Make 'em laugh?

Did Emmy voters send a message to 'The Bear' by voting for 'Hacks' for best comedy? Plus, 'Pachinko,' and a Rod Serling celebration

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I hit the jukebox again… 

Comedy? Bang! Bang!

For much of its running time, Sunday night’s Emmys telecast was shaping up to be a perfectly cromulent awards telecast. Eugene and Dan Levy had their moments as hosts. (And the producers essentially treated the Only Murders trio as secondary hosts, with an extended intro to the night’s first award that was nearly as long as the Levy’s father-son patter.) The reunions were fun, albeit not as much as the ones from January’s ceremony. Some of the awards were predictable, but there was genuine uncertainty in the drama categories as Shōgun had a tough start to the night, and even the Baby Reindeer steamroller took a while to become obvious. 

But as I wrote about at length over at Rolling Stone, the thing that’s likely to be most remembered from this one was the final award, when Hacks shocked the world — including its own slack-jawed creators — by beating The Bear for Outstanding Comedy Series. The Bear had a pretty good Emmy campaign overall, and in fact broke the record for the most awards a comedy has won in a single Emmy season. But it was the overwhelming favorite for the top prize, especially since this was for the universally adored Season Two, rather than the more divisive third season. Instead, a show that has a much, much, much, much more plausible argument for being considered a comedy— even though it’s plenty good when it wants to be serious — took the prize. Even with all those individual trophies The Bear got, it sure felt like the voters had finally said enough was enough about the series itself being called a comedy. 

So now we’ll see what, if anything, comes of this. With Shōgun taking next year off (if not longer), The Crown ending, and traditional TV drama in general being in a slump right now, the drama field could be The Bear’s for the taking if it decided to recategorize itself. Will FX decide to do that? Will this result in any way embolden the TV Academy itself to decide that their members have spoken and it’s time to do something about category fraud? Or will everything be run back the same way a year from now? 

Odds and/or ends

• A while back, I said that I hoped to write at greater length about Pachinko at some point later in Season Two, since I didn’t have a chance before the premiere. This week’s episode — a spiritual sequel of sorts to last season’s earthquake episode, focusing on Kyunghee’s husband working in Nagasaki in the later days of the war — gave me that opportunity. Great show is great. Film at 11.  

• I’m traveling on various assignments this week, so I only had chance to watch the first two and a half episodes of Agatha All Along before my screener access expired. My colleague David Fear reviewed it for us instead, having seen the first four episodes. I’m more or less with him on this: as a delivery system for Kathryn Hahn, Aubrey Plaza, Patti LuPone, Deborah Jo Rupp, Sasheer Zamata and company to crack wise and do the various comedy and/or musical things they do well, it’s fun. But it also feels less like a show with a story that needed to be told than it does an excuse for WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer to reward Hahn for the scene-stealing work she did on the first Marvel streaming show. That’s still a much better justification, and result, than several other recent MCU series, though.

An open doorway. 

I spent last weekend in Binghamton, NY, birthplace of Rod Serling, to attend SerlingFest, a gathering of hundreds of passionate fans of the work of the late, great, mind behind The Twilight Zone, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and so much more. Serling was born on Christmas Day, 1924, so this was a centennial celebration of his life, culminating in the unveiling of a Serling statue in Recreation Park, one of his favorite childhood spots, and the inspiration for the classic Twilight Zone episode “Walking Distance.” I couldn’t resist posing in front of the thing:

I was lucky enough to be there for all of it, and to be welcomed in by the Serling fandom. Because I’m still at the early early stages of researching my Serling biography, I was in the position of being the newbie among experts, and it was a blast to just sit in various bars around Binghamton and hear people have passionate arguments about episodes of Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, and more. Much of this will be recounted in great detail in the book, but for now I’ll give you three brief anecdotes: 

The main day of SerlingFest was filled with panels on all kinds of Serling topics, from Rod’s daughter Anne, his friend and protege Mark Olshaker, and longtime TV critic (and my friend) Mark Dawidziak talking about Rod’s moral code, to The Twilight Zone Podcast host Tom Elliott unearthing a rare radio play from Serling’s college days inspired by Serling’s deep love of Christmas. That day began with a lengthy video tribute to Serling, which included admirers like Geddy Lee from Rush and X-Files producer Frank Spotnitz, as well as surviving actors who worked on Twilight Zone, like Bill Mumy and Carol Burnett. Burnett, who was also friends with Serling, got to close out the video, and when she did her trademark tug of her ear, you could hear people in the theater choking up. I may have been one of those people. 

Like I said, you get a bunch of Serling fans in a room, and you will hear a bunch of Serling opinions. My favorite of these happened at a bar, regarding a Night Gallery episode that most people — including Serling himself — consider to be that series’ high point. I was sitting at a table, chatting up one of the attendees, when someone came over and declared, “That guy over there just said he doesn’t like ‘They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar!’” My new friend shook his head apologetically at me, said, “Well, I think I need to go deal with this,” and got up to visit the other table.  

Finally, one of the cool things about Recreation Park is that it, like several other parks in Binghamton, has a vintage carousel that was donated nearly a century ago by a wealthy businessman whose only stipulation to the town is that they could never charge people to ride them. It’s still the original Wurlitzer music machine, original horses, etc. And while I was in there, it was playing “76 Trombones,” “Spoonful of Sugar,” and several other songs from musicals written during Serling’s mid-century heyday, but set many decades earlier — the nostalgia of “Walking Distance” brought to life in another way. It was an experience. 

Now I just need to do all the remaining research and write the thing. Shouldn’t be too hard, right? Right?  

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