What's... What's Alan Watching?

Your host pays a visit to 'Jeopardy!,' plus 'Severance' Season Two, a weird 'Abbott Elementary'/'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia' crossover, 'American Primeval,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I soak the pelts in urine…

Who are several interview subjects who’ve never been in my kitchen?

Welcome to the most jam-packed newsletter I think I’ve written to date! A variety of things I’ve been working on for a while all wound up landing in the same week. The biggest of those is a story I reported way back in September, when I got to visit the Alex Trebek Stage to talk to Ken Jennings and company about Jeopardy! finding stability after years of years of various kinds of uncertainty following the death of Alex Trebek. I also spoke with showrunner Michael Davies, head writers Billy Wisse and Michele Loud, stage manager (and former Clue Crew member) Jimmy McGuire, past contestants like Matt Amodio and Amy Schneider, and other people on a lot of topics, from the show’s enduring appeal, to the Mike Richards fiasco, to all the changes, big and small, that Davies has introduced to the franchise. (I visited on the first day for the new video game board, for instance, which is one giant screen rather than 30 individual monitors.)

It’s a really fun story, and I encourage you to read it in the way I encourage you to read all my Rolling Stone stuff, but even a bit more than usual, because I so rarely get the chance to do something like this.

I spent two days on set, and talked to many people, but a story can and should only be so long. So an awful lot wound up on the cutting room floor, including all my conversations with people who were playing in the games I watched. I thought I’d offer up a few deleted scenes, aka interesting things that didn’t make the final version:

• The most crucial thing is that everyone on Jeopardy! wants the players to play well, both for their own sake and for the sake of the show. It is simply bad television if people aren’t buzzing in because no one knows the answer, or if people keep getting wrong answers. (More on this in a second.) When I spoke with the writers, I clumsily used the phrase “stump the contestants” in a question, and Michele Loud replied, simply, “I think you have a misconception of what we're trying to do. We are not trying to stump the contestants.” So there are a lot of safeguards in place to bring out everyone’s best. During the practice games at the start of each taping day, a contestant coordinator is always standing just off set, ready to jump in with advice when it’s clear that someone is struggling with their buzzer timing. More often than not over those two days, people who had problems with the buzzer in the practice games wound up doing very well with it in the real thing, simply because they received good coaching in between.

• Speaking of the timing, a thing you can’t see when you watch from home is that there are lights on the side of the game board that flash when Ken has finished reading the clue, meaning that the signal devices are now unlocked and it’s safe to buzz in. (If you try buzzing any earlier, it makes it more difficult to get in before another contestant who waits until the devices are unlocked.) There are two schools of thought among contestants regarding timing. Some look at the lights, while others train themselves to wait for the host to stop talking. I assumed the lights are more reliable, and especially during the period when the show had multiple hosts with different cadences, yet both Matt and Amy told me they preferred to buzz by sound. And you can’t exactly argue with their results.

• The story references a particularly rough Double Jeopardy round, with long stretches where nobody buzzed in, and lots of incorrect guesses when they did. It was like going to see your favorite basketball team play on a night when nobody can hit a shot. Cut from the final version is what happened after. During the postgame chat Ken does with the contestants, one of them insisted that was one of the toughest boards he’d ever seen in all his years as a fan. I then ran into Wisse and Loud as they were leaving for their lunch break, and asked what they thought about that framing of things. Both were dismissive of the complaint, and Wisse even pointed out that the guy who made it screwed up multiple times by not phrasing his answers in the form of questions. Everybody’s prideful on this show, whether you work or play on it.

• Perhaps the biggest difference between watching the show on TV and in the studio is that announcer Johnny Gilbert, who is 96, doesn’t physically come to work anymore. He records his part from a home studio after the episodes have been taped, which means that in person, producer (and McGuire’s fellow Clue Crew alum) Sarah Whitcomb Foss plays the role of Johnny Gilbert, introducing the contestants and enthusiastically revealing the returning champ’s cash winnings to date.

• There was a lot more in my first draft about the Mike Richards mess, before my editor and I decided it was taking too much space in a story meant to be about the current state of the show. Among the bits cut were Ken talking about how he had to break the news to his parents that the showrunner wanted the hosting job (“We were on a hike and I was like, ‘By the way, I know you guys have a Google alert for me. The producer wants the job, so please it ends here. I had a good run.’”), and Samit Sarkar, a contestant during Richards’ one and only day as “permanent” host, talking about how half the contestants that day were “extremely online” and had read Claire McNear’s Ringer article about Richards, and thus knew that this was all about to get weird, and half were oblivious and just giddy to finally play Jeopardy!

My job is a lot of fun sometimes, you know?

Buy my book! Buy my book! (In one month, but preferably sooner.)

(First of all, apologies for the bad photoshopping. This was my lame attempt to recreate Seth Cohen reading Welcome to The O.C., but I’m both not as good as the person who made that, and there aren’t as many clear shots of people reading books on this show.)

We are now only 25 days away from the release of Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul, which is still available to preorder so you can have it in your hands (or on your devices) on February 4. So the shameless plugging is going to take more prominence in the newsletter for a bit. Apologies if you’ve already bought a copy, and I’ll try to keep it interesting, regardless. (And if you’re the type who wonders whether to preorder or wait until it’s in stores, I would say preordering is a considerably bigger deal in publishing, even more than when I began writing books a decade or so ago.) My once and future partner Matt Zoller Seitz will be selling signed copies through his own bookstore, if you’re interested in that sort of thing. And if you want one signed in person and live in the New York area, I’ll be doing events at The Strand on February 5, and at Words in Maplewood, NJ on February 6.

When Matt and I began work on The Sopranos Sessions, I worried that the show might not have aged as well as I wanted it to, and that we had just committed ourselves to celebrating a series I no longer loved as much as I did when it first aired. Instead, I wound up liking it even more, because this time I wasn’t watching it with any expectations of where the story would, or should, go. I knew where all the zigs and zags were. I knew not to get invested in the Russian, or Dr. Melfi’s attacker, or all of the other story threads we obsessed about in the early 2000s, while David Chase couldn’t have cared less about them past their original appearance. I could just appreciate the show for what it was, and as a result it was, remarkably, better than I remembered. I wound up enjoying certain episodes and even seasons a lot more than I did the first time. Season Four still has a number of imperfections, but it also contains some of the best moments of that series, including my single favorite piece of James Gandolfini acting.

With Better Call Saul, the experience of revisiting the show and my prior coverage of it wasn’t identical, but it was similar. There weren’t any individual episodes or sections of the story where my opinion changed dramatically. At the same time, though, when I first watched the series a decade ago, I had to keep adjusting my expectations for what exactly it was going to be, in large part because Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould had no idea what it was going to be, even as they were making it! It’s not unusual to see a new comedy figure itself out over the course of a season or two, but it’s incredibly rare to watch it happen with a drama, and especially one aspiring to as high a level of ambition as Saul. Yet it’s a work in progress for quite some time — just a terrific work in progress, because these people are such gifted storytellers, even when they aren’t yet entirely sure what story they’re telling.

(Some broad Saul spoilers follow, if you haven’t seen it but are preparing to when the book comes out.) When I rewatched it for the book, and began revising and rewriting my essays on each episode, I was prepared for the pacing to be strange, for the narrative to bifurcate so quickly. I knew this time not to expect Jimmy to become Saul anytime soon. I knew that it would take forever for the Jimmy and Mike plots to significantly intersect again. I knew where things were going with Chuck. Most of all, I knew how important Kim was going to be, well before the show itself did, and where her story would go. And so I could follow all those little breadcrumbs that Rhea Seehorn was laying for the writers, and vice versa, until the moment she unquestionably became the third lead. And getting to pay attention to that arc on such a granular level, knowing exactly what to look for and when, really enriched the entire process, and gave me an even greater appreciation of one of the great characters and performances of TV this century.

I did my best to capture that feeling, and everything else about the show, while putting the book together, and I hope it will come across to those who begin reading it in less than a month’s time.

Reconnecting with Severance

Hey, remember Severance? Remember how excited we all were when its first season ended with one of the tensest, most thrilling episodes of dramatic television anyone had seen in a long time? Well, it has been [checks notes] three years since Apple released that episode, thanks to a confluence of various real-world events, but Season Two is finally coming next week.

As much as I loved the first season, I was skeptical that Ben Stiller and company could keep such a high-concept premise going. And that finale seemed to back a lot of characters into corners I wasn’t sure the creative team could get them out of, at least not without having to change the show so much that it became unrecognizable. So it was to my very pleasant surprise that I found Season Two to be mostly fantastic, as I discuss at length in my review. Because Severance is a show built so much on plot and surprise, I did my best to be extra-careful about what I said about events in the new season, and instead tried to focus on theme, the series’ technical brilliance, and the way the new season leans even more on some of the first season’s big discoveries, like Zach Cherry’s facility with dramatic acting, and the massive ball of charisma and menace that is Tramell Tillman.

After you read that, you can look forward to two stories next week: 1)A breakdown of things you might want to recall after the long gap between seasons, and 2)My recap of the season premiere. Yes, for the first time since True Detective: Night Country almost a year ago, forces have aligned to give us a show meaty enough for lengthy analysis of every episode at Rolling Stone, and also released on a weekly schedule to make it feasible. So I’ll be weighing in on each episode as it drops, and then linking to those posts in each week’s newsletter. Who says you can’t go home?

It’s Always Sunny at Abbott Elementary?

This week brought the first half of the unlikely crossover between Abbott Elementary and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which are both comedies set in Philly, but have wildly different tones and target audiences. The crossover began with the latest episode of Abbott, where the gang from Paddy’s Pub turned up as volunteers at the school and proceeded to make their usual mess of things. Later this year, we’ll see the same events from a different perspective in a Sunny episode.

Last month, I spoke with the respective creator/stars of both shows, Quinta Brunson from Abbott and Rob McElhenney from Sunny, about how this happened, why the characters will appear a bit different in each show based on their respective tones and formats, which characters each of them would like to steal from the other’s show, and more. You can see some of what they talked about reflected in the Abbott episode, like the way that the mockumentary format adjusts the behavior of the gang, at least a little. (And Dennis, the most obviously criminal of the group, is barely in the episode at all because he doesn’t want to be on camera.) These aren’t the full TV-MA versions of the gang, yet the episode cleverly stays true to them while fitting them into Abbott’s sensibility. So the Charlie subplot, for instance, is a sweet one about Barbara teaching him to read, when his illiteracy has long been a Sunny running gag. And Sweet Dee’s shameless and ineffectual attempts to seduce Gregory don’t feel that far afield from how Ava behaved around him when the show started.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing the Sunny episode, not only to get additional context to what the gang is doing, but also to see, as Quinta and Rob discussed with me, slightly more “real” versions of the Abbott characters, when the documentary crew isn’t around to film them.

Also? While we’re on the subject this week of deleted stuff from articles, I thought I was being super clever — and expressing my vague Philly bonafides, as someone who went to college there once upon a time — by ending the interview by asking Quinta and Rob, “What is the best cheesesteak place in Philly, and why is it Jim’s?” Quinta’s eyes went wide and she let Rob go off on a rant about how many of their interviews that day had already featured a cheesesteak question, “Philadelphia is the birthplace of our nation,” he said as part of it, “and I feel like we get relegated to being the city where you can get sliced meat on a piece of bread.” It was funny and good-natured, but also a necessary reminder that sometimes, when I’m not being careful, I can be as much of a hack as everyone else.

When crossovers stop being polite, and start getting weird

The Abbott/Sunny team-up also gave me an excuse to go deep on one of my favorite bits of TV critic nerdery: crossovers between shows that have no business crossing over with one another. I picked a dozen of my favorites, including live-action characters turning animated (and vice versa), drama characters visiting sitcoms, John Munch being John Munch, and more. I for the most part avoided using dream sequences, but made one exception because the combination of the two shows was just so darned weird. I love stuff like this. More more more, please.

Country Primeval

My last column for the week is my review of American Primeval, a new Netflix miniseries set in Utah in the late 1850s, and starring Taylor Kitsch, Betty Gilpin, Shea Whigham, Dane DeHaan, and others. It’s directed by Peter Berg — his fifth collaboration with Kitsch, going back to the Friday Night Lights TV show — but more importantly written by Mark L. Smith, aka the screenwriter of The Revenant. Despite that great cast, it’s unfortunately a complete wallow. When a character in one episode said, “There is only brutality here,” I laughed at his concise, spot-on review of the show — and of course began my own slightly longer review with that quote.

The Pitt premiere recaplet

Again, this is a super busy week (including more travel for me for another magazine feature coming later this year). And I know I said I wouldn’t necessary cover The Pitt — aka Noah Wyle reuniting with ER producers John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill for a new hospital drama that I liked a lot — but I thought it was worth starting a conversation here after this week’s two-episode premiere. Let’s go around the horn with some random thoughts:

• If you are a viewer of a certain age, it’s hard to avoid viewing the show through an ER lens, at least at first. Hey, John Carter grew back his beard again! Hey, now it’s Carter giving the tour to the kids who look as overwhelmed as he used to! But both Wyle and the show quickly establish their own rhythms. Wyle’s new character, Dr. Robby, is in a foul mood from the start, which is explained by him having to work on the anniversary of his mentor’s death during early Covid. (If anything, he’s more of a blend of Mark Greene and Doug Ross: the respected boss, but also the guy who can be prone to ignore policy and do what he thinks makes more sense.) During the traumas, the camera doesn’t whirl around like it does on ER, and the sense of chaos is conveyed a bit differently. And the pacing is its own thing; when Robby asks everyone to take a minute to reflect on the death of the DNR woman from the nursing home, it also feels like The Pitt saying it doesn’t feel compelled to race through everything, just because the previous hospital show these people made did.

• Taylor Dearden (as Mel, the young blonde resident with glasses), Fiona Dourif (as McKay, the older resident who wears an ankle monitor), and Isa Briones (as Santos, the intern who keeps trying to give everyone a nickname) are all second-generation actors, whose fathers are, respectively, Bryan Cranston, Brad Dourif, and Jon Jon Briones. I’ve never loved the term “nepo baby,” even as I understand that people like this have a way into the business that others don’t. And Dearden and Dourif give my two favorite non-Wyle performances of the show. That said, it’s a bit funny that a show featuring three legacy actors — and that has Mackenzie Astin (son of John Astin and Patty Duke) appearing as the son of the elderly man whose children disagree about whether to intubate him — also has a character wary of being considered a nepo baby in Javadi, the 20-year-old prodigy whose mom is a top surgeon at the hospital.

• Because this is a streaming drama rather than a network one, and because TV in general has become looser about graphic content in the 31 years since ER debuted, some of the cases here get pretty gory. There’s the Nepalese woman with the degloving injury from winding up between a train and the platform, as well as the patient with “floating face.” I will say that if you are squeamish, the degloving is about as bad as it gets here. (For that matter, if you still have Covid PTSD, I’ll say there isn’t a ton more in the way of flashbacks, at least not in the eight episodes I’ve seen beyond these.)

• Finally, whenever I do check in with the show here, I’ll make note of various things that feel weird within the context of the season taking place over a single hospital shift. Not necessarily implausible, but that just made me raise an eyebrow. There’s not a ton of it in these two episodes, but by the time Santos had dubbed Javadi “Crash” and referred to Whitaker as “Funky Music,” I began to wonder how many nicknames she would try to apply to others on her very first day of work.

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