It's the end of the world as we know it

An apocalyptic 'Paradise,' plus a disjointed 'Suits' spinoff, another terrific 'The Pitt,' book corner, 'Severance,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I trick my mind into liking beans…

Just another day for you and me in Paradise

Forgive back-to-back classic rock references to start off this newsletter, but 1)I’m old, and 2)Paradise absolutely invites it with all of its emo covers of Eighties power ballads.

This week’s episode, “The Day,” went cover-less, but that was far from its biggest departure from the norm. (Spoilers follow.) This one was the event that’s been teased since the very first episode: getting to see the day a climate apocalypse abruptly ravaged the planet, and sent Collins, President Bradford, and all our other main characters fleeing to the relative safety of their underground home.

While my overall feelings on Paradise are very mixed, I thought Dan Fogelman and company did a great job of leaning into full disaster movie mode. The chaos and horror of the day was adequately conveyed, despite the budget being way lower than your average Roland Emmerich film. And Cal’s dawning awareness that he should give the people being left behind at least a little warning of what to expect was a fairly powerful development, and one that does a lot of heavy lifting for a character who doesn’t appear at all in the series’ present-day action. Cal having a device that could unleash a worldwide electromagnetic pulse — devastating the infrastructure for any aboveground survivors, but preventing a full nuclear holocaust — is both silly and very true to this genre.

Of course, Paradise can’t end the world more than once (probably?), and the action inside the cave has been a lot more hit-or-miss for me. Hulu already ordered a new season, so I’m expecting some kind of big cliffhanger in next week’s season finale. But it won’t be Collins getting confirmation that his wife is still alive, since we’ve already received that.

For those of you who have stuck with it, how are you feeling?

You have failed this spinoff!

This week’s big-ish premiere was Suits LA on NBC. As you might recall, 2023 gave us the Summer of Suits, where for weeks and weeks on end, the most streamed show in all of television was one of the second-tier entries from the “Blue Skies” era of the USA network. Suddenly, Suits was a recognizable brand name — aka the single most valued commodity among film and television executives today. So it was inevitable that Suits creator Aaron Korsh would try to do a new show. Though Gabriel Macht is eventually going to appear on the spinoff, at this point it is a brand-new thing, with different characters, a different setting, and — most problematically for a spinoff of a show that was relatively light and nimble most of the time — a darker tone, tied to yet another show where Stephen Amell plays a tortured hero whose tragic backstory is gradually revealed in flashbacks each week. That doesn’t work, nor does the fact that Korsh decided to open the series with what should absolutely be a Season Three or Season Four plot for this kind of show. I never loved Suits — of the Blue Skies shows, I’d much prefer to see more Burn Notice or White Collar — but as I discuss at length in my review, this just seems to miss the target entirely.

In Memoriam

• News broke Thursday morning that Gene Hackman, his wife Betsy Arakawa, and their dog were all found dead in their home in Santa Fe. Hackman was 95, so his death was much less shocking than this circumstance, which police are still looking into at the time of this writing. Hackman was a giant of acting, the kind of guy where nearly every performance he gave had a good argument for an Oscar nomination. (Well, maybe not his final role in Welcome to Mooseport.) His work as paranoid surveillance expert Harry Caul in The Conversation is one of the all-time great screen performances. He was hilariously narcissistic in different ways in Superman and The Royal Tenenbaums, was terrifying as Little Bill in Unforgiven, an indomitable spirit as Norman Dale in Hoosiers, and spectacular in so many other films. I wrote about his work as Lex Luthor as part of a Rolling Stone tribute to his best performances.

• Where Hackman got to live a long and full life, Michelle Trachtenberg was taken way too soon at 39. She got a very early start on acting, doing her first commercial at the age of 3. She joined the cast of The Adventures of Pete & Pete before she turned 9, and spent her mid-late teens as Dawn Summers, the magically-created sister of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in that classic show’s final seasons. (Later, as my colleague Brittany Spanos wrote about, she stole scenes as a Gossip Girl villain.) Dawn was something of a thankless role, but by design, as she was something of a commentary on TV shows that add cute kids in their later seasons as their younger characters age. And Trachtenberg played her with such energy and conviction that she very quickly felt like she belonged, even when Dawn was at her most deliberately annoying.

The Pitt recaplet: “Hour Nine”

Let’s hit various random thoughts (with spoilers) for this week’s The Pitt. (Also, a reminder that my deep dive interview with the producers is still waiting for you if you hadn’t already seen last week’s episode when it was published.)

• Robby’s speech about the young patient he lost during his residency was notable for two reasons. One is that it establishes that he did said residency in New Orleans, once again making whatever deviations possible from the guy Noah Wyle played on ER. The second is that Wyle is just spectacular on this show. It’s not just that Robby doesn’t really feel like Carter, despite the similar setting. It’s how well Wyle plays Robby as an open wound. After Whitaker lost his first patient earlier this season, Robby admitted that he’s never really managed to build up the emotional armor necessary to just let that kind of thing go. In this speech, it’s clear how much that 30-year-old memory still pains him, which only helps underline how hard it is for him to cope with Adamson’s death, as well as the tragedies of this day like the fentanyl overdose and the drowned girl. We’re still relatively early in this year’s Emmy cycle, but Wyle not only feels like he has to be a lead actor nominee, but he’s probably my favorite right now. (He was nominated several times for ER, but the only actors to ever win for that show were Julianna Margulies in the first season, and guest stars Sally Field and Ray Liotta.)

• This one offers two very different sides to Langdon dealing with the new doctors. He is so over the top in his anger towards Santos that even Robby feels compelled to intercede, despite Langdon being Robby’s favorite. Yet with Mel, he’s incredibly sensitive and encouraging, not only recognizing that the drowning case hit her hard, but already understanding her particular quirks enough to know how much she would enjoy picking out hundreds of pieces of glass from the road rash victim. Yes, Santos is abrasive, reckless, and has made several mistakes over the course of this one day, while Mel has been kicking ass all shift and not stirring up trouble. But perhaps Langdon can also tell that Santos is suspicious of him regarding whatever’s happening with the meds, and is overcompensating?

• It feels like both Santos and Whitaker have been through several months worth of experiences over this single shift, but it’s still fun to watch Whitaker gradually blossom. Here, he gets to put his rural background to good use by not only catching one of the loose rats, but swiftly and easily breaking its neck, to great applause from his colleagues. That’s the sort of thing that the others will tell stories about, for as long as he works there. (Which, for our sakes, will hopefully be many seasons.)

• But whatever occasionally feels silly about the format is more than made up for by what’s gained by getting to follow some of these cases for many episodes. McKay’s struggle to get their human trafficking victim to ask for help, like her earlier failure with the unhoused mom, are just much more effective because of how long we’ve been watching her try with each. And while it was obvious from at least the second episode that Doug, the angry patient in chairs, was eventually going to explode and do something awful, but the emotional impact of seeing him punch Dana — the single kindest and most empathetic character on the show, who earlier in this episode does such a good job of defusing the fight over masks — is greater because we’ve gotten to watch his tension build and build in close to real time.

You think you’re better than me?

So far with my White Lotus recaps, I’m continuing to break things down by group. For the second episode, the focus was on various characters acting fundamentally superior to other characters, sometimes with justification, usually without. Meanwhile, some good discussion in our Monday morning chat.

Buy my book! But also buy their books!

• In case you’ve forgotten, Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill is still on sale wherever books are sold, and here’s a fun interview I did with Wisconsin Public Radio about the show and the book.

• Linda Holmes’ third novel, Back After This, came out on Tuesday. It is both a super charming and funny romantic comedy and a very knowing look inside the world of audio from one of the tru pro’s pros in the podcasting business. As was the case back when she first sent me the manuscript for what became Evvie Drake Starts over, I couldn’t put down the first draft of Back After This once I got my hands on it. And the book only got sharper and funnier and more tightly-plotted with subsequent revisions. As with Saul v. Jimmy, it’s available wherever books are sold. Also, as a fun and suitable twist for a book by and about a woman who works in audio, Linda got to narrate the audiobook this time, which you can get on Libro.fm, Audible, etc.

• Emily St. James, meanwhile, is publishing her debut novel, Woodworking — about the unlikely friendship between a trans high school teacher in South Dakota and a student who’s the only other trans person she knows — on Tuesday. I won’t be getting to read it until after its official release, but among the annoying things about Emily is how talented she is, so my expectations for this are very high. I certainly don’t expect to have to bust out this old meme after I finish reading:

All this has happened before, and it will all happen again?

Finally, it’s Severance time. This week’s episode was so different from the norm that I’m reluctant to say much of anything about it here for the unspoiled, save that I spend a good chunk of my Rolling Stone recap talking about how much it surprisingly echoed the premise of a long-forgotten show featuring one of the actors who appears in it. In the big picture of the season and the series, it’s a very important one. Did it work? You tell me. And speaking of which…

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