Taking Batman back to his roots

The retro 'Caped Crusader' cartoon, plus 'A Good Girl's Guide to Murder,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I call you “Puddin’”…

Nineties x Thirties = fun in the Twenties?

I spent a lot of my review of Amazon’s Batman: Caped Crusader talking about Batman: The Animated Series. The new show invites a lot of these comparisons, between the retro aesthetic, the overall animation style, and, of course, the presence of Bruce Timm, who oversaw so much of that golden Nineties era of cartoons based on DC Comics characters. There are also nods to other DC animated adaptations, with Diedrich Bader (who has played Batman on both Brave & the Bold and Harley Quinn) as Harvey Dent, and Tom Kenny once again providing the voice of Eel O’Brien, who for this season at least does not turn into Plastic Man.

Caped Crusader is more good than great, especially when you start thinking back to Batman: The Animated Series, but it does some interesting things with both the period setting and the way it reimagines characters like Harley. If nothing else, it’ll scratch an itch.

What’s Alan writing?

• Speaking of things that are solid but not incredible examples of the thing they’re trying to be, I reviewed the British mystery A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, which arrived on Netflix yesterday.

• Some Rolling Stone inside baseball for you: for the summer double issue of the magazine (our first with a gorgeous new redesign, which I highly recommend picking up if you enjoy a beautiful periodical), I wrote a column expressing skepticism about Shōgun becoming an ongoing series — and about the overall danger of TV series extending their runs past where the story justifies it. Because of the long lead deadlines for print, I wrote this several months ago, not long after FX officially announced this change of plans. Then a few weeks ago, you may recall I wrote an online column about how the shortening seasons and runs for series is hurting TV overall. As we prepared to finally publish the Shōgun piece online, my very wise editor pointed out that I seemed in danger of saying wildly contradictory things about the medium. So I tweaked what I wrote for print to acknowledge that some shows are better-served than others by running on and on, while others might want to get in and out relatively quickly. I think the point is clear enough in this new version, but you’ll have to read both pieces and let me know if you agree.

Odds and/or ends

• Erica Ash died this week at the much-too-young age of 46. She did a lot of TV and movie work, including stints on Mad TV and Real Husbands of Hollywood. I remember her best as M-Chuck, the sister of Jesse T. Usher’s basketball superstar character on the Starz dramedy Survivor’s Remorse. She was awfully funny on that show, not that many people seemed to notice it. So let me once again point out that the unfortunately-titled series can be looked at as, “What if Entourage, but good?” or “What if Ballers, but good?” If you’re not a Starz subscriber, all four seasons are now streaming on Peacock.

• Speaking of shows that too few people noticed at the time but are still streaming now, last week I attended an event where Stephen Colbert interviewed Paul Giamatti. At one point, Giamatti was asked if he had one movie he starred in that he felt not enough people had seen. He pivoted and instead invoked Lodge 49, the AMC dramedy that he executive produced, and made a couple of hilarious guest appearances in. I loved that show — a super vibe-y, extremely plot-light tale of two guys who improbably become best friends as part of a local fraternal order — and Giamatti’s mention of it prompted me to check for its current whereabouts. It’s on AMC+, so if you happen to already subscribe for Interview with the Vampire or anything else, I highly recommend it. Here’s what I wrote at the start of its second season. (There are no Season One spoilers, because the show is impossible to spoil.)

• Back in 2019, it was announced that Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail would executive produce a new Battlestar Galactica series. Earlier this week, Variety reported that the project seems to be kaput — at Peacock, at least. Esmail’s a huge talent, but this always seemed like a strange idea. The 2000s version of BSG, which was one of the shows featured in The Revolution Was Televised, is the platonic ideal of a reboot, where you take an old title that wasn’t very good but had an interesting idea behind it, and you execute that idea better. What Ron Moore and company did had its flaws, but it was operating at such a high overall level that the standard for Esmail and his colleagues would have been impossibly high.

When great episodes happen to non-great shows?

Finally, here’s a quick challenge based on a debate we're having on the Rolling Stone TV team: What are some truly great episodes of TV from not-as-great shows? Something like the Season Two finale of For All Mankind — an uneven series, but ending on a handshake that saves the world from nuclear apocalypse was pretty damn powerful. Have any examples of your own?

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