This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I explain the difference between Earth-616, Earth-1610, and Earth-26496 to you…
Perhaps the headline of this week’s newsletter is a bit too harsh, since I found Apple’s Dark Matter more dull than outright terrible. But I couldn’t resist the wordplay here. Besides, devoting 9 hours to watching a story that could have been more than accommodated within a 2-hour film — and that largely wastes the great Jennifer Connelly while leaning way too much on Joel Edgerton — at least gave me an excuse to vent about multiversal overload.
Look, I get it. The very first comic book I have any memory of reading is a tattered copy of Justice League of America #100, which featured an early team-up between the Justice League of Earth-1 and their older Earth-2 counterparts, the Justice Society of America. I was conditioned from an early age to understand this stuff, and to see all the exciting possibilities of stories that allow the characters to visit parallel realities. There’s just so many variations on that exact theme right now, including two different Marvel franchises, and a recent Oscar winner for Best Picture. When the stories are told well, I still love them. But if it’s something as deeply mid (more on this in a few) as Dark Matter, then it feels even more annoying than if it was a mediocre show that wasn’t hitting the same notes that so many other projects have now.
My other review this week is of Bodkin, a new Netflix mystery series starring Will Forte as an American podcaster who teams up with an Irish reporter to investigate a cold case in a small town in West Cork. While the show has its moments, it never quite comes together, so instead a lot of my review is about the challenge that movies and TV have had in trying to tell fictional stories about podcasters, which is something of a corollary to my old friend The Studio 60 Problem.
Even if the pop culture multiverse keeps expanding, it seems that Marvel’s specific universe is contracting. Earlier this week, Disney boss Bob Iger announced that the plan moving forward is to release no more than 3 MCU movies per year, and no more than 2 MCU shows on Disney+. Scaling things back is absolutely the right move. Is it any surprise that a brand once famed for its quality control — where some Marvel projects were better than others, but nearly all were at least in the B or B+ range — turned wildly uneven when forced to dramatically scale up in the aftermath of the Infinity Saga? That said, this retrenchment probably means far less opportunity for some of Marvel’s weirder or more obscure characters. It’s hard to imagine, for instance, Marvel in this new environment greenlighting a series about Avengers C-lister Wonder Man in this new environment, but we’ll eventually see the season they’re filming with Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as my improbable favorite Marvel hero. (I can elaborate on why whenever the show comes out. But it’s not just for the red safari jacket and sunglasses.) It may just be that Endgame would have been the absolute peak of the MCU no matter what, but we’ll have a much better idea of whether Kevin Feige can still do this at a high level once he doesn’t have to oversee so many things at the same time.
A couple of weeks ago, my counterpart at The New York Times, the great James Poniewozik, wrote a story about how we are now in a weird golden age of Mid TV — i.e., shows that have the superficial gloss of genuine prestige classics, but that are competent approximations at best. “Netflix’s Ozark,” he wrote at one point, “showed that you could ask, ‘What if ChatGPT rewrote Breaking Bad?’ and enough people would embrace the result as if it were Breaking Bad.” It’s a problem I’ve written about a lot in micro over the years, but it was nice to see the whole phenomenon laid out on a broader canvas. I do, however, disagree with the column attempting to place two different kinds of shows under the same Mid TV umbrella: the Ozark and House of the Dragons-esque faded Xeroxes, and more traditional TV that happens to be made by A-listers, like Poker Face. To me, those are two largely separate trends, and the latter is way more appealing than the former. I suppose an argument could be made that they’re related: i.e., because the landscape is becoming less hospitable to truly original and adventurous storytelling, some creators and stars are settling to create the best possible versions of tried-and-true formulas. Regardless, I love Poker Face too much to see it in any way connected to House of Cards and such.
The planned Office revival now has both a home, Peacock, and a setting: a Midwestern newspaper’s office. As someone who spent 14 years working at a newspaper, and who can see the dire state of that field right now, this feels like it could be too depressing a setting even for the world created by Gervais and Merchant, then adapted so well by Greg Daniels. The paper business itself wasn’t exactly thriving in the early-mid 2000s, but it wasn’t at death’s doorstep the way newspapers are. Worse, the premise acknowledges this: the same documentary crew that used to hang out at Dunder Mifflin will now be filming a dying newspaper that’s trying to revive itself with “volunteer reporters” — which sounds like people working for free in jobs that once paid actual journalists. Greg Daniels is developing this one, too, and while he has an incredible resume, he’s also had recent stumbles like Space Force. So we’ll see if this works. But maybe Chris Diamantopoulos can reprise his role as everyone’s favorite Office character: the boom mic guy who had a crush on Pam!
Earlier this week, Disney and Warner announced a joint venture where viewers will be able to subscribe to a bundle featuring all three of Disney+, Hulu, and Max. We are drawing ever-closer to all of these companies just reinventing your cable package. Maybe Dennis Duffy from 30 Rock was right, after all: technology really is cyclical?
Finally, skip ahead to the comments if you aren’t caught up on Sugar and care about being surprised.
So let’s talk Sugar’s big twist, which I could only vaguely allude to when I reviewed it last month. The end of last week’s episode revealed that John Sugar, hard-boiled private eye, is in fact a blue-skinned alien who’s just posing as a human, for reasons explained in the two remaining episodes of this first season.
As I suggested in my review, and as my Vulture peer Kathryn VanArendonk argues this week, the problem isn’t the twist itself, but the timing of it. A show where we found out that Sugar was an alien at the end of the first episode, or even at some point in the second, could work very well. In fact, I enjoyed this week’s episode and next week’s finale. But dropping it on viewers 3/4 of the way through the season is terrible storytelling. Sometimes, revealing huge twists late in the game forces you to re-examine everything you’ve previously watched, most famously at the end of The Sixth Sense. Here, though, it essentially washes away everything that’s come before. One look at Sugar’s true face is all it takes to make the kidnapping case, all the scheming among members of the family, the human trafficking, etc., feel completely irrelevant. If you were to go back and rewatch the episodes knowing that Sugar is an alien, it wouldn’t fundamentally alter your understanding of what’s happening, because there are only vague hints about it that have little or nothing to do with the investigation. Whereas if Sugar had told us this upfront, and dealt with John’s true nature even as he looked for the missing woman, the whole thing would feel richer and more complicated, rather than a reasonably effective film noir pastiche.
[extremely fake Bernie Sanders voice] I am once again asking you to please learn the lessons of Surf Dracula.
That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?
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