Let's rank all the MCU TV shows!

Plus, 'Daredevil: Born Again,' TV at the Oscars, 'Paradise,' 'The Pitt,' 'Severance,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I’m higher than a bearded vulture…

From least Marvel-ous to most

As the premiere of Daredevil: Born Again drew closer, it occurred to me that it would be the 20th live-action show set within (more or less) the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With such a round number staring at me, I couldn’t resist going into listicle mode, ranking all 20 of those shows from the worst to the best.

Despite them all drawing on source material from the same company, there were varying kinds of apples and oranges comparisons required here. How, for instance, do you measure Jessica Jones’ relatively grounded exploration of coping with the trauma of sexual assault against the multiversal shenanigans of something like Loki? For that matter, how should you compare Loki (which had one excellent season and one disappointing season), much less Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (which had many highs and lows over the span of seven seasons), against shows that only ever made six episodes? I did my best to wrestle with that, and in the process was reminded that, even as a longtime Marvel fanboy, it’s hard not to notice that even most of the shows near the top of the list had creative peaks and valleys. There are a few great seasons of Marvel TV, then some great half-seasons that eventually fell apart, then some shows that were mediocre, and a few outright terrible ones. And yet, I will keep watching. Because the room next to my home office is has a few dozen boxes of Marvel Comics that made a big impression on me growing up.

Meanwhile, back in Hell’s Kitchen…

As for Daredevil: Born Again itself, my review spends a lot of time on the messy development history of the series, where the original head writers were fired after they’d made roughly six episodes, and their replacement had to work around what had already been shot. Because even if I didn’t know about all of that, the Frankensteined nature of the show would be hard to miss. Parts of it work, but on the whole it reminded me of the weaker stretches of the Netflix series with many of these characters.

Speaking of which, the opening scene with Matt and Karen and Foggy bantering — shortly before the latter two are written out of the show — was one of the things added by the new showrunner. It is both charming and exasperating, because how could anyone look at those three actors working together and not want that to continue to be the dynamic for the series?

You will also not be shocked to learn that I got irrationally excited when I realized the season’s middle chapter was an almost entirely self-contained story where Matt, out of costume, intercedes in a bank heist. It’s the kind of standalone episode that I’ve been begging these shows to do since the early parts of Jessica Jones and Luke Cage, but that the Marvel powers that be have been so reluctant to incorporate into all the serialized storytelling. I had hoped at first that this was the work of the new creative team, and perhaps a sign of what to expect from Marvel now that it has allegedly bought into the concept of a traditional showrunner. But it sounds like that one was primarily the work of the guys who got fired, and now I fear that Kevin Feige and company looked at the bank episode and said, “Yeah, this is not what we do here.”

Wait... he done it?

Some Paradise finale spoilers, as the Hulu series followed up by far its best episode with by far its worst, in which the solution to who killed President Bradford was… some random guy at the library who had appeared incredibly briefly a couple of times earlier in the season.

No, Paradise is not just a murder mystery show. But the question of who shot Cal, and why, was the narrative spine for this entire season. There are certain conventions with whodunits that need to be honored, the most important one of which is this: the audience has to at least have a chance to deduce the answer based on the information provided. Making the killer out to be an incredibly minor character with no apparent motive to assassinate the president prior to this episode, completely violates that concept. Bad, bad, bad, awful storytelling, of which there was plenty to find throughout the finale. (See also the killer somehow getting out of a supermax prison and to the site where refugees were approaching the cave, and managing to obtain a police uniform and weapons, within the incredibly short window between when it became clear the world was ending and when Cal detonated the EMP.) It’s a silly show, but this went well beyond that.

When the most interesting thing to happen in your finale is establishing that one character is such a sociopath that they’d be willing to commit murder in order to maintain access to the last functional Wii on the planet, things have gone very awry.

Odds and/or ends

• One of my old Twitter bits was to spend Oscar night with photos of each presumed acting winner in a TV show they once did, ready to tweet the moment they won. I thought about doing it this year on BlueSky, but wound up watching the telecast on a delay, so there was no point. Still, it would have been pretty easy this year. Kieran Culkin obviously is best known for Succession, Zoe Saldaña is for some reason currently starring in Taylor Sheridan’s Lioness, Adrien Brody has done several shows, most recently Winning Time, and of course Mikey Madison’s professional acting debut was as Pamela Adlon’s oldest daughter on the late, incredibly great Better Things:

• A couple of Oscar-cast thoughts: 1)As host, Conan O’Brien did very well in what’s become an increasingly thankless job. Nothing fancy conceptually, but he just committed fully to wanting to be there, and to letting things get silly early and often. 2)As someone who doesn’t see nearly as many movies in theaters as he used to, I am very much Team Just Show Clips of the Nominated Performances, Please. I like the idea of the testimonials from the presenters, and thought it worked well to expand them to a couple of non-acting categories, but ultimately I want to be shown, not told, why these people are in consideration for an award.

• Just a note that the third season of Dark Winds — the wonderful mystery drama starring Zahn McClarnon as a Navajo cop working cases on the reservation in the early Seventies — is back on AMC and AMC+ on Sunday. My review won’t publish at my usual spot on Rolling Stone until tomorrow morning, but I feel comfortable in teasing that the show is still great, and takes advantage of having eight episodes to play with this season, rather than six. Say it with me, kids: Make TV seasons longer. We are not crackpots.

• The third White Lotus episode (which I recapped here, and which y’all began to discuss here) was a bit of a calm before the storm kind of chapter — including several characters either dreaming about or watching video clips of actual tsunamis — but it also had Walton Goggins handling snakes, which feels like one of the more meme-able moments of the series to date.

The Pitt recaplet: “Hour Ten”

Though I’m at the moment several episodes ahead, this week’s installment was the last one I got to see before I reviewed The Pitt. A few thoughts:

• While this was another excellent overall on what for the moment is the Show of the Year for me, it did illustrate a couple of areas where The Pitt occasionally wobbles. The first of these is with the structure of having all of this happen within one incredibly eventful shift. Several subplots, and the evolving nature of the relationships between some of the characters — particularly between the newbies and the vets — feel like they would make more sense playing out over the weeks or months covered by a traditional hospital drama season. Nowhere is this more apparent than with Santos realizing that Langdon has been stealing pills. It just feels like too much for Santos to have sniffed this out within hours of arriving at this place. And it also feels like the show didn’t do a great job of illustrating exactly what Langdon was doing related to the various vials that would lead her to suspect him of stealing. Also, outside of his angry outburst against her last week, this was the first week to seriously hint at his behavior being altered by the meds he’s been taking. Maybe to actual healthcare providers, this was all clearer, but to my civilian eyes, at least one step felt missing.

• The other part that took me out of the show slightly was the scene where all the nurses were getting angry about Dana being assaulted, and recounting their own histories with violent patients. In this case, it wasn’t the subject of the scene so much as the execution of it. For the most part, The Pitt does an excellent job of placing various topical issues for the medical community into a context that feels both natural and specific to these characters. Every now and then, though, you have characters say phrases like, "Violence against hospital workers is a national problem,” and suddenly it feels less like a conversation than a PSA.

• As I’ve said previously, I think Noah Wyle’s incredible performance, and the writing of Dr. Robby, has very effectively delineated him from John Carter, despite the shared specialty. That said, it was interesting to have two different scenes this week where Wyle found himself on the opposite side of a memorable moment he played on ER. The first of these is when Robby and Langdon coach Whitaker through performing an escharotomy on the burn patient. On the second season of ER, this was a procedure that Dr. Benton tried to coach Carter (then a fourth-year med student, just like Whitaker) through after a paramedic was brought to County General with full thickness burns. Carter ultimately couldn’t get through it, and later required a pep talk from Benton, who assured him that he still had what it took to be a surgeon. The second is the episode-ending confrontation with Langdon about the stolen pills. Carter became addicted to painkillers, and began stealing them from the ER, after he was stabbed in Season Six. In that case, the intervention was a lot calmer and came from a place of love and affection from Benton and the others — even after Carter took a swing at Benton at one point. Here, though, Robby is just furious and betrayed that his protege would do this, and that he wasn’t paying close enough attention to catch it. A great scene, but one that brought on ER flashbacks more than most of The Pitt has to date.

Severance gets back in Harmony

Finally, this week’s Severance was yet another off-format episode, catching us up with where Harmony went after quitting Lumon, and filling us in on how she became the Kier zealot we know, as well as the crucial role she plays in the series’ mythology. I honestly hadn’t missed Harmony these last few weeks, as she feels like a more one-note antagonist than Milchick. So an episode where she’s the only character we know — at a moment when the season should be building momentum for everyone’s stories — wasn’t my favorite, even if she was given a bit more dimensionality by the end.

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