Time for another installment of Ask Alan, as I take your questions about the past, present, and future of TV.
I’m on vacation at the moment, having recorded this video before I went away (it got delayed due to a scheduling glitch). I’ll be back fulltime as the fall TV season is getting underway after Labor Day, and perhaps appropriately, our first question asks me to identify any new broadcast network shows debuting this fall that are worth getting excited about. It’s a tricky request, particularly in a fall where nearly every show — broadcast, cable, or streaming — worth getting your hopes up for are returning shows. But I identified a few with potential. In this case, the fact that I still haven’t seen a number of the new fall shows was actually helpful, as a lot of them are probably better in theory than they will be in reality.
After that, Disney’s decision to launch its own streaming service rather than continuing to license its content to Netflix leads into a discussion of how the new a la carte universe isn’t all that cord-cutters dreamed it would be.
Finally, I explain why it’s so rare for one person to direct every episode of a TV drama’s season — or, for that matter, a single-cam comedy’s season, even though it’s relatively common for that to happen with multi-camera sitcoms.
As always, you can email me questions at askalan@uproxx.com, or tweet at me with the hashtag #AskAlanDay.