"Agatha All Along" is fun. That's really enough to say about it, frankly, because almost nothing is fun right now. If you were a devotee of "WandaVision" (and in the throes of the pandemic, who wasn't?) you will also love "Agatha All Along."
The pitch-perfect timing of Kathryn Hahn as witchy star Agatha Harness that made "WandaVision" a surprise hit, even outside the Marvel Comic cult and clan, is on full display again here. She is just so very good everything falls into place around her. Building a whole series off the catchy tune from "WandaVision" might seem a stretch, but everything seems to work so well in this Disney+ story that we are left, as with its progenitor, always wanting more.
And there's plenty "more" here. "Agatha All Along" is the 11th television series in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) produced by Marvel Studios, via its Marvel Television label. It was a bold move to do this spinoff, and early response says it was the right move, that three years since "WandaVision" left us aching for more Agatha, we have this vehicle that is just all things to all people.
But we digress, sort of. The show's premise is far more than a song. As Disney+ details, three years after being trapped in the town of Westview, New Jersey at the end of "WandaVision," Agatha Harkness escapes with the help of a goth teen who wishes to face the trials of the legendary Witches' Road. Without her magical powers, Agatha and the Teen form a new coven of witches to face the trials, while contending with some of Agatha's old enemies.
"Agatha All Along" proffers a cast of notables and not-so-notables who just lure us in. Joe Locke is wonderful as "Teen," Agatha's gay familiar. He's darkly funny and is a perfect foil for her as the assistant in her coven. And her coven includes Patti LuPone and Debra Jo Rupp. Wild, right?
This frolic is also super queer. What more could we want as we try to survive the countdown to the election? "Agatha All Along" is must-watch TV. Airing weekly on Disney+ through Halloween, it costars Aubrey Plaza, Sasheer Zamata, Ali Ahn, Okwui Okpokwasili, Maria Dizzia, Paul Adelstein and Miles Gutierrez-Riley.
Season of the...
Just in time for the final weeks of the election, "Saturday Night Live!" is back, with a vengeance! The longest-running satire and comedy sketch show on TV turns 50 this year. "SNL50" did not disappoint. Hosted by comedian Jean Smart, fresh off her Emmy win for "Hacks," and with musician Jelly Roll, the show was one of the best season openers in recent memory. Smart was great, the music was appropriately melancholy and the politics were perfect.
In her monologue, Jean Smart, in her first hosting gig on the show, talked about loving New York, sang a little and made funny allusions to her series, including fans loving her.
"Lesbians are obsessed with me. Great. I have options."
The cold open brought back Maya Rudolph's Kamala Harris in a slightly mixed bag of hilarious to cringy, with some notables from "SNL" past seasons to bolster the excitement. The premise: the different rallying styles of Harris versus her opponent, Donald Trump.
The reality of Trump is so over the top these days that satire and comedy just can't match it, but James Austin Johnson's spot-on Trump is always good. However, the Diddy references were too well aligned to even be that funny.
Still, Rudolph was stellar, with her Harris joking that her campaign was not unlike Sabrina Carpenter's summer hit "Espresso" — "the lyrics are vague but the vibes slap." Truth.
Not all the vibes, though. Harris's VP pick, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz was played with BDE ("Big Dad Energy") by a usually hilarious Jim Gaffigan who fell flat. Bowen Yang was a bold choice for JD Vance and made us eager for more. Andy Samberg was an amusing Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff. And the great Dana Carvey was okay as Joe Biden, but was written to be old and sniffing Harris, which felt like last season's humor.
Rudolph was so good she had us looking forward to four (or eight?) years of her reprising that role. The vibes most certainly do slap.
What was best about the premiere of "SNL50" was all the skits were funny.
"Weekend Update" was alarming and the music was lush. Smart did some hilarious turns, including one in a skit meant to snark book bans where she played a romance writer who's brought in by Scholastic Books to spice up a math text. The word problems include what you'd expect—lots of sexiness of all sorts. The skit also featured Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson and Mikey Day and was totally hilarious.
We're not sure who put the word out that "SNL" should use gay cast member Bowen Yang more, but he was in nearly every skit and we were so down for it. His turn as baby hippo Moo Deng on "Weekend Update" commenting on the perils of fame was pure genius.
Yang also was featured in a talk show skit in which he played singer Charlie XCX discussing politics in a way which was wildly over the top funny. Ego Nwodim played everyone's fave House rep, Jasmine Crockett, with a fabulous takedown of some of the worst GOP reps like homophobe and transphobe Marjorie Taylor Greene and accused teen trafficker Matt Gaetz.
Yang also played host to a "CNN's History of the Sit Com" skit in which it's revealed there was a dramatic actress playing Lucy in "I Love Lucy" prior to Lucille Ball with Jean Smart in a very dark "Double Indemnity"-style turn that was absolutely fabulous. (She repeatedly asks Ricky if he's gay, waving his ties at him.)
"SNL50" was an exceptionally good first show. If the writing matches this throughout the season, we are in for a treat. And bravo for showcasing Bowen Yang's wide-ranging talents. More gay is always good and we'd be thrilled to have Yang reprise the role Kate McKinnon played on "SNL" as the queer cast mate who can play anyone. Good as he was, though, we hope his role as JD Vance ends in November.
Minerva McGonagall and much more
What can one say about the passing of the great Dame Maggie Smith? We fell in love with Smith as a kid when we first saw "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" on TV. Many others fell in love with her in the Harry Potter films as Professor Minerva McGonagall.
Yet Smith joked in interviews that no one knew who she was until "Downton Abbey." While her amazing one-liners from the redoubtable Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, were certainly fan favorites, there was nothing Smith didn't change with her imprint.
We were blessed to see Smith on stage in "Lettice and Lovage" when we were living in London part time in the late 1980s. Smith won the Tony for her role in 1990. It was among many awards she won over her years of films, theater and television.
Smith won two Academy Awards, five BAFTAs, three Golden Globes, four Primetime Emmy Awards, five Screen Actors Guild Awards and that Tony Award. She is one of only 14 actresses to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting, winning the highest accolades for film, television and theater.
Still, it wasn't just the breadth of her performances. Smith was just such a decent person in real life. All her co-stars and the young actors she mentored over the years were in awe of her even as they said she resisted both the fame moniker and any sense that she was better-than.
We read numerous stories online from various co-stars, as well as stories from ordinary people who had casual run-ins with Smith, including a man who ran into a flustered Smith struggling to swipe her credit card at a shop.
He offered to pay, her card finally went through and in a surprise exchange she told him she'd just been diagnosed that day with breast cancer. He told her his partner was undergoing treatment at the time. The exchange was one of deep humanity, empathy and quintessential Smith; no pretense.
Black gay British actor and playwright Danny Lee Wynter wrote a long, heartbreakingly beautiful tribute on Twitter/X about how much Smith had formed his early life as an actor and as a writer. He detailed how his mother would take him along as she worked as a cleaner and his tapes of Smith were what soothed him on those outings. His story of meeting Smith and her kindness to him are evocative and powerful.
It will be the roles she played that carry her memory forward, though her "Downton Abbey" words will always resonate. Two favorite Violet Crawley lines for us:
"Principles are like prayers; noble, of course, but awkward at a party" and "The presence of strangers is our only guarantee of good behavior," never ceased to make us laugh.
Maggie Smith was singular as she was unbothered by her own fame. May she rest in peace and may her memory be a blessing to all who loved her. She will forever be missed.
So, for the endlessly sublime and the quixotically funny, you know you really must stay tuned.
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