Chapo Trap House - Bonus: This is Sus 7 – A Million Little Things, Part 2 feat. T & Jack Wagner

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

Felix is joined by Yeah, But Still's Jack Wagner and T from Champaign Sharks to discuss ABC's hit dramedy "A Million Little Things". Yeah, But Still on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/yeahbutstill or subscribe to their premium feed: https://www.patreon.com/yeahbutstill Champaign Sharks on Soundcloud:https://soundcloud.com/champagnesharks or subscribe on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/champagnesharks

Hello everybody. Welcome to another week of This Is Us. We're doing another return episode. We are returning to one of the most strange and disconcerting shows that we have watched. One of the shows that does not have the smooth features of This Is Us or Council of Dads, the disgusting lack of edges that pass through your body designed to just be digested by people being pump full of pharmaceuticals. Now this is a very difficult watch show that sort of makes you nauseous. I'm talking of course about a million little things and I am joined again by Jack Wagner and new guest, Ricky Rawls from Champagne Sharks. Hello guys. Hey. Hey. How's it going? I'm good. I've been very excited to talk about this but before I like do we do every episode

where I go down my recap of the show and you guys just jump in wherever. What did you guys think of what we just watched? I mean it's hard for me to not go Galaxy Brain immediately with this so I could hold myself back but this one, I have so many things. There's so many things I want to jump into immediately but I don't want to like... It's a million little things you have to jump into. Yeah a million little things if you will. There are a couple main things. I mean I'm slowly losing my mind while I watch this show because it's just increasingly disconnected from any sense of reality and I'm sure in terms of the larger This Is Sus universe there's a couple things in this episode that I think just completely cracked me in half. Oh absolutely. Yeah I'm sure

we'll get to. Yeah my sanity is fucking cracking but I think just as like I'm just going to catch everyone up to speed before I begin the recap. So last episode the pilot of Million Little Things, Ron Livingston plays this guy John who's a very successful businessman who's beloved by all. He commits suicide very suddenly without warning and it sort of cracks open the seams of his groups of friends. We find out that his friend Rome tried to kill himself that day also and has been suffering from depression. We see his other friend Gary who's a breast cancer survivor begin a relationship with a woman from a breast cancer survivor's group and we see that his friend Eddie has been having an affair because he's unhappy in his marriage. Later we find out that Eddie has actually

been having an affair with John's wife Delilah which was a secret and we find that out at the end of the pilot and there's a question over whether John knew or not and if that's why he committed suicide. John also left behind a grieving family and I guess in a very generous way of describing it I could say that this show deals with these issues but we'll get into that. I'm going to start recapping this though. I want to just tell you real quick about this show that's really weird right is that this show somehow is very banal and like tedious but also about earth-shattering things at once and it makes this weird cognitive distance or disconnect. If they don't remind you periodically that the driving narrative of this is their best friend's recent suicide you would just think it

was a random episode of just like 7th Heaven or something. I know exactly what you're talking about and I am jumping ahead but I wrote that down a million times a million little times in my notes and I think it stands out the most in this there's a scene in this episode where they all show up the morning after the funeral and just kind of like hang out like I brought bagels and they just have this weird breakfast and it's like their friend just committed suicide and they're at the widow's house the first morning without her husband and they're acting normal it's so weird. That shit that like I wrote so much down for that because it was that was like this you know this show gave me it gave me the feeling of you ever tried like when you're a kid you don't know

you're not supposed to do this and you try reading something in a car ride like when your parents are driving you somewhere yeah you got a car set yeah yeah that's what it feels like because it jerks you around so fucking much yeah yeah and I feel like they forget that the suicide happened like I feel like the writers like you know probably went back and said hey throw in a couple lines about the suicide just remember we went five pages and the screenplay on the on the teleplay without mentioning it so you know people will be talking because yeah uh I guess just like you know if John was here yeah okay about those bagels it's like what like my yeah mine my note throughout the entire show almost every single scene is not plausible it's like people would not be acting

like this if their friend or husband just committed suicide and if you and if let's say that you're one of the kids and your family was acting like that it would traumatize you forever the way they acted and your mom being like oh hey come on in for bagels everybody yeah like I'm so glad you're here I like this show is so like I already like it when people do they do that for these because these shows are actually like just on its surface very banal so you guys can jump in whatever or whenever but uh I I do want the audience to learn how truly awful this was though so we're gonna start at the beginning of this episode uh Gary the cancer survivor and Maggie the woman that he's been hooking up with from his cancer survivor group they're having you know that absurd

TV sex where they both get totally exhausted by unbuttoning two or three buttons and I mean they're breathing heavily to show that it's hot but it's really like a very non-sexual scene but they're having this sort of weird dialogue where they're a bit standoffish and it's like oh where did you move from I don't know well why don't you take off your shirt during sex so then in a hallmark of the show we have a fast cut like this show jerks you around so fucking much you know you're not on a scene for more than 30 seconds so you're with Eddie and his annoying Weiner kid and they're doing some bullshit and the little Weiner who is apparently the child that's been starring in every liberal tweet oh my god he goes the little the little kid who's

talking to me star yeah he literally is the woke toddler he says daddy why is there a war yeah it's the deepest question in the entire show question in the entire show like full Confucius mode like and that was and the worst part is that dad I don't know if it's the actor's fault or the way he's written he doesn't seem competent to even answer the question like I feel like no you're asking the wrong person your dad is has a constant doe-wide clueless stare uh that is his hallmark you know he's actually incapable yeah I don't think he even knows where the spaghettios are like I don't think this guy is equipped to do anything but let's answer every single person on the show is extremely dumb this is the dumbest

they're the dumbest ensemble of men I have ever seen that's the biggest characteristic of the show and I want to get into that much more later but you could continue all right so yeah he asked him where war is and he's like just like before Eddie can I mean I guess Eddie probably went to wikipedia will war is that night but before he can get through stumble through his terrible answer his son also asked him where his famous necklace is well first of all like your dad's a necklace guy your dad we're about to get to like the the thing that made me laugh the hardest in this the two episodes of the show yeah was this reveal that Eddie lost his necklace working what is the necklace because that's important because then that what is the necklace that's

it's very important because they cut to it super reported and they reported they cut to a shot it it's him it's him hooking up with the widow before john committed suicide and they show this close up and it's a braided leather yin yang chain like straight out of 1999 yes like straight up like I started laughing so hard because I have this memory of when I was 10 years old my mom took me to venice beach and she gave me $10 to spend and I bought like a pair of goggles and a yin yang chain like 1999 or whatever like it's so on the nose yeah it's so on the nose and it's like it's also it's it's so funny it is like literally like a vintage 1999 like from a len music video like steal my sunshine yin yang but it's also an obvious like symbolism like oh the duality

of this man he's he was a good friend but he's cheating you know he's cheating with his friend's wife who killed himself it's like and he's torn yeah it's it's very on the nose as uh a shorthand for who this character is like oh he's the 90s bohemian guy but it's also like two on the nose as a metaphor like it's just the most heavy-handed hand-fisted thing like that's what this show does it gives you the most clumsy visual metaphor and then once you're done processing it like the minimum time you should spend processing it it just jerks you to another fucking scene which is often like a flashback or something that has like you're not like the chronology fucks you up it makes you physically nauseous the other way I interpreted it which is like actually the most

plausible is if he got the chain to honor his wife who but who's actually Korean and he just thinks she's Chinese like to please her yeah really funny yeah yeah he totally he totally seems like one of those guys who um had a Asian fetish and got with the Asian girl and you know does hand-fisted stuff like that because I mean he he's such a cliche in every other way but I mean that wouldn't actually be a bad thing if the show was doing that in a self-aware way to critique the guy you know like let's say wow this guy is that guy but I think this show just has no ability to be self-aware but in a way it almost works for the show because it allows the show to say the quiet part out loud like like it's not even smart enough to know we should downplay this

you know right well like that's the thing there will never be the show will never criticize their cast a harsh light in its characters in any way but having another character say out loud like you know Eddie your problem is that you want a blah blah blah like that yeah when the show has a criticism of its own characters you will know because it will instantly fucking spit it out like I mean we're gonna get down to it later but the impromptu therapy session with Rome deep in the episode like that's how it criticizes its characters or yes focuses on character developments it just beats you over the fucking head and we know when the show is attempting humor because there's about 38 setups like every line that Gary has I I never I never really thought

that highly of Josh Whedon's writing style and humor until I've seen someone like misappropriate whatever he does as humor so badly because I feel like this guy was trying to do Whedon that's banter and I was like wow this is really bad like like um maybe just maybe what Josh Whedon does actually takes a lot of work because this is really like like the part where um Gary goes uh ban the dads and the Eddie goes yeah it could ban the dads and Gary's like I just said that and then Rome goes um he did just say that you know I'm like oh my god this is even Whedon would do better you know like absolutely this is like if we didn't try to write a script the day he was soft me dude like he wasn't really focused on his game that's what this is like

yeah I actually well I'll get to I have a note coming up that was I reference a different show but um Whedon's very accurate before we before we move on from the necklace scene I want to say two things it is just such a objectively funny prop that like I can't believe they even picked that out of any necklace it's like inherently funny it does not fit this time period but also his wife because she's not in this show I realized uh that's Grace Park and she's from Battlestar Galactica I didn't notice in the first one she played Boomer and Athena she's like a huge role on Battlestar Galactica I never watched the show what uh I feel bad for her because the fault that's a very notable fallen prestige oh my god you well first of all you have to watch Battlestar

over uh the quarantine man that's an assignment for sure yeah it's a good show I'm not crazy about the ending so I'll say like you know the ending might uh the mileage might vary on that but it's still it's one of those things where even if you don't like the ending the journey is fine it's not one of those endings that's so bad it retroactively ruins the show for you to me no matter which way you fall on it yeah but yeah realizing that just made me realize how much worse of a show is this one is it's like thinking about a better show um it's weird about the show I think this show tries to be like it's it's made by the guy who you know thinks that his way of being woke like like dad woke like like Jenix woke is you know hey um I'm not racist I don't even see color or

I'm not homophobic I don't even um you know gay people are just like I don't even think it makes you that different yeah yeah so basically the kid being gay just makes him oh spoiler I'm sorry yeah the kid being gay is they try really hard to erase any difference or weirdness um when I say weird I mean weird as in like you have trouble fitting in like like weird by society standards not like objectively weird but it just to make um like if you never knew what um gayness was right and how it's treated in society and this show is your first exposure to it you would get no idea why the kid's struggle is a big deal it just flattens it into nothingness it's just like choosing um a blonde over a brunette like in this effort to try to show how woke it is

it just erases any uniqueness or uh struggles or context about being gay and the same thing with uh I feel like Rome and his wife they're just uh you know I could tell the guys probably really proud that he puts no racial markers into into them but it just makes everything kind of a bland Jenix white person you know yeah if I had to if I had to describe like if I could only have like one uh proper noun to describe the show it would be Beto O'Rourke like if I had a Cambridge Analytica set up where I could do crosstabs on media consumption I guarantee you that everyone who watches this show and likes it donated money to Beto O'Rourke's presidential run like it's the same vibe where everyone is a millionaire for no fucking reason uh there's this like very flat

Jenix cultural liberalism and this very clear but fumbling and ultimately futile search for meaning that it's very Beto yeah like Beto and his wife probably watch this yeah Jenix has the vaguest uh liberalism like you know boomers at least when they were younger had a very particular brand of liberalism you know regardless of where where you think they took it when they got older and stuff but it was a very um impassioned at least from the outside looking again form of liberalism and um the modern like type of liberals that we have now um they're so pronounced and they're total selling out you know and whatever there's at least an identity to it even if it's an identity of just I want to get a blue check and I want to um you know get consulting gigs at least

it's very pronounced in this blatant bootlicking you know but Jenix had this super vague type of liberalism that's like um I just kind of generally want to rebel in a way but like rebelling to me is um you know just um listen to punk rock record a couple of times and wear a Ramon shirt and I feel like I'm doing something and yeah I mean that's something and uh hey Reagan said the Jenix battle cry is it's actually punk rock to have retirement fund yeah exactly it's actually it's very punk to support Israel like it it's like it is the most having your cake and eating it too type of liberalism because at least like at least boomers will like go out of their way to reject liberalism or like when they're younger

yeah they had their own care they had like a national liberalism I guess you can describe it but the Jenix thing is just so amorphous because it's all about what you you're supposedly true feeling inside trumps whatever your outward actions yeah like early Gavin McGinnis the first couple years of vice yeah like like do's and don'ts that's that's Jenix liberalism like you know I'm gonna just know not dressed in a conformist way but even though I'm dressing like everyone else in my uh tribe I'm gonna tell myself I just did something you know and and there I am yeah like the 90s like the two political parties were happy and pissed like it's like yeah like that's all it was all right so wait this next part yeah I'm just gonna like get us back to the recap but uh so

Eddie he lost that necklace having sex with Delilah before John's death then we cut to Delilah in the present seeing the necklace in her bedroom without John and it it sort of makes her break down uh we go back to uh Maggie and Gary and they're having a weird moment where they're trying to sort of act like casual fuck buddies and wait wait wait wait wait what did you just say about her finding the necklace in the drawer because because I think I got different implication from that than uh you did oh well I thought she was seeing um the necklace in their nightstand and it was sort of like it gave her this pause right she actually found it in John's things so that all right so she realized that John knew about the affair because she realized John must

have found it in the car in the Lexus yeah so finding Eddie the worst way to find out about your wife cheating on you is to find your boy's yin yang necklace yeah there's no other explanation for that you only have one friend who wears that fucking shit yeah yeah and you probably don't let him in your car because he's such like a dweeb so you know had to be your wife letting him in the car it can't be when you give him a ride because you never give him a ride you try to outside of the Bruins games you try not to hang out with him yeah uh so after that Maggie and Gary have this weird moment where they try to act like uh Maggie goes uh hey I'll see you when I see you and Gary goes uh love it and there's this pause because it sounds like he said I love you but uh that you

know they're not trying to do that but it's an uncomfortable moment because they're clearly in love with each other that's what the show is trying to tell us the way I heard it because I rewinded a couple times he doesn't say love it he says love and then he stops so then she's like what were you gonna say and then he goes uh love it you know and I was like oh my god you're like in high school like what is that so so he doesn't like to say love it he says love so they make it sound like he was actually going to say love you but then uh he caught himself and she caught him but first off what's stupid about it is didn't they just meet like a couple days ago yeah I have a note here where I wanted to walk through this if you don't mind so go ahead so to put for the

audience like to put yourself what's her name again Maggie Maggie I want everybody to put themselves in Maggie's shoes I want to run like a little a little uh meditation here so imagine you just move to a new city you haven't unpacked your bags yet right so you haven't moved into your apartment everything's a mess you're like okay I'm going to go to my cancer survivor meeting in this new town it's important to start the habit at that meeting you meet a guy who then you bang in the bathroom right immediately after that he invites you to come with him on a date that date turns out to be a funeral for his friend who just commit suicide and then at at the funeral he ditches you and tells you to hang out with the widow while he goes to a hockey game with his boys

and then you're with his widow the entire night which is mind-boggling and then he shows up later at like midnight to dick you down and then gives us awkward some goodbye and that's where they we uh we are right now like that's Maggie's day wow it's completely nuts when you put it together like that it's even crazier than I remember because because I was watching this like you know over a long period of time when I first saw this so it didn't really register what you just said yeah imagine like going on a date after like even just a weird hookup like that is weird imagine a funeral for somebody you don't know alone imagine you spend the entire night with this widow like it's like not only unrealistic doesn't even scratch the surface of Maggie and

Gary's relationship it's like someone came out of Plato's cave and they were like right what you think a relationship would be like it's psychedelic it's like yeah literally he's psychedelic and I'm sorry like I just cannot imagine Gary pleasing a woman to that degree not even because of anything about uh his physical whatever whatever but he just seems like the kind of guy who is just too clueless to even tune into a woman's needs enough like like like just have this image that Gary is just smashing her to oblivion and he doesn't have a sexually dynamic relationship they're always spent all the time and I just feel like Gary is just like the guy who is going to do the bare minimum he's just too yeah yeah I'm not I'm not buying it you know he doesn't give me that vibe yeah Gary's

character so like to catch the audience up Gary's character is basically that he's a Reddit guy like every time anything happens yeah anytime anything happens Gary is just like completely like poxically sarcastic but not funny it just like has very few if any redeeming qualities and is just like like some character will say something and be like well finally got that one out of you because that was sitting around for a while like sub weed and s dialogue and the show the it wants you to believe that this redditor this man who spends real-life money on reddit gold if you were a real guy is just this woman can't even breathe the cock he's giving her he is bottoming out he is wearing her down like she is it's like she's given birth every time Gary is done fucking her

he is filling her up she's dripping with Gary she can't even fucking think this dick is driving her crazy this redditor is fucking oh my god like she can never be with a different guy after yeah this redditor is driving her insane and I just cannot imagine ever like a fantasy football redditor guy ever like you know smashing to that degree like Gary is the kind of guy who's in like r slash dead bedrooms on on on reddit he's not he's not like this guy you know I just don't see it no he's the guy he's the guy who it's like yeah he's the guy who if it's like his his birthday it's like oh that means my wife has to give me a blowjob while I watch yeah it's taking a blowjob day today awesome um no just like the nature of them it's just surreal everything about this show

is um it's like a fever dream which um which is weird this is like a very personal note but it informs how I watch the show um I'm taking medicine right now where a side effect is that I have like really vivid cinematic dreams that are like too intense right and it's producing it's uh it's fine but it's weird during quarantine because nothing happens during the day to me so like I have this very inverse uh experience of life now where nothing happens during the day and when I go to sleep I like have this very intense experience where a bunch of stuff happens but of course it's a dream and my dreams are like this show where it's like reflecting life but just in a it's a little off you know it's like there's this level of like um psychedelicness to this tv show and it's like

watching a very vivid dream the word hyper real kind of came to mind when I was watching this yes yes I was bringing I brought that up last episode it is like um it's it's very much where it's like uh the map proceeds the terrain yes you know Adam Curtis would go insane watching this like I almost want to keep it from him I want to shield this from Adam Curtis this show blows your mind even in just the recap like like I caught something in the first sentence of the recap you know when they say last time on um like last time on a million a million little things I had a recap note too yeah usually when you um watch a show you can just skip the recap but on this show you can't let any second pass for granted because something disturbing casually disturbing might um fly by

but but it opens up and it's supposed to be like a deep saying you know but uh last time on a million little things and then the guy I think his name is John right the suicide guy yeah yeah he goes friendship is the person that you trust with your wallet and your wife and your kids blah blah blah blah it's a million little things that's like wait a minute your wife and your kids aren't little things that's weird that he puts a wallet yeah the wife and the kids right it is it is like wait those are two big things but first off who leads off with the wife like like who says like yeah you know my criteria for friendship you know it's a little things like don't fuck my wife yeah it's it's like and and and what's the best thing is Eddie you know uh this is the recap so I

think it was even meant to really pretend to this episode it wasn't even like in a flash you know usually when something's on a flash back within the episode you can tell that it's done there to foreshadow something in the episode but this is just a recap and I kind of realized Eddie actually dropped a ball with both uh he he oh yeah he dropped the ball with uh the wife because he's still you know doesn't admit that he had sex with her and he had an affair with her but the kid the one thing he had to do you know that could have redeemed himself a little bit was just just dance with his damn daughter and even that on the day of the minute of he doesn't so so basically the only thing we don't know is whether he's taking John's wallet at some point too but I'm sure he's probably

done that too but but but the fact that they even said that like friendship is the person that you trust with your wallet and your wife and your kids it's a million little things and I'm like the fact that uh he equates the wallet and the wife and the kids a on the same level and cause them all little things and you kind of understand and no jumping ahead in this spoiler but you kind of understand why you find out that he's so cool with uh they're sleeping together because it's like forgiving your friend for taking 20 dollars out of uh your wallet like yeah yeah I know you're banging my wife you know enjoy yourself it's it's fine it's funny that you had a recap note I had one too and it was very simple it was just that um he it's a line I didn't catch before but it's when

um Gary tells uh one of the other characters about the suicide he goes you're never going to believe this John killed himself and I thought it was really strange like of a way to say it like you're never going to believe this like that's not what you say deliver that news about like an NFL trade roober yeah michael jordan's retiring from the NBA one of the things that could have made that worse is if you said hey guys you're never going to believe this take a guess and then let them guess for like four or five times that's the only way that could have been worse oh dude hey hope you hope you don't have any coffee in your mouth right now John killed himself like you know what's so fucked about the show is the reason it

necessitates so much notes and so much like I have to do more recapping for this show than any other show because scene to scene line to line no there is no emotional prompt like I can't tell when I watch this is us or council of dads I could kind of tell even if I like didn't quite hear the line and after one I can kind of tell what type of scene it is judging by how the characters react in this they give me no indication it plays everything the phone is so all it plays everything the same and that's why I think the wallet wife kids line is so perfect because that's that's the show everything at the same weight no matter what yes where everything is super gravitas but it's also weightless at the same time somehow it's it's like a dream I'm telling you and it's uh it has

the same watching it is like explaining a dream back to somebody where you think it makes sense in your head and then as soon as you start telling them the dream you're like oh this is really dumb and boring yeah yeah exactly um so speaking of dumb and boring uh we uh after back in Gary's annoying scene we cut back to John's office at the end of the last episode where Gary asked Eddie if John left him a voicemail when he called him right before his death and he says he did not but it turns out he did he's looking at the notification on his phone and he can't even bring himself to open it next the next day Regina wakes up grasping for her husband Rome in bed but he's just left a note saying he couldn't sleep so he went into work actually he went to John's office which is

completely unguarded and like they allow him to just go in and wander around despite it being where a millionaire businessman just fucking brained his shit downtown Boston he wanders around the office and retraces what John did right before he hurled himself off the building and imagines himself falling just like his Kyle Chandler lookalike friend did he's doing like the boondock saints detective yeah there was a firefight they make you think that Rome is about to kill himself like John did in the exact same site but he's just imagining it he's just he just touches the crime scene a lot and then we get our credits this very few shows where it's so like weird that i start researching the creator of the show right so like yeah it's already two other shows like

when was californication where i'm like okay i i gotta i gotta find out who wrote this show and i look at it and it looks like uh if tom likeus was trying to be david duke of the that's what what the guy who creates californication looks like looks like like like he's really tom likeus in real life but he wants so badly to be david the covney and he writes this idealized version of himself he looks like a weird version of the david the covney character so like i came up with this elaborate headcanon that um that the charlie ronkel character on californication is who he's afraid he is and the david the covney character is who he prays that he is but because he's so uh narcissistic he still makes both sides himself get laid a lot even the shameful dejected side it's still

smashing ass uh all the time like like like he can't even let uh his mostly prayed fantasy uh uh not get uh ass so that was the one the second one was um i think guys named benny off from game of thrones like yeah yeah once they once they ran out of um source material the show just got like so weird and his his personality started coming through i started like watching all these youtube videos on his life and whatever and this guy is the third guy the creator of this show uh dj i think nash is his name the fact that he goes by dj as a uh professional name 40 year old man yeah yeah uh it says it says it all but i've been um reading about this show and the guy is like so weird i sent phoenix an article like you know he he kind of fixes himself as like he's like

trying to be the kind of woke but he's like he's at the heart of genix dad so he just he's he's just really i i can't i can't describe it but but the guy is weird and i'm i'm convinced he's got bodies in his basement there's something weird about him i cannot uh figure out but i mean i don't like like everything around the show like very off like i read that interview and it's like very like i think he's just one of those people that exist in a dreamlike state yeah his interview is like this show where it's like something's off about this profile and i don't know what it is and reading the interview felt like watching this show like this show is kind of his mind yeah absolutely it is you're in a horrifying mind palace of this guy's world but uh so after the really weird

roam and uh john suicide scene uh yeah the the scene that we alluded to earlier uh regina and rome show up at the lila's house the day after the funeral and give her bagels gary shows up with a single roll of toilet paper this is insane he makes this joke about he brings her toilet or yeah paper towels and it's i just got so mad at this because he jokes about it to a widow he like literally what's the point of bringing paper towels if you were next to him and it was your friend you you just pull him aside after and be like dude you're an asshole like just i would put it don't bring anything yeah like dude don't bring anything like you're not funny like what are you doing yeah yeah exactly why not leave it in the car and this kind of thing with this guy

no matter what tone deaf thing he does everyone just like uh that's gary that's gary you know we love it i'm a weird thing he's written to be like a 19 year old right like it would make sense if he was in college like a slacker but he's like a 43 year old man it's like what are you doing why yeah yeah and and like he even adds insult to injury because first he brings the paper towels and you know then then he says um you know it was either that or the four loose french fries in the bottom of my car so basically you do a shitty thing and then you say hey be happy it could have been even shittier you know ha ha aren't i funny it's like god damn like every single second of this scene is worth analyzing it's like yeah it's like do you ever have an off button you know and

no this is crazy he has to cut down his friend's gift of bagels like he can't just ever let anything go by without uh a joke um when he said toxically sarcastic and that's a perfect way to describe him he's like toxically sarcastic he's dripping with passive aggression all the time but you're meant to believe it this guy's is a heart of gold and in my real life experience no one is that toxically sarcastic has a heart of gold you know that's there they're always an awful fucking yes they're an awful fucking person because they can't give you one genuine moment of honesty no like this character can't and this scene i think this scene is the perfect scene to explain the show because the thing it starts off with is completely off tone and disconcerting like it's your first

day waking up without your husband you're a fucking new widow and your friend shop and they give you this fucking funny banter about their bagels that they brought like this the tone of what rome and regina say it's completely off if it was that scene alone i'd be like this show's fucking weird he's definitely the guy that caught himself an asshole but says it like in a self-congratulatory uh yeah and thinks everyone like loves him because you know me i'm an asshole like you know shut up yeah yeah that but then gary shows up and does the insane toilet paper bit and that's like it raises the stakes from like unrealistic to like this show is trying to make me insane it goes from unrealistic to hyperreal that's what it does that's like what this show

does and it gets worse from there yeah it starts off a little off then just goes completely fucking insane and you're supposed to like it and the the widow is happy to see them and immediately snaps into this like this mode that i can only describe as like if you visited your grandma by surprise like how happy she would be where she immediately is like come in i'll make some food like oh my gosh like oh wow i didn't expect you and they showed up without calling to a widow who her husband just committed suicide and then well i mean i don't want to steal the reins from you but then the next reveal is even more surprising to me though this is fucking crazy i mean go ahead like this shit's fucking nuts so uh gary's slam piece is already there in the kitchen like the girl he'd

met yesterday and is banging is already over at the house at like eight in the morning and the widow called her he met she met her yesterday mind you she's a person that your husband's friend and banged and then brought to your funeral most likely a normal person would dislike her off the bat and somehow she's invited over in the morning and she's already there yeah every what yeah so is that where you were thinking i just i don't even have anything to say about it because it's so insane but everyone's like having fun banter generally not acting like the guy that they all loved just fucking killed himself with no warning yeah yeah so i mean even a funeral or aftermath of a funeral where somebody old dies a death that they saw coming usually isn't

this light so for it to be like someone who's relatively young who committed suicide and blindsided everybody that's the kind of thing that i mean i know people have been in situations like that where it traumatizes them for years you know so it's very weird how you know fast we're getting getting over it you know it's not it's not something it's extra tragic in my notes i have two things written down i have what for this scene it's imagine doing any of this one day after your husband killed himself and then the second note is refers to the next part which is um i mean felix take the reins if you want but this is like a crazy two-part moment to me yes so gary goes over to john's son who has not really been a part of the

show yet but um he's going to talk to him so imagine like talking to your friends like seven year old son after he just killed himself what's the first thing you're gonna say gary slides up next to him and basically says so do you like anybody at school like gary gary's scenes with john's son are like they start out with like what the fuck dude to like is he grooming this so maybe we should maybe we should just cover these two scenes they're split up but like okay so what happens is that he says to him uh do you like it to be at school and the kid seems totally fine and he's like no and then he's like come on do you and he's like well okay there's this kid Ella she's our this kid Ella the new kid at school is exactly what he says and like oh Ella then

they get interrupted and then felix do you want to explain what happens the next time they're talking the next time they're talking um gary says you know i'm the cool uncle and then the kid says you're not going to try to make me drink beer again and it's like oh gary's a pedophile oh yeah well there's that there's that but then then they're talking late literally the next time they're talking gary says like something along the lines of you know are you gonna tell me that Ella is a guy and you're like what it was very weird i mean gary's asking a seven-year-old if he's gay i'm based off what i mean i mean the only way that could have been worse but in a way it would have been better is if the kid was like uh yeah i like the new kid john uh john jhonifer you know

i mean even though that would have been clumsy at least it would have set up the other scene better like there's no reason why he would have jumped that conclusion based on Ella you know i felt insane i had to rewind it because i was like wait did the kid imply at any point uh that this might have been a boy um and he didn't he didn't use any uh identifying pronouns he just said new kid um and even so it's still mind boggling because it's like seven years old is around this kid's like about seven and if my friend's kid if i was for some reason talking about their crushes the day after their dad killed themselves and he was like i was like do you like anybody at school and he's like and if even if he told me like yeah i really like this boy derrick i would be like

that's cool man and like not cover the topic yeah yeah like today is not the day to talk to him about homosexuality and you know what else with that too is like is like weird right is that um you know like um something that um gay people i know have told me is like you have to let people come out of the closet on their own terms and this is for a grown adult to tell you this like people who are fully grown you don't try to like pull them kicking and screaming um out of the closet you try to respect their space and whatever so because they say that it could be traumatizing to uh oh of course be pulled out of the closet before you're ready so if that's what they say for an adult then it seems to be extra tacky to do it to like a seven-year-old who's still developing who they are to force

them to confront any um conflicting feelings they have like so um are you gay or what you know but then on top of that the day after his father's funeral from from suicide like you know this is like a life-altering conversation just regularly for an adult devoid of any extra context so and this is what i was saying i don't remember i said this off-air or on-air but i was saying like uh this show feels like the show made by the guy who uh their idea of being anti-racist or or not homophobic is to create this world where uh hey black people are no different than white people uh gay people it's just like being uh straight like he reduces the show reduces the gain is to just like uh revealing your favorite color or something like yeah something

like if you wrapped up in such a pat patronizing way to to the point that it's almost worse than not addressing it at all you're better off if you're gonna dress in such insulting dismissive reductive way you're better off not broaching the topic at all and the i mean we're already in so deep on this moment but the the wildest thing is that gary has yet to broach the suicide conversation so it's like you go up to your friend's son whose dad just committed suicide and he's like like at best hoping for you to talk to him about his dad dying but instead you sit him down you're like you're gay bro gay or what yeah like his dad his dad is like freshly in the ground body not even decomposing yet not even close yeah so it's like yeah so like i've always wondered

like you're gay right in a crowded room too sorry about crowded room you're fucking gay right dude yeah yeah yeah that's that's the other thing like you're already processing one thing and now somebody's forcing you to process this other thing and the kid's reaction is very off too because the kid treats it as if he just brought up the most uh minor thing like you know um hey so is it true you peed the bed two years ago like you know like where it's kind of embarrassing but it's like you know not like life altering you know but this is what i was wanting to ask you guys like which application do you think is worse because one of two things either happened there he was either asking just an innocuous question of asking you know the seven year old about who he wants to

smash or something you know like like who do you like like like that's that's just weird thing to talk about after a funeral or in general like seven year olds in general even there's no funeral going on i'm not really pressed about um how far along the puberty scale they are you know so it has that pedophile like moment or and then he discovered the gayness inadvertently somehow because uh like jack said somehow the way the kids in Ella somehow uh this guy was like um the final reel of the sixth sense everything just just clicked for him at once and he just picked up yeah yeah it's either that or this he already suspected this kid was gay and he was just thinking okay now's the time to finally make him come out the closet you know

i've been harboring this for a while second option all right all right he's at his week i bet he's not as weakest right now he has to admit it none of his defenses are up after his dad is doing suicide i mean to get this little fuck yeah it's it's like the entire gayness like b or c plot in this episode was like if it was like someone at abc was like we get a tax break if we have a gay storyline can you just like throw one in there and the writers were just doing adderall mixing adderall and bicardy for a day straight we're like yeah even even if the kid wanted to like said the kid was straight there was no gayness issue and he just liked the girl what was he going to do if if the kids said yeah i do like this girl was he gonna proceed to give

the kid like pickup chips like like even the kids yeah bro you gotta spell the abc's on her pussy dude with your tongue all right so wait uh so maybe should we just cover the third gay scene because i i have a question to ask you guys about this so actually no i mean like we should i think it should i don't know i think like the third gay scene like we need to set up with that like why is there but like uh so i'll get back to yeah we'll get back to the linear recap uh uh so after this insane fucking scene with gary and john's son uh eddie shows up late to delilah's house uh and delilah tells him that his stupid yin yin necklace was in john's nightstand and so john must have known about the affair they they had they fight about it like eddie doesn't think john

knows but before it can escalate any further john's secretary ashley shows up with two cups of coffee she says out of instinct that she got john's usual coffee order and instead of throwing it out she decided to take it to delilah's house to give it to her like this is like this only would make sense if ashley recently had a traumatic brain injury like there was a general lack of boundaries on this show all around whether it's the john's employee whether it's uh gary with the son like like this show has a weird sense of boundaries and appropriateness that just gets worse like unlike you guys i've actually seen the whole season the first time around last year that's fucked yeah yeah i i was uh i could not turn away from this show i just couldn't believe it was real

and i was going crazy because i would go on twitter and nobody with our sensibility was somehow watching this show so i would only get see commentary on social media from people unironically like the show and i'm like this show can't be real and i would keep on watching it that's why i beg you to watch this show uh because i'm like i need someone normal to uh to watch this and give me a feedback so i know what comes i know what comes up you know so uh there's things that i can't uh spoil but like so many things get get worse and uh there's one supporter i i don't know if i should give it to you but i feel like it tells you how much worse this show it's it's kind of it's not i'm revealing the effect to our analysis um well maybe well i

actually i if it's that fucked up i kind of want to find out on my own like i kind of like well tell us at the end of the episode okay well it's not it's not it's not fucked up as in it's a big mystery like it's not anything about why john did what he did or whatever it's just something that happens well i i'll just say because i don't think it's that big a deal but it's a sort of example of um later in the season uh gary bangs the secretary and oh that's not too surprising yeah yeah yeah it's not that big but in it and he's the one that ends it with her because you know he wants to be with maggie but just it just lets more to the idea that get like the secretary is i think so far probably the hottest or one of the hottest ones on the show so far you know second yeah yeah

and second how the fact that she is yet another person who carries this gary's charms and then gary has to turn her down eventually and be like oh no you know i want to be with this person it's just we see the secretary now that i know that she ends up with gary for a split second and gary you know ravishes her as well you know i can't look at her now and not uh think about that that is okay that is very disgusting like that's like gary like he's somebody who like would spend time going to docks another reddit mod and take a picture of his house over an argument on like r slash underskirts and upskirts and ashley who's like the second hottest person on the show i think delilah's like delilah's fucking delilah's fucking banging like let's be honest here uh he's like

gary i need your cock like gary i need that i need your like fucking paid money for physical media myth bus this is this is boston culture you're describing and it's actually the most accurate part of the show is that this uh you want to be absolute imbecile with uh who barely has a allegedly has a career like dating all these women and causing all these problems yeah just this guy who looks like completely like blink create a character white guy boring fucking shitty guy unfunny no good qualities just the hottest women ever like yeah i'll date that just i'm gonna default today in this guy it's like a default plan to see us go that happens in boston but the problem is that if you get to live that lifestyle you aren't allowed to leave boston legally so it's a faustian

bargain yes uh have you guys ever seen those products right like um you ever see those bath bombs and this is this is a whole line of products basically where it's like for men who think everything is gay so it's like hey this is a bath bomb but you know what it's in the shape of a grenade so it's like yes you don't you don't have to feel gay uh using this bath bomb because hey it's shaped literally like a bomb or hey here's a here's a body wash but the body wash is comes in a wd-40 shaped bottle you know so yeah like like like like yeah like a nail the one called like the garage yeah yeah yeah or you know it's exfoliant it's an exfoliant but you know it's a exfoliant wash but it's called sandpaper or something so you know you don't feel

gay using the sandpaper that's what this show feels like it feels like um this is us for guys who think everything is gay you know and well yeah i was saying last episode that the the show itself is afraid of being gay like the actual like the plot of the show is self-conscious about coming off as gay because like every time there's an emotional moment it's interrupted by some kind of immature joke yes yes it's like it's like afraid of showing any kind of like emotion because i guess to the show that would be feminine and that's and that's what makes it funny that it actually explicitly tackled gayness because it even made gayness not seem gay like you know gayness just seemed like everything everything is gay except for homosexuality yeah um so like

any emotion is gay but just like being gay is like it's like i mean being gay is a device to i think like what happened with that gay story line honestly was that it was like oh like we're trying to make it so that gary is this sarcastic guy with a heart of gold but he never does anything good so we have to show that he's great in the most gen X way which is just him not being homophobic which is a great act but that's the type of shit that gets you reddit up votes but you know i will say one thing gary did that was um this is the interesting dichotomy of the show that it creates constant cognitive dissonance right is um eddy they're both reddit guys eddy and actually probably all of them are different types of reddit guys just go to different subreddits absolutely right

like eddy goes to some probably a reddit called nice guys or something or the red pill like you know his his his his yin yang his yin yang nexus was probably uh peacocking he probably uh consciously said hey i think we're the peacock you know he went and got that you know but uh eddy is the guy who is the nice guy you know the capital ng but actually the biggest dirtbag of them all but but you know you always talk about the horrible guy the stereotypical nice guy who isn't really that nice you know and it's like he's just like afraid of it seems of confrontation or conflict or whatever but any thing he can get away with you know he's gonna do he's gonna he'll he'll bang your wife your dog he'll he'll do anything that he can feasibly um get away with you know whereas gary is um

it's supposed to be the asshole you know with the heart of gold and like like philip said for the most part uh he doesn't but the one thing i'll give him credit on he's the only one well there's only one one other person who could follow up on this but he's the only one who actually follows up on the fact that um rome admitted the bombshell that he wanted to commit uh suicide you know like eddy does not care all eddy is thinking about is uh you know his dick that's all he's thinking about like like throughout the whole thing like like to gary's credit i would say the one genuinely good thing is multiple times even says to the guy i called you all day today and you didn't pick up and um and you don't get to do that you know what you tell what you tell me

that you try to kill yourself uh the days of not picking up your phone and letting me hang for hours you know that's not going to fly i'm like why can't we get more of this gary like like this is actually like a glimpse of a likable guy you know but you know yeah yeah but i think as bad as gary is eddy is by far the worst there's no redeeming anything about him but you would so he's the other guy ready he's the nice guy who is just a total um douche bag you know uh where he would bang anything you gave a different chance he would like you know um sleep with a drunk without super drunk girl if you could and you know knowing full well absolutely so actually i propose that gary after you know ashley the secretary behaves like someone who has done heroin

for the first time and delilah excitedly invites her in with her fucking tragedy coffee cup for some fucking reason uh we come back to gary and now he's prodding roam about opening up to him like he just alluded to and it is like a redeeming thing but it's like i wonder why he wouldn't open up to the single most toxic and unlikeable character the guy like i mean like actually like eddy's more toxic character but like openly toxic and likeable like more than like ralph's are freddo more unlikable than ralph's are freddo yeah yeah eddy eddy on the surface seems like the guy because he never wants anybody to be mad at him and wants to be performing to be nice that's sort of the person that you'd want to talk to you but he literally wouldn't care

in the back of his head he'd be thinking i wonder how long is too long to try to bang delilah again you know in the back of his head yeah he would be like yeah he would he's like he's already envisioning if roam also killed himself and using it to like leverage fucking delilah yeah yeah like use sympathy it's for delilah to fuck yeah yeah he's like oh wow and then anything i can either use roam dying to fuck delilah again or maybe i could bang roam's wife you know in her moment of uh yeah weakness you know he's that guy so you get the option of him who is performatively like the one that's easier to talk to you but you know is uh super self-absorbed or you have the guy who actually does care but he's going to give you a bunch of stupid jokes before he gives you any meaningful advice and you know

just be tossing these sarcastic yeah yeah so isn't hell uh the the next thing that happens i think is really important is that the characters have a realization and i immediately thought of you felix this was like my big holy shit moment in this episode oh yeah yeah you know what i'm talking about i do i do um this really upset me the three morons gary john or gary roam and eddie uh they're talking about you know the dire straits the delilah and john's family are in and they say that they're going to make a council of that they're going to make they're going to make a council not a band of dads they say a band of dads say they a band of dads they do this becomes council of dads like another awful show that i watch they've overlapped like it's not enough

i wouldn't have council of dads watch this show and and that line inspired them or something because this show i know it's like this this predates council of dads i believe yeah yeah it does so i could you know i wonder if somehow watching this episode you know because anyone who comes up with the show council of dads just that title is someone who would probably like this show yeah yeah well i do think yeah there is a network tv universe it's like marvel but the the council of dads of the three imbeciles they are given their first task because uh sophie john's daughter uh she's having a rough time because they heard the daddy daughter dance recital some shit was supposed to happen this week and obviously she was going to do with john

and the council of idiots is like you know we can help her how come we can't help her sophie and delilah are arguing about the recital and they're are they're doing the tv the family drama thing where they argue going down a big flight of stairs and sophie goes i don't want everyone to treat me like the girl at school whose dad killed himself and she gestures at her family's imbecile freak friends who are dining room table and says you see just like this the sun in one of the most fucking insulting scenes i've ever seen in one of these shows says i'll take you to the dance there's just a weird system of pauses it's supposed to indicate to the viewer that this is a touching scene but sophie's like also i noted a musical cues there was like a couple

of planks there was a couple of planks at a piano like bling bling yeah feel this viewer uh the assembly of buffoons resumes their debate after this rome says obviously i'm the guy who everyone turns to with anything involving dancing but sophie says i pick eddie possibly using a female occult magic alluded to in the show to divine that uh eddie has bombed out in her mom why do i ask tells eddie in the next scene that he can't do it which eddie he does ask a very fair question which is like okay if i can't do it what am i supposed to tell sophie hey i was i'm actually fucking your mom and your dad may have killed himself over it so like it would be weird if i did it so he's gonna default to doing it uh the worst part is he backs out anyway but with

no explanation which is oh right no yeah he just still has the flashback and feels but also nobody does the most normal thing in this situation which is tell her like honey considering all that's just happened i don't think you need to do the daddy daughter dance we could just skip it and stay home you don't need to do the dance recital yeah it's not important that's never it's like it's like when a character gets pregnant at one of these shows it's like no one has an abortion no one can just like not do the thing there's enough conflict in this show there's so much conflict in the show but whatever uh ashley the secretary is there uh so in the previous episode we find out that john secured restaurant stayed space for uh regina rome's wife because she always

dreamed of opening a restaurant and ashley's like oh hey the lease got approved absolutely thoughts on this but but but let me let me know when you take a break uh you give me okay i got you yeah we have gary pestering john's son again we already did that the thing weird fucking shit about him drinking beer uh there's a very weird scene after that though where maggie's leaving finally uh she spent about three days in a row with this poor grieving woman and she tells gary that she's calling an uber she's there's a really fucking weird line here that i think like really yeah i feel like the rhythm of the writing of the show she says i have a 4.93 star rating it wasn't my fault it was the tequila it's just like this weird fucking dude i think we should play the clip for this if you

can i like referenced it so maybe chris can pull it but i have this flag too because it's like actually this is bigger i call this first of all i call this gilmore gore girl voice what's that about guy's stuff oh yeah talking about uh corvettes and testicles pretty much well her nest out his corolla are 12 minutes away that's what you get for having a 3.9 rating it was not my fault it was the tequila i'm gonna give you a ride don't vomit in my car can do it's funny that you guys reference joss sweden i think that's accurate as well but um the way they're talking to her i think you're just about to say it but like it's so strange the way they're talking to each other is something that i believe came from tv shows but is now replicated in real

life by the most annoying types of people possible do you ever experience that yeah no absolutely like like you wanted people to talk like that it is like i guess like maggie they're trying to make her like a funny vivacious character but the result is it's like a woman who followed around the barstool chicks in the office podcast like the grateful death yeah it actually reminds me actually reminds me of that phase where the way to be a female comedian was to just be the female version of a cellar comedian so you had like all these women who were just trying to be more fret boyish than the guys and and you know those memes and these are most annoying people and memes like like these are the same people who do harley and joker memes you know where it's like uh my bitch is just like

me she's a female version of me you know and they and they both have a gun in the picture or it's like a bugs bunny and lola bunny on a facebook meme and they're both holding up a gun you know or something like that yeah like uh my she my bitch is crazy she's a female version of me and i'm like she's really becoming a female version of gary like as the show goes off from the first episode to the second one she's basically been like absorbing to garriness you know and it's like watching two garies and it's even more annoying like in a woman because you feel like a woman should have more social intelligence to not be a gary like i feel like uh i can see a boston guy doing this but she's like a psychiatrist like a psychologist and and just and she's not part of

the weird world where you know she got socialized into just being socially inept you know this i feel like as an outsider and a professional and a woman she should not be morphing into a female gary well and i i realize my apologies felix i cut you off before you said the whole line i think but she says uh i have a four three point nine rating on uber but it's not my fault it's the tequila uh and then gary like oh yeah no i i brought that yeah that's the thing so fucked and what it is like i hear people do that in person which is weird because this is basically it's like a flat circle of like people imitating shows and then shows imitating like because the writers then talk like that in real life and it's weird when you hear it in real life because like i'm

sure people listening have had an interaction with somebody like that where they deliver you what's supposed to be like a quick uh piece of wit but it's like a line of dialogue and it makes you you don't laugh because you're too distracted thinking like wait you like planned that like you had that line in the hopper ready to go so you either have said it before to a different person or you've been wanting to use it and you just chose to use it on me because it didn't match what we're talking about yeah and i've used it when people do that because i feel like when people do that they put you in a messed up position like i feel like it's like when the guy who's way ahead of you opens the door and holds it for you and it's like damn you put me in a position now

where i have to pick up my pace and run or be the jerk who doesn't uh speed up you know and i feel like people could do bad jokes like that it's like okay you put me in a position of i hate that to be 10 that's funny and give you a courtesy laugh which i don't want to do or you're gonna make me be a douche and just give you a blank stare you know and i hate that either way either way you're acting in their play yes and that's like what mac and gary are everyone is just like they're in their own sitcom like they're the deep state of the show there's a state within the state this sitcom about two awful unfunny people and just making everyone play along with their shit but uh gary uh is like no don't don't call an uber i'll drive you home in my awful misery car this is the second time he

references his car yeah they go on to do that but regina and rome are looking at a picture of john in another room regina remarks at how happy john looked and rome says he can hide a lot of pain behind a smile uh in an awful parallel we get immediately rome is at work and he's directing a soda commercial and the two annoying ad guys rome's commercial director are like uh hey can you make this guy smile bigger and for some reason this really like depresses rome the idea that someone would want an exaggerated smile on a fucking soda commercial so he loses focus i love how pretentious i love how pretentious uh he is that's the best his delusions of grandeur and then when he goes home you see what he's working on he's just doing a basic polaroid slideshow of uh of his friends

he's in windows yeah he's in windows movie maker that's like my it's just making a movie called like my friend who i miss it's so idiot everything about him so weird and the ad agency characters in that pizza shoot right that scene stuck out to me did it like seem bizarre to you guys oh oh it was very yeah it was like one of the dream scenes of the sparrows that are purposely disconcerting yes because this felt to me like it was kind of like almost as if we are glimpsing into the set of this show it felt to me like the director wrote it into the show in the same way that like you you might find like a help message uh from the sweatshop workers inside a nike box you know yeah yeah yeah where it's like ad agency guys were supposed to be the studio execs yeah

yeah i was wondering that like is the show being meta or is it just not self-aware because i was thinking the same thing because i'm like what do you guys think your show is like like your show is not high art your show is a commercial product for a network so is it like you guys think your show is high art and you're making fun of like uh corporate product or do you guys realize that you're you're like you know is it like what jack is saying like like they're aware and they're taking a dig like i don't know if they're oblivious and they think they're above what's happening in the commercial or if they know that they're more unpowered the commercial but the other sad thing was to me the commercial was more engaging than what rome was working out like i would rather see

what that commercial oh yeah if you gave me a choice see the finished commercial or see rome's finished uh movie about john i would choose the commercial yeah no the commercial has way more like i don't like all rome has is like he has like a billion hours of footage of john being like the good thing about friends is that they're nice except when they do yeah yeah no the commercial is a billion times more artistically interesting so and i i don't think that it was uh i don't believe in my own theory about it being inserted there on purpose to be meta i do like i do think that the the directors and the writers are just like so so not self aware that they are like legitimately thinking they're different from

bad people so in the next scene the lila sophie and eddie are watching a video on the phone of sophie dancing with john to practice for the recital and they're essentially doing this to practice for the recital but this seems like very grim and insane um for all of them to do this this is the thing that i said i wanted to bring up earlier and i decided not to bring it up but this is something that i think is very bizarre and that john is basically the batman or lex luther or heat ledger joker of suicide like he has a many contingency plans right and and what i i realized when i um watched this the second time right because when i first i'd be watched this for uh this episode because it's been like a year since i saw the first run when i realized was this was supposed

to set the stage that john basically to me could tell you tell me if i'm wrong i think he was planning the um suicide even back then so um they're kind of revealing little by little uh because they're dropping little little clues the first the first scene the the dartis says uh he he had plans for everybody you know except except for me you know so basically he was basically laying out all these different um heat ledger jokerish uh plans yeah for all his friends and his family and then you know the next scene we get um a little more of a hint that wait you know maybe he was not thinking about something and then the final scene you find out you know something and i just thought i guess it's a really weird way of making suicide look kind of cool and weird it was it was just yeah it's

like a it's like a cool nice prank you could play on your friends yeah right exactly but everyone ends a better off for it because you know you can actually make a make a good thing out of out of a bad thing so there's very little trauma but there's a lot of upside everyone's you know um getting some upside out of this when it's all done because if you plan it well enough and you um make enough cool surprises your suicide can be actually a sign that you're a nice guy it's like adult 13 reasons why but in a positive way that's literally it um so maggie and gary are and gary's misery car wait can i make a note about this too you're before yeah so they reference three times um the car he drives and usually in a way of just like yeah i'll have to work my job to pay for my

cool car and like yeah my tiny cool car that i have to pay for every month and then they finally show it now i just kind of thought it was funny that he um he drives an oudie tt quattro coop like a 2000s car like oudie tt quattro and it's just a really funny car like i don't i don't know how to describe it it's like it's like a car no single person would ever lease for themselves it would just be a weird car to pay for or buy it's kind of like it's like what a doctor would like lease for his wife because she saw it and sort of liked it you know it's kind of like a random car it's it's a car for if you make exactly 400 000 a year it's like and you're not weird you're like i'd do very well but uh you know i'm not you know i don't want to be worse with my friends

yeah i don't want to be obnoxious yeah it's like spending a ton of money on something that's like not that cool looking like yes exactly exactly yeah exactly it's like buying really something really expensive but it has no logos and looks um totally not ostentatious but you know add a quick note this is really fast i think one line speaking of cars that really shows the values of this show and when um the flashback to the uh hooking up with the lila thing and eddie uh they can't just say um yeah maybe one day we can do this not in your car he has to say um yeah maybe one day we can do this not in your lexus and like what is the fact that's a lexus relevant to the point you could have just said um yeah maybe one day we won't have to have sex in your in your car

and also like he brings up a point of like it's a lexus like i don't know but it's like the lila lives in a 10 million dollar mansion that's like cooler than having a lexus yeah yeah i don't know i don't know there's like a bunch of weird classic defiers in the show but um so they get out of gary's misery car and like he's about to make a move on her to like make out again but maggie catches this guy in the corner of her eye and sort of like weirdly skips out on gary and she runs over to her and hugs him and gary like can't really act upset because they're acting like it's casual even though she's just gone to the funeral of his best friend but whatever so gary mercifully fucks off and it turns out the woman or the the the man that maggie is running into is her ex

he's not there to beg for yeah he's not there to beg for her back but she he says hey everyone's worried about you because you left town and he stopped your cancer treatments and maggie goes on this thing where she says you know i followed all the rules and i got cancer twice uh she goes on to say that having stopped cancer treatments and just leaving her life until the cancer kills her she's happier than she's ever been and then she closes out by saying that she didn't leave this guy her ex but she left the old her like this scene was very confused and it felt like they were writing two totally different scenes and two totally different shows but they were using the same document and didn't fully delete the first one before starting the next yeah it was a weird line

from her you guys the real drug addicts yeah like yeah i didn't leave you guys actually i left the old me you know toxic people who just want you to stay alive damn yeah i wasn't well did they explicitly say it was her boyfriend or they imply it because i thought maybe it could it could be a brother no no i think it was her ex yeah i think it was i think it was her ex um that's another thing with this character right is that she's supposed to be a psychologist but everything she says is kind of like um sassy facebook or twitter status update you know where it's like yeah you know like for example when she tells rom um you know um there's flowers and there's a gardener sometimes you know you've been the gardener but now you've got to tell vagina

that is your time to read a flower and he's like damn you're a good therapist you know like like yeah and it's like she's not technically wrong it's not even a bad insight but it's it's up there with um a facebook meme that talks about you know you have to give from your cup of overflow not from your cup these are the words of a person with a medical degree like yeah she didn't need it to say that yeah yeah that's just like some simple facebook you know wisdom or stuff you get from your mom or your friend and that's what the thing about like the new meme you reminded me of like everything she does is just uh facebook deep you know but uh it's meant to be like a truth bomb or something i have some thoughts about that but i'll save it for the end because oh i want to

back up something really quick about your your quattro thought uh i think these people are like uh you always say people who are like basics but they're super rich and they're almost infuriating like like mark zuckerberg is like this i'm like god damn if i had your money i would have such an interesting life like mark zuckerberg his phone was hacked and a lot of people don't actually know the story about his phone being hacked they didn't really make news and the reason why i barely made news but if you google it you can find out about this story his phone was hacked and his photos were leaked and the photos were so boring it made no news it was just like pictures of his place setting uh some new taco recipe he was trying with his slow cooker uh pictures of his wife's

like you know uh new thing from pottery barn uh karaoke game it was so boring like it like it was useless to to hack and you and like you can't believe somebody this rich you know um like donald trump i'm sure it went to his private stash or something you know say what you will about the guy there's probably some very disturbing stuff in his phone roll you know and this is what these people are to me like like there are people who you know are rich but have no type of anything interesting as far as taste beliefs anything so they still probably go to cheesecake factory they still probably go to buffalo wild wings you know the most interesting thing they could think to do is uh go to boss and bruins games you know they they uh they probably go to pf chang's when they

want chinese like like go to strip mall places i i feel like that car is kind of on brand for for the rest of the show no one has anything interesting to do with all that money that they have no absolutely not no they're they they have zero flourishes as people any of these characters but uh so after the bizarre magi and her ex scene uh we have eddie and sofi practice dancing uh sofi leaves to get water because she's very exhausted uh while she's away delilah comes in the room and eddie tells delilah that sofi is incredibly strong just like her mother delilah says she doesn't know how strong she is uh as delilah leaves eddie looks at the voicemail from john that he still isn't open we flashed to ashley in john's office reading john's suicide note and his

will he entrusted it to the three morons we all know and someone named barbara morgan she searches his email for the contact info for barbara morgan but she doesn't turn up before we can get any more this sort of interesting the only interesting element of the plot this like weird mystery uh we get roam at home uh trying to find a still in a video of john not smiling and somehow failing in the billions of hours of video they have and then he just like because he can't find it he goes into a gamer rage and like spikes a water cup on his desk but then he sees a pill on his floor from his near suicide and then the scene ends it's so dumb he's so dumb he's really dumb like i can't believe he remembers to eat oh my god he's in processing his friend suicide

he's trying to see if he could find a picture of him not smiling like like that's the evidence of a person being happy as whether or not they smile when a camera is pointed at them like he's suicidal himself and he's like what the fuck uh but we abruptly leave that awful scene to show ashley signing the lease documents with regina and uh or to ashley regina and delilah work on the lease documents so they figure out that john structured everything in this way where delilah would also be on the lease so she wouldn't be all alone after john suicide uh really planted in as a quick question is john like a partner or something in some kind of firm sort of business goes on without him or was he the whole business i'm trying to figure out

who is employing act i don't know who's employing ashley now like why is that office just open that rome can come in because i think ashley's keeping the deals going yeah yeah you're a deal factory john kept the city moving baby yeah because i think why is ashley spending so much time on this like it's still her day job you know even if she's unemployed you would think she's spending more time looking for a new work but she's just still acting like she has nothing to do but act out john's contingency plans dude ashley is like that story about the guy in japan who he would walk his akito to the train he might pronounce that breeder dog right that uh like it's yet japanese breeder dog the one from the doge meme uh he he would walk his dog to the train and the dog would

wait at the train for his owner to come back and one day the guy died at work at the heart attack and the dog waited at the train stop like forever it just lived there after that that's what ashley is like that's the saddest thing i've ever heard by the way i'm sorry no it's okay in a happy way but it is like that's like ashley doesn't know what to do like she literally just got john's coffee and was like oh i have to give this to his closest blood relative like she's not a human care they she's like basically john's dog i mean i mean john john is such a super villain of suicide that he might have an ongoing trust that pays her her weekly salary you know for the next six months as she as she um continues to act out all his contingency plans because she she doesn't go away

she keeps uh acting out more stuff for him we get ashley forever for a while at least uh yeah so sophie conveniently walks in during that part and says well john like dad seemed to have a plan for everyone except me and she sort of storms out cries we don't get the follow-up to that because we're just given the 500th flashback of this fucking show where ashley or sophie is at a softball game a high school softball game pitching and she's really fucking it up and she wants to quit and john who's umpiring for some reason goes up to her and he's he says you can't quit you're a dixon dixon's don't quit and the entire reason they did this is to flash back to the present where sophie says but he did quit she's furious because she feels like her dad abandoned her she then goes on to

say he may have quit but i'm not going to which is like very something they would say in the expendables but whatever i was just happy to be done with this scene uh something weird about the flashback right and this is a thing i have with with ron livingston and the guy who plays gary right um for example on um on game of thrones i remember i used to always wonder is the guy who plays joffrey is you really like an asshole because he's playing an asshole so well and he by all accounts the guy is a really nice guy and quite the opposite and everyone knows him says nothing like that and he even quit acting to do like for the philanthropic stuff but i was like well this guy is a really good actor because i really thought this guy was a um raging asshole and i wanted

to know about gary like is the guy who's gary is he just that good an actor you know because if he's not really like a smug douche then he really needs to be submitted for the emmy's because you know but yeah but the other thing is and that sucks too because that means it's a waste of his talents he's wasting about this dog shit yeah yeah yeah one of two things is happening either he is uh gary and this is him playing himself which is tragic in his own right or he's not gary which means like he's like he said he's wasting his talents but the second question i had and this is related to the scene the flashback is like ron limington right they keep trying to tell you oh i'm sick of seeing things where you're smiling and this the idea behind that we were saying that

is that he was always putting on this mask of um happiness you know and normally you can see but every clip ron limington's in he looks like a total sad sack he doesn't look like the ron limington that i'm used to yeah he looks like a total sad sack he's technically smiling but his eyes are like really sad and i'm like is this just really good acting where ron limington kind of was able to convey like his brokenness behind the mask of um smiling you know uh or no he's still doing his character from band of brothers just like shell shocked i was thinking maybe ron limington was just depressed he was doing this show like you know i'm so much better than this like yeah it really is deep ron limington uh by the way to answer your question about gary uh

neither options are correct in fact gary the audience the target audience perceives gary to be a good guy not a smug asshole and i assume that the director is not directing him to be a smug asshole either you know all right you don't you think so like like he's supposed to be like a funny guy we see him as a douche right yeah um but i think like in the vacuum of the show it's like oh yeah he's like a jokester with a heart of gold i mean we we've addressed that but like i feel like we're just we're perceiving him differently than everybody else i know what they're going for with gary because it's like you know it's that reddit thing where it's like well uh a gentleman by which i mean uh clearly terrible human beings i hate everyone equally

yeah yeah exactly that's a good one but yeah it's um right that's meant to be like the mask for a good guy we yeah i i think jack's right like we just don't read him that way but on the other hand like that is how those guys come off to me so like i guess gary's actor is doing a great job but we should keep going i just realized how long we've been going yeah we yeah this is going to be two hours holy shit so uh rom shows up at the building that maggie works in and basically bullies her to giving him a therapy session and it's like immediately tells her hey i tried killing myself like two days ago um that's that is such a big move because how can she not proceed like like like basically like but i i put a note like um this is like therapy rape like this is like

you're you're forcing your problems on somebody without consent like the person said no i don't want to take on like like this is a horrible tweet where the where the woman said like uh you know uh if my friend asked me if i have time for a problem i send him this what was that tweet with the lady said yeah yeah um you know i know what you're talking about yeah i yeah i neither have the capacity nor the yeah i know what you're talking about yeah but and and everyone was like damn lady you're psychotic but this is actually a real life version of where that's warranted like you know somebody it's just a right to say look this is heavy i only make you people two days ago you know uh i don't even know being this guy have a relationship like this is weird don't

give me this problem he's like he brutes out i just took a bunch of pills it's like damn now what can i do like like maggie's experiencing a nightmare scenario her her character isn't reacting properly to it but for everybody else it would be a nightmare scenario of like the worst possible date where you end up going to a funeral and then like being stalked by the guys friends who are like hey can i talk to you i try to kill myself at your job yes and also help this in your life is it a pair for any of that but it is forced to do free free labor you know i don't know what the he's not gonna pay her yeah yeah so that's another term that this show validated emotional labor like like terms i usually think i wrote that down yeah no this is like turned me into an emotional

labor guy but uh so interspersed with that gary shows up to groom slash take john son to the recital his son instantly asked gary if john his dad killed himself because of him i just wrote down here ha ha ha ha ha because it's so like on the nose and fucked up oh yeah so bad yeah this son is like do you think no like did he kill himself because of secrets about me that i thought everyone didn't know but maybe he did and gary like this is a very fucked up so you are gay homey this is a little this is a little boy just out of nowhere going like did my dad kill himself because i i'm gay and not good at hiding it and gary's like uh listen uh neil patrick harris is gay and he's uh one of the most epic sirs on all of tv i mean he doesn't literally say that but that's

like how he responds he responds in like you know a reddit up vote way like he's gonna get a lot of reddit gold for how well he handled his friend's uh uh now fatherless son coming out to him yeah it's just a weird thing like i don't i don't know but like i i don't know the experience of a gay child especially now uh but i do remember at that age for me i wasn't i didn't know if i was gay or straight you know i'm saying and it's like i don't know if this kid would even know what he is he might like guys he might be young enough to know that he he likes boys but i don't know if you'd even know what gay is yeah and even if he did like i feel like starting a dating life would not be like like for example when i had crushes on girls that stuff like first i didn't really understand

what i was feeling you know at that age i just know i could like maybe um pull this girl's hair or something but i wasn't really thinking about strategizing okay what's the next step how am i gonna move this to the next level like like like this kid is between gary the groomer and you know this kid later on they're both kind of strategizing how he can make this happen with this um with this uh boy and i feel like i don't know if these are different now but i don't i feel like well they must be in later episodes yeah kids are strategized on a relationship yeah yeah because it's not a sport like like this this thing goes on with him and the boy about them getting closer you know so so it's just scary just grooming the two young boys

like listen i'm gonna teach you how to do some things grooming them in a grooming them in a reddit way hold on to this banana i'm gonna show you some stuff okay yeah you can use later just let like uh you're so mature for your age yeah um the question i wanted to ask you guys before is um the it seems like on a lot of tv shows they're adding gay uh child characters um which i thought is a strange pattern like why do you do you guys have any theories of why these network shows are adding i mean it's good to see gay characters on tv but yeah it's written by like fucking dumbass gen X hollywood libs that's like the entire reason and it's like but why are the kids i think their audience i think their audience has this anxiety because um gayness is kind of in their eyes more

in your face and never like like this this is the generation that because they're like gen X they kind of fancy themselves as way cooler than their square parents and grandparents and their kids actually not only um being gay but now having like pronoun things and trans things is like scaring the hell out of them but they can't really admit this scares me because um then i'll be as i'll be like my parents with civil rights or stuff like that i always have to be the punk rock punk rock dad so i think this is feeding them a fantasy of a what would it happen if the kid was gay yeah yeah your kid being gay it's not really a problem just treat it like you know if if your kid like the girl like like gay kids it's really that easy you know and and b this is how you would handle you would

just give a pep talk and everything would go right i think that fantasy is i think it's an anxiety no that they feel that's and a fantasy of how it would play out if it happened it's i think it right i totally agree with i mean that's like that was it was uh i hate to do this but that was a really funny like onion article guy fantasizing about how much he'd nail it if he had a gay kid that's what this is and like if we look at this through the lens of gary who's like an annoying redditor guy who probably is like uh yeah uh donald trump is a fail tard he would um like really pride himself on accepting a gay child so that it's this character's like wish fulfillment for a lot of the audience is being given this moral template of helping a gay kid accept himself in his reddit

way yeah yeah and in these type of guys if their gay kid didn't just uh roll over and comply with the fantasy they would just be horrible like if they presented gayness as anything more complicated than the scope of this pep talk you know they would actually be probably horrible parents to that gay kid like that kid pretty much has to be this kid uh for uh them to be able to handle it well well they need it like all things like they need a compliant gay child who like is so compliant that he thinks like he's let people down by being gay yeah he would just continuously buy him queen albums and be like you would like this freddy murky who is gay actually but he was awesome they've been they've been they've been bowies an icon yeah he's a boy these people are like you

know i said this before but it's another example these people are like with the gay kid the way they are with their uh black friend like they pride themselves on having like a black friend or any from friend of color but if that friend of color actually makes any type of demand or checks them in any way about you know any racism that they might be doing you know suddenly like it's it's a problem you know uh like like they they want to have uh diverse things around them but uh they want that person's diverse to make it as easy for them as possible and just be a prop to show how enlightened they are and if uh that person does not comply in any way it's going to be a backlash it's like that line in citizen kane where they talked about like why kane was running for governor

and it's like oh you think it will be like enough if you get all these people to love you because of what you're giving to them and it's like that's what that's what like the gen X liberals writing the show they feel like i never thought citizen kane would come up in reference to this show but you actually made it work like but it's the same thing it's like why why why do they use the gay kid device so much because they like they need the pv so that's not yeah i didn't have an answer to this it's not about gay people i didn't have an answer i was legitimately asking you guys but i just thought it was interesting because um my original instincts are that like a lot of the failures in shows like this come from executive notes um where it's like basically uh well there's

a couple points like a lot of these shows they're really bad because they're kind of made for people who are texting or not only half paying attention to be able to watch it yeah um but it's it's once again one of those cycles um and not all obviously not all executive producers are bad or studio executives but there are a lot of them who are giving notes after only skimming these scripts you know and like often telling the writers uh oh no you know i read it yeah we need a gay character you know just like yeah when they're about to shoot it so i was like my first thought was like oh maybe they added a gay character and they just like made this kid gay but i'm i'm like why is it always the kid like it would make more sense to just have like one character who is incidentally

gay just like like what if what if gary was gay they wouldn't change his character i mean you could do the same thing just have him be gay um i think i think what he wouldn't do it is because they don't know what to do with that i don't think they're committed enough to it because for gary to be gay now you really have to have a three-dimensional gay life and that's i think there's more resources than they really want to do i think i think they really care that much but with the kid you can just make it into precociously gay precociously sexistly gay and is that gay yes he's not gay yet he's gay junior yeah exactly exactly they can barely write people who are basically analogs of themselves so can you imagine he's gay but not doing it yet yeah yeah exactly he's not with the

kissing stuff yet they can't even write carbon copies of themselves like convincingly can you imagine them trying to put themselves into the mind and body of a totally different type of person i can't see that is so funny these these types of liberals that they only like the puppy version of uh of gay people or pocs yes like it's like when they're a kid before they grow up and get complicated and you have to like take them on walks yep yep oh i have a very quick note uh this is a backtrack to something you said earlier in addition to um uh roams like uh problem assault like it's problematic problem assault we know without consent i like i just she keeps after he dumps all that stuff on her after her second or third refusal you know he tells her all this stuff

and she goes uh that's nice but again uh i can't be your therapist but she goes but as your friend and i'm like wait they just that's another example of they just met and she says as your friend i can tell you this and it's like you're not his friend you know he you moved here one day ago your box you have not unpacked your moving boxes yes none of this is earned these moments yeah so so wall gary and john like they're having that bad scene uh delilah is returning tupperware to regina uh she gave delilah and john like a bunch of uh brownies in tupperware and regina's upset because it seems like they really put a dent into it but delilah explained like she's like oh did john hate my cooking but delilah explains that every time john closed a business deal he would eat

a single brownie i'm not kidding like i rewatch this two times to make sure that i got this right because he was so fucking insane you can go and watch this for yourselves if you're listening you don't believe me that this is in the show this is really in the show there's really a separate scene where they have to explain that every time john would do one of his famous fucking business deals he would eat a single brownie and then kill himself that is so funny that this sucked up minutes from the show like there were other scenes that were cut to keep this yes they had to have this in and then it just ends there's nothing more after that yeah so we're back at rome's problem this all is he put it and he he goes rome goes john is just like me we both hide behind fake

smiles maggie tells him that they can't be yeah she can't be a therapist but gives him a referral she asks if his wife knows and takes note that rome has told his friends his idiot friends but not his wife she has this weird line like this character is always giving clumsy visual metaphors she says a lot of every relationship has a gardener and a flower you're the you're the gardener and your wife's the flower you have to be the flower for once all right so by the way i don't think that's a healthy relationship format template no that is it yeah anyway one person who takes care of every every psychiatrist would disagree it's like codependency so next we're finally at the recital the thing that most of this episode has been about john john sees the boy

nadella who he has a crush on like whatever rome tells gary that he found a therapist maggie is there and does not tell gary that rome just fucking tracked her down and pestered her he does ask who was outside of her apartment but she goes if she says very vague she's like it's someone from my past so backstage sophie and eddie are getting ready for their dance at the dancer cycle we get a flashback flashback number two fucking trillion of this series uh back to that softball game we saw earlier we see delilah and john in the stands they're talking about a song that eddie wrote or delilah and eddie are in the stands sorry they're talking about a song that eddie wrote delilah wants to hear it eddie says that they should all go to dinner so he can play it for

delilah says well you know john's working late every night this week so we can't all go well what like what if just me and you went to dinner eddie and uh because your wife also works late and he's like yeah and he kind of looks at her in this way that you can tell he's always had a thing for her and it's like oh this is how the affair is is she hitting is she hitting on him like why would you take on that like like i'll try i think if she was being a being like a uh seductress or if it was like an innocent thing because this seems it's just weird i couldn't tell what i'm supposed to get out of that all right as as the as an expert in affairs uh so i do kind of like i think the baggie and john or the baggie and eddie writing is like it's not good but it's comfortably

good per the rest of the show it's the most realistic and i think it's the most realistic because any affair that you do have it actually is corny they're corny things to do and they're unlike a lot of they're unlike any conventional relationship because it's love that you have that you do in the face of immense consequences which for a lot of people there isn't a lot of but it's also like very fleeting because it's so powered by the the anxieties and the tension and the uh prevent the uh the transgressiveness of it and because this is a corny show it can capture the cornyness of what you're like if you're in like a transgressive thing like that and i actually did think like the way that they show this affair is starting is actually like that is kind of

out goes it doesn't start off like hey we should fuck it would start off like it's just a feeler it's just like hey we're friends but like what if we just you know did something without ever anyone else but it's like yeah yeah yeah well you're not well you're not like that's what i mean that's what i mean so you think she was giving out as a feeler not uh innocent not an innocent uh thing because that was the part i feel like the male actor was better communicating that to him it was a feeler but i was having trouble reading if the female actress was trying to convey that it was mutual feelers or you know um yeah i thought that was like the one thing that was kind of done okay was like how ambiguous and vague that is because that is like that's kind of how it goes you know

i mean it makes sense because you got plausible deniability so if anything the way the way she did it was probably more realistic because that's probably how somebody really really would do it in that instance is they want to be able to walk it back if they have to yeah um so but uh so like just having that flashback makes eddie decide that he can't do the dance even though they're on next like him and sophie he convenes the fucking moron friends backstage and tells them that he can't be there for so and i wonder why would that flashback stop him from doing it because he's been thinking about he's been thinking about uh sex with lila and talking about it for the whole show so why would that conversation specifically like to me i would think a conversation

maybe of him talking with maybe john and him thinking back to john saying oh man i love my wife so much i mean i mean the way this show writes that that's how the flashback would go i really love that wife of mine but for some reason she's so distant to me you know uh it's a good thing i have you as a friend to talk to you know uh you'd never beg my wife or something like that you know with the subtlety of this show and then that specific flashback basically like wow i'm such a traitor to uh it was like they used the wrong flashback yeah yeah that flashback was compared of you mild to the other flashbacks he was having you know when when he agreed to do this so rome steps up for the moment and uh like sophie's freaking out because it's like well what the

fuck i picked eddie i was practicing with eddie and rome like calms her down uh as she's starting to freak out and then sophie has this moment where she's like oh my god my dad did have a plan for me and she realized this the plan was that he would have to lila record him and her dancing as practice because he knew he wouldn't be there for the recital he wanted to kill himself before which like whatever no no no no no that wasn't the contingency plan the contingency plan is even more disturbing in my opinion wait the contingency plan was it the contingency plan right he this was a contingency plan was and this is why i say he's a super villain of suicide which is very very the heat ledger suicide he actually that's kind of weird because the actual heat ledger

committed suicide forget that yeah i get you though that really went wrong but um okay um i say worse stuff every day uh see rome has a perfectly because wait a minute i know the dance wait rome how do you know the dance well john felt really subconscious about his ability to dance so he asked me to coach him through the dance so he taught me to hold dance uh so basically john pretended that he couldn't master the dance so that rome would be forced to learn it all in plans of that when i commit suicide rome will now know to hold dance at the key moment and be able to step in so the recording was a part of it but but uh that was what made me so good at committing suicide i see i totally misread that i thought that was rome just like trying to keep her from

freaking out no no no no the way i took it that was that was the plan he he had rome coach him through it so that someone else would know the whole dance from beginning to end so that makes it extra morbid he was there with his whole friend having his friend having a great time learning how to dance meanwhile thinking man i can't wait to kill myself you know you know like what the whole time i want to kill himself for like 20 years yeah yeah so it's so freaking morbid how premeditated the suicide was and he was just i'm saving my final thoughts on this he was laying down contingency plans he was doing everything with the end result of this suicide even like little innocuous things like having his friend secretly coach him uh how to

dance he was uh doing it as one more uh i to dot or uh teed across on his uh post suicide checklist john's suicide was like more thought out than any contingency plan than like if the president thoughts it's insane there's like a chain of command and designated survivors but so Delilah like sees Eddie wandering around backstage and they have you know one of their whisper fights where it's like you know i i love you i love you you can't love me blah blah blah you did the same Delilah and eddie bullshit uh she's like eddie's basically like i love you and that's why i can't dance with sophie which makes zero sense but anyway before rome goes out there Delilah gives eddie his fucking dumb shit necklace back and they both sort of like walk out of the

hallway crying they go back in the crowd and rome is dancing competently with sophie uh everyone in the crowd is thinking about their shout whisper affairs it back in the hallway of the auditorium eddie finally listens to john's message it's just uh i was hoping to speak with you not just to leave a message but i just have a favor to ask you love each other eddie walks back in and the episode ends i made a note i made a note uh when that scene happened i put um reverse wife guy please email my wife like that's yeah yeah yeah absolutely yeah that was so i got like my final thoughts on uh for this episode are that the show is the opposite of smooth like if you can identify the nbc shows the council of dads and this is us is like upsettingly smooth and without friction

this is jagged and confusing it gives you the feeling of nauseousness and unlike nbc schlach which is just like a smooth turd coming out of your asshole this is just painful it's like shards of glass being removed from your body have you ever have you ever had uh this is a little too graphic but have you ever had like when you get sick and somehow you're simultaneously constipated and have diarrhea it's like the worst of both worlds that's why this is yes absolutely it's like because it's like those nbc shows they're just shoving like tragedy and like saturated sweetness in your face and saying feel this feel this feel this this is it's like giving immersion therapy of emotion to a tonier audience than the nbc shows who have like blown out their

pleasure receptors in humanity like steven paddock did this is it's so weird to watch like so my one thought about this and i don't even know if i've fully wrapped my head around it yet but i've tried to figure out what the show really is and it's like it's it is a fantasy and it's like my first thought was that it was like the fantasy of a wise of having a wise father figure um who isn't actually distracted by his own devices even when he is in the show um it's like at least for for me and a lot of people i know i can't speak to everybody i'm sure there are some people who have great parents who can give you uh wisdom when you need it but for my experience being an adult um part of being becoming an adult it's realizing like in moments of chaos it's like you go to your

parents for advice and you realize oh these people are they don't know what to tell me like they've not even gone through what i'm going through right now and they're living their own lives and they're distracted by their own shit like they're often um so that was my first thought it's like it's like this fictional they're like doing a subversion of like the leave it to beaver father where it's like oh john's the wise dad who knows all but he is a little dark because he kills himself because i thought it was like i thought it was weird it's like he's like being a leave it to beaver dad from the grave um but then i thought about it more and it's like oh john is giving the same advice that i've gotten and wasn't helpful right like i don't know i don't want to get too personal or

dark but like going to a parent in like a time of like crisis where like my friends aren't even like giving good advice you know like something like pure crisis and then like they just kind of don't know what to say you know so they give you some lines be like well you know things sounds pretty bad but the thing is things do get better when they're bad i think you really touched on something there because i think what you describe and i think it's the fantasy that i think a lot of parents have especially uh gen X parents and boomer parents because i think boomer parents are probably the first like kind of self-absorbed parents really that really kind of um want to keep living their lives and getting new experiences even after um parenting but you know this is kind

of idea i can be a self-absorbed uh parent but still be be a good parent and this i think i think you really nailed it is the ultimate expression of that fantasy i'm so self-involved and whatever that i'm actually gonna um do the most um self-focused thing of all which is kill myself and i'm still going to be a good parent like not only can i can i date and be a good parent not only can i have an active uh work life and work be workaholic and be a good parent i can actually sort of kill myself and still be a leave it to be for leave it to be for parent it's it's very morbid yeah i think that the fantasy there's two ways to look at it you could look at it as a show where it's like it's the fantasy of how parents want to adult like 50 plus year old parents

want to perceive themselves that's one fantasy the other way for me watching it if i could look at it as anything it's like it's the fantasy of being dumb enough where your parents advice is actually useful yeah like i just thought of like my dad my sister's engine on her car like had a catastrophic failure and me and a mechanic uh we're trying to figure out what happened and we're like deep like we're in like there's two problems either it's like one thing happened to the other and then like my dad would like text me like hey i had an idea for the car maybe it's something to do with the engine i'm like oh thanks like we're like three days into tearing it apart right like but like it's a fantasy where that is helpful to a person that's like

so jack i wrote that down that's why the characters are dumb because you have to make the characters unbelievably and unrealistically stupid for any of the dumb shit like pearls of wisdom they get to have any gravity and that's a perfect that's a perfect example of the what what you described when you're dead and the engine and stuff that's a perfect example of like the gay kid like if you knew nothing about what it's like to be a gay kid you'd wonder why any gay kids have problems because it was such a solvable problem the way gary did it you know like like what did gary even really tell him they just made him okay with it was nothing he said he said he said hey i still love you and it's like that's the only thing with being a gay kid you're unsure if people will still love you

not anything else yeah yeah and everything's okay after that it's just like a regular um childhood crush every still like me if i'm gay that's the main issue that's the thing that gay kids wonder yeah gary like me anymore oh man it's so they're mind numbingly dumb um they well i feel like before we recorded i was uh i was saying to you like uh the characters from the wire like the ones who who are supposed to be comically dumb are vastly more intelligent than the character every character on the show combines way more like smarter imagine if christopher multisanti from the soprano was like walked into the set like a transplanted character he would be like a different species of intelligence he would like intellectually run circles around them yeah you said christopher

multisanti would wash everyone in the show and i completely agree with yeah yeah like on them easily yeah yeah christ had a contextual uh intelligence for all for better or worse like like little things like um putting his that thing in the scale remember the meat scale something he does he get like like a couple of extra sense off on the meat like he has his own contextual scammy knowledge whereas these people i can't even imagine them in their day jobs being being competent like like at like in any context being intelligent like like for example the psychiatrist and her um and the psychologist and her advice you know like yeah i don't see these people i don't see rome being a good director i don't see uh i can't imagine those women running a restaurant like nothing

it's like hard to tell how dumb they are because it's the type of dumb where they don't even correctly respond to basic stimulus it's like they would keep their hand on a hot stove yeah yeah the very large physics don't work so even the dumbness is going to get rewarded like like you know everyone is a 10 million daughter house everybody is super successful so are they really dumb like like like for example if you if you look at um a superhero um movie or something you know somebody is the smartest uh person in the world or whatever and but the planet they have defies all physics so in this world like in that justice league movie superman supposed to be like um a smart powerful guy and he lifts a whole building a whole giant building by one corner um and he's flying with the building

and physics doesn't work that way the whole building will collapse on the stuff you can just pick up a giant building hold it up by one corner but you know he's smart and noble in this world because the law of physics been to accommodate how stupid he actually is so in this world that is a smart thing and that's what this thing is like everybody's stupid but i'm not sure if this stupid because this world operates by totally different rules like these people should not be able to feed themselves should not be able to be as successful as they are but it's a good thought experiment well my next galaxy brain thing and then i'll kind of stop is um i was uh i was trying to make sense of john's character because the way he plans this suicide and commit suicide for no apparent

reason i mean there's clearly implied reasons right like that we don't know about but he kind of like plans this and he like seems to let his wife cheat on him it doesn't make sense that she's cheating there's like a lot of just like holes and how he kind of like peacefully gives this up and forgives things um it only makes sense to me as if like he had another life going that consumed him way more so i was imagining like an alternate version of the show where if john was running like a big criminal empire uh that was like collapsing on himself and like like that would rationalize all of this if he had something some secret that was like so big that like he was killing himself over that and like his family and this life was like just kind of like props to him almost like

henry and good fellas like the way he treats his family yeah you want to you want to was crazy and this this is no spoiler i watched the whole first season and i think they partially answered this and i cannot remember a single bit of the answer that's how little little it ended up registering like so much of the micro is so weird on this show that it sticks in my head better than the main overlying thing like i honestly cannot remember at all why they said like first off i don't remember if they i don't even remember they gave the whole answer or part of the answer but uh there's a whole mystery that goes on and even though i watch the whole season i cannot remember a single bit of the mystery back you remember a million little weird things i didn't do that on purpose ironically uh

that uh gary and roman eddy do strangely you know it's uh it's it's funny because like when i see movies like that where it's like it's usually somebody like a tommy karketti in the wire or like some like a a secret cartel boss in a lot of shows there will be like our cartel boss living in america with a normal family you know and i always find myself thinking like oh like their life is their work life and their secret life is so chaotic it's like i couldn't imagine having a home life but this is what it would be like like john would have to like that person would have to have the dumbest friends that only talk to him about things that he could autopilot through through and have like and his behavior with his family would be like how john is where he just

kind of like is very floaty and like walks out into the mound in baseball games just like the thing is you can't give up you just gotta you gotta throw the ball and uh even if you don't you throw it you gotta you gotta try along those lines you know this reminds me of too because you know i say he was like uh the batman or a heat ledger joker of uh suicide and you mentioned the tommy karketti and yeah it's kind of like the people have to be stupid enough to uh not spot who clarkin is with glasses and not be able to figure out uh why does that clarkin leave like 75 percent of the time when uh trouble happens and stuff like this this is the people are left behind like how stupid they are yeah wait yeah just interesting like that would be the pearl jam shirt sure oh i'm

sorry go on that's funny the pearl jam shirt go ahead yeah the weird cultural signifiers with this guy are so weird like like the only personality trait for him is you know remember he was big in the 90s but i feel like i don't feel like anybody who's even in the band in the 90s um still dresses like they're in that band or still wears all the cultural like markers like why is like like the yin yang necklace the pearl jam shirt i didn't have much anything deeper to say about that it was just kind of annoying that everybody's just um broken down to the most rudimentary signifiers as a sign of what the character is no yeah well they're all like i guess like you know i to close it out i guess that's like it does feel like they're all adult children like they're like

everyone is like a child with like a job who drives an awadi like that's like that is their their the depth of their emotional world they have no concept of like abstract thought they can't process anything except what's right in front of them and even then they have a lot of trouble uh it's just i mean it's a i guess it is appropriate that they deal with like a gay child character because that's how they would write a gay adult like that's it's the same thing there's no difference if you like looked at the script you couldn't immediately tell that this character is a child but uh this show would we went two hours and nine minutes yeah it's been like three it took us three times as long to explain describe the show then like if you were to just watch in the episode

you know it's funny before you even did this episode i thought to myself i wonder if it's going to be a regular one hour episode because this show is very hard to just fly through it's just so many layers of weird yeah it's so fucking disconcerting like i am very glad i had both of you guys on because i think it warrants like a deep dissection uh i hope chris doesn't get mad at us for how for how much audio we're giving him but like seriously thank you guys so much this is one of my favorite episodes we've done and uh we will we're gonna yeah obviously put the patreon and soundcloud for champagne sharks and yeah but still in this but uh yeah thank you guys so much i'm putting chris's email where you can we transfer him your web files right excellent yeah thank you so

much to tea and jack thank you everyone for listening we'll be back again next week i am working on a very extensive episodes is similar to this higher in cons like like um how do i describe i don't know i can't describe too much without uh blowing it i'm writing a script for it but uh no boy you'll you everyone will see next week what i do with the last bits of uh this is us oh it's wonderful so the scripted concept is different than this is us or this is the next level of this is us oh this is the end this is going to be the last thing i watch for the show this is the last thing i do for the show this is us because it's too boring for me to keep watching so i have to go i'm doing something kind of insane with it you'll see oh cool cool you'll see uh but

no thank you guys so much yeah thanks for having us great and no my pleasure and yeah we'll have to when we get back to this fucking show we're gonna have to do this again yeah yeah absolutely i'm going to tell you this show only only gets weird when it gets weird oh oh boy i want to treat all i need you here all right thank you guys so much all right take care guys all right all right me