Keri is so very

'The Diplomat' returns, plus 'Only Murders in the Building' & 'Agatha All Along' finales, a Teri Garr tribute, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I swap clothes with a stranger at a formal event…

Diplomat-ic immunity?

The Diplomat Season Two hit Netflix yesterday, and I published two stories about it since last we newslettered together.

The first is a long and absolutely delightful conversation I had with Keri Russell, who at this point is remarkably unfiltered. We talked a lot about this show, but also spent time theorizing about The Americans(*), the long history of everyone’s obsession with her hair, whether her real partner or her TV partner are better at faking an American accent, and a lot more. In general, I consider myself better at interviewing behind-the-scenes people than actors, but this was a very good one. If you haven’t already read it, I hope you enjoy.

(*) Left on the cutting room floor: I asked Russell how, if time and space weren’t factors, Elizabeth Jennings from The Americans might attempt to get close to Kate Wyler from The Diplomat. Among the things I love about talking with Russell is that she will treat the premise of such a ridiculous question with utmost seriousness. She spent several minutes trying to think it through, before hitting a wall because, as she pointed out, “Kate doesn't have many hobbies so far,” and Elizabeth so often approaches her targets through non-professional avenues. Eventually, she suggested I ask FX publicist — and encyclopedic American expert — Lana Kim for a suggestion. Kim’s response: “She will be one more person forcing Kate to pull her look together. At first Kate resents her but then Elizabeth through her styling expertise gains Kate’s trust. There are few people closer to getting one’s secrets than a stylist.”

The second is my take on Season Two itself. As I talk about often, it’s hard to decide exactly how to cover binge-release shows, especially once they get past their first seasons. Sometimes, I do a traditional review, with no real spoilers. Sometimes, most of what I want to say that’s new requires me to spoil things, so I do what I did here, with a column designed to be read after you’ve finished the season. As a result, I won’t say much else here, except to share the spoiler-free thesis of the column: this remains an incredibly fun show whose seasons are nonetheless much too short, preventing it from being as good as it possibly can be. (Make TV seasons longer; I am not a crackpot.”) The good news is they’ll be making eight episodes next year instead of six, but 10 still feels like the better size. (Maybe 13, but that’s a pipe dream in the modern streaming economy.)

Only recaps of the finale

Elsewhere in streaming spoiler country, Only Murders in the Building wrapped up its fourth season earlier in the week. The finale was surprising in that it didn’t try to pile one more twist on top of last week’s revelation of who the killer was, and instead spent most of its time explaining how and why everything went down, while also trying to give Charles and Oliver some emotional closure on their respective stories this year. (Whatever Mabel’s story was meant to be, the season long since lost interest in it.) On the one hand, I think it was smart to not overcomplicate things, since Only Murders can, like many more straightforward mystery shows, get too twist-happy for its own good. On the other, I think both the Charles and Oliver stories were hit-or-miss, with Jane Lynch doing a lot of heavy lifting on the former, while the latter felt fairly sweaty in finding a way to work around Meryl Streep’s busy schedule without giving Oliver and Loretta an unhappy ending.

My pal Myles McNutt has been covering every episode of the season over at his excellent Episodic Medium newsletter. As an exclusive to the What’s Alan Watching? community, here’s a free link to his expansive thoughts on the finale, and Season Four as a whole, which will hopefully inspire you to become a regular subscriber there.

Though I think this season got too overwhelmed by all its guest stars, the three leads still make it an enjoyable watch. Curious how everyone else feels at this stage.

Agatha at the end

I started out Agatha All Along as something of a skeptic — or perhaps just so burned out on the MCU that I couldn’t fully embrace what Jac Schaeffer, Kathryn Hahn, and company were up to. By the time we got to this week’s two-part finale, though, I was as pleased with it as I’ve been with any Marvel show since its predecessor, WandaVision. I wrote about all the things that link the two series — not least of which is the way that they, unlike most of the other MCU entries for Disney+ (She-Hulk excepted), embrace being television shows. I have no idea when, how, or even if the story might continue, which is an annoyance, but on the whole, this turned out very satisfying.

She’s not there

Teri Garr did some TV work — most notably several appearances on Friends as Phoebe’s birth mom, as an unofficial acknowledgment of how much Lisa Kudrow’s performance owed to Garr — but was most famous for her Seventies and Eighties work in film. But when she died earlier this week after 20-plus years of dealing with multiple sclerosis, I was asked to write the tribute to one of my favorite comedic performers of my youth. I highlighted a few of her best film roles — including Tootsie, Young Frankenstein, After Hours, and The Conversation — in an attempt to explain what made her such a special, and singular, talent. I spent half a day just rewatching some of her scenes in those films, as well as falling down a rabbit hole of her god tier appearances with David Letterman, and I embedded some of the best clips in that story. She was wonderful.

Putting out the paper

Finally, we end on a story as sad as it was inevitable: Advance Media is doing away with the print edition of The Star-Ledger, and several other of its New Jersey newspapers, with the last issue coming out in February of 2025.

I started working as a features intern at the Ledger in the summer of 1996, a week after graduating college. Within a few months, through a combination of luck, good timing, and me being a lunatic, I was sharing the TV beat, in a job I would hold for the next 14 years. When I began, the Ledger had just brought in a new editorial team that would reshape the paper into a powerhouse that broke big stories, won awards (the paper got its first Pulitzer while I was there), and had an embarrassment of talent. If we weren’t exactly printing money, it often felt that way, and it seemed like any kind of project we wanted to do was possible.

Then came the internet, as well as legacy media’s decision to give away their product for free online, realizing far too late that if you get people used to not paying for news, they’ll never want to pay for news. While this was good for some individuals — myself among them — it was the first step in a long road towards where we are right now. Even by the time I left in 2010, the paper was a shell of its former self, thanks to buyouts and other forms of staff attrition. It’s been a long time since I’ve picked up the increasingly-skimpy print edition, anyway, though I remain a digital subscriber, so I’m as much a part of the problem as everyone else. (And for now, at least, management is saying all the right things about investing in the digital project. I will keep my fingers crossed for the friends I have who still work there.)

Still, I think about the day that someone at HBO called up me and Matt Zoller Seitz to ask if we could arrange for someone in our production department to speak to someone making props for a new show of theirs called The Sopranos, because one of the characters was a Star-Ledger subscriber and they wanted to make fake papers for him to read. We had no idea how big a deal that show would become, nor how iconic the image would be of Tony waddling to the end of his driveway at the start of each season to pick up his newspaper.

Times change, consumption habits change, and the world spins in new directions. But it’s staggering that this institution that was such a big part of my life — long before I got a job there, I grew up in a house that subscribed to the Ledger — would one day cease to exist, at least in the form I knew so well.

Like Tony Soprano, I apparently came in at the end, too?

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