Space. The final frontier...

'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' is back, plus 'Black Mirror,' 'The Full Monty,' and best shows of the year so far

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I have a good reason to steal the Enterprise…

The best of the best (so far)

My first column this week was my list of the 15 best shows of 2023 so far, alphabetically from Abbott Elementary through Succession. Technically, we have a few weeks to go until we’ve reached the year’s mid-point. It’s entirely possible that something like The Bear Season Two — which premieres next week, but whose screeners I have yet to watch — would be better than one or more of these selections. But it’s nonetheless been an excellent six months so far. And this list didn’t even have room for Season Three of The Great, which I loved (especially in the second half, when the show’s status quo was massively upended), or something super charming like Primo.

The question I get asked a lot is whether we’re at the end of an era. Four of the shows on this list were in their final seasons, on top of some huge shows like Better Call Saul ending last year. A few of my other selections appear to be one-and-done miniseries, and who knows if or when Party Down might be able to make another comeback? And regardless of what happens with the WGA strike, it appears the business is headed for some kind of massive retrenchment, due to the many systemic problems described in this great Vulture story co-written by my friend Joe Adalian.

But the end of Peak TV doesn’t necessarily mean the end of great TV. Yes, everyone wants to do more shows based on superheroes and other IP. Yes, there will be fewer overall shows, and maybe less room for the most niche stuff. But HBO and FX aren’t going anywhere. Netflix’s batting average will probably remain low, but all of those swings usually lead to a few home runs like Beef and a few doubles or triples like The Diplomat.

Maybe I’m a cockeyed optimist here, but my hope is that the good stuff will continue, just without the oppressive feeling that there’s not enough time to keep up with all of it.

What else is Alan writing?

I wrote three other columns this week:

• FX on Hulu’s sequel series to The Full Monty dropped on Hulu on Wednesday. Set a quarter century after the movie, it’s largely plotless and doesn’t even have a big showpiece objective like the striptease review. But I found it charming in its shagginess. And, like The Conners, it’s a sequel whose existence is justified by how much tougher life has gotten for working-class guys like these.

• Black Mirror Season Six came out yesterday. As has always been the case, but especially in the show’s Netflix seasons, it’s a mixed bag, and the first episode, with Annie Murphy and Salma Hayek, is the only one that I think works in its entirety. But it’s interesting to see Charlie Brooker pushing back on both the themes of the series, and on Netflix itself. I wonder how much longer he wants to keep making it.

• Also debuting yesterday was Season Two of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds on Paramount+. I’ll have more to say about it in a second, but my review of the season’s first six episodes was a celebration of the show’s ability to feel like the best of Eighties and Nineties Star Trek, even though they only make 10 episodes a year as opposed to 22 or more. I also used that column to talk just a little about my current family binge of Deep Space Nine. We have just started the fourth season — and there was much crying and hugging after a viewing of “The Visitor,” which is one of the best Star Trek stories of all time, on TV or in film — and I’ve been relieved to see how well most of it holds up.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds recaplet: “The Broken Circle”

Finally, as part of my ongoing commitment to celebrate shows that want to Make TV TV Again, I’m going to write at least a little something each week about the proudly episodic Strange New Worlds.

The show begins Season Two with “The Broken Circle,” which makes the interesting choice to barely feature Captain Pike, even though Anson Mount is the lead, and the best part of a terrific ensemble. But with Una in Starfleet jail, and Pike off to find her a lawyer, we’re down to a skeleton crew for an action-oriented episode where Spock and company have to prevent a resumption of the war between the Klingons and the Federation.

It’s a good showcase for the supporting cast, which expands to include Carol Kane as the ship’s long-lived new chief engineer. (Think Guinan, only wackier.) Ethan Peck in particular gets to do a lot as Spock. There’s the comedy of him struggling to figure out his version of “Make it so” or “Hit it.” (He lands, awkwardly, on “I would like the ship to go… now.” And then there’s the ongoing drama of his complicated feelings for Christine Chapel, whom we’ll get back to in a moment. But everybody gets at least one moment to shine, and we also see various character arcs advance. Uhura, for instance, is no longer a cadet who’s ambivalent about Starfleet, but an ensign who’s clearly in it for the long haul. (And the episode ends with a lovely title card paying tribute to the late, great Nichelle Nichols.)

The big action set piece involves Chapel and Dr. M’Benga taking some kind of super drug from their time in the last Klingon war, and Hulking out to take on an entire shipful of Klingons. It should seem ludicrous for the gentle doctor to go full Jack Bauer, but the show has made a repeated point of noting that Christine and Joseph fought in the war when many of their shipmates didn’t. The actors sell the hell out of it, the fight choreography is good, and it leads to a thrilling climax where the two of them have to go out an airlock without spacesuits to avoid blowing up with the fake starship. (The idea evoked the incredible sequence in the For All Mankind Season Two finale where Tracy and Gordo have to do a spacewalk while covered only in duct tape.) And, of course, the threat of Christine dying brings all of Spock’s messy emotions to the surface as he pleads with her to not die. I like that the show is leaning into the idea that this younger Spock has much greater difficulty balancing his human and Vulcan halves than the Leonard Nimoy version from the original series, and Peck plays that kind of material very well.

All in all, an excellent start. And even if this wasn’t quite your tempo, the great thing about Strange New Worlds is that each episode feels very different from the one before, so perhaps next week’s will work better for you.

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