Time for another installment of Ask Alan, where I take your questions about the past, present, and future of TV.
With this week’s release of Avengers: Infinity War, which teams up characters from nearly every film to date in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I was asked to pick TV’s best crossover episodes. (Related: Our Mike Ryan talked to Marvel film boss Kevin Feige about the “greatest crossover even in history” memes.) I struggled to narrow it down to just one, but tried to present a sampling of my favorites, and look forward to reading about yours in the comments.
Next, we get into the question of how much, if at all, the KGB is paying Philip and Elizabeth Jennings to have the nice house, run a travel agency, and do all their other upper-middle-class American things on The Americans, and why Philip seems to be having such a tough financial go of things in this final season.
And we close things out with a discussion of shows that tried to incorporate an actor’s real-life talent into something their characters could do. This usually leads to people who don’t seem particularly musical turning out to have beautiful singing voices, or characters suddenly playing hockey because they’re played by Canadians, or, in the case of one of my favorite sitcom clips of all time, a young surgical resident knowing all of the choreography from Bel Biv Devoe’s “Poison” video:
As always, you can email me questions at askalan@uproxx.com, or tweet at me with the hashtag #AskAlanDay.