Oh, hi, Mark!
A wild 'Severance' finale, plus 'The Pitt' goes into disaster mode, the delightful 'The Residence,' and more
This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I think the equator is a building that got so big it became a continent…
The they they are
You may recall that, at the start of this year, I raved about Severance Season Two, declaring, “There are some storytelling hiccups here and there (as there were, to be fair, in Season One), but for the most part the new season is as exciting, surprising, darkly funny, and distinct as before.”
Then a strange thing happened: as I began writing recaps of each episode, particularly in the season’s second half, I found myself dwelling far more on those hiccups than on the exciting/surprising/funny/distinct parts I’d so highly praised in early January. It got to the point where, in recent weeks, I was wondering exactly why I had been so positive in the first place. A little of this is an occupational hazard of doing weekly recaps, where the more you dig into a series, the harder it is to ignore flaws that may have whizzed by on initial viewing. But I think a lot of it was that my high opinion was largely shaped by the initial batch of episodes (the premiere through “Woe’s Hollow”), and then by the finale, which dropped last night, followed soon by both my recap of everything that happened in the episode and an interview with Severance creator Dan Erickson.
I have some issues with the finale, as well, though those owe more to events preceding it (rushing through the Dylan/Gretchen material, how much we do and don’t know about Cold Harbor) than to what’s actually in there. All I know is that, a time or five during the episode, I found my pulse quickening in a way that very much reminded me how it felt to watch the concluding chapter of Season One three years ago. And just as a terrible finale can wipe away memories of things you enjoyed earlier in a season, or series, an excellent one can make it easier to ignore things that bothered you in prior chapters.
There’s been some definite unrest here in the comments, and in a handful of other places where I’ve observed reaction to the last few episodes prior to this one. So I’m awfully curious to see if others share my excitement about the finale, along with a willingness to focus more on that than on earlier missteps. And, for that matter, whether people feel Erickson’s answers(*) give them more or less confidence in the show going forward. I got a sense early that asking for specifics wouldn’t get me very far, so we talked a lot more about process than anything else. Apple just announced the Season Three renewal, so we’ll see what comes next.
(*) You will note that at one point, Erickson refers to the Harmony hometown episode as “a bottle episode.” I did not think it a good use of my limited interview time to interrupt him to explain that an episode which required the production to move to another country to film, and thus had to be more complex and expensive than your average Severance installment, is pretty much the opposite of a bottle episode. But I was very much thinking it.
Triage time at The Pitt
Ordinarily, this would be the point in the newsletter where I would offer a bunch of thoughts on this week’s The Pitt. But after my editor watched the season’s twelfth hour — where the emergency department is flooded with the first batch of victims of the mass shooting at PittFest — we agreed that this one deserved a lengthy essay to discuss what made it so special, and how it sums up the many aspects that have made The Pitt into the early frontrunner for TV Show of the Year.
The column pretty exhaustively covers my thoughts on the episode, and the season. One point I will expand on a little here is what a good job the episode does in establishing the night shift doctors with only a couple of lines of dialogue or pieces of action. The way Dr. Shen, for instance, just keeps calmly sipping his coffee in the ambulance bay while Robby is frantically trying to drill him on triage procedures was delightful, and said a lot about how not every doctor at this place is quite as obsessive and volatile as our hero. And just having lots of additional doctors and nurses pop as characters goes a long way towards maintaining the illusion of realism, even in an episode covering such a heightened situation. It would ring false if Garcia was the only surgeon we saw, so we add in Dr. Walsh, who’s cockiness is similar but not identical to Garcia’s. As with so much about this show, the little details become as important over time as the big stuff, like the exchange about blood donation that begins that column.
I’m currently on a text chain with a few other critics who are just as obsessed with the show as I’ve become — we call it The Pitt Crew, of course. When I informed them that I would have to watch this episode for a fifth time — because The Pitt has inevitably become my new treadmill show, even though there’s so much less of it than there was of ER — to write this column, they sarcastically expressed sympathy for my plight.
Murder at 1600
Between another Pitt standout and a pair of memorably crazy episodes of the two shows I’m recapping at the moment, this was a fantastic week for series I’ve been covering for a while. But I don’t want the week’s best new debut to get lost in the shuffle, because I enjoyed it tremendously, and in a way that scratched a very different itch from the others.
That would be Netflix’s The Residence, a Shonda Rhimes-produced comedic murder mystery miniseries that basically allows Uzo Aduba to do her own version of Benoit Blanc, and at a location with incredibly high stakes: the White House. The cast is loaded and eclectic: to name just a few among the sprawling list, there’s Giancarlo Esposito, Ken Marino, Susan Kelechi Watson, Randall Park, Bronson Pinchot, Al Franken (playing a senator, no less), Eliza Coupe, and… Kylie Minogue?!?! The tone is very arch, everyone is clearly having a blast, and while the investigation is at times a bit hard to follow, the resolution feels very satisfying. I had a great time watching this one, and I hope, like Daniel Craig with the Knives Out films, Aduba gets to reprise this role from time to time.
Odds and/or ends
Welcome to the mea culpa section of this week’s newsletter regarding last week’s recaps. First of all, I screwed up in setting up the weekly Monday morning White Lotus chat, so that no email went out, and thus almost nobody seemed to notice that it existed. But my recap is still up there — including much discussion of Sam Rockwell’s surprise guest appearance, and the even more surprising monologue he delivered — and there’s still plenty of time to discuss the season’s much wilder, nuder, more drug-fueled fifth installment.
Meanwhile, a notable omission from my penultimate Severance Season Two recap: as someone who is writing a book about Rod Serling at the moment, and as someone who interviewed Severance producer Ben Stiller for the book about his love of Serling and the influence The Twilight Zone has had on this show, you would think I would have at least devoted a hundred-odd words as an aside to the fact that the penultimate episode, “The After Hours,” was not only named for a TZ episode, but had Harmony quoting dialogue from it. But because I rewatched that one way back near the start of my research, and because the chapter I’ve been working on lately is about a different period of Serling’s life, the connection escaped me entirely. Again, my bad. There’s more detail if you’re curious, but the short version is that the episode — involving a woman who has forgotten that she’s a mannequin who has briefly come to life for a chance to explore the world outside her department store — is basically dramatizing a form of severance, only one where the innies know themselves better than the outies.
That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?
I'll foment unrest: the reason the show doesn't hold up week-to-week is because its story mechanics are bad. (By this I mean, the actual building blocks of what a story is, setups and payoffs, character arcs, etc.) They don't do the work to earn the stories they seem to be trying to tell. If you just float along with the show based on style and vibes, then I'm sure it's great. If you're actually expecting real storytelling, it's not.
Mark, the lead, does not have a character story in season 2. At all. He has a plot (get Gemma back), but no emotional journey. So, too, with many of the other characters. Innie Mark's choice between Gemma and Helly at the end should have been a grand climactic choice point for the character - and maybe it would have if reintegration didn't end up being absolutely pointless - but instead it was never even a question. There was no reason for innie Mark to go with Gemma, whom he doesn't know. The fact that they even played it as a choice is absurd. He starts the episode saying he wants to live and be with Helly and he ends it in the same place, no arc there. Innie and outie Mark arguing at the beginning should have been the climax to a season-long interplay between the two - asking the question of who's real, who gets to live, who is the priority, how do you decide - but instead it was just a thing that happens, as if outie Mark never considered that his innie would have his own POV. Over and over again, we get these scenes that should be the landing points of long-form stories, but they just... skipped over telling the story.
The show wants all the payoffs, but doesn't do the work to get there. Which is how you get that false finale choice for innie Mark, how innie Dylan proposes to Gretchen after seeing her like 3 times, how outie Burt and Irving are in love after only one dinner. They're not bad end points, but because we didn't see the work to actually get there - building up these relationships so that the choices matter - it all just lands with an unsatisfying thud.
The show is well-shot and well-acted and again, if you're just bopping along with the vibes, then it's probably a fun time. But if you apply any kind of story scrutiny, it falls apart. Which is why it feels so empty at the end of it all.
I liked the finale but also had an unexpected feeling come over me about two-thirds through: I started to hope that I was about to watch the series finale, and the wool had been pulled over all of our eyes.
I think it comes from a mix of wanting to see the boldness of it (a mystery show where everyone is expecting a cliffhanger, ending without any advanced warning from the producers or network and thus not priming the audience for a series finale) and also some fatigue with the usual mystery show cliffhanger song and dance.
It was a great, if uneven season, overall. An excellent show - and yet still, probably because I rewatched the first season just before and also let myself get too hyped by Alan’s season preview, it was a bit of a step down. Everything through Woes Hollow was on par with season one though.
Last bit - I’m not alone in noticing this - but it seems like it’s Helena and not Helly R in the hallway at the end, based on the small smirk she sends Gemma’s way (“Helly R is never cruel”). Doesn’t seem to matter in terms of Marks decision to stay though