Dad TV for a Dad TV critic

'Bosch: Legacy' returns, 'Big Mouth' graduates middle school, 'Neon' goes for a reggaeton 'Entourage,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I change my name to Sepinwall: Legacy…

What is a Bosch: Legacy?

I turned 50 earlier this month. In some ways, this is unsettling to me, since I once upon a time was the hotshot kid on the TV beat, writing about the importance that networks and advertisers placed on the 18-49 demographic, of which I am no longer part. (The good news, I guess, is that I still have four more years to enjoy being part of the 25-54 demo that CBS has long said should be the true age range.)

In other ways, though, this feels reassuring, because I’ve finally officially graduated into an age more reflective of my tastes. Well, some of them, anyway. Later in this newsletter, you’ll find discussion of a historically raunchy show about middle schoolers, and another comedy about twentysomething reggaeton wannabes, both of which I liked, to varying degrees. I still write about and enjoy a lot of shows focused on characters and worlds way outside my current demo(*), so I haven’t quite had my Seymour Skinner moment yet. (At least, I hope not.)

(*) In case you didn’t know, I wrote a whole oral history book about one of the great teen dramas of all time, which you can preorder now.

That being said, you know how you sometimes hear about actors who seemed to have been born old, like Stephen Root, the late Burt Young, or my guy Dennis Franz? Well, I seem to have been born with old man pop cultural tastes. While I watched a lot of the Gen X kid staples like The A-Team and Diff’rent Strokes, I was also glued to the set for shows like St. Elsewhere, Cheers, and L.A. Law, none of which were remotely targeted to someone my age. I loved to watch Westerns, I read a lot of hard-boiled detective novels and Apollo program histories by middle school, etc. I was into Dad TV long before the term existed, much less before I became an actual dad.

So of course a new season of Bosch: Legacy should premiere on Freevee not too long after I crossed this particular rubicon of age. I’ve always been destined to be an old man who watches Bosch, and now I actually am. It feels good, to be honest.

As for Bosch: Legacy itself, today’s column about the second season is mostly devoted to my amusement at how the spinoff is basically the parent show with a slightly tweaked title. I go into the business reasons for that in the story, drop various bits of TV nerd trivia (including stuff about All in the Family and Archie Bunker’s Place, which I was also much too young to watch in the early 80s, but did anyway), drop various bits of Michael Connelly trivia (again, see previous paragraphs), etc. But no matter the name, it’s still, as the late, great Lance Reddick liked to say…

Graduation season

There are shows I like a lot that, from season to season, are so consistent in both what they’re doing and how well they’re doing it, that eventually I stop writing about them. Often, this involves long-running animated series, like Bob’s Burgers, or, in this case, Big Mouth. But the seventh season, which dropped on Netflix yesterday, does have a significant change: by the end of it, the kids have graduated middle school and begun high school. The show is still fundamentally the show, but even this slight advancement in time gave me an excuse to revisit it many years after I last wrote a review.

Vince is gonna do the movie?

One of the new shows I’ve most enjoyed this year is Freevee’s Primo, the family comedy created by Internet man about town Shea Serrano. Now, Serrano has a second new series in 2023, Neon, a Netflix comedy about three lifelong best friends trying to break into the world of reggaeton. Co-created with Max Searle, Neon is much more laid-back than Primo, aiming for more of a hangout vibe in the vein of other shows about trying to hit it big in showbiz, from Entourage to Rap Sh!t. It’s likable (certainly more than Entourage), if not hugely funny. More in my review.

Welcome to the audiobook recording, b*tch!

Finally, in case you missed the earlier reminder, I wrote a new oral history book, Welcome to The O.C., which, again, is available for preorder now. (And if you do preorder, you get a free bonus chapter immediately.) Come November 28, it will be available in print, in various ebook formats, and as an audiobook — one where you’ll get to hear the dulcet tones of yours truly, at least part of the time.

I’ll be reading everything I wrote, including the prose connecting all the interview quotes, plus footnotes. (You know how much I love my footnotes.) Some members of the creative team will be reading their quotes, and a team of professional audiobook narrators will be handling the rest.

This is only the second time I’ve read part of my own audiobook. Matt Zoller Seitz and I split those duties on TV (THE BOOK), and some of the others had pros do the whole thing. I have mixed feelings about having another voice reading what I’ve written, especially when it’s something written with a lot of first-person commentary, like The Revolution Was Televised(*).

(*) It is pure coincidence that I’m raising the issue in a week when the amazing Julia Selden was unavailable to provide the audio version of the newsletter.

On the other, the two recording sessions I did for Welcome to The O.C. were a reminder of what a physically taxing job audiobook narration can be. My voice is usually indestructible, but by the end of the first session, I felt like I didn’t want to talk again for a week, and had various aches and pains from reading in the same position for so long. I asked a professional audiobook narrator I know for tips, but a lot of it amounts to muscle memory and being in better reading shape than I apparently am. But I think my part sounds good, and I really like the lineup of other voices we have. If you’re big into listening to your books, I think this one will work really well for you. (And preordering the audiobook also qualifies for the free bonus chapter offer.)

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to ice a number of body parts and drink a lot of hot water with lemon.

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