From the Motor City to Moscow

'Diarra from Detroit,' 'A Gentleman in Moscow,' 'Parish,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I suggest you try some of our signature spice curls…

Diarra from Detroit is a delight

I keep a running list of shows I’d like to watch far enough ahead of their premiere that I can decide whether it’s worth devoting the time to review them. Because it’s now more common than not for me to get a full season of a show in advance, it’s increasingly difficult to get to everything on that list, or even to the majority of it. More often than not, if I miss something, I miss it, lament the opportunity to see something that could be good, and move on to newer things.

In the case of Diarra from Detroit, a new mystery/comedy/drama hybrid that began streaming last week on BET+, I only had time to watch the first episode before it premiered. But that first episode was appealing enough to make me want to keep going, even if it meant I would have to make this an occasional example of reviewing a new show post-debut. As discussed at much greater length in my review, it’s a terrific showcase for creator/star Diarra Kilpatrick, and an excellent example of how to make seemingly incompatible tones and genres enhance one another, rather than detracting. I liked it a lot, and highly recommend if you happen to be a BET+ subscriber. (Or, if you want to wait another month until all the episodes are available, you could binge it during a free trial.) Looking forward to seeing more from Kilpatrick after this.

A mustache in Moscow

This week’s other column is my review of A Gentleman in Moscow, the charming 8-part adaptation of Amor Towles’ novel about a Russian aristocrat who, post-Revolution, is sentenced to lifetime home imprisonment in a luxury hotel. It gets by primarily on vibe and the charm of Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, but I enjoyed it.

Mostly, though, I have mustache brain right now. McGregor begins the miniseries sporting an impressively styled handlebar mustache, and even though that gets trimmed a bit during the first episode, it’s still a distinctive piece of character-building facial hair. I also spent a couple of days this week polishing off a Doctor Who interview feature I did with Ncuti Gatwa and Russell T. Davies, which will be published in May, close to the new season premiere. Despite having a limited amount of time and a whole lot to cover with those two, I could not stop myself from devoting several questions to Gatwa’s own ‘stache, which led to the discovery that he had to wear a fake one for his first two months as the Doctor, because he had just finished Sex Education, and he went clean-shaven as Eric to look younger. This then sent me down a rabbit hole of classic TV mustaches, both real, fake, and in between, like the period when Nick Offerman had to wear a fake one for a while during Parks and Rec Season Four episodes, because Tammy I got Ron to shave in an early episode. I even revisited an interview I did with Sam Elliott that inevitably spent several minutes on him being clean-shaven for the final season of Justified.

All of which is to say that I am a sucker for a well-deployed push broom. And I’d like to know what some of your all-time favorite TV mustaches are. Because I can’t be the only one with this fixation, right? Right? Is this thing on?

Odds and/or ends

• Going into the week, I had to choose between reviewing A Gentleman in Moscow or Parish, a new AMC drama starring Giancarlo Esposito as a reformed getaway driver who gets mixed up in an archetypal One Last Job. (It debuts on Sunday.) I watched the first Parish, episode, but even with my love of the man who played Gus Fring, I found it to be a glum, paint-by-numbers cable anti-hero drama, including an inconvenient body to be disposed of. The odd thing is that both Esposito and Bryan Cranston (with Showtime’s Your Honor) made their post-Heisenberg-verse return to series television with similar types of dramas, both of them remakes of British series, both set in New Orleans. It’s entirely possible Parish gets more distinctive and/or thrilling in later episodes, but there wasn’t enough here to keep me going in a week when I had a lot on my plate.

• Phoebe Waller-Bridge as Fleabag is my Prime Video profile avatar, and every time I open up that app to watch something else, a part of me thinks, I should really just rewatch Fleabag instead. A few nights ago, I finally gave into that impulse, popping on the Season Two premiere — aka The One Where We Meet Hot Priest — as my bedtime viewing. It remains an absolute masterpiece, one of the best episodes of television ever made. (The finale’s pretty incredible, too, as I wrote about at the time.) That is all.

• Among our family binges at the moment is King of the Hill, about which I have one major complaint: the closed captions make most of Boomhauer’s dialogue intelligible, thus ruining the primary joke about Boomhauer. I don’t know if this was a decision made way back in the Nineties when the show debuted, or if it’s something that was done when it came to streaming, but I hate it. At minimum, there should be some kind of option where you get captions for everyone else, but not him.

• You might remember that I turned my review of Peacock’s Apples Never Fall into a larger complaint about the flood of forgettable spring miniseries with A-list stars that try and fail to get lots of Emmy love. One of the examples I mentioned was Apple’s The Last Thing He Told Me with Jennifer Garner, which seemingly came and went with no notice last year. Hilariously, Apple this week ordered a second season, thus elevating it from limited to ongoing drama. Maybe someone there realized that the overload of the former — and the relative lack of prestige dramas these days, in the wake of Succession, Better Call Saul, The Crown, and others ending — means that continuing series are now the better Emmy-bait play.

• Speaking of shows that should not be continuing, The Constellation season finale debuted earlier this week on Apple. As you know, I grew increasingly frustrated with the show over the course of these eight episodes, especially when I realized this very thin story wasn’t meant just for a limited series. But if any of you stuck with it til the end, I’m curious how you felt.

• This Variety story about why HBO has delayed production on Euphoria Season Three is really wild — as are most things about Sam Levinson these days, it seems. Admittedly, I’ve never been the show’s target audience — though I like parts of it a lot (and find other parts exasperating) — but I’m disappointed that they apparently won’t be doing the storyline where Rue is now a hard-boiled private detective.

• I watched Doug Liman’s Road House remake last weekend, which was reasonably entertaining, but also not distinctive enough to wind up a cult classic like the bonkers original with Patrick Swayze. Throughout the lengthy action sequence involving boats, though, all I could think about was an anecdote from my interviews for Welcome to The O.C. (still on sale everywhere!), about Liman jumping off a boat while filming The O.C. pilot. It turns out, you see, that this is just a thing Liman does:

When patience pays off

Finally, speaking of revisiting old shows, my current treadmill watch is ER(*), where the trauma sequences are adrenaline-pumping enough to help get me through the cardio. I binged the first eight seasons or so straight through when the show first arrived on Hulu back in 2018. So this time, I’ve been bouncing around, starting off with mass casualty episodes like “Exodus” and “Blizzard,” then hitting scenes or stories I like.

(*) While we’re on the subject of ER, by the way, I was very heartened by the news that Max had commissioned a new medical procedural drama, starring Noah Wyle, and produced by fellow ER alums John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill, which will be making 15-episode seasons. My buddy Joe Adalian’s own newsletter breaks down the many reasons why this is promising.

Since the Benton/Carter relationship was my favorite part of the show (which I wrote about for Uproxx during that earlier binge), one of those scenes was of course their farewell midway through Season Eight:

The thing that’s always struck me about that conversation is that it is, I believe, the first and only time in the series where Carter calls Benton by his first name. It’s a great payoff to a relationship that was always presented as mentor/protege, even long after Carter left surgery and became a respected doctor in his own right. For Carter to finally say “Peter” rather than “Dr. Benton” gives their goodbye so much more emotional heft than it would have had the show let them act more like peers sooner.

It’s the kind of moment you can only get on a long-running series, and specifically ones where the creative team doesn’t feel compelled to fast forward through character interactions. It reminded me of another classic example, from very late in the final season of Better Call Saul, where Jimmy and Kim say “I love you” on screen for the first time in the entire series (definitively the first, in this case), and at the worst possible moment:

It would be a powerful exchange no matter what, simply because Odenkirk and Seehorn are that great, and because Kim adding, “But so what?” perfectly captures how awry their marriage has gone. But the fact that we never heard them utter those words to each other previously takes it up another notch.

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