Daaaaaaa 'Bear'! (Part 1)

Plus, 'Squid Game, 'Ironheart,' 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia,' 'Poker Face,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I inquire about the psychopath smell...

The Bear necessities

You can thank Cousin Richie for two newsletters in two consecutive days. That’s because my Rolling Stone editors and I decided to split up my coverage of The Bear Season Four over several days, rather than just publishing it all the second the embargo lifted in the wee small hours of Thursday morning. My review of the season — which has no real spoilers, other than telling you definitively what the Chicago Tribune review of the restaurant said — is already live, as is an essay I wrote about two of the season’s standout episodes, and how they reflect the depth and breadth of what The Bear can do at its best. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be publishing my take on the season finale, and what it means for the series going forward.

Because most normal people haven’t had time to binge 10 episodes of television yet — one of which is 69 minutes long — I thought doing a short all-Bear newsletter tomorrow made sense. Anyone who’s finished it all already can discuss it in broad terms in today’s comments, but ideally all the spoiler discussion will wait until tomorrow.

Season Four isn’t perfect, but on the whole it’s a nice creative rebound from last year’s largely unfocused episodes. And when it’s good, it’s great. More tomorrow.

Squid Game’s endgame

You might recall that I found Squid Game Season Two to be a poorly-paced affair that seemed to have no reason for existing other than the fact that its creator didn’t get paid enough on the first season. The third and final season, which Netflix released early this morning, is unfortunately even more underwhelming. So much so, I devoted a good chunk of my spoiler-filled take on the season to discussing a very brief cameo, and what it might or not portend for any future Squid Games.

There was a very brief window in the 2010s where it seemed like TV had learned its lesson about making every hit show run as long as possible, whether or not it made creative sense to do so. We’re unfortunately past that, now. It’s a shame. Season One was incredible, and these later ones don’t diminish that in the way that, say, the later Dexter seasons — and the many Dexter spinoffs — did. Still, I think everyone but Hwang Dong-hyuk would have been happier if it had been one-and-done.

(As with The Bear, I’d ask anyone who has already finished the season to be respectful in the comments of those who might not have. I’ll have a prompt for additional discussion next week.)

Less than super

Tuesday night, Disney+ dropped the first three episodes of Ironheart, bringing back Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, a Tony Stark-obsessed engineering prodigy who built her own Iron Man-style armor, and who last appeared in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The last three episodes will go live next Tuesday, and if it seems like Disney and Marvel are eager for this show to come and go as quickly as possible — much as they were with Echo, which got a binge release — you wouldn’t be wrong.

My Ironheart review talks about the show’s flaws (particularly Riri herself), as well as the parts around the edges that I found interesting (like supporting performances by Lyric Ross and Alden Ehrenreich). But it’s just as much about how the series — which was announced way back in 2020 — is one of the last remnants of the era where Marvel Studios was determined to flood the zone with projects about practically every character who ever their own solo comic. A show like Ironheart simply wouldn’t get made now — nor would Echo, which was uneven, but on the whole much more satisfying than this —  and it unfortunately doesn’t make a strong enough creative case for its existence.

Fingers still stubbornly crossed for Yahya Abdul-Mateen II later this year in Wonder Man, about a Marvel C-lister who improbably remains my favorite Avenger.

Everybody Loves panel videos

Last week, I offered some highlights from the Everybody Loves Raymond anniversary panel I moderated at the Paley Center. The full video is now up on YouTube, so enjoy Phil, Ray, and the gang being very funny, and me mostly trying to stay out of the way.

Still Sunny after all these years

As part of a recent Rolling Stone print package about contemporary comedy, I wrote a tribute to the remarkable creative longevity of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I went back to the series’ earliest episodes, which I didn’t like much at the time. (In one of the bigger miscalculations of my career, I briefly was more excited by the comedy FX paired it with, Starved, which in hindsight was only interesting for featuring a young Sterling K. Brown.) Some of my issue was just getting used to the specific Sunny wavelength, but some was the show not entirely finding itself until a year or so in. The new season comes out next month, and I can’t wait to see it.

Also, I’ll be moderating the Always Sunny 20th anniversary panel in LA on Tuesday. If you have tickets, say hi! And if there’s something you’ve always been dying to ask the gang, let me know in the comments!

Odds and/or ends

• Just a reminder that the first two episodes of Smoke debuted today on Apple. I reviewed it last week, and noted that these two episodes were pretty frustrating, before the miniseries improved afterwards, once the end of the second episode revealed what it’s really about.

• Two different pieces of Paramount silliness happened this week. The first is that the clumsily-named Paramount+ with Showtime subscription tier is being redubbed Paramount+ Premium, though it will continue to feature various past and present Showtime series like Yellowjackets and whatever the latest Dexter show is called. Complicating matters further, the linear pay cable channel that used to simply be known as Showtime will continue to be called Paramount+ with Showtime. Why are big media corporations, which presumably pay big money to marketing and branding experts, so bad at this?

• Meanwhile, Paramount announced that Doug Liman will be directing a feature film version of Stephen King’s The Stand. Never mind that the last adaptation — for CBS All Access, aka the original iteration of Paramount+ Whatever — debuted in late 2020. That miniseries was a mess, which either fundamentally misunderstood the strength of the source material, or was so hamstrung by budget concerns that it had no choice but to devote most of its time to the least interesting part of the story. I like Doug Liman a lot as a filmmaker, and he gave me some of the best anecdotes for Welcome to The O.C. (still on sale wherever books are sold). But the length of the novel, and the amount of time spent on each character as they journey across a post-apocalyptic America, is what makes it great. You simply can’t squeeze all the important stuff into a single film, even a long one, and make it have the same impact. Oh, well, at least we’ll always have the “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” intro from the Nineties version on ABC:

Poker Face recaplet: “The Big Pump”

My first thought while watching “The Big Pump” was that Poker Face killed off spouses Melanie Lynskey and Jason Ritter in two out of three consecutive episodes. Were they a package deal? Was there a discussion of “The Big Pump” while Lynskey was on set for “The Sleazy Georgian,” and a lightbulb went off over someone’s head? Or was it just a happy coincidence?

The plot that gets Ritter’s health inspector character killed, where gym owner Method Man is selling his best customers unregulated breast milk to help boost their gains, is on the sillier side for this season. It might even be goofier than the one with Kumail’s alligator, and is probably a degree or two too silly. But I can’t entirely hate on Cheese from The Wire being involved in selling an illicit substance, even if that substance is breast milk.

That said, there’s a lot of interesting stuff independent of the main plot. For starters, there’s Charlie’s reluctance to even try to solve this murder. After all she’s been through since she left Reno, all the death she’s seen, and the recent loss of a guy she really liked in the heist movie episode, she’s understandably burnt out. It’s tricky to do a show like this and have the amateur sleuth begin to question why they’re always around people being killed, and the emotional toll that takes. But I think it’s fair to hit it now and then, and especially in a part of the season where Charlie has settled down in one place, and thus has more time to contemplate what’s been happening to her, rather than worrying about staying two steps ahead of the hitmen.

Mostly, though, there is Charlie’s friendship with Alex, who is idealistic where Charlie is cynical, and who seems congenitally honest in a way Charlie just isn’t used to. Natasha Lyonne and Patti Harrison make a good comedic team, and there’s some excellent self-aware humor this time, including the “23 seconds later” cut that skips over Charlie again explaining her superpower to someone, and Charlie’s “Hard cut to what the fuck am I doing?” joke.

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