Have watched first four episodes of Too Much. It is well named.
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Underrated. You know season 5 has to end with building a hot tub that looks like a bread bowl so they can bathe in soup.
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I’ve got free Apple TV again for 6 months. Last time I watched Ted Lasso and The Afterparty, maybe a couple others. This time I plan to watch Murderbot. Anything else I should be considering?
Just finished Murderbot . It was entertaining for sure. Episodes were pretty short so overall it wasn’t a huge time commitment.
Severance is the obvious one if you haven’t seen it.
Foundation is pretty good. I have to catchup on the current season but may wait until they are all out.
not sure when you last had -
Monarch legacy of Monsters was entertaining.
My wife liked the The Studio a lot, I thought it was just OK. If you’re a Seth Rogan fan you’ll probably like.
Constellation was a trip. I enjoyed but I think it got cancelled after one season.
Silo if you haven’t seen is excellent
Severance weird as all get out but seems to be the consensus hit.
Here is an LA Times article about Tudyk.
Summary
Alan Tudyk was nearly 50 when he scored his first starring role in a TV series as the titular extraterrestrial Harry Vanderspeigle in Syfy’s “Resident Alien.” It’s not that he was underemployed or little known — he’s been celebrated in genre circles since “Firefly,” the 2002 single-season western-themed space opera in which he played the sweet, comical pilot of a spaceship captained by smuggler Mal, played by Nathan Fillion, with whom he has since been linked in the interested public mind, like Hope and Crosby, or Fey and Poehler. His own 2015 web series “Con Man” (currently available on Prime Video), based on his experiences at sci-fi conventions, in which he and Fillion play inverted versions of themselves, was funded by an enormously successful crowd-sourced campaign, which raised $3,156,178 from 46,992 backers; clearly the people love him.
You can’t exactly call “Resident Alien” career-making, given how much Tudyk has worked, going back to onscreen roles in the late 20th century and on stage in New York, but it has made him especially visible over a long period in a marvelous show in a part for which he seems to have been fashioned. He has, indeed, often been invisible, with a parallel career as a voice artist, beginning with small parts in “Ice Age” in 2002; since channeling Ed Wynn for King Candy in Disney’s 2012 “Wreck-It Ralph” (which won him an Annie Award), the studio has used him regularly, like a good luck charm. You can hear him in “Frozen” (Duke of Weselton), “Big Hero 6” (Alistair Krei), “Zootopia” (Duke Weaselton), “Moana” (Hei Hei), “Encanto” (Pico) and “Wish” (Valentino). He played the Joker on “Harley Quinn” and voices Optimus Prime in “Transformers: EarthSpark.” Performing motion capture and voice-over, he was Sonny the emotional android in “I, Robot” and the dry droid K-2SO in both “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” and again in “Andor.” (He’s a robot again in the new “Superman” film.) This is a partial, one could even say fractional, list. Among animation and sci-fi fans, being the well-informed sorts they are, Tudyk is known and honored for this body of work as well.
Alan Tudyk at his home in Los Angeles last year. The actor has been in a variety of roles onscreen, on stage and as a voice actor.
(Ethan Benavidez / For The Times)
“Resident Alien,” whose fourth season is underway on Syfy, USA and Peacock (earlier seasons are available on Netflix, which has raised the show’s profile considerably), is a small town comedy with apocalyptic overtones. It sees Tudyk’s alien, whose natural form is of a giant, big-eyed, noseless humanoid with octopus DNA, imperfectly disguised as the new local doctor, whom he kills in the first episode. (We will learn that the doctor was, in fact, an assassin, which makes it sort of … all right?) Learning English from reruns of “Law & Order,” the being now called Harry will preposterously succeed in his masquerade, and in doing so, join a community that will ultimately improve him. (By local standards, at least.) It’s a fish way, way out of water story, with the difference that the fish has been sent to kill all the Earth fish — I am being metaphorical, he isn’t actually out to kill fish — although he is now working to save them from a different, nastier race of alien.
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‘Resident Alien’ is an amusing trip to Spielberg country, where ETs live in our midst
Jan. 27, 2021
Some actors play their first part and suddenly their name is everywhere; others slide into public consciousness slowly, through a side door — which may lead, after all, to a longer, more varied career. Tudyk has the quality of having arrived, despite having been there all along. Like many actors with a long CV, he might surprise you, turning up on old episodes of “Strangers With Candy,” “Frasier,” “Arrested Development” or “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” or repeatedly crying “Cramped!” in a scene from “Patch Adams,” or in the movies “Wonder Boys,” “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Tale” or “3:10 to Yuma.” You might say to yourself, or the person you’re watching with, “Hey, that’s Alan Tudyk.” (You might add, “He hasn’t aged a bit.”) It was “Suburgatory,” an underloved ABC sitcom from 2011, though not underloved by me, where he played the confused best friend of star Jeremy Sisto, that, combined with “Firefly,” cemented Tudyk in my mind as someone I would always be happy to see.
He’s handsome in a pleasant, ordinary way. If he’s not exactly Hollywood’s idea of a leading man, it only points up the limitations of that concept. His eyes are maybe a trifle close set, his lips a little thin. There’s a softness to him that feeds into or productively contrasts with his characters, depending on where they fall on the good-bad or calm-hysterical scales. (In the current season of “Resident Alien,” a shape-shifting giant praying mantis has taken over Harry’s human identity, and this evil twin performance, which somehow fools Harry’s friends, is as frightening as the fact that the mantis eats people’s heads.) It makes his robots relatable and roots his more flamboyant characters, like Mr. Nowhere, the villain in the first season of “Doom Patrol” — who comments on the series from outside the fourth wall, inhabiting a white void where he might be discovered sitting on a toilet and reading a review of the show he’s in — in something like naturalism.
Sara Tomko and Alan Tudyk in a scene from Season 4 of “Resident Alien.”
(USA Network / James Dittiger / USA Network)
As Harry, Tudyk is never really calm. Relaxed neither in voice nor body, he tucks his lips inside his mouth and stretches it into a variety of blobby shapes. The actor can seem to be puppeteering his own expressions, which, in a way Harry is, or splitting the difference between a real person and an animated cartoon, in the Chuck Jones/Tex Avery sense of the term, which is not to say Tudyk overplays; he just hits the right note of exaggeration. Harry often has the air of being impatient to leave a scene and get on with whatever business he’s decided is important.
‘Resident Alien’ star Alan Tudyk is in no hurry to return to his home planet
June 3, 2024
Though he’s given to explosive bursts of speech, as the character has developed, the humor he plays becomes more subtle and quiet, peppered with muttered comments and sotto voce asides he means to be heard. He is, as he likes to point out, the smartest and most powerful being around, but he has the emotional maturity of a child. At one point, having lost his alien powers, Harry was willing to sacrifice the entirety of his species to get them back.
Where once he had no emotions, now he is full of them. Last season, he was given a romance, with Heather (Edi Patterson), a bird person from outer space, which has continued into the current run; he is also a father, with a great affection — anomalous in his species — for his son, Bridget, an adorably fearsome little green creature. And he loves pie.
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And that Tudyk himself seems genuinely nice — there are interviews with him up and down YouTube, and my friend David, who worked on “Firefly,” called him “kind, grateful and curious” — makes him easy to like, however likable a person he’s playing. That possibly shouldn’t matter when assessing an actor’s art, but it does anyway.
Not a word about his racist character in “42,” a role that usually brands an actor as poison.
Adults (8 episode, 22min each)
very funny.
That’s selling the racism a bit short. Ben Chapman (the historical figure played by Tudyk) was so racist that even 1940s white America said “dude, that’s a bit much”.
So maybe the key is to play a role so racist that no one could believe you (the actor) are that racist, and so it must just have been the part?
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I probably should have said
Because I’m sure much of 1940s white America would have been fine with Chapman’s behavior in a different context.
It’s not people. It’s “industry” people who greenlight the actors to play roles who are concerned about those other people.
Hadn’t heard of it, but saw a show called the Hunting Wives on Netflix and I like Brittany Snow.
Just started watching Two Sentence Horror Stories on Netflix. It’s a series from CW from a few years ago.
started S4 of the Bear on Hulu.
my wife ends every episode with a “now THAT was funny!” owing to their mis-categorization as a comedy for emmy awards. she feels Ghosts has been unfairly punished
That reminds me, it’s probably time for me to cancel Apple TV for a while.
I loved Severance and Shrinking.
“Ghosts” should be in the drama category cuz not funny?
I kid, I kid. it is mildly funny; typical FCC-approved Network fare for middle-America consumption.
But, yeah, I agree that “The Bear” is no Comedy. I might not even watch this season.
Love Ghosts, but I believe once upon a time any hour long show was considered drama and half hour comedy.
I believe Ally McBeal broke the mold
Dimension 20 on Youtube (and now on dropout)… is a long running Dungeons and Dragons game, played by excellent improv artists. I recommend it if you like Improv or D&D or are just curious about it. The battles go too long (much like real D&D) but you can skip them. The heart of it is people sitting around a table, having a good time playing pretend, and telling silly jokes.
For reasons, we recently jumped from the first season (set in modern high school) to the last (steampunk) and it’s jarring to see the actors all aged 7 years.
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finished. did not enjoy the ending. get he direction, but the still volatile broken people yelling over eachother to the very end was not great IMO (since they seemed to show some progress in S4)
Too many unresolved issues for me -
The clock counted down and there was no redeeming Michelin Star. Why are they even talking about who gets what share? It’s like arguing over who gets which bedroom and meanwhile a meteor has just flattened the whole house in the background.
Apparently admitting to really being there at the funeral (for one second) changes everything.
Why would the ex-employees of Ever want to have anything to do with the place?
Who the f#ck is Mr Clark?
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