Time for another installment of Ask Alan, as I take your questions about the past, present, and future of TV.
Unsurprisingly, we’ve got a few questions inspired by Stranger Things season two this week. Everyone’s love of the Steve/Dustin buddy dynamic prompted our first question, about TV’s tradition of turning villains into heroes because the audience and/or the writers enjoy the characters too much.
From there, we look at how my opinion of the show, and/or what I wrote about it, would have changed had it been released weekly — and if I had been watching the episodes weekly, rather than seeing them all in advance.
We close things out with a non-Stranger Things question, prompted by all the interviews I’ve done about Breaking Bad 101 and how well Breaking Bad holds up despite being so widely imitated over the last few years. How, I was asked, does Seinfeld — even more influential on TV comedy, over a longer period of time — hold up 20-plus years later? As I rewatched a lot of Seinfeld for TV (The Book), this one I felt confident answering.
As always, you can email me questions at askalan@uproxx.com, or tweet at me with the hashtag #AskAlanDay.