respective first seasons making cameos in whatever the heroes’ new adventures turn out to be.

• Finally, if you’re doing last-minute holiday shopping, the sitewide Abrams Books 50% off sale continues, with the code FESTIVE24. So you can preorder Saul Goodman v Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul, or buy a copy of The Sopranos Sessions or Breaking Bad 101 for the TV fan in your life at a deep discount.

Happy Chrismukkah, everybody! We’ll have one more newsletter next week, and then back in January!