Emmys finally book a 'Reservation'

Emmy snubs and surprises, plus 'Lady in the Lake,' 'Kite Man,' and a lot of tributes

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I get to say “shitass” one last time…

Bear vs. The Bear

This year’s Emmy nominations were announced on Wednesday. Some of the nominations were both predictable and predictably confusing — The Bear set a record for the most nominations a comedy has gotten in a single year, even though it’s not really a comedy — while others were surprising, sometimes in good ways, sometimes bad. I wrote about some of those surprises and/or snubs, starting of course with Reservation Dogs finally getting a couple of big nominations, for comedy series and for D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as comedy lead actor. The fact that Devery Jacobs, Zahn McClarnon, Graham Greene, and a million other people associate with that show weren’t also nominated stinks, but you take what you can get? Especially since the notoriously chuckle-worthy The Bear will be sweeping all the comedy categories, anyway.

Odds and/or ends

• Earlier this week, Max debuted Kite Man: Hell, Yeah!, a Harley Quinn spin-off from the Harley creative team. I’ve watched the whole season already, and enjoyed it a lot. You have to look at it basically as the Human Resources to Harley’s Big Mouth, though, in that the irreverent, filthy sense of humor is still there, but it’s not quite as emotionally resonant, since Kite Man himself is a pretty thin, straightforward character. But if you love the James Adomian version of Bane as much as I do, there is a lot of him here, plus some incredibly obscure DC characters like alcoholic superhero Six Pack. (Alas, the show does not include Six Pack’s teammates like Dogwelder, who, um, welds people to dogs, or Jean de Baton-Baton, who fights bad guys with the power of Frenchness. I am not making either of those up.) There’s also a time traveling toilet, plus the late Lance Reddick steps in for Giancarlo Esposito to play Lex Luthor for most of the season’s episodes.

• Elsewhere in genre TV, The Acolyte wrapped up its first season a few nights ago. I have to confess to giving up on the show after the episode that revealed what Manny Jacinto was really up to — not because that one was appreciably worse than the others, but because it wasn’t appreciably better, and at a certain point I just couldn’t muster the enthusiasm to keep going. And I watched all of Obi-Wan Kenobi, which was objectively a worse show than this. Mostly, I’m curious how those of you who stuck it out felt. Most of the recaps by colleagues at other publications seemed to be straining to find positive angles to take on the show.

Natalie goes to Bawlmer

I’m a fan of Laura Lippmann’s novels in general, and I really liked her 2019 period piece Lady in the Lake, about the intersecting lives of a Jewish woman and a Black woman in mid-Sixties Baltimore. So I was excited to watch Apple’s new miniseries adaptation, starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram. Unfortunately, I found it frustrating, due mostly to this being one of those occasional Portman performances that’s a bit too mannered (including a heavy emphasis on the local dialect) to work. But Ingram is terrific, and it also brings Wood Harris back to Baltimore to play the local crime boss who’s at the center of some of the story’s mysteries.

Bye, Bob

Bob Newhart died Thursday at the age of 94. He was an absolute giant in the world of comedy, both for his stand-up work and his sitcoms. Because my colleague David Browne’s excellent obituary covered so much of the big picture of Newhart’s life and career, I decided to shine a spotlight on arguably the funniest, and/or most famous, moment of said career: the incredible meta joke where the series finale of his second sitcom, Newhart, somehow turned into an episode of his first sitcom, The Bob Newhart Show.

A masterpiece of meta humor, from one of the last places you’d expect to find it.

More in memoriam

A few brief thoughts on some other notable TV passings from the last week:

• Beverly Hills 90210 was an iconic show to people around my age, and now its two most iconic stars are gone. Luke Perry died back in 2019, and now his onscreen flame Shannen Doherty has died after a long battle with breast cancer. As you might expect, Doherty’s passing inspired some poignant tributes from my peers, including my Rolling Stone colleague Rob Sheffield, Linda Holmes at NPR, and Kate Aurthur at Variety.

• By the time Dr. Ruth Westheimer got her first TV show, she was already in her late 50s, on top of being a tiny woman with a thick German-Jewish accent. The idea that she would become television’s go-to authority figure on matters of sex should have seemed ridiculous. But the improbable packaging only helped get the message across. In Reagan’s America, if this grandmotherly little lady could speak so frankly on the subject, and with such obvious insight and humor, then maybe it was okay for the rest of us to be less uptight about it. (She also played herself in a weird final season episode of Quantum Leap, where Sam leaped into her body, while the real Dr. Ruth got to speak frankly with Al.)

• Like Dr. Ruth, fitness guru Richard Simmons didn’t fit the mold of what the audience would expect from an expert in his field. But that was ultimately the point of Richard Simmons. He didn’t look like an Adonis, nor did many of the people exercising with him in his shows and videos. He helped normalize the idea of aerobics and other exercise as an activity that welcomed in people of every shape and size. Plus, the same relentless enthusiasm that made him such a ripe target for parody (including in an incredible Simpsons outtake) also made him so beloved, because the guy never seemed to give up on himself or his followers.

• Finally, the death of James B. Sikking reminded me of the weird things that can happen out in the wilds of a location shoot. In the summer of 1997, I was in New York to watch Brooklyn South — a short-lived cop show from the NYPD Blue team — spend a few days filming the real Brooklyn before going back to their stages in Los Angeles for everything else. Sikking and I were on a street corner, talking about how, even though he’d been in other successful shows like Doogie Howser, M.D., he was probably always going to be recognized first and foremost as Lt. Howard Hunter, the cartoonishly gung-ho SWAT team leader from Hill Street Blues. Because the universe has a sense of humor, practically within seconds of Sikking saying this, a car full of young guys pulled up at the stoplight in front of us, and one of the passengers leaned out the window, pointed frantically at Sikking, and told his buddies, “HILL STREET BLUES! HILL STREET BLUES!” The others recognized him, too, and they all began loudly humming Mike Post’s iconic HSB theme song. Sikking smiled and told them that if they loved him on that show, they should make sure to tune in to CBS on Mondays at 10 in the fall to watch Brooklyn South. That’s a professional, ladies and gents.

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