'The Bear' is back

Plus, 'Doctor Who,' 'Better Call Saul,' 'Supacell,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I save the universe with a spoon…

Daaaaaaa Bear is back

Wednesday night’s premiere of The Bear Season Three was the TV event of the week, the month, and arguably of the year so far — the return of a universally acclaimed, adored series that swept the most recent Emmys, and will likely do so again at the next ceremony in a few months.

I’ve covered the show differently each year. Some of you may recall that I bailed on Season One after only a few episodes because I found it too stressful, then couldn’t resist returning to watch and write about how great it was in spite of that stress. For Season Two, I took the approach I usually try for binge releases where I have a lot to say: a traditional spoiler-free review, followed by a deep dive for people who had already watched (this one primarily focusing, as you might expect, on “Fishes,” “Forks,” and the season finale).

With Season Three, FX embargoed reviews until after the episodes had been available for several hours, so I took a different approach. First up, I wrote an all-in-one review/recap/essay, which begins with overall thoughts meant to be safe for people who haven’t watched yet, then goes deep into spoiler country. I also wrote a season premiere explainer, sort of, since I acknowledge at the beginning that on the most important level, the premiere explains itself. And I’m writing a third story, which I’ll link to in next week’s newsletter, about the end of the Tina-focused sixth episode, which was my favorite scene of the season. (You can also look for it over the weekend on my Rolling Stone author page.)

I had mixed feelings about the season. The great parts are still operating on an emotional level that few other shows can even see, let alone touch, and I simply love this world and its characters by now. But I don’t love that this is essentially a half a season, with everything left unresolved until the next batch of episodes a year from now. I think some of this year’s experiments don’t work as well as last year’s, and there’s a bit too much reliance on real chefs and other guest stars.

More Bear talk next week, by which point I imagine any of you who care will have seen the full thing. Feel free to discuss anything and everything in the comments this week, though, since it’s all out there in the world.

Buy my book! Buy my book! Buy my book!

In case you are some kind of hardcore, Fridays-only reader who refuses to even acknowledge newsletters that arrive on other days of the week, this is me letting you know that I have a new book coming out early next year: Saul Goodman V. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul. You can preorder it right now, and there’s a lot more detail about what’s in it if you are willing to read Monday’s newsletter on a Friday.

End plug. I swear I won’t be doing this every week from now until February. (Just many weeks.)

Odds and/or ends

• My one non-Bear piece of the week is a review of Supacell, a new Netflix series about a group of Black South Londoners who discover they have superpowers. I compared it to a less pretentious Heroes, while several readers wondered if the more apt parallel, given the setting, should be to Misfits. I only watched a bit of the latter, but my memory is that was a more lighthearted, low-stakes affair, whereas Supacell is grim and dark, early and often.

• Bill Cobbs died earlier this week at the age of 90. He was a quintessential That Guy, where you would recognize his face and his buttery voice even if you had no idea of his name. I remember Matt Zoller Seitz and I watching a Sopranos episode where Cobbs turned up briefly as the father of one of Tony’s associates; as soon as Cobbs appeared on screen, Matt turned to me and said, “Bill Cobbs never gives a bad performance.” He was right. Just look at his long and eclectic resume: no matter the type of project, the tone, or even the quality, Cobbs never phoned it in. Hell, he even makes you believe he’s a real person with a deep inner life in Air Bud! A great run.

• My Midnight Run episode of the Blank Check podcast dropped last weekend, if you want to spend three hours listening to me talk about Walsh and the Duke. In hindsight, we spent barely any time on figuring out why Jack is unpopular with the Chicago Police Department.

Goodbye, Ruby Sunday. Who could hang a name on you?

Finally, let’s talk the end of Ncuti Gatwa’s debut season on Doctor Who — and the end of what for the moment seems to be Millie Gibson’s one and only season on the show.

On the whole, this was a triumphant debut for Gatwa, and a successful return for Russell T. Davies, who last served as Doctor Who showrunner back in 2008. There were, of course, the kind of bumps you might expect from a wonderful but fundamentally uneven franchise.

Like I said last week, my main issue is with the relative lack of episodes. Even if you consider the Christmas special part of this season, we got less than seven total hours of the Doctor/Ruby pairing. Even that’s an overestimate, since the Doctor is barely in “73 Yards,” while he and Ruby mostly appear on separate screens in “Dot and Bubble.” So the Doctor and Ruby’s friendship never really had the weight it was supposed to, especially with her departing the TARDIS (at least for now) at the end of the finale. We’ve seen modern companions come and go after only a season — we even saw a modern Doctor do it once (in an episode I rewatched earlier this week) — but there was still more overall time than we had with Ruby. And not all of the short-timers were presented as being as important to the Doctor as Ruby was supposed to be to Fifteen. So that was disappointing, and left the closing stretch of the finale feeling rushed, as if Gibson’s departure was decided late in the process of making the season. (Davies has said that Ruby’s time on the show is “paused,” and that Gibson will be back at some point next year, but there’s going to be a new regular companion in the meantime.)

The other issue is a familiar one if you were a fan of RTD’s initial run on the show: the man is great on emotion and character, and a mess on plot. While revisiting the Eccleston season with my family, I’ve frequently had to field and dismiss questions about what’s happening in a given episode and why, suggesting that you just have to accept the sloppy narrative in order to enjoy the rest. That continued to be the case here, particularly in the finale, where I couldn’t begin to explain half of what happens, like how the Doctor found the grieving mother played by Sian Clifford. Yet the scene between Gatwa and Clifford was moving enough that I just had to shrug off my utter confusion about the story.

Gatwa, though, was incredible throughout. I know it’s recency bias talking, but he may already be my second favorite modern Doctor, after only David Tennant. And I’ve really liked all the actors who’ve led the reboot, even if I didn’t always love the material that some of them were given. He’s just super charismatic, and larger than life in a wait that seems appropriate for this part. I just wish there was more.

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