ATX Fest Delivers a ‘Fargo’ Premiere, a ‘Halt and Catch Fire’ Reunion, and More
The ATX TV Festival, founded by TV superfans Emily Gipson and Caitlin McFarland and held annually in Austin, is an intimate, enlightening, taco-adjacent celebration of all things small screen. Each year brings an eclectic mix of panels, some focused on individual series (both new and old), some on industry-wide themes, some on minutiae micro-targeted to the kind of person who would attend a four-day festival just about television.
At this year’s fest, the 13th installment, the main event was a tribute to the late, great Norman Lear, with actors like Pamela Adlon, Phil Rosenthal, and Dulé Hill performing table reads of classic episodes of Lear’s Maude and Good Times; afterward, I conducted a panel discussion with the group about Lear’s life and legacy. There was also a reunion of the cast and creative team of Halt and Catch Fire — a brilliant, criminally underseen drama about the early days of personal computing and the internet — held on the 10th anniversary of the show’s premiere on AMC. And I was part of perhaps the most niche panel in the festival’s history, wherein Vulture critic Kathryn VanArendonk and I attempted to define what is and isn’t a bottle episode.
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There were also show-specific panels covering two recent favorites. After a screening of the premiere of the fifth season of Fargo, I sat down with its creator, Noah Hawley, to talk about the evolution of his Coen Brothers tribute act, the casting of Juno Temple and Jon Hamm in the lead roles, and more. At one point, we dug into this season’s concluding scene, which was my single favorite of the series so far:
I also got to chat with nearly the entire Rosenthal family from Netflix’s travel/food series Somebody Feed Phil, as star Phil Rosenthal was joined not only by his brother and producer Richard, but by his son Ben and daughter Lily. (Rosenthal’s wife, Monica Horan, was back in Los Angeles acting in a play.) The Rosenthals as a group do not require much prompting to talk, as you can see in this clip where a tribute to Phil’s late father Max somehow turns into Succession:
ATX’s YouTube channel is gradually rolling out videos of each event, and both the Fargo panel and the Somebody Feed Phil panel are now available in their entirety.
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