In defense of 'filler episodes'

Plus, Rashida Jones gets 'Sunny,' 'House of the Dragon' at mid-season, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I’m a barn owl cursed to wander in human form…

I’m having an episode

Last week, Lost began streaming on Netflix again. And as we all know, old TV shows don’t truly exist until they’re on Netflix, even if they’ve been available to stream elsewhere for a very long time. As part of the observation of this particular religious holiday, Vulture recirculated an old article from 2010 that suggested certain episodes that are best skipped if anyone were to attempt a rewatch. One of those happened to be among my favorite Lost episodes, “Tricia Tanaka Is Dead,” aka “The One Where Hurley and the Guys Fix the Dharma Van.”

And my irritation over this inspired me to finally write a full-length version of an argument I’ve been making piecemeal for a while now, both here and in various Rolling Stone columns: that the move towards making shorter seasons of TV shows, and of eliminating so-called “filler episodes,” has cost us far more than it’s gained, and that my recent rewatches of older shows have only reinforced the value of getting to spend extended time with characters, even in episodes that aren’t that great. Lots of chatter about lots of different kinds of shows and episodes in that column — including how the mock trial episode of The Good Wife, which was designed as filler, accidentally took that series to a new level — which allowed me to vent this ongoing frustration a bit.

It's always Sunny in Kyoto

Earlier this week, I reviewed Sunny, a new Apple comedy/mystery/sci-fi series starring Rashida Jones as a woman who loses her husband and son in a plane crash, and has to navigate her grief with the help of the robot her husband left for her. It’s an odd show, and one that doesn’t always work, especially where the plot is concerned. But Jones herself is terrific. Because she was the straight woman for so long in a Parks and Rec ensemble filled with comedy Hall of Fame performances, she can be easy to overlook as a comedic performer in her own right. But when the Parks writers gave Beautiful Ann funny things to do, Jones crushed it. And she was also very strong as the Leslie Nielsen-style lead of the TBS cop show parody Angie Tribeca. Here, she not only gets to play snarky and bitter, and play it well, but gets to interlace that with some real emotion and pain, given the show’s subject matter. It’s an excellent showcase for her, even if the story gets so labyrinthian that several late episodes have to be devoted to explaining it all.

Mid-season check-in: House of the Dragon

If you’re watching House of the Dragon Season Two live, then you’re caught up to where I was when I wrote my review. So let’s do some quick spoilers for the latest episode, shall we?

Spectacle-wise, “The Red Dragon and the Gold” is as good as it gets for HotD so far. Dragon-on-dragon-on-dragon action, filmed in broad, clear daylight, where it was never hard to tell what was happening, and where various twists and turns of the battle were surprising, not least of which was Aemond simultaneously attacking both Rhaenys and his brother Aegon, creating a whole new Westeros constitutional crisis in the process.

The battle also happened to feature two of the show’s four most interesting characters to this point, in Aemond and Rhaenys. (Alicent and Rhaenyra are the other two.) But my ongoing issue with HotD is that none of these characters has proven as compelling as even some of the third and fourth-stringers from Game of Thrones. I think a lot of the performances are excellent — the weariness on Eve Best’s face as Rhaenys steered back towards what she knew would be a losing, fatal battle really stung — but the Targaryens remain the clan of this fictional world I care about the least, despite those actors’ efforts.

But that’s just me. How are those of you watching feeling about this season at the midpoint?

Odds and/or ends

• The Fantasmas finale is tonight. I hope some of you were encouraged by my review to watch it. If not, you have a lot of delightful weirdness to look forward to, including the scene screencapped above, where Julio Torres is scolded by his social media manager, Pirulinpinpina. I will be using this early and often when I do not appreciate how people are speaking to me digitally. Also, like Sunny, Fantasmas features a slightly unnerving household robot. One more, and we’ve got us a trend.

• Meanwhile, sending out love and emotional support to any pals in the Television Critics Association who happen to be reading this on Day Three of the summer TCA press tour. I haven’t been since before the pandemic, for a variety of reasons. Like the amount of episodes in a typical TV season, press tour has shrunk over the years: some of my early summer tours in the Nineties ran a shade over three weeks, while this one is only eight days, and some former tour mainstays like HBO won’t be there at all this time. But I still miss being there, both to see all my friends in the TCA and to have the kinds of valuable in-person interactions with people in the business that simply can’t be replicated over Zoom, DMs, etc. Stay strong, everybody.

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