Happy Friday! Time for a more low-fi than usual Ask Alan, recorded in my hotel room in Pasadena, where I’m attending the Television Critics Association press tour. Apologies if the lighting and sound quality aren’t up to the usual cutting-edge standards, but I did my best with the space available. (And couldn’t pack the Belcher family Pop figures to use as background props.)
We’ve got four questions this week, starting with the matter of Netflix’s One Day at a Time (which I liked a lot, and interviewed the showrunners of) being an old-school multi-camera sitcom, as opposed to some of Netflix’s hipper single-cam comedies.
After that, I point out why a proposed way for a show to conceal a big twist doesn’t work, and then tackle the very difficult question of which fictional TV holiday is better:
Chrismukkah from The OC?
or Festivus from Seinfeld?
Finally, we pick up on something discussed a couple of days ago here at press tour: shows like Prison Break that ran too long because the TV business model at the time demanded that they keep going until the audience lost interest.
As always, you can send questions to askalan@uproxx.com, or tweet me with the hashtag #AskAlanDay