transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[01:00] This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever have a plan come together out of nowhere and realize you're missing something? Like a last-minute beach day, a spontaneous hike, or an outdoor movie night you didn't plan for? That's when Prime's Same Day Delivery has your back. Getting you exactly what you need, fast and reliably, so you can actually join the moment instead of watching from the sidelines. Same Day Delivery, it's on Prime. Visit amazon.com/prime to find millions of items delivered fast, available in select areas, terms apply.

Speaker 3:
[01:38] I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk, now!

Speaker 2:
[01:44] Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com, and joining me in the silver slipper. Good, because he loves dance. Yeah, it's Andy Greenwald.

Speaker 3:
[01:58] And I like free nachos.

Speaker 2:
[01:59] Do you think they have those?

Speaker 3:
[02:01] I don't remember, because I was on Ketamine at the time, but it's possible.

Speaker 2:
[02:06] I loved how you pronounced Ketamine as like...

Speaker 3:
[02:08] Ketamine.

Speaker 2:
[02:09] Like a Jewish dentist from Philadelphia.

Speaker 3:
[02:12] First of all, I am much closer to a Jewish dentist from Philadelphia than I am to a habitué of the silver slipper. The truth is, you caught me. I started to back out of the comment two thirds of the way through, but I was pot committed. And frankly, that's how I live my life.

Speaker 2:
[02:27] That's why I love you, man, because when you're in, you're in. And we're in on Euphoria season three, which we will be talking about the second episode today, as well as the first three episodes of the new Apple TV series, Margo's Got Money Troubles. Problems or troubles?

Speaker 3:
[02:42] She's Margo's Got Money. I think it's troubles. Again, no way of knowing. It's troubles.

Speaker 2:
[02:49] It's troubles. Did I say troubles?

Speaker 3:
[02:51] Yeah, but you were thinking of Northern Ireland.

Speaker 2:
[02:53] That's the problem is like Margo and the Dairy Girls is a much different thing. It's really good to see you. What a weekend for us.

Speaker 3:
[03:01] Oh, was it?

Speaker 2:
[03:02] Yeah, no, I just mean what a weekend for United States of America, the NBA playoffs, the NHL playoffs.

Speaker 3:
[03:07] Yeah, sports wise, you're right to switch allegiances. You should leave the Phillies hat at home.

Speaker 2:
[03:13] I'm fine with the Phillies. I have the Phillies hat at home. There's no deviation from the plan.

Speaker 3:
[03:19] I know.

Speaker 2:
[03:19] I told you on Thursday, wait for game 60, I'm getting miserable texts from you. But I'm getting actually, honestly, a whole variety of awesome texts from you.

Speaker 3:
[03:28] I sent some pretty funny texts this weekend, if I do say so myself.

Speaker 2:
[03:32] How are you doing? I have one new story for you today before we get into our TV talk, but I just want to do a temperature check.

Speaker 3:
[03:38] Great. Temperature feels good. The studio is nice.

Speaker 2:
[03:40] Yeah. No, I mean like emotionally and spiritually, and also just like artistically, where's your soul at when you're, did you search around this weekend and watch anything that was not necessarily an assignment, but just a pleasure?

Speaker 3:
[03:52] No. This weekend, there was quite a lot on the TV docket. So no, I was focused. I was just working for you all weekend.

Speaker 2:
[04:01] Yeah, I was actually gonna say it might be good after we do beef on Thursday. So we're gonna, I don't know that we're gonna cover all of beef, but.

Speaker 3:
[04:09] You have beef with beef.

Speaker 2:
[04:11] I don't. I watched the first two episodes. And I would definitely say that it's better than I thought it was gonna be.

Speaker 3:
[04:16] Well, you had, you were very down.

Speaker 2:
[04:19] All I did was say, this is what people are saying about it. And if it's true, watching eight hours of this is not necessarily what I want to do this weekend.

Speaker 3:
[04:28] Straw men everywhere coming up to me on the street. Tears in their little straw eyes saying, sir, sir, beef season two is underwhelming.

Speaker 2:
[04:37] You know, speaking of film production, today I went to go get my custom, not custom, like they make it special for me, but like my coffee at my coffee shop. And they were shooting somebody, they were shooting something there. Yeah, probably fucking nobody wants this or something.

Speaker 3:
[04:54] And Tim's working, be nice.

Speaker 2:
[04:57] I was just like, you guys got to be kidding me. Of all the gin joints that you couldn't find in London or Budapest, Vancouver, you decided to take my coffee shop.

Speaker 3:
[05:07] Are you zagging on LA film production?

Speaker 2:
[05:09] No, I'm very happy for them, but like.

Speaker 3:
[05:11] This is, wait, hold on. You're being a nimby about Hollywood film production within Los Angeles? This is a wild new character for you.

Speaker 2:
[05:21] I have a few things that need to go right for me during any given day.

Speaker 3:
[05:25] All right, let's go through them.

Speaker 2:
[05:26] Finding my, getting my coffee, having the right kind of Nicorette.

Speaker 3:
[05:32] Like as opposed to off-brand, like what?

Speaker 2:
[05:33] Well, off-brand or like the new flavors that the Nicorette company introduced. So we talked about this. It's just like, I have to have everything kind of line up in the stimulation category, and then we can get into our day. But if I show up and Sidney Lumet's like, now here's what you're going to do. And it's like, no, man, I need an Americano. And also, you know what I really don't understand?

Speaker 3:
[05:56] Snort the Ketteman.

Speaker 2:
[05:57] Why do you guys have to shut shit down?

Speaker 3:
[05:59] To shoot.

Speaker 2:
[06:00] Yeah, be like a little guerrilla film-making style, you know, Gidard, get in there while I'm ordering.

Speaker 3:
[06:05] Sean Baker, tangerine style, iPhone horizontal.

Speaker 2:
[06:08] Put me in an aura. I'll just be getting my coffee, you know?

Speaker 3:
[06:11] I think that not as many people like passers-by are historically not as open-minded and artistic as you.

Speaker 2:
[06:18] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[06:19] They do not want...

Speaker 2:
[06:19] That's like if the camera was on me, I just turn to it and go...

Speaker 3:
[06:24] He would frame Mog. I'm workshopping that slang.

Speaker 2:
[06:27] Yeah, you really like the Mog thing. Why don't you get your book out?

Speaker 3:
[06:30] No.

Speaker 2:
[06:30] I want you to. You want to save it for the library after dark? Watch in the books and the stacks?

Speaker 3:
[06:35] No, but what if you start, you know, maybe you have an anecdote to camera about a film you saw, I'll just get a little reading in.

Speaker 2:
[06:40] Okay, I did see a film this weekend and I wanted to recommend it to our viewers. It's The Christophers, the new film from Steven Soderbergh. In the news recently for saying that he was going to use AI to visualize some of John Lennon's dreams in an upcoming documentary he has about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Speaker 3:
[06:57] That's what he said.

Speaker 2:
[06:58] Yes. He was going to use AI to do some visual effects or some like imaginative visualizations of like John Lennon's dream life. And he was like, and I never would have been able to do this or would have been in like a visual production house, effects house that would cost me an arm and a leg. And now it's easy or not easy.

Speaker 3:
[07:17] But basically, is this now under the rubric of like, he can now do it himself like he does everything else?

Speaker 2:
[07:22] Yeah, I mean, I think he's always been like, how can I? What's what's the not market inefficiency because I don't even think it's economic. I think he's just a tools guy. He's interested in tools.

Speaker 3:
[07:31] What if Mike had real magic and the magic was AI? Is that what he's doing?

Speaker 2:
[07:37] Do you know what? Honestly, I think that, you know how they name all these guys, the MAI's like just Claude. What if the AI was named Magic Mike?

Speaker 3:
[07:46] I would use it.

Speaker 2:
[07:46] Yeah, me too. If I was, can you make me some furniture, man?

Speaker 3:
[07:50] Yes. Can you still hang out with Olivia Munn? What's that like?

Speaker 2:
[07:57] I did have one piece of actual Hollywood news for you. Chris Verz is fantastic. Ian McKellen, Michaela Cole. It's essentially a two-hander chamber piece. It's about a, I don't know if it would be like a Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel era. Like I can't tell exactly. He seemed like an en font terrible British painter now in his Twilight, living in Bloomsbury, it looks like. That's close to home.

Speaker 3:
[08:20] Now I'm listening.

Speaker 2:
[08:20] And lovely, lovely three-story, four-story house in Bloomsbury. Michaela Cole is an art restorer slash painter who takes a job with Ian McKellen's aging artist to catalog some of his work.

Speaker 3:
[08:35] In his home?

Speaker 2:
[08:36] In his home.

Speaker 3:
[08:36] So easy access to Essex Market and Farringdon.

Speaker 2:
[08:38] All that.

Speaker 3:
[08:39] Great lunches.

Speaker 2:
[08:40] But she is, I mean, Deco, I'm surprised Cafe Deco didn't come up.

Speaker 3:
[08:43] Deco's at the south end of it, but I would imagine that you would probably get the lunch deal at Quality Wines.

Speaker 2:
[08:49] It's not a deal, dude. You wind up walking out, smelling of liver when you go to Quality Wines.

Speaker 3:
[08:54] That's not their lunch special.

Speaker 2:
[08:55] Oh, okay. What's the lunch special?

Speaker 3:
[08:56] We don't need to get into it. I'm just saying it's very reasonable.

Speaker 1:
[08:59] You brought it up.

Speaker 3:
[09:01] I'm interested in the job she took.

Speaker 2:
[09:02] She takes it surreptitiously though, because she's in fact working for Julian's children, who want her to finish a series of unfinished portraits called The Christophers, of his lover that he did in the 90s, and they would fetch quite a bit of cash, and he has thus so far refused to finish them.

Speaker 3:
[09:20] Are you one of the Christophers?

Speaker 2:
[09:21] No, sadly not. But it's, I thought it was wonderful. It was just like a great type movie. It's going to come up later when we talk about Margo's Got Money Troubles. Problems.

Speaker 3:
[09:33] No, it's Troubles.

Speaker 2:
[09:34] God damn it. I really got to get that right. You know what? Those two words probably have like different meaning to different people.

Speaker 3:
[09:40] Again, in Belfast, they do.

Speaker 2:
[09:42] I wanted to let you know that Joe Russo, one of your favorite filmmakers.

Speaker 3:
[09:46] Yes, yes, yes. He is the visionary.

Speaker 2:
[09:48] He appeared via Zoom at the St. Andrews Film Festival, which is in Scotland. This is a film festival I believe I've read about the Russos being patrons of before.

Speaker 3:
[09:58] What do you think that is? I don't know.

Speaker 2:
[10:00] I really don't. Any other podcaster would probably be like, well, you have to understand.

Speaker 3:
[10:05] I was waiting for that.

Speaker 2:
[10:06] But honestly, I feel like sometimes it's okay to be like I have no idea. But I've read bits and pieces of them appearing at this festival. He did this via Zoom to talk about Doomsday.

Speaker 3:
[10:22] What a journey this has been.

Speaker 2:
[10:23] I'm trying to do a cool intro to this. It's essentially that they're making Doomsday and now they're going to re-release Endgame in September, I think, with either re-contextualize old footage, I imagine, or perhaps new footage from Doomsday that they're putting into Endgame. But to put Endgame now on the Doomsday narrative rails. And I thought this was really interesting because, first of all, it is kind of a tacit admission that the last six years of, seven years of Marvel has kind of not worked, between the multiversal shenanigans and Kang and Jonathan Majors and some of the other things that they've tried that haven't worked, and the fact that Fantastic Four, I mean, Fantastic Four is obviously going to be a major part about this, but was not maybe living up to people's expectations.

Speaker 3:
[11:19] Right.

Speaker 2:
[11:20] What do you think about the idea of a filmmaker going back and tweaking something in mid-air to connect it to another part of the franchise?

Speaker 3:
[11:27] Greedo shot first.

Speaker 2:
[11:29] But they never actually made that canonical, did they?

Speaker 3:
[11:32] Well, who's they in this case?

Speaker 2:
[11:34] Disney. George Lucas?

Speaker 3:
[11:35] Yeah, if he made it, I mean, he touched it, it's canon.

Speaker 2:
[11:38] Okay, but in Solo, a Star Wars story, I don't know. I mean, has this been done before?

Speaker 3:
[11:47] I think what you're asking is interesting because in terms of tweaking a prior movie to retcon it into alignment with a sequel, I'd be hard-pressed to think of an example of that. I mean, I think Disney, especially, like the animated movies, like Frozen 2, a movie I know that's near and dear to your heart.

Speaker 2:
[12:09] Honestly, this is where your expertise-

Speaker 3:
[12:10] I talk to my kids, we talk about this a lot because one of the things that I find really interesting about that movie from a process standpoint was the entire movie is created out of whole cloth of a larger overarching plot that 100 percent didn't exist at any point during the decade plus development of Frozen.

Speaker 2:
[12:26] Okay.

Speaker 3:
[12:26] Where they like retconned that the parents, like in the opening of the first movie, the parents went off on a boat adventure and sadly, spoiler for the first 30 seconds of Frozen, did not survive. The second movie suggests that they were actually going on a quest to discover the origin of their daughter's powers when they were sunk.

Speaker 2:
[12:45] It's suggested that they told the daughter it was a boat, like a cruise-

Speaker 3:
[12:49] No.

Speaker 2:
[12:49] The light or-

Speaker 3:
[12:50] No, we know kings and queens are always going on boat trips, probably.

Speaker 2:
[12:53] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[12:55] You know. We've all got troubles.

Speaker 2:
[12:57] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[12:58] But no, but to answer your question, Frozen was not re-released with swashbuckling footage of the dead parents attempting to get to them.

Speaker 2:
[13:06] And I don't know the extent to which they are going to tweak Endgame. I think it's a pretty savvy idea, although I'm surprised we're finding out about it via Zoom in Scotland instead of like a big Cinemacon announcement or like a big, maybe even a trailer for the re-release of Endgame to prep you for Doomsday, but I'm sure that's coming.

Speaker 3:
[13:23] Well, a couple of things, the Doomsday, there's Doomsday footage has been screened.

Speaker 2:
[13:28] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[13:28] They played it at Cinemacon and it's not released yet, but every single detail of it has been leaked. And I think it was intentionally designed to push back on your, I think, quite accurate observation. The last six plus years have been a complete wash. The footage features many characters from this cursed phase engaging with each other. Like it's Shang-Chi fighting Florence Pugh.

Speaker 2:
[13:54] No, fighting Gambit. I read the same recap, bro.

Speaker 3:
[13:57] Yeah. Yeah. That's a bummer. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[14:01] I pushed the Atlantic Magazine out of the way and I said, let me read this blog post describing the Doomsday trailer.

Speaker 3:
[14:06] That was the text I sent you. I said, attention, a little worried about things at FBI HQ. Thoughts? Question mark. You didn't respond.

Speaker 2:
[14:16] Then I wrote back, flyers.

Speaker 3:
[14:18] Go flyers. I don't know, but they are also, I found it interesting that they are doing a really interesting thing where they are trying to convey complete confidence that they have this thing in the bag. So there's a beginning drumbeat of this tested better than anything since Endgame. They're dropping all these things like we had 40 actors on set standing in a blank room, where they drew in the backgrounds later. They are re-releasing one of the, was Endgame like top three most successful movies of all time? They're re-releasing that to prime the pump, to remind people of how great this was with new footage to get people in the theaters. They are claiming that they don't need the IMAX screens, the Dune 3.

Speaker 2:
[15:01] Oh, because they're making a proprietary technology of like, so that it always shows in the way it's supposed to.

Speaker 3:
[15:07] Infinity Vision?

Speaker 2:
[15:08] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[15:09] Can you just make a proprietary format?

Speaker 2:
[15:11] I hope it makes Euphoria season four an Infinity Vision.

Speaker 3:
[15:14] Because, so it'll go on forever? The episodes, I think, are made in Infinity Vision.

Speaker 2:
[15:18] Honestly, they breeze right by me.

Speaker 3:
[15:20] Incredible.

Speaker 2:
[15:21] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[15:23] So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, what's your Doomsday temperature check?

Speaker 2:
[15:27] I immediately started thinking about other franchises that have perhaps made some wrong turns, and filmmakers going back and tweaking them, you know? So the first franchise that comes to mind is Star Wars, and they've had this largely stalled out movie production development process where they've given out all these deals to people to make trilogies and to make one-off movies that haven't really come to light or haven't come to fruition. They've continued to kind of mine these in-between years between the trilogies and to some success, but I think that the thing that's missing is the feeling of forward momentum and the feeling of the unknown because like any kind of well-versed Star Wars fan can watch one of these shows and just be like, yes, and then this has to happen because this happened. Star Wars legendarily does not mess with canon. Marvel is a little bit more like, guess what, everybody was dreaming that day.

Speaker 3:
[16:23] Or it was a different universe.

Speaker 2:
[16:24] Yeah, and they've been playing with that for a few years. But if you were doing Star Wars and if you were like, hey, why don't we just go back to right before Force Awakens? Or why don't we go back to right after The Last Jedi and just do this? And basically, I mean, it sounds like Stephen Soderbergh's The Hunt for Ben Solo movie was in its own way. Like, well, what if he wasn't dead? And that was a bridge too far for Bob Iger. But it is kind of interesting that the same company is like, yeah, we'll tweak a little bit of Endgame and probably like yada yada some of the stuff that's happened in between.

Speaker 3:
[16:59] I think that the main difference here is that in the case of Marvel, they are going back to their last greatest success and just basically moving the off ramp in a different direction.

Speaker 2:
[17:07] Yes, I suppose Stephen Soderbergh wanted to revisit The Last Skywalker.

Speaker 3:
[17:12] Well, yeah, because those Star Wars movies...

Speaker 2:
[17:14] The Rise of Skywalker, right?

Speaker 3:
[17:15] I think in retrospect, those movies are not thought of fondly, but particularly they are not just thought of fondly, they are like ground zero for a lot of the toxicity of fandom and fandom's relationship to the projects that they love or they love to hate. And so it would just be a minefield to go back, because it wouldn't just be like, let me pick up on the really cool adventures of Admiral Holdo or whatever Laura Dern's name was. It was like, let us pretend none of that woke shit that Ryan Johnson did ever happened. Please attribute that quote to Chris, because he needs a couple of dings in his Mando armor online.

Speaker 2:
[17:53] Come on.

Speaker 3:
[17:54] I'm just saying.

Speaker 2:
[17:56] This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever have a plan come together out of nowhere and realize you're missing something? Like a last minute beach day, a spontaneous hike or an outdoor movie night you didn't plan for? That's when Prime's same day delivery as you're back. Getting you exactly what you need fast and reliably so you can actually join the moment instead of watching from the sidelines. Same day delivery, it's on Prime. Visit amazon.com/prime to find millions of items delivered fast, available in select areas, terms apply. Was your reading of the Doomsday trailer, were you excited?

Speaker 3:
[18:33] The scrolls? Not the scrolls, the scrolls. I'm choosing to be very excited about this movie. Why not?

Speaker 2:
[18:42] Great.

Speaker 3:
[18:43] You know?

Speaker 2:
[18:43] That's fantastic.

Speaker 3:
[18:44] I want to know how you're feeling about the X-Men casting rumors. I know Van doesn't like it when we talk about that, but... I don't know if I saw it. Your girl Odessa is being circled for Rogue.

Speaker 2:
[18:56] I didn't know that.

Speaker 3:
[18:56] And our guy Sir Dunk, Peter Claffey is rumored to be Beast.

Speaker 2:
[19:01] But they haven't gotten Cyclops.

Speaker 3:
[19:04] No.

Speaker 2:
[19:04] They haven't gotten the new Wolverine. Wake me when that happens.

Speaker 3:
[19:07] Is there going to be a new Wolverine?

Speaker 2:
[19:09] So old-ass Hugh Jackman is going to be hanging out with Peter Claffey and Odessa Ozion?

Speaker 3:
[19:15] First of all, we are now on the other end of these cross-generational...

Speaker 2:
[19:18] Why did I get this callin Odessa Ozion? Like, she was also in the Troubles.

Speaker 3:
[19:25] I think that they are going to slow walk Wolverines. I think they are going to go back to some of the original X-Men before he joined.

Speaker 2:
[19:33] Okay. Cool. Keep me up to date on that.

Speaker 3:
[19:35] I will. Hold on. Breaking news. No, let's talk about Euphoria.

Speaker 2:
[19:38] Episode 2, America, My Dream. The title of the episode is spoken by Cassie, played by Sidney Sweeney's housekeeper at one point when she is taking some content shots.

Speaker 3:
[19:49] Say her name. Wana.

Speaker 2:
[19:50] Wana. Well, it comes up a lot because there's a lot of jokes made at her expense.

Speaker 3:
[19:54] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[19:55] This one is a tale of two or three different TV shows, I think.

Speaker 3:
[20:01] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[20:01] I mean, I think this is a really useful conversation that I think also bleeds into Margo. Because it's about tone and it's about making a couple of different things at once. But I think for Euphoria, personally, for me, it works.

Speaker 3:
[20:14] Well, let's also preface this by saying for people who are just, this is their first ever episode of The Watch.

Speaker 2:
[20:18] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[20:18] This is my second ever episode of Euphoria.

Speaker 2:
[20:21] I got to admit to you something. I'm about 70 percent in on this bit, but the interest level I have in this bit shot up last night when you sent me one text message.

Speaker 1:
[20:33] I got a question.

Speaker 3:
[20:35] I've tried to avoid asking questions.

Speaker 2:
[20:36] I think it was at 9:45 PM, and I was just like, tomorrow, okay, what are we going to talk about? And Andy sends a text message that just goes, is Rue canonically gay?

Speaker 3:
[20:47] I didn't know. I thought I should be prepared with that information.

Speaker 2:
[20:52] But the word canonically is what got me.

Speaker 3:
[20:56] Because first of all, I need to know who she's romantically interested in before she returns in Doomsday.

Speaker 2:
[21:02] Yes. Yes. Yes, Rue is canonically gay.

Speaker 3:
[21:06] Thank you. Was that so hard?

Speaker 2:
[21:07] But it is an interesting situation for you, because I have a question. Now, we're going to talk a lot about the Rue stuff, because that remains the thing that I think I'm most attached to about this show.

Speaker 3:
[21:18] Do you think I should keep a list of questions I almost ask you and deliver them live on the podcast?

Speaker 2:
[21:22] Absolutely. Yeah, I am also not necessarily the keeper of Euphoria lore, nor do I think Euphoria is being overly sanctimonious about everything that's happened in these characters' lives adding up to something.

Speaker 3:
[21:36] Which I appreciate.

Speaker 2:
[21:37] That being said, I wanted to start in a stranger place than maybe you thought I would for this episode, which is Nate, the Jacob Elordi character, who is so far been portrayed as a flustered, I'm in over my head, but I'm ultimately seemingly a good guy who likes to get his work done. I just don't have the money right now for $50,000 worth of flowers for my wedding, but I've got an alcoholic dad who's also quite a sex pest. I have my fiance, Cassie, who is making certain demands of me.

Speaker 3:
[22:13] And making certain content.

Speaker 2:
[22:15] And making content. And also he's in hock to seemingly like an underworld figure for about half a mil.

Speaker 3:
[22:23] Underworld figure in the sense that he services bodies to the underworld.

Speaker 2:
[22:27] Literally, he does seem to be like a funeral home. I also think if he's dealing out $500,000 and is like in a week, that will be $600,000 or whatever.

Speaker 3:
[22:33] Well, you think he has some untoward.

Speaker 2:
[22:35] Yeah, I think the interest rate is maybe above Wells Fargo's, for instance.

Speaker 3:
[22:38] I think Sam Levinson is blowing the lid off this whole coffin thing.

Speaker 2:
[22:41] But guess what, man?

Speaker 3:
[22:42] Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[22:42] Nate's kind of a piece of shit and I didn't know if you knew that.

Speaker 3:
[22:46] No, he seemed like a good guy.

Speaker 2:
[22:48] No, not really. He's pretty dark prince.

Speaker 3:
[22:52] One thing about me, I'm very credulous at people. I take them as I see them.

Speaker 2:
[22:55] I was wondering what you thought. I was wondering, there's a line in this episode when Juana, the aforementioned Juana, the housekeeper, is going through every single thing from their barbecue.

Speaker 3:
[23:05] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[23:06] He's like, would you like to keep this? Would you like to save this? Would you like to save that? At one point he goes, Juana, I'm going to kill you.

Speaker 3:
[23:12] He did say that, yeah.

Speaker 2:
[23:13] Now he says it very dryly. It's a laugh line in the episode, I think. But that's Nate's vibe. Season one to Nate can get pretty fucked up.

Speaker 3:
[23:23] It's very, we mentioned this last week, but there's a Bretty Sinellas aspect to it, that he is a little American psycho, like he is the perfect scion of a West Coast dynasty and has the right jawline to either run for office or to go to jail forever for murder.

Speaker 2:
[23:39] Yes, and so I was curious whether or not you picked up on that as this being your only, your second episode of Euphoria.

Speaker 3:
[23:47] I didn't because this episode, well, I'll say two things. One, part of his storyline is probably at the bottom of my power rankings because this is, we're now two for two in him voicing something that I have to believe is near and dear to creator Sam Levinson's heart, which is that all Californians of good standing care about PNZ laws and how difficult it is to build here.

Speaker 2:
[24:12] Why can't you separate art from artists?

Speaker 3:
[24:13] Literally, the guy's like, all Californian, it's like the pit, he like turns to camera and is like, do you know planning and zoning regulations?

Speaker 2:
[24:19] Is Euphoria the Republican pit?

Speaker 3:
[24:22] Yes, this is how we win at podcasting. Say it slower to the camera.

Speaker 2:
[24:27] Actually, women are allowed to make content about whatever they want, you know what I mean?

Speaker 3:
[24:31] There you go.

Speaker 2:
[24:31] That is sort of what this show is doing.

Speaker 3:
[24:34] I don't know if I agree that all Californians should be worried that it's challenging to build here.

Speaker 2:
[24:40] How do you feel about the zoning laws of this great state?

Speaker 3:
[24:43] It's not my top 20 of current concerns about living in this great state. No, it's really not. But then again, I'm not really part of a real estate empire.

Speaker 2:
[24:52] The ironic thing is that I don't think it's lost that Nate is complaining about starting a somewhat nefariously funded, you know, he's like an honest business man. It's like Nate's the furthest from, you know, I he's like, have these guys move sand around when the developer, when the investors come.

Speaker 3:
[25:12] The reason I've liked my experience watching the show cold is because it is never boring. And I actually feel like this is obviously self-fulfilling, but that my experiment is supporting itself, that like there's very little that I need to be standing on to just be present with these characters as they are going about whatever it is they are building towards in this undoubtedly final season of the show. That said, your question brings up one thing that I was picking up on, which is as certain threads, currents bubble up, some of them are tonal, but some of them feel canonical or biographical in ways that I'm at sea with. And it's hard to...

Speaker 2:
[25:53] The Maddie Cassie-Nate love triangle.

Speaker 3:
[25:58] Absolutely no idea what any of that was about. Nor did I honestly have any idea what Maddie was, who she was, and what she was doing. I found that less compelling.

Speaker 2:
[26:08] Did you look it up on Wikipedia?

Speaker 3:
[26:09] I didn't. I didn't. I was reading the new Jonathan Franzen novel at the time.

Speaker 2:
[26:15] Do you have it with you by any chance?

Speaker 3:
[26:16] I do, but I'm pretty locked in right now, and I'll let you know if that changes. People watching at home will see that's my interest level dips in the show. It's like retreat to the warm embrace of literature, my true home. The backstory of that was a little bit confounding. I guess I will say that the Cassie-Nate relationship, as far as I can tell, I don't actually care what they were like in high school. But I do care about them as a starter pack.

Speaker 2:
[26:49] He used to date Maddie in high school.

Speaker 3:
[26:50] Sure, but them now as a starter pack, upwardly mobile, would-be-Nouveau-Riche couple living in this hellscape, works for me. It's fine.

Speaker 2:
[26:58] I think that the show, it's interesting to hear you say that. I think that the show is very much depicting them as frozen in amber out in Calabasas somewhere and not truly part of the zeitgeist and maybe even tapped into the money stream that runs through Los Angeles.

Speaker 3:
[27:15] Right. Cassie is very excited to be on the roof of the peninsula.

Speaker 2:
[27:18] Yes. And where's like, what was that? Magenta? Fuchsia? What was her top? What color was that?

Speaker 3:
[27:24] I was not staring at her top in that scene. I have to say, I was not focused on that.

Speaker 2:
[27:29] Because what were you looking at?

Speaker 3:
[27:30] The Hildebrandt family in 1971 Chicago, they're the protagonists of Crossroads. It was pretty interesting.

Speaker 2:
[27:36] Did you like this episode of TV?

Speaker 3:
[27:38] I actually, I really did enjoy it. I really enjoy it because the, first of all, I do like the chaos theory approach.

Speaker 2:
[27:46] There's no staring at her top.

Speaker 3:
[27:48] Sorry, does that make me the bad guy? There are other things on the screen. I am enjoying full stop, like we said last week, I'm enjoying Zendaya. I don't know what's going on with this character or where she's headed, but I just think it's pretty funny. And I also really like that I have no sense of how much time is passing at any moment in an episode of the show. So the fact that she goes to this Silver Slipper Club, I have no idea where this is either. It looks like it's only...

Speaker 2:
[28:15] Antelope Valley, Palmdale, Lancaster, maybe Nevada.

Speaker 3:
[28:20] Unclear, but she immediately just starts running shit there and it's just hanging with everyone. I found that to be kind of fun. And I also have to say that I'm interested in the way... Okay, so wait, one step back. During the long gestation period for this season, we had heard all these stories about the type of show that it would, Euphoria, if it were to return, how it would return. And the one that obviously we fixated on was, oh, it's gonna be a private detective show. Watching this episode particularly, there were moments when Sam Levinson moves the camera or sets up scenes in ways that suggest the things that interest him may have outstripped the bounds of the show that he's making. So when Maddie arrives at the peninsula and it does this like wide shot of her crossing the boulevard and it's like classic Hollywood noir, and I'm interested in that. And I kind of like the idea of him casting his Hollywood fantasia, whatever this is, spectacular, with not just the actors from his previous high school piece, but the characters of his high school piece who are now playing very different roles in the movie he wishes he was making. When the show so far has elevated to me this season, that's what he's been doing, and that's when what's on screen and what clearly is in his head seem to align. The moments that I'm less interested in are on the margins, and lead to me almost sending you texts, like I almost did in the first 10 minutes of this episode, asking if this blonde woman coming to LA during COVID was the Cassie origin story. Didn't she go to high school with them? Because again, maybe I wasn't looking at the right part of her. I thought that was Sidney Sweeney.

Speaker 2:
[30:02] No, it was not. You were just staring at her eyes.

Speaker 3:
[30:05] Just locked in.

Speaker 2:
[30:06] It's interesting to hear you say that. I probably give this show credit because it's doing something that I rather enjoy when TV shows at least effort to become, which is the bucket show that allows a show runner, a creator to basically be like, on the side of the bucket, it says Euphoria, or on the side of the bucket, it says Leftovers, or The Americans, or whatever. The industry does this. But we're going to make it a receptacle for everything that we're interested in. And for Sam Levinson, obviously, he is interested in the American dream, the American debt, the absolute attraction repulsion nature of California to the point where he talks about its geological evil magnet that's underneath.

Speaker 3:
[30:52] The big magnet under the soil attracting evil.

Speaker 2:
[30:55] It's spoken by a character named Angel.

Speaker 3:
[30:56] I like that.

Speaker 2:
[30:58] And I think he's obviously playing with a bunch of different styles of filmmaking within this. And for him, you know, if Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney are in something, 20 million people about are going to watch it every week. So it's going to be this big thing. And he can kind of then get away with making a spaghetti western mystery movie if he wants to, or a pop art almost commentary on exploitation slash also a piece of exploitation itself. I think that's fascinating. And I think also this show is not boring. And I've been struggling for the last couple of months with the shows that aren't ones that you can tell that Andy and I have really positively responded to, that it's hard for me to get by on a 65 or a 70 with a show. It's like, it's pretty good. It's like, this show is exciting to watch. I don't know what's going to happen next. Yes, there are things that perhaps offend people. And there are things that I feel like I've watched that pig conversation, like the one that Alamo and Marshawn Lynch have in any number of Tarantino and Tarantino ripoff movies. There's definitely homage that borders on.

Speaker 3:
[32:12] This was Kirkland Tarantino.

Speaker 2:
[32:14] Sure. But I just give it a ton of credit for holding my interest and for being... I don't want this to be clipped, but stimulating.

Speaker 3:
[32:24] I'd like to be clipped, but connected to something we were talking about about two, three minutes earlier. I'll come into the studio with you guys later.

Speaker 2:
[32:33] The show is stimulating.

Speaker 3:
[32:37] I never thought I would say this, but I understand Sam Esmail better. No, when our friend Sam would come on the podcast and do his top ten list, often what he would rail against would be what he was joking about as laundry folding shows. And he would praise things that were aesthetically bold and directorially driven, even past the point of what I and maybe sometimes we felt were reasonable, or entertaining, or even generous in terms of the effort they were making to include an audience. Now, Sam, despite being very successful and very good at making television, historically doesn't love or watch a lot of television. So he's less interested in the things that we praise for hitting familiar, comforting, technically excellent beats like The Pit, for example, or the story connecting the bits on Mad Men, where despite pushing things forward visually and thematically, they are just a family in the workplace at the end of the day. All of that being said, the moment we're in with television, where everything is received through this lens and viewed through this lens, that everything is excellent, and everything is prestige, whether it's because of the money Apple or whomever has spent on it, or the actors who are in it were used to seeing them in films, when, in fact, a lot of the meat of television shows from minute 14 to minute 48 were laundry folding, you know? This will come up with Margo as well, I think. It can be elite laundry folding, but it's laundry folding. And the best thing that I want to say at the end of this long digression is there's no laundry in the show. And if I had been watching it, with any laundry in mind, over the past few years, I think that I would be having a lot harder time just breezing along. But because I have no stakes here, I like the fact that I don't have any idea where it's going. And that everything on the screen, somebody had an idea. Sometimes too many ideas, maybe, and too many ideas piled on top of each other, but they had some ideas.

Speaker 2:
[34:51] Yeah, and I also, I mean, frankly find the photography of Southern California and the desert that he's doing to be as exciting as anything that happens inside of the Silver Slipper. Like, I think that he's doing really, really beautiful work in being evocative of the entirety of the Southern California region.

Speaker 3:
[35:10] Yeah, Southern California, not LA in a way.

Speaker 2:
[35:13] But it's relationship to Los Angeles and this idea of suburbs and city, it's almost antiquated or at least because I moved here so late in life, it never really resonated with me as like, you growing up in the valley, but going into the city for fun, like that doesn't scan for me.

Speaker 3:
[35:29] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[35:30] But it is obviously something as an LA kid that he is thinking about. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[35:34] Maybe as an LA kid he's thinking about that, but also maybe as an LA rich person, he's thinking about it the same way like the great Kanye song, More Parties in LA, which is basically about how annoying it is to drive from Calabasas to a party. Super relatable. But this is a show built by people who exist only in siloed spaces and only ever traverse through the middle of the city, either ironically or being driven in an air-conditioned SUV. I'm not saying that Ru's perspective is of a rich person, but I think the vision of it, which is not to invalidate the vision. It is incredibly haunting and it feels very of the moment, and it's claustrophobic and also agoraphobic in equal measure. But everything about it is siloed, and I think intentionally and I feel like that aesthetically is interesting to me, that Cassie goes from her golden prison somewhere out in the hills, and where she goes that's exciting to her is the roof of a building. We never see her actually touch the ground, and suddenly she's around people again, or at the very end when Ru goes to visit Jules, who is a character I've never seen before or encountered before.

Speaker 2:
[36:41] Jules is a major, major, major character on the show.

Speaker 3:
[36:44] Once again, like absolute siloed somewhere at the penthouse of a building with no one else around.

Speaker 2:
[36:50] Yeah, a lot of Jules and Ru, this is, Jules has historically been the sort of, I would say the love of Ru's life, but in some ways, you wonder whether she is just an object of her kind of fascination and affection more than it is like a life partner kind of thing, just because of the way they are talking at the end of that episode. A lot of their romance tends to happen in an almost fantasy world, at least to my eye visually. And you could see in the flashback of Jules' time at art school, when Ru goes to visit her, it's taking place in a loft that looks like a sound stage basically. And that-

Speaker 3:
[37:32] It's like a Hollywood romance.

Speaker 2:
[37:33] And her high rise apartment, luxury apartment that she's living in, that Jules is living in at the end, has like the fakest of fake sort of nightscapes outside of the window. So I think from scene to scene and from story line to story line and from coupling to coupling throughout the show, it almost has a completely different visual language. It's to a credit, to the show's credit, that you can have something like Sidney Sweeney's bubblegum far out pop, pop, pop LA, the sort of glam luxury night noire of Jules' LA, Rue's desertscape, and that you can go from Sidney Sweeney's pretty comic arc so far this season, to Rue in a bathroom with another woman telling her that her best friend just died of a fentanyl overdose and that it's being kept from her, and then that woman spiraling out on drugs.

Speaker 3:
[38:33] Who's the character who I met last night who I'm forgetting? Who's working as a management manager of Nate's ex?

Speaker 2:
[38:40] Maddie.

Speaker 3:
[38:42] And Maddie's story line, which is more or less the Rachel Sennett story line from I Love LA., which is just like the day to day nuts and bolts of managing this crazy town. But I say that to support your point that there's all these different visions of it. Ultimately, in terms of vision, why I am like good faith enjoying this exercise is because the shot of Rue begging her mother to come home while a gas station light, the gas station goes out behind her, is, it's an astonishing image. It's a beautiful image. She's acting the hell out of it. And every so often, every time the show starts to trip into something where I want to take out my like stern little red pen and mark it up, it does something that is genuinely moving and quite eye-catching and breathtaking and beautiful. And that's enough to keep me going. I would say largely, and we don't need to segue now, although we could, and you don't need to have watched both episodes for this point to be relevant and not spoilery, Euphoria and Margo have both staked out some terrain on OnlyFans Island.

Speaker 2:
[39:49] What a moment for OnlyFans.

Speaker 3:
[39:50] Great. I'm just glad the little guys are succeeding.

Speaker 2:
[39:53] Well, the guy who made OnlyFans is dead.

Speaker 3:
[39:55] Oh, no. Did he set everything up? So are his children going to benefit? Look, probate court is a mess. You know, so I hope that he had his affairs in order.

Speaker 2:
[40:07] I think it was the OnlyFans guy.

Speaker 3:
[40:09] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[40:10] Yeah, it was.

Speaker 3:
[40:11] But we don't know about who's...

Speaker 2:
[40:13] I don't know what the boos' heirs are. Yeah, I mean, in some ways, we all are. We're all sharing in the wealth because OnlyFans redistributes, you know, it goes back to the content creators.

Speaker 3:
[40:23] You know, really, Karl Marx was only a fan of that kind of redistribution of wealth.

Speaker 2:
[40:28] Yes, we could get into Margo if you'd like.

Speaker 3:
[40:30] But we don't need to segue necessarily. I just wanted to make the point that... The euphoria vision of this is in keeping with there is a devil magnet underneath the San Andreas Fault and everything is absolutely cynical and evil. And this is just a turbocharged vacuum attached to what was already a soul-sucking enterprise of celebrity and fame and devaluation of human spirit. And then you have the Margo vision of it, which is, isn't that neat? We can all take advantage of this and become better people and pay for diapers. And I would like to posit, I know this is a little radical, that somewhere in the middle of these two aesthetic viewpoints, there might be some nuance in an even more interesting story.

Speaker 2:
[41:10] I wish you luck with your third way.

Speaker 3:
[41:12] My third way. I'm going to do the Andrew Yang storyline of OnlyFans. Clip that, I dare you.

Speaker 2:
[41:18] I'm trying to think if I had anything else really to say about Euphoria. There's not, obviously, Eric Dane, this is his final performance on camera.

Speaker 3:
[41:29] Do you think he will appear in other episodes? I do.

Speaker 2:
[41:31] I do think that this season seems to be building towards this wedding. We have not watched ahead, but obviously the wedding is an opportunity to bring together the entire cast in a way that I don't know necessarily we will have otherwise. I would imagine, given everybody's release schedules in the major movie theaters, that he shot Zendaya stuff and sometimes Alexis Demi would be on set for that. He shot Sidney Sweeney stuff with Jacob Elordi. I think he had to work around a lot of schedules to do this. So maybe some of the separation is representative of that. But then again, you're not necessarily always around people you went to high school with even if you live in the same city. So I think it is a legitimate depiction of their lives, even if it doesn't necessarily feel like they're all on the same TV show all the time.

Speaker 3:
[42:25] I have not seen what people have, many people have celebrated Eric Dane's performance on the show, that it was very different than what he had done before. But even without that knowledge, I thought this was pretty great.

Speaker 2:
[42:38] I have to say that him being vulnerable enough about his illness, but that took his, I believe it was MS, correct?

Speaker 3:
[42:46] No, he had Lou Gehrig's ALS.

Speaker 2:
[42:48] Sorry, ALS. To take that and be like, what I'll do is have, we can have Cal basically always four beers deep.

Speaker 3:
[42:56] Yeah, and seeded and they treated, seemingly treated him with dignity and gave him the opportunity to deliver a very good performance that was not in any way like a, it wasn't just like a moist-eyed tribute.

Speaker 2:
[43:07] Yeah, here you go, big guy. Thanks, man. Yeah, it was really cool. Honestly, just the Zendaya note that I will hit every week, which is that she's compulsively watchable. She communicates so much of the necessary ambiguity that should come with a show like this because it would be easy to take everything at face value. But obviously, her trepidation, so as you obviously probably have deduced, the Rue character has been through several rehab and intervention situations, including just absolutely astonishing intervention in the second season. Her dropping Angel off at this sort of, it looks like K-Town sort of fly-by-night rehab facility that didn't quite scream wellness to me.

Speaker 3:
[43:59] Yeah, it seemed like she was going to be...

Speaker 2:
[44:01] It seemed like a way station. It seemed like where you stash people that you don't want out in the world for whatever reason.

Speaker 3:
[44:06] Potentially never want them to appear again.

Speaker 2:
[44:07] Yes, and the lighting of that whole scene and her promising her that she was going to come pick her up in a couple of weeks, I thought was great and that they never come out and have Rue say like, this place doesn't seem like a reputable facility, but I'm going to look into it. It's just everything is looks, everything is the texture of the plexiglass between the person who's just playing video games behind the counter. It's just really good.

Speaker 3:
[44:30] The one counter to your beautiful bucket analogy that I generally agree with in terms of ongoing television shows, because honestly nothing is worse than a show in which the creative team behind it has lost interest in what they're doing and going through the motions. I'll say that even as potentially overheated and pulp fiction coded as the whole Alamo Silver Slipper storyline is, I would be really interested in this is the first season of that show, of Zendaya working at this place in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 2:
[45:05] Zendaya's strip club Michael Clayton.

Speaker 3:
[45:08] When you put it like that, but yeah, like that pops. Yeah. And the rest of the stuff is interesting, but it is not that.

Speaker 2:
[45:15] I'm just going to throw up a quick note here, which is I was trying to do a power poll of shows that are on right now. This is like a post pit rooster DTF. So stuff that's-

Speaker 3:
[45:27] We were very busy watching all three of those shows.

Speaker 2:
[45:29] I think I gave DTF a college try. I have not received, there's never been a show I have received more contentious e-mails about. It's basically insisting that I did not get it and that I should try again.

Speaker 3:
[45:45] People want Joe Russo to go back and change the ending to that podcast. Like they're changing Endgame. Yeah. So that you become a big DTF fan.

Speaker 2:
[45:53] So Bill Simmons often does power polls in the midst of an NBA season where he's just like, I'm just going to go from bottom to top here or from top to bottom and rank these shows. We have not watched maybe enough of this to do a hearty power poll. For instance, I have not watched any of The Miniature Wife with Elizabeth Banks and Matthew McFadden.

Speaker 3:
[46:12] Neither have I.

Speaker 2:
[46:13] But Margo's Got Money Troubles, Your Friends and Neighbors, Euphoria Beef, Big Mistakes, which is the new series from Dan Levy on Netflix, which honestly wasn't that bad. I watched two episodes of that.

Speaker 3:
[46:26] Look at you doing the work.

Speaker 2:
[46:27] Honestly, it's like an end of the evening kind of like before we fall asleep thing. And I was like, this is pretty good.

Speaker 3:
[46:32] It's a comedy.

Speaker 2:
[46:33] Yeah. Bandi, which we talked about last week. Rochante's new Martinique based.

Speaker 3:
[46:40] What were the numbers on our Bandi convo?

Speaker 2:
[46:42] I don't know. It's still in the top 10 of Netflix. You know what I'm saying? Like sometimes you got to look beyond your echo chamber.

Speaker 3:
[46:48] Thank you. Appreciate that.

Speaker 2:
[46:50] Hacks, which I have not discussed. Have you discussed it when I wasn't looking? No. Okay. Abbott Elementary, which I still watch and still love.

Speaker 3:
[46:59] Huge in my house, but we're behind. The kids are watching it on Hulu a season. We're behind.

Speaker 2:
[47:04] Then two AMC shows, one which I have often said to my own detriment, I have not watched Dark Winds, but I want to and I was half thinking about-

Speaker 3:
[47:14] Just Euphoria.

Speaker 2:
[47:14] Going to Greenwald and just jumping in on season four and then if it works going back. The Audacity, which is a new series with Billy Magnussen and Zach Galifianakis.

Speaker 3:
[47:26] I feel like we owe that a watch.

Speaker 2:
[47:28] Because we run AMC as a network.

Speaker 3:
[47:30] Well, no, we're going to be inheriting it and we're going to have to make the decision about re-enlightening season two.

Speaker 2:
[47:34] Inheritance seems to be on your mind.

Speaker 3:
[47:36] That's heavy. Yeah, yeah, you know, I'm trying to accrue powers of attorney as much as possible across, you know, any field in relation to my parents.

Speaker 2:
[47:47] Do you think you'd like that responsibility for me?

Speaker 3:
[47:49] To have your power of attorney?

Speaker 2:
[47:50] Yeah, you just be letting all my doctors know DNR.

Speaker 3:
[47:54] Listen, he's here for a good time, not a long time.

Speaker 2:
[47:58] Because he tore his labor and weight lifting, but don't take any extraordinary measures to keep this guy on the table.

Speaker 3:
[48:03] By all means, compliment him on what it's done to his physique. No, I don't want that smoke.

Speaker 2:
[48:10] In your estimation, I mean, obviously, I think, against all odds, Euphoria would seemingly be your number one right now.

Speaker 3:
[48:16] Yeah, although I, you know, I'm approaching beef with excitement and optimism.

Speaker 2:
[48:22] With an open and an empty stomach.

Speaker 3:
[48:24] An empty stomach, big appetite.

Speaker 2:
[48:26] Yeah, so this is an interesting moment.

Speaker 3:
[48:28] That there's no clear alphas, what you're saying.

Speaker 2:
[48:30] Yeah, and I think also with something like Your Friends and Neighbors, which has already been renewed for season three, and I could see being a four, five, six, for as long as Ham wants to do this kind of thing, you kind of get to a point where there's some of these shows and you're like, this is gonna be what it is, and I will, if I like it, I'll keep watching it.

Speaker 3:
[48:50] Before we even answer the question you're smartly asking, I will say that this is an interesting snapshot of kind of what TV is now, in a way that it hasn't been.

Speaker 2:
[48:58] Yeah, this is what I wanted to get into. This is the stuff.

Speaker 3:
[49:00] A number of the shows you're mentioning, especially shows like Your Friends and Neighbors and Rooster, those are ongoing shows. They're designed to be ongoing shows. They're gonna be greenlit before the first seasons or current seasons have ended. And similarly, the other types of shows that we're talking about on the margins, Margo and stuff, like there's, if Apple had its way, there's always going to be a Margo-like show on the air. And we will discuss and debate the merits of the show in particular, which I think is worthy of our conversation. But what's interesting about all the shows we're talking about is that they are starry at a certain level and they are safe at a certain level. And I don't mean that judgmentally. When we talk about them individually, I'm happy to be judgmental about their attitude towards risk and storytelling. But they are dependable. And even like Your Friends and Neighbors in the season 3 announcement, and this wasn't a surprise that it was getting renewed again, even before the second season premiered. Much like last year, they said, it's coming back and James Marsden will be one of the Friends and Neighbors. This year, Michelle Monahan is joining Friends and Neighbors. And who better to represent that certain type of affable, contemporary television plus celebrity than those two? Very, very high approval ratings. Good in basically everything, dependable, and feel like the people who have always been on these shows, even if they haven't been before, and even if they're only doing an arc.

Speaker 2:
[50:25] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[50:26] This is a relatively healthy snapshot of a moment that even if we're not engaging with a lot of it, or are we necessarily fired up about it?

Speaker 2:
[50:34] And I think some of it is firing these shows all off around one another to get in under the wire for Emmy consideration.

Speaker 3:
[50:41] Usually that window ends around May 31st.

Speaker 2:
[50:44] So the next couple of weeks will also be busy. I'll be curious to revisit this list after we've gotten a chance to maybe watch some more of Beef, Maybe the Audacity. I think we'll pick Hacks up as a where are we at as the final season comes to a close kind of thing. Let's talk about Margo, a show from David E. Kelly. It's adapted from a novel by Rufy Thorpe. It's only 2024 novel, so it's a quick turnaround from page to screen.

Speaker 3:
[51:11] She's been recommended to me as a bard of Cambridge County.

Speaker 2:
[51:15] Do you know Rufy Thorpe at all?

Speaker 1:
[51:17] Yeah, I read this book.

Speaker 2:
[51:18] There you go. This is actually useful. Kaya, if you feel like it, please jump in. I don't have a specific prompt for you. I felt mid about it. That's how I feel about this show. But here's what I want to ask you. Ever since The Wire, we've talked about TV as the great opportunity to novelize story, to tell a long form story. And I think now we've kind of bled into, especially since Apple has thrown its weight around in the adaptation space and Amazon as well. And a bunch of these places are now like just buying up novels that seem to have a viable screen story for TV. If you gave me El Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer and Nick Offerman, and if you even gave me a Fullerton English student unexpectedly gets pregnant by her creative writing teacher or her writing teacher and decides to keep the baby. I don't know if in like a hundred years I would have come up with this specific mixture of character and tone that this show did. And I wonder whether or not it's just because it's like, we're adapting this book and that's what the book is like. But I'm starting to wonder whether or not TV is the right place to adapt novels. Because this to me is like a perfectly fine example of like in 1996, this would have been an adaptation of a Mona Simpson novel that lots of people liked.

Speaker 3:
[52:50] Can you imagine Curtis Hansen's Margo's Got Money Troubles?

Speaker 2:
[52:53] Absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 3:
[52:55] Would have been very enjoyable and it would have been better than anyone expected and really satisfying.

Speaker 2:
[53:01] Yes. And there's something about this. You were talking about the safety of it. I think we were talking about the element of surprise that Euphoria packs in to each scene, to each shot. Yeah. Part of it is because I know what is going to happen on this show, because you watch a trailer for it, so you know that Margo gets into OnlyFans and you know that her father was an ex-professional wrestler who's gotten out of rehab to come back to her.

Speaker 3:
[53:30] Yeah. I mean, the log line of the book was like, it almost felt like a ChatGPT stunt to get optioned. Which is, again, people really like the book. Kaya, not so much, but it was a hit book and it is a legitimate thing. I am not trying to discredit the author, but the series of words strung together, I was like, well, that's going to get adapted.

Speaker 2:
[53:53] I've been having this sensation when I'm watching shows now. Kate Heron directed the third episode. It looks cool. Elle Fanning is wonderful.

Speaker 3:
[54:01] Dierba Walsh, who did Bad Sisters, was a really talented Irish director.

Speaker 2:
[54:06] I hate when scenes start and I know exactly how they're going to end.

Speaker 3:
[54:09] Oh, I am. If you think I'm insufferable, imagine me watching the show saying what was going to happen in this. Yes.

Speaker 2:
[54:15] And it's not like, oh, let me guess, she's actually going to do OnlyFans, but I mean, let me guess she's going to get insulted by this HR work person, or let me guess Michelle Pfeiffer is not going to be able to take care of the babies tonight, so she's going to ruin her restaurant job, or let me guess. And yes, like TV, there's a huge swath of television where I'm like, I want a reliable, repeatable, emotional experience along with a couple of laughs or a couple of thrills every week for 42 minutes or 59 minutes or an hour and five minutes or whatever it is. But more and more, I think TV like the pit and industry and, you know, Euphoria kind of makes it hard for me to watch stuff where I'm like, no shit. Well, that happened.

Speaker 3:
[55:05] If you're committing to 8, 10 hours of something, you don't necessarily want extremity, which I think is what was a misunderstanding of a lot of the last 10 years in terms of pushing genre things or violence or shock to the forefront to get people to keep watching. You don't need to be surprised. I think you ought to be delighted. When you get the feeling that things are moving along a predictable track, that for me, saps my enthusiasm of spending this much time watching something. Now, if I had a lot of laundry to fold, I get it. I will also say that this is from the book. This might be considered a zag, considering I am the Dattington of this particular island, but I do find the unexpected pregnancy story arc to be diminishing returns. I dare someone to show me a version of this story that follows a different path, other than throwing up in public and finding out the hard way and taking multiple tests and saying no, no, no, and then the chat. It's hard, and this is a legitimate part of the human experience, but dramatically, it's increasingly kind of inert because it follows a very similar pattern. Before we get specifically even more into the weeds of the show, I wanted to say some positives. I think that the, first of all, production design, I'm biased, this is Richard Bloom who worked on my show, but I think he did a beautiful job showing a part of, attention Sam Levinson, a part of Southern California that is very specific and not the version you often see. This is like on the outskirts of Pomona-ish. And one of the things that I noticed that I really appreciated is like in Margo's apartment, Margo is the main character played by L. Fanning. It doesn't look like poverty porn.

Speaker 2:
[56:46] No.

Speaker 3:
[56:47] And it doesn't look like there's a bowl of plums on the table for no reason.

Speaker 2:
[56:50] Right.

Speaker 3:
[56:50] Which is often the case.

Speaker 2:
[56:52] It's right in the middle.

Speaker 3:
[56:52] It's right in the middle. It's like, oh, some people live here and sometimes they eat cereal. And I noticed that in location to location to location. And when the show does like put a little curly queue on it, like the scene in Bloomingdale's when Margo has sort of a panic attack and falls on the ground, Michelle Pfeiffer is yelling at her to get up. You can see that he hung these like furry, Cassie and Nate-esque lilac lamps over her, which I don't believe are a feature of Bloomingdale's, but accentuated the shot.

Speaker 2:
[57:17] I was just in Bloomingdale's last weekend. And I did not see them.

Speaker 3:
[57:19] You're shopping for strollers?

Speaker 2:
[57:20] No.

Speaker 3:
[57:21] As a gift.

Speaker 2:
[57:22] We were looking for home goods and we went to a Bloomingdale's that didn't have them.

Speaker 3:
[57:24] OK, well, you should go to the one near Pomona. It's classier. And the original music is by Nathan McKay. We love from industry and executive producer and I think essentially day-to-day showrunners, Eva Anderson, who's an incredibly talented writer who I work with, who I love to see her succeed in something like this. I will also credit one other huge thing here that maybe goes against our initial take. The episodes are like 36 to 42 minutes. Bravo.

Speaker 2:
[57:55] Huge. Let's normalize this. Once you get through your Friends and Neighbors trailer, you get 38 minutes.

Speaker 3:
[58:01] Although, this started with a trailer for itself.

Speaker 2:
[58:03] Yes.

Speaker 3:
[58:03] Which I was like, relax, Apple. You have a winner, I'm here. I really appreciated that. Like, there's nothing, few things worse, few things worse than you fire it up and it's like 64 minutes. But you know what else is worse than that? A 36 minute half hour comedy. But if you tell me it's an hour long drama and you hit that 40 minute sweet spot, I'm paying attention.

Speaker 2:
[58:26] I sincerely would probably, I would watch every episode of Fallout if they were 42 minutes.

Speaker 3:
[58:31] It makes a huge difference.

Speaker 2:
[58:32] Huge difference.

Speaker 3:
[58:33] So there's that. I think the other thing I will say that's really positive is I think Nick Offerman is amazing so far in this show. Three episodes in, he's playing a, just out of rehab, former wrestling great.

Speaker 2:
[58:46] Named Jinx.

Speaker 3:
[58:46] Named Jinx. This feels a little like, you know, you talking about the tops on Euphoria to say this, but like the version of the show focusing on the man is pretty interesting. He's really good.

Speaker 2:
[59:02] Well, this is kind of the thing is like.

Speaker 3:
[59:05] But it's a different show.

Speaker 2:
[59:06] Yeah. And I was most delighted by the opening episode, the first episode, specifically El Fanning in college. And like maybe being in Fullerton and having a gift that should be bigger than Fullerton.

Speaker 3:
[59:23] And the great Michael Angarano, who I love, wearing a weird gold button blazer.

Speaker 2:
[59:27] Yeah, but like suburban, ex-burban California, higher education, living in an apartment with a bunch of roommates who all seem like they could have their quirks and would be pretty interesting to get to know. And El Fanning kind of working at a Bennigan's or a Chili's or whatever and having dreams beyond Fullerton, but not really sure how to get to them. But in a different world, that's enough.

Speaker 3:
[59:55] That's a good show.

Speaker 2:
[59:56] That's a good show, man. Like I would watch El Fanning doing Frances Ha, you know? Like I would watch her kind of just be like, yeah, like I wish there was something bigger out there for me. But I think part of it might be because when you get big, big, big stars, like Michelle Pfeiffer, who is married to David E. Kelly and I think has made a turn to television in these last few months with The Madison in this. Her story line with Greg Kinnear is kind of bigger than I thought it would be or maybe bigger than it needs to be. And then Offerman could just be a dad that comes back into the picture, but you add on this whole element of wrestling.

Speaker 3:
[60:35] It's a lot of extra. But I would also, and the baby becoming the fulcrum to reunite this kooky family, and make things work out. I mean, look at us. We're just a couple of kids who started a TV podcast, and now we're talking about Michelle Pfeiffer projects twice a month. So really, the culture moved to us. So thank you. Gratitude, practice gratitude. I found the tone and the consistency of the characters to be all over the place. And I wondered if it was the creeping reach of celebrity. And what I mean by that is when we first meet Michelle Pfeiffer's Cheyenne character, she is, and it's interesting, she is made up heavily and is seemingly trying to embody this lower-class ex-Hooders waitress piecing it together, now trying to pretend to be a different person to marry a preacher who apparently only dines at chain restaurants, played by Greg Kinnear. The next time we see her, she looks completely different and a little bit more like she does on the Madison, which is Michelle Pfeiffer looks incredible all the time at any age of her life and in any setting. And she seemed a lot softer and more likeable and nicer. And so then when the turn is that she won't hold the baby, her grandchild or take care of him or help or talk to her daughter, it felt like suddenly we've twisted it again. The drift towards likeability and wanting to be a hero in a story that almost inevitably will turn to some kind of mush started really, really early. Maybe it's the familiarity with these characters, maybe it's a little bit of the ego of who they want to play and how they want to be seen, that creeping in. But what I didn't understand really was the troubles that anybody was in. Up until a certain point, everything seems to be working out fine. She's spending hundreds of dollars and diapers and things up until one of the roommate moves out. And then suddenly the crisis is writ large for us. Suddenly she says, I could have moved in back with you, but your dress is filled in the other rooms. And I don't really understand the peril. Everything is a little bit agreeable. Everything is a little bit nice until it's not for the purposes of the plot. So a character who is kind in one scene comes over to pick another fight with someone else because we're in episode three and we need more conflict.

Speaker 1:
[62:51] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[62:51] And we introduce, I think it's in, is it two or three that we introduce Marsha Gay Harden who plays Michael Arango's mother.

Speaker 3:
[63:00] Michael Angorano's character is a professor, the father of the baby. Marsha Gay Harden shows up, really shows up and turnt up as a character who immediately announces that her hair looks like a skunk and she has some- Sorry, a raccoon. Are you sure it was a raccoon? I think it was skunk.

Speaker 2:
[63:16] Raccoon because she's like, and I fight like one too.

Speaker 3:
[63:18] That's generally, again, I've been paying a lot of attention to inheritance and family matters and legal stuff. That's generally how people behave in legal mediation type of circumstances. You show up and you say, I'm a villain. Now, please speak to my attorney. It's all over the place.

Speaker 2:
[63:38] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[63:39] Right. I feel like I'm sounding more negative than I intended to be because it is a good expression of what Apple likes to do and tends to do on things either executive produced by Nicole Kidman or spiritually executive produced by Nicole Kidman.

Speaker 2:
[63:52] It's maybe it's Hello Sunshine Corps, but it's also like it's not dissimilar to how I feel about the episodes of Shrinking that I've watched, which is this is about taking these incredibly vulnerable, destabilizing moments in characters' lives, but creating the feeling that everything is fine and safe and good and cushioning. I don't mind going either way. You know what I mean? I don't necessarily need everything to be last exit to Brooklyn, but if somebody loses their wife in a car accident or someone has an unexpected pregnancy and finds themselves in dire straits economically, I find it difficult to sometimes square the circle of, but actually in terms of the televisual experience that you're going to have, it's fine. It's safe and it's cool and it's nice, and you're going to get to know and love these characters. Honestly, let's just try to keep these characters in play for two, three seasons, but keep them more or less in the same IU. So we're going to want them all existing in this same world and in these same circumstances forever. In some ways, that's how I feel about your friends and neighbors, which is a cool concept that I would have liked to have watched a 90-minute to 120-minute movie about a guy who's fallen out from an investment bank and starts robbing houses in his rich neighborhood. But when you're like, here's episode 11 of him doing this same thing.

Speaker 3:
[65:21] But also, the central problem with your friends and neighbors, and maybe this is just the note that they don't give it Apple, or maybe this is just Apple where everything is smooth and contoured and works out fine.

Speaker 2:
[65:31] Maybe they're like, this is exactly what we want.

Speaker 3:
[65:32] That's what I'm saying. Jon Hamm's character in Your Friends and Neighbors turns to a life of crime for reasons that are kind of shrug emoji. Like he loses his job that pays him seven figures, so he starts stealing paintings. But don't worry, his daughter still gets into Princeton. Like the stakes are never really that bad for them, even when they try to create the sense that they are. He, the biggest risk he has is of maybe not being able to pay for the tennis club membership anymore or hang out in the sauna with his equally rich friends. This is not really a problem. It is a conceit for a television show, fine. But we are living in this moment where it does feel like some of these streamers, studios, creators are trying to cherry pick the trappings of a grungier, more intense kind of drama that we have history and success with on television. But really just standing off the edges and making it TV.

Speaker 2:
[66:30] Maybe you can't get in the door unless you're like, here's the sticky, hooky part of this. If you pitch Jon Hamm loses his job at a big-time investment fund or private, you know, badge fund, and in the midst of a divorce, needs to recalibrate how he fits in to this Tony Long Island community. That's just like Jon Hamm doing Jon Cheever, and I'd probably be really into it, and I wouldn't have any expectations about how he does and doesn't change. But to get it sticky, you have to be like, and then he turns to a life of crime. But don't worry, it's not like Breaking Bad, where like...

Speaker 3:
[67:05] It's not like Breaking Bad. I mean, this is the example. It is not something we generally do, which is hold up one of the generally acknowledged...

Speaker 2:
[67:13] Greatest shows ever.

Speaker 3:
[67:14] Rushmore shows ever and say, well, you're not doing that. Nobody needs to do that. Very few people could do that. And if they did it again, we'd be like, you're just doing that. I hear all of that. But early on in that show, Walter White reaches the first of what ends up being dozens, on dozens of absolutely existentially catastrophic decision points. And he does the thing that you can't believe that he's going to do. It begins with the first, the guy who's in the basement, who they then have to, they melt his body in the bathtub. You can't really walk back from that. What a lot of these other shows do is they create a clever opportunity and circumstance parachute to get away from, you go near the body in the bathtub, but then you're not really responsible for it. And he was just sleeping anyway. And you're off to flirt with Danger again the next week.

Speaker 2:
[68:03] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[68:05] That's kind of a bummer. And I can understand why you might do it in an ongoing show, but...

Speaker 2:
[68:12] But it's like something about the mechanics of the storytelling sticks out to me too. If you were going to pitch Justified as a movie, you would pitch it as Oliphant vs. Goggins, and the end of the movie would be their showdown. If you pitch it as a TV show, you're like, this is a week-to-week show about a really cool marshal who returns home to Kentucky after he gets in trouble in Florida and has to deal with all of the, like, rural crime outside of Lexington and the hills, you know. And that's awesome. And then it emerges over the course of the season that there's going to be this big bad. But they are like, from any given week, you're not going to know what the story is going to be. And it's all these different cool little procedural marshal stories. I don't think that they are using the same logic of like what makes an entertaining television show week-to-week anymore, understandably, because a lot of people are waiting for all the episodes of Your Friends and Neighbors to go up so that they then just watch them over a weekend or whatever. And I don't know, with Margo, it's the same thing. It's like, how long can you do a show about someone who didn't expect to be a mother and now is?

Speaker 3:
[69:25] Well, I think...

Speaker 2:
[69:26] You probably could do it for a while, I guess.

Speaker 3:
[69:28] But we could separate the conversation because, Kaya, how would you characterize the book? Is the book surprisingly dark at times, or is it essentially a fun read that touches on contemporary society?

Speaker 1:
[69:41] Yeah, I would say the latter.

Speaker 2:
[69:43] I think my issues with the book are also like my... I watched the first episode of this and my... I think the tone of the book was a little bit off-putting to me, similarly in the way that the tone of this show is a little bit off-putting, where it just feels like overly twee.

Speaker 3:
[69:59] Yeah, I think... Like, I don't think... It's not necessarily fair to combine that into this conversation, because if this is true to the spirit of the book, like one thing that David Kelly is just expert at, and especially in this later part of his career, is he's really good at finding the thing that made the thing successful. And he just expands on that and celebrates it. So turning this into a glossy but affirming sort of twee magical creative family story, that's fine. There's plenty of space for that on TV. There are a lot of talented people working to make that happen. And maybe it'll have a couple twists and turns along the way. And also with a show like this, it's like, oh, that's Carrie Kenny Silver in one scene being funny. That's Laura San Giacomo as a minor character. We haven't seen her in a minute. That's great to see. Like, it's attracting Marsha Gay-Harden. Like, it's of a very, very, very high level. But the bummer is when that sensibility, that kind of Apple just contoured, smoothing everything out sensibility, becomes the lingua franca of the medium or becomes the expected thing. Now, to bring it all the way back to the first point we were making when you were talking about what's out there right now, historically TV is pretty laundry folding and affirming and magical and fill space and fill time. And it's okay to bring some of that back into our lives. The pit proves that you can be pretty boundary pushing and thrilling within using some of that old language. I think the problem becomes when all of the resources at the shrinking number of streaming services pour all of those resources into that. Now, we're not at that point. There's still 300 new shows.

Speaker 2:
[71:35] Absolutely.

Speaker 3:
[71:36] And Apple UK especially is putting out a lot of really interesting things.

Speaker 2:
[71:38] And this also might speak to the difference between watching TV as a professional pursuit versus watching TV as a way to let off steam at the end of a long day. So I acknowledge that, but there is something fuzzy going on with me and with these shows, where I'm just like, I'm not connecting with as many as I usually do.

Speaker 3:
[71:59] Well, I think that goes back to the... I think you were right about the shrinking observation. And I also think that it's just a lot of hours to fill. Like, not many stories are deserving of this much of our time, frankly. You know, and some, even some of the spy shows that maybe people think we overrate, it's like, well, I also read a lot of spy books in my spare time and probably couldn't tell you about half the plots. Like, that is something that I enjoy doing once I'm in that world. But I wouldn't give the same, I probably wouldn't give the same grace to books in different genres just to fill time. It would have to earn my attention.

Speaker 2:
[72:31] Thanks for your participation in the show today. Thanks to Sarah, Kaya.

Speaker 3:
[72:36] Do you think I had other plans? No.

Speaker 2:
[72:39] I got another podcast I got to go to.

Speaker 3:
[72:40] Oh, well, please, by all means.

Speaker 2:
[72:41] And we'll be back on Thursday with Beef Top Chef and...

Speaker 3:
[72:47] Wild Card?

Speaker 2:
[72:48] I mean, I listed all those shows. Maybe we should check out The Audacity for that.

Speaker 3:
[72:50] I mean, I don't want to overcommit, because it's kind of a busy week, you know, with all the probate stuff I got going on.

Speaker 2:
[72:55] I don't really, I gotta get to the bottom of this.

Speaker 3:
[72:57] That was just a bit.

Speaker 2:
[72:58] Thanks everybody for listening. We'll be back on Thursday.