The Rundown: The Good Shows Simply Will Not Stop Coming, For Better Or Worse

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

It only dawned on me recently that there are so many good shows now. I think the problem is that we went so long without lots of good shows at once. Things got weird for a while there between various shutdowns and protocols and delays. There were still some good shows in there, but they were spaced out a bunch and some of them weren’t even really that good, if we’re being honest. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And in a world with no shows, Manifest becomes so blisteringly popular after getting canceled that Netflix saves it for a supersized 20-episode final season. Again, it was weird.

But things are getting normal enough now that the flood of shows can rush back to our screens again, and they sure have done that. And they still are doing that. And they will continue to do that for the foreseeable future. It’s crazy that we all used to live like this, just inundated with shows coming at us from every angle, on our computers and televisions and sometimes from the same website where we buy power tools and Gatorade. It’s going to take some adjusting to get back into it.

But hopefully, it doesn’t take long. Look at what we’ve got going on right now. What We Do in the Shadows just came back and that show remains just about perfect. Reservation Dogs is on FX and Hulu, too, and that sucker is a heck of a ride. Only Murders in the Building and Nine Perfect Strangers are on Hulu too, and while I’m enjoying the first one of those a whole lot more than the second, it is undeniable that both are big deals with big stars attached.

Ted Lasso is on, too. People got all worked up about that one recently, not in a great way (more on this in the next section), but that ship is righting itself and remains one of the most pleasant and enjoyable half hours of television you’ll watch any week. Sandra Oh is in a big Netflix show called The Chair that was created by Amanda Peet and produced by the Game of Thrones guys. My beloved Holey Moley is in the middle of its third and stupidest season yet, which I mean in the best way possible. The Other Two and Pen15 and Archer are all back. The White Lotus just ended and gave us a finale so wild that this was not even a top-three crazy thing that happened.

And it is only going to get more intense from here. Take a look at the upcoming schedule if you don’t believe me. Billions is back this weekend. Succession is back in October. Curb Your Enthusiasm is back in October. The Morning Show returns in a couple of weeks. Impeachment: American Crime Story debuts next week and, even though the reviews haven’t been too hot, that’s still a buzzy piece of pop culture you can plop on your plate. B.J. Novak has a big new prestige-y show called The Premise coming to FX soon. There’s a Ken Burns documentary about Muhammad Ali on the way and I am going to watch it just entirely too hard.

And that’s just the fancier stuff. Network television is coming back, too, which is notable because network dramas have gotten so, so weird lately. They’re like middle children who start acting out when all the attention gets distributed between the oldest and youngest kids. The best current example of this is 9-1-1, a show that once killed a man by having a mall escalator malfunction and crush him as he proposed to his girlfriend. But there are new ones getting added to the mix. Ordinary Joe is an upcoming series that stars James Wolk — Bob Benson from Mad Men, renegade zoologist Jackson Oz from Zoo — as a man living out multiple versions of his life on different timelines, including one where he is a rock star. Natalie Zea is starting in a new show called La Brea that looks just as bonkers as you could ever want. Look at this thing.

So I guess what I’m saying here is that we have a good news / bad news situation on our hands. The good news is that there is so much stuff out there that it’ll be easy to keep yourself entertained as the weather cools off and the sun goes down earlier and we maybe have to hunker down a bit again. The bad news is people are about to start a lot of conversations with, “Oh my God, do you watch…” and it’s going to get really stressful when you keep answering “ummm, no” and they sigh at you and say “You have to watch it. It’s so good.” You remember those conversations. They’re coming back. This isn’t even all the shows. I’m probably missing an obvious one. I bet someone will reach out to me in a tweet that starts with “actually…” to tell me another good show I’m forgetting. I bet it’s already happened.

So, look. I’ll do my best to keep you abreast of the big stuff, usually in this very column, just so you can be interesting in that conversation. Just so you can speak semi-knowledgeably and not get shamed for missing out on stuff. But it’s going to get really intense really fast. I need you to be ready. I need you to lock in with me. We have to agree to be in this one together to get through it all alive.

But mostly, I need you to watch Reservation Dogs. You do watch Reservation Dogs, right

You don’t!

You have to watch Reservation Dogs. It’s so good.

The Ted Lasso Discourse has been trending in a bad direction for a bit now. It’s all understandable, I guess, if I want to give everyone and everything the benefit of the doubt. The show had a good and uplifting first season that came out of nowhere at a time when people really needed something good and uplifting. The second season was still good and uplifting through the first handful of episodes, but some people felt it was treading water a bit. Again, this is fine. The problem was that all the writers on the internet saw this red meat in front of their faces and started a feeding frenzy. I say this without much judgment because I am also a writer on the internet and Lord in Heaven knows I’ve participated in these buffets in the past, too.

But it is my great pleasure to report that the Ted Lasso Discourse is good again now, and it’s good again for one simple reason: the conspiracy theorists have entered the chat.

There were actually two Ted Lasso conspiracies this week, which is something that is making me smile right now as I type it. Let’s start with the more tame one, just to ease into it. Some people who like to log into various forums and speculate about upcoming Apple products thought that the company might have premiered its new notchless iPhone 13 in the most recent episode. That’s it up there, allegedly, in the hands of Rebecca’s mom at lunch. Our Ryan Nagelhout looked into this one a bit and more or less had it debunked in an hour.

Apple is certainly known for its product placement in its TV shows, as anyone who watched the first season of The Morning Show can attest. But Lasso, a show where a fake soccer team plays against real soccer teams and was filmed amid a pandemic, makes use of a good amount of CGI to make the show somewhat realistic-looking. So this may just be, well, a fake phone that wasn’t an exact model of a real Apple device. Or a computer-created device that simply doesn’t include all the quirks of the real deal.

These are all good and fair points. But even if they weren’t, I mean, it would be really funny if Apple chose to debut their biggest product of the year by putting it in the corner of the screen in the hands of a character’s mom who was only there for a guest spot. Not, like, Jason Sudeikis. Or one of the big-name stars of The Morning Show, which is also coming back soon, as we discussed earlier. Rebecca’s mom. I almost want it to be true.

And speaking of Ted Lasso conspiracies that may or may not involve CGI and that I want to be true, there was also this: A collection of beautiful minds on the Ted Lasso Reddit page are convinced that Roy Kent, the gruff former player who is now an assistant coach, is actually a character that was created with CGI. Our Josh Kurp investigated this one and, boy, was it ever an investigation.

As spotted by Twitter user @guymrdth, the Ted Lasso subreddit includes a thread started last July with the headline, “Ok just started the show and… CGI” The post reads, “I just started watching the pilot, and i’m up to the scene where roy is called into teds office. Am i crazy or does he look like a complete cgi character”

Which is incredible. It’s perfect. Going from “Ted Lasso develops slowly and I’m tired of its optimism and also nothing happens” to “ROY KENT IS A SECRET CARTOON” is about as good a twist in a discourse as you’ll ever see. It’s my new favorite thing. I am thisclose to just deciding to accept it as fact and start telling strangers. I might make it My Thing. It’s so stupid and harmless and I did not think any of it could bring me any more joy.

Until…