Death becomes her

Michelle Williams is back at FX, plus the penultimate 'Pitt' and 'White Lotus'

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as Jesus saves me from those Buddhists…

Sex and death

Only one Rolling Stone review this week, but it’s for a show I liked a lot: Dying for Sex, a new FX-on-Hulu miniseries starring Michelle Williams as a woman with terminal breast cancer who decides to go on a journey of sexual self-discovery while she still can. It’s based on the podcast of the same name, adapted by New Girl creator Liz Meriwether and former New Girl writer Kim Rosenstock. It’s funny, raunchy, sad, and another fantastic showcase for Williams, as well as for a stacked supporting cast that includes Jenny Slate as her best friend, Sissy Spacek as her estranged mom, Jay Duplass as her useless husband, David Rasche from Succession as her oncologist, and Rob Delaney as a neighbor she’s equally repulsed and aroused by. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me write a rave review.

Odds and/or ends

• Hacks Season Four debuts Thursday, before next week’s newsletter comes out. I’ve only seen the first three episodes so far, and had mixed feelings. To me, Hacks works best when Ava and Deborah are getting along, but the show’s creators clearly enjoy riding a rollercoaster with their partnership. So opening the season with the two of them openly feuding isn’t my preferred mode. The second season began the same way before the two of them inevitably became close again, so I assume that will happen at some point here. I just think the comedy is stronger when they’re mismatched friends than when they’re enemies, and the later-rinse-repeat dynamic of them splitting up and then reconciling seems unnecessary — like a hedge against things getting stale, when the repetition itself has become predictable. But I still enjoy Smart and Einbinder.

• The penultimate White Lotus of Season Three left me frustrated with the pacing this year, and how it feels like Mike White keeps repeating a handful of story beats over and over between the various groups. The Sunday night chat suggested many of you have similar concerns. There aren’t screeners of the season finale, so I’ll be watching it live. White tends to be really good at finales — I wasn’t crazy about Season Two as a whole but thought the last episode was terrific — though news that it will be 90 minutes long has me worried about even more bloat.

The Pitt recaplet: “Hour Fourteen”

Rapid-fire thoughts on the penultimate episode of the season:

• It’s a smart choice to have Whitaker be the one to pull Robby out of his panic attack. He’s been shown throughout the season to have strong people skills. But he’s also inexperienced enough — and knows he’s inexperienced enough — that he can’t give a traditional, melodramatic pep talk. All he can do is point out how badly the whole team needs him right now, given the stakes. That bluntness is enough to shake Robby out of his PTSD and back to work.

• A lovely small note immediately after that: Esme, one of the custodians who has been racing around to mop up all the blood being spilled, sees that Robby looks rough and offers to get him something to eat or drink. Everyone here is looking out for each other, especially today.

• The season makes its first significant misstep, I feel, with where the David story goes here. It’s a relief that he’s not the shooter, because that would be too contrived, and, again, too much of a burden to put on Robby. But the episode frames things as if Robby was right the whole time and McKay overreacted and did this kid a disservice. Yes, McKay called the cops, but that was before the shooting, and little was likely to happen to him immediately as a result. Whereas Robby grabs one of the cops in the ambulance bay, points to Theresa, and says that her son had something to do with the shooting — and that cop is one of the ones who arrests David when he turns up later. Robby did that, not McKay. And Robby was willing to sign the form for the involuntary psych hold. All of which would be fine if we were meant to view this as Robby being a hypocrite, or so thrown by the events of the day that he’s forgotten all the detail. But it’s presented as if he is right, and McKay screwed up. Which is not at all what happened in the show we’ve been watching.

• Speaking of McKay, all hail the show’s first Nepo Daddy! That’s Fiona Dourif’s father Brad (from Deadwood, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Child’s Play, The Lord of the Rings, etc.) as McKay’s dad, who arrives to take Harrison home and throw some deserved insults at Chad. I think this means that Bryan Cranston and/or Jon Jon Briones are now obligated to appear in Season Two, even if they aren’t also playing parents to their respective talented offspring.

• We finally get an explanation about the mute patient that Mel and Santos were struggling to connect with over the previous two episodes, and it’s even worse than we assumed: she was at PittFest with her disabled husband, and he was shot and killed by the same bullet that wounded her. At least Mel and Lupe are able to reunite her with her daughter from the cafeteria, just as Lupe brings the newly-widowed dental hygienist down to see her wounded brother when he finally turns up after playing hero for several hours.

• The brother is the final shooting victim to arrive at the ER, as Gloria soon announces that the shooter killed himself, and the site has been cleared. The episode calms down considerably after that, finally allowing back in some of the humor from the season’s earlier installments. There’s a running gag about Dr. Shen repeatedly jinxing things by declaring the crisis over, right before a new patient arrives. And there’s the sweet moment where Mateo gives Javadi a juice box and calls her by her first name.

• Just because the crisis is over, doesn’t mean patients stop coming. The heroic brother brings in a drug overdose case that forces Santos and Langdon to work together — with Dr. Ellis playing referee — while Mel and Shen and Robby struggle to get the anti-vaxxer mother of a boy with measles to allow them to do a spinal tap. The latter case is unfortunately even more timely than it seemed when the episode was written. The season finale was filmed out of order back in the fall, because there are some outdoor scenes that production didn’t want to risk doing in potentially inclement winter weather. So all the other episodes had to be written before that one — and, thus, well before the recent measles outbreak in Texas.

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