The new Doctor checks in

Talking with 'Doctor Who' star Ncuti Gatwa, plus 'Hacks,' 'The Veil,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I start wearing intelligent gloves…

Ncuti at Fifteenth

The May print issue of Rolling Stone doesn’t hit newsstands until Tuesday, but my story from it is already online: a Doctor Who conversation with new star Ncuti Gatwa and returning showrunner Russell T. Davies. They discuss the ways that the Fifteenth Doctor will be different from his predecessors, above and beyond the fact that Gatwa is both the first Black actor and the first openly queer actor to play the role.

Joint interviews can sometimes be difficult, because one of the subjects winds up monopolizing things. In this case, though, it worked out very well. Davies has been doing this a long time, and knows the franchise as well as anyone alive. So he could speak to the institution more easily than Ncuti could, while Ncuti in turn could discuss what it felt like to grow up on the series, and then to get this most iconic of roles. And where Ncuti is still figuring out how much he publicly wants to talk about his sexuality — not that he wants to hide it, just that he clearly doesn’t want it to be the primary thing he’s asked about in the press — Davies has been writing LGBTQ+ stories for his entire career, and is beyond comfortable discussing how he’s incorporated queer material into this show. So we got a mix of both perspectives, and a couple of exchanges (Ncuti’s snap, RTD warning him what the article’s headline might be) that I thought captured the personalities of both of them. It’s always a good feeling when you’re conducting an interview and someone says something that you instantly know will be either the first or last line of your story.

I’ve seen the first two episodes of what RTD and Disney+ are calling a new Season One, which debuts May 10, and I liked them a lot. Perhaps more on that in the coming weeks.

Also, since I’ve been asked about it a few times elsewhere: I didn’t directly quote RTD about the redesign of the sonic screwdriver for the sake of conciseness. If you’re curious, this is what he said:

Oh, that was largely me. I love that new sonic. This new Doctor for 2024, I worry that sometimes the old sonic starts to look like a gun — like a weapon that gets pointed like a weapon. And I wanted to just cool that down and check that out. That works brilliantly in an action adventure show, but actually let's just take the heat off that, little boys running around the yard playing with that. There's other ways to do it, and I think this is a thing of beauty now.

Hacks is back, baby!

This week, in “beloved half-hour series that have been gone for a bit too long,” we get Season Three of Hacks on Max. Unlike some other shows — like Life & Beth, which prompted my complaint about these long hiatuses in a recent newsletter — Hacks is so focused on the relationship with Deborah and Ava that it was easier for me to dive back into these new episodes than it’s been elsewhere. Mostly, I wish the show had come back sooner just because I really enjoy Hacks, and, as I elaborate in my review, liked the professional and emotional space in which the new season places its heroines.

My only real complaint is that there are a lot of terrific guest stars this time out — which feels appropriate for the new level of fame and respect Deborah has achieved at this point in the series — who don’t get enough to do. Christina Hendricks, for instance, is involved in a hilarious scene with Hannah Einbinder, but she’s only in one episode. And some other guests like Stephen Tobolowsky don’t even get a big moment like that.

Still, excellent show remains excellent. Enjoy.

Rolling Stone praises some Moss (but not her show)

Many years ago, while talking with writer/producer Shawn Ryan, I observed that on The Shield, he generally showed little interest in Vic Mackey’s life prior to the events of the series. At the time, Ryan was working with David Mamet on the CBS military drama The Unit, and he told me that Mamet likes to say that “backstory is bullshit” — that showing what a character does in the present will tell you much more about who they are than any number of flashbacks or monologues about their difficult childhoods.

Obviously, many acclaimed TV writers disagree with this philosophy; it’s hard to imagine Mad Men without Don frequently reckoning with his past as Dick Whitman, and impossible to picture a Sopranos with a story that wasn’t heavily influenced by things that happened to Tony and the others long before we met them.

I thought about these different points of view a lot while writing my review of The Veil, a new FX/Hulu miniseries starring Elisabeth Moss as a British spy trying to figure out whether a woman accused of being an ISIS killer is a terrorist plotting an attack on the West. There’s a version of the show, promised by much of the first episode or two, that is just about Moss being a kickass secret agent who’s always a step ahead of both her targets and the French and American intelligence operatives who think they’re really in charge of her case. That version, when it appears, is a lot of fun, and a welcome change of pace for Moss, one of our best actors, but someone who’s been playing a lot of righteously furious abuse victims lately. After a while, though, it becomes clear that Veil creator Steven Knight is only interested in the cool James Bond of it all as a means to exploring the trauma that lies in his heroine’s past. And that material is a lot less interesting, especially once the spy plot becomes increasingly difficult to follow.

Maybe Moss enjoys emotional challenges too much to want to do the straightforward take on this material. But I began The Veil very excited by what she was doing, only for nearly all of my interest to fizzle by the conclusion.

Odds and/or ends

• Last week, I wrote about how much I loved the ending of Shōgun. Now it’s my colleague David Fear’s turn to rave, this time by interviewing one of the miniseries’ breakout stars, Tadanobu Asano. The feature is almost as delightful as Asano’s performance as the trickster Yabushige.

• Time-wise, I had to choose between The Veil and Netflix’s A Man in Full to review this week. As often happens, I watched the first episode of each before picking which to go forward with. As it turns out, I had just watched the best Veil episode. But based on my pal Dan Fienberg’s review of A Man in Full — which has David E. Kelley belatedly adapting Tom Wolfe’s 1998 novel about a businessman in crisis — it doesn’t sound like I would have been any more thrilled by the other choice.

• A quick Abbott Elementary check-in: Last week brought an end to Janine’s time with the school district. But where that story for the most part was blatantly patterned on Jim briefly working at Dunder-Mifflin’s Stamford branch on The Office, it surprisingly didn’t result in Janine hooking up with school district coworker Manny, unlike Jim dating Karen for a while. This week’s episode, “Double Date,” plays with our expectations, by having Gregory spot Janine and Manny out together at a bar, and assume they’re dating. He is, of course, in the process of learning what happens when you assume, and it’s nice to see that Abbott isn’t committed to retracing the Jim and Pam story beat for beat. That said, “Double Date” ends with Gregory realizing that he still has romantic feelings for Janine, and that part of the show has never been my favorite. (Even in this episode, the highlight is the B-plot about Ava’s book club breaking into post-apocalyptic factions.) But it seems worth asking how you’re feeling as Abbott nears the end of its strike-abbreviated third season.

• Finally, I don’t ramble on about my sports obsessions here nearly as much as I do on social media. But if you’re a reader who happens to overlap with my fandom at all, and if you feel like these NBA playoffs haven’t been enough of an emotional whirlwind for the Knicks, you might enjoy reading the same book I’m partway through: Kings of the Garden, which chronicles the wilderness period between the Knicks’ second championship in 1973 and the drafting of Patrick Ewing in 1985, and contrasts the team’s struggles with all that The Deuce-era New York City was grappling with at the same time. The Knicks are a team whose history has been wildly over-chronicled relative to its actual success, yet there hasn’t been a lot done about these days when, as would-be Knicks star Michael Ray Richardson put it, “the ship be sinkin.’”

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