I just saw an interview with Lyonne where she sounds so much like Columbo, I was baffled. I haven’t watched the new season yet, but is this the way she talks now?
The second episode of Duster is fantastic. The first was fun, but everything really clicked in the second. Donal Logue and Patrick Warburton are great, it's funny, moves fast, and the theft is a blast. Loved it.
I am totally fine with Joel's death happening when it did. I still love the show. It packs a wallop and I miss him, but Bella Ramsey is so good and I remain fully invested in Ellie's story. I don't think the quality or storytelling have suffered due to Joel being killed so early.
Agree with the sentiment behind let TV be TV, but I missed The Pitt as it aired, and it made for an excellent binge watch. Devoured it in a few days. Will definitely watch the second season weekly.
To build upon your "Let TV be TV" article, this is also reflected in the streaming rankings where long-running procedural shows (NCIS, Grey's Anatomy, SVU) are consistently among the most viewed top 10 non-original streaming shows.
Yup. The audience has made it clear — including in The Summer of Suits — that they like traditional TV shows with lots of long seasons. And the streamers are so reluctant to make those.
Poker Face is catnip to me, as a lover of both Columbo and Rian Johnson. But I also often feel like something is missing. I think its the length of the episodes. They're usually just a bit longer than half the length of Columbo episodes. The killer setups are generally the right length (like this week), but then we lose the interaction between Charlie and the killer. She needs to keep going back to the killer, who first trusts her, then tries to double down when they worry Charlie is on to them, and then finally get sick of her. There isn't time to do all that in 25 minutes. Has Johnson addressed why episodes aren't longer? Even 10-15 minutes would be a huge improvement. (Also, for what it's worth, I think Elsbeth does a great job with the second part...but their killer setups are too short.)
I haven't specifically talked to him about the length, though I'm hopefully interviewing him again at the end of the season, and will ask then. I agree with you that the Charlie sections often feel too short. I don't know if that's just about trying to make Lyonne's workload manageable, or if Johnson and the others feel like they don't want to overstay their welcome. But the best episodes are the ones that get close to an hour in length, because that means more of Charlie interacting with the killer.
I don’t know how serious the Cheers producers & NBC were ever about a Norm & Cliff spin-off but I’m glad it never happened. As much as l love those characters, I don’t think neither could carry a show. Better in supporting roles.
Agree completely on the Last of Us. It felt like there was a way that they could have spent a whole season in Jackson, adjusting to "normal" life, while Abbie and her crew slowly made their way there. At least in that way, when Joel was killed, Ellie's relationships with other characters might feel more earned, and the hand-off from Joel/Ellie to Ellie/Dina might have been more effective. As it is, all the new characters just feel two-dimensional, and their relationships with Ellie are rushed.
I've avoided reading anything about the game because I did some research on the Cordyceps infection 2 years ago and was spoiled on the smart infected in S2. From the answers in Alan's interview and comments game players have made, it seems that almost all of TLoU the TV show is a scene-by-scene, line-by-line remake of the game. The creators are very committed to that faithful reproduction, so I doubt there was ever any chance of them doing what you describe (and many of us might have enjoyed). Extending Joel's story or changing the outcome would probably lose the game fans, and they're the core audience for the show.
Book fans of Game of Thrones slowly turned on the show long before the public did over all the little changes that were made, I'd assume HBO was well-aware of that and has been supportive of the approach on TLoU. It's debatable if that was wise but the game fans seem to be thrilled with this show.
If the game fans are the core audience of the show, the show is doing something wrong. GoT, for better or worse, understood that it had to reach out beyond the book readers, for both the sake of ratings and the sake of creativity. If you're making a show that is designed to primarily be appreciated by people who played the game(*), then you've failed as an adapter.
(*) Also, considering there is a not-insignificant segment of the gamer audience who hated this plot, I don't know that you can justify this as "we have to please the people who played the game." If anything, the reluctance to deviate — even to, as Mike and others have said, put it off for a while to better establish the other Jackson characters, and to get as much Pedro/Bella time as possible — comes across as a creator doubling down on a story choice that was divisive, because shifting from it would risk coming across as appeasing the angry gamers.
GoT also made a lot of good, smart adapatational changes in especially the first season but even for the next couple too, much like how the Last of Us show has done for the games. Book fans turning on it was more of a canary in the coal mine during like season 5-6, where a lot of nonsense like Littlefinger arranging the Ramsay marriage for Sansa, or Dorne being a baffling, dull diversion with no characters worth caring about, or Euron the dollar store Jack Sparrow, were easier for general audiences to shrug off when they had faith the show was going somewhere good, and didn't have the vastly superior book plots to compare it to.
I don't see anything like that at all with the Last of Us, and the fact that the second game's most diehard haters are now pretending they always thought it was a masterpiece just so they can hate on the show and harass Bella Ramsay shows that it was always in bad faith. I can see why Druckman wanted to avoid anything that could be perceived as caving to people like that, even if it might have limited his perceived options a bit.
I agree, but even as those GoT book fans turned, the show became more and more popular with larger audiences. I've played the games, and I'd just rather a great story be told here than a scene by scene re-creation...I can replay the games for that.
I think you're probably right, and that's probably the downside of having a creator of the game directly involved. I think killing Joel was the right move, but I wish they'd just taken a season to flesh out Jackson so that it had a better foundation for handing off the show from Joel/Ellie to Ellie/Dina.
I've also played the games, and I do see the argument of killing Joel as early as they did, just as I see the argument others are making about needing more time to flesh out Jackson and the relationships. Taking a whole season feels like a bit much though, as the show would likely get accused of being "boring" and "stalling" (for those who know the twist. I do think that they should have had an extra episode or two though, and had Joels death occur midseason rather than in the 2nd episode.
While I do agree that Pascal and Ramsey are great together, not sure that is enough of a reason to have him stick around. It wouldn't be great if this show turned into Homeland, where the creator decided against killing off Damian Lewis because of the chemistry between him and Claire Danes. I definitely understand that you are discouraged now, but I think you will come back around once they get back to Abby's story (which unfortunately won't be until season 3). As someone who has played the game, I found her storyline more compelling than Ellie's
I watched Sirens this weekend and really enjoyed it in spite of the messy plot. I agree with you on the ending. There were so many ways they could have gone and this was not my top choice. But the sisters' dynamic was really fun to watch so it saved it for me and I forgot how silly some of the plot points were.
I was very disappointed to see that Amazon canceled The Bondsman. The show wasn’t perfect, but there isn’t much like it out there. I love all the actors too. Sucks.
I only watched a few episodes of it, but it seemed like each one was made for about $5.37. So it’s not like it was a huge burden on Amazon. Unless Kevin Bacon‘s quote was incredibly high?
I started watching the first episode of the second season of Poker Face, but the whole thing was so ridiculous and overacted that I gave up about fifteen minutes in. I will doubtless return to give it another shot in the hope that it, and the season, will improve.
Between your review of Sirens this week and your recent review of The Four Seasons, Alan, it feels increasingly clear to me—as a LONG-time reader, going back to your days recapping The Wire—that you have a serious blind spot where stories about women are concerned. I don't mean this in any accusatory sense, as you've written wonderful things over the years about various shows' depictions of women; however, over the last handful of years, I've consistently noticed that, when a show is written BY a woman and primarily revolves around themes involving women's relationships with society and each other, you frequently seem to miss some pretty basic elements of the series in question.
Again, I don't mean this to be accusatory—I don't think it's any kind of intentional misogyny or anything! But something that I notice in your reviews of shows like this is that you seem somewhat baffled by them, as if you yourself notice that there's something you're missing. (To pull out another, earlier example, I reread your review of Kevin Can F**k Himself, which was one of the first ones where I noticed this tendency of yours, and: yep, the pattern showed itself there too.) It's disappointing to me as a pretty huge fan of yours—not in a "shame on you" sense or anything, I'm just bummed to see THE TV critic I've read since I was in high school consistently miss out on one of the most interesting developments in the last decade or so of television.
I won't turn this into a polemic, but long story short, I think you seem to struggle when a series revolves around women struggling with how they're perceived by others around them—men and women alike. It particularly rings true when a series is specifically about women struggling to make sense of other women: Devon, Simone, and Michaela here; Anne and Ginny in The Four Seasons; Allison and Patty in Kevin Can F**k Himself. I think it's telling that all three series, all of which you were lukewarm on, involve at least one woman who's seen as romantically "unfaithful," not only to the man they're with but to other women in that man's orbit (spouses, close friends, etc). All three series look at a woman who's perceived as acting "poorly" in some sense—a woman who others might villainize—and revolve in large part around questions of whether the woman has, in fact, done anything worth villainizing: not just "what are her motives?", but, on a deeper level, "in what ways was this forced on her?" or "to what extent did she have a choice at all?"
They're stories about complicated, three-dimensional women, in other words, that attempt to grapple with those complications from within. They're not doing the "antihero but a woman" thing that Enlightened did, back in the day; they're not taking the Big Little Lies approach of structuring themselves explicitly around a man who's obviously a monster. They're stories about the conflicted relationships between women, and about the ways in which those women attempt (or fail) to understand each other more clearly.
(Speaking of Enlightened, the thing I'm pointing to here also applies to your write-ups of season three of The White Lotus, a lot of which similarly baffled me. But season 3 revolved around relationships between women in a way that wasn't as true of earlier seasons—and some of its most interesting drama was the same stuff that you referred to as the show "recycling" characters from earlier seasons, which imo was not at all the case.)
I hope this is an interesting observation and not just another Internet crank asking to speak to your manager. This pattern has been a bit of a bummer to behold, recently—it got to the point that, the moment I finished Sirens myself, I ran straight to your review, because I was CONVINCED that you were going to say exactly what you in fact had said. Like I said, I don't want to make this out to be some horrible failure on your part, but it HAS been a shame to see, for no other reason than that I usually think your perspectives are tremendously interesting, and this has been an axis on which your reviews seem to fall consistently flat.
Sorry to have disappointed you. I always try to be aware of my biases as the person who I am. Without getting into the other examples, I’ll just reiterate that my issues with Sirens were entirely with tone and not theme.
When Breaking Bad started, Bryan Cranston was best known for his role as Hal, the wild, comical father in Malcolm in the Middle. There were questions about whether he had the gravitas for the role of Walter White.
I just saw an interview with Lyonne where she sounds so much like Columbo, I was baffled. I haven’t watched the new season yet, but is this the way she talks now?
Before the first season, I asked her about the change in her voice over the years. She said this is just what smoking does.
Ok… it’s quite something.
The second episode of Duster is fantastic. The first was fun, but everything really clicked in the second. Donal Logue and Patrick Warburton are great, it's funny, moves fast, and the theft is a blast. Loved it.
I am totally fine with Joel's death happening when it did. I still love the show. It packs a wallop and I miss him, but Bella Ramsey is so good and I remain fully invested in Ellie's story. I don't think the quality or storytelling have suffered due to Joel being killed so early.
Agree with the sentiment behind let TV be TV, but I missed The Pitt as it aired, and it made for an excellent binge watch. Devoured it in a few days. Will definitely watch the second season weekly.
To build upon your "Let TV be TV" article, this is also reflected in the streaming rankings where long-running procedural shows (NCIS, Grey's Anatomy, SVU) are consistently among the most viewed top 10 non-original streaming shows.
Yup. The audience has made it clear — including in The Summer of Suits — that they like traditional TV shows with lots of long seasons. And the streamers are so reluctant to make those.
I wish longer seasons (13-16 eps.) would be the lesson streamers take from the old model instead of reviving every IP property that was on linear tv.
Poker Face is catnip to me, as a lover of both Columbo and Rian Johnson. But I also often feel like something is missing. I think its the length of the episodes. They're usually just a bit longer than half the length of Columbo episodes. The killer setups are generally the right length (like this week), but then we lose the interaction between Charlie and the killer. She needs to keep going back to the killer, who first trusts her, then tries to double down when they worry Charlie is on to them, and then finally get sick of her. There isn't time to do all that in 25 minutes. Has Johnson addressed why episodes aren't longer? Even 10-15 minutes would be a huge improvement. (Also, for what it's worth, I think Elsbeth does a great job with the second part...but their killer setups are too short.)
I haven't specifically talked to him about the length, though I'm hopefully interviewing him again at the end of the season, and will ask then. I agree with you that the Charlie sections often feel too short. I don't know if that's just about trying to make Lyonne's workload manageable, or if Johnson and the others feel like they don't want to overstay their welcome. But the best episodes are the ones that get close to an hour in length, because that means more of Charlie interacting with the killer.
On both The Studio and Hacks this week, we saw a character who was so stoned that it was necessary to give them cocaine to revive them.
Does anyone else find it strange that Jimmy didn’t know or share that there was non-compete in Deborah’s contract? It’s driving me nuts!
Jimmy is her manager, not her agent.
He would still know what’s in her contracts and a lot of performers only have managers now.
A real missed opportunity that they didn't think of boofing Bryan Cranston though!
I don’t know how serious the Cheers producers & NBC were ever about a Norm & Cliff spin-off but I’m glad it never happened. As much as l love those characters, I don’t think neither could carry a show. Better in supporting roles.
Looking forward to the Paul Reubens documentary on Max (HBO Max?) this weekend. Have you gotten to see it yet?
I haven’t.
Agree completely on the Last of Us. It felt like there was a way that they could have spent a whole season in Jackson, adjusting to "normal" life, while Abbie and her crew slowly made their way there. At least in that way, when Joel was killed, Ellie's relationships with other characters might feel more earned, and the hand-off from Joel/Ellie to Ellie/Dina might have been more effective. As it is, all the new characters just feel two-dimensional, and their relationships with Ellie are rushed.
I've avoided reading anything about the game because I did some research on the Cordyceps infection 2 years ago and was spoiled on the smart infected in S2. From the answers in Alan's interview and comments game players have made, it seems that almost all of TLoU the TV show is a scene-by-scene, line-by-line remake of the game. The creators are very committed to that faithful reproduction, so I doubt there was ever any chance of them doing what you describe (and many of us might have enjoyed). Extending Joel's story or changing the outcome would probably lose the game fans, and they're the core audience for the show.
Book fans of Game of Thrones slowly turned on the show long before the public did over all the little changes that were made, I'd assume HBO was well-aware of that and has been supportive of the approach on TLoU. It's debatable if that was wise but the game fans seem to be thrilled with this show.
If the game fans are the core audience of the show, the show is doing something wrong. GoT, for better or worse, understood that it had to reach out beyond the book readers, for both the sake of ratings and the sake of creativity. If you're making a show that is designed to primarily be appreciated by people who played the game(*), then you've failed as an adapter.
(*) Also, considering there is a not-insignificant segment of the gamer audience who hated this plot, I don't know that you can justify this as "we have to please the people who played the game." If anything, the reluctance to deviate — even to, as Mike and others have said, put it off for a while to better establish the other Jackson characters, and to get as much Pedro/Bella time as possible — comes across as a creator doubling down on a story choice that was divisive, because shifting from it would risk coming across as appeasing the angry gamers.
GoT also made a lot of good, smart adapatational changes in especially the first season but even for the next couple too, much like how the Last of Us show has done for the games. Book fans turning on it was more of a canary in the coal mine during like season 5-6, where a lot of nonsense like Littlefinger arranging the Ramsay marriage for Sansa, or Dorne being a baffling, dull diversion with no characters worth caring about, or Euron the dollar store Jack Sparrow, were easier for general audiences to shrug off when they had faith the show was going somewhere good, and didn't have the vastly superior book plots to compare it to.
I don't see anything like that at all with the Last of Us, and the fact that the second game's most diehard haters are now pretending they always thought it was a masterpiece just so they can hate on the show and harass Bella Ramsay shows that it was always in bad faith. I can see why Druckman wanted to avoid anything that could be perceived as caving to people like that, even if it might have limited his perceived options a bit.
I agree, but even as those GoT book fans turned, the show became more and more popular with larger audiences. I've played the games, and I'd just rather a great story be told here than a scene by scene re-creation...I can replay the games for that.
I think you're probably right, and that's probably the downside of having a creator of the game directly involved. I think killing Joel was the right move, but I wish they'd just taken a season to flesh out Jackson so that it had a better foundation for handing off the show from Joel/Ellie to Ellie/Dina.
I've also played the games, and I do see the argument of killing Joel as early as they did, just as I see the argument others are making about needing more time to flesh out Jackson and the relationships. Taking a whole season feels like a bit much though, as the show would likely get accused of being "boring" and "stalling" (for those who know the twist. I do think that they should have had an extra episode or two though, and had Joels death occur midseason rather than in the 2nd episode.
While I do agree that Pascal and Ramsey are great together, not sure that is enough of a reason to have him stick around. It wouldn't be great if this show turned into Homeland, where the creator decided against killing off Damian Lewis because of the chemistry between him and Claire Danes. I definitely understand that you are discouraged now, but I think you will come back around once they get back to Abby's story (which unfortunately won't be until season 3). As someone who has played the game, I found her storyline more compelling than Ellie's
I have fond memories of Bryan Cranston in Malcolm in the Middle, especially the episode where Hal showed off his championship roller skating chops.
I watched Sirens this weekend and really enjoyed it in spite of the messy plot. I agree with you on the ending. There were so many ways they could have gone and this was not my top choice. But the sisters' dynamic was really fun to watch so it saved it for me and I forgot how silly some of the plot points were.
I was very disappointed to see that Amazon canceled The Bondsman. The show wasn’t perfect, but there isn’t much like it out there. I love all the actors too. Sucks.
I only watched a few episodes of it, but it seemed like each one was made for about $5.37. So it’s not like it was a huge burden on Amazon. Unless Kevin Bacon‘s quote was incredibly high?
I started watching the first episode of the second season of Poker Face, but the whole thing was so ridiculous and overacted that I gave up about fifteen minutes in. I will doubtless return to give it another shot in the hope that it, and the season, will improve.
I just finished Overcompensating and thought it was fantastic! Warm and funny and extremely raunchy. Fun little show with a lot of heart.
Between your review of Sirens this week and your recent review of The Four Seasons, Alan, it feels increasingly clear to me—as a LONG-time reader, going back to your days recapping The Wire—that you have a serious blind spot where stories about women are concerned. I don't mean this in any accusatory sense, as you've written wonderful things over the years about various shows' depictions of women; however, over the last handful of years, I've consistently noticed that, when a show is written BY a woman and primarily revolves around themes involving women's relationships with society and each other, you frequently seem to miss some pretty basic elements of the series in question.
Again, I don't mean this to be accusatory—I don't think it's any kind of intentional misogyny or anything! But something that I notice in your reviews of shows like this is that you seem somewhat baffled by them, as if you yourself notice that there's something you're missing. (To pull out another, earlier example, I reread your review of Kevin Can F**k Himself, which was one of the first ones where I noticed this tendency of yours, and: yep, the pattern showed itself there too.) It's disappointing to me as a pretty huge fan of yours—not in a "shame on you" sense or anything, I'm just bummed to see THE TV critic I've read since I was in high school consistently miss out on one of the most interesting developments in the last decade or so of television.
I won't turn this into a polemic, but long story short, I think you seem to struggle when a series revolves around women struggling with how they're perceived by others around them—men and women alike. It particularly rings true when a series is specifically about women struggling to make sense of other women: Devon, Simone, and Michaela here; Anne and Ginny in The Four Seasons; Allison and Patty in Kevin Can F**k Himself. I think it's telling that all three series, all of which you were lukewarm on, involve at least one woman who's seen as romantically "unfaithful," not only to the man they're with but to other women in that man's orbit (spouses, close friends, etc). All three series look at a woman who's perceived as acting "poorly" in some sense—a woman who others might villainize—and revolve in large part around questions of whether the woman has, in fact, done anything worth villainizing: not just "what are her motives?", but, on a deeper level, "in what ways was this forced on her?" or "to what extent did she have a choice at all?"
They're stories about complicated, three-dimensional women, in other words, that attempt to grapple with those complications from within. They're not doing the "antihero but a woman" thing that Enlightened did, back in the day; they're not taking the Big Little Lies approach of structuring themselves explicitly around a man who's obviously a monster. They're stories about the conflicted relationships between women, and about the ways in which those women attempt (or fail) to understand each other more clearly.
(Speaking of Enlightened, the thing I'm pointing to here also applies to your write-ups of season three of The White Lotus, a lot of which similarly baffled me. But season 3 revolved around relationships between women in a way that wasn't as true of earlier seasons—and some of its most interesting drama was the same stuff that you referred to as the show "recycling" characters from earlier seasons, which imo was not at all the case.)
I hope this is an interesting observation and not just another Internet crank asking to speak to your manager. This pattern has been a bit of a bummer to behold, recently—it got to the point that, the moment I finished Sirens myself, I ran straight to your review, because I was CONVINCED that you were going to say exactly what you in fact had said. Like I said, I don't want to make this out to be some horrible failure on your part, but it HAS been a shame to see, for no other reason than that I usually think your perspectives are tremendously interesting, and this has been an axis on which your reviews seem to fall consistently flat.
Sorry to have disappointed you. I always try to be aware of my biases as the person who I am. Without getting into the other examples, I’ll just reiterate that my issues with Sirens were entirely with tone and not theme.
When Breaking Bad started, Bryan Cranston was best known for his role as Hal, the wild, comical father in Malcolm in the Middle. There were questions about whether he had the gravitas for the role of Walter White.
Looks like he still has the range.