You only get one shot

'Adolescence' stuns, plus 'Dark Winds,' John Mulaney, 'Ted Lasso,' 'Dope Thief,' 'The Pitt,' 'Severance,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I invite you to devour feculence…

The oner I love

March is turning out to be a TV month with a whole lot of oners — aka a long scene that’s either filmed entirely in one shot, or one edited to make it look like one shot. Apple’s upcoming Seth Rogen comedy The Studio has at least one oner in every episode, and even an all-oner episode called, of course, “The Oner.” And Netflix’s Adolescence, which premiered earlier this week, features four episodes that were each filmed in one unbroken take. The Studio has a character complain that nobody in the audience cares about oners, and they’re always just about the director showing off.

I’m embargoed for a couple of weeks from saying how I feel the device works on The Studio, but I can say that it works spectacularly well in Adolescence, which was created by Jack Thorne and its co-star Stephen Graham, and directed by Philip Barantini. It’s not just that three of the four episodes feature at least one moment where I couldn’t fathom how the camera operator kept following the action. It’s how the device links together the disparate pieces of a show that is trying to cover many different angles of a tragic crime involving teenagers, and especially how it allows actors like Graham, Owen Cooper, and Erin Doherty to do astonishing work in a format that doesn’t protect them with edits as they have to shift from one emotional extreme to another.

It’s easily one of the best shows I’ve seen in a while, though far from the most uplifting watch. I get into all of this much more in my review.

Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?

As promised in last week’s newsletter, my Dark Winds Season Three review published on Saturday morning, the day before it premiered. I wrote about how the new season takes Zahn McClarnon’s performance to another level by presenting a more broken, less all-knowing Joe Leaphorn than in previous seasons, and how the expansion from six episodes to eight allows the show to take an amazing detour into the spirit world for an hour.

There are also some wobbles, particularly in the attempt to devote the season to mysteries from two different Tony Hillerman books that never feel connected, with one of them happening on the reservation and the other down at the US/Mexico border. But McClarnon and the scenery are worth the price of admission on their own.

Also? Since the season premiere has dropped — and since half the recap industrial complex has already discussed it — it’s worth noting the cameo in the premiere by the two incredibly famous men who are both producers on the series: Robert Redford and George R.R. Martin:

It’s a fun bit of business — including Redford improvising a line that could be interpreted as being abut Martin’s inability to finish writing A Song of Ice and Fire — but for a minute, it also pulls you out of a show that’s so effective at making this place and time feel so real. But if the coverage of it brings more eyeballs to a series that deserves it, I have no real complaints.

Everybody’s back in L.A.

I really enjoyed John Mulaney’s Everybody’s in L.A. talk show last year, and was pleased that Mulaney and Netflix agreed to bring it back this year in a new, recurring form, as Everybody’s Live. The first of the new episodes, though, was more hit-or-miss than most of the previous batch. Several comedy bits just died — the Tracy Morgan as King Latifah gag in more ways than one. Mulaney seemed unprepared for how serious the phone calls from viewers got, as if he either wasn’t sure whether they were making up their stories, or as if he wasn’t sure how to maintain the show’s light, chaotic tone with this particular subject. (Similarly, he wanted no part in engaging with Joan Baez talking about the current presidential administration for a moment before answering his first question.) But the Willy Loman bit was inspired, and Richard Kind’s mere presence in the sidekick role continues to fill me with joy. Not all of Everybody’s in L.A. worked, either, so I look forward to seeing upcoming episodes click more than this did.

Have you met Ted? Again?

Newsletter’s slightly later this morning than usual because I wanted to wait for the embargo time to discuss the announcement that Apple TV+ will be making a fourth season of Ted Lasso, with Jason Sudeikis returning to play Ted and produce.

Many thoughts, in no particular order:

• The release mentions no other actors from the first three seasons. Perhaps some or all of them will be part of this, but it’s entirely possible that this will be a Bosch: Legacy situation, where only the star continues while everyone else is written out. Or, for that matter, this could be the start of Apple splitting Ted Lasso into two shows, with Brett Goldstein, Hannah Waddingham, and everyone else continuing in a The Conners-type spinoff that has everyone but the original star.

• The release also gives no clues as to what the new season will be about, offering only this vague and weird quote from Sudeikis: “As we all continue to live in a world where so many factors have conditioned us to ‘look before we leap.’ In season four, the folks at AFC Richmond learn to LEAP BEFORE THEY LOOK, discovering that wherever they land, it’s exactly where they’re meant to be.” If you ask me, there is already too much leaping before looking in the year of our lord 2025.

• For that matter, while the release says multiple times that Sudeikis will be reprising the role of Ted, it never actually says he’s the star, so it’s also possible that he will guest star in an episode or two before giving things over to a new cast. (Or giving things over to the Roy Kent/Rebecca Welton-centric show.)

• As you may recall, I found Ted Lasso Season Three to be an absolute mess. Perhaps new showrunner Jack Burditt will be able to make things more focused; perhaps not.

• Bill Lawrence took a step back from Ted to focus on making the excellent Shrinking. Nevertheless, he is a co-creator of the show and an executive producer, which ordinarily leads to prominent billing in a press release such as this. Instead, his name first appears in the release after twelve other producers (including Sudeikis and Burditt) have been mentioned. In other words, no one should expect him to be involved in a hands-on capacity in whatever it is this fourth season turns out to be.

Odds and/or ends

• As I’ve mentioned in the past, every now and then I watch an entire season of a show and wind up not reviewing it for various reasons. This week brings one of those: the Apple TV+ miniseries Dope Thief, starring Brian Tyree Henry and Wagner Moura as a couple of Philadelphians who pose as DEA agents in order to rob drug dealers. It’s a pretty good showcase for what Henry can do as a leading man, and features a strong supporting performance from Marin Ireland as a woman who gets caught up in the mess these two crooks inadvertently create. But it’s a pretty classic case of This Should Have Been A Movie, if that. The Ridley Scott-directed premiere is interesting, but the show runs out of steam almost immediately afterwards, and by the time I got to the eighth and final hour, I realized I didn’t have much more to say than what I just wrote.

• I recapped this week’s White Lotus, which takes us to Season Four’s midpoint. Beyond what I wrote there, I feel it’s worth noting that, while Mike White’s sympathies are generally much more with the staff than with the guests, his storytelling interests are the inverse of that. So Belinda doesn't get a ton to do, especially not compared to Tanya as last season’s legacy character. Mook barely even qualifies as a character at this point, and Gaitok is primarily there to be an incompetent who allows things to happen to the guests. The first season felt much better balanced in this respect.

• If this week’s excellent Abbott Elementary karaoke episode had just featured Mr. Johnson singing “Hard Out Here for a Pimp” (while Janine danced and lip-synced enthusiastically)… dayenu. Same for if it had just featured Jacob angrily tearing into Papa Roach.

• It’s been a minute since I plugged my book Saul Goodman v. Jimmy McGill: The Complete Critical Companion to Better Call Saul, but there’s been a recent development worth mentioning. While I note each time that it’s available wherever books are sold (links here), for a variety of reasons too boring to get into here, until recently Barnes & Noble was selling it online but not in stores. That has now changed, so if you happen to be browsing at your local B&N this weekend, you might just come across it in the TV & Film section.

The Pitt recaplet: “Hour Eleven”

Various thoughts on this week’s doings at PTMC:

• Because most of the episodes are well under an hour, the show has never been especially strict about the real-time conceit, and from time to time we’ll jump from a character leaving one room and winding up elsewhere in the department without the necessary travel time. So it’s notable that this one picks up in the exact same time and place that the last one ended, with Robby watching the door that he just made Langdon exit from.

• By the end of the hour, Robby is down both senior residents, since he sends Collins home to recover from her miscarriage. I like Tracy Ifeachor’s performance as Collins, while also feeling frustrated that she’s the one main character on the show whose primary conflict has little to do with the job itself. (In that way, she reminds me a bit of Susan Lewis on ER, who had some juicy professional conflicts early on, but then spent much of her first stint on the show focused on caring for, then losing custody of, her sister’s baby.) Still, the scene where Collins tells Robby about the abortion she once had — and the ambiguity of whether she means that this was from when they were together — was really well played by Ifeachor and Noah Wyle.

• Another reason the pregnancy subplot felt less compelling is because of how thickly the show laid it on by so often giving her cases involving pregnancies throughout the shift. That said, the childbirth story in this one was pretty harrowing, and among the more graphic I’ve seen, and required a lot of technical wizardry to pull off. The benefits of streaming shows not having to deal with censors! (And as a side note, the sheer nerdy joy on Mel’s face when she handed the healthy baby to one of the dads is among the most endearing things Taylor Dearden has done yet.)

• Robby’s speech to David the incel kid’s mom about toxic podcasts and other ways that society is failing or outright damaging young men (which is also territory covered by Adolescence) was another case, like last week’s discussion of healthcare workers being assaulted by patients, of the show making a sociological point a bit too bluntly to fit into its world.

• And speaking of David, it seemed inevitable that there would be a mass casualty of some kind this season. And between the potential threat of David and all the talk about Jake (clarified here to be the son of one of Robby’s exes) going to Pittfest, something bad happening there in particular made sense. So we head into the season’s endgame with the terrible news that there’s an active shooter at the festival. Having seen the next few episodes — some of them multiple times, because I’m addicted to this show like few in recent memory — all I can say is, buckle up.

Leaving Lumon?

Finally, the penultimate episode of Severance Season Two spent a lot of time setting up getting Outie Mark to a place where he can figure out what to do about Gemma. But it also seemingly wrote several characters out of the narrative — or at least out of whatever town it is that all this is taking place in. Back when I first watched the screeners, I came out of this one very curious for how the story might move forward, and also whether this year’s finale could come close to matching the intense genius of Season One’s. We will obviously save that — as well as a post-mortem interview I’ve done with Severance creator Dan Erickson — for next week. But how are people feeling about the season as we prep for the finale? Speaking of which…

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