Submitted for your approval

Announcing my next book project, plus 'House of the Dragon' finale thoughts

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as it’s a cookbook…

Twilight time

A few weeks back, I announced that my next book (which remains available for pre-order now, ahead of its release in February of 2025), will be Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul. But I finished writing that months ago, and all that’s left is minor proofreading and other small bits of business. In the meantime, I’ve begun preliminary work on my next next book, which was officially announced this week:

I’m writing a biography of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone and one of the most acclaimed and influential writers in the history of television. It’s for Grand Central, the same publisher responsible for TV (THE BOOK).

This is the first proper biography I’ve ever attempted, though I’ve written newspaper and magazine profiles before, and offered some backstory on the showrunners from The Revolution Was Televised. It’s both an exciting and terrifying task. Because I am who I am, I imagine a lot of the book will still be offering analysis of The Twilight Zone and Serling’s other work, but it will be filtered through his life story, mid-century America, those nascent days of the TV industry, etc.

For one reason or another, virtually every book I’ve written in the past has had to be completed on an absurdly tight schedule. With this one, I’m finally getting to take my time, which means you shouldn’t expect it for a few years. But I imagine I’ll be mentioning it now and then as I do my research. The first step in that process is me watching as much of Serling’s output as is available. I saw most of The Twilight Zone when I was young, but I hadn’t revisited them until the last couple of months, and some episodes, I hadn’t seen at all. It’s been fascinating to go through them , both the great ones like “Time Enough at Last” and the less thrilling ones, like the Season Four stretch my Paramount+ binge is in right now, when someone had the unfortunate idea to expand the show to an hour. (Twilight Zone stories are almost always better served by brevity.) Some episodes are very much a product of their time, while many others still play like gangbusters, and a fair number of them have much more resonance today than they should, 70-plus years later. When this binge is done, I have to go through his Fifties teleplays (many of which are on YouTube, or at The Paley Center), Seven Days in May, Planet of the Apes, Night Gallery (which I had to buy on DVD), and all the others. I can’t wait to watch everything, and to dive very deep into the life of Rod Serling himself. And I hope by the time I’m done, I can do justice to both that life and the incredible art it produced.

House of the Dragon takes a break

After being a House of the Dragon skeptic at best for most of its first two seasons, I found myself in an odd position on Sunday night, as reaction to the Season Two finale rolled in, and I realized that I had enjoyed it significantly more than many people who are overall much higher on the show than I am.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m still here almost entirely for a handful of performances, for the production values, and for whatever residual affection I have for Game of Thrones. I don’t care about the fate of a single character here as much as I cared about, say, Hot Pie. The Targaryens fundamentally bore me. And I rarely feel invested in all the gamesmanship between the two factions, since I’ve seen the other series and know this will all be moot. (You can make an effective tragedy out of this kind of pointless power struggle; this one just hasn’t been, for me.)

Beyond that, I should have been predisposed against “The Queen Who Ever Was,” what with the show once again pausing right before everything happens. A frequent complaint I saw on social media is that this would have been a good penultimate episode, and many are annoyed it’s instead the finale — and, given the long production episode, the last episode anyone will see for quite some time.

And yet… on a scene-by-scene basis, this was about the most consistently engaged I felt all season. The three-way dragon battle in the fourth episode was impressive, and I of course enjoyed Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke’s previous scene together. But the individual conversations just felt richer this time around than they generally do on this series. Larys’s plea for Aegon to flee with him to Braavos is the most he’s felt like an actual person, rather than a shameless Littlefinger rip-off. Criston recognizing how small and useless he has turned out to be is somehow the most I’ve ever liked him. Tyland Lannister, who barely even qualifies as a character, came alive a bit in his adventures in pirate land. Daemon’s prophetic glimpse of Dany once again serves as a reminder that the civil war will eventually be rendered meaningless. But if it forced him to commit to a clear role and character arc moving forward, rather than being too elusive for the writers to pin down, like he’s been in the past, than I’ll gladly accept the help of the Mother of Dragons, Breaker of Chains, Painter of Birdhouses. And, of course, the latest conversation between Rhaenyra and Alicent crackled like usual, and seemed to genuinely move the story forward.

I suppose this is where my overall lack of investment helps: because my enthusiasm for the story is so modest, I wasn’t troubled that the season ended on so many ellipses, most of them too mild to even qualify as cliffhangers. Mostly, though, it was that this was the first episode of the series where there was real effort put into making the supporting players into something more than walking Wiki entries. I recognize that’s an incredibly low bar, but it’s something. Now we’ll see how much I remember, or care, whenever Season Three arrives way off in the distance. But maybe one day, I can do more than just damn HotD with faint praise!

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