The man with the getaway face

'Duster,' 'Murderbot,' 'Overcompensating,' the 'Mad Men' finale 10 years later, 'Andor' ends, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I'm the Michael Jordan of being a cop in Florida panhandle…

Drive, he said

It’s a week where I reviewed three new shows, all of which I enjoyed to varying degrees. First up, we have Duster, a crime show set in Arizona in 1972, starring Josh Holloway as a slick getaway driver and Rachel Hilson as a rookie FBI agent trying to turn him against his mobster boss, played by the great Keith David. It’s co-created by LaToya Morgan and J.J. Abrams. Given the latter name, you will not be surprised to learn that Duster is unabashed about leaning into its many influences, from gritty early Seventies crime thrillers like The Outfit and Charley Varrick to The Dukes of Hazzard. Your mileage may vary on whether you find the pastiche endearing or shameless, but I enjoyed it, mainly because Abrams knows how to use Holloway’s charisma so well, two decades after they first teamed up on the Lost pilot.

That said, the casting of Holloway brings up one of this week’s themes: actors playing wildly off of their real age. Holloway is 55. He looks great for 55. Would look great for 40. But the character he’s playing seems like he should be 30, 35 at the absolute most. (Among other things, he fought in Vietnam when Holloway is old enough to have fought in World War II if he’s the age he is in 1972; meanwhile, Keith David is playing a WWII infantry vet, and he’s almost old enough to have fought in World War I if he’s his current age in 1972.) If you enjoy Holloway as much as I do, you’ll learn to go with it. But it’s silly.

Also, even if the idea of the show does little for you, I strongly recommend tracking down the opening credits sequence, which is the best I’ve seen in a few years, and the best non-dancing one (i.e., Pachinko and Peacemaker) in quite a bit longer than that.

It likes to watch

Next up is the show I’ve been asked about the most this spring, since I happen to be friends with a lot of nerds. That would be Murderbot, Apple’s adaptation of the popular sci-fi book series by Martha Wells, about a security droid that hates its job and only cares about watching his favorite serialized TV dramas. I mean… who among us cannot relate?

I’ve only read the first couple of books, and years ago. But my memory is that they’re science fiction with periodic jokes. The TV version, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz and starring Alexander Skarsgård as the title character, is more of a comedy with periodic action and questions about sentience and free will. I enjoyed it, mainly because Skarsgård is so dryly funny and weird as Murderbot, though the human characters are more hit-or-miss.

One loud source of debate among my fellow critics who know the books is whether Murderbot’s beloved show-within-the-book The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon is meant to be good or cheeseball. My memory is cheeseball, and that’s certainly the direction the Weitz brothers have gone in. Some others strongly disagree.

The streaming closet

Back to the question of whether anyone in Hollywood knows what age actors look like, we have Overcompensating, a new Amazon comedy about college freshmen, where the two main characters are played by the show’s creator, Benito Skinner, who’s 31, and Wally Baram, who’s 27, and everyone else is in that vicinity. There’s a long tradition of high school and college shows casting extremely mature performers as teenagers. (I was in high school when the original Beverly Hills 90210 debuted, and Gabrielle Carteris and Ian Ziering were older than several of my teachers.) Unlike Duster, though, every single actor is too old for the part they’re playing (including Kyle MacLachlan and Connie Britton in small roles as Skinner’s parents are at least slightly too old), which makes it a bit easier to just accept and move on.

Skinner’s a big comedy guy on Instagram and TikTok, where he’s got a million followers apiece watching his sketches. The track record of social media stars doing TV has not been great, but I wound up enjoying Overcompensating — in which Skinner’s closeted ex-jock wrestles with whether to come out, and Baram’s former high school outcast tries to reinvent herself at college — quite a bit. Like a lot of first-year comedies, it starts out way too loud and aggressive. But like the good first-year comedies, it quickly calms down and starts paying attention to what makes the characters tick, and improves rapidly as a result. Eventually, it’s almost more YA soap than comedy, but by that point, the writing and acting has become sharp enough that I felt genuinely engaged in what would happen to these “kids.”

Odds and/or ends

• In between writing all that stuff this week, I took some time to go through the Rod Serling Archives at Ithaca College, where he taught as a visiting professor in the final years of his life, as part of my Serling biography research. Lots of amazing stuff there, including original drafts of Twilight Zone and Night Gallery scripts, plus multiple drafts of his version of Planet of the Apes (which was largely rewritten by Michael Wilson for the version that got made). And in the middle of a display case, they have one of the Dictaphones that Serling used to “write” his scripts. For reasons of both temperament and health, Serling had all but stopped typing by the late Fifties, so he spoke his scripts into one of these gadgets, and then his secretaries put them on paper. I’ve listened to a few Dictabelt recordings that are in other Serling archives, and it’s incredible to hear these ideas just come pouring out of his mouth, with no real disruption of the flow.

• The biggest — or, at least, the most amusing — news out of Upfronts Week is that Max is rebranding again, changing its name to… HBO Max. It’s rare that you see a big corporation so blatantly retreat from a dumb decision like this. Maybe for his next trick, David Zaslav will release Batgirl? Buy back the various Looney Tunes movies from Ketchup Entertainment? Keep The Many Saints of Newark from leaving the service after this month? Buy back NBA rights somehow?

• Welcome to Wrexham returned to FX this week for its fourth season. I’ve seen, and really enjoyed, the first two new episodes. That said, one of the dangers of having caught up to a show I paid no attention to until after the end of its third season is that I’m now much more aware of the fortunes of the club, and know at least some of what happened in its most recent season. The news isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a spoiler, but at the same time, I’m going to be watching the show differently knowing the results of the decisions being made by Rob, Ryan, and company.

• I was mostly frustrated with the latest episode of The Last of Us, as were many of you. That said, the glimpse of Joel at the episode’s end, and the promise of a flashback to when he was still alive with Ellie, thrilled me. And without spoiling things, the next episode very much lives up to the promise of that glimpse.

• Last week’s trio of Andor episodes was the creative high point of Season Two, and among the best segments of the series as a whole. This week’s concluding chapters, though, felt a bit too focused on moving Cassian into position for the events of Rogue One, rather than serving as a thematic summation for the show Andor quickly evolved into. There’s still some excellent material there, particularly in the Kleya-focused 10th episode, but the season, and series, peaked before the ending, rather than at it. Join the earlier conversation about it, or talk about it here.

I’d still like to buy the world a Coke

Speaking of series finales, tomorrow marks the 10th anniversary of “Person to Person,” the last episode of Mad Men. If you were reading me back then, you might recall that I was a bit disappointed in the ending — or, at least, that I was disappointed in Don Draper for finding a new ad campaign, rather than enlightenment, on his spiritual retreat. Despite Mad Men being a top 10 all-time series for me, and one of the two shows I’ve gotten the most pleasure out of recapping while they aired (Leftovers would be the other), I haven’t gone back to rewatch it in the last decade. These days, it’s hard to justify bingeing an old show unless I’m either doing a book about it (like The O.C.(*), Better Call Saul, or, now, Twilight Zone), or it’s something I’m introducing something to family who haven’t seen it before.

(*) Did you know that Welcome to The O.C. came out in paperback this week? Now available from Bookshop or wherever you get your books.

So I honestly have no idea how, or if, my feelings might have changed about “Person to Person” since 2015, when for the last time, I stayed up until the wee small hours of Sunday into Monday to write about Don, Peggy, Joan, and the gang. But I’m curious how everyone else feels about it, whether you’ve revisited it lately or not.

Poker Face recaplet: “The Taste of Human Blood”

Finally, we’re back to only one Poker Face episode per week, as God, Rian Johnson, and Peter Falk intended. “The Taste of Human Blood” kicks off the show’s post-fugitive era, with Charlie now wandering the country simply because she enjoys it. And she’s using the CB radio that Kevin Corrigan installed in her car in “Last Looks” to make a new friend in “Good Buddy,” played by the inimitable voice of the great Steve Buscemi.

But the biggest deviation from the series’ norm this week isn’t that Charlie doesn’t have to keep running away from hitmen. It’s that this is a weird episode, man. The murder was largely an accident because Gaby Hoffmann’s Fran couldn’t get over her jealousy of the viral fame of Kumail Najiani’s Gator Joe. (By the way, I think this character’s look has really unlocked something for Kumail Nanjiani. If he never wears a blonde mullet again, I’ll be disappointed.) Charlie only cares about solving it so she can rescue the alligator that didn’t actually kill Joe. And much of the episode ultimately spins around Charlie and then Fran having some kind of cosmic vision while staring into the gator’s eyes.

Is it strange? Yes. Is it silly? Absolutely. Would I want Poker Face to do this kind of thing every week? Nope. But as an odd change of pace outing, I found it pretty delightful.

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