Will the 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' finale repeat 'Seinfeld' history?

Plus 'Ripley,' 'Sugar,' 'Fallout,' 'Loot,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as we talk about the Rangers…

Larry David gets another day in court

I’m taking a few days off at the start of next week, which means I won’t be around when the Curb Your Enthusiasm series finale debuts, nor will I be writing about it for Rolling Stone. Expect some kind of brief take in the next newsletter. Now that everyone has seen the same nine episodes I did before writing my lukewarm review of the final season, I want to repeat the prediction I made a couple of months ago:

The Curb finale will be a mirror of the Seinfeld finale.

It doesn’t take a genius to see this coming. The main story arc of this season has involved Larry getting ready for his day in court in Georgia. And on top of that, there’s been a running gag where people mention that Larry wasn’t involved in the final two seasons of Seinfeld, other than the finale that nobody liked. So it seems pretty obvious that most of the finale will involve Larry in court, trying to prove his goodness to the world, while witness after witness comes in to complain about things we’ve seen him do over the course of 12 Curb seasons.

Plus, it seems like a very Larry David thing to do, whether he believes he can present the same idea more effectively this time, or if he has always believed that the Seinfeld finale is great, and blames the audience for not getting it. It would be a spite finale from the mind of the man who invented the spite store.

Anyone else have finale predictions? Any old characters you’d really like to see when the trial happens? And how have you felt about this season to date?

Sugar with a secret

Both of my reviews this week are of shows with deliberately retro, mid-20th century vibes. Let’s start with Sugar, a new Apple drama starring Colin Farrell as a modern-day detective who loves classic ‘40s and ‘50s film noir, and who carries himself very much like one of those heroes. The version of Sugar that’s just that — with the first season focusing on a case that brings in James Cromwell, Amy Ryan, Anna Gunn, and other notable guest stars — would be quite satisfying, particularly if you, like me or John Sugar, love the kinds of movies it’s paying homage to.

The problem is that Sugar is substantially more than just a contemporary pastiche of hard-boiled detective stories. What it actually is, I’m embargoed from telling you, in part because the show waits until its sixth episode to reveal what’s really going on. And the timing of when that information comes out undercuts both the mystery plot and this big new idea. It’s not quite as exasperating as what another Apple drama, The Crowded Room, did last year, simply because Sugar is already entertaining before we find out the real premise. But it still feels incredibly misguided to not explain things much, much sooner, and to allow the real version of things to co-exist with what it initially seems to be.

As I discuss in greater depth my review, it is perhaps the most extreme version of the Surf Dracula Problem I have ever seen.

A Ripley remake

Meanwhile, Netflix has Ripley, an eight-part adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s classic suspense novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, here starring the Hot Priest himself, Andrew Scott, as sociopath con man Tom Ripley. I reviewed it here.

The 1999 movie version of the same book — starring Matt Damon as Ripley, and co-starring Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Cate Blanchett, and others as his targets — is so great(*) that the idea of retelling the story seemed pointless at best, self-defeating at worst. But writer/director Steven Zaillian(**) has a different, much colder and more process-oriented take on this adventure, which he executes well enough to justify starting off here, rather than trying to adapt one of the less famous Ripley novels. Scott’s excellent, the black-and-white photography is both gorgeous and chilling, and in terms of depicting the step-by-step challenges of being a criminal, it is perhaps the most patient, meticulous show I’ve seen outside of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.

(*) I have to admit that I didn’t fully appreciate the film when it first came out, as I was too immature and/or impatient for its particular vibe. I watched it again to prep for the show, and my god is it a masterpiece.

(**) Zaillian’s best known as a screenwriter on films like Moneyball and Schindler’s List. But if you haven’t already seen his 1993 directorial debut, Searching For Bobby Fischer, about a child chess prodigy, rectify that as soon as possible. (It’s on Paramount+, and rentable as well.) You will thank me later. (He also directed the majority of HBO’s The Night Of, which is mostly excellent, but stumbles a bit in the finale.)

Because it’s a binge that just dropped yesterday, I’d ask anyone to be vague about Ripley spoilers until next week’s newsletter, where I’ll likely get into more detail about some of my favorite parts.

It’s Walton Goggins time

The review embargo for Amazon’s adaptation of the Fallout game franchise doesn’t lift until the middle of next week(*), so we’ll save my thoughts on the show until then. But it gave me an excuse to speak once again with one of my favorite interview subjects, the great Walton Goggins. We’ve known each other professionally since I visited The Shield set in, I think, Season Two, and talked a lot over the years about Shane Vendrell, Boyd Crowder, and other indelible characters he played. This is more of a career overview piece, in addition to focusing on some Fallout specifics, like how long it takes him to get into his post-apocalyptic makeup as the Ghoul.

Like the characters he plays, Goggins is a talker. The raw interview transcript for our conversation is over 8000 words. (The version that ran in this month’s print edition of Rolling Stone is under 1000, while the more expansive but still polished online version is about 2600.) He is also a gregarious, cheerful, and self-effacing interview most of the time. So it was interesting to me that, when I brought up his reputation for playing larger-than-life characters, he not only started bringing up less-heralded roles that he got to play straight down the middle, but talked about how great he was in them. Every actor hates being typecast — by both the business and the audience — and iwhile he loves getting to play the Boyds and Baby Billys of this world, it sure seems like he doesn’t love that those are the only kinds of characters most people think about when they think of him.

(*) Embargo inside baseball complaining time: Netflix did a time-of-release review embargo for Ripley, which is a show that I suspect would have benefited from some advance word of mouth, especially since so many critics I’ve spoken to also loved it. But it’s far from the first time a show seemingly destined to be praised gets this kind of embargo. (You may recall me objecting to something similar with Poker Face last year.) In this way, the TV business is very unlike the movies, where any film that either doesn’t screen in advance, or has an embargo very close to the release date, is almost always a dog that the studio is trying to get out in front of the public before the negative reviews are in.

Odds and/or ends

• Speaking of shows that waste their entire first seasons setting up the actual premise, Apple’s Loot returned earlier this week. That first year was deeply uneven, unsure if it wanted Maya Rudolph’s Molly to be a caricatured One Percenter, or someone more vulnerable and real, if at times oblivious. The finale offered a near-total reboot of the premise, with Molly promising to give away all of her money to try to make the world a better place. This seemed a more interesting idea than watching Molly fumble around for purpose after her divorce, and it also seemed to zero in on the less cartoonish, more interesting take on the character. But the first two episodes of Season Two felt just as hit-or-miss as before, didn’t offer much movement on the new plotline, and still couldn’t decide exactly how ridiculous or human it wanted Molly to be. So I’ve moved on.

• RIP to Joe Flaherty, who died earlier this week. The guy was one of the best to ever do sketch comedy, with indelible SCTV characters like frustrated children’s show host Count Floyd, duplicitous station manager Guy Caballero, or Farm Film Report co-host Big Jim McBob, who just wanted to see famous people blow up real good. He was also so funny as Mr. Weir on Freaks and Geeks that you could frequently see Linda Cardellini and John Francis Daley struggle to stay in character when he was riffing. And those must have been the most usable takes! Imagine how much they were cracking up at other times. Back in 1999, I met him at a Freaks and Geeks press event and was struggling to find a delicate way to say how glad I was to have him on TV again. By the time I'd haltingly mumbled, "It's so good to see...," he jumped in to say, "To see me working again? Yeah, it's good for me, too."

• Finally, this past Sunday marked the 10th anniversary of the How I Met Your Mother series finale. As I wrote that night, it is a spectacular miscalculation in almost every way, an object lesson in why long-term planning for a TV series can do more harm than good when the show clearly evolves beyond that original plan, and a rare instance where I disagree with my usual “it’s the journey, not the destination” philosophy regarding once-great shows with terrible endings. That finale killed my interest in ever watching even “Slap Bet” — an all-time classic sitcom episode — again.

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