Time for another installment of Ask Alan, as I take your questions about the past, present, and future of TV.
Three super fun questions this week, starting with a question about TV’s greatest fight scenes, inspired by one of you rewatching the Nola-Burton fight from Banshee:
As promised in the video, I’m trying to embed as many of the clips I talked about as possible (though there aren’t YouTube versions of a few like the Altered Carbon zero-G fight, and there are other shows like Into the Badlands that I don’t watch enough to consider).
Daredevil hallway fight:
Brienne vs the Hound:
Arrow vs Slade:
Preacher “Uptown Girl” fight:
Hannibal vs Jack Crawford:
Sydney vs Evil Francie:
Sarah Walker vs Triad boss (in a small car):
Tony Soprano vs Ralphie:
Walter White vs Skyler:
Dan Dority vs the Captain:
I’ve talked a lot over the years about great one-season shows, but our second question is a fascinating variation: what’s the best second season of a show that only ran two seasons? I divided this up into three categories: great shows that ran two years, but the second year wasn’t the better of the two; shows where the second season was a significant improvement on the first; and British shows designed for finite runs.
Finally, some fantasy casting, where I was asked to piece together a crime fighting team with pre-existing TV characters filling familiar archetypes like the muscle, the tech nerd, the ace detective, and more.
As always, you can email me questions at askalan@uproxx.com, or tweet at me with the hashtag #AskAlanDay.