Welcome to my Monday newsletter! This week, I am looking at the second season of A Man on the Inside plus the finales of The Morning Show and Murdaugh: Death in the Family and the latest episode of Pluribus. Also, I'm continuing my Top 25 Shows Since 2000 with #2 and doing a pilot re-review of Raising Hope!
The blog will be taking a break next week and return on December 8!
WHAT'S NEW
I really enjoyed the first season of A Man on the Inside. Premiering late in 2024, it finished high on my end of year list and there seemed to be solid buzz for the show. By the time the Emmy Awards season rolled around, it seemed to be a little bit forgotten which I guess isn't too surprising. It was a really charming show but not necessarily one that stays with you. So now we're back for the second season and a new mystery, this time set on a college campus instead of a retirement home with Ted Danson's real life wife Mary Steenburgen joining the cast.
I've watched three episodes of the eight episode second season. No doubt some of you have already watched the entire season. I'm still enjoying the show but not nearly as much as I did the first season. It seems a lot closer to Only Murders in the Building than its own thing. I think the first season, while it had the mystery, really had something to say about aging and community through its retirement home plot - and we know creator Mike Schur is a master at making shows about connections with other people. But by setting the second season on a college campus (not a bad location for a mystery), it just feels like "here we go again" without the added pathos that was present in the first season. And yet, I'm also not thrilled that they're trying to still shoehorn in the retirement home into a second season plot.
But Danson remains completely watchable and the new members of the cast, led by Steenburgen, had acquainted themselves well. It's just hard to compare with the retirement home ensemble in the first season. I think this show will go from being exceptional to good, but it's still a nice watch.
LAST WEEK ON...
Of the people, especially critics, who still watch The Morning Show, I feel like there's been an embrace of the show's outrageously soapy elements. I've seen multiple people praise this season, not in the way they praise a truly acclaimed show, but in a "this was fun" way. I couldn't disagree more. I still need to go back and watch the first season again to see if I still think the show has gone downhill so dramatically or if now I think it wasn't ever that good to begin with. But I feel like this show was once in a heightened reality and has since careened off the cliff of any sort of reality. So why do I keep watching? I'm not really sure. I still think Jennifer Aniston is a great actress and can save most scenes she's in. I used to think that about Billy Crudup too but man did he annoy me this season. Of the new faces, Marion Cotillard had the right vibe for a show like this. But there's also way too many people involved in this show. Boyd Holbrook and Nicole Beharie could have helped save this season but disappeared for huge swaths of time. People like Jon Hamm and William Jackson Harper drop in and out. Reese Witherspoon is still in a completely different show half the time and that's just naming a few of the names. I'll probably keep watching in the fifth season whenever it arrives (probably 2027) but this show is really testing my patience.
Murdaugh: Death in the Family (Finale)
I felt very aggressively fine about this show. I don't think it ultimately had anything more to say than your average true crime show. But it was competently done. Jason Clarke was very successful at playing a complete jerk. I really hated his character but that was the point. I thought Patricia Arquette was going to maybe really shine in later episodes but I don't think she ever really did. The show also felt padded a bit too much. Like most true crime stories, it probably could have benefited from two less episodes. I think this is a show I'll forget about quickly and when I see it referenced in the future, I'll think "I watched that but I don't remember much about it."
Pluribus
I am really loving Pluribus now. We have now had two episodes in a row where huge swaths of the episode was just Rhea Seehorn and another character talking and it is completely fascinating. This time she was joined by recent Emmy winner Jeff Hiller in a great guest turn. I just love the way the show is explaining its world. They are accomplishing so much exposition and explanation but in a way that is expertly performed and written. It doesn't feel like a slog because we have so many of the same questions Carol does.
TOP 25 SHOWS SINCE 2000
The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel won an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series in its first season and was nominated for all five seasons and yet it seemed to be an afterthought to most critics by the time it went off the air in 2023. Well, it was never an afterthought for me. It maintained its quality aside from a slightly down fourth season that was due in part to circumstances beyond its control (a show this big struggled with COVID-era guidelines). And its quality was GLORIOUS. Aside from expert production values that gave the show its candy-coated look at New York City in the late 50s and early 60s, the show was cleverly written, inventively directed and wonderfully acted. From Rachel Brosnahan's quirky and dynamic portrayal in the title role to Alex Borstein's truly unique character to Tony Shalhoub's perfectly neurotic touch to so many more, this show was firing on all cylinders from the opening minutes of the pilot to the closing minutes of the finale. As far as I'm concerned, this show is an all-time great and I will not stand for any slander that does not put it up with other greats.
PILOT RE-REVIEW
This season, I am traveling back in time to the 2010-11 season, the first season I did this blog. I will be re-reviewing the pilots from that season, at least as many as I can find!
Original Review: Click Here!
What I Think Now: I'm not sure I fully appreciated Raising Hope back in 2010. I think it fits much more into the type of humor I've grown to appreciate more over the years. I thought the entire first scene was so absurd but yet hilarious. It also accomplished an awful lot. The prelude had to introduce the insane story about Hope's mother while also establishing the family dynamics and it did both with very strong execution. We got a real sense of the family (including the outrageous performance from the late, great Cloris Leachman) and the show also managed to sneak in some subversive humor (an electric chair bit that was the kind of thing you might see on an HBO comedy). It didn't need to keep up the pace of those first few minutes, it needed to settle into the type of show it was going to be long term and it did that with a real standout performance from Martha Plimpton. By the end of the episode, the show demonstrated it could have heart too. This might sound like a disjointed pilot but it didn't play that way. It got our attention with the white trash image of the family before chipping away at the façade to show us a genuinely sweet family unit. I think it was very impressive that this sitcom pilot effectively presented a lot of exposition and still showed us exactly what type of show it would be going forward. Many sitcom pilots are lucky if they can pull off one of those two things and many sitcoms, even ones that become good, struggle off the bat. This one didn't.
What Happened to the Show: FOX has struggled for much of its existence with live action sitcoms. In the years leading up to the premiere of Raising Hope, FOX was pretty much only having success with animated sitcoms. By that measure, Raising Hope had an OK run for the network as it lasted four seasons and 88 episodes. It got to follow some big FOX hits (Glee in its first season and New Girl in its second) but it always struggled to get beyond a niche audience and it quickly dropped on the priority scale once New Girl broke out the following season. It was the lead-off show for an ill-fated four comedy block on Tuesdays in Fall 2012 and by its final season, it had been banished to Fridays. There was some buzz for the show in the early going and Martha Plimpton and Cloris Leachman were both nominated for Emmys in the first season. But its buzz peaked in its first season and while it had its fans, it never really became a beloved sitcom of the 2010s and hasn't seemed to be a big player in the years since on streaming or anywhere else.
COMING UP
Thanksgiving Week usually means very few premieres though there is one major one this week. Monday has the fourth and final season premiere of Bel Air on Peacock. The show was once a buzzy property. It felt like it never really caught on but has quietly gone for four seasons. Wednesday is the big event of the week with the fifth and final season of Stranger Things. The show was last seen in July 2022 and of course has only managed five seasons since 2016. The first four episodes premiere Wednesday with three more on Christmas and the finale on New Year's Eve, the closest Netflix will get to a weekly release. On Thursday, the little-known streaming service The Network will premiere The Artist, a gilded age era drama starring Mandy Patinkin, Janet McTeer, Patti LuPone, Hank Azaria, Zachary Quinto and others. It's a great cast but will anyone even know how to watch this show? The first three episodes premiere on Thursday with the remaining three coming on Christmas.
Comments
Post a Comment