When you presume, you make a 'pres' out of 'u' and 'me'?

Jake Gyllenhaal steps into Harrison Ford's 'Presumed Innocent' shoes, plus 'Queenie,' a 'Sopranos' anniversary, and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I figure out how to parallel park…

The legal is so loud you have to shout!

(No, this item otherwise has nothing to do with Jake Gyllenhaal’s appearance as Mr. Music in John Mulaney & the Sack Lunch Bunch, but as that may be the pinnacle of both Gyllenhaal’s career and the medium of television, may as well pay quick photographic homage to it.)

It’s been said often that part of what killed off the mid-budget movie drama for adults was the rise of The Sopranos and its successors on television. I’m not sure there’s a more literal example of that than Apple’s new take on Presumed Innocent, the bestselling Scott Turow legal thriller which was already adapted into a hit 1990 movie version with Harrison Ford. Writer/director Alan J. Pakula needed slightly over two hours to tell the story, where the streaming version — starring Gyllenhaal —  is more than three times as long, even as it streamlines or outright eliminates various characters, plot points, and moral shadings from the source material. Apple didn’t give critics the finale, and thus I have no idea if David E. Kelley changed Turow’s famous ending. But what I have seen really drags well before that point, even with some good performances by Ruth Negga, Bill Camp, and a few others.

Some stories need the expanded space of a TV season (or multiple seasons) to be properly told. Some do just fine at feature film length. This sure feels like the latter.

Royally rewarding

Last week, I mentioned that I hadn’t had a chance to watch more than a couple of episodes of Hulu’s Queenie, about a young British-Jamaican woman struggling with personal and professional upheaval. I found the time to finish it earlier this week, and to write about it, and I was really impressed by the time I got to the end. Where I described it in the previous newsletter as a comedy, it’s ultimately more in the 70/30 range of drama-to-comedy, if not 80/20. Dionne Brown is so strong in the title role, and Candice Carty-Williams, adapting her acclaimed 2019 novel, has an impressive command of how to tell this emotionally complicated story. Not every good novelist makes a good screenwriter, and vice versa. This time, at least, the skills translated from one medium to the other. Queenie is excellent.

It’s gettin’ HotD in here

As a reminder, even though House of the Dragon doesn’t return until Sunday, we published my review early to meet the embargo. There was barely any discussion of it in the comments last week. Perhaps many of you share my frustration with the series. Or perhaps my lack of enthusiasm sets a tone, such that anyone who’s excited for Season Two would prefer to post about it elsewhere. Once upon a time, I would recap shows I actively disliked — Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip most infamously — because I kept finding interesting things to write about. These days, though, there doesn’t seem to be much value for either the reader or me to have me making the same complaints over and over about series I don’t much care for. I didn’t recap the first season of Dragon. Prior to seeing the new screeners, I told my editors that I’d be up to recap Season Two if I thought the show was significantly improved now that all the time jumping was done. Instead, no. I suspect I’ll keep watching the season, so if something particularly notable happens, I might write about it here or at Rolling Stone. But in the meantime, let’s take a more overt temperature check: how excited, if at all, are you about going back to Westeros?

Odds and/or ends

• Two follow-ups to last week’s ER/Maura Tierney note. The first is that, just days after extolling the virtues of Tierney’s work in the unaired Parenthood pilot, I got to an ER episode guest-starring both of Tierney’s would-be children on that show, Mae Whitman and Miles Heizer. She even played several scenes with Whitman. The Sarah Braverman family that never was! The second is that I just got to the end of Busy Philipps’ season-long run as Hope, a very Christian intern who dates Archie Morris for a while. And I realized as she left that somehow, ER employed both her and Linda Cardellini for a whole year and barely let the two Freaks and Geeks besties interact on camera. That’s showrunner malpractice right there. (Returning to Studio 60, this is even worse than when Jenna Fischer hosted the show-within-the-show, and nobody thought to put her in a scene with Lucy Davis, thus finally achieving a Pam/Dawn Office US/UK singularity.)

• The nominees for this year’s Television Critics Association Awards were announced earlier this week, and as you can see from the full list, the TCA is no better equipped these days to deal with the question of what category a show belongs in than the Emmys are. At least Reservation Dogs got several nominations, though I’m skeptical it will win anything, given competition from The Bear, Shōgun, and others.

• Monday was the 17th anniversary of The Sopranos series finale, which meant it was time for me to make my annual joke about it on social media. Only this time, there was a twist, courtesy of Facebook’s AI interface. To be fair, I do want to know more about onion rings!

  

• The 17th anniversary of that finale means it was also the 17th anniversary of the premiere of John From Cincinnati. When HBO announced plans to launch David Milch’s Deadwood follow-up immediately after The Sopranos finale, it seemed like the best possible timeslot. Instead, it turned out to be perhaps the worst ever, because the audience was so worked up over the cut to black that nobody noticed or cared about what was on next. Poor John From Cincy was too weird and opaque to have been a hit under any circumstances, but still. Or as the title character would say: I don’t know Butchie instead.

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