Odds 'Andor' ends?

Plus, a momentous 'Last of Us,' 'Sinners,' 'Étoile,' 'Mythic Quest,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as the disco ball droid floats out…

Destination: Wedding

This week’s big TV premiere was Andor Season Two, which I reviewed and mostly loved, despite some reservations you can find in my column. Disney+ is doing an unusual release pattern this season, dropping three episodes per week for a month, and that’s all she wrote from this corner of the galaxy far, far away. Because Tony Gilroy structured the season as a quartet of three-episode arcs, each set roughly a year apart, this particular mini-binge schedule makes some sense, so I chose to cover it three episodes at a time, starting with this week’s batch. This was my least favorite of the four groups, with a bit more stalling, narrative throat clearing, and talk of wedding customs than I might have expected from Gilroy compressing what was once meant to be four seasons into just this one. But there’s also some excellent stuff in there, particularly whenever we’re dealing with Dedra, Syril, and, especially, Syril’s passive-aggressive mother. We got a little discussion going about this on Wednesday, but please fire away with more thoughts if you have them.

Odds and/or ends

• After Andor, the week’s most notable premiere is Amy Sherman-Palladino’s new Amazon comedy Étoile, which is not a direct sequel to Bunheads (RIP), but which also takes place in the world of ballet. The premise is that the heads of the top dance companies in New York and Paris, played respectively by Luke Kirby and Charlotte Gainsbourg, agree to swap several dancers and other personnel as a publicity stunt engineered to revive interest in what they fear is a dying art form. I’ve grown less innately charmed by Sherman-Palladino’s style over the years, and didn’t even finish Mrs. Maisel. I’ve only had time to watch two episodes of this, which has all the usual rhythms, zany tone, and rat-a-tat dialogue that’s been her trademark since Gilmore Girls. I found the scenes in Paris to be much less interesting than what’s happening in New York, but they’re also primarily in French and thus demand more attention at all times. And the New York scenes are buoyed less by Kirby (who was often my favorite part of Maisel, but is asked to play even crankier than Luke from Gilmore Girls on his worst day) than by Lou de Laâge as a transplanted French prima ballerina who terrifies everyone in her path. I respect ASP cashing her Maisel blank check on this, but I don’t know yet if I’ll continue with it.

• Last week’s Doctor Who, featuring Alan Cumming as the voice of a vintage cartoon character come to life, was one of the best of the uneven second Russell T. Davies era. In particular, the scene where it appeared that the Doctor had broken the fourth wall and was meeting fans of the show was a meta delight. Though as someone I was watching it with pointed out, the fans just naming “Blink” over and over again as the best episode — much to the dismay of a Doctor created by someone who did not write “Blink” — raises a key question: how would the Doctor would know what they were talking about if they didn’t mention Sally Sparrow or something else that differentiated that one from the other Weeping Angels stories?

• You may recall that I enjoyed Clean Slate, the Laverne Cox/George Wallace comedy that was developed at Freevee, then debuted on regular Prime Video after Freevee was shuttered. You may also recall that I speculated that, between its origins in a defunct service and the presence of a trans main character at a time when trans rights are under siege from the federal government, “it wouldn’t be hard to imagine Amazon hoping this one comes and goes without much attention, let alone fuss.” That prediction has unfortunately come true, with Amazon canceling it after a single season. My old pal Dan Fienberg wrote a suitably frustrated tribute to the final nail in the coffin of the Freevee brand, which produced a lot of good half hours (see also High School and Primo) that Amazon as a company utterly failed to support.

• An important question prompted by this week’s episode of The Studio, where Rebecca Hall played Seth Rogen’s pediatric oncologist girlfriend: in a show where Sarah Polley and Olivia Wilde have played themselves, is their fellow actor-turned-director too famous to be cast as a civilian character? Or does the fact that the show has Rogen, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, etc., playing fictional characters give The Studio cover to use its other guest stars either way? And how are people feeling about it partway through the season?

• I’m curious about reactions to The Rehearsal Season Two premiere. I probably won’t check in until after the finale, and you know my overall opinion already.

• A crowdsourcing question for something that is juuust out of mental reach: Is there a relatively recent movie or show where two characters argue about whether Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid die at the end of that film? As in, one of them refuses to accept that the freeze-frame means they die?

• I’ve been buying lots of old issues of film and TV magazines from the Sixties and Seventies as research for my Rod Serling book. When I picked up a 1978 issue of Starlog, I didn’t expect to be assaulted by this description of the original Battlestar Galactica:

A kiss is just a kiss… except when it becomes a hug

When I wrote about the fourth season of Mythic Quest a few months ago, I thought I had seen all the episodes. As it turns out, the finale wasn’t on the screener site yet, and I didn’t even know it existed until after word broke last week that 1)Apple had canceled the series, and 2)Rob McElhenney and company were going to change the available version of the finale, so that the series now ended with Poppy and Ian sharing a platonic hug, rather than a passionate kiss.

I always groaned whenever there was even a hint of attraction between these two. Male/female friendships exist, and can be as compelling in their own way as romances, and this particular combo never made any sense as a couple. So in that sense, I’m pleased that this is now the official closing note for the series. But it’s also weird, and maybe unprecedented in TV?

The only close examples I can think of are How I Met Your Mother, where CBS posted an alternate ending to the finale where Tracy and Ted lived happily ever after, and Winning Time, whose second season finale tacked on a new scene and a triumphant montage of news footage after it was canceled. But with HIMYM, this other ending — which most fans prefer to the actual one — was always treated as a bonus feature, rather than edited into the version on DVDs, streaming, syndication, etc. And the only people who saw the version of Winning Time that ended with Magic Johnson crying in the shower after losing to the Celtics in 1984 were TV critics and people who worked on the show; the cancellation news arrived in time to add the extra stuff before the episode debuted.

I guess it’s better that the version available to people who discover Mythic Quest in the future will only see the more appropriate ending, especially since the show didn’t get a chance to prove whether there were good stories to tell about Ian and Poppy being together. But still, it feels a bit like how Star Wars now permanently has the terrible Jabba the Hutt scene, and Greedo saying “Maclunkey.”

Sweet Sinners

Since this is primarily a TV-related newsletter, just a quick note on a movie I couldn’t resist sneaking out of the house to see last weekend. Ryan Coogler’s period vampire musical Sinners was an enormous pleasure, especially to watch in a crowded theater that got, shall we say, interactive once the vamps started vamping. It’s Coogler squeezing a lot of big ideas, and multiple genres, into one package, and I could see a version without any supernatural elements being very satisfying in its own way. But the one he actually made is wonderful.

I bring it up mainly to observe that I have been writing about Michael B. Jordan since he was a kid from Newark on The Wire, and I was the TV critic for his hometown paper. There are plenty of times in doing this job where you see a young actor, or writer, or director, and think that they could really go places if they get the right opportunity. Jordan was one of those for me. Even as a teenager, even amidst that stacked Wire Season One cast, he popped off the screen. By the time he arrived for the revamped final seasons of Friday Night Lights, it was clear there was a future leading man there, if everything broke right. It’s fair to say that things have broken wildly beyond even my best-case scenario. He is hugely popular, hugely talented, and hugely charismatic. He can do a stunt like playing identical twins who are often interacting within scenes, and make it feel like you’re watching two excellent and separate performances at the same time. He’s great, and great things have happened for him in his career. It’s really nice to see.

Who’s watched their last The Last of Us?

Finally, we can’t outright call the return of Andor the biggest TV event of the week, because this week also brought with it an eventful, tragic, and, to some viewers, too traumatic to accept episode of The Last of Us, which I recapped. By now, everyone who cares surely knows what happened, but I’ll nonetheless leave my thoughts for you to read in that piece. And I’ll say that the events of this one are what I was so carefully dancing around while explaining some of my concerns in my review of the whole second season.

I expected the episode to be divisive, particularly to people who hadn’t played the game and had no idea this was coming. And, sure enough, I got a lot of responses on social media, and in our Monday morning chat, with people saying that this event had killed their interest in continuing with the series. So I wrote about that, too, and looked back for any historical comparisons that feel close enough to what happened here to offer real predictive value.

(The closest one I could find gave me an excuse to shamelessly plug my O.C. book. Did you know I wrote a book about The O.C.? And that the hardcover version is still available, while you can preorder the paperback ahead of its May 13 release? I’m not sure if anyone knows any of that. For that matter, did you know my Better Call Saul book can still be bought wherever books are sold?)

Like I said at the end of the second column, I’ll believe there’s a mass viewer exodus when I actually see it reflected in the ratings. But I also completely understand why seeing… that might have inspired some viewers to ask if they wanted to watch anymore.

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