The Bill Simmons Podcast - Ep. 72: 'The Watch' Takeover with Chris Ryan & Andy Greenwald

Episode Date: March 4, 2016

Chris and Andy cohost to discuss the TV Championship Belt, the Netflix model (12:00), the prestige dramas 'Vinyl' and 'Billions' (19:00), and 'Better Call Saul' (28:00), and celebrate the work of Courtney B. Vance on 'The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.' Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to the Bill Simmons Podcast, and this is The Watch Takeover. My name is Chris Ryan, and I am an editor for TheRinger.com, and joining me on the other line, he just released an album at midnight, it's Andy Greenwald! Title exclusive, buddy. Feels good. Yeah, we are replacing the Friday Roland crew here today on the Bill Simmons Podcast. My name is Chris Ryan. My friend Andy Greenwald is on the other line.

In case you don't know, we host a show called The Watch, which is on the Channel 33 podcast feed. It's usually about television and other pop culture matters. You can subscribe to The Watch by subscribing to Channel 33 on iTunes, Stitcher, or SoundCloud. I also highly recommend that you go to TheRinger.com and enter your email to sign up for our newsletter, which should be starting very soon in mid-March. And we'll be hitting you up about three times a week with all sorts of good stuff in your inbox.

You can also follow us on Twitter, at Ringer, and on Instagram, at Ringer, and on Facebook, TheRinger. Andy, what's up, man? man it's Friday we don't do Friday roll and we usually do a Friday re-up and uh we're here to introduce today we're going to talk about something pretty exciting for us right we're going to talk about deflate gate some personal news is that right no uh we are here to talk we're going to introduce a new concept for our podcast to watch that we're going to try and keep going over the course of this year.

Now, this is not going to be an unfamiliar idea if you were a Grantland reader or a Grantland listener. Sometimes we would bring up something called the championship belt. I think we did it for point guards. I think we've done it for action stars, if I'm correct. The idea of the championship belt is that there is a, what is it, a transitive kind of idea. It's been a while since I was in college i don't make me talk about math man um the idea that basically at any given time something is the is the best or the dominant kind of uh entity in whatever field you're talking about and in television we're gonna do the television show championship belt and when we

feel like something has won or uh unseated the holder, we will talk about it. And Andy, let's talk a little bit about what this idea means, because I think for television, it's a very specific criteria we're talking about. Yeah, and I think it's also worth noting the time frame we're going to look at here, right? Because basically when Bill and other people did the Action Star Championship championship belt it was a belt that you held until it was taken from you right so like van damme had it until i actually have no idea who took it from van damme i wouldn't even want to try but the point being it lasted for a long period of time i think the way to think about it for tv is let's look at the year and let's break it up into quadrants there are four seasons in the actual year for people to go outside and experience weather and there are four seasons

for people who watch television too and i wouldn't know dog i'm just out here with my vitamin d drip that's right or like me having to watch so much tv i actually have no idea what season it is outside um so it's worth noting that we're going to think of it as who's holding the belt for each season of the year right and the other reason why that's relevant is because up until relatively recently tv was pretty much about the fall and maybe the spring yeah all the new shows came out in the fall everyone paid attention to them sorted the wheat from the chaff shall we say i'm using a lot of metaphors from like outdoorsy things for someone who has already established that he never leaves the house. But that was it.

And then maybe in the spring, there would be a couple new shows. And in the summer, there would just be hot garbage. Hot garbage piped directly into your TV box. Obviously, those days are long, long gone. And the fall almost feels like an afterthought when the networks back up the truck and dump unnecessary remakes of The Muppets on us. Everything else happens at the other times of the year. And in fact, I would say that the season we're just coming out of, the season that starts in January, is in many ways the busiest now.

And Chris and I, you and I were talking before about how it's actually getting even more micro-targeted, where the services like Amazon and Netflix have figured out that the best time for them to dump their new shows is on Thanksgiving weekend or Christmas weekend or New Year are move yeah that's when people are trapped with their families that they don't want to talk about i talk to so they watch tv instead the what you're talking about with this idea that the fall is is high tv like the high season for tv you know we're talking about that like it's you know they used to have model t fords and you have to crank them real hard to

get them up the hill we're we're in the tesla age now man like this is not only is there just uh no no respect for for for the seasons as as the wizard gandalf made them but there's no respect for time i mean like whether or not we're talking about house of cards which is coming back this weekend or love that's already on Netflix, or all these Marvel shows that are on Netflix, Amazon's Gold Rush that they've got going, Hulu putting on show after show. I think The Path, the Jason

Canem show is coming soon, correct? All these shows that are either binge-worthy, bingeable, plus you've got upstart networks from WGN and on A&E looking to put like more and more original scripted content on the air it's incredibly difficult to navigate this and one of the things we try to do with the podcast obviously is like pick and choose what these

things you know the best of the best are for you to be checking out uh currently andy is this we we would describe this i think as uh the calm before the thrones this period, right? I think that's right. I think that there is the one thing that is absolutely certain as we introduce this completely subjective and utterly fictional concept is that spring is on lock. The spring season is owned by Game of Thrones. And in fact, it's not just Game of Thrones. And in fact, it's not just Game of Thrones. The Sunday nights on HBO, Game of Thrones into Veep and Silicon Valley, that's probably pound for pound the best night of TV that exists currently in 2016.

And the reason we say Game of Thrones wins, and we're going to talk a little bit more about what's coming with Thrones soon. In fact, in this show, we're going to talk about it. But the reason Thrones wins is because it hits all the points that we consider relevant to hold the belt it's not just the massive popularity which by the way it certainly

has it's the fact that it is the most culturally engaged and electric show that we have on tv i've liked to in fact i've often called it the last consensus show because it's the sort of show that feels like if you're not watching it you're missing out yeah and not only um do you have to watch it you have to watch it sunday nights or else you basically have to become a Luddite and cannot go online for the next week. You have to be a part of the conversation. You have to watch it. And for both of us, this is a little bit self-serving because obviously we record a podcast where we have conversations about TV. We want there to be conversation drivers out there.

But I think it's more than that. I think the thing that separates TV from the other mediums and the thing that I've always really loved about it is that sort of third rail where it's the people make the art, the people watch the art, but then we kind of hold it aloft in our arms and talk about it throughout the week. It feels, you know, it's exciting, it's engaging. And we miss that a little bit as we've gone from this consensus era of TV into this just wild, wild west of streaming and a thousand choices at any moment. Yeah. And I think that one of the things that we've been talking about monitoring for the last

year or two really is the way in which television watching habits have impacted the actual production of television, right? That the idea that people want something they need a reason to tune in live and if you're if you're gonna make a show these days and we see this with um uh you know with with the success of the shonda shows and with the wild success of game of thrones and walking dead those are really the shows that you feel like if i'm if you're a fan of them if you're not watching that live you will be you will miss out you know and then there are other shows which kind of um eschew that and you you i have i have a you know a sober respect for something like say

better call saul which is very good and very well done but is almost feels like it is like a piece of 70s cinema compared to the way a lot of what we watch now is. And I feel like you could just accumulate three Saul's and watch them on a Sunday and not feel like you had missed out on the, you know, the latest Sandpiper newsletter. But whereas with Thrones and Walking Dead and with and with a lot of the Shonda shows, you feel like there is. They used to say there has to be three jokes per minute on a nbc sitcom on a thursday or whatever there has to be three jokes per page there needs to be three twists per episode yeah but you know it's interesting we're talking about those shows the shondaland shows on abc uh walking dead game of thrones is being the paradigm for what tv should

be just in terms of audience engagement but it's, they're kind of the model T's in the Tesla analogy you used before. Because where we're headed is towards the streaming future. And Netflix and Amazon in particular, they don't care about what we're talking about. Yeah. They want to be talked, they want their shows to be in the conversation. There's no doubt.

But they also don't think it matters. They think it's yesterday's currency, basically. What has value to them is building up this unbeatable library to keep people subscribing to keep people discovering they actually don't care if we watch the entire season of love today as opposed to when it dropped a month ago or if we watch it in a year or two years that's fine i think that's probably great for the people making the shows in the sense that they know that there will be an audience will find them. It's not going to disappear into the ether.

It's not going to go out of print on DVD or whatever. But it is lacking that thing that we really enjoy about TV. And actually, anecdotally, I've heard this too from people who've had shows on the streaming services. They feel kind of lonely too. Yeah. It's kind of like their album dropped and nobody's listening to it at the same time. I'm going to make a prediction. That's kind of like they're they're it's like their their their album dropped and nobody knows nobody's listening to it at the same time i'm gonna make a prediction sort of a bummer you know what within the next couple of years some enterprising you know and i know that some

websites are already doing basically like tv guide style apps for streaming television but once they have enough of a library i could could see Amazon and Netflix basically sponsoring their own content sites to talk about their own shows. I mean, why not? Right. Just to keep it alive. Yeah. Well, because I was watching on The Atlantic today. They are doing basically a live binge blog of House of Cards. And that's often been one of the issues with those Netflix shows is that how do you kind of do an episodic check-in of it

when people are either watching 10 hours in a row or 10 hours over the course of 10 months? And they're just kind of like, screw it, we're going all in, we're going to watch it and we're going to write about it as we watch it. There's going to come a time where, I think that the problem with a lot of editorial sites

don't really know how to engage with some of those shows in a proper way. I think you're going to actually see a time when Netflix is like, cool, we'll do it for you. They definitely believe in doing it for you. There's no question about that. House of Cards is an interesting example because when House of Cards debuted three years ago, and that's crazy to imagine that that was already three years ago. I would say that in the period it debuted, and I don't have the date in front of me but it had the belt when house of cards debuted as netflix's first first um you know big ticket scripted show all eyes were on it people were racing through it it was incredibly addictive february 1st 2013 okay so it felt momentous you know it's it it felt like it was um well i'm trying to you

know i'm trying to reverse engineer this point because i think well i don't think we're alone in thinking now we realize that house of cards actually hasn't added up to anything well yeah it was was incredibly snackable it was not a satisfying meal but when it debuted it felt like one now three years later there isn't the same excitement of this being dumped onto our servers. Now, many people will watch it, but I think actually the way that it has been serviced to us has affected the way we've perceived it. And I think that's in a negative way. Do you think that part of what you think about that?

So when House of Cards came on February 2013, the pilot's directed by David Fincher. It's got Kevin Spacey, Robinight and kate mara in it it looks like a billion dollars it's about something very compelling and told in a kind of quasi trashy way but you know relatively intelligently and just you can't overstate it david fincher directed a piece of television and now i think that when we saw it in 2013 and it's all the episodes are available at once, everything about it felt progressive in some ways, even though it was in some ways a very traditional show. It was basically like Knott's Landing or Dallas set in the White House.

Now it just feels like television. Now it's just like another season of House of Cards. Yeah, it's available all at once. Yeah, Robin Wright and Kevin Spacey are still on it. It still looks like David Fincher or Joel Kinnaman's on this season. But basically season of House of Cards. Yeah, it's available all at once. Yeah, Robin Wright and Kevin Spacey are still on it. It still looks like David Fincher. Joel Kinnaman's on this season. But basically it's House of Cards and it's just another season. There are certain ways in which television still can't break out of being television,

no matter how much, say, a Soderbergh or a Fincher might try to tweak it a little bit. Well, look at the freedoms afforded by something like Netflix, which basically will say you can do whatever you want and we'll fund it. Yeah. That's an amazing thing. But often people don't quite know what to do with that freedom. And often that freedom leads to the same kind of sloth that affected traditional TV. What I mean is House of Cards is example A and Netflix is historically better show. Orange is the New Black is example B.

Both felt gripping and engaging and exciting and new in different ways both now are settled in for the long haul they put on you know they they're they're they're sitting back in their seat putting on the cruise control and they're gone and we've referred to it before as the showtime problem but i think it's fair to call it the netflix problem too orange is the new black just got renewed for what three more years she's in prison for 15 months how exactly is this working and the problem with a show like house of cards when you know now it's going to run four years maybe it'll run five years maybe six seven years the extremity of the first two seasons it's it just becomes a

implausible but b you have to top it and when you have to top a sitting congressman murdering someone else you're kind of you're you're kind of uh you kind of painting yourself into a corner there. Before we get too esoteric, I did want to say just, and then we're going to start actually talking about who holds the belt, we wanted to make it clear that we want to try to be as critically minded as we do this and a little bit populist minded. What that means is the show does have to have some popular oomph behind it. It can't just be something we love.

So you and I, big fans of things like Top of the Lake, The Honorable Woman, we love a British spy miniseries like London Spy on BBC America. Even though we spent a lot of time on our podcast talking about it, at no point did these shows hold the belt. It's just not possible, right? So think instead, obviously, Game of Thrones. We said House of C cards three years ago you know four years ago um breaking bad would have certainly had it and been holding it higher than many shows that held it before um you know mad men probably had

it going into its last season i would say there have been times i don't know whether i don't know if we could pull one out of thin air here but there were probably times when a comedy had it too right um i think louis had it at certain times, right? I think Louis could have had it. Because Louis basically had that House of Cards moment where all of a sudden you felt like the possibilities of televised scripted comedy were endless. And because of that, everyone was talking about it,

inside the industry and outside of it. Exactly. So should we run down the contenders for this moment? Before we get to the contenders, let's just get to a quick word from our sponsor. Your to-do list can seem a little out of control. So much to do, so little time. There's one thing you can check off your to-do list. Going to the post office.

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the championship belt now should we talk about some of the contenders before we actually give the award out here i think we should okay uh and this could actually serve as something of like a mid-season report card for a lot of these shows just so we do a little bit of a check-in here but we're gonna work our way up to the to the belt holder now uh currently right now on the the big sort of three of the big uh premium networks you've got vinyl on hbo and billions on showtime um kind of men both men behaving badly shows both difficult genius shows so very familiar for people who have been watching prestige television quote unquote for the last four or five years uh i think that they're both coming

into their own as with each episode but tell me where you're at with vinyl right now because i know that that's one that we've been kicking around a lot yeah it's interesting you know you you made this point the other week on the watch and i i appreciate it but i don't think i completely bought into it but now i i'm starting to i think that the thing about vinyl and billions is that both suggest a cleverness and a nimbleness in the creation of them or in the creator's mindset, the storytelling that isn't quite there in the show yet. And I wonder if that is the collision of people who want to do something new, who are a little bit looking at things a little bit sideways in a way that's fun, have a sense of self-awareness

of everything that's happened in TV before them and, you know, not wanting to sort of hammer those same beats, but sort of for whatever reason whether it's um network interference or notes or their own decision making process have sort of sidled into the straitjackets of macho dudes out maneuvering each other in the same old ways yeah you know there there are sparks in both of these shows and for me this third episode of vinyl was the first time that i kind of saw it for myself. I enjoyed this episode. I thought this was the first, you know, the second hour of the show. By that, I mean the second episode because the first episode was, I believe, nine and a half hours long. I think the first episode is actually still going if you have, like, HBO Premium.

And you can just watch the 47-hour version of Martin Scorsese's Vinyl. It's just still running like it's just still in his cadillac doing cocaine and there are still people running no actually it at this point the camera has done a complete 180 on thelma schoonmaker with her head just like turned up at the ceiling having just started up the biggest thickest line of the devil's dandruff you've ever seen um that yeah look this was more this was a more i tune into the watch for deep editor jokes that's just kind of what we do um this was a lot more fun this episode you know we we i think last week on our show on the watch on the re-up we went through all these

other scenarios that we would have enjoyed more for a music business set show and i think one of the the reasons we wanted to do that is because in our minds, some of these scenes that we were talking about, whether they were like Athens, Georgia in 1980, or The Clash playing in New York in 1981, or like Dungeon Family and Organized Noise starting out in Atlanta in 93, 94, is because they would have given us more of a sense of the creative along with the corporate. And Vinyl is a very top-down show, which is really to say that it focuses on the business people. And the business people are, I think even the business people would admit, are the least

interesting part of the record business. Right. Right. This episode gave us a little bit more of the creative spark as to why these people care so much and why we might want to care so much. There was the long-running B joke with Alice Cooper cooper which was fine i mean that was fun that felt like the kind of anecdote that you would hear about in a rock book written you know in the 80s about the 70s and that was perfectly enjoyable and similarly the the way that the nasty bit signing thing happened up to that show that was just really well shot you know that it felt fun

and when the music kicked in you kind of got into it that was show, that was just really well shot. You know, it felt fun. And when the music kicked in, you kind of got into it. And that was Mark Romanek, right? I think so, yeah. And my man Jonathan Tropper, who co-created Banshee on Cinemax, co-wrote this episode too. I didn't even know he was involved in it. But it's funny the way fun is often a bad word

in serious drama rooms. And I've heard anecdotally that even in some broadcast networks, they like to stamp out anything that might be fun or funny because they think their, you know, procedurals are all about, you know, naval crimes and there's nothing to laugh about there. But when you're talking about worlds as absurd as rock and roll in the 70s or hedge funds in the 2010s. I was just going to say that I think Billions has become a fun show too. And that's like a really big... If that had been a miserly show where Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis were battling for the soul of New York City and it was basically replaying 2008 financial crisis in some way,

I don't think it would have really worked. I just think that we've kind of had those lessons taught to us a couple of times in The Big Short and Margin Call and a couple of other things. I don't want to, like, I'm not laughing about financial malfeasance. I'm laughing at these people. And these guys are hamming it up. I mean, the boar's head is being sliced so thick, I might even send it back to my butcher. And so Chuck Rhodes versus Bobby Axe Axelrod

with a little sprinkling of wags on the top is a really nice Sunday palate cleanser. Whatever sexual deviancy they throw in is always welcome. And I love to see Terry Kinney, my man from Oz, getting a little bit of work. He's he's great. I think he's hit the hit it right on the head. What happens to these shows is that they sometimes start out as prestige drama and then they're like, maybe we're comedy, you three four seasons it's important that a couple of times an episode people laugh and that it doesn't feel like a slow-mo version of of of

them getting their their 401ks dissolved you know who i'd like to see laugh a little bit olivia wild olivia wild had her ali g just started improvving next to me face throughout episode she said uh she she actually did come out and say that she was quite a fan of that bit by SBC. I know, but I don't believe anything. You know what I watch TV with, Chris? My eyes, first and foremost. Same thing that I eat with. Do you watch it with your heart?

My eyes. And my eyes didn't lie about the sort of like, you know, I haven't seen a proof of life look on a face on tv like that since well since tuesday with chris christie but you know i think i know what i saw yeah the point being here vinyl and billions do not have the belt despite possibly building themselves into being stronger contenders i i'll say that i think vinyl doesn't just simply because it for all the fun that it's suggesting it is still a deeply backwards looking show and i don't say just simply because it for all the fun that it's suggesting it is still a deeply backwards looking show and I don't say that just because it's a period piece it does seem to yearn for both an era in our life and an era on television where we kind of wanted to see men

behaving badly and clubbing each other with ideas or checkbooks or just simply their fists so it does not feel of the moment and the ratings reflect that yeah and I have one one last note on vinyl and we can get to this some other time but i just want to put it out there a lot of these other difficult men shows that we're talking about whether it's breaking bad or mad men are at least within the universe of the show the purse the protagonist is very good at what they do and i don't know that richie fenestra is like i think and i don't know that the show necessarily thinks he is either or i think they're still trying to decide he says i have a golden ear and silver tongue and brass balls but i don't he the artists that he has signed are such a weird collection of like donnie eisman and black oak arkansas and he's screwed over other artists

and he's sort of like graph grasping at straws here at this point in the show and that might actually be a good thing for this show that they have a protagonist who is not actually a genius listen i think you're really onto something here but i think that they are afraid to go there and i think it's a problem that we've seen with homeland too yeah the takeaway from from all 11 seasons of homeland i could be rounding up or down is that Carrie Matheson is terrible at her job, right? She has missed every sign. She's behaved terribly. And yet the show cannot commit to her being the problem with it. And I don't mean writing her off of the show.

I mean admitting that she keeps screwing up instead of letting everyone fall in love with her. I think that's not just endemic to Homeland. I think that's endemic to dramas on TV in general. Yeah. That we aren't quite at the point, unless it's a show like Baskets, which by the way, you really should check out. We're not ready for the main character to be, quote unquote, a loser. The other problem with vinyl in this is that as soon as you start to introduce new bands

or new ideas, if you want to make him really good at his job he has to discover something incredible right right but then you enter the uncanny valley that bedevils all music shows which is you have to create something that is plausible yeah this is this is the that thing you do problem yeah you have to if you make a movie about the greatest song ever recorded you better get the greatest song ever recorded and as soon as someone's like it's not that great the whole movie crumbles yeah this is they're kind of in trouble with that it's the same problem that studio 60 has where they have to write the sketches and bill likes to go back to this over and over and over again where like sorkin was like i'm not just gonna cut away when they're gonna do the sketch i'm actually gonna say isn't sarah paulson as this nun hilarious i don't know

that might be american horror story i'm not sure might be both it's both but the same thing for that thing you do where they actually did whether you like the song or not you acknowledge that it sounds like something that could have been a hit but the the nasty bits you're just like yeah okay and i hope that they are not that good i hope that this is a not a genius finding not a good band and putting all going all in on it and then maybe then juno temple takes the show over can i god i wish can i just say um i i know ryan murphy doesn't listen to our show but in the off chance he listens to bill's show can i just suggest for season eight american horror story colon studio 60 on the sunset strip because you've already got Sarah

Poulsen in the fold I think the idea of it like a choir of gimps doing a Gilbert and Sullivan maybe Zachary Quinto can play conjoined twins that are the head writers right exactly oh that see now we're talking right and uh and and Evan Peter oh I thought the conjoined twins but one of them was in Iraq and the other one is doing a comedy show um there are a lot of possibilities here or here's actually my version of it here's my real pitch okay it's called it's on fx it's on wednesdays it's called produced by ryan murphy starring sarah paulson it's called american horror story colon studio 60 on the sunset strip and they just show studio 60 on the sunset strip i mean if we want things to get pushed if we want to really get progressive with television i don't i can't imagine let's just start showing shows with different titles well i feel like that

was or yeah it's arguable would you characterize studio 60 as an american horror story or an american crime story either way fx has options but boy that show is bad okay let's move on neither of those shows get the belt um better call Saul another contender here I want it to be if it's called better called Mike I think it would be yeah you're you're you're a little more sour on better call Saul in year two you said to me I asked you a couple weeks ago when you had seen the first episode and I hadn't and I said what do you think of better call Saul and you said they have walked back a lot of the character work that they did, where basically they had started from zero again with these characters, where there had been an arc for a bunch of them.

They got to the end of that arc, and then they were like, let's just sort of backpedal a little bit and put Jimmy in the same situation, put Ray Sehorne's character in the same situation, put Mike in the same situation. I just feel like there's just a little bit of treading water with this show right now we've talked about how this show has this weird relationship to another show it's unlike anything I think we've seen in this way I mean I know there's been spinoffs before but never one that was so obviously within touching distance

of the mothership. Look at you, by the way. You're like the Megyn Kelly of this podcast. You're hanging me with my own words. Unbelievable. I want to know how, what does it take to get a degree from Greenwald University? God, can you imagine? I feel like the extra credit alone would be, look, I absolutely felt that way about the season premiere. I thought the season premiere of Better Call Saul, second season, was a little bit strange step backwards.

Because, you know, and we said this on The Watch, that it actually, if we, the audience, takes a step backward, it's actually kind of admirable in the way that all of these Vince Gilligan produced shows are admirable in that they built in the option they built a a they built a car that basically could run on two speeds and they you know they reached the end of the first season and they basically had a turbo button where if they needed to get to Omaha they needed to get to Saul quickly they could have they realized a lot was working and they didn't need to so they hit the so they just downshifted basically and started to work with the story they'd built in season one. I will say that after having watched the third episode, which I was already inclined to like because it started right in that sweet spot of elder care and early bird specials that I really moved me as a TV watcher.

I do like it where you get a nice—any scene on a bus with a bunch of senior citizens is really—you just feel the electricity running through you. But the thing that I'm noticing and that I really appreciate is that what they're playing with now in a very interesting way is they are playing with the stakes that they introduced in season one. But they're playing with them in a very Breaking Bad, um, adrenalized way. And, uh, I saw our, our pal Alan Sepinwall was mentioning this on Twitter, so I should give him credit first and foremost about this. The tension that already exists in Jimmy and Kim's relationship,

which sort of came out of nowhere, but it kind of didn't because it was building since the pilot, but they slow pitched it so well to actually becoming a romance that now as we see the cracks in it, as she starts to see who he is and you know this guy who's been thirsty his whole life and suddenly has you know giant

nalgene waters nalgene bottles of of free water coming to him all the time and he wants all of it the idea that he's going to betray her in a small way before he betrays the constitution in a million ways is very moving and affecting yeah you know it's that if you think about what made breaking bad good it wasn't the way it shattered plates the way it did at the end of the season at the end of the series it was the way that beautiful china got so many hairline fractures and cracks yes leading up to it and that's the same storytelling they're doing and what's interesting but the comparison is interesting because a lot of people had a lot

hard time getting into breaking bad in the beginning because they were like what is this no one remembers that yeah they were like is this a is this a dark comedy about a guy with cancer uh is this guy gonna become a crime lord who's this jesse guy who keeps screaming bitch this show seems very slow there's only five episodes i think it's worth noting i think it's worth and obviously the writer's strike affected the first two seasons of breaking bad but i think it but i think it's worth noting that i don't know had we had a podcast back then which boy great job by us because i don't know if podcasts existed but um i don't think breaking bad would have had the belt until the the gus season yeah you know i i think that it was a slow build and then once it hit that maybe jane was jane before or after gus jane was season two yeah and i think i think that jane stuff's

incredible i do too i've been hearing in retrospect some people are sour about that some people are out on that season um which i don't i don't i don't buy i feel like that was the season when they started to play with things you know one of the things we ascribe to vince gilligan and peter gould who co-created Better Call Saul, but worked throughout, worked on every season of Breaking Bad with, with Vince Gilligan is we, we think about,

we credit them with this sort of long-term thinking that isn't often found in TV. And I think they were kind of making it up as they went along too, but season two, when they had the stuffed animal in the beginning in the pool, and then we saw that it was from the plane crash at the end, that was when they started to really experiment with that and really act like they knew what they were doing, even when they didn't. But look, we're off track. I really like the show, but it doesn't have the belt.

I agree with you. It doesn't have the belt because, look, it's about Michael McKean in the desert and old people and buses. You know, that's just kind of what it's about right now. It's about Mike with pimento cheese sandwiches doing all-nighters in an old chrysler like i love what it's about but we have to admit that it is only allowed to be about those things because it is breaking bad adjacent and not and not when the belt holder is on the air right now you can't you can't rock with it let's get to it not when courtney b vance is patrolling this earth like a great, beautiful acting beast. What an incredible episode of the people versus O.J. Simpson we just saw.

This is the championship belt holder right now. This is the best show on TV right now, and here's why. Because it hits all of our points. It's pure pleasure to watch the show in the way that I can't wait to watch it. This episode of Vinyl we're talking about that I liked, I fired it up on the old HBO Go or whatever, and at the bottom of the screen it said one hour, five minutes. There's a little deflation, right? I don't look at this. I don't look how long these OJ episodes are.

I wish they were twice as long. It's totally fun. It's incredibly smart. It's incredibly well made. But I also think that it is really pushing some conversations in a way that other TV isn't at the moment and other TV should. And in fact, it might even be pushing reality. Because I don't know if you saw today that Newsbreak, they may have found the murder weapon at the Rockingham property in Brentwood. What are you telling me?

That OJ might have done it? it look i don't want to i don't want to i don't i don't want to like step out of line here i know that we don't break news on our podcast i don't want to do it on bills but it's possible that he might not be as squeaky clean as his last 20 years of his life is suggested you bring up a good point this is the one argument against uh the wonderful arguers of oj that i would like to bring up is uh we've talked about this a little bit we are now in the court case right we have gone through preliminary hearings we've made opening statements and uh co-prosecutor bill hodgman has a heart attack in the court room and during the prelim so which opens the door of dramatic doors kicked open for christopher

darden to be made co-prosecutor of the case that did not happen well it did not happen like that bill hodgman did have a cardiac episode sure but it was in judges chambers the next day uh but that was i would agree with you that that was the first, like, that is really over-dramatizing something. Yeah. Some of the other details. And there's an implicit connection from Cochran's way of, I know that we'll get in trouble for doing this, but you're going to take the fall for this to his assistant lawyer. I don't know what assistant lawyers are called. A co-worker. And he's like, yeah, you're just going to fall on your sword for this one for OJ. They do it, and it so enrages Bill Hodgman that he has this attack.

And people have been picking on little and big details that the show is starting to embellish here and there. That almost, it's maybe even a testament to how good that episode was, is that that's much lower on the totem pole of things i want to talk about when it comes to this show because i think that for as much as television is a writer's medium uh i think shows are made or broken on their performances and um there's a lot of ham hammy performances there's a lot of funny performances in this show we've talked about how funny it is that people who are celebrities at

the time of the actual odre odre trial are being brought sort of to star like schwimmer and travolta but um courtney b vance is a guy who has never really had um at least on television an opportunity to play a role like this and you know he has a lot of very big lines, big scenes in this episode. My favorite is actually watching him run the meeting where Bob Shapiro is mad at F. Lee Bailey. And he's coming in and he sort of refuses. He drives all the way over to the office and refuses to go in because F. Lee Bailey sits down and calls him Judas. And there's just a quick second where Courtney B. Vance, as Johnny Cochran, just runs the meeting. And I think he's passing out folders, and he's sort of delegating tasks to people.

And that is just a very, very economical way of showing what a great lawyer Johnny Cochran was outside of the courtroom. And what an incredible manager. These are little things that maybe the audience doesn't even recognize it but they it brings an authenticity to the proceedings that when you go big in this show there is a baseline of that's barry sheck talking about dna evidence at the end of a table like i see the playing field here and and the way that they have sort of established cochran as this chess master not only in the courtroom but outside of the courtroom who's putting on performances and and turning down the volume and turning up the volume at different times to manipulate people is amazing and he is

giving one of the best performances i've seen in a very long time on television i completely agree and i wanted to point out my favorite scene, which was also out of the courtroom. My favorite scene was in the bedroom when he's practicing his opening arguments in this silk bathrobe and his wife is laughing at him and helping him with stuff. And he's taking joy in it. And he's an alive person. And I'm watching this and I'm thinking of just the depth and the breadth of this performance to allow someone who was more or less a caricature in the public imagination, but was in fact a complicated, interesting human who had, you know, had an enormous amount of experience and talent and skill. I'm thinking about this just in terms of the performance

that Courtney Vance is allowed to play here. You know, I went through it was going through his IMDb. He's an actor who I've been aware of, I've known about. He's apparently, you know, he's done amazing work on stage that I don't think I've ever been lucky enough to see. He's good in everything he's ever been in. Yeah, he had two big movie roles at the beginning of his career in Hamburger Hill and in Hunt for October. And he's great in both of those things. But never really got the big look. The like, you're the cop.

You're the lawyer. You're the doctor. Whatever. And you think about, I mean, all the argument that's been going on about diversity um in on screen especially in movies that just happened from the oscars and you look at what courtney vance is doing with this part now that he's allowed to play a completely three-dimensional human being who is both um brilliant and conniving who is both um cynical and a true believer who is both funny and furious who who is, you know,

flirting with his wife and getting up in front of these cameras and delivering that incredible speech that he does to rebut Christopher Darden's whole spiel about whether the N-word should be allowed in the courtroom. I mean, this is a thundering performance. And it's worth noting, first of all, Sterling Brown, who plays Christopher Harden, is incredible too. And watching the two of them face off has been just an absolute thrill. Watching the show, it makes me, as a viewer, hungry for more diversity on screen. And not just in terms of racial diversity, just in terms of human diversity and the types of roles that we

get to see. Because when I'm watching this, and there's that scene there are 100 scenes in this episode alone but the scene when uh darden after swallowing his tongue for much of the episode confronts marcia clark and says how it's going to be how he's going to come off if he um cross-examines mark firman and she says i know and he says no you don't yeah you're right and you see the level and when i there's a diversity keep saying that word, but it's not just skin color, it's of point of view. Yeah. Because Marsha Clark, up to this point, and I believe next week is a Marsha Clark-centered episode, has been presented, I think fairly, as a complicated, smart, well-meaning feminist woman who is doing her best in a very difficult circumstance. The idea of her being well-meaning and genuinely liking Chris Darden, wanting to work with him, thinking he is a smart, worthy person, but then the other reasons why he is absolutely there. And in that moment, just her almost shutting him down, saying that she could

speak for him and him saying, no, you can't. We never see that moment on TV. We never see that moment in courtrooms or when people of different races are working together. And these are all stories that are out there to be told. The fact that it is a Ryan Murphy-produced show about the O.J. Simpson trial that's giving us a chance to talk about them and see them, I don't know what to say. I mean, I guess, Dainu, it's great. Well, I mean, you say that this show has the belt, and that's as good a place as any to wrap it up. Hopefully, we'll return to this. You can follow it. Again, I said you could subscribe to Channel 33, and you'll get the watch usually we uh go every monday

and friday the next week we'll be going tuesday we'll be talking about house of cards uh the new kendrick lamar album and a bunch of other things uh and probably about every two three weeks we'll talk about who has the championship belt right now or whenever it gets thrown into contention. Yeah, I'm excited about this. I think that what our podcast lacked was large, large bits of personal clothing and also professional wrestling imagery. I feel like this is really going to help us just as podcast hosts and as friends.

I agree with you. All right, man, I'll talk to you Tuesday. We'll be back. Subscribe to Channel 33 on iTunes, SoundCloud, and Stitcher. Please sign up for the Ringer newsletter at theringer.com. Follow us on Twitter at Ringer. And we'll talk to you next week. Thanks, Bill, for letting us sublet the space.

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