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?