Yeah, I'm the opposite of Alan here—I thought the premiere (which he thought was the best of the early bunch) was tedious and borderline unwatchable, but the rest of the season was totally enjoyable.
And i loved the finale I though there were very funny jokes. The whole mexican food bit was so great. The ted danson story, making fun of the judge reading the sentence first etc. Great way to go out
Yeah I almost avoided the last season altogether based on Alan’s comments but I’m glad I changed my mind. I’m baffled at his negative reaction to the season and the finale, but I am so in the bag for Larry I have no thoughtful analysis. Like Chris Farley and Norm MacDonald I laugh at literally everything he does and says!
We finished Ripley yesterday and really enjoyed it. I don't know if you read the book, but my memory is that it stuck pretty close to it, both in the level of detail it awarded to Tom and the meandering way the case circles around him. And I don't think this is a spoiler, but the next book (Ripley Under Ground) deals directly with art forgery, so I feel like Malkovich's involvement and the allusions to art forgery are both an easter egg for readers of that book and a possible setup for a sequel. Which hopefully we get, because that one is my favorite of the Ripley books.
Thanks, Ken. Does Tom have a partner/mentor in that book? I'm at least a little skeptical that Netflix will make another season — this show is expensive, as you can tell from the locations and the photography, and I don't know if it's going to turn out to be a Cobra Kai-level phenomenon that transcends the show's non-Netflix origins — but if they do, I'd love to have Malkovich along for the ride.
Partners yes, but they would be more contemporaries in age. And it's been a while since I read it, but I do remember there being a mentor-ish character that shows up later in the book.
The character Malkovich played, Reeves Minot, is indeed his partner in Ripley Under Ground, and also shows up in at least one other Ripley book, so this was 100% queueing up a second season.
I think the finale's critics - and David - have always had it wrong. The concept - parading former guest stars to encapsulate the series - is actually rather clever. And I have no problem with David's idea of subverting everyone's love of the characters by reveling in the fact that they truly are shallow narcissists. I'm not sure pivoting to that extreme in a finale is the best course (as bad as the foursome were, they were never as bad as they act in the finale) - but, OK. All of that is fine & dandy.
No, the problem with the finale is that it isn't funny. Never. Not once. It does not generate one genuine laugh. Again, the concept - which is great - does lend to some warm, nostalgic smiles. But none of the guest stars do anything *funny*. They just rehash old jokes.
Meanwhile, Kramer is jumping around like an actor on a kids' show; Jerry is struggling to hide his smug contempt; George is acting for the back row- so insanely big; and they give Elaine *nothing* to do but, essentially, be really, really mean.
While I lean Alan's way on Curb's finale - IMO, once we knew where David was going, I think the concept wore out its welcome before we ever saw it executed - I will at least argue that the finale looks and sounds like a Curb episode. Not a great or even good one - but they didn't fundamentally change the show to accommodate a wildly decisive idea. All the things we loved about Curb are there (I thought Danson was tremendous, and the Mexican food bit was peak Curb). And I thought the final scene, on the airplane, was perfect.
It is a significantly better finale than Seinfeld, IMO.
I'm all caught up on Sugar's first 3 eps and even if you hadn't basically spoiled some big plot twist coming in ep 6, I'd still be wondering at all the odd little elements of Sugar's condition, the recurring bits of dialogue that could have multiple meanings, or the weird heightened nature of the show that swings between homage and wish fulfillment. So I'm not sure how to feel about knowing something big is coming, because that knowledge has foregrounded all of these things so much that I'm not really into the show itself. At first I was mad you revealed that, now I'm not sure I wouldn't be picking up something weird regardless. I can't decide if its good or bad that you revealed that (even though you gave up no specifics).
I didn't want to rush through Ripley, I really hate binging good shows, so I'm only a couple eps in but it is absolutely breath-taking to watch the incredible cinematography. But as such I had to skip half this newsletter and much of the comments here, which is disappointing. I hate binge releasing.
Revealing whether something has a twist is often something I wrestle with, because I'm similar in that once I know, I keep looking for it everywhere. However, I will say two things:
1)Every critic I know who watched it cold began to suspect something along the lines of what happens well before it happens. As you say, the show does begin seeding clues that things aren't entirely what they seem.
2)In this case, the timing of the twist frustrated me so much that I couldn't in good conscience write a review that ignored this. It is, to my mind, an enormous mistake on the part of the creative team to do it when and how they do it, and it made me think much less of the show than I would have if they hadn't Surf Dracula'ed it.
Right, I can definitely see the reasoning behind giving a warning, the further I've gotten into the show the more strange and unreal it feels. I think I'm going to stick with this because I have a couple rough ideas of where this is going and a morbid curiosity to play that out.
In honor of Alan's late, lamented podcast "Too Long; Didn't Watch," ahead of watching the Curb finale, I watched the Seinfeld pilot and finale for the first time, then watched Curb's first episode. It was fun seeing the parallels besides the courtroom cavalcade, like the button riff from Seinfeld 1 to finale, then the pants tent from Curb 1 to finale. One small possible connection I found was that the scene at Aunt Rae's restaurant seemed like it was filmed for a multi-camera sitcom and not like how they normally shoot restaurant scenes on Curb; wonder if that was a nod to the Seinfeld diner?
Also, in terms of connections to the Curb premiere, if not Seinfeld, I liked how Larry gets into an altercation with Richard's love interest, without knowing she was his girlfriend. While Allison Janney was pretty great in the role, it's too bad they didn't get the same actress. She is still doing TV: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0590499/.
Overall, I liked this season more than Alan did in his opening preview, but I agree that the show was not firing on all cylinders. Even this finale, while obvious in plotting, had no momentum heading into it since the last few episodes barely seemed to grapple that we were coming towards the conclusion of the series. Though I guess that does feel very "Curb."
So agree about Robert Downey Jr in Ally McBeal. I was so disappointed that because of his actions irl, that the character couldn’t continue in the series.
The "Curb" finale was predictable but then we had the outstanding last 5 minutes when Larry faked us out with the tent pants callback to the 1st episode just as the last conversation in "Seinfeld" was a callback to the 1st conversation (about shirt buttons)... then Jerry came in to save the day. (BTW, Leon said that he watched all of "Seinfeld" except for the finale.)
I know he didn't get to the finale. I'm just not sure what the point of that subplot is, in an episode that is remaking the Seinfeld finale, if there's not a payoff to it. As Dan Fienberg and I noted when we discussed the episode on today's TV's Top 5 podcast, it's like the catawampus joke had a middle and a punchline, but no setup, while this one had a setup and a middle, but no punchline.
Alan, your review of Sugar caused either an argument or a 'lively discussion' on our own TV podcast. One of my co-hosts who watched the first two episodes is of the opinion that reviewers shouldn't give their view on a twist that the audience won't see for another 4 weeks. I spoke up for the reviewers saying that you have to look at the series as whole and examine what and doesn't work where he thought giving your opinion on whether a twist works and whether that sours your view of a whole season was wrong. We argued a lot and I still don't know what I think. What is your view on this? Obviously you spoke about the twist but were prevented to reveal what it was.
I discussed this in a reply to another comment here. What I would say is that part of the job is to tell people whether they should or shouldn't spend their time watching a show. So in this case, the notion of spoiling the idea of twist was outweighed by my belief that people should be warned that they might get really annoyed 3/4 of the way through the season.
That was my argument. I'm certainly grateful I haven't got to spend 6 hrs with something that morphs into something entirely different. So I appreciate that.
I thought Sumner was delightful as Freddie—they brought their own take, and I never thought about Hoffman once—and I think their casting as a cis character is intriguing. I too expected some acknowledgement that Freddie was non-binary in some way (which I imagine might not have been out-of-place in the kind of urbane expatriate European scene of the early 60s) but the fact that he wasn't in retrospect makes a lot of sense. After all, this is a show that also asked to believe that the main character is (or should be, logically, and is in the books) about two decades younger than the actor—but again, I bought it completely, because Scott is so terrific in the role. I'm a little uneasy drawing a parallel between a mid-40s actor playing a 25-year old and an NB actor playing a man, but the fact that they both "read" as something a little bit other than their characters seems both fitting in a show that is very much about identity and "passing" (see also, Ripley's implausible disguise.)
To be clear, there should be anything controversial about casting an actor in a part that doesn't match their real life identity, but given the current conservative backlash against such things I think the casting inevitably makes a sort of statement that it's the performance that matters. Depending on your level of comfort it's either challenging, or "just" a damn good performance, and I suspect with time it will age into simply being the latter.
Great show. I wish they'd released it weekly, in part because I find these binge-releases easy to miss/overlook, so thanks, Alan, for bringing it to my attention. I hope they adapt more books although from what the director and Scott have said that sounds not at all a sure thing.
I'm not sure that Tom is meant to be in his 20s in this. Johnny Flynn is in his early 40s, and doesn't look a lot younger than that, even in black and white. I think the idea is that this version of Tom is a veteran con man, but a really small-time one until this huge opportunity falls into his lap. Maybe Scott is playing a decade younger — which he can pass for — but he's not meant to be a relative kid like Matt Damon was.
They don't really say, and they do elide certain details from the book that would pin him down to a particular age. But aging him up is such a substantial departure from the source material that I assume those choices were made in service of casting Scott rather than vice versa. (And to be clear, I approve.)
As you said previously, revivals/reboots only work if there’s still more stories left ( The Comeback, Party Down) or if they adapt to the times (Twin Peaks, The Connors) as otherwise it’s mostly a waste of time.
We still have two episodes to go in Tom Ripley vs. the Stairs. I’ll come back to read your further thoughts once we’re done, Alan, but one comment now (with the most negligible of spoilers for the series’ early chapters): Gorgeous as the B&W cinematography is — and it really is breathtaking, from composition of frame to astounding visual texture — I found it jarring when attention was drawn in dialogue to colors that we can’t see on screen, namely Dickie’s blue paintings and especially the Greenleafs’ correction* of what Tom calls maroon to burgundy. [*Edit: That was apparently a shop clerk and not Dickie's parents.]
Curb finale was fantastic and the entire last season was incredibly good.
Yeah, I'm the opposite of Alan here—I thought the premiere (which he thought was the best of the early bunch) was tedious and borderline unwatchable, but the rest of the season was totally enjoyable.
Absolutely. Alan was wrong. It happens.
I agree
liked the season a lot
I think it was the best one since the long break.
And i loved the finale I though there were very funny jokes. The whole mexican food bit was so great. The ted danson story, making fun of the judge reading the sentence first etc. Great way to go out
Yeah I almost avoided the last season altogether based on Alan’s comments but I’m glad I changed my mind. I’m baffled at his negative reaction to the season and the finale, but I am so in the bag for Larry I have no thoughtful analysis. Like Chris Farley and Norm MacDonald I laugh at literally everything he does and says!
We finished Ripley yesterday and really enjoyed it. I don't know if you read the book, but my memory is that it stuck pretty close to it, both in the level of detail it awarded to Tom and the meandering way the case circles around him. And I don't think this is a spoiler, but the next book (Ripley Under Ground) deals directly with art forgery, so I feel like Malkovich's involvement and the allusions to art forgery are both an easter egg for readers of that book and a possible setup for a sequel. Which hopefully we get, because that one is my favorite of the Ripley books.
Thanks, Ken. Does Tom have a partner/mentor in that book? I'm at least a little skeptical that Netflix will make another season — this show is expensive, as you can tell from the locations and the photography, and I don't know if it's going to turn out to be a Cobra Kai-level phenomenon that transcends the show's non-Netflix origins — but if they do, I'd love to have Malkovich along for the ride.
Partners yes, but they would be more contemporaries in age. And it's been a while since I read it, but I do remember there being a mentor-ish character that shows up later in the book.
As I'm sure was intended by you, Alan, I mentally read the ellipsis in your "Believe It...or Not" heading as a deep Jack Palance-y inhale.
The character Malkovich played, Reeves Minot, is indeed his partner in Ripley Under Ground, and also shows up in at least one other Ripley book, so this was 100% queueing up a second season.
I rewatched the Seinfeld finale, post-Curb.
I think the finale's critics - and David - have always had it wrong. The concept - parading former guest stars to encapsulate the series - is actually rather clever. And I have no problem with David's idea of subverting everyone's love of the characters by reveling in the fact that they truly are shallow narcissists. I'm not sure pivoting to that extreme in a finale is the best course (as bad as the foursome were, they were never as bad as they act in the finale) - but, OK. All of that is fine & dandy.
No, the problem with the finale is that it isn't funny. Never. Not once. It does not generate one genuine laugh. Again, the concept - which is great - does lend to some warm, nostalgic smiles. But none of the guest stars do anything *funny*. They just rehash old jokes.
Meanwhile, Kramer is jumping around like an actor on a kids' show; Jerry is struggling to hide his smug contempt; George is acting for the back row- so insanely big; and they give Elaine *nothing* to do but, essentially, be really, really mean.
While I lean Alan's way on Curb's finale - IMO, once we knew where David was going, I think the concept wore out its welcome before we ever saw it executed - I will at least argue that the finale looks and sounds like a Curb episode. Not a great or even good one - but they didn't fundamentally change the show to accommodate a wildly decisive idea. All the things we loved about Curb are there (I thought Danson was tremendous, and the Mexican food bit was peak Curb). And I thought the final scene, on the airplane, was perfect.
It is a significantly better finale than Seinfeld, IMO.
I'm all caught up on Sugar's first 3 eps and even if you hadn't basically spoiled some big plot twist coming in ep 6, I'd still be wondering at all the odd little elements of Sugar's condition, the recurring bits of dialogue that could have multiple meanings, or the weird heightened nature of the show that swings between homage and wish fulfillment. So I'm not sure how to feel about knowing something big is coming, because that knowledge has foregrounded all of these things so much that I'm not really into the show itself. At first I was mad you revealed that, now I'm not sure I wouldn't be picking up something weird regardless. I can't decide if its good or bad that you revealed that (even though you gave up no specifics).
I didn't want to rush through Ripley, I really hate binging good shows, so I'm only a couple eps in but it is absolutely breath-taking to watch the incredible cinematography. But as such I had to skip half this newsletter and much of the comments here, which is disappointing. I hate binge releasing.
Revealing whether something has a twist is often something I wrestle with, because I'm similar in that once I know, I keep looking for it everywhere. However, I will say two things:
1)Every critic I know who watched it cold began to suspect something along the lines of what happens well before it happens. As you say, the show does begin seeding clues that things aren't entirely what they seem.
2)In this case, the timing of the twist frustrated me so much that I couldn't in good conscience write a review that ignored this. It is, to my mind, an enormous mistake on the part of the creative team to do it when and how they do it, and it made me think much less of the show than I would have if they hadn't Surf Dracula'ed it.
Right, I can definitely see the reasoning behind giving a warning, the further I've gotten into the show the more strange and unreal it feels. I think I'm going to stick with this because I have a couple rough ideas of where this is going and a morbid curiosity to play that out.
In honor of Alan's late, lamented podcast "Too Long; Didn't Watch," ahead of watching the Curb finale, I watched the Seinfeld pilot and finale for the first time, then watched Curb's first episode. It was fun seeing the parallels besides the courtroom cavalcade, like the button riff from Seinfeld 1 to finale, then the pants tent from Curb 1 to finale. One small possible connection I found was that the scene at Aunt Rae's restaurant seemed like it was filmed for a multi-camera sitcom and not like how they normally shoot restaurant scenes on Curb; wonder if that was a nod to the Seinfeld diner?
Also, in terms of connections to the Curb premiere, if not Seinfeld, I liked how Larry gets into an altercation with Richard's love interest, without knowing she was his girlfriend. While Allison Janney was pretty great in the role, it's too bad they didn't get the same actress. She is still doing TV: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0590499/.
Overall, I liked this season more than Alan did in his opening preview, but I agree that the show was not firing on all cylinders. Even this finale, while obvious in plotting, had no momentum heading into it since the last few episodes barely seemed to grapple that we were coming towards the conclusion of the series. Though I guess that does feel very "Curb."
So agree about Robert Downey Jr in Ally McBeal. I was so disappointed that because of his actions irl, that the character couldn’t continue in the series.
The "Curb" finale was predictable but then we had the outstanding last 5 minutes when Larry faked us out with the tent pants callback to the 1st episode just as the last conversation in "Seinfeld" was a callback to the 1st conversation (about shirt buttons)... then Jerry came in to save the day. (BTW, Leon said that he watched all of "Seinfeld" except for the finale.)
I know he didn't get to the finale. I'm just not sure what the point of that subplot is, in an episode that is remaking the Seinfeld finale, if there's not a payoff to it. As Dan Fienberg and I noted when we discussed the episode on today's TV's Top 5 podcast, it's like the catawampus joke had a middle and a punchline, but no setup, while this one had a setup and a middle, but no punchline.
That's a good point. Was the "payoff" supposed to be his discussion with Jerry about getting "tail"? That wasn't much of a payoff.
That's all Leon has been for years, unfortunately.
Alan, your review of Sugar caused either an argument or a 'lively discussion' on our own TV podcast. One of my co-hosts who watched the first two episodes is of the opinion that reviewers shouldn't give their view on a twist that the audience won't see for another 4 weeks. I spoke up for the reviewers saying that you have to look at the series as whole and examine what and doesn't work where he thought giving your opinion on whether a twist works and whether that sours your view of a whole season was wrong. We argued a lot and I still don't know what I think. What is your view on this? Obviously you spoke about the twist but were prevented to reveal what it was.
I discussed this in a reply to another comment here. What I would say is that part of the job is to tell people whether they should or shouldn't spend their time watching a show. So in this case, the notion of spoiling the idea of twist was outweighed by my belief that people should be warned that they might get really annoyed 3/4 of the way through the season.
That was my argument. I'm certainly grateful I haven't got to spend 6 hrs with something that morphs into something entirely different. So I appreciate that.
I thought Sumner was delightful as Freddie—they brought their own take, and I never thought about Hoffman once—and I think their casting as a cis character is intriguing. I too expected some acknowledgement that Freddie was non-binary in some way (which I imagine might not have been out-of-place in the kind of urbane expatriate European scene of the early 60s) but the fact that he wasn't in retrospect makes a lot of sense. After all, this is a show that also asked to believe that the main character is (or should be, logically, and is in the books) about two decades younger than the actor—but again, I bought it completely, because Scott is so terrific in the role. I'm a little uneasy drawing a parallel between a mid-40s actor playing a 25-year old and an NB actor playing a man, but the fact that they both "read" as something a little bit other than their characters seems both fitting in a show that is very much about identity and "passing" (see also, Ripley's implausible disguise.)
To be clear, there should be anything controversial about casting an actor in a part that doesn't match their real life identity, but given the current conservative backlash against such things I think the casting inevitably makes a sort of statement that it's the performance that matters. Depending on your level of comfort it's either challenging, or "just" a damn good performance, and I suspect with time it will age into simply being the latter.
Great show. I wish they'd released it weekly, in part because I find these binge-releases easy to miss/overlook, so thanks, Alan, for bringing it to my attention. I hope they adapt more books although from what the director and Scott have said that sounds not at all a sure thing.
I'm not sure that Tom is meant to be in his 20s in this. Johnny Flynn is in his early 40s, and doesn't look a lot younger than that, even in black and white. I think the idea is that this version of Tom is a veteran con man, but a really small-time one until this huge opportunity falls into his lap. Maybe Scott is playing a decade younger — which he can pass for — but he's not meant to be a relative kid like Matt Damon was.
They don't really say, and they do elide certain details from the book that would pin him down to a particular age. But aging him up is such a substantial departure from the source material that I assume those choices were made in service of casting Scott rather than vice versa. (And to be clear, I approve.)
As you said previously, revivals/reboots only work if there’s still more stories left ( The Comeback, Party Down) or if they adapt to the times (Twin Peaks, The Connors) as otherwise it’s mostly a waste of time.
Boy did they love casting well known actors for bit parts in Curb these recent years.
We still have two episodes to go in Tom Ripley vs. the Stairs. I’ll come back to read your further thoughts once we’re done, Alan, but one comment now (with the most negligible of spoilers for the series’ early chapters): Gorgeous as the B&W cinematography is — and it really is breathtaking, from composition of frame to astounding visual texture — I found it jarring when attention was drawn in dialogue to colors that we can’t see on screen, namely Dickie’s blue paintings and especially the Greenleafs’ correction* of what Tom calls maroon to burgundy. [*Edit: That was apparently a shop clerk and not Dickie's parents.]