This aggression will not 'Landman'

Another Taylor Sheridan soap debuts, plus FX visits the Troubles with 'Say Nothing,' Aldis Hodge talks 'Cross,' 'Penguin' finale thoughts, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I show you my cabinet of Funko Pops…

Boomtown or bust?

I have a very distinct memory of spending my first or second day at Rolling Stone sitting in my new office and watching screeners of a new Paramount Network drama called Yellowstone. Despite my affection for both Kevin Costner and the films scripted by Taylor Sheridan, the show didn’t really click for me, reminding me a lot of the contrived plotting of the later seasons of Sons of Anarchy, where Sheridan once acted. Little did I realize that this would be the origin story for Sheridan to become TV’s newest mogul, and among the more prolific writers the medium has seen in quite some time.

His newest show, Landman, has most of the earmarks you’ve come to expect from Sheridan, for good or (mostly) for ill. There’s an all-star cast, some of them used very well, like star Billy Bob Thornton at his most loquacious; some barely used at all, like Jon Hamm and Demi Moore. The female characters are embarrassingly-written, ranging from Thornton’s dumb and hypersexualized teenage daughter to an ice queen attorney who of course is going to melt in time due to his charms. Pretty much all of it feels like they shot the first draft, which perhaps is what happens when your showrunner insists on writing everything himself. I have many more thoughts in my review. Like pretty much everything Sheridan does, I wish it was better. I like a lot of these actors, and I like the kind of show it’s trying to be. The show it actually is? Much less so.

Aldis and Alan talking about Alex

At a TCA party way back in the summer of 2008 (the same event, I believe, where this photo was taken), Dan Fienberg and I noticed actor Aldis Hodge hanging out by himself. It was a Turner cable party, so he was there to talk about Leverage, but at the time, we only knew him as renegade quarterback Ray “Voodoo” Tatum on Friday Night Lights. And since we really enjoyed saying the phrase “Ray ‘Vodoo’ Tatum,” we decided to go over and ask him what he thought happened to Ray “Voodoo” Tatum after the end of FNL Season One. What started as a goof quickly turned into one of the more memorable interviews I’ve ever done at a press tour party, as Hodge rattled off all sorts of interesting biographical details, like his side career designing luxury watches. As Dan put it the other day on BlueSky(*), “Alan and I chatted with Aldis Hodge at press tour 16 years ago for like 15 minutes and I can tell you more details about him and his interests than I can tell you about some members of my family.”

(*) Speaking of BlueSky, it seems there’s been a pretty big influx of new users over the last couple of weeks. If you want silly random thoughts from me on the days in between each newsletter, that is your best place to look. I also made a list of other TV and pop culture writers to follow if you’re just starting out on the app.

Because of that conversation, I began paying more attention to Hodge, and it quickly became clear what a huge talent he is. I’ve rooted for him to have the career breakout commensurate with that talent and screen presence. But even though he’s had a healthy career, that star moment hasn’t quite happened. Maybe it finally happens with this week’s debut of Cross, Prime Video’s series take on James Patterson’s popular Alex Cross novels. The show itself frustrated me — it’s mostly a lot of fetishized Awesome Serial Killers Are Awesome nonsense, with some especially dumb plotting in the final episodes — but it’s an excellent showcase for Hodge’s charisma and versatility, and also does some interesting things with the idea of a Black cop hero in a post-George Floyd world.

Because I found Hodge by far the best part of the show, instead of reviewing it, I decided to interview him again. He did not disappoint. The guy can talk. Highly recommend reading this one, whether the series interests you or not.

Troubles ahead

Yesterday, Hulu binge-released the FX miniseries Say Nothing, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s non-fiction book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The show has a lot to recommend it, including some excellent performances, and emotionally potent moments drawn from a complicated, ugly stretch of history. But, as I discuss in more detail in my review, Say Nothing stumbles at times trying to do too much, letting its narrative sprawl even when it’s trying to focus on the story of IRA soldier Dolours Price. Definitely worth a watch if the subject matter interests you, but the whole isn’t quite the sum of its many impressive parts. It’s yet another instance of the problems that can come from the new business model of making shorter seasons for everything.

Puttin’ on my top hat…

As you may recall, I was not especially fond of The Penguin, which features a terrific performance by Cristin Milioti, but is built around a dramatically inert, one-note character in “Oz Cobb,” and is mostly doing middling gangster movie karaoke.

So let’s talk a few spoilers about the season finale, which debuted earlier this week. First, and most importantly, there was Penguin’s decision to murder Victor, rather than risk his protege one day turning against him. I know that a number of people who enjoyed the show a lot more than me were upset by this, because they liked Victor and because it felt so unnecessary. For me, it was the last and worst example of how the show depicts Oz as a guy who will betray anyone, but never in an interesting way, and never once demonstrating why anyone else would actually think to trust him for a second. Shows about manipulative sociopaths can work if the sociopath is well drawn, and/or if the writing puts in the effort to show how and why they keep getting away with things. (See Ripley, for instance.) Oz just does things because he can, and because he’s destined to fight against Batman in the next movie.

And speaking of which, the finale featured a couple of teases of Bat-characters whom the show wasn’t allowed to otherwise use: Sofia gets a letter at Arkham from her half-sister, Selina Kyle, while the season ends with a shot of the Bat-signal lighting up the Gotham sky, with it finally occurring to someone to have the Caped Crusader look into the incredibly violent and destructive gang war that’s been raging in the city over the past few weeks. It feels pretty shameless to do 8 episodes of Batman Without Batman and then suddenly promise the audience that the more famous heroes and villains might be appearing down the road. And it’s silly that nobody bothered to even write a single line of dialogue explaining that Batman had been seen fighting crime out of town at the time of all these explosions and assassinations.

But, hey, at least Sofia survived, too. And if that means Milioti also winds up in the new movie — or just uses this show as a springboard to do new and even more exciting things — then I’ll take it.

Odds and/or ends

• I tended to be the low man among my critic pals on Superstore, a show where I respected what it was doing without ever really laughing while watching. I continue to not quite be on creator Justin Spitzer’s comic wavelength with his new NBC comedy, the hospital mockumentary St. Denis Medical. Good cast, led by Alison Tolman, Wendi McClendon Covey, and David Alan Grier. Some gentle but smart satire of the fragile state of healthcare in America. And a bunch of gags that, through the three episodes I watched, never fully landed with me. But if you vibed more than I did with Superstore, or with Spitzer’s American Auto, you might want to check it out?

• Speaking of my lack of vibe, my brand of nerditry has somehow never encompassed Dune. I’ve seen the David Lynch movie and the first Denis Villeneueve film, without loving either (despite some stylistically brilliant aspects of each), didn’t feel compelled to see the second Villeneuve, and never made it very far with the first book on multiple attempts. So knowing that this was definitively Not For Me, I opted not to watch the new prequel series Dune: Prophecy, instead letting my colleague David Fear handle the review.

• I’ve been doing email outreach to potential interview subjects for my Rod Serling biography the last few weeks. On Monday night, I wrote to a couple of people to see if they would want to talk, assuming we’d set something up for a few weeks, or even months, from now. Then on Tuesday, the first of them — someone I wasn’t sure would be available at all for the book — emailed me to say, “I’m actually free right now if you want to give me a call.” Not wanting to miss my chance in case the stars didn’t again align, I called them up. Even though I’d done no specific prep, it was a great conversation — the kind where practically every answer will wind up in the book. Then a few hours later, the second potential subject also wrote back to say they happened to have a window right at that moment, and could I just call them now? Even though this was someone I felt more confident I could get on another day, I decided not to ignore the cosmic coincidence, and again jumped on a call without having any questions mapped out. And again, it was a great interview, a lot of which will make its way into the book. Sometimes, you just have to follow the signs the universe is showing you, you know?

• Finally, my pre-New Year’s resolution is to make sure that in any newsletter where I mention the Serling book, I also remind you that my Better Call Saul book is available for preorder, and is, if I’m allowed to say it, pretty terrific.

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