Alan Sepinwall (2015)

Thanks, Dan!

Like I said on Twitter yesterday, I will be less surprised if David Chase explains exactly what happened to Tony in the seconds after the screen went black than I would if Lindelof were to publicly state who was in the outrigger.

In one of my blog posts today, I note that in 5-10 years, someone could easily do a similar book about, say, Louie, Game of Thrones, Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, The Knick, Fargo, maybe Leftovers, and a few other shows that in different ways changed the way TV was made and/or viewed. We remain in an era of enormous change, so some historical distance helps before trying another book.

I think FX is pretty great, in that they mostly leave creators alone but still (with the exception of Louie) insist on some feedback. Unfettered creative freedom is awesome if you're David Simon or Matt Weiner, but there's genuine value to network notes when they're coming from smart people (and the guys at FX are very smart). I think we saw with True Detective season 2, and with some of the flabbiness of recent Netflix shows, that just leaving people alone isn't always the best way to go about things.

1)Even more fondly, I would say. Once I got out of the week to week of it all, and the frustrations over the various stupid things that Lost did, I realized that what I tended to remember was all the good stuff. When I wrote the first edition of the book back in 2012, I rewatched a couple of bad episodes, but for the most part, what I wanted to look at again were ones like Exodus, Through the Looking Glass, The Constant, The Brig, etc.

2)No more than Willie Mays falling down in the Mets outfield taints his rep as one of the 5 best players in baseball history. Very few shows end on top creatively. It's a fact. The Office was uneven even in the Carell years, but it's still a classic.

3)THAT'S WHAT THE MONEY IS FOR!

1)Top 10 lists are just A Thing We Do. Ideally, especially these days, I'd do a Top 25, and will almost certainly follow my "official" list (which has to be a certain length in part because of the HitFix TV Critics Poll) with another featuring the next 10-15 shows.

2)David Simon doing an HBO show about the '70s porn industry starring James Franco would be awesome in a fantasy world. Wait, that is a thing that is actually happening?

3)Not yet. We had hoped to keep the podcast going when Dan went to THR, but it unfortunately didn't work out. Rather than rush into something where I just grab a new partner and try to do the same show I was doing with someone I've been friends with for 20 years, I'm taking a little time to do a soup-to-nuts assessment of what I should try to do with the next one.

I would tend to doubt it on Review. It's just too far off the beaten path. For Comedy Central shows to break through into nominations, they have to be way more in the zeitgeist, like Amy Schumer and Key & Peele (which are/were also great).

Deadwood is probably the tops, just because it was so big and sprawling. The fake boardwalk HBO built for the first few seasons of Boardwalk Empire was also really impressive. I started visiting sets before the transition from SD to HD, and I remember a lot of the older sets looking surprisingly dingy, because the cameras couldn't catch that level of detail. Like, Frasier Crane's apartment was a mess in person.

I listen to a bunch: Extra Hot Great with my pals from Previously.tv, NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour (which doesn't always do TV, but does it a bunch), Andy Greenwald and Chris Ryan's new podcast, Mo Ryan and Ryan McGee's... the problem is that I don't always have enough time, especially since I like to listen to ones on other subjects (sports, mainly). It's Peak Podcasting in America, too.

I hear Steph Curry is pretty good...

The networks have it tough, less because of the programming model than the business model. They have affiliates to please, which means they depend on ratings a whole lot more than even an AMC or FX, let alone a pay cable channel or streaming service. I feel like there will come a point in the next 10 years where one of the Big Four simply goes out of business, but I also feel like that was being said 10 years ago and they are all somehow still making it work.

Walking Dead I write about because the conversation around it is interesting, even when the show's in a really frustrating stretch like this most recent half-season. Sometimes, shows that aren't quite there are more fun to write about than ones that have it figured out.

But as to the question of when to pull the ripcord, it's a whole lot easier these days. Sometimes, it just becomes a question of what's stacked up the most unwatched episodes. I didn't hate the start to The Affair s2, for instance, but I kept prioritizing other shows, and suddenly I have more than half a season to catch up on, and do I really want to binge... that?

Babylon 5 is one I get asked about a lot. That was one of the first shows to try the whole "novel for television" idea. Problem is, not enough people — particularly people working in the industry — watched it to have enough of an impact on later shows, even if some of those shows had similar structures and/or themes. When I did the original interviews for the book and I asked people for influences, Twin Peaks came up a lot, Hill Street Blues came up a lot, French cinema came up a lot, and some other things (including some of the earlier shows of the Revolution); nobody ever mentioned Babylon 5.

I wouldn't call Game of Thrones universally loved. And Mad Men certainly wasn't universally watched. Nor was Breaking Bad until that high-rated final season.

NOT GREAT, BOB!

I'm a big believer in building a viewing foundation, but I'm also the weirdo who was recording daily Hill Street Blues repeats with his VCR when he was 12. A mix of old and new is great. One of the more dispiriting things about the Cult of Netflix is all the people who won't get exposed to The Wire or Deadwood because HBO's deal is with Amazon.

Master of None a few weeks ago? Happens a lot these days.

Fargo is fantastic, one of the best shows on TV right now.

My favorite podcast episode is one that's a technical nightmare: the first road trip from Los Angeles to San Diego episode. For some reason, I thought the crappy internal mic on my laptop would catch everything, and the system crashed altogether midway through. But the conversation and jokes and whatnot were so much fun, I wished we had done a better job capturing it all.

I take notes as I watch episodes, and jot down just as soon as candidates as I go along. With comedies in particular, I've found there's a direct correlation between the number of candidates I write down and my enjoyment of that episode.

As to the absolute boringness of watching pitchers sacrifice bunt, if it makes you happy, then I'm happy for you.

Terriers arguably already was one of the great just based on that season. Rubicon maybe could have become great, or could not have, given the problems with the finale. Luck seemed to finally be getting its act together by the end of season 1, but Milch can be a wildly inconsistent writer, much as I love him, so a permanent step up wouldn't have been a guarantee even without the horse deaths.

Different skill sets. Lester is the better investigator, Frank the better interrogator. If I'm starting from scratch and know nothing, I call Cool Lester Smooth. If I have the likely perp and just need a confession, I send Pembleton into the Box.

You're the Worst and BoJack Horseman are two recent shows that I dismissed almost entirely out of hand after watching the first 2-3 episodes, and are now two of my favorites on TV.

House of Cards. There are at least a few JFC scenes I occasionally will call up on YouTube or HBOGO. I have no interest in ever revisiting any of Cards.

David Chase is terrifying to interview — and he likes me. He challenges the premise of nearly every question, and/or will demand, "What's your question?" if you make some kind of open-ended statement that 99 interview subjects out of 100 will respond to in some way.

The interview we did the morning after the Sopranos finale aired was particularly nerve-wracking because of that, but also because I knew I was the only one he was talking to, I knew he didn't want to do it (as I relate in the book, he'd agreed to it at the start of that season, and reluctantly agreed to keep his word when I reminded him of that), and I knew he wasn't going to explain much, if anything, about the finale. No pressure, kid!

HIEROGLYPH!!!!!!!

Unsurprisingly, getting a lot of podcast questions, so let me repeat this answer: We had hoped to keep the podcast going when Dan went to THR, but it unfortunately didn't work out. Rather than rush into something where I just grab a new partner and try to do the same show I was doing with someone I've been friends with for 20 years, I'm taking a little time to do a soup-to-nuts assessment of what I should try to do with the next one.

I think it's worked out well this fall, in part because there haven't been any shows where I found myself wishing I was writing more about. The various superhero shows, for instance, are giving me more pleasure if I don't have to think of what I'm going to say after every episode. And it's given me more breathing room to do things like last week's In Defense of the Episode, which I was really proud of.

A few years back, someone interviewing me asked if I was missing the forest for the trees by recapping so many shows at the same time. In hindsight, I think I probably was.

But if we head into January and there are 8 shows I feel like I want to write about every week, then I'll write about those 8 shows every week.

1. Yes, you can only read the chapters on the shows you've seen if you want. I very deliberately kept spoilers for one show out of the chapters for other shows, though I think references to the end of The Sopranos (which the whole world knows about) crept into a few discussions of later shows with divisive endings.

2. Oh, god. So many to choose from, and that's just from the last couple of months. Off the top of my head: Leslie & Ron from Parks and Rec, both the Fargo and Banshee episodes where the precinct was under siege, International Assassin from Leftovers, Lost Horizon (among others) from Mad Men, the episode of Broad City where Jeremy gave Abbi the Shinjo, either the Review episode where he reviews being a little person or the one where he gets an imaginary friend in prison, Indians on TV from Master of None, There Is Not Currently a Problem from You're the Worst... It has been a GREAT year in TV

I think it's a huge problem, but the show has always been wildly uneven. (People have very selective memories about the first season because the pilot was so great — the show's best-ever episode, in fact — but even back then at least half the episodes stunk.) There have been periods (previously with the Governor) where it seemed like no one knew what to do with the series, and then other times (the first half of last season) where the show seemed to have finally turned a corner, only to turn right back.

I think their fidelity to the comic book (which I never much liked) is an ongoing issue, and it's not a coincidence that many of the best characters and/or stories were TV inventions, but I expect the series to continue to have wild swings in quality, and stay on the air until it stops being profitable.

Terriers was a show you had to see to appreciate. The awful title and/or poster (the latter of which is on a wall behind me in this office) aside, there was really no way to sell the show, because all of its genius was in the execution rather than the ideas. Describe it to someone who hasn't seen it, and it sounds like 10,000 other, less interesting shows.

As with the episode question, way too many to pick just one, so I will go with three:

1)Peggy struts down the McCann hallway with the cigarette dangling from her lip;

2)Ron and Leslie make a saxophone fart;

3)We find out on The Leftovers why Laurie has to keep washing her car.

I think the existence of a Broad City — which Abbi and Ilana started on YouTube because they felt they weren't advancing quickly enough in the New York comedy scene — is a sign that there are now side doors beginning to open in the business. It still requires you to know someone, or develop a famous fan (like they did with Amy Poehler), but there are more non-traditional ways to break in now.

When Leftovers is said and done (which hopefully won't be this weekend), I wouldn't be surprised if I rank it comfortably alongside the early HBO classics. I love that show, despite its various flaws.

Game of Thrones is, like Walking Dead, hamstrung by its fidelity to the source material. I can't speak to the quality of the books; I just mean because GRRM has so many characters and so many different story threads, and Benioff and Weiss are trying to be relatively faithful to what he's done while only producing 10 episodes a year, the show is always going to feel overcrowded and rushed to a degree. When it's at its very best, it's in the discussion with its predecessors, but most of the time I'd call it a notch or two below.

Hopeful for Vinyl, as I liked Boardwalk Empire more than a lot of other critics. No idea on Westworld, but the delay in announcing an airdate are at a minimum puzzling.

No time to hate watch in the TV's new Golden Age, my friend. Too many good shows to choose instead. I do still make time to hope watch a few shows, like the aforementioned Walking Dead, but if I've completely given up hope on a show — unless we're right near the very end, like HIMYM — I'd rather devote that time to something good.

I think I'd seen 3 Leftovers eps before I wrote my initial review of season 2. But I've been reviewing it every week. Here's my International Assassin review

I was very sad about both The Dissolve and Grantland. This is a hard business to make a living in. I've been very lucky. When I got the summer internship at The Star-Ledger that led to my first full-time job, the paper's managing editor warned me, "You'll never make a lot of money in this business, kid." And this was at a time when the Ledger was as flush as any paper in the country. Now, the TV-covering business is very much like the TV business itself; no one's quite sure how to make money doing it.

Not live, but one of the reasons I've fallen behind on shows like The Affair and Homeland is because a lot of the time that would ordinarily be devoted to DVR catch-up has instead been given over to watching this scrappy Knicks team and its new godlike power forward. The only thing not fun about the experience, given how far Three 6 Latvia is ahead of projections, is that we don't have our draft pick because of the heinous Bargnani trade. If we were going to get a late lottery pick out of the season and could still enjoy watching KP, Grant, Galloway and others develop, the inevitable losses wouldn't trouble me in the slightest.

I'd say about half the list each year is a lock, and then the other half consists of 10 or 15 other candidates that I shuffle back and forth until I'm the least unsatisfied with the collection.

As I said to another critic yesterday when they turned in their Critics Poll ballot, I hate my Top 10 list, even though I love every show on it, because I had to leave out so many others.

I think Lindelof either has a plan or at least the ability to come up with one, as we saw this season when he and Perrotta had to work without the book as source material. But the ratings have been awful. The reviews have been much better — Lindelof even converted his bete noir, Andy Greenwald! — but I don't know if that's enough. Maybe an out of left field Golden Globes nomination saves them?

Watch as much as you can, and write as much as you can. The only way to get better is to keep doing it, even if it's for an audience of only yourself.

Let's just say that I'm friendly with a few iZombie writers and have been regularly sending them Vines of Kristaps putback dunks and blocked shots.

HBO is also the network that has given him the freedom to do crazy things like John from Cincy, and Luck, and even Deadwood. I'm not sure who else would give him that framework.

I think the Gleeson thing fell apart. I'm not sure what exactly he has in development right now.

Finding the time to do it all? I started doing this as a 22-year-old single guy with only a handful of networks to cover. Now I'm a 42-year-old with a wife and two kids who understandably want my time and attention, only now it's Peak TV in America.

Drama: Ozymandias from Breaking Bad.

Comedy: Ask me on any given day and I'll likely give you a different Simpsons episode. Today? Homer the Heretic.

Ummm... I liked that it ended in time for Kevin Bacon to do a Tremors TV show!

That was pretty amazing. I'm assuming he was reading Andy Greenwald, given the Grantland/Simmons of it. But if it turns out he's read me? Wow.

Reminds me of how the whole "secret MS" story arc on West Wing happened because Sorkin wanted to do a scene where President Bartlet was watching a daytime soap, but couldn't find a way to justify it unless POTUS had a serious illness. (It was only after the episode aired that people pointed out that the president keeping that a secret might be kind of a big deal.) If Obama has time to read recaps, Bartlet sure as heck could have justified an hour for Days of Our Lives!

1. Squirrel Girl, starring Mae Whitman.

2. Squirrel Girl, starring Mae Whitman.

3. Squirrel Girl, starring Mae Whitman.

I think there needs to be some way to allow for budgetary flexibility so that you don't have to make 13 episodes just because that's what you've been given the money for. I really enjoyed Jessica Jones, but imagine if they could have squeezed that down to 8 or 9 hours and spared us idiocy like Robyn in the diner.

I'm all in favor of experimentation, so long as the material is there to back it up. I wouldn't watch 90 minute Bastard Executioner episodes, but most of these extra-long Fargos have been swell.

It varies, but it's never practical to write the reviews as I watch the episodes. Sometimes I'll hold off on watching every screener so the episodes are fresher in my mind when it's finally time to write about them. But my notes are usually detailed enough that I can do it a month or even two later and be okay.

One of the things I experimented with on Master of None, and may try with Transparent, is to do mini one or two paragraph reviews for every episode of a streaming show's season. The approach I took the last couple of years with Orange Is the New Black (review two episodes each week over 6-7 weeks) wasn't particularly satisfying for me or the readers, it seemed. The Master of None piece seemed a decent compromise.

Nah. The Wire's entire run overlapped with American Idol, CSI, and other shows that were vastly more popular and not nearly as good. Doesn't make the revolutionary era any less exciting.

I doubt it. I revisited a bunch of episodes for the original edition of the book, and while I enjoyed them and had to include it because of its historical importance, there are other shows I'd rather revisit that I also don't have time for.

HBO employs The Rock. HBO's team beats anyone else's team, even if it's Dwayne Johnson, Ann Dowd, Lena Dunham, and the cast of Silicon Valley.

Like it a lot. Its first season was better than the first season of Breaking Bad, when Vince was still working out the kinks. Will it have the same growth curve that BB did? We'll see. But I was super-skeptical about the show going in for a bunch of reasons, and found myself shocked with how much I cared about Jimmy within a few weeks.

Studio 60 for the first. Aaron Sorkin doing another show about a show, with Tommy Schlamme directing, a great cast, etc., and it was a catastrophe on almost every level.

I'm not without sin for writing the odd scathing review, but I tried to stop being purely mean about it a long time ago. Who needs that? It can be fun to write, but I'd rather not be an asshole about it. Plus, I think negative reviews are more convincingly argued when they're not just taking easy shots.

If Bill asks me to come on, I'll come on. But based on the podcasts he's done so far, and the one Andy and Chris are doing, I wouldn't expect much to change. Bill's at the point in his career where he does what he does, regardless of venue.

(And the first of the two ABC seasons of Scrubs is wonderful, and one of that show's best.)

I miss them both for different reasons. I like to say that when I was at Penn, I majored in the DP, as I spent way more time and energy on that paper than I did on my classwork. And the Ledger gave me a career, plus a ton of great friends — including Matt Seitz, with whom I'm working on my next book.

My dad used to work at Hoffman LaRoche in Nutley, so I loved the Tick Tock across the highway from him. And growing up, our family used to eat regularly at the Tiffany Diner (now replaced by a Bonefish Grill) in Pine Brook.

Modern Family is another example of one I cut the cord on pretty easily. I never loved it even in the early days, though I did love some individual episodes, and after a while I found it was frustrating me much more than it was entertaining me.

Oddly, I neglected to delete the season pass for it on our basement DVR for an additional two years after I stopped watching. I'm not sure why.

I'll be excited if they hire a cool person to run it. Right now, it's a business deal more than it is an actual show. CBS needs to bait a hook so people will subscribe to their service, but they don't have a writer, a premise, or anything else.

I'd like to think there's a general understanding like that, and there are in fact some writers who have been surprisingly understanding when I wrote negatively about a new series (or even a new episode) of theirs.

But at summer press tour, I ran into a producer I've known and been friendly with for virtually my whole career, and he said he was very unhappy with me because of things I'd written about a show he worked on (where he wasn't even the showrunner) and made it clear that I was persona non grata to him.

Which is fair. But I have to write my honest opinion, regardless of access or any personal relationships that may develop along the way.

Been a while since I watched much of either, to be honest. I want to loop back in on Noah (and on Larry Wilmore), but I'm always so far behind on everything else, and I tend to get a better night's sleep if the last thing I do before my head hits the pillow is reading a book rather than watching a show.

Awfully hard to top Schillinger, played by Future Oscar Winner JK Simmons.

1. I think about that every day of my life. It's not just that I wound up in The Sopranos backyard, but that I wound up at a paper with a long-time TV critic nearing retirement with no backup in place, AND that Matt — who was smarter than me and grabbed hold of The Sopranos beat at the start — got tired of writing about the show and invited me to take it on for the second half, which meant I was the guy there for the finale.

2. I can't imagine Chase would have done a sequel. He mentioned a few times the idea of doing a prequel about young Johnny Boy and Junior in the '60s, but even that might have been a stretch. He ended the show on his terms, then moved on to the next thing. I do, however, think he would have found a role for Jim in every project he did for as long as both of them were alive and working.

3. It's entirely possible. There's a kind of fundamental repetition to the show at this point, just as there was for Dexter within the first 3-4 seasons (even the Lithgow season is super formulaic, but elevated because Lithgow and Hall were so good), and the only way there seems to be to vary it is with the rate and explicitness of the violence.

4. The new intro to the new edition not only talks about a couple of shows I might have included (either Six Feet Under or Louie) if there'd been a 13th chapter, and there's a prologue listing lots of the precursor shows like Hill Street and X-Files.

Joffrey at least has the excuse of being a kid who was raised by a monster and an absentee drunk. Schillinger did a lot of incredibly heinous stuff over six seasons as a fully-grown adult.

Something happy and/or very funny. Maybe the Parks and Rec where Andy and April get married? Or the Cheers where Cliff goes on Jeopardy? Or Lisa's Substitute?

TV. The economics are slightly more stable. The recap industrial complex has its issues, but there's more paying work there, it seems.

I want M. Emmett Walsh or John Turturro or another Coen regular to be in the next season of Fargo, even if it's a tiny role.

Just looking around my office, I've got bobbleheads from Dexter, The Shield, and Sharknado, a Selina Mayer commemorative plate, several action figures from Mike Tyson's Adult Swim show, a Rick & Morty hip flask, and a piece of tile from the Melrose Place pool, which has somehow survived a whole lot of office moves over the last 6 years.