Make it 2015 again through science or magic

Jon Stewart returns to 'The Daily Show,' Amy Schumer's back with more 'Life & Beth,' plus 'The New Look,' 'True Detective,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as “involvement” is my middle name…

Welcome back to The Daily Show! He’s Jon Stewart… again.

On Monday night, Jon Stewart returned to The Daily Show, as part of a temporary arrangement where he’ll host once a week from now through the election in November. Prior to that episode’s premiere, I wrote a column wondering if the moment had passed for both The Daily Show itself and for Stewart, whose Both Sides Are Bad, Actually comic philosophy — still expressed as recently as 2020 in his film Irresistible — hadn’t aged well in a world where Donald Trump spent four years as president, and may get re-elected by the time Stewart’s second stint behind that desk is over.

I’m far from the first to express this opinion, and Stewart and The Daily Show writers were very much aware of it in Monday’s episode. At one point, Jordan Klepper even mocked Stewart for “your Nineties brand of snark and both siderism.” Earlier, Stewart acknowledged that “I was glib at best, dismissive at worst” about some of the topics he discussed during his original tenure. And while doing a segment about how both Trump and Joe Biden seem too old for the job, Stewart did acknowledge that there are many, many, many additional reasons to not want Trump to be re-elected, while also arguing that the possibility of a second Trump victory shouldn’t be an excuse to dismiss or ignore concerns about the guy running against him.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that Stewart seemed relieved to be returning to the job at the exact moment where it’s become much easier to criticize Biden, and thus to return to his folksy desire for everyone to stop yelling and get along. But he also did a long monologue towards the end of the segment arguing that America won’t end if Trump wins, nor will it be saved if he loses, and that people who want the country to be better have to work hard every day both in the next nine months, and long after this election is over. While a noble sentiment on paper, it’s also one that’s a lot easier for a wealthy straight white guy to make, since he’s far more insulated from many of the things Trump and the GOP want to do — and the rights they want to strip away — in the event of a win in November. In the conversation with Klepper, Stewart tried to argue that his goal was never to save democracy, but he’s often made a similar plea of, “Aw, shucks, we’re just a silly comedy show,” even as he’s used the platform to passionately argue for causes he believes in. So he likes being able to have it both ways.

All that being said, I laughed a bunch at his return. Whatever philosophical issues I have, Stewart’s a gifted comic who knows how to sell a joke, and the show continues to find great correspondents after all these years. Ronny Chieng spitting food at Desi Lydic, during a parody of TV news segments about interviewing “real” voters in diners, was both an easy joke and one that left me as amused as it did both Stewart and Lydic herself. So anyone who just expects this to be, well, a silly comedy show, can continue to enjoy this reunion tour. If you intend to take Stewart as seriously as he often presents himself, though, it’s a lot more complicated.

Life & Beth and another long wait

Speaking of former Comedy Central stalwarts who left in the mid-2010s to do other things, Hulu premiered the second season of Amy Schumer’s autobiographical dramedy Life & Beth oday. As I wrote about over at Rolling Stone, I found these new episodes even better than the first season, in part because we’re past that rough early patch in the series where the darkness felt a little too unrelenting, and clashed too much with the comedy. There’s a lot of excellent stuff here, particularly in the Schumer/Michael Cera duo.

As an aside in the review, I mentioned that my one real problem is one that I have with a lot of streaming series these days: so much time passes in between seasons that it’s hard to both remember and feel emotionally connected to everything after a long hiatus. Season Two becomes more of an ensemble comedy, and I spent a lot of the scenes that focused on Beth’s friends struggling to recall what their character was all about back in 2022.

Once upon a time, it was an anomaly when something like The Sopranos was absent for over a year from one season to the next. Today, it’s become so commonplace that it’s almost surprising that FX has managed to keep The Bear on a regular schedule, with the third season recently scheduled to premiere in June. And because so many shows now take long breaks, it’s become harder and harder to stay on top of what happened before, and why we should care. If the returning series is some combination of great, hugely popular, or relatively compact in its storytelling, it can get away with that. It wasn’t hard, for instance, to jump back into Atlanta after a four-year gap, because there were only four main characters, and it wasn’t serialized in any significant way. But there are too many shows of late that I like but don’t necessarily love, and where I have to spend the first few episodes of a new season Googling character names and plot details I’ve forgotten because so much time has passed.

In the broadest sense, there’s not a great solution. Because the business has evolved to a place where most shows produce 10 or fewer episodes per season, the most in-demand actors take multiple jobs per year, and aren’t necessarily available to return to any of them quickly enough to keep things moving. And many of these shows require more time to write and produce than the broadcast network series that still manage to be on the air for roughly the same window each year. There can be exceptions like The Bear or Slow Horses (which films multiple seasons in a row to help stay on schedule), but the horse has left the barn, overall.

But maybe shows with these long breaks can make life a little easier on their audiences. If you have a big cast of characters, for instance, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world for your season premiere to be an ensemble piece that tries to explicitly restate who everyone is and how they relate to one another. Or, since there are no timeslots to worry about in streaming (and barely in cable anymore), maybe it should be mandatory that every show return with a thoroughly detailed montage of clips from the previous season. (It’s also possible that more shows than I realize are doing this, and I just don’t see it because they’re not attached to the screeners.) But something needs to be done.

Odds and/or ends

• While we’re on the subject of charming Hulu series built around comedians, the axe fell earlier this week on This Fool, starring Chris Estrada as an uptight Angeleno and Frankie Quiñones as his ex-gangster cousin. I really liked the first two seasons, but the show is yet another victim of the post-Peak TV market correction. (Which, unfortunately but unsurprisingly, seems to be coming first for smaller shows built around female, queer, and/or non-white characters.) At this writing, both seasons are still streaming, so enjoy it before it gets Zaslav’ed.

• Another of this week’s notable premieres was Apple’s The New Look. Created by Damages and Bloodline’s Todd Kessler, it stars Ben Mendelsohn as Christian Dior and Juliette Binoche as Coco Chanel, following the French fashion icons in the final days of World War II and the years after. I only had a chance to watch four episodes, which is why there’s no review. What I can tell you, based on that small sample size, is that Mendelsohn is outstanding as always, and that the Dior half of the show is very emotionally affecting. But Mendelsohn and Binoche are essentially starring in two separate, very loosely related shows, and the show about Coco Chanel — focusing a lot on her role as a Nazi collaborator, and the attempts to cover that up after the war — is very one-note, despite the best efforts of Binoche and other actors. (Emily Mortimer is fun in one of the early episodes as a snarky friend who insists that all of Chanel’s best ideas were based on Mortimer’s own sense of style.) Mendelsohn alone wasn’t enough to keep me watching Bloodline, and I suspect I’ve already seen as much of this one as I’m going to.

• As promised last week, I made a list of the 10 most memorable TV episodes to air after the Super Bowl. It’s less topical now than it was on Super Bowl Sunday, but it’s also never a bad time to think about the premiere of Homicide, or about Sydney Bristow snarling “What was wrong with the black one?” after having to change into a second set of lingerie.

• I recapped the penultimate episode of True Detective: Night Country. Because I saw the entire season in advance, I’ve avoided making any kinds of fake predictions in my recaps, and tried to focus on what’s happening in the moment — which this time included a horrific father-son moment between Hank and Pete. No spoilers for the finale, which we can talk about at greater length next time, but I was very satisfied with how the various mysteries were and weren’t resolved.

• Finally, a housekeeping question. The newsletter is just a weekly thing, which means it often comes out many days after a particular story was published, and when people might be most inclined to discuss something. I’ve been weighing whether to post individual links to Substack Chat, and then email them to people so they see those stories as they publish. It would create an opportunity for more conversation, timely or otherwise — especially during the upcoming Emmy-bait stretch where I’ll probably be writing a lot every week. But it would also mean people get more than the one email each week, and I don’t want to start flooding inboxes. If you have an opinion, please weigh in in the comments just hit reply to the email version of the newsletter.

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