The Rundown: There Are So Many Good Comedies On TV Right Now But Please Do Not Forget About ‘The Afterparty’

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

ITEM NUMBER ONE – Good show back

This summer is already stuffed like a holiday turkey with fun little shows. It’s Always Sunny is on and still cranking out deranged episodes. What We Do in the Shadows just came back and continued being a perfectly silly television program. I’m going to discuss The Righteous Gemstones — yes, again — in the very next section of this column but the short version there is also “very good and I love it.” It’s an embarrassment of riches, really, if you enjoy high-to-high-ish-concept goof parades where unreasonable people set themselves loose on the world and watch things explode around them, which I do. It’s nice.

But also, please, while you’re watching all of those shows (and you should be, provided you can find the time in your allegedly busy schedule), do not forget about The Afterparty. The Afterparty is also a good show. And it just came back for its second season. This is all terrific news as long as you do not have plans or a social life and can make the time.

The first season of The Afterparty went something like this: All of your favorite people from all of your favorite comedies — Sam Richardson! Ben Schwartz! Tiffany Haddish! Ilana Glazer! And so on! — went to a party after their high school reunion that ended with a dead body. Every episode focused on a different character’s version of the events, told from their perspective using a different genre of film (action movie, rom-com, and more). It was inventive and fun and everything you’d probably expect from that cast and the production team of Lord and Miller.

Aaaaand yes, it’s back.

The new season dropped its first two episodes this week and yup, we have another dead body, and yup, Sam Richardson and Tiffany Haddish are there again to sort through it all, and yup, there are more genres to play around with. This season’s murder victim is Zach Woods, which is pretty great because Zach Woods rarely, if ever, misses at doing exactly the things Zach Woods does. It’s all very nice. I appreciate it.

I know it’s not super fair to throw another show at you. There are already way too many of them to keep up with as it is. It is literally my job to stay on top of them and I still somehow just finished the new season of The Bear. (I’m sorry! I’m doing the best I can! Kind of!) But that’s what’s nice about most of these little comedies. They’re dropping just 30 minutes on you at a time and all the ones I mentioned in the first paragraph roll out weekly instead of all at once. You can get all caught up on a single rainy Saturday if you clear the schedule and tell everyone to shut up for a little. Or, you know, you could take your headphones out and invite them to watch, too. Either way.

Something to consider.

ITEM NUMBER TWO – Hey, speaking of good shows

The Righteous Gemstones did another “Interlude” episode this Sunday, which is great because those episodes have traditionally been awesome. The first one gave us “Misbehavin’” and it has not left my brain since. (Not a complaint.) The second one showed us Christmas in 1993, hideous sweaters and all. And this one zipped us ahead to 2000 and a bunch of Y2K mania that Eli used to get very rich. It was good. Go watch it. Or go watch it again. And when you do, please take note of how good the show did at finding an actor to play teen Jesse.

The actor’s name is J. Gavin Wilde and boy howdy did he ever nail it. The other kid actors were good, too. The girl who played Young Judy was wonderful and brought a crazy-eyed mania to the proceedings. But the stuff Wilde did in channeling Danny McBride’s speech patterns and mannerisms was kind of incredible. Screencaps don’t do it justice but that’s what we have here so they’ll have to make due. Look at this guy.

Look at how good he is at this.

I spent most of the episode so focused on how much he looked and sounded like Danny McBride that I forgot to focus on what was happening in the show sometimes, which was weird when I snapped back into focus as he was, like, mashing stuff with the monster truck the show teased in a previous episode. (CHEKHOV’S MONSTER TRUCK.) It’s not the worst problem to have. Kudos to everyone involved here, from young Mr. Wilde to the casting department to Walton Goggins, who did not have anything to do with the stuff I’m talking about but did post this tweet later in the week…

… and that has to count for something. I really need someone to go ahead and give these two a travel show. Or at least record them both saying “cacio e pepe” out loud back and forth to each other for an hour. I can be flexible here. A little. I can be a little flexible here.

ITEM NUMBER THREE – Just give people gift cards, Tom Cruise

Tom Cruise is out doing press for the new Mission: Impossible movie and that means the various outlets of the press are currently flooded with stories about Tom Cruise just being the most extremely Tom Cruise dude who has ever lived. Want to read about Tom Cruise just popping up at screenings of the movie at random in the hopes it will convince even one more person to go see a movie in a movie theater? We have those. Want to read about Tom Cruise’s dream of filming an actual movie in actual outer space? We have you covered there, too. When it comes to being Tom Cruise, Tom Cruise rarely disappoints.

Another example: People has a story this week about the elaborate gifts he gave his castmates. Gifts like, for example, skydiving lessons for Pom Klementieff, which she asked for…

“Another beautiful gift that was so thoughtful is that I wanted to skydive with him and also the stunt team, but they said that I needed to get my license,” recalls the French actress, 37. “So when I wrapped the movie, he gifted me, as my wrap gift, the lessons of learning how to skydive.”

“He found a teacher for me and I learned how to skydive and I got my license and we even did jumps together. And now I’m addicted, so that’s my new thing now!”

…. and shark-diving with Simon Pegg and the rest of the crew, which they maybe did not ask for but sure did get anyway.

“We were filming somewhere near some coastal waters where there were sharks and we had the afternoon off and we all jumped,” says Pegg.

“It’s such a Tom Cruise thing. We’ve been filming in a helicopter and he flew us in the helicopter to this place where you could go into a cage and feed sharks. It was one of those days that we got to the end of the day and we were like, ‘That was a real Tom Cruise kind of day.’ “

There are two things I would like to note here:

• It’s very fun to read stuff like this and then try to stop and picture Tom doing a low-energy activity, like, to choose just one I thought of this week, fishing out by himself on an isolated lake in the woods at like 6:30am
• Tom Cruise, if you are reading this and you want to get me a present some year for my birthday or whatever, I swear it is okay to just grab a $25 gift card to Panera while you’re checking out at the grocery store

This has been your Tom Cruise update.

ITEM NUMBER FOUR – Wonka things are happening

Welllllllll the trailer for the new Willy Wonka movie is out. It looks pretty good, actually. It’s got a hell of a pedigree, too, between Timothee Chalamet as the mad chocolatier and the man who directed Paddington behind the camera. And that’s great. Probably. I don’t know if it’s great, actually. Maybe it’ll stink. But what I do know — and I’m far from the only person to point this out, but still — is that it’s really, really funny that this version of Willy Wonka…

… dresses exactly like Gonzo dressed when he played Charles Dickens in A Muppet Christmas Carol.

Good luck un-seeing that one, suckers.

The trailer also introduced us to Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa, which is a fun thing I never expected to get to type out in a sentence. He looks horrifying. Look at this little demon.

There is very little I can say about any of this that wasn’t already said in a GQ piece by writer Lucy Ford that came with the headline “I Want To Kill Hugh Grant’s Wonka Oompa-Loompa With A Hammer.” A sampling…

There’s also something pest-like about him, probably reinforced by Wonka trapping him in a glass prison like a bug. Wonka’s reimagination of how the Oompa-Loompas ended up in this deranged serial killer’s servitude is simply just by accident? Wonka didn’t capture them and steal them from their land to toil away in chocolate rivers, no, they followed him into his life by choice, actually. He reminds me of a spider, something I rationally know I shouldn’t kill because of the holistic order of nature but also, deep inside, want to so much because something so horrifying shouldn’t be allowed to enter my house unannounced. I want to suck him up with a hoover or set my cat on him or throw a heavy book and watch him go splat. I’m not proud of it, but this is what this awful little thing does to me.

Is this basically just an article-length version of the “me and my friends would have killed ET with hammers” tweet? Yes. Does that make it any less enjoyable for me? No. Do I feel okay about all of that? I really, really do.

Somehow, after not being excited for this movie at all as recently as like four days ago, this is now the only thing I care about. Send me all your Wonka takes and memes. It turns out I adore them. You learn interesting stuff about yourself from the strangest places sometimes.

ITEM NUMBER FIVE – Let’s give Rhea Seehorn a trophy

Hey, wanna hear something crazy? Better Call Saul has never won an Emmy. Like, for anything. Acting, writing, directing, nothing. Nada. Goose eggs across the board. That’s crazy to me. The Breaking Bad spinoff has been one of the best shows on television for almost a decade and it somehow lived up to its predecessor and still nothing. I had no idea about any of this until I saw this paragraph over at Gold Derby when the 2023 nominations were announced this week.

To date, AMC’s spin-off of “Breaking Bad” has lost 46 times with the television academy, including six for Best Drama Series. It just nabbed seven additional nominations this year for the second half of its farewell season, so pundits everywhere are wondering: Will “Better Call Saul” finally win an Emmy?

I mean… wow, right?

The field is heavy as hell again this year, too, for the record, so it’s not like it gets any easier in the show’s final run at it. Bob Odenkirk is up against half the cast of Succession in the lead actor category and Outstanding Drama is stacked, too. The smart money is on Succession going on a crazy run at the ceremony — if the sucker even happens, what with the current double strike Hollywood has on its hands — so things could get dicey once again.

Luckily, I have a solution. One that lets everyone throw roses at Succession and The White Lotus and everyone who worked at HBO in the last 12 months but also gets Better Call Saul on the board, finally: We give a trophy to Rhea Seehorn.

We should have done this already, to be honest. She’s been out there killing it as Kim Wexler pretty much since the show started, holding her own against veterans of Breaking Bad and smoking cigarettes and doing finger guns and all of it. But we can do it now. She’s up for Best Supporting Actress in a similarly pretty stacked field…

Best Supporting Actress In A Drama Series
Jennifer Coolidge, The White Lotus
Elizabeth Debicki, The Crown
Meghann Fahy, The White Lotus
Sabrina Impacciatore, The White Lotus
Aubrey Plaza, The White Lotus
Rhea Seehorn, Better Call Saul
J. Smith-Cameron, Succession
Simona Tabasco, The White Lotus

… but come on. Do it. Give Rhea Seehorn a trophy. She’s earned it. She deserves it. I won’t be, like, angry if it goes to Jennifer Coolidge instead, or even Aubrey Plaza if only to hear her speech, but… yeah. Come on.

Give Rhea Seehorn a trophy.

Please.

It would mean a lot to me.

To her, too, probably.

And Bob Odenkirk would really appreciate it.

Don’t let this be the show’s legacy.

In the Best Drama Series category, “BCS” now holds the record for the most nominations (seven) without a win. While it doesn’t seem to have a great chance of toppling HBO’s trio of front-runners (“Succession,” “The White Lotus” and “The Last of Us”) this year in that top race, fans are still hoping it will claim a trophy for one of its other last chance nominations. Time is running out.

Come on.

Do it.

Thank you.

READER MAIL

If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at brian.grubb@uproxx.com (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.

From Mike:

I had honestly never considered the possibility that Scooby Doo could be a superhero until I heard Nick Castellanos explain it, but now it makes a lot of sense. He’s probably more of a superhero than Batman, if you think about it. Batman is just some rich guy who solves crimes with his expensive gizmos. He doesn’t even have a superpower. Scooby can talk. A dog that can talk has a superpower. There’s really very little separating from the Ninja Turtles in this regard. I will probably be thinking about this forever.

Oh, Mike. I am with you here. But I’ll provide a tiny bit of background for healthy people who don’t spend all the time online and/or watching baseball.

Phillies right fielder Nick Castellanos was recently asked who his favorite superhero is, as part of one of those cutesy little Q&As athletes do sometimes. He said Scooby Doo. This week at the All-Star Game someone asked him to elaborate on it all and he said this…

A couple of things are true here:

• There is no logical error in any of this and it has changed how I view that entire show
• Go Phillies

Thank you, Mike and Nick and Scooby.

AND NOW, THE NEWS

To California!

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is warning people enjoying the waters along West Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz about an aggressive sea otter that has been seen going after surfers.

Good.

“Since then, in the past five days now, there’s been three more incidents of it,” Woodward said. “And they’ve all been much more aggressive. I have photographed a lot of otters over the years, I have never seen anything like this.”

There are three things going on here, all of them noteworthy:

• The ocean is the otter’s house
• You would be upset if some bozo ran through your house on a big board, too
• I love this otter very much and I hope it builds a little house out of all the surfboards it steals

Moving on.

“It was a true wrestling match over this surfboard,” Woodward said. “And the person finally got it away and it was damaged. Basically, the board was destroyed. Literally the day before, I filmed the surfer that got so freaked out by it that he left his board and swam back to shore without it.”

What I need here is an R-rated Pixar movie about a furious animated otter going wild on surfers and mangling their boards. I don’t care why. Maybe a surfer killed one of its loved ones. Maybe it just wants to protect its home and way of life. Maybe it just really hates surfers. Again, I do not care. Just give it to me.

CDFW says this five-year-old female southern sea otter also exhibited unusual behavior in the Santa Cruz area back in September 2022, but nothing else until recently.

“They’re actually pretty aggressive animals,” SJSU’s Moss Landing Marine Laboratories Professor David Ebert said. “They’re not as cute and cuddly as people tend to think.”

THERE’S YOUR TAGLINE

MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT THE OTTER

HAVE… LET’S SAY RUSSELL CROWE DO THE VOICE

THINK ABOUT IT