'Shōgun' wins the war before the first battle is fought

Plus, 'Bluey,' 'Baby Reindeer,' 'Dead Boy Detectives,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I take your baby Copernicus to daycare…

Shōgun soars, but should there be a sequel?

Wednesday’s column was a celebration of the Shōgun finale, and of how masterful event the entire limited series was. It’s one of the very best shows we’ve been lucky enough to have in the last several years, and a great example of how well a book can be translated for the screen.

The column also touches on the thorny question of whether the show might continue. These 10 episodes covered the entire plot of James Clavell’s novel, even choosing to end, like Clavell did, on the eve of a civil war, rather than feeling the need to dramatize the war itself. But the success of Shōgun, with both critics and viewers, may turn it into TV’s latest case of a limited series that isn’t quite so limited, and/or a book adaptation that sticks around well after the book’s plot has been exhausted. Sometimes, the latter can work, most famously with The Leftovers, which became an all-time great only after it had told the whole story of Tom Perrotta’s book. More often, though, you get things like Big Little Lies Season Two, where the success of the original fools people into thinking it’s a good idea to keep going.

It’s unclear whether FX will attempt something similar. By following Clavell’s structure, the show’s creators Rachel Kondo and Justin Marks have in theory given themselves room to maneuver in a second season, even though it’s obvious Toranaga will win. But honestly, it might be more interesting to see if FX could somehow fold in some of Clavell’s other Japanese historical novels, like Tai-Pan and King Rat, into some kind of Shōgun Presents anthology banner. Heck, Kondo and Marks could even pull a Ryan Murphy and keep bringing back these actors in different roles. More of Anna Sawai and Tadanobu Asano would never be a bad thing, right?

The surprising return (and end?) of Bluey!

Last week, you may recall, I finally got a chance to write about Bluey for Rolling Stone, including the question of whether the super-sized episode “The Sign” was meant to be the end of the series. A week later, Disney+ and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation released another episode, appropriately titled “Surprise!” Many Bluey obsessives had already sniffed out its existence, and mathematically, it allowed the show to finish out a 50-episode season. But “Surprise!” once again has raised the question of the show’s future.

For those who didn’t see it, much of “Surprise!” is a pretty straightforward episode of Bluey, where Bandit has a simple parenting dilemma: his kids want to play two different games, so he has to find a way to play both at once, while also keeping an eye on the sporting event he has on the TV. There’s a lot of slapstick, a lot of silly names coined by Bingo, and the usual heartwarming solution where Bluey — who has been asking all episode about what it’s like to have kids — takes pity on her father and agrees to play Bingo’s game.

But then there is the ending: a flashforward to Bandit and Chilli at a much older age, greeting a young adult Bluey for a visit home. Bandit hears the doorbell and steps out onto the porch, just like he did earlier in the episode with Bluey, only this time, it’s a new puppy hiding behind the door, lying in wait to ambush what we assume is their grandfather.

Like “The Sign,” this would work very well as a series finale — in some ways, even more, because Bandit (who is the avatar for Bluey creator Joe Brumm) gets to play a much bigger role in things, where he’s largely absent from “The Sign” until the emotional climax. The flashforward takes things full circle, establishing the idea of Bluey as a mom with her own kids, even if Bandit is still getting roped into games after all this time.

But is it? Brumm himself remains completely silent about the series’ future, and the internet has been filled with circular stories that are all aggregating the same handful of quotes from other producers — all of them given before “The Sign” debuted, all of them vaguely worded to say that Bluey will continue, but not specifically that this TV show will. Maybe they make movies now. Maybe it’s a spinoff set in the flashforward time period. Maybe something else. Maybe it’s just merchandise for a long time? It’s all speculation, other than the fact that the show finished production several years ago — which, in turn, means that the girls who play Bluey and Bingo must now sound much older.

“Surprise!” isn’t the first episode to finish with a glimpse of an older Bluey, since we saw her as a teenager at the end of “Camping.” And we saw an older Bingo at the end of “Daddy Dropoff.” So we can’t even look at this choice as anything definitive. The series is the most popular TV show in the world at the moment, and Disney reportedly wants to buy it for a very large fortune. So it’s hard to imagine it going away forever. But every once in a rare while, a creator — like Bill Watterson from Calvin & Hobbes — will walk away, caring more about the integrity of their work than the dumptrucks of money being driven up to their homes.

Selfishly, I’d love more Bluey. But it’s perfect as it is, and if Brumm wants to end it, he should get to.

Odds and/or ends

• Dead Boy Detectives premiered yesterday on Netflix. Conceptually, it’s like a vestigial organ of a TV show. It was originally developed to stream on Max — the characters, played by different actors than in this version, appeared in a couple of episodes of Doom Patrol — before James Gunn took over DC’s film and TV operation and decided to reinvent most of it. So it moved to Netflix, which makes some sense, since the characters — a pair of English teenage ghosts from different eras who have stuck around on Earth to solve mysteries — originated in Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, and Netflix has its ongoing Sandman adaptation. (Which I have mixed feelings about.) But even though Kirby Howell-Baptiste has a brief cameo in the first episode reprising her Sandman role as Death, the two series are otherwise completely disconnected in the five episodes I watched. Structurally and tonally, it feels way more like a late-period CW comic book adaptation — iZombie more than The Flash or Black Lightning — than like anything happening on Sandman. It’s as if Cousin Greg from Succession appeared for 90 seconds in the pilot of a medical procedural show, then went on his way once he got a necessary dose of penicillin. Then again, the version of Lucifer introduced in Sandman was later turned into a police detective’s sidekick on the Fox cop drama Lucifer, so maybe the source material is more elastic than I give it credit for?

• Now… having said all that, Dead Boy Detectives (developed by Steve Yockey, who created The Flight Attendant) is a fairly decent example of the type of show it’s trying to be, with a lot of energy, and a lot of colorful and creative ideas about the borders between our world and the one beyond it. A fine laundry folder for me, and perhaps more than that for people particularly into that subject matter. It’s also perhaps the most hilariously Vancouver show to ever Vancouver, since our London-based heroes quickly wind up stuck in a small Pacific Northwest town because one of them runs afoul of the very horny and queer local Cat King, played by an amused Lukas Gage.

• A couple of notable recent renewals: First, Apple has ordered both a fifth season of For All Mankind and a spinoff, Star City, that will go back to the Sixties to tell a parallel narrative about what the Soviets were doing while Ed and Gordo were lamenting the fact that Apollo 10 didn’t land on the moon. As you may recall, I was underwhelmed by the fourth season finale, and have made peace with the idea that FAM isn’t going to regain the heights it hit back in Season Two. But Star City sounds intriguing as an idea, at least. And I look forward to seeing what ridiculous kind of old man makeup they try to put Joel Kinnaman in for FAM Season Five.

• Second, Amazon has unsurprisingly ordered another season of Fallout. Even if it wasn’t a hit, a second season would help amortize the costs on a show where the sets, makeup, and props had to be fairly expensive to make. But Fallout also seems, anecdotally, to be the most talked-about Prime Video show in a while, if not since The Boys debuted. I was more mixed on it, enjoying Walton Goggins and Ella Purnell, but quickly growing tired of all the violent montages set to Forties pop tunes. But it and The Last of Us have both managed to bring in enthusiastic viewers beyond ones who know the game, so good on them. I’m curious what the level of enthusiasm is among you, fine readers.

Baby Reindeer, and fact vs fiction

Finally, I came late to the party to write about Baby Reindeer, which has been at or near the top of Netflix’s charts practically since it began streaming two weeks ago. (Speaking of which, I remain fascinated and/or puzzled by what shows streamers do and don’t make the effort to give critics for review. It feels like this one would have generated a lot of positive buzz if we’d gotten it in advance. But it also seems like it didn’t need our help, so…) It’s a really interesting, often gripping, show. But because I was getting to it after so many people had already watched, I elected not to write a straight review. Instead, my column tried to place it into the larger context of Based On A True Story television series, and specifically the kind of confessional, auteur-driven half hours like I May Destroy You, Feel Good, and, well, Louie. As I say at the end of the story, I am very curious to see what creator/star Richard Gadd does next, since he’s already put so much of his own life into this one project. Are we headed for the classic problem of the second album or novel? Or does he, like Phoebe Waller-Bridge (whose Fleabag is also discussed in the column, even though she has said it is not based on her own life), have the gift for inventing ideas and stories wholesale?

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