FX goes BIG with 'Shōgun'
A bestselling classic gets a new adaptation, 'The Regime' disappoints, 'Elsbeth' plays Columbo, and more
This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming just as soon as I try the breakfast loophole…
An epic new Shōgun
On a vacation in my 20s, I brought a paperback copy of Shōgun, James Clavell’s mid-’70s novel about an English sailor who washes ashore in feudal Japan and becomes an unexpected player in a burgeoning civil war. Despite the book clocking in at over 1000 pages, I blitzed through the whole thing on that trip, enjoying both the details of that period of Japanese history and all the vivid characters Clavell crafted, most of them fictionalized versions of real figures from that era. Eventually, I tracked down a copy of the 1980 miniseries adaptation, starring Richard Chamberlain and the late, great Toshiro Mifune, and was bummed out that that version’s producers opted to not subtitle any of the Japanese dialogue, which turned all the characters I’d loved into exotic, often inscrutable supporting players in the white hero’s story.
The new FX take on Shōgun, whose first two episodes are now streaming on Hulu, doesn’t make that mistake. As I wrote about at length in my review, not only do we get to understand all the dialogue, even when no one is translating for the Englishman, but the great Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada ultimately has a better claim to be the lead than Cosmo Jarvis as the sailor. And the whole thing is terrific. It’s made on a scale that, if not at peak Game of Thrones level, makes every previous FX drama look like a student film. The performances are wonderful — my favorite is Tadanobu Asano doing his best impression of the young Mifune — and it all builds to a satisfying conclusion by the end of the 10th episode. Highly recommend.
Winslet’s HBO winning streak comes to an end
This week’s most disappointing debut, by far, is The Regime. Despite starring Kate Winslet, and featuring a creative team that includes Succession writer Will Tracy and direction by the great Stephen Frears, it’s a clumsy blend of political satire struggling to find a target, and character drama that never feels like it belongs with the rest of the piece.
The Winslet/HBO pairing has led to excellent results in the past, most recently with her chowing down on hoagies in Mare of Easttown. She’s by far the best part of The Regime, but very little of the show around her works. Oh, well.
Just one more thing?
I always enjoyed Carrie Preston’s appearances on The Good Wife and The Good Fight, and was curious about her new spinoff Elsbeth, even though the last CBS drama I watched regularly was, I think, Evil — not coincidentally, another show created by Robert and Michelle King. To my surprise, Elsbeth isn’t a quirky legal drama, but a Columbo-style open mystery. Elsbeth is in New York, technically overseeing a consent decree for the NYPD’s major case unit, but in actuality playing detective herself, annoying various powerful killers into inadvertently revealing that they committed what was supposed to be a perfect crime.
I liked the three Elsbeth episodes I watched, because the Columbo format is so durable with the right performer in the lead, and Preston qualifies as much as Peter Falk, or more recently Natasha Lyonne on Poker Face. It’s not executed as well as those shows, and the idea that this is how Elsbeth would deal with a consent decree is one of the silliest premises I’ve seen in a while. But it’s fun.
In hindsight, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by the shift in genre and tone. The broadcast networks in general, and CBS in particular, has given up the ghost on trying to compete with cable and streaming when it comes to ambitious prestige drama. The Good Fight went straight to what was then called CBS All Access, and Evil got bumped over to streaming after a short stint on original recipe CBS. (It was also recently announced that Evil will end with its fourth season, with a few extra episodes tacked on to allow the Kings to bring the story to a proper conclusion.) Though This Is Us got a lot of Emmy nominations, and a handful of wins, The Good Wife feels like the real last gasp of a tradition of network shows like ER, Homicide, Hill Street Blues, and all the way back to The Defenders and East Side/West Side. If you want to get on CBS these days, you need to at least vaguely resemble the FBI shows, Blue Bloods, etc.
As creative compromises go, though, this is a pretty entertaining one. And while I would always encourage you to click the links to my reviews, since Rolling Stone is where I make my living, I might especially encourage it in this case, as after a while, I ran out of things to say about Elsbeth and began suggesting other spinoffs of recent great shows that could feature supporting characters solving murders in their spare time.
RIP, Richard Lewis
Richard Lewis died earlier this week of a heart attack. He was 76 and had been dealing with Parkinson’s, so the news doesn’t come as a complete shock. But it’s still a big loss to the comedy world.
I spent a lot of my impressionable years watching comedy specials on HBO. Lewis was a semi-regular presence in my living room, whether in ensemble specials (my favorite was 1988’s An All-Star Toast to The Improv, featuring him, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Martin Mull, Paul Rodriguez, and Robert Klein), or in his own solo showcases. Even though I was usually too young to fully appreciate the specifics of what he was talking about, he was, to me, the defining example of the neurotic Jewish school of comedy.
These days, he’s almost certainly best known for playing himself for most of the run of Curb Your Enthusiasm, opposite his lifelong friend Larry David. But he took several cracks at TV leading man status, without ever quite achieving it. His longest-running, and best, sitcom was ABC’s Anything But Love, where he and Jamie Lee Curtis played best friends who kept shrinking back from the idea of taking the relationship from platonic to romantic. It’s not streaming anywhere officially, but a couple of episodes are on YouTube, including this grainy transfer of the pilot episode:
Anything But Love ran for four seasons, but was never a big hit. (In the days when timeslots still mattered enormously, it stuck around largely because it got to air after the more popular Doogie Howser, M.D.) Still, Lewis and Curtis’ chemistry was infectious. Even though it’s neither the first nor last place where I encountered Lewis on my TV, it was the role I immediately thought of when I heard the news of his passing. Curtis loved the show, too, and wrote a lovely tribute to Lewis on her Instagram, which, among other things, thanked him for helping her get sober.
As coincidence would have it, this Sunday’s Curb Your Enthusiasm is one of the bigger, better Lewis spotlights the show has done, as he gets a great subplot that builds off of his own sobriety, which he was so proud of maintaining in the later decades of his life. He’s also prominent in several of this final season’s remaining episodes. It’s bittersweet to think that some of his best material on this show will appear after he’s no longer around to hear people praise it, but it also means he gets to remain present for us at least for a few more weeks. Rest in peace.
Odds and/or ends
The first two episodes of Apple’s The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin premiered today. I’ve only seen the first three installments. If you’re someone still grieving the loss of Our Flag Means Death, this show — a deliberately anachronistic, extremely queer show, starring Noel Fielding as the legendary 18th century English highwayman and Hugh Bonneville as his nemesis — will fill some of that hole in your heart, even if it’s not quite as deep.
Now that we’ve finished celebrating yet another wild Leap Day, it’s time to settle an important question once and for all. Which is the better Leap Day sitcom episode:
1)The 30 Rock that gave us the fake trailer for Leap Dave Williams
2)The Frasier episode where he tries and fails to sing “Buttons and Bows” at a PBS telethon?
Finally, Holsten’s, the New Jersey ice cream parlor institution that was the location of the final scene of The Sopranos, is remodeling its interior, and has put the famous “Don’t Stop Believing” booth up for auction on eBay. As I write this on Thursday afternoon, bidding is already over $32,000, which is way too rich for my blood, even if it would be much more interesting, and on-brand, than our current dining room arrangement. But even if I could afford/justify such an expense, I’d feel bad about owning the booth, because I feel like it should stay exactly where it is. Even if the rest of Holsten’s looks more modern, that thing should be preserved as a historical landmark. After all, it
That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?
Have to go with Fraser for the leap day content. The twirl/shimmy to get the handkerchief is classic.
I see what you did there.