DANIEL FIENBERG TV’s breakout character for winter 2022 has been an engorged talking penis.
Apologies to Eagly from Peacemaker and Che Diaz from And Just Like That (not every breakout is beloved), but also apologies to Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson, or at least their semi-fictionalized equivalents; for all of the conversation that greeted Hulu’s Pam & Tommy when it launched, it felt like interest in the limited series peaked with the early introduction of Tommy’s commitment-phobic boner.
The message here isn’t that people love a garrulous groin, but rather that when it comes to the discourse, there are no guarantees about what will get people gabbing or strike a critical chord.
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This winter saw new shows from Shonda Rhimes and Julian Fellowes, the returns or reboots of long-absent favorites, franchise superheroes and ripped-from-the-headlines limited series. Yet I keep urging people to watch dramedies about a woman in Kansas having a midlife crisis and three roommates with autism in Canoga Park. They’re my engorged talking penis.
Wait. That sounds bad.
ANGIE HAN Of course all the early attention goes to shows that have built-in name recognition, usually in the form of associated franchises or household-name creators. But all the careful marketing in the world can only do so much to keep something afloat once it’s actually out.
Case in point: Some version of Hulu’s How I Met Your Father has been in the works for years, and yet the series itself seems to have been met with a shrug — probably because it immediately felt stale in a way How I Met Your Mother never did. Peacock’s Bel-Air went viral before it even existed with that 2019 fan trailer, but reactions to the actual show, with its newly serious tone and surprisingly villainous Carlton, have been mixed. (Frankly, if you want Fresh Prince as a primetime soap, just watch The CW’s All American — it’s warmer and funner.) And Just Like That did spark a lot of conversation, but the chatter around characters like Che reminded us that not all buzz is good buzz.
But what do I know? HIMYF and Bel-Air have second seasons locked in already, and AJLT still has its hopes up as well. Someone loves these shows enough to keep them alive, even if I don’t particularly.
Meanwhile, I was pleasantly shocked to discover that one reboot that did work for me was Amazon’s Reacher — not because I was deeply invested in the property it was based on (I wasn’t) but because unlike the shows I just named, it seemed to know exactly what it was from the jump.
FIENBERG How I Met Your Mother may have ended poorly, but at least it started well. How I Met Your Father gives the impression of having been written by people who don’t recognize what a punchline is supposed to sound or look like. It’s a waste of Hilary Duff and a jab in the side of her fans who just wanted a grownup version of Lizzie McGuire, darn it.
I’m more in the realm of light disappointment when it comes to Disney+’s The Book of Boba Fett, which was a total snooze when it focused on the eponymous bounty hunter and only found momentum when the Mandalorian and Baby Yoda showed up.
It was a bit easier to warm to the lovable meatheads of HBO Max’s The Suicide Squad spinoff Peacemaker and the size-appropriate adventures of Amazon’s attempt to rescue the Jack Reacher brand from Tom Cruise’s diminutive grip — though each episode of Peacemaker peaked with the dynamite opening credits and Reacher exposed just how plot-light and exposition-heavy Lee Child’s books tend to be. (Reacher and Peacemaker both picked up quick renewals, proving audiences love their supersized protagonists.)
I’d add that I actually grew to really like Pam & Tommy, but the talking penis is entirely representative of the smug first half of the series, not the far more sensitive second half, which is carried by a spectacular Lily James performance.
The cheeky artificiality of the Pam & Tommy flesh peddling somehow still feels less exploitative than HBO’s Euphoria, in which creator Sam Levinson’s leering camerawork — the awkward intersection of misery porn and, well, porn — too often upstages the genuinely spectacular work by Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney and Hunter Schafer. At least The Gilded Age, HBO’s answer to Downton Abbey, only puts its Tony-laden cast through erudite wealth porn, contrived in its own way, but less frequently manipulative.
HAN Well, if we’re going to talk manipulation, we can’t not bring up Inventing Anna, Netflix’s miniseries about master manipulator Anna Delvey. Admittedly, the show’s a bit of a mess. It never quite seems to figure out how it feels about Anna or what exactly it wants to say about her, so it shifts between tones and themes and styles in some futile attempt to reach a cohesive takeaway. But that was also what I found kind of interesting about it — I enjoyed wrestling with the story while also watching the show wrestle with itself.
Or maybe I’m just an easy mark for such games. That was definitely part of the appeal for me of Apple TV+’s The Afterparty, a murder mystery that rebuilds itself in a different genre with each episode. It’s a gimmick that could’ve easily gone awry. But thanks to an all-star cast and crew — including creator Christopher Miller and stars Sam Richardson and Ben Schwartz — and a refusal to take itself too seriously, it emerged as one of the most purely entertaining shows I’ve seen all winter.
That said, I do appreciate a show that can keep it simple, too. ABC’s Abbott Elementary and NBC’s Grand Crew are two of my favorite new series this season, and neither is reinventing the wheel — they’re just making better wheels than most everybody else, with cast chemistry that pops and line readings that make me laugh when I think of them days later. (Basically everything Janelle James’ Ava says falls into this category.)
And I did not expect to fall as hard as I did for Freeform’s Single Drunk Female and HBO’s Somebody Somewhere, neither of which were even on my radar at the start of the year, but both of which won me over with their clarity of voice and vision. The latter, in particular, filled my heart to bursting every time Bridget Everett’s Sam reclaimed another little piece of her heart through her exuberant musical performances or long, lazy afternoons with her new BFF Joel (Jeff Hiller).
FIENBERG You liked Inventing Anna far more than I did, even if I admired Julia Garner’s commitment to playing a regionally ambiguous Eastern European muppet. It’s hard to believe how many limited and docuseries about manipulative con artists we still have to go before we just get to Showtime’s adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Fortunately, there have been things that snuck up on me, in a good way. You mentioned Abbott Elementary, which seems deservedly on the verge of making Quinta Brunson a star, Janelle James a household name and Sheryl Lee Ralph formally a national treasure (if she wasn’t one already). It’s part of what has generally been an impressively good year for broadcast comedies: I’ve also been enjoying NBC’s American Auto and catching up on CBS’ Ghosts. (Too bad the same can’t be said on the drama front, where unless you’re a fan of procedurals about the FBI or some variation of law and/or order, the broadcast hour-long is on life support.)
Somebody Somewhere has been one of the shows I’ve been recommending to everybody for months now, at least once it became clear that anybody who could stomach a drama about pandemics and Shakespeare had already watched Station Eleven. The series is so full of humanity and tremendous empathy for a part of the country — Kansas, as played by rural Illinois — that TV mostly ignores.
Many of the same qualities are front-and-center in Amazon’s As We See It, about three roommates — breakouts Rick Glassman, Albert Rutecki and Sue Ann Pien — on the autism spectrum. It shouldn’t be surprising that As We See It is nearly guaranteed to make you laugh and sob, since it comes from Parenthood and Friday Night Lights veteran Jason Katims. But since his last series was the Fox dud Almost Family, maybe it’s just a relief to have him back in his emotionally rich comfort zone.
And then there’s rom-com-with-a-twist Wolf Like Me on Peacock and the indescribably absurd sci-fi critique of American work culture at the heart of Apple TV+’s Severance. TV didn’t go into hibernation for the winter.
HAN No, and a quick glance at my calendar tells me it’s not going to be slowing down for spring, either. Not when there are more splashy adaptations to launch (Pachinko, Moon Knight), long-awaited returns to celebrate (Better Call Saul, Atlanta, Barry) and scammer sagas to breathlessly recount (The Dropout, WeCrashed). It’s even possible the next few months will bring still more talking genitalia, seeing as Big Mouth spinoff Human Resources is on the way.
Am I perpetuating the hype cycle we just discussed by rattling off a bunch of big upcoming titles? I suppose I am. So I’ll close by pointing out that you and I also talked about the sheer impossibility of guessing what’ll end up connecting in a TV landscape this crowded. It could be one of the high-profile shows I namechecked, or it could be some hidden gem neither of us even knows exists yet. That’s the beauty and the terror of Peak TV, Dan: You never do know where the next metaphorical engorged talking penis could be coming from.
This story first appeared in the Feb. 23 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
