Master of puppets

Benedict Cumberbatch gets his Henson on in 'Eric,' plus 'We Are Lady Parts,' finale spoilers for 'Hacks' and 'The Sympathizer,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I assume you’re a caddie…

What’s Alan reviewing?

• The first of this week’s two reviews is about Netflix’s Eric, a strange, overly ambitious, but extremely watchable miniseries starring Benedict Cumberbatch as a Jim Henson type who begins hallucinating conversations with a new puppet creation after his son goes missing in mid-Eighties New York. Ultimately, I think the show’s creator Abi Morgan (whose Fifties TV news drama The Hour was one of my early-2010s favorites) bites off more than she can chew, but I was never bored, and I appreciate a wild swing like this.

• Meanwhile, it’s been nearly three years since we last heard from We Are Lady Parts, a delightful Britcom about an all-female, all-Muslim punk band. Between the pandemic and some other jobs (like Anjana Vasan being in the final season of Killing Eve), it’s taken much too long to put this particular band back together, but the second season is just as satisfying as the first — in some ways, even more, as it found more ways to use the ensemble, rather than just leaning on Vasan’s prodigious comedic gifts.

Technology’s cyclical?

Did I write a column this week — about many of your favorite streamers teaming up to bring back a new version of the cable bundle — solely as an excuse to watch Dennis Duffy clips from 30 Rock? Well, I didn’t not want that excuse.

Or perhaps I wrote it so that, over here, I could quote one of the final lines of Twin Peaks: The Return?

Regardless, we’re still in the midst of a biiiig shift in how the streaming ecosystem will function. We’ll see some streamers go away altogether, others merge, and prices certainly aren’t going to go down. So that’s fun!

And in the end: The Sympathizer finale

Getting back to the idea of big swings that don’t always connect, Sunday brought us the finale of HBO’s The Sympathizer. As I wrote before the miniseries debuted in April, Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar had a lot to deal with in terms of tone, theme, and plot, in adapting Viet Thanh Nguyen’s book. For the most part, they did very well, even if Robert Downey Jr. doing the Peter Sellers multiple characters thing often felt too gimmicky. The finale was the one episode I was disappointed in. My understanding is that it more or less is faithful to how the book ends, and perhaps this ongoing interrogation and torture of the Captain plays out better on the page. Here, though, it was the first time that a lot of the show’s questions about identity began to feel too abstract and intellectualized, rather than feeling like part of the Captain’s emotional journey. And the payoff about his father didn’t land as well as I think Park and McKellar wanted it to — perhaps, again, because of the RDJ silliness.

Mostly, I’m curious how those who watched to the end felt about this, whether you already knew the book or, like me, hadn’t read it.

And in the end: Hacks Season Three finale

Similarly, I said most of what I had to say about Hacks Season Three in this review, but I wanted to get a little granular with the finale, “Bulletproof Hacks.” It’s been interesting to see the trend in this show’s finales.

Season One ended with Deborah and Ava’s relationship seemingly in a very good place, but with the ticking time bomb of the drunken email Ava sent about Deborah while they were still on the outs. I hated that cliffhanger, because the show had gotten so much better once the two started to get along, and this seemed like conflict for its own sake at a moment when the show was doing better by reducing the conflict between the leads. Thankfully, Season Two mostly sidestepped that plot, and that year concluded with Deborah surprisingly firing Ava — not out of cruelty, but to encourage her protege to go out on her own. This season ended with yet another shift in the power dynamic, with Ava blackmailing Deborah into giving her the head writer job she felt she had already earned.

But even though I just observed that I preferred the show when the two were getting along, I’m very excited for the potential of this latest turn. There’s never going to be anything like a real balance between Deborah and Ava, due to the gulf in age, experience, fame, and money. But they’ve been working together long enough, and have grown close enough emotionally, that they’re as even as they’re likely ever going to be. Because of that, and because the characters are now genuinely bonded like family — closer to each other, really, than Deborah is to DJ or Ava is to her mom — Hacks is now in better position to do a season where they’re back to being enemies. Especially since I doubt that’s what the entire season will be, since there will be so many knives out for both of them as Deborah’s new talk show launches. I can’t wait.

(Oh, and I would not be unamused if the next season wants to have Ava cross paths again with the power lesbian played by Christina Hendricks.)

Happy ATX Fest to those who celebrate

By the time you’re reading this, I’m hopefully enjoying a breakfast taco, or else some way-too-early brisket, as I avail myself of the sights, sounds, people, and, yes, foods of Austin, Texas for this weekend’s ATX TV Festival.

If you happen to be in Austin for the festival this weekend, please come on by and say hello! I’m doing three panels today (a Fargo screening and Q&A with Noah Hawley, a “What is a bottle episode?” nerd-out with Kathryn VanArendonk, and a books on TV panel with Mo Ryan, Joanna Robinson, and Dave Gonzels), and three tomorrow (Somebody Feed Phil with most of the Rosenthal family, an unofficial Firewall & Iceberg reunion with Dan Fienberg, and the big Norman Lear tribute, with all-star table reads of episodes of Maude and Good Times). Here’s the full schedule of times and places. There will also be a pop-up bookstore on Friday and Saturday, if anybody wants to buy a copy of Welcome to The O.C. for me to sign. (You can also bring any other one with you if you want.) And if you’re not in Austin, then I believe most panels eventually wind up on the ATX YouTube channel.

I look forward to lots of fun conversation — less so to what my scale is going to read upon my return.

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