Are You Ready For The Television Event Of The Year?

Also in the Friday newsletter: Someone stole Gordon Ramsay’s cat figurines and I have a White Lotus theory

The Five Spot is a weekly Friday roundup where I rank and riff on my five favorite things from the week. Most of the entries will be about film and TV, but there might also be ones about weird local news or sandwiches I ate or anything else, really. The opening section is free but the rest is an exclusive for paid subscribers, so if you want to read the top four entries, you can do that by upgrading…

Off we go.

FIVE: I can’t believe it’s really happening

When we last checked in with 9-1-1, Angela Bassett was landing a commercial plane on the Los Angeles freeway with the assistance of a child because a bee-nado had struck Southern California and caused a private plane to veer off-course and rip through the cockpit of the plane she was on as she was transporting her ex-husband’s killer so he could provide jailhouse information that would take down a high-society sex trafficking ring.

When we last checked in with Doctor Odyssey, the show had just released a teaser informing us that it would return with a two-part midseason premiere that would involve shark attacks and the potential resolution of the thing where the ship’s medical officers engaged in three-way trysts between treating multiple penis-related injuries and an overdose on cocktail shrimp and it all resulted in someone getting pregnant and having no clue who the father is.

And now, thank the good lord in heaven, these two borderline recklessly chaotic hours of network television will cross streams. On March 20. In the very next episode after the two-part shark attack event. You cannot imagine how excited I am to be typing all of this.

It gets better. Here is the episode’s plot summary, via the announcement in Variety this week…

Continuing “Doctor Odyssey’s” premise of each episode being centered around a different themed cruise, the action takes place during Casino Week aboard The Odyssey, and “unexpected guest Athena Grant suspects two passengers are targeting the ship’s vault,” the logline explains. “Enlisting Max’s help, Athena raises the stakes in a dangerous game where not everyone will end up with a winning hand.”

To be clear: Angela Bassett and Joshua Jackson are going to thwart a casino night cruise ship heist on the high seas, possibly with the help of the ship’s captain, played by Don Johnson. This is all I have ever asked for out of a television show. It’s perfect. I have yet to discover a flaw in any of it.

“But Brian,” you say, interrupting my moment of bliss, “wasn’t Angela Bassett’s character on a cruise ship just last season that was overtaken by gun-toting pirates and capsized in a hurricane? Don’t you think it’s a little unlikely that she would board another one so quickly?”

Shut up and leave me alone.

“Okay, but seriously,” you press on for some unknowable reason, “doesn’t this crossover kind of poke a hole in the theory that the events of Doctor Odyssey are all taking place inside Joshua Jackson’s character’s mind as he suffers a fever dream hallucination while battling COVID in a Connecticut hospital at the beginning of the pandemic?”

Well, two notes on this one…

• I can’t think of a better dream, fever or otherwise, than thwarting a cruise ship casino night heist with Angela Bassett and Don Johnson

• Again, shut up and leave me alone

This is how you do it, people. This is how you make television.

FOUR: People stole 500 cat figurines from Gordon Ramsay