'Inside' Dan(son)

A 'Good Place' reunion on Netflix's 'A Man on the Inside,' plus 'Interior Chinatown,' 'Night Gallery,' James Bond, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as you’re the Louise to my Thelma — if that movie was a banana comedy…

Not too old for this shit

The last show Mike Schur made with Ted Danson was an all-time classic, The Good Place. Their new collaboration, Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, isn’t as audacious as Good Place, nor as consistently funny. But the series — in which Danson plays a lonely retired widower who goes undercover in a retirement home to help a private detective investigate a jewel heist — is incredibly warm, wise, and clever. I wrote a lot about it over at Rolling Stone. The whole season is already out. This particular case gets solved by the end, but hopefully Schur and Danson get to explore future mysteries — and future questions of how to live the best possible life, at any age — in future installments. I imagine it will appeal greatly to readers of this here newsletter, and I will offer some spoiler thoughts on it next week. (In a newsletter I’ll publish on Wednesday, due to the holiday.)

Better off Ted

This week’s Shrinking has maybe Harrison Ford’s funniest moment of the series to date, when Paul performs a spoken word rendition of Summer’s TikTok anthem “Cheater Bitch.” It has more of Damon Wayans Jr. being super charming as the other Derrick (aka “D2”). It continues Alice’s push into recklessness, as she and Summer get into a brawl at school. And it has a lot of fun with the idea of Jimmy trying his immersive therapy routine with the very reluctant Dan. There are so many things here I could talk about.

But all I want to talk about is Ted effing McGinley.

Through no real fault of his own, McGinley has spent much of his career as a punchline: the guy who joins shows after they’ve passed their peaks. Never mind that several of those runs were very long: he was on Happy Days for five seasons, and on Married… with Children for seven seasons (more than half its run). Never mind that Happy Days had creative problems long before McGinley showed up, or that many Married fans prefer Jefferson to Steve. Never mind that McGinley has pretty much always risen to the level of good material when given it, like his stint on Sports Night. Once you get dubbed a showkiller, however erroneously it’s a hard label to shake.

Even this show didn’t do a lot with him in the first season. He would sit on the couch or stand on the balcony, and get one or two lines at the end of a scene in each episode. They were funny lines, sold expertly by McGinley, but he was a garnish on the dish at most. This year, he’s a course of the meal unto himself, and he’s been wonderful. The writers for a while really leaned into the idea of Derek as the perfect man — at total peace with himself, superhumanly supportive of Liz and their friends — to great comic effect. And here, he gets to play straight drama — and play it awfully well — as Liz finally discovers the limits of Derek’s affability when she kisses Mac.

I’m in the process of finalizing various year-end superlatives lists, including one with 10 of my favorite performances for the year. I’m only doing one per show, and for a while wasn’t sure who from Shrinking I’d want to spotlight. Ford? Brett Goldstein? Jessica Williams? But I think it has to be McGinley, the most unexpected of MVPs for this season.

Everything’s still coming up Milhouse?

Fox announced earlier this week that Simpsons voice actor Pamela Hayden, who played Milhouse, Jimbo, and several other long-running characters, is retiring, and this Sunday’s episode — an anthology episode featuring a Peak TV parody segment that we’ll talk about in next week’s newsletter (which, again, will probably be out on Wednesday) — will be the last one featuring her work.

While Mrs. Krabappel, Lionel Hutz, and Troy McClure were all retired after the deaths of Marcia Wallace and Phil Hartman, the plan is to recast Milhouse and company. This raises the question of what happens if/when we get other retirements before the show ends. Hayden is 70, but she’s actually younger than Julie Kavner and Harry Shearer, and not that much older than Dan Castellaneta. All of them sound appreciably different than in the show’s early decades, but it’s still clearly the original actors playing them. Will the plan be to eventually recast all the characters? Or will all involved consider it one thing to replace secondary characters, and another when it comes to Homer, Marge, Bart, and Lisa?

As I wrote here earlier this fall, I believe The Simpsons still has creative juice, albeit less frequently than in the classic years. But I’d need a lot of convincing about the idea of the show going on with new voices for Our Favorite Family. Then again, Mel Blanc died in 1989 and they still make Bugs Bunny cartoons…

Hanging up the Night Gallery

Progress continues on many fronts in my Rod Serling research. The latest milestone I cleared this week was finishing a quasi-binge of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery on DVD (it’s not streaming anywhere), in which I only watched or rewatched the episodes Serling himself wrote. Despite his name in the title and his presence as host, Serling’s creative involvement was minimal outside his own scripts, and he and showrunner Jack Laird didn’t get along.

Like any anthology show, including Twilight Zone, Night Gallery is fundamentally uneven. But its extremes are greater. The show features some of Serling’s best writing, like “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar,” which completes something of a quartet that began with his breakthrough teleplay Patterns and continued with Twilight Zone episodes “Walking Distance” and “A Stop at Willoughby.” That one, and others like “The Messiah on Mott Street,” “The Boy Who Could Predict Earthquakes,” and “Cool Air,” hold up well against the best of his work from the Fifties and Sixties. Then there are others that are just godawful, like “The Nature of the Enemy,” where a crew of astronauts go missing on the moon and it turns out that they were killed by… a giant mouse? (The only rationale I’ve ever been able to come up with for that one is that he was attempting a sick joke about the idea of the moon being made of green cheese.) I’ve been watching and listening to a lot of interviews and other public appearances Serling did around this point in his life, and he always comes down incredibly hard on Night Gallery, partly out of frustration from being iced out by Laird. There are some episodes that left me thinking he was being way too hard on the show, even under this awkward circumstance, and others where I’ve felt he was somehow being too kind.

I still have a couple of dozen teleplays to get through, and a handful of his feature films, and I’ve barely begun the interview process. But things are coming together nicely so far.

(Also, because I just reminded you of the Serling book, I am now contractually obligated to once again bring up the upcoming February release of Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul. You can preorder it right now!)

Odds and/or ends

• I really enjoyed Charles Yu’s novel Interior Chinatown, an extremely meta look at the marginalization of Asian-American characters in pop culture, told from the point of view of a man who’s a background character in a police procedural and forces his way into the spotlight. Hulu released all 10 episodes of Yu’s miniseries adaptation of the book this week. For reasons I still don’t understand, Hulu only gave critics the first five episodes in advance, which made reviewing it seem besides the point given the binge release. I did sample the first two episodes anyway, just to see if Yu was able to translate the very specific and idiosyncratic tone of the book to television. And at least in what I saw, it doesn’t quite work. (Critics who watched all five screeners seemed in line with my take.)

• What We Do in the Shadows continues to cook with gas in its final season. In previous years, the show picked its spots regarding the vampires intersecting with modern human culture. That was a smart move, because while those stories were always among the series’ funniest, there’s more of a limit to how often they could be told than there is with, say, Laszlo’s various kinks. But with only a handful of episodes left, the show clearly sees no reason to hold back. So we’ve gotten one banger after another set at Cannon Capital, this time with Colin Robinson trying to help Guillermo figure out his office “thing.” Even better was Laszlo and Nandor seeing Sean melting down over March Madness and assuming his behavior was due to demonic possession, because what else could explain such extreme highs and lows in so short a span? Bonus points for Jon Glaser as a demon who’s just as obsessed with the NCAA tournament as Sean, particularly for Glaser’s pronunciation of “Gonzaga.”

Boxd. Letterboxd.

Finally, I finished my oft-discussed, out-of-sequence ER treadmill binge last week. Because I still can’t commit to another show for the purpose of exercise, I’ve made a temporary shift back to action movies, but with a series twist: I’m watching James Bond movies, at random, based on whichever one hits me in that moment. Like ER, they hit the sweet spot of having enough action to keep me going, while also being material I know well enough that I don’t worry about not giving it my full attention while I’m on the move.

Plus, it’s an excuse to do a bit more with my Letterboxd account, which for much of this year has been used to log the Rod Serling movies I’m watching. So far, I’ve done Licence to Kill, the lesser of the two Timothy Daltons (he and Carey Lowell both deserved a better and Bond-ier movie) and For Your Eyes Only, an attempt at back-to-basics spycraft after the silliness of Moonraker. Next up, I think I’ll hit one or both of the two middle Brosnans, which I last watched in theaters on dates with my future wife. No need to follow along on this odd journey, but you can if you want to.

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