Second to 'Last'

'The Last of Us' returns, 'The Pitt' and 'The White Lotus' end, plus 'North of North,'

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as we bring in our utensils specialist…

Breaking up is hard to do

The Last of Us returns to HBO on Sunday night after more than two years away. I’ve gotten to see all of Season Two and reviewed it for Rolling Stone. It’s still an excellent show, packed with great performances — Bella Ramsey chief among them — and I’m looking forward to recapping each episode, and to getting some discussion going here via Sunday night chats. That said, my understanding is that this is a relatively faithful adaptation of the second game, which means a much bigger ensemble this time, and a lot more of Ellie interacting with other characters rather than with Joel. And since the Ellie and Joel relationship was the heart of, and the best part of, the first season, it’s hard not to watch chunks of this season where the two are not getting along, or not interacting at all, and not lament how great Ramsey and Pedro Pascal can be together. This season is only adapting the first half of The Last of Us 2, so we won’t know until next time whether the payoff to this change will be worth what’s been lost.

As I do whenever discussing a show based on another piece of media, I will ask any commenters who know the source material to tread very lightly regarding what’s to come. Don’t spoil other people’s fun, especially when there are so many other places online to connect with people who’ve already played the game.

Gunfight at The White Lotus corral

I already vented my spleen about the bloated, underwhelming finale of The White Lotus Season Three, and contributed to a Rolling Stone TV team list of questions we still had after the episode. A lot of you expressed similar frustrations in the Monday chat. But the episode was by far the show’s most-watched ever, and Mike White was, um, colorfully defiant when interviewed on Monday. So I imagine he will keep following his muse with Season Four. The comments here are wide open if more of you have thoughts on blender cleaning methodology and such.

Take off! To the North of North! Take off! It’s a beauty way to go!

Last week, a critic pal texted me to ask for advice on what to do with North of North, a Canadian comedy that began streaming on Netflix yesterday (after airing on the CBC earlier this year). On the one hand, they enjoyed the show, about a young Inuk woman living in a remote village in the Nunavut territory. On the other, they were worried that, in an age where there’s still so much more TV than critics have time to watch, let alone write about, the mere existence of a review risked overselling a show that’s cute and likable but not extraordinary, and that’s most notable for where it takes place and what kinds of characters it presents. I said that sometimes, you just have to say that you like a show, while being careful not to heap more praise on it than it can handle.

Their mention of it actually succeeded in moving North of the North to the top of my queue, and to be the other show I reviewed this week. As happened with my friend, I found it appealing but not instantly great. Mostly, I think the star, Anna Lampe, is wonderful and hopefully destined for big things, and I felt that the setting and the focus on Inuk culture helped breathe some new life into some very familiar sitcom and romcom plots. But I definitely felt the same pressure when writing that my friend did, because I couldn’t resist mentioning both Reservation Dogs and Northern Exposure in my review, even though North of North isn’t in the creative echelon of either one, at least not now. It’s a cute hangout show, in a novel locale. I had fun watching it. Sometimes — especially at times like these — that’s all you need.

Odds and/or ends

• A new season of Black Mirror dropped yesterday. I’ve only had time to watch two episodes: “Hotel Reverie,” where Issa Rae plays an actress who gets digitally inserted into one of her favorite old movies, as the male lead; and “USS Callister: Into Infinity,” a follow-up to one of the show’s most popular episodes, with Cristin Milioti and friends still stuck inside the video game Jesse Plemons cloned them into last time. The latter is an overt sequel, while the former plays as a spiritual sequel to several others, most notably another fan favorite, “San Junipero,” and I’ve heard from other critics that the season as a whole has a feeling of Charlie Brooker Plays the Hits. That’s all but inevitable after 14 years — and the unevenness baked into any anthology show — and I enjoyed both of these. Emma Corrin is especially good as the female lead of the movie in “Hotel Reverie.” Maybe I’ll write more down the line when I’ve had a chance to watch the rest.

• Doctor Who is back tomorrow on Disney+. I’ve only seen the season premiere, which introduces Varada Sethu as Belinda Chandra, the Doctor’s new companion. I like her, and continue to love Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor. But like a lot of Russell T. Davies’ scripts from last season, the premiere is stuffed with more ideas than it knows what to do with.

• I will most likely be on vacation next week, which in turn means likely no newsletter next week, though I’ll set up a chat Sunday night to discuss The Last of Us premiere. So that means I have to devote a few words today to letting you know two things about Ransom Canyon, a Netflix drama debuting next week that, while based on a preexisting book series, seems very much like the streamer trying again to develop its own Yellowstone. The first is that Josh Duhamel’s character is named Staten Kirkland, which is so ridiculous a moniker, I assume my pal Brian Grubb is legally obligated to watch it. The second is that while Duhamel and Minka Kelly are the leads, another main character is played by Eoin Macken, who to me will always be the star of the NBC medical drama Night Shift, which gave us the greatest piece of key art in the history of television:

• If I’m off next week, that also means no newsletter item on this weekend’s Dark Winds, which, as I mentioned in my review, is another contender for Episode of the Year, along with Adolescence episode 3 and The Pitt episode 12. I’ll try to have more on that whenever I return, but if you like Zahn McClarnon doing some acting, you won’t want to miss.

The Pitt recaplet: “Hour 15”

Oh, man. Nearly four months later, we’ve reached the end of The Pitt. The good news is that Season Two is supposed to arrive no later than next January, as John Wells continues being a key player in Operation: Let TV Be TV, Please.

I’ve already written two different long essays about why the show is great, and I’ve interviewed the producers. All that’s left is to break down various things that happened in the finale:

• Most importantly, Robby doesn’t quit, nor does he have such a massive public meltdown that he jeopardizes his career. It’s unclear from his final conversation with Dana whether the panic attack he suffered gave him some level of catharsis about Adamson, or if he’ll continue to blame himself forever. But for the moment, at least, he stayed calm, made it through another shift, and even got to enjoy a beer with a few members of The Pitt Crew(*) afterwards. The right note to end on, I think, after so much turmoil throughout the season. (*) Not to be confused with my Pitt-obsessed TV critic text chain of the same name.

• That said, Dana does quit — or, at least, she takes all her family photos with her at the end of the shift, not intending to return. If this were a traditionally-structured medical drama, a few Season Two episodes could feature a subplot where she gets bored working for an internist out in the suburbs, then comes back to work at PTMC. This show is not abandoning its format — producers have already said Season Two will take place around the Fourth of July — so either Dana’s gone for good, or there’s a line of dialogue explaining that she just couldn’t stay away. Considering how valuable Katherine LaNasa has been, I would bet on the latter.  

• While Dana goes, Collins never returned, which is a somewhat surprising choice, even if I didn’t really miss her with everything else happening. Meanwhile, Langdon goes full heel. He refuses to accept Robby’s offer of going into treatment, then attacks his mentor for breaking down in the middle of the PittFest crisis. If that character’s back next season, it feels like he might not be getting along with anybody, other than maybe Mel.

• Speaking of which, we finally get to see Becca, who is as sweet and innocent and lovable as she should be, given Mel’s obvious devotion to her across the season. It’s fun to see Mel so much more relaxed around her sister, a person she’s known her whole life, and whom she’s used to being in a leadership role around, than when she was on her first shift at the hospital. Also, how many times do you think Mel has watched Elf with Becca?

• A couple of seemingly random lines from earlier in the season get surprising payoffs here. Early in the crisis, Robby offers to help Abbott put in a second chest tube on a patient, and Abbott quips, “I’ve got two hands.” In the final scene at the park, we see that Jack has a prosthetic foot, presumably from his time in the military. Also in that twelfth episode, Whitaker mentioned an empty wing of the hospital where they could send patients. Why would he even know about such a place? It turns out that he’s been living there, having run out of money for anything but his med school tuition. (We also saw him pocketing food at least once during the day.) This leads to Santos inviting him to live for free in her guest room. It’s a nice moment for Santos, who has pretty mercilessly teased Whitaker throughout the day, but whose abrasive personality seems to come from a defensive place inspired by her past abuse. Because the show has to take place almost entirely inside the hospital, it’s hard to imagine the roommate situation figuring much into Season Two, but maybe they’ll be bickering about chores in the middle of procedures?

• The first time I watched it, I felt like the finale rushed through Mohan’s adrenaline surge and crash. But after rewatching the other PittFest episodes, it was clear she’s been riding the high of all these crazy procedures for several hours already. At the same time, the dialogue about Samira needing to have a life outside the job felt a bit shoehorned in, as that wasn’t really an issue we saw struggling with throughout the season.

• I was remiss last week in not pointing out two guest stars from beloved shows past. That was Devon Gummersall — aka Brian Krakow from My So-Called Life (also set in Pittsburgh!) — as the measles dad, who finally consents to the spinal tap when his terrible wife is out of the room. And the night shift nurse who takes mock offense to Dana’s complaints about night shift workers is played by Lesley Boone, who was Molly on Ed. I will spare you my TED Talk on why that show would have worked much better if Ed had wound up with Molly…

• The show has cheated the real-time gimmick before, but never as explicitly as in the scene where Robby tells Leah’s parents the terrible news about their daughter. We see him go into the room and close the door, and then we immediately cut to him leaving, because we don’t really need to see any of that. I’m not bothered by cuts like that, as rigid adherence to following everything second by second feels unnecessary. It’s just interesting when the show doesn’t even attempt to disguise it.

• Finally, let’s get back to my one complaint from last week’s episode, about how the show is framing the situation with Robby, McKay, and David as one where Robby was right and McKay was wrong. Some of you pushed back last week to say that this was meant to be another example of Robby responding poorly during one of the worst shifts of his life. But in every other situation like that, the show has given us another character reacting with concern about Robby’s state of mind. (Like Abbott does when Robby takes the measles dad into the morgue to try to scare him straight.) There’s nothing like that here, and nobody at any point learns that Robby’s words to McKay belie his actions from earlier in the day. In an interview with Vulture, R. Scott Gemmill said it took the writers until late in the season to decide for sure whether David was the shooter, and I wonder if the back-and-forth about that led to this part of the story not coming across as intended. It’s a misstep, but we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of the great when looking back on this spectacular first season.

That’s it for this week! Next newsletter probably coming on April 25. What did everybody else think?