Captain's Log
Next week, more new TV starts to return. Until then, let's wrap up the summer season
What we have here is likely to be another short one, because so much is ending and the fall slate doesn’t kick off until next week…
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, “The Golden Bachelor Live” – We get to the episode this whole season has been building to. I read some other TV critic write about four paragraphs this week (and a couple last week) about how much he hates this kind of synergistic tie-in and how terrible reality TV is and how there’s no way Disney is getting a crossover audience between Sunny and Golden Bachelor, so I’ll spare you anything like that and just tell you I didn’t know Jesse Palmer was the Golden Bachelor host, or any kind of TV host, which left me feeling a little bit like Jim Downey on Conan O’Brien’s podcast: “No, no, I’m talking about Jesse Palmer the former University of Florida quarterback.”
Anyway, we start right away with Frank being as immediately horrific as you’d expect, instantly rejecting a number of candidates for being, well, age-appropriate. The one he doesn’t reject is Carol Kane’s Sam, because of her smartass comments toward him when she arrives. (Also: Carol Kane!!) And then he asks Jesse Palmer to bring on Legally Not Hailey “Hawk Tuah” Welch.
Let the show begin and the questions abound. How will Frank choose between an age-appropriate woman who actually vibes with him and a hot young influencer who might be willing to fuck him for content? Will he avoid getting kicked off the show before he can make that choice? Can the Gang appear normal to America’s television audience? Will the Gang fuck this whole thing up in some other way, whether or not they manage to appear normal? Will some outside factor complicate the game?
The answers to all these, and more, in a terrific season finale that made me laugh my ass off and still managed to genuinely surprise me. And even move me, and not just because of the terrific tribute to the late Lynne Marie Stewart at the very end. A very worthy finale to a Sunny season that’s the best I think we’ve seen in eight years, since season 12.
Digman!, “The Fortune Pursuit” and “The Arky Trials” – With no other way to watch the new episodes as of last night, I finally broke down and purchased the season on Amazon. I barely got to these in time last night, and I’ve been in a pretty crappy mood since my back gave out on Tuesday, so it was a struggle to even want to write anything instead of saying “the hell with this.” I hope you all appreciate that. Anyway, in the first episode we meet Saltine’s parents (Artemis Pebdani and I think Kayvan Novak) and learn more about why she’s estranged from them, as well as unearth some secrets in their past (as well as some very funny weirdly casually dropped information from Rip about his own).
The second episode’s titular plot involves Saltine entering “The Arky Trials” to qualify to become an Arky (which I guess you can’t just do by, like, getting a degree in it and then doing it). The trials are led by an ancient-looking weird little blue man named Yorbo (Nathan Lane!) who does a really shitty job of emulating R. Lee Ermey in the introductory scene to the trials. Meanwhile, Rip and the rest of his team are commissioned by Magnus Knight (John Waters!) to find the mysterious “god piece,” a chess piece with the power to move anywhere on the board and do anything, that was created with the first chess set in the 6th century and then discarded for being too powerful… and no one knows where. This story leads Rip, Swooper, and Agatha (and Fleety, I suppose) onto a series of strange adventures involving Las Vegas, a Make-a-Wish kid on death row, and eventually to the World Chess Championship in Helsinki, which is probably about as weird as it sounds but nevertheless is very funny. These episodes were quite good times; the second one is probably funnier, but the first one injects some personal stakes the show doesn’t have too often.
I guess I could have watched the finale, too, but this was already a lot at the last minute and I didn’t want to.
Well, nothing, really. With Sunny and Bob’s Burgers ending their seasons, and The Great North not returning until September, there’s just Digman!, and I have no way to see that episode of the show in time for this article (even if I went all-out and bought it VOD on Amazon).
So we did use some of that time to watch Brett Goldstein‘s HBO standup special, The Second-Best Night of Your Life, which is pretty funny. (Thinking of Conor‘s critique of Hannah Einbinder’s special– this one definitely has more actual jokes.) It might have been funnier in the first half than the second, or I might have been hung over and just had a fading attention span.
Well, I guess the latest episode of Digman! awaits us, but as per usual, I’ll be putting that into next week’s article.
After finishing this season of It’s Always Sunny, we decided to go back to some favorites. The ending montage struck me with how young the cast looked in some of the clips, which of course makes perfect sense since the show premiered 20 years ago. We decided to throw it back to season 1, with “Charlie Wants an Abortion”– an incredible episode for the second episode of the show, and it serves as a reminder that while Danny DeVito did add a lot to the show and Frank is a fantastic character, Sunny was excellent from the jump.
Then we watched “The Gang Goes to Hell, Pt. 2” for Dennis’ CCH Pounder impression.
And I watched “Hero or Hate Crime?”, one of the funniest episodes of the second half of the series, and probably my favorite of season 12. I watched it in part because it’s funny, of course, but also because it ends with Mac coming out for real, and also because I was thinking about how good season 17 was, and that 12 is probably the one that I most recently thought played on that level. (I don’t think the show has had a bad season, but after season 7 it becomes a little more inconsistent; 9, 12, and 17 are my favorite seasons since then, though every season has some good episodes.)
For some reason this weekend, the other “old favorites” I felt like watching included some standup. Aziz Ansari, for whatever you may think about him, really knocked it out of the park with Buried Alive, with the material on dating and marriage (and the terrific callback to it at the end) being some of my favorite, and I find myself often thinking about his bit about how club music is trying to fool you into thinking you’re having a good time. But a reason I went back to this one, too, is I’d been thinking about his “Bullying” segment and didn’t realize it was on there. (The sentence “All right, well, I don’t want to be ended, whatever the fuck that means!” is another one I think about.)
And I watched Bill Burr’s I’m Sorry You Feel That Way, which has long been a favorite, although maybe it hasn’t aged as well as I’d hoped. I do still enjoy the segments on Donald Sterling and Phil Robertson, as well as how the latter leads into his analysis of religion, and the bit on his father’s attempts at parenting. I generally give him more of a pass than I would most comics on the rougher stuff, in part because of where his journey has taken him and in part because he’s very self-critical and knows that his reaction to something is not correct– and in fact often isn’t– just because it’s his reaction.
Last week was the It’s Always Sunny finale, and while I’m not exactly clear on how many episodes Digman! is airing this season, last season was eight episodes, which makes it seem likely that last night’s was the season finale.
Lots of new shows we watch here returning for the fall slate! We start off next week with Beavis and Butt-Head coming back for its third-revival third season on September 3. (Feels like there’s some numerology afoot there.) And Peacock is releasing The Paper in its entirety September 4.
Here’s everything I have confirmed fall return dates for– or, in two cases, premieres: DMV, a sitcom starring Harriet Dyer, Tim Meadows, and Tony Cavalero; and the Rachel Sennott-created and -starring I Love LA. The Paper, Solar Opposites, and A Man on the Inside will be released all at once on streaming; the rest will follow some kind of weekly schedule. (Also, I only got two episodes into season 1 of A Man on the Inside, so I won’t be covering it unless I catch up before then.)
| Beavis and Butt-Head | September 3 | Comedy Central |
| The Paper | September 4 | Peacock |
| Only Murders in the Building | September 9 | Hulu |
| Futurama | September 15 | Hulu |
| High Potential | September 16 | ABC |
| Bob’s Burgers | September 28 | FOX |
| Abbott Elementary | October 1 | ABC |
| Elsbeth | October 12 | CBS |
| Matlock | October 12 | CBS |
| Solar Opposites (Final Season) | October 13 | Hulu |
| DMV | October 13 | CBS |
| I Love LA | November 2 | HBO |
| St. Denis Medical | November 3 | NBC |
| A Man on the Inside | November 20 | Netflix |
There are upwards of six series I’m still waiting on release dates for.
What did you watch in TV this week? (And what did you watch generally last night, which you can answer in the “What did we watch?” thread. I’ve said the words “what did you watch?” so many times they’ve lost all meaning.)
About the writer
Captain Nath
Born on the bayou, thriving in the mountains. Writer, gambler, comedian, singer-songwriter, bon vivant, globetrotter, and all-around Renaissance Man with perfect opinions about TV and music. Pronounced with a long A and with the H.
It's a gaming ship.
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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Live Music – Canadian-Australian jangly indie-rock band Ducks Ltd played one of the more generic venues in town and were blessed with a terrible fit of a local support act who I shouldn’t be too mean about because they were young and not without talent. But their influences, ugh. Please don’t bring back the post-Britpop shit-rock sound, lads. Ducks Ltd were very good though, their frontman is very energetic and enthusiastic and they have some great songs. Plus it was a nice early finish, which I always appreciate midweek!
Seinfeld, season 2 episodes – only just noticing now that we’ve gone out of order on these, not sure if we’ve skipped a disc or the episodes are just presented in a different order due to DVD madness. Anyway the episodes from the last couple of days have been “The Jacket”, “The Baby Shower”, “The Chinese Restaurant” and “The Busboy” and they were all pretty great. I really enjoyed Elaine’s grumpy father in “The Jacket” and “The Baby Shower” has an astonishing one-scene performance from a woman that Jerry didn’t call back that had me in stitches. I see “The Chinese Restaurant” is considered one of the great episodes, I enjoyed it but kinda missed Kramer a little, great to see James Hong in a guest role though. “The Busboy” is a really fun escalating-chaos episode which might be my favourite type thus far.
Alfred Hitchcock Presents, “The Long Shot” – fun, twisty conman episode. Will see if I have more to say when the article arrives.
Wooo, live Canadian-Australians!
Obviously I have thoughts on “The Long Shot,” which will be up earlier today, but yeah, this one is fun.
Jerry being unable to resist pointing out that he didn’t say anything in “The Busboy” is one of my favorite character details. And unfortunately relatable.
I definitely related to George getting the guy in trouble by just relating the facts without thinking about how they might sound, I’ve been there!
I remember “The Chinese Restaurant” was good, but was one of those rare cases where something absolutely groundbreaking was old hat to me by the time I got to it. But as always, the details are so good. Meanwhile, “The Jacket” is a perfect example of the show’s strengths – in the future, they’ll be doing that, only moreso.
George going from “I won’t ask how much The Jacket cost” to storming out of the apartment in horror at the assumed price he concocted in his own head within about 30 seconds and without any real input from Jerry was magnificent.
Great early example of Jason Alexander’s performance (which will never slow down or decline). He goes from amused to outraged entirely on his own.
It’s not even the best bottle episode on this one series as long as The Parking Garage exists
Woo live music! Side-eye Britpop returning!
Woooooo live music!!
Synergy! Just finished watching Always Sunny tonight! A lovely season finale. Carol Kane’s little speech to Frank made me a bit emotional, and I howled at the gang in the audience.
“Please excuse our appearances…”
Alfred Hitchock Presents, “The Long Shot” – More later but I am with Vomas. Fun and twisty.
Slow Horses, “Drinking Games” – See above (or below)
Frasier, “IQ” – Frasier and Niles’s competitiveness gets the best of them first at a charity auction, then at home when they dig up the IQ tests from childhood their mother hid, and then finally at the lunch they bought with three Nobel Prize winners. Where for reasons Frasier is strung out on caffeine and Niles strung out on cold meds (allowing more physical comedy from Hyde-Pierce). What makes this work is the physical comedy and the awareness from both brothers that their rivalry is really beneath them, and also an awareness that within the jealousy is a deep and positive influence each had on the other. (For the record, Niles had a much higher IQ.)
Andor E5 – Tracks that Cyril’s mom would be loving but overbearing to his perpetual irritation, feels like a lot of fascists have mommy issues rather than strict daddy ones? Very Shieldian “deny and reveal nothing” performances on this show, especially the double agents like Lieutenant Gorn. Alex Lawther of The End of The Fucking World and The Last Duel is perfect then as a heart on sleeve rebel incapable of cloaking his idealism, probably the first time in a TV a character has a manifesto and this is a quirk rather than an evil terrorist red flag. Weakest plot so far seems to be Mon Mothma with the angry teenage daughter and cold bourgeois breakfasts. It’s cool to see how the Rebellion gets its money but we haven’t gotten much of that side yet.
I feel like there’s the embedded idea that a lifetime with Eedy’s emotional manipulation and not-so-subtle criticism–all excused, at least to her, by the genuine love she does have for him–has set Syril up to want a system where the rules are coherent and explicit for once and following them can net you actual, firmer rewards and self-respect. But he hasn’t realized that the Empire is not that, and the rules will actually change whenever to justify whatever. (And also that it’s much worse than he’s aware of.)
Great point about the manifesto: it’s a nice and inspiring detail, and yeah, it’s a huge shift from how the concept is normally used on TV.
Yeah, if you have hyper-critical parents (speaking as one who knows), you absolutely want or need that autonomous respect, and this makes fascism pretty attractive – it’s a regimented order, surely this is set up for that! And in fact, your criticisms all apply, plus fascism doesn’t award competence, it awards loyalty. Cyril fucked up, but worse, he disobeyed.
The X-Files, “The List”
A weaker episode. This drags, and you can tell it knows there’s not enough story because we have to focus on a pallidly “atmospheric” shot of Mulder staring out a car window and then slowly rolling it up. It’s only a couple seconds, but there’s padding like that all over the place here in an attempt to get this jumbled ghost story/mystery to fit the show’s usual runtime. Also, we’re saying “reincarnation” throughout this episode, but this is just a ghost. You’re not fooling anyone!
It’s all a bit needlessly complicated, and it manages more gross-outs than scares (watched this while eating dinner, and all those maggot shots did a number on me), but at least we get Ken Foree, Bokeem Woodbine, and J.T. Walsh.
Saving grace was this great Mulder-Scully exchange:
Mulder: Okay, but imagine if it was true, Scully. Imagine if you can come back and take out five people who caused you to suffer. Who would they be?
Scully: I only get five?
Mulder: … I remembered your birthday this year, didn’t I, Scully?
M*A*S*H, Season Two, Episode Fourteen, “Hot Lips and Empty Arms”
This is the first time the show has ever taken Margaret seriously, and as always, it’s a weak first draft of a concept the show plays with more creatively later. In this case, it just doesn’t have much of a plot; Margaret is sick of the boys, requests a transfer, and then gets drunk. The one scene that really works here* is when Hawkeye and Trapper initially approach Margaret to apologise, knowing they’ve gone too far this time and really want to make it clear they respect her. Like I said, the show would hit this point more artfully later (particularly with Hawkeye), but it’s nice now.
*Now I’m thinking of the “three good scenes and no bad ones” approach Howard Hawks applied to movies, and how one of the strengths of television is that this applies to individual episodes. Certainly, even at its weakest, M*A*S*H holds up to that standard. Even this early, when the ideas aren’t as ironed out as they would be in the show’s middle period, the structure of stories means every scene is good and some individual scenes are bangers.
“Oh, go soak your head!”
“That’ll teach you to ad-lib with the master.”
This is also the first episode written by a woman – Linda Bloodworth and Mary Kay Place. The fact that they have the episode about Margaret implies some Hawkeye-like male liberal thinking behind the scenes.
Bloodworth will come back for the key season five episode “The Nurses.”
Mickey 17 – Despite Robert Pattinson and Naomi Ackie giving great performances this didn’t quite come together for me. It’s ambitious, attempting to be smart SF, funny, strange, satirical and grounded in romance and human emotion. That is a lot of balls in the air at once. Terry Gilliam is the only one I can think of to succeed in such a feat. He did it twice! with Brazil and 12 Monkeys. But this is hard to dislike. Pattinson is very good at giving two Mickeys distinct personalities while still being the same person. But Mark Ruffalo is so distracting as a Trump satire who can’t separate religion from corporate interests. The film stops for me when he is on screen with the satire falling flat. There are structural problems. The film is filled with a lot of narrated exposition from Mickey, which Patts makes quite funny, but there isn’t much suspense from it. The third act finally manages some. Not entirely bad. It has some interesting themes about reprinting humans with the memories of the previous print job, what makes a human life and do they deserve dignity. There is amazing direction, effects and Pattinson is something to behold. But still, Mickey, Mickey, you’re so…ok.
I thought this was a way off Bong Joon-Ho’s best but enjoyed how weird it was as a follow-up to his big worldwide critical breakthrough, and I guess I was more into the Ruffalo performance. Definitely a bit of a mess though.
(Marie Kondo voice): I love mess!
I am making a note to watch A Man on the Inside when we pull the trigger on Netflix for Stranger Things: We’re All Too Old to Be Teens Now.
Ended the first season of Slow Horses and started the second. And even though the seasons were filmed back to back, the second season seemed a bit more assured. I think some of that is not needing to introduce the premise or the cast, and some of that is the first season’s story had us spending a lot of time with the bad guys and the victim away from the cast. It worked very well, but in season two so far there is pretty much no time without either a Slow Horse or Kristin Scott Thomas’s MI5 bosslady on screen. (And boy did I get confused, as I thought since Thomas was third billed, she was played Jackson’s long suffering assistant and not the MI5 lady. The assistant is in fact Saskia Reeves, who is my favorite actor in the cast, even including Oldman.)
The second season’s plot has three overlapping elements, and halfway through the season it’s clear “Soviet sleeper cell,” “Meeting with anti-Putin oligarch” and “anti-capitalist march” are going to connect. This allows for some complexity in the story, though really the story is designed to give the characters things to do, and reasons to feel. Especially since the saddest boy at Slough Horse is murdered, and his girlfriend is devastated and is likely to do something stupid to avenge him. And at the center of it is Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, who has moderated his grumpiness (if not his generally sloppy ways) just enough to find a modicum of compassion for the dead and actual concern of a sort for his losers. I feel like out of the gate Oldman was told to be as unlikable as possible, and once he found his footing began to figure out ways to peel back Lamb’s coat of endless cynicism.
Oh boy, can’t wait to see how anti-capitalist marches and Soviet sleeper cells get connected!
I fully expect it to be a Simpons-esque “ha, we fooled you, the Soviet Union is back!” (As I noted, the Russian plot aged badly before it aired with the invasion of Ukraine.)
If it is like the book, it is done well!
Catherine is a great character in the books, glad she’s getting a strong portrayal on the show.
Yep, fantastic Always Sunny finale, and I was moved and surprised too. There’s a built-in assumption that nothing much is going to change this late in the game, so at least ending on a note of a real development–and one I’m definitely in favor of!–is very cool. And that tribute was lovely.
Frank’s reactions to the fact that “chew on that thang!” wasn’t a metaphor were hilarious all episode.
Watched the first episode of Peacemaker over the weekend and am definitely digging it so far: that’s a helluva hook at the end. The show’s also as funny and violent and endearingly emotional as ever. I’ll avoid anything too spoilery on that last front and instead just say that Vigilante apparently constantly calling up Economos and–in at least one case–demanding to be quizzed on his knowledge of owl trivia delighted me.
Old stuff: still rewatching old favorite episodes of Scrubs at odd intervals. This really is one of the shows that helped shape how I write and what I appreciate in writing.
Hey, uh, I noticed we didn’t get a Mr. Show this week…
It’s because the charging port on my laptop stopped working last Friday! I had to wait for the Apple Store to get the right part for repairs, and now I can finally take it in tonight. (Fingers crossed they’ll be able to fix it there while I wait instead of sending it away.) It’s a lot harder to liveblog on my phone, when I’m slower with my thumbs, so I’m hoping I’ll get it back soon and have a much easier time doing all kinds of writing.
Update: NOPE, five to seven more days.
Aww.
I need this, everyone is going through my recommendations at a glacial pace! (Or for some reason watching stuff that sucks instead, Tristan.)
At least you’ll get more albums-off-the-list thoughts on Tuesday?
Man I love that needy creepy psycho (Vigilante).
I’ve started watching Avenue 5, and it took me eight minutes to lock down exactly what’s wrong with this show: the premise doesn’t work as a comedy. It has to come out of the gate with absurdity but it cannot do that in a plausible way; characters all have to be totally stupid at all moments, which makes it unsurprising. I feel like the writers are floundering without real history to draw on the way The Thick Of It, The Death of Stalin, or (based on what I’ve heard), Veep all did.
In the first two, history provided both plausibility and density of plot and they could just layer on one-liners; this has them trying to make shit up, and the characters are too vague to pull that off (with the possible exception of Billie, who comes off as a competent person who is very clearly going to go insane around these people, and Mark, whose nihilism paradoxically makes him a clearer character who is clearly just in this to amuse himself).
This kind of thing really has to be a horror/drama of some kind where characters are initially acting seriously and competently and things simply escalate from there. One compares it to the first season of The Terror, which was mildly funny and escalated both the horror and the absurdity as time went on, until one wonders how the fuck we got here.
If you’re wondering why I’m watching this, it’s because a) I’m curious by nature and b) I’m mulling over writing a story with this exact premise, and it’ll be fun to look at something that doesn’t work and, in the process of trying to fix it, coming up with ideas for my own story. Actually, it’s funny – between this, Battlestar Galactica (the Ron Moore version), and Star Trek: Voyager, it’s surprisingly clear that writers tend to fumble the concept of a spaceship lost out on the frontier. Although what I’ve seen of the rebooted Lost In Space was pretty good, if fairly different from this premise.
It’s very weird that shows so often fumble this irresistible premise, because it feels like a real “whaddaya want, a road map?” idea. And yet apparently they do need one!
I watched the first season of Avenue 5 and wound up with no investment in going back for more, and I think the lack of specificity in most of the characters–which comes from the lack of a real world for them to push back against, when it’s being written without an inherent SF-ish turn of mind–is a big part of that. I feel like a lot of American satire really fell apart post-Trump, too, in ways that hurt it; it became bigger and broader and more nonsensical, and while it did that because it was chasing a reality that felt like that too, it wasn’t as fun to watch as more precise, sharply-plotted material. And the feeling that it was written against real damaging forces rather than real absurdities made writers more reluctant to inject any sympathetic qualities into their satiric characters, lest that be taken as commentary on their real-life counterparts. The characters on Veep were often awful and absurd, but they had some occasional bits of pathos and humanity that I don’t remember from Avenue 5, which is more, “Isn’t everyone ridiculous and stupid?” Which can be funny, but it has to be done with real excellence to pull it off, and this isn’t.
The Vietnam War: Shit sucks, but at least the protest music was good.
The War on Terror: The protest music sucks, but at least the satire was good.
The Trump Era: Man, fuck everything
I’ve said it before, but my thesis, more or less, is that satire fell apart post-Trump because so much satire is proscribed by pro-American, pro-capitalist propaganda (especially true on something like late shows, where it’s more explicit). Satire requires an actual understanding of what it’s satirizing. A lot of attempts at satire, especially in Trump’s first term, seemed to live in this idea that America was a truly noble country and a shining beacon of freedom and democracy, somehow usurped by one bad actor. Which is, of course, comical: America is a violent looter internationally and a white supremacist casino full of used car salesmen domestically. Trump is exactly what this country should produce. But to acknowledge that would require confronting the idea that the only thing they’re really satirizing is that Trump doesn’t bother to hide America’s actual goals and values under any kind of noble veneer, which is a lot more toothless (less toothful?) and also would, again, require them to acknowledge that the reality of America is not the propaganda they were raised on.
(Shoot, even the title Avenue 5 suggests how toothless this show was going to be– something that must have seemed clever to Iannucci when he conceived of it largely brought a “Huh? What? Oh, that” when it was announced and explained.)
Year of the Month update!
This September, we’re covering these movies, albums, books, from 1938!
TBD: Cori Domschot: Bringing Up Baby
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Rebecca
Sept. 22nd: Sam Scott: Holiday
Here’s how we’re wrapping up August…
TBD: Bridgett Taylor: Pillow Talk/Some Like It Hot
Aug. 29th: Gillian Nelson: The Monorail
And here’s a primer on some of the movies, albums, books and TVwe’ll be covering for 1973 in October!
Naturally, Adult Swim conspired to make me look foolish by announcing this morning that Smiling Friends will return October 5.
Any implied foolishness comes nowhere near outweighing how impressed I am that there’s a table in your article.
There’s a pretty convenient table function in WordPress, but it also turns out that if you just paste from a spreadsheet, it’ll do the tabling for you.