RIP, King Lear

Loss of a TV giant, 'Monk' returns to say goodbye, a 'For All Mankind' fight, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I get the Saudi package…

Thanks for everything, Norman

Norman Lear died on Tuesday, at the grand age of 101. What a man. What a career. What a life. Lear is on the shortest of short lists of the greatest and most influential TV creators of all time. If you’re doing a Mt. Rushmore, it’s him, Lucy and Desi together, David Chase, and… James L. Brooks? Steven Bochco? Regardless of the final Mt. Rushmore spot, Lear’s importance and genius are undeniable. Since Rolling Stone already had an excellent obituary ready to publish on Wednesday morning, I instead picked the five Lear shows that best illustrated what he meant to the medium.

I hope you’ll also allow a quick personal Lear story. In the summer of 2016, I was at the ATX TV Festival in Austin, with a bag full of galley copies of TV (THE BOOK) that I was handing out to fellow journalists, festival panelists, or anyone else in town whom I felt could help get the word out. Lear was being honored by the festival that year, and was accompanied by Mike Royce, who was developing the great One Day at a Time reboot with Lear at the moment. I knew Mike, and asked if he could make a backstage introduction. I’d never met Lear before, and wanted to express my appreciation for him. But I also selfishly wanted to give him a copy of the book, which prominently featured a number of Lear shows. Mike brought us together, Norman was very polite and patient as I said the same things to him that a million other people had been saying to him since before I was born, and at the end, I awkwardly pressed the book into his hand and said that I hoped he would like it. As fanboy encounters go, it was a bit awkward, but nowhere near “Never meet your idols” territory, and I was pleased that I’d kept it together.

Cut to that night. I run into Mike again at a festival party. He looks embarrassed and says, “Norman left your book in the car at the airport. But we’re getting it to him!”

My guess is that this was not an accidental leave-behind. I just hope he at least flipped through the pages until he got to the All in the Family essay before he got out of the car. And even if he never opened the thing, seeing a man whose work meant so much to me holding a piece of my work in his hands still meant an awful lot to me.

Odds and/or ends

• Writing about Lear’s death, and then doing various interviews about it, ate up the time I would have spent reviewing Mr. Monk’s Last Case, a reunion movie that debuted today on Peacock. Like many people, I went on a big Monk binge early in lockdown, eventually losing steam around the same middle seasons point where I stopped being a regular viewer during the original run. (It was after Traylor Howard replaced Bitty Schram as Monk’s assistant, but before Hector Elizondo succeeded the late Stanley Kamel as Monk’s therapist.) Like a lot of reunion movies, Mr. Monk’s Last Case runs into trouble balancing the nostalgia of bringing everyone back together for a new adventure with the reality of what their lives would be like now. It acknowledges that both the pandemic and many more years of living with his OCD would have left Monk badly damaged, and potentially suicidal, but then it tries playing those dark notes in the middle of an otherwise whimsical Monk case involving a shady tech billionaire killing to protect his fortune. Some of the comic set pieces land perfectly, others feel extra clumsy because they’re side by side with the heavier material. And the closing sequence, while well-intentioned, somehow winds up resembling the end of Schindler’s List? It’s very weird.

• It’s Friday, which means another recap of The Curse, this time in an episode where the pressure of the show, and of other characters pointing out her hypocrisy, really starts to weigh on Whitney.

Welcome to the new Barbenheimer?

Welcome to The O.C. remains available wherever books are sold, and that includes a few locales where I’ve never had my books appear before. One is airports, since Hudson News is stocking the book. The other is Target, which I’m told is a very tough place to get a book shelved. So that’s exciting. In fact, I got to see it on the shelves at our local Target over the weekend, and was amused by the placement:

I’ve asked various friends to suggest a Barbenheimer-esque portmanteau for this pairing. So far, the better ones include “Sepinheimer,” “Oppenbitch,” and, from my old pal Dan Fienberg, “I Am Become Deathmukkah.” I am open to any and all of your ideas on this important, important subject.

For All Mankind recaplet: “Goldilocks”

“Goldilocks” jumps ahead several months from the events of last week’s episode. But it also jumps back a decade to resolve the Danny Stevens matter once and for all. In a series of flashbacks set between Season Three and Season Four, we see that Danny died during his exile in the North Korean spacecraft. Did he starve to death when the rations Dani was giving him ran out? Did he simply sit out on the Martian soil and let the air go out of his suit because he couldn’t handle the loneliness? It’s not entirely clear — nor is it clear why the combined forces of NASA, Helios, and Roscosmos couldn’t get a food re-supply probe to Happy Valley even while everyone waited for a new ship that could get them off the surface. (I’ve read and/or watched The Martian a million times. I know this can be done.) The specific details don’t matter. What does is that one Dani banished the other Danny for his sins, and so he died alone. And Ed freaking Baldwin is still refusing to take responsibility for any of it a decade later.

The long-delayed fight this inspires between once and future crewmates Dani and Ed is sensational, easily the highlight of Season Four to date. Krys Marshall is just so good in these kinds of moments, when Dani knows she is one million percent right, yet once again can’t get it through this arrogant jock’s thick skull.

The rest of the episode advances various plots along well enough, like Dev, Kelly, and Kelly’s son all heading to Mars. But it was a relief to finally put Danny Stevens behind us, especially when it led to such a great final scene.

Fargo recaplet: “Insolubilia”

This was largely a fun one, with Dot once again repelling home invaders sent by Roy, this time with adding a touch of John McClane to her now-familiar MacGyver inventiveness. She gets her husband electrocuted, albeit not fatally, but otherwise proves far craftier than Gator and the others expect.

But Roy also turns out to be pretty crafty. By murdering the abusive husband and attempting to position him as the cop killer from the season premiere, he hopes to shut down the state police investigation and have free reign to keep hunting his runaway bride. Jon Hamm has been my favorite part of these early episodes, and the more ruthless Roy is, the more interesting Hamm’s performance becomes.

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