See ya in the next life, 'Succession' (and 'Barry,' and 'Ted Lasso')

Plus, 'I Think You Should Leave,' 'Yellowjackets,' and big guest stars on 'Dave'

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I lick my stepfather’s cheese…

So long, Succession

As I mentioned in the last newsletter, this was a seismic week in television, with series finales for several acclaimed, award-winning, zeitgeist-y shows. (This includes The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, whose final season I didn’t watch because the previous one extinguished whatever enthusiasm I had left for it.) We have to start, of course, with Succession, whose finale I recapped live on Sunday night, trying to organize my thoughts without the benefit of the time I usually have with an advance screener.

In that rush, the main thing I feel I didn’t get to was Shiv’s motivation for leaving the vote, and then for siding with Tom against her brothers. I think a few things were happening there. First, while it was easy to agree to another Roy sibling team-up while she and Kendall and Roman were all down in the Caribbean, the reality of seeing Kendall sitting at their father’s desk, trash-talking with Stewy, and generally being his most arrogant and insufferable self, served as a warning that he would probably shut her out of things once he officially had the throne. So that gave her pause right there, along with her residual feelings for Tom, and her recognition that she could certainly influence Tom more than she ever could do the same with Kendall. But even then, I don’t think she knew for sure what she was going to do when she exited the big conference room and headed over to the small one. She tells Kendall and Roman to leave her alone, but Kendall just can’t stop himself from following her. And in that incredible five minute scene, he makes every wrong choice a person could possibly make under these circumstances, confirming Shiv’s worst fears about him and pushing her to vote for the deal. It all tracked for me, even though I know a lot of people had questions on Sunday night.

Also? I don’t think the finale materially altered my ranking of Succession characters from least despicable to most. Kendall might move up a slot or two, and in hindsight, Lady Caroline should have been higher, at least above Connor. But the finale was true to the series, which meant everyone was who we already thought they were.

Bye bye, Barry

I was a lot more mixed on the Barry series finale. It had incredible moments, particularly the showdown between Hank and the Raven, where Anthony Carrigan and Stephen Root were just fantastic. And the abrupt ending of Barry and Gene’s relationship felt perfect. I didn’t love the epilogue, though, and I’m still wrestling with Jim Moss turning out to be another idiot at the end. But when Barry was good, it was really good.

I also interviewed the great Henry Winkler, mostly to talk about the unexpected career resurgence the role of Gene gave him, but also as an excuse to finally apologize to him for unwittingly robbing him of an Emmy nomination 23 years ago. His response was… well, just read it.

I think this is how I Think You Should Leave works

Let’s take a finale break for a moment to talk about the incredibly welcome return of I Think You Should Leave on Netflix. Rather than attempt a straightforward review of the third season, which would probably have devolved into me spoiling all of my favorite jokes, I decided to take a step back and look at the different kinds of jokes and sketches that Tim Robinson and friends love to keep returning to, episode after episode, and season after season. It’s hard to single out just one sketch as my favorite this year, so I’ll pick two: Tim trying to stop Jason Schwartzman from talking about his kids at a party, and Tim threatening Beck Bennett about the rules of their paid friend group. Just hilarious stuff.

Ta-ta, Ted Lasso

I’ve started using Substack Chat to get people talking about certain shows and articles in advance of the newsletter coming out. So many of you already know my feelings about the Ted Lasso finale, and I know many of yours. Still, I imagine we all have many more thoughts on the subject, including the ongoing mystery of whether anyone plans to continue the series in some form without Ted Lasso himself as a character.

Dave and the Case of the Very Special Guest Stars

We switch from series finales — or episodes that felt like series finales — to a good old-fashioned season finale. I spoke with Dave Burd — aka Lil Dickey — about the just-concluded third season of his great FXX comedy Dave, and specifically about how the show kept bringing in huge guest stars like Rachel McAdams, Jack Harlow, Don Cheadle, and, in the finale, Brad Pitt and… well, I’ll leave the last one as a surprise to anyone who hasn’t watched it yet.

An excellent show, even if there were some episodes this year where I had to hit pause and walk around the block before returning to another moment of Dave making a situation deeply uncomfortable for everyone around him.

Where did the Yellowjackets buzz go?

Finally, we come to Yellowjackets. Showtime opted for a weird release pattern for the second season. Episodes were available digitally on Fridays, while debuting on the linear cable channel on Sunday nights — directly opposite the final Succession season. Anecdotally, it felt like as a result, people were talking about the new season far less than they did for the first.

Or maybe people were just much less enthusiastic about the season? You may recall that I was pretty mixed on the first six episodes, which seemed to have not learned any lessons from some of the messiness that was there even in the show’s excellent first year. I still can’t believe, for instance, that it took until the end of that sixth episode to put all the adult characters together. But I at least hoped that the reunion would make the remaining episodes work better.

Unfortunately, they didn’t. Adult Charlotte just wasn’t charismatic or interesting enough to carry a story arc built entirely around her. It still felt like Shauna and Misty were each part of shows that had very little to do with the show everyone else was in, even if I loved watching Melanie Lynskey and Christina Ricci work.

Mostly, though, it feels like the adult portion of the story has run out of road, even though it features most of the show’s best performances, and all of its best-known actors. I don’t always love the Nineties timeline, especially when those scenes lean too hard into the idea that all of this is supernatural. (To me, it’s a lot more interesting if the girls are just experiencing a mass psychosis due to the trauma of the crash and their isolation.) But that’s still a story with a lot of forward momentum, and one that keeps all the major characters together.

When I interviewed the show’s creators at the end of Season One, they seemed very aware of some of the show’s flaws, and about how to avoid them in the future. But other than ignoring Taissa’s job in the New Jersey state senate, this doesn’t feel like they made any effort to fix those issues, even as they fell into new problems like Charlotte.

Second seasons are hard. That Yellowjackets stumbled so much this year doesn’t mean the show is already done. But there’s a long history of Showtime series with great first seasons that fell apart almost immediately afterwards and never found themselves again. So I don’t blame anyone for looking at this season and worrying about the future for Shauna and the others.

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