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'Only Murders in the Building' returns, 'English Teacher' debuts, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I double for Scott Bakula…

When every guest star is special, no guest star is?

The fourth season of Only Murders in the Building debuted earlier this week, with two main plots: Charles, Oliver, and Mabel investigate the murder of Charles’ stunt double Sazz, while Eugene Levy, Zach Galifianakis, and Eva Longoria are cast to play the trio in a movie inspired by the podcast’s first season. I’ve seen this year’s first seven episodes, and in my review, I suggest that having so many recognizable guest stars — also including Meryl Streep, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Melissa McCarthy, Kumail Nanjiani, Richard Kind, and Molly Shannon, among many others — is a double-edged sword. Everyone involved is super-talented, and some of them get some excellent bits of business with the leads. But there’s just too many of them, which gets in the way of both the comedy and the story after a while. This is a show that can’t find a way to say no to anything or anyone anymore, it seems. Still, I love the main trio, and we can revisit after the finale drops.

English Teacher makes the grade

This week’s other review is of a new FX comedy called English Teacher, created by and starring comedian Brian Jordan Alvarez as a teacher at an Austin, Texas high school who keeps running afoul of students, parents, and other faculty members. I was extremely charmed by its dry sense of humor — a dryness no doubt enhanced by Baskets creator Jonthan Krisel directing many of the episodes.

English Teacher is also one of the increasingly rare cases of a new FX show whose episodes will debut first on the actual FX cable channel, before appearing on Hulu the next day. Over the last couple of years, it seemed that the majority of FX shows that didn’t go directly to Hulu were either new seasons of older series or franchises (i.e., every Ryan Murphy anthology show), or shows like The Old Man that are specifically targeted at the demographic most likely to still have the cable bundle. While the always reliable Enrico Colantoni has a supporting role as the apathetic principal, English Teacher is about a Millennial who keeps making a fool of himself in front of Gen Z’ers. Not exactly geared towards the same crowd eager to watch Jeff Bridges kick ass. I wonder if this means more stuff goes to linear first, or if this is just a weird anomaly.

Odds and/or ends

• I realize I’ve been talking a lot of late about a book (my very early in the works Rod Serling biography) that’s a few years away from being published, and thus failing to plug the book — Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul, which you can preorder right now — that’s being published only a few months from now. Bad self-promoter, Alan! Bad! But this is what happens when you’re hard at work on the former while you’ve all but finished work on the latter. So consider this a reminder. And, as a reward for sitting through this plug, enjoy a supercut of Lalo Salamanca moments.

• Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is back this week with Season Two’s first three episodes on Prime. While I mostly enjoyed Season One, I found myself with minimal enthusiasm for its return. Part of this is a problem that James Poniewozik wrote about this week: TV shows are gone so long these days that, unless it is your absolute favorite and you’re obsessed, it’s easy to forget most or all of what happened when a new season arrives. At best, you need multiple episodes to remember everything and emotionally reconnect with the material. At worst — as happened to me with this show midway through the Season Two premiere — you give up and move on. If I hear a lot of enthusiasm from people who aren’t the hardcore Tolkien fans, perhaps I’ll dive back in later.

• This week, in complaints about 25-year-old episodes of television: ER treadmill binge just got to George Clooney’s final episode as a regular character. He returned a couple of times later, mostly to give Doug and Carol a happy ending. But it’s still baffling to me that his farewell episode would conclude not with a scene of the two of them — specifically, the one where Carol cries, begs him not to leave town, and insists that she doesn’t want to wake up alone tomorrow — but with Doug and Mark bantering about basketball. Admittedly, the tone of his departure was made messier because Clooney was leaving and Julianna Margulies wasn’t. (Without that as an issue, either Doug would have simply gotten a job elsewhere in Chicago, or Carol would have immediately followed him out west.) But it remains weird to me all these years later, that we’d cut from Doug walking away from the utterly devastated love of his life to a lighthearted scene with his buddy.

• Related: because of the aforementioned binge, I’ve been very excited to see The Pitt, an upcoming Max hospital drama starring Noah Wyle, and produced by a bunch of ER alums like John Wells, because it sounds like an ER sequel in everything but name. There’s just one problem: the estate of ER creator Michael Crichton also thinks it sounds like that, especially because negotiations fell through for Wells and company to make an official revival series. So the estate is suing. On the one hand, every hospital drama is in some ways like every other hospital drama. On the other, it feels like there’s enough here for this to get messy. And probably puts the kibosh on any attempt to have Eriq LaSalle guest star as the gruff mentor of Wyle’s new character, right?

• I’ve mentioned a few times recently that I’ve been tied up with several big Rolling Stone projects. One of those will finally see the light of day next week, likely on Monday morning. You can all come and yell at me about it when next week’s newsletter is published, but keep an eye on my author page in the meantime.

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