What I'm Watching: Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Abbott Elementary, Five Nights at Freddy's, and More

On six shows, five movies, a podcast, and an essay.

Donald Glover, Maya Erskine, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Prime Video

Here’s a quick rundown of everything I watched, read, and wrote about over the past two weeks:

The shows:

• Abbott Elementary is back, and the winning sitcom’s two-part premiere felt like one of its strongest episodes in a long time. I didn’t have any real problems with season 2 of the award-winning series about Philadelphia public school teachers, but I thought it sometimes fell back into a holding pattern replete with comforting but familiar sitcom beats (a la Parks and Recreation). There’s no hint of any of that in the latest premiere, which is fresh and funny and lays the groundwork for a season that seems poised to shake up all our favorite characters’ lives in intriguing ways.

• The winter TV slump that’s become an unspoken norm for the streaming era is nowhere to be found this year: in addition to the new True Detective and some buzzed-about shows I haven’t caught yet (Hazbin Hotel, The Traitors season 2), Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane’s spin on Mr. and Mrs. Smith has already brought some heat to the beginning of February. ICYMI, the series is a very loose riff on the Angelina Jolie-Brad Pitt movie of the same name, except this time around, the new agents John (Glover) and Jane (Maya Erskine) are two spies posing as a married couple despite being strangers to one another. I expected this series (which is on Prime Video now) to show some cracks given the exit of original co-creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge, but the version we got is still a satisfying subversion of both the action and romance genres. Hiro Murai’s always-fantastic direction is the icing on the cake; I really hope this show gets a season 2.

• Covering Star Trek at work means that I’ve watched a lot of the long-running franchise out of order, but I finally caught the first few episodes of Star Trek: Discovery the other day and was immediately smitten. I’ve seen later episodes and know this show has some major ups and downs, so let me know if you think it’s a Trek worth sticking with. In fact, if any generous readers feel inclined to rank Trek shows in order of worth-watching-ness, I’d be grateful for that, too. I’ve got a lot of time on my hands in the coming weeks, and am hoping to dive headfirst into some of the Treks I’ve missed.

• Did I watch the entirety of the French Netflix docuseries Rael: The Alien Prophet just because one of my favorite people on the planet lives near this cult’s former home base? Yes! I can’t say this was one of Netflix’s strongest doc offerings (it has one of those drawn out, ethically bankrupt “wow, we talked to the actual cult leader!” reveals), but it was extremely interesting — even if I didn’t come away from it with any real understanding of what drew people to the UFO and cloning-obsessed figure in the first place.

• Now that I’m officially in the UK, I figure it’s time I start catching up with UK TV. So far, the strategy James and I have been using involves opening BBC iPlayer or Channel 4 and clicking on murder mystery shows and documentaries at random. That’s how we ended up watching Magpie Murders, an annoyingly quaint and less-clever-than-it-thinks-it-is show based on the book by Anthony Horowitz. Watch this if you’re a Lesley Manville fan. Otherwise, it’s not worth the time investment.

The movies:

• My Criterion Challenge continued this past week with Fantastic Planet, one of the trippiest and most disturbing science fiction films I’ve ever seen. The animated 1973 French-Czech classic starts off with a creatively upsetting premise (a large alien race tames wild humans as pets) and from there forward, it packs pretty much every minute of its runtime with increasingly stressful images and ideas. Despite the sharp horror overtones, Fantastic Planet is a striking, essential work, one that’s clearly inspired much of the strange sci-fi made in decades since.

• Speaking of ‘70s genre flicks, has anyone else seen Space Amoeba? The Toho-made kaiju film forgoes the familiar face of Godzilla to instead serve up battles with a giant squid, crab, and other alien-powered creatures. The plot is thin here, but if you’re into creature feature practical effects, this one is worth watching for its very fun monster designs.

• Orson Welles’ tricky ‘70s meta-doc F For Fake, a movie I’ve been meaning to watch for years, is both a technical achievement and an exhausting “puzzle.” The central story about an art forger, which may or may not be real (stay tuned to the end!), is at times frustratingly obsessed with its own mystery, and the edit is more dizzying than effective. Despite all that, the mind map format at some points works wonders, and Welles remains an incomparable screen presence.

• As someone who has basically zero background knowledge about Five Nights at Freddy’s, I found Emma Tammi’s big-screen adaptation of the popular video game series (which is on Peacock) fairly entertaining, mildly scary, and impressively bleak. The film’s lore is boldly convoluted and Josh Hutcherson and Matthew Lillard are aces.

• In a month full of truly random watches, I’m sorry to say The Pope’s Exorcist ended up at the bottom of the heap. This 2023 movie starring Russell Crowe as a renowned exorcist feels entirely like a cheap knockoff of, well, The Exorcist. It adds absolutely nothing new to the subgenre and is neither scary nor compelling, though it livens up at the very end thanks to a Da Vinci Code-style mythology download.

Odds and ends:

• The business side of the current pop culture landscape is bleak in a way that's both cruelly creative and shockingly mundane. The only upside to the onslaught of depressing headlines is that occasionally, we get extremely thoughtful and talented folks like Matt Zoller Seitz writing about the state of the industry. Seitz’s recent piece for RogerEbert.com cuts through the BS to say what needed to be said – that the permanent shelving of completed movies (like Coyote vs. Acme) for tax write-off purposes should not be legal.

• I don’t usually do retroactive recommendations here, but I’ve been scouring past newsletters for any mention of NPR’s On Our Watch podcast and can’t seem to find it. On the off chance I forgot to hype this investigative deep dive (which should’ve made my top 10 podcasts list last year), I’ll do it now. On Our Watch looks closely at the records released by SB 1421, a California law that made information about police misconduct public for the first time. Both sweeping and specific, On Our Watch takes a detail-oriented, fact-driven look at the way the people who are theoretically meant to protect the public often spend a lot of time and resources protecting themselves instead.

• I’m officially off work for the time being as I settle my visa sitch here in Scotland, but some stuff I wrote before leaving will still be posting in the next few weeks. For example, here’s a primer on a few of the major theories about what’s actually going on in True Detective: Night Country, although it’s worth noting this was written before episode 5 blew the whole mystery up.

• This is not a drill: Beyoncé is making a country album.

That’s all for now. I’m thankful to everyone for bearing with me last week as I ended up taking time off to settle in. I’ve been in my new home for a week now, eating good food, taking lots of naps, and occasionally venturing out despite the chilly weather. As thrilled as I am to have finally made this move, I also sometimes get overwhelmed by all the change, so I’m grateful to have the grounding ritual of this weekly writing to come back to. Let me know what you’ve been watching in the comments!

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