What's Alan Watching?

The risk of taking what had been a highly effective melodrama with hints of comedy and playing more frequently and overtly for laughs is that the humor will unravel the emotional spell already cast on the audience. But the opposite happens. Lestat as a character is funnier this way, but he's also more tragic. The humor winds up enhancing the heavy stuff, while the darkness of it all only makes the laughter feel more welcome and necessary.

Devoting most of the season to one difficult shift is itself a change of pace from anything The Bear has done before. It gives this home stretch a focus and a grounding in the world of the restaurant that the series only intermittently had the previous two years. And there are still extreme emotional highs to be found, even as there's much less variation from one episode to the next.

This new Little House, run by Rebecca Sonnenshine, is in many ways true to both the spirit and substance of the books and their beloved prior adaptation. But it's also smart in the ways it tries to reconsider Wilder's young adventures through the lens of 2026. It's made the story feel bigger and more complicated, but still Little House.

Meriwether's take on this half-forgotten source material has its highs and lows, but those highs include terrific showcases for Rossum, Petticrew, and several other actors, and a lot of thought-provoking material about sex, gender, and abuse, particularly when law-enforcement gets involved in any or all of these things. It's not always an easy watch, but the highs are very high.

The series' primary strength is its ability to function as an Anya Taylor-Joy delivery system. Its secondary is how it does the same for Timothy Olyphant, allowing him to be charming and grizzled and superhumanly relaxed, and for Annette Bening.

That struggle to make the human characters seem real and vivid unfortunately extends to most of the scenes set on terra firma, without the dragons in sight. We're several years into this series, and other than childhood friends-turned-archenemies Rhaenyra (Emma D'Arcy) and Alicent (Olivia Cooke), almost no human characters have clear motivations, nor compelling reasons to watch them as everyone jockeys for power. In many scenes, it can be a challenge to even remember who some characters are, and how they relate to one another.

Ferrell's an incredibly gifted, versatile, and thoughtful performer, but his instincts in material can be all over the map, even more than many of his peers from that surprising period chronicled in Funny Business. It's not shocking that The Hawk is this difficult to get through, but it's nonetheless disappointing.

Where Young Sheldon was able to translate the aspect of BBT that people loved most — the mix of social awkwardness, relentlessness, and vulnerability of Sheldon Cooper — into a new context, Stuart Fails to Save the Universe fails to bring over any of the good aspects of The Big Bang Theory into this grim mess.

The good news is that I felt substantially more engaged by Star City than I have by the parent show the last couple of seasons, and there are clear ways the spinoff differentiates itself from its predecessor besides the setting. The bad news is that Star City has some flaws, some systemic to this creative team (like FAM, it was developed by Ronald D. Moore, Matt Wolpert, and Ben Nedivi), some specific to this idea and how it's executed.

It's a mix of extreme darkness — scenes either discuss or depict suicidal ideation, assault, and rape — and quirky humor. This is a delicate thing, where if the balance isn't exactly right, the drama feels weightless and the comedy much too heavy. The great majority of the time throughout this excellent first season, Wainwright gets it just so.