What's Alan Watching?'s Scores

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For 37 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 72% higher than the average critic
  • 0% same as the average critic
  • 28% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 9.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average TV Show review score: 76
Highest review score: 100 The Pitt: Season 2
Lowest review score: 40 Chad Powers: Season 1
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 30 out of 30
  2. Mixed: 0 out of 30
  3. Negative: 0 out of 30
30 tv reviews
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  1. Spartacus: House of Ashur: Season 1
    Spartacus is one of a kind. It is stylized and soapy and smart; it revels in brutality and bloodshed but it cannot be discounted as a cartoon (it actually does employ subtext, sometimes quite deftly). It nimbly avoids being a slog, but it does weigh the cost of the suffering caused by greed and exploitation as it surveys a decaying Rome on the verge of civil war (any resemblances to the times we’re enduring seem entirely intentional). This show is not for everyone, and would that more programs would try for that kind of unashamed distinctiveness. But the drama is for anyone willing to understand that Spartacus absolutely knows what it’s going for and why.
  2. Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal: Season 3
    The action is still staggering. At various points, Zombie Spear takes on a tribe of marauders who either wear skull masks or just have skulls for heads (the show doesn't pause long enough to clarify), a pack of enormous lions, and a herd of hideous giant razorback-type creatures. Over and over, I found myself with my jaw on the floor and my fist pumping at the scale and ingenuity of the latest set piece.
  3. Best Medicine: Season 1
    Will it win awards and wind up on critics' top 10 lists come December? No. Will you see every line and plot development coming well before they happen? Yes. Will you nonetheless feel a soft spot for it, particularly if you have preexisting affection for this specific kind of small town dramedy? Quite possibly.
  4. Star Trek: Starfleet Academy: Season 1
    Does this blend of old and new — at least, new to Star Trek — actually work? At times, almost shockingly well. At others, there are as many growing pains and awkward interactions for Starfleet Academy itself as there are for its students.
  5. The Beauty: Season 1
    For a while, watching the highlights are worth sitting through the lowlights. How many other shows can have an Emmy winner (Peters, so great on Mare of Easttown) casually deliver a line like, "an assistant editor at Vogue combusted in the Condé Nast cafeteria today"? But even in the early going, Murphy, Hodgson, and company struggle to find a narrative focus, and they let the story completely unravel by the end.
  6. Wonder Man: Season 1
    This is one of the most entertaining MCU shows — if deliberately weird and non-superheroic in a way that I expect to baffle many Marvel fans — in quite some time.
  7. Riot Women: Season 1
    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.
  8. The Muppet Show (2026)
    It turns out the formula still works like gangbusters when it's these characters involved. Especially when they're handled by writers and directors and performers who understand the very delicate mix of sweet optimism and manic chaos required.
  9. Dark Winds: Season 1
    This is a well-built show, where the relatively unusual setting, plus the performance at the heart of it, breathes new life into old cliches. At this point, Dark Winds is already doing variations on its own themes. But they're good themes, and interesting variations. Change can be overrated sometimes, when you're already good at what you do.
  10. Scrubs (2026): Season 1
    The creative team leans into how much both the characters and the world of medicine have changed. As a result, the new episodes don't have the same whiff of desperation you often get with these things. The four episodes I've seen aren't nearly at the level of peak early Scrubs. But they work much more than they don't, and gave me both pleasure and relief that all involved weren't about to sour my memory of the original run.
  11. Vladimir
    Sometimes, Vladimir finds the right balance, while at many others, it feels as lost in the weeds as its main character. Weisz is having a ball playing this dangerous mix of cockiness and cluelessness, but Vladimir as a whole never quite coheres.
  12. Rooster: Season 1
    Rooster stumbles at times in depicting the clash of generations, ideologies, and sexual urges on a college campus... It sets up various story and character ideas that it doesn't always have interest in following, and going back and forth on how ridiculous it finds both its setting and people on different sides of the student/faculty divide. But it also has a generosity of spirit, a warmth, and a trust in its performers, that evokes the charms of much of Lawrence's other work.
  13. Daredevil: Born Again: Season 1
    Marvel has struggled the last few years, but the company has still made several large fortunes for Disney. Scrapping everything the fired creative team did would have been costly in the short term, but would have been much better over the long haul for Matt Murdock and friends.
  14. Big Mistakes: Season 1
    It doesn't all quite work — especially if you stop for even a moment to think about the logic behind pretty much anything that happens — but it's interesting to see Levy getting so down and dirty (often literally) after he became one of the faces of a show about shallow people who find fulfillment in learning how to be nicer.
  15. Malcolm in the Middle: Life's Still Unfair
    Malcolm's creator Linwood Boomer and his collaborators put the passage of time front and center. Life's Still Unfair doesn't try to act like it's normal that all these people are acting the same way after decades have passed. It's entirely about how unhealthy so much of this is. It only occasionally resembles the highs of the show's younger incarnation, but it's acknowledging that challenge the entire time.
  16. Widow's Bay: Season 1
    Dippold and lead director Hiro Murai unleash the comedy version of Rhys in many wonderful ways. Tom is so obviously in over his head, and so easily panicked, that it's hard to hate him even as he keeps putting other people at risk.
  17. Man on Fire (2026): Season 1
    Mateen is excellent casting for this, as he is for pretty much everything he's done lately. There are isolated moments where you understand why someone might want to build a new version of this title around him. But some stories — many stories, it turns out, based on the number of similarly sluggish streaming dramas of the past decade — aren't meant to fill this many hours of filmed entertainment.
  18. Lord of the Flies
    That Thorne helped craft such an outstanding variation on the classic story would seem to make redundant the idea of him doing a literal adaptation of Golding's book. But his four-part take on Lord of the Flies is excellent in its own right. It understands why the story has resonated for over 70 years, and become a middle school English class perennial — and the ways in which it feels especially, unfortunately, timely at the moment.
  19. Beef: Season 2
    In increasing the number of central characters from two to four — five, arguably — in jumping back and forth between America and South Korea, and in trying to say more thematically about income inequality and various forms of economic anxiety, Beef creator Lee Sung Jin's reach has exceeded his grasp this time around. There's still some good material here, and one fantastic episode that's the equal of anything in the first season. It's just not as focused, nor as potent, as it was when Yeun and Wong were going at it.
  20. Euphoria: Season 1
    For all of the many flaws of those earlier years, high school was a much better setting for Euphoria than everything happening now. But there are still moments.
  21. Margo's Got Money Troubles: Season 1
    The show has actual things to say about sex work, motherhood, economic anxiety, and found family, while also being a raucous time and a great showcase for Fanning, Nick Offerman, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nicole Kidman, among others.
  22. Shoresy: Season 5
    If Shoresy isn't the most improbable character in TV history to get a spinoff at all — much less an excellent one — then he's very high on the list. He was barely a character at all on Letterkenny. But that relative blank slate, plus the fact that he was being played by the guy doing much of the writing, in hindsight made him the ideal choice. Keeso could have done anything with him. Improbably, he made him the center of a show that's equally ridiculous and heartfelt, and that seems to have eclipsed the popularity of the prior series.
  23. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms: Season 1
    But Knight's ambitions are modest, its charms are huge. It's a reminder that while Game of Thrones is best remembered for its spectacle, many of the series' most effective moments — especially early on, when it was building an audience big enough to justify the cost of dragons and zombie hordes — were similarly modest, and mostly involved two or three characters having conversations inside castles.
  24. Agatha Christie's Seven Dials
    This kind of story needs a heroine who's both charming enough to carry the action, and believable as someone whom no one expects to be good at detective work. Fortunately, McKenna-Bruce is slyly funny and cool in the lead role.
  25. The Pitt: Season 2
    It was an all-time debut season, setting the bar high as the series returns this week. Having watched most of Season Two, it is my great pleasure to inform you that The Pitt remains The Pitt. I may have even watched some of the new episodes more than once already.
  26. Fallout: Season 2
    Parts of the show are too silly to care about at all. Parts are oppressively glum. And every now and then — almost always involving Goggins — it gets the balance just right.
  27. Percy Jackson and The Olympians: Season 2
    Percy Jackson Season One was a vast improvement on the films, while also dealing with struggles of its own. Season Two begins in roughly the same place, but shows enough growth as it moves along to give me some optimism that Riordan and everyone else are starting to figure out how to translate what's worked so well in print to the small screen.
  28. Stranger Things: Season 5
    But if the actors are too old to be doing this, Stranger Things itself feels fairly energetic and youthful even after all this time.
  29. Blue Lights: Season 3
    Blue Lights definitely wants to be the Belfast equivalent of The Wire. It never quite gets there, but there's also no shame in not living up to one of the greatest TV dramas ever made. At the end of the first season, two of the peelers are offered opportunities to move out of response to more esteemed divisions of the PSNI. Both decline, deciding they can do the most good exactly where they are. When Blue Lights focuses on the simple triumphs and tragedies of what Grace and the others do every day, it's terrific in its own right.
  30. The Beast In Me
    Despite all of this, Rhys is having so much fun, Danes makes such a good sparring partner for him, and the story moves at such a good clip prior to that ill-conceived flashback episode, that The Beast in Me is pretty engaging for most of its eight hours. It's an example of why tropes become tropes in the first place: because they work.
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