Happy Friday, everybody! Time for a new installment of Ask Alan, where I take your questions about the past, present, and future of TV.
We start off with what’s become a pretty common question lately: why do shows abruptly leave Netflix or other streaming sites — like Netflix’s recent loss of X-Files and most of Joss Whedon’s shows and why do some of those never reappear elsewhere in the streaming world?
After that, a reader asks where The Americans might rank on the all-time drama list assuming its remaining season and a half is up to the caliber of everything we’ve seen so far. This is something I thought about a lot during the TV (THE BOOK) press blitz, and the methodology Matt and I used there comes in handy in trying to answer that question here.
Finally, last week’s discussion of TV’s greatest spinoff inspires a question that’s nearly the reverse: what’s TV’s most disappointing spinoff? There are worse pure shows than some of the ones I listed, but expectations for those were low to begin with.
As always, you can email me questions at askalan@uproxx.com (we had server issues recently, but the address is working again), or tweet at me with the hashtag #AskAlanDay.