Make it 2021 again through science or magic

'The White Lotus' and 'Yellowjackets' return, plus the best 'SNL' ads, 'Severance,' 'Better Call Saul' loves movies, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as we have to cancel our trip to Milwaukee…

Ned Schneebly, Boyd Crowder, and Nora Durst go to Thailand

It’s been more than two years since we last saw The White Lotus, with a terrific ending to what I otherwise found to be a disappointing second season. Mike White and company are finally back for Season Three, this time set in Thailand, with a cast that includes Walton Goggins, Carrie Coon, Parker Posey, Jason Isaacs, Michelle Monaghan, Leslie Bibb, Aimee Lou Wood, Lalisa Manobal (aka Lisa from Blackpink), and Season One returnee Natasha Rothwell, whose Belinda comes to the White Lotus’s Thai resort as part of a workplace exchange program.

It is a stacked, stacked ensemble. It is also, as I discuss in my review, a season that makes White Lotus feel more formulaic than it did previously, as if White is primarily mixing and matching character types and story twists from the first two years, on top of the Love Boat and Below Deck DNA already baked in. Those actors make most of it sing, though, and I’ll be recapping each episode on Sunday nights at my usual spot at Rolling Stone, to discuss what’s working and what isn’t. Because of the long lag between when each episode debuts and when each newsletter publishes, I’ll try doing a Lotus chat post each Monday morning to see if that encourages more discussion, and perhaps I’ll attempt that this Monday for Severance as well. (More on that in a bit.)

Does Yellowjackets still have the buzz?

It is, in fact, a big week for the hot shows of 2021 to make belated third season returns. The first two episodes of Yellowjackets Season Three are now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime. I’ve seen those two, plus two more, and wrote about them for Rolling Stone. There’s a song choice in one episode that feels like a deliberate homage to Lost — also a show that splits its time between stories of wilderness survival in a place that might be magical, and stories about the castaways’ lives back in civilization — which gave me an excuse to talk about the challenges that come from doing a bifurcated, high-concept show like this by the time you get to the third season. While I still enjoy parts of Yellowjackets, like the soundtrack and many of the performances, it feels like it’s spinning its wheels in many way, particularly in the adult scenes, which can’t risk spoiling what’s happening to the teenage versions of the characters. And both timelines very much need to pick a lane already regarding whether what the survivors are experiencing is mysticism or mass psychosis.

Given the nearly two-year gap between seasons, and the more muted response to Season Two versus Season One, I’m curious what the level of enthusiasm is among you to have Yellowjackets back.

Fake ads, real laughs

Saturday Night Live is celebrating its 50th anniversary this weekend. Back in the fall, I wrote an essay about the series’ anarchic first season. Heading into this anniversary weekend, I joined the rest of the Rolling Stone pop culture team in making a ranked list of the 50 best SNL fake ads of all time.

As with all lists, there was a lot of arguing, starting with the question of eligibility. Do fake movie trailers, for instance, count, or do they qualify as film parodies rather than commercial parodies? (We ultimately ruled the latter way.) Should we include ads that existed within larger sketches, like Chris Farley’s legendary hidden camera coffee commercial meltdown? (You’ll have to read the list to find the answer to that one.) Then, of course, there was the matter of the staff covering a wide range in ages. As with the axiom about everyone’s favorite SNL cast being the one from when they were in high school, the same seemed to prove true when everyone submitted their initial lists of the best ads. But since almost all of them are available to stream somewhere, each generation was able to get up to speed with older or newer classics of this comedy subgenre that SNL more or less created for itself.

I imagine there will be much protesting over what was omitted, what was included, what was ranked too high or too low, etc. I did not have sole ownership over this list, either in terms of the picks and rankings, or in writing the blurbs. But I had enough influence over it that the yelling should probably be directed at me for simplicity’s sake. Fire away.

At the movies, with Jimmy McGill

The publicity tour for Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul (still available wherever books are sold) is gradually winding down. But there’s a fun new interview from this week: I spoke with Keith Phipps from The Reveal — aka my former editor from Uproxx, and my discussion partner throughout Twin Peaks: The Return — about the shared love that both Jimmy and Better Call Saul itself have for classic movies and movie references. We talked about the show’s homages to Network, Sunset Boulevard, Touch of Evil, and many others, as well as to what movie I feel the character arc of Saul Goodman most closely matches.

A couple of other notes from the PR blitz: First, at several stops, I was asked variations on how Lalo would have done as a Breaking Bad villain. It occurred to me that Walter White would have lived about five minutes after meeting Lalo Salamanca, if that, because Lalo would have seen him for the threat he was in a way that Gus, Mike, and others all took much too long to recognize.

Second, at Wednesday’s event at The Paley Center, museum curator Jason Lynch showed this montage of Kim making calls to land a big new client that would get her rescued from doc review purgatory…

…and it was all I could do to not excuse myself early, grab my iPad, begin streaming the rest of the episode, and then binge more Saul. And I recently rewatched the entire thing while writing a book about the show! I say this not to sell books (though I never mind selling books), but just to reiterate the idea that this is not only one of the best TV dramas ever made, but one of the most compulsively rewatchable.

Odds and/or ends

• This week’s Severance had a lot to live up to after the previous episode, both in terms of addressing the major plot turns of “Woe’s Hollow” and competing with the sheer weirdness and quality of that one. As I get into in my recap, it couldn’t quite make everything work, though certain parts like Innie Mark’s conversation with Milchick were awfully good.

• I’ve been light on The Pitt discussion recently because I interviewed Noah Wyle and two of the show’s executive producers for a story that will be running next week, tied to an episode that absolutely floored me and every other critic I know who’s seen it. There’s a lot of excellent stuff in this week’s episode, though. But it’s also maybe the one that most made me question the idea of all of these things happening to these doctors in the same shift. Robby has what has to be at least the third or fourth identical argument in one day with Gloria about patient satisfaction scores versus the boarding crisis. Santos, having already accidentally impaled a surgeon’s foot with a scalpel, and run afoul of the veteran doctors in other ways, gets to confront an apparent child molester who conjures up terrible memories of the abuse she suffered herself as a kid. And Dr. Collins miscarries her pregnancy. It is a lot, on top of everything else all the other docs have gone through in prior episodes, and some of the things I’ve seen in the upcoming ones. So I of course asked the producers about this, and you can read their responses next week, probably on Friday morning.

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