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'Phineas and Ferb' returns, Owen Wilson plays golf, a June programming swoon, a 'Doctor Who' farewell, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I turn off your motion smoothing…

104 more days, 10 years later

You know I am deeply skeptical of almost any TV revival(*). There have been three great ones (Twin Peaks: The Return, Party Down, and Roseanne/The Conners), a few acceptable ones, and a whole lotta bad ones. So anytime a familiar title I once loved returns to my screen, I get nervous. Thankfully, what I’ve seen of the new Phineas and Ferb season at minimum qualifies as very, very good, for reasons I discuss at length in my review. It’s the exception that proves the rule, and I was so giddy to have new Perry the Platypus and Dr. Doofenshmirtz scenes to consume.

(*) As a reminder: a revival is a show bringing back some or all of the original characters from a previous series, played for the most part by the original actors. A reboot is a show that uses the original characters or some other element of the original show, but has new actors and that can also have a completely different approach to the old material. Party Down was a revival; Battlestar Galactica was a reboot.

Stick it

This week, Apple debuted Stick, a new comedy starring Owen Wilson as a disgraced former pro golfer who puts all of his money and energy into mentoring a talented but reckless teenage prodigy. As I say in my review, it is on the one hand cynical and shamelessly derivative, trying to copy the feel-good vibe of Ted Lasso while copying at least half a dozen different underdog sports movies. (Tin Cup in particular is a big reference point.) On the other hand, I have a weakness for the genre, Owen Wilson remains superhumanly charming, and the later episodes start doing some interesting things with the ensemble. Not a strong recommendation by any means, but you could do worse? Just prepare to be five beats ahead of almost everything that happens. And maybe have a murder board prepped to keep track of all the things they’re cribbing from?

What should Alan be watching?

Because the Emmy eligibility window closes at the end of May, June tends to be a slower-than-normal month in TV, just like January is for the movie business. But I can’t remember a June that’s been this slow. Other than the two shows I reviewed this week, there’s barely anything of interest until the last week of the month, when The Bear and Squid Game return, and there are few notable premieres or returns.

(Admittedly, some of this is a matter of genre preference. If you’re more into period costume dramas than I am, for instance, there are new seasons of The Gilded Age and The Buccaneers.)

For many of you with a long list of shows on your personal watchlists, this may be welcome news. For a writer looking for relatively current things to cover, it’s a lot trickier. But it may be time for me to break out my own list of shows I never got around to watching and/or writing about, just so the Rolling Stone TV reviews section doesn’t go dark for a few weeks.

To that end, I’m going to open the floor for suggestions. What are some 2025 shows you’ve enjoyed that you would encourage me to check out, either because you loved them or because you’re curious for my take on them? I can’t make any promises, but if ever there was a time for me to take requests, it’s now.

Doctor, doctor

What a mess Doctor Who finds itself in, both with its latest season finale and with the larger state of the franchise. “The Reality War” was utter gibberish, even by Russell T. Davies standards. At his best, he’s able to make the emotional beats so potent that it doesn’t matter that the plot was impossible to follow. Here, he couldn’t accomplish that, perhaps because the whole baby storyline seemed like it was designed for Ruby, then retrofitted to Belinda once Millie Gibson decided she didn’t want to continue full-time. It didn’t make emotional sense any more than it made plot sense. The only good scene was the appearance of Thirteen. And even that was frustrating, because it was a reminder that the show’s first female Doctor and its first non-white Doctor were both terribly underutilized. Chris Chibnall seemed reluctant to treat Thirteen like the main character of her own show, while Fifteen only appeared in two abbreviated seasons, with multiple episodes that barely featured him. And now he’s gone.

There’s a lot that’s been rumored, without serious reporting behind it, suggesting that the new seasons have been a disappointment for Disney and/or the BBC, that the show being in limbo led Ncuti Gatwa to quit and pursue other opportunities, that Davies might be out even if the BBC keeps the show going without the extra Disney money, and more. We’ll have to wait and see. I didn’t expect Gatwa to stick around very long, anyway, as he’s so young, talented, beautiful, and charismatic that I assume he’s going to have a big career in film and/or TV. But it’s still frustrating, because he was a wonderful Doctor, and, like Christopher Eccleston, we didn’t get nearly enough of him.

Poker Face recaplet: “One Last Job”

Finally, let’s talk about an extremely meta episode of Poker Face, featuring two different characters who see life almost entirely through the filter of their favorite movie genre. For Sam Richardson’s Kendall, that’s heist movies. For Geraldine Viswanathan’s Jenny, it’s romantic comedies. Because Kendall is tied to this week’s murder, while Viswanathan just has a glorified cameo, “One Last Job” leans much more in the crime movie direction. And its stretch of romantic comedy, where Charlie falls for Corey Hawkins as big box store manager Bill, comes tinged with sadness, because we already know that Bill will be killed by Kendall’s partner Juice (played by James Ransone from The Wire) when he walks in on them in the middle of them robbing the store.

So on the one hand, we’ve got Charlie feeling her tightest emotional connection to a victim since her best friend got killed in the series premiere, which makes the episode feel even darker than usual. And on the other hand, the climax features consecutive homages to Enter the Dragon (with all the flatscreen TVs standing in for the hall of mirrors) and Heat (including use of the Heat score), plus Juice running around the store with a samurai sword sticking out of his chest. This is a a tricky tonal balance, and there are many ways it could have fallen apart. But Hawkins and Natasha Lyonne are very good together. And Richardson gets to play Kendall with just enough depth that he feels like a person, when he could easily come across as an I Think You Should Leave character.

Also: if you see my Mission: Impossible rankings at the bottom of my Final Reckoning Letterboxd review, you know I do not agree that the third movie is the best. (It’s fine! Philip Seymour Hoffman is great and the rest is competent! I just don’t understand anyone who tries ranking it near the top.) But since we’re on the subject of Ethan Hunt’s latest adventure, featuring lots of our TV pals, I’ve had a hard time clearing this idea out of my head regarding the sequence with Tramell Tillman, Katy O’Brian, and the rest of the sub crew:

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