The Ringer-Verse - Ringer-Verse Recommends: May 2026 (Featuring ‘Outlander,' 'For All Mankind,' and 'Star City')

Episode Date: May 30, 2026

In a departure from the typical "Recommends" format, Ben Lindbergh brings on 'Vulture' TV critic and 'TV Is Good' cohost Kathryn VanArendonk for a wide-ranging discussion centered on a sci-fi/fantasy pairing of 'Outlander' (which just concluded an eight-season Starz run), 'For All Mankind' (which just wrapped its fifth season of six on Apple TV), and their respective spinoffs (especially 'Star City,' which just premiered). They start by assessing how much the shows have in common, what sets them apart, and how they reflect TV trends, before diving deeper into each franchise, first in a high-level way and then (with warnings) by reacting to the latest seasons. (00:00) Intro (04:14) Kathryn VanArendonk Joins (15:39) 'Outlander' (38:29) 'Outlander' Spoilers (48:18) 'For All Mankind' (65:03) 'For All Mankind' Spoilers (78:25) 'Star City' Host: Ben Lindbergh Guest: Kathryn VanArendonk Senior Producer: Steve Ahlman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg's senior editor for the ringer buttonmash host and your master of ceremonies here at Ringerverse recommends welcoming you into the addition for May 2026. Now as you know, normally what we do, we get together a collection of clips from various hosts and friends of the Ringerverse and House of Ar and we pair that with a main central spotlight conversation. This time, we're just doing the latter. We're stripping it down, but also giving you maybe more than we usually do. Look, I'm disappointed too. We always like to get a collection of clips, but sometimes it just doesn't work out. There are vacations, their travel, there's other obligations. But that means that I have even more time to bring you a main central conversation with one of my

favorite TV critics, Catherine Ben-Aren-Dong who writes for Vulture, also does the TV as Good podcast with Alan Sepinwal. And she will be joining me to talk about a perfect sci-fi pairing for Ringerva fans, we will be talking about Outlander and for All Mankind, as well as their associated spin-offs. So if you have not followed these shows, that's okay. You should. I recommend them. That's what we do here on this program. You do not have to have seen them. We will sell you on them. And we will start out spoiler free. And we will warn you when we enter spoiler territory. For those who haven't heard of these shows who have no idea what I'm talking about, I will give you a grounding, just a basic synopsis of Outlander and for all mankind. Outlander is a time travel, romanticcy story

starring Sam Hewin as the Highland Love, Jamie of Claire, a 20th century nurse who travels back through some stones in Scotland to the 18th century, and there is a lot of sex, there is a lot of romance, there's a lot of violence. It's also sometimes heartwarming, and it's very beautiful and pretty to look at and listen to. And we follow these core characters over the course of decades from the Jacobite rising in Scotland in the 1740s,

all the way up to the American Revolution. So that gives you some sense of what you're getting with Outlander. Of course, it gets more complicated from there. For All Mankind is a alternate history, hard sci-fi show that starts from the premise that the Soviets won the space race. They landed on the moon first,

and now we figure out what comes of that. How does history develop differently because of that first move? And then we expand elsewhere in the solar system. Humidity advances decades past characters come and go. But it's basically an alternate history look at past and also how that affects the future. So that gives you some sense of what you're getting. These shows have the same creator, the fabled sci-fi hero, Ronald D. Moore. And so if you've ever seen one of his shows, Balstar Galactica, Star Trek, et cetera, then maybe that will give you some buy-in

beyond my recommendation. So Catherine and I are aligned on this point. We both really love these shows and we're going to talk about why and we're going to talk about why they deserve more attention than they get. And we're also going to have more of a wide-ranging conversation about TV and sci-fi and fantasy

and whether there is an appeal to fans of both of these shows or whether it's either or. Spoiler, I think, and we think it's the former. So I will be back to bid you farewell at the end, but right now we will transition right to my in-studio conversation with Catherine. We will start with sort of a high-level, spoiler-free overview of these shows. I know everyone's watching Widows Bay on Apple TV. So am I.

You can check out our coverage elsewhere on the network. There's also maximum pleasure guaranteed, but don't sleep on for all mankind. or, for that matter, outlander, where people sleep with each other, not on each other, sometimes both. I will be right back with Catherine. Well, one of my favorite TV critics has crossed state lines, or at least one state line, to appear on this podcast. Catherine, Ben Aaron Dunk, welcome to Ringverse Recommends. It is such a delight to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

The delight is mutual, and I'm so happy you're here, not just because I admire your work, but because we both occupy the center of a Venn diagram of Outlander and For All Mankind fans. There are dozens of us. There are. It's not crowded. I know of two other people who are definitely in the center, my wife and Ronald D. Moore. And beyond that, it's a mystery to me. So I can't say I've encountered a ton of crossover Outlander fan fans. Are you aware of any cross-pollination there?

I am not. And I do think there are interesting. reasons why that might be, they have, I actually think they have quite a lot of common threads that are appealing. There are things about for all mankind where if it's like, if that's the thing that you're into about it, it makes total sense to me that you would also like Outlander. But those are not the obvious marketable things about either of those shows. Yes. And they're for sure, like, one is dude coded and one is lady coded. And so I also think, they are both by virtue of marketing and by a lot of sort of genre assumptions, almost trying to

keep people out of our Venn diagram where more people belong to be. Yeah. Well, we're inviting people into it because we're recommending both shows at once. And there used to be a contingent of fam fans at the ringer. We had a fam hive. We referred to ourselves as the family. we had a little slack sub thread where we would just sort of say hi bob to each other all day long. But even the rest of the family, not Outlander fans.

So I just, I had no one to talk to about both of those things. And I thought, Catherine, perfect, because I've read you covering both of these shows. And there should be more overlap because let me list some commonalities here. So obviously, same creator, Ronald D. Moore of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, future god of war fame. Also, though, they both unfold over decades, right, which is a challenging storytelling structure. That man loves a time jump. Yes. They have both, I think, spanned about 40 years, give or take at this stage and counting in fam's case.

Yeah. And also like hundreds. I mean, yes. One is timeless, essentially. And each has spawned one spinoff thus far. They also have, I noticed, while prepping for this podcast, identical rotten tomato and metacritic ratings if you care about aggregation. So it's faded that they have exactly the same sort of critical reception.

Yeah. So different genres, obviously sci-fi fantasy, maybe different gender skews of the audiences, but there is or there should be a lot of overlap there. You'd think wouldn't you want to check out the other Ronald DeMore show if you like one of them? Yeah. I mean, they also come from different source places. That's true. So Outlander has these wild, have you read the books?

I have not. Okay. The books are fully unhinged. I mean, they are as unhinged as the show is. It tracks. Yes. And a lot. I know that because every time something wild happens on the show and I think that can't

possibly have been in the books. I look it up and if anything, they toned it down for the show. A hundred percent. Which includes, alas, the amount of rape. that drives plot lines in that show. Unfortunately. And the books were, they're one of those really incredible acts

of like, Dana Gobbled on who wrote the books. The first one is an early 90s publication. She was so busy. Like, you were operating in such a fever dream of like, these are all the things I like and I'm just going to put them together in the same book that it's like no one told you you're not supposed to do it this way.

It's really kind of how those books came into people. being. And there's something really remarkable about the legacy that they have had. And I think the way that they are interesting and important precursors to a lot of the big Romanticie waves that are happening in publishing right now. But like you look at Outlander and you see her wind-swept hair and you see her sort of stand with the stones and he's got the kilt. And you're like, I understand what that show is. And the art looks like romance, like clinch-clench covers of romance books. I see the Highlander. Whereas for all mankind, like the reason I and most TV critics first encountered it was like,

Apple's going to make TV shows? The computer company will be making content? What will it be like? And it was one of those early wave Apple shows. It's kind of surprising to me that it has lasted as long as it has. Yes. It's partly me watching it and rewatching it maybe. But it's got to be just that Tim Apple loves this show, right?

Like that has to be something. I mean, clearly there's a sci-fi bias over there, which works out in my favor because I also have a sci-fi bias. But I do wonder about the programming decisions at times. For sure. I'm putting an asterisk next to sugar right now. Well, yes. Yes, there are a lot of shows that you think, how did that get greenlit? And then how did that continue to get greenlit is the bigger question.

We made these choices. Yes. But yeah, that I think it's not that surprising to me that despite right. Ron Moore being a part of them that they would have such different audiences. My big thing about why these shows appeal to the same kind of person is there is something about materiality that's really compelling and tangible about both of these things, where while at the same time, the world building around them, you. You just kind of got to be like, I don't, I don't, we're just, it's fine.

Yeah. So for Outlander, the way that that looks is you have crazy work, like people are traveling back and forth all the time and you're like, I don't understand how these stone circles work and the gemstone system that is like sort of matters and sort of doesn't for how they travel. But you know what I know a ton about is beekeeping. Oh, yes. And especially in this past season.

in this season, I know what all of their clothes look like. I know where the well is. I understand how hard it was to dye this particular fabric. And there is something about just the, if you were a person in this crazy, like, circumstance, this is what you're, this is what it would feel like when you touched something. Yeah. And I think that's the appeal of for all mankind so often for me, because I, at some point I'm like, What are they?

This makes no sense that anyone is making these choices or that this is what this Mars colony, how it functions. And what is Dev doing over there in this cave? Like what? And yet the appeal of it so often is like it's this kind of gross looking, underwhelming bunker system. All of the walls look exactly the same. They're dirty. everything's kind of grimy. They have a bar.

It feels you understand the textures of those spaces. And so those are the things where I look at both of those shows and I see the shared interests, shared qualities. The other commonality is that I think they both fly under the radar, which is maybe a product of the fact that five seasons in, eight seasons in, they're not the new hotness. If you're not breaking bad or succession or something where it's building to some crescendo and it's gaining audience over time, And it's just, oh, right, that's part of the wallpaper of TV. It almost, it becomes kind of the showtime, you know, Homeland Season 8. What are we up to now? Or you just kind of take it for granted and people tune out a little bit.

But I think it's also something that you got into in a piece for Vulture earlier this year when you did a feature on Outlander and its significance, which is that it doesn't neatly fit into a certain box or genre or level of high slash low or TV consumption or coverage. You can't say that they're not critically acclaimed because, you know, those identical Metacritic and Rotten Tomato ratings are high. But other than the fact that, you know, there will still be Vulture recaps of each episode or there are rabid fan bases, of course, of particularly Outlander.

But it doesn't cross over. It doesn't become kind of a mainstream sensation. And so if you're not already in the tent, one of these tents, then at this point, you're probably not going to get there, which is why we're highlighting them here. We want to change that one podcast at a time. That's right. Be the change. There's something about the it's not quite prestige.

It's not quite pulp. It's some hybrid blend of genres and also types of TV that you can't quite categorize it. And maybe that makes it tough for people to recommend or to cover in the way that a lot of TV is typically covered. Yeah, they both feel a little bit like shibboleths. Yeah. You walk up to somebody else and they're like, what TV do you're like? And you're like, oh, you know. And then you say the title of either of them.

And if they recognize them or have watched any of it, you're like, okay, I understand who you. Then they say hi, Bob, back to you. 100%. But they, which I think is, is it's got to be somewhat frustrating because it does, it is the kind of thing that makes it hard for to argue for these shows relevance, for these people to then go on. on to make other shows that, to use this to turn around and say, I now would like to make this other cool new project. They feel like they live in these secret little spaces. But I think there is something, this was sort of the promise of streaming, right? The promise of cable that you could have these perfectly good shows that live in these interesting niches and don't have to be for everyone

and don't have to speak to all of what's happening in culture at any moment. I guess Stars probably doesn't help the Outlander outtake, uptake argument. Lord knows that was the case for Apple TV at the beginning, too. And to some extent even now, it still is. It's hard to tell. Unless you're a big MLS fan or something, yeah, you might still not be in that ecosystem. Yeah. Although at least Apple has like severance.

It has like a couple of among TV fans. You say the name of those shows. And you're not going to get the, I've literally never heard of that before. Which you might with stars, even though there's some quality TV on there. But yeah, I keep thinking, well, someday it will cross over. You know, there will be like the Netflix boost for these shows and everyone will find them. Outlander seems ripe for it. It does, right?

And particularly something you got into in your piece, which is that if anything that show was out of time, ironically, that maybe it might have been better off today. I guess we can kind of focus on Outlander first because it came first and it finished first. And then we can talk about Fam. So Outlander goes all the way back to 2014. And as you talked about in your piece, this was a very different TV environment. Yeah. And the show was in some respects tailored to that environment, maybe to its detriment potentially. Yeah.

And I can't help but think that if it had come along today, you know, maybe it, when the Romantasy boom happens and everyone talks about heated rivalry, although, again, that's another show where the buzz, I think, over indexes on the popularity. of the show in terms of just pure ratings, but it was one of the most talked about shows. So if Outlander comes along in this environment, maybe suddenly everyone's into it, whereas when that catches on and you're on season seven or something, then that's a big investment. Yeah, yeah.

The thing, the fam-like counter history that I really wonder about for Outlander is if it were being developed right now, would it have, would there be more push to make the adaptation farther away from those original books? Because there is now more romance happening on television. And we've also then seen a lot of conversation about what romance looks like on television. This is a big, a whole long spiel that I have about like how TV uses romance and how little action.

romance television has been made. It has usually been the will they, won't they side plot to whatever the thing is happening. And it's only recently that we started to see shows where like that is the job number one. On Outlander, it's the main attraction. Yeah. Yes. But because there now have been shows like Bridgeton and Heeded Rivalry and then you get conversations about them and there's a little bit more awareness of what romance book readers like and respond to. And it turns out that in none of those cases, do they like rape as a part of the show? Yes. And it would be very, very hard to excise, particularly in some of the early seasons,

really hard to remove the arc of some of those plots and character development from how that works at the beginning. But I really, really wonder if you would be getting a version of this show that was tilting. toward the current romance environment where you are, there's a lot more context for those things. There's a lot. Suddenly you're getting people having, yes, a historical conversations about trauma and consent. And there's, you know, all kinds of trigger warnings all over them. They are given, they're paced differently. Part of what is so, I think, disorienting for romance fans in this show is the way that, like, it'll happen. And then it's like,

And then we're still being, we're getting hauled across the countryside yet again. Yeah. And so I, I'm very curious what that would look like. But instead, the outlander that we have is one that is inflected by Game of Thrones, where it was, like, Game of Thrones is the biggest thing on television. It is the only thing anybody wants is what is the next Game of Thrones. And guess what, there's a lot of on Game of Thrones, sexual violence. And so it is like.

those two threads, this desire to be a romance to really invest in how much these people love each other and they're being faded across time and sexual pleasure, all of this stuff, is actively at odds with the TV context where it's trying to be like, but we're prestige and we're important and there's violence. Yes. And early on at least it's equal opportunity sexual violence, which I don't know if that makes it better or worse. It's more equitable. Fascinating. Fascinating and unusual. Yes.

Yes. Jamie is the victim, as often as Claire, early on at least. And it's a tough watch, obviously. It's very much a content warning kind of situation. And we're recommending the show. So I don't want to immediately turn off anyone who's hearing this and thinking that's not for me. But I imagine some viewers had that experience. I think it's a huge part of why this show has

struggled to catch on as much as it has. And it's not pervasive. I don't want to exaggerate. It's not in every episode incident. And I would say probably they took that feedback. And in later seasons, toned that down significantly. But it's also like still part of the books.

And there's still, you know, the author is a part of the, she's one of the producers. She is writing throughout on the show. And so then you're in this weird place where it's like, maybe it would be nice if this weren't as much a part of this story, except she's right here. and she made it a part of the story.

And how do you deal with that? And it's jarring because often Outlander is kind of comfort TV for me. Yeah, 100%. And so then all of a sudden it gets very rapy. And you're thinking, this is not the Outlander I love. It is unfortunately sometimes the Outlander I know. But this is very much my TV friends, Jamie and Claire, and I want to spend time with them.

And I want to be in this period piece. And the music is beautiful, you know, Bear McCreery. And the scenery is the cinema. cinematography. It's all very soothing and beautiful except for. And then, you know, there's violence, of course, lots of killing, lots of stabbing. But yeah, it's especially those certain scenes, which are seared into the mind of any Outlander fan as well as the characters that really kind of interrupts that soothing aspect to the series and makes it tough to, you know, every time Outlander would come back, my wife and I would have this kind of negotiation where we would be.

Outlander's coming back and I'd be all gung-ho. We're going to watch Outlander and she'd, oh, but remember that scene with Jamie and the prison and I'd have to kind of, but remember all the good parts that made that maybe tolerable or worthwhile. And then we would start watching again and we'd both get invested and we'd love Outlander again. But then it goes away. It comes back. Yeah, yeah. It's just, yeah, that is, that's an impediment for sure. 100%.

100%. And it is a little bit striking to me that those are the things that do stick in your mind between seasons. I agree with you about the comfort elements of, I mean, the landscapes and the kind of textural stuff that I was talking about before. The four poster beds everywhere. And they're riding on horses and they have flowing hair. And they're operating in almost a little house on the prairie. It's the wrong era. I understand. But that homesteading, what if we're just, it's us in the country and how are we going to keep our family safe and how do we survive in this wilderness?

and I have always loved the kind of competence porn elements of a narrative that is mostly about the way people live in the world. And it's very good at doing that in the later seasons. Earlier seasons, you get a lot of the, like, sexy hot. You get the soft core porn in addition to the confidence porn. I mean, if you, if people sort of were tracking Outlander discourse at all in that first season, which was I think the wind where it was still unclear whether this was a show for everyone that was going to be huge or whether this was going to sort of find its fandom and then stay there. The episode you probably heard about was the wedding episode,

which was this really lovely, they have sex after they get married. Yes, not a red wedding. Not a red wedding. And it is shot in ways that were incredibly effective and unusual for television at the time where it was really focused on her experiences of pleasure and and I think set the tone for what how a lot of shows like Bridgeton and even heated rivalry later approach like what connection emotional connection during sex looks like it was there were think pieces everywhere you couldn't show up on the internet without stumbling over like a

bunch of screenshots of this wedding episode um and it it should be as much a part of the show's legacy as any of the rest of it. But I do think Outlander is a show where you have to be in for all of the really incredible, innovative stuff that it does, and then also be willing to put up with both the violent side of it and the frankly goofy side of it that happens, particularly as the show goes on. And emblematic of it being a bridge between eras, a bridge or tin between eras. It's you covered in your piece. There was no intimacy coordinator when this series started. So this is a different world. Now, it didn't ever appear that Sam Hewain and Katrina Belf ever had issues with coordination of intimacy as far as you could tell on screen.

But the fact that that was not really part of the language of TV and filmmaking at that time, it's not that long ago. We're talking 12 years ago or so. But, you know, maybe this is a show that I don't know if it helped usher it in, but it at least provided an example of how this can work well. Yeah, yeah. Yes, I mean, when I was talking with Sam Hewin about it, I was not surprised to hear him say that

because I remember covering the beginning of Bridgeton, which was also when everyone learned what an intimacy coordinator was for the first time. But just listening to him talk about what it was like to shoot those scenes and to be as the actor kind of responsible for figuring out how to choreograph and what you were and were not comfortable with and for there to be no person to really go to who is not the director of the episode

or your co-star where you can be like, I just don't think this is what's worth. Like it, it, I think we went through a wave where everyone was like, yay, intimacy coordinators. And then there was the inevitable backlash of like they're ruining shows. Chemistry, yes. Yeah, people can't just be free

to express whatever they want in the process of making their art. And it's like, yeah, no, I think it's probably pretty good idea, actually. Probably pretty useful to have, which the show absolutely then introduced, I can't remember what season, but has been a part of the later seasons

of the show. Yeah, and, you know, you talk about the sort of silly aspects of the series, which I appreciate on some level because, you know, I don't really believe in the concept of guilty pleasure TV because I don't feel guilty. It's not harming anyone. My pleasure in watching Outlander, but there are moments where something happens.

I wrote something for the ringer years ago because there is a famous, infamous scene in Outlander where Jamie is on the point of expiring and Claire, using all her medical know-how, brings him back to life by giving him a hand job, essentially. Yes. It's beautiful. It's heartwarming. I interviewed doctors about the feasibility of this. They were skeptical, but this is the timeless magic of their romance.

And so it's that kind of show where there is this mystical and magical element to it, which also applies to the passage of time and they're aging, not just the fact that they are time traveling or at least Claire is. But the fact that- Never have 50-year-olds in the 18th century look hotter than these people. They don't look a day over 46, which is I believe they're actual ages. and they don't look that even. But because the series starts nominally, I guess it's 1743, and by the end we're at 1780, and Jamie and Claire are now 60-ish, roughly. And for a while there, you know, the hair got grayer as the seasons went on.

They gave Jamie little glasses. They gave Jamie glasses. He's old now. Now, do you ever see those glasses on that man? Rarely, rarely. But you see him shirtless and, you see him shirtless. and as powerfully built as ever. So no concessions to age there.

And I interviewed the showrunners for a piece about that years ago. And, you know, it's not a show that stresses very similitude in most respects. There are ways in which it does, as you said. Like the bees could have been the third build cast members in season eight. It was Sam and Katrina bees. Yes. For sure. But some of things, it's, look, people just want to see these people.

in love with each other and having lots of vigorous sex. And I don't think anyone is stressing over, wait, what year is it exactly? And does this match up with their appearance now? It's not really foremost on people's minds. And so they nod to it. And maybe there are a few crow's feet thrown in for good measure. But that's about the extent of it. Yeah.

Which is, I guess, a difference for all mankind when it comes to Ed Baldwin and his appearance by season five. But we will get there. We'll get there in a second. I have Ed Baldwin feelings. Me too. But, yeah, I mean, I think I don't, I have no issue with the lack of aging makeup. They understand why we are watching this show. They have accurately diagnosed why we were all here.

My hesitations about the sillier elements of Outlander are more to do with plotting things that happened particularly in the last season. where characters who you were pretty sure were dead, turned out are not dead for reasons. And I have no, I love a person you thought was dead came back. Like, this is not snobbery on my part. This is not sort of resistance to pulpy plotting. I think that sometimes Outlander can fall victim to just wanting to do stuff

because it seems, because somebody had the idea. and then those characters don't mean anything or they're not fully, they're not ever able to fully integrate them into the core of what is compelling about the show. It's something that I think is going to be even a continuing question

about how to do romance on television because the genre, the structure of the genre, is kind of antithetically opposed to the long-running series structures that TV has to maintain. You, in a romance, have two people, they have tension, they are together, they are broken apart, eventually you have a happy ending.

And like a mystery plot where you are saying, who did it, there's a body, and you're sort of holding off the end as long as you possibly can and just sort of tap dancing in the middle to keep that ending away. Romance plots have to do all this kind of shenanigan stuff in the middle where it's like, not just between your couple, but you've got to fill that time with all their kids and their time travel cousins and a random guy who showed up. And sometimes the show is really successful at making you care about those things. And sometimes you're like, I'm just going to be honest, I don't think you actually care about this at all. And you are just sort of throwing surprises in here so that I go, what?

Yes, because there's no will they or won't they on Outlander. No. They will repeatedly. Yeah. But it's more a question of will the universe allow them to. And what are the obstacles that we're going to place in their way to keep them apart somewhat arbitrarily so that they can have their joyous reunion eventually? And you do have that passage of time when decades are going by. Characters come and go.

Some of them I loved and missed to this day. And you feel their absence. Yeah. But that's okay, I think. Yeah. Yeah. shows change and evolve as lives and relationships do. But, yeah, sometimes, I mean, it seems silly to say it's far-fetched in a show like Allander where the premise is far-fetched.

But there's still sort of an internal logic to these things. Okay, we accept that she can go through the stones and she can go back to the 18th century. But given that, does this play by the rules that you've established for this series? Right. Yeah. Yeah. One of my enduring favorite things about, and this is also in the books, but they, they introduce this thing where you have to have gemstones to travel.

And I in the beginning thought that this was going to be something where it was like, okay, so they can't actually, because otherwise you're just going to have people hopping back through the stones all the time. So it's essentially a rate limiting effect on how much time travel you can have. This made total sense to me, except that whenever anyone needs to go anywhere, they just magically have gemstones in their pocket all the time. Exceptions must be made. Yeah. They're just stumbling over diamonds left and right so that they can just pop back and forth

every time your grandkid has a heart defect. Yes. I do feel the void, though, that the ending of Outlander will leave in my TV viewing. Because it's been a constant and it's been with us for so long now, not only has it been on TV since 2014, but also there's so much of it. And you mentioned this in your piece, too, that because this pre-eastern, you know, dated some of the shrinking of TV seasons where now we just all take for granted that TV seasons are not even 13 or 10 or 8 or 6 maybe now if we're lucky. And also it'll be three years

between seasons. Whereas Outlander ended with what 101 episodes. And these are full hour long episodes. And so we have spent a lot of screen time with Jamie and Claire. TV has lost this. So much TV has lost this. And I lament that because even though there are benefits, a lot of benefits, the sense that if you don't have to do 26 episodes of the next generation per year or something, I'm sure Ron Moore is saying 16, no sweat. And thus, you don't have to do a clip show because we ran out of budget and we need something that can be filmed immediately. And so in theory, okay, we're kind of lopping off the filler. We're taking the worst episodes out and now the cream of the crop is left. And that's true to an extent. And you don't have to constantly kind of place the

track in front of you as you're telling the story, which always led to, we don't have enough story to sustain this. And so we have to make it up as we go along. But, and also just the work-life balance of the people who are making these shows and the burnout because something like Lost would be airing for half the year. And it would go off the air for three months and then next season. Yeah. But if you were a fan of one of these shows, whether it was Next Generation, or West Wing or lost in its heyday or whatever, it was always on. And that was great.

And I missed that now because there were certain shows, few of them, but some of them could sustain that pace and actually make it compelling and watchable every week. And then it was on every other week of an entire year, whereas now as soon as it comes back, it's gone again, especially if it's a binge drop and then you blow through it

and then two, three years, it's gone again. It's just hard to stay in that sort of rhythm and maintain that continuity and remember what was happening and who are these people. So I agree. Even though we've gained some things, we've also lost a lot. And Outlander was maybe kind of like the last gasp of having 100 episodes, hour-long episodes of something, which is another reason why if this comes to streaming and has some big breakout, suddenly, wow, there's a lot to dig into here.

For sure. And I want to say that as I am sort of complaining about silly shit on this show, I love that. I love that stuff. I love to complain about it. I love to be like, Claire invented ether and then got addicted to ether. But, you know, there is, I get so frustrated, exhausted with the alternative, which is TV where there is no time for looseness for characters to do things just because somebody thought it would be. a really lovely, strange little scene. And the sense of who these people are,

not just in the context of the most driving plot that is in front of them at all times, you know who they are in a much different way. They brought back Good Night Moon from the future. And Lord of the Rings, right? Or the Hobbit, but Jamie never read it as far as we can tell. As far as we can tell. Yeah, which is very disappointing.

But that's true because we've been, condition now to think, you know, people dismiss an episode where there's not some climactic pluck twist as filler, right? Well, will you like me to get my soapbox out? Because I will stand on top of it. And filler often is shorthand for character development and sort of setting the scene and enriching the world. But there's no time for that if it's eight episodes and then it's gone again.

And so Outlander sometimes moves at this more languid pace, which might be frustrating for some folks, but for me was, I want to be in this world with these people. Absolutely. Absolutely. And the, the, I don't know, there is something about it that reminds me of like AI discourse where the idea is that what you want when you're spending time with a character or a story, on one hand, you have an outcomes based metric. where it's like I put in the thing, I created the thing, this tool made it made me get to the end faster. And so it was a more successful experience. And Outlander is really a testament to like, do it yourself, spend a lot of time in strange corners.

You will have a different relationship with this text. And you will be so fond of this thing that you are also grinning at sort of with absurd frustration. Yeah. before we switch to fam, a brief spoiler section here. So beware anyone who has not watched the end of Outlander. Oh, I'm sorry about the Goodnight Moon spoilers. That's okay.

I think that's not vital. But if we could briefly discuss the ending. Yeah. Yes. So I don't know if this was not in keeping with the ethos of Outlander writ large, but it sounds like you have some thoughts, some feelings about the way that this ended, which is if you're still with us, but you haven't seen it. and you're risking the spoilers.

A lot of the last season is that Jamie's demise is faded, that he reads in a book, which was sent back by Claire's other love interest in the present slash future, Frank. Tobias Menzies. Yes. And who in another... Respect on his name.

Also plays a character who is responsible for some of the rapiness in the past timeline. Same actor, same appearance. Great stuff. Just go with it. So he sends back this account of the battle that is shaping up in Fraser's Ridge, Fraser's Ridge, which is where they have set up here. And Jamie knows that he is faded to die.

And so a lot of the last season is, can we avoid this? Can we build better guns? Can we just forestall this confrontation somehow? Ultimately, no. The rules of space and time are inviolable to some extent, in this particular case, at least. and Jamie meets his end and then very quickly is revived, resurrected,

no hand job involved. No hand job necessary. I was thinking, this worked before you're lying on top of him. It's true. She didn't even think of it. She didn't even try. Wow.

Anyway, what she did instead was just sort of lie on him for a while like Aslan, you know, in Narnia. And her faith, her devotion, their timeless love, which crosses continents and centuries, is such that she can bring him back from across the river sticks or wherever he is. And at the very end, they wake up. And Claire's hair now is not just gray, but full white,

which was prophesied earlier in the series, that she would fully come into her power. Her hair would be white. And I guess there's room for interpretation about what exactly happens here. And is this the afterlife? and they're awakening together and she died of a broken heart and she couldn't go on and now they will live on in not real life. But it's outlander, so it might also just be real life.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know how you interpreted it. It's totally real. They're going to bone on the beach. And they boned shortly before the death, which, you know, I guess when you know that your time is limited, you make the most of it. Especially those two. I did enjoy how there was sort of a sex tour of all the characters in the final

episode or two where everyone got their last sex scene, including Bree and Roger Mack, which is just like, I don't know that I have the same desire to see that with that. I'm glad that they have a healthy love life, but it's not quite the draw for me. But everyone got there, their chance to disrobe one final time, which felt appropriate for this show. But what did you think? And also, I know there's some precedent because there is one book still to come in the series, right? But this was adapting something that happened in the most recent book. Yes, yes. So there is another Game of Thrones like situation here where the original author,

her has not finished the series. Yes. But the show is going to be done. And so the decision was they would end at this point and then she will have another book that comes out after it, which will then, I'm very curious what ending she is seeing for all of these people. I found the ending ridiculous in ways that I expect this show to be. Sure.

I can't say it's unearned. It's not like they haven't been teasing Claire the magical witch from quite early. Yes. And there is... She does revive someone else in this season. In this season. She has magical blue, glowie light.

Yes. And the show's relationship with what is plausible, what fantastical things are real and are not, has always been so fluid. And if this show has a thesis statement at all, it's like, these two people are going to stay together. Love Conquer's all. Yeah. Does not matter. So that seems, that seems fine for me. My, my, my spoilery frustration was the entire plotline where their granddaughter, their daughter, who she miscarried in season two at like 20-something weeks somehow survived in 18th century France was given to somebody else to raise her

in the process of giving this would be pre-man would be almost there's no very little chance a baby at that gestation would survive today much less then is given off to a nun to raise her and in the process of doing that the nun is like what will soothe this baby and the guy the time travel apothecary guy is like, oh, there's a song her mother would sing. Let me sing it to you

specifically so that you can remember it. And then she sings it to the baby and the baby grows up, knows the song, has a baby. She dies. That baby shows up in colonial America

and Claire and Jamie figure out that she's their granddaughter. Like, why? Why? And it does take away, you know, before when they're all bidding

their farewells and they're going off to battle. And Claire, really, I mean, even by the standards of Claire, she's reckless in that final battle, understandably, I suppose, given what's at stake. But Fannie, who is the long last granddaughter reunited, she gets maybe multiple farewells, parting scenes. I don't care about this child. Yeah, I'm so sorry. Right. We just met her, you know, the actor was fine, you know, no complaints. No. But then you give short shrift. to the characters we've been watching for years,

Bree, who is the daughter of Claire and Jamie, who I must say, you know, took me some time to warm to the actor's portrayal. I did not find the most magnetic, but grew on me over the years. She gets basically a wordless goodbye. You know, she says goodbye to Jamie, I guess, but she and Claire hardly exchange a word because we need that time to say goodbye to Fannie again. We just met. Yes.

Yeah. So I get it. Yes. These are just priority questions where I feel like everything is there. I just needed the dials turned differently. Yes. You know. However, the saving grace is that the Outlander franchise lives on.

There is a spinoff, which I have watched and you have not yet. And so I'm here to recommend that spin off to you. It's called Blood of My Blood. And season one already aired. Season two is coming back this fall. so we will not be Outlander lists for long. And this series very much has the vibe of Outlander. And so if you like Outlander, which clearly you do,

I think you would like this. It's an easy adoption, I think, when you're conditioned to like Outlander. It was written created by the showrunner of Outlander. So it's the same sort of DNA, same sort of production style, music, visuals, all very similar. And this is following Jamie and Claire's parents. who it turns out are also time travelers conveniently, which is...

It is genetic. It is heritable, yes. But that was not the case in the books, as I understand it. This was based on some notes that Gabaldon had made for a potential series or trilogy, I think, centered on Jamie and Claire's parents. And then she decided not to pursue that. And then they picked up that loose thread and said, we will show this. And I understand that it may be tough for people who followed Jamie and Claire. It's, you know, high bar, big shoes to fill from a chemistry and romance standpoint.

But I found it pretty compelling. And again, I kind of had to talk my wife into it. And then suddenly she decided she liked this better than Outlander. Less rape. Less rape. There you go. Yeah. So that alone is a selling point.

So give it a shot. I will also recommend that while you're at it. Blanket recommendation for all things, Outlander. There you go. Books, main series, spin off. All good. So I guess the fact that we now know based on what happened in season eight of Outlander that Claire never reunites with her parents, right? And so they never need up.

And I guess given our knowledge, you might think, well, you know, there's always the prequel problem, I guess, of we know what's going to happen. But one way to counteract the prequel problem is to have original or different characters who you come to care about. And then you want to know what happens to them. And that becomes a draw in itself. And I think they manage to do that, to establish that. So even though it was tough to get me to buy into a new central romance with relatives of the of the romancers that we know and love, I liked it. I liked it a lot. Good to know. Okay.

So we will miss you, Outlander. You gave us a lot of joy and also some horror and disturbance over the years. And some surprising laughs. Yes, that too. Yeah. There was some comic relief, you know, that's sly Jamie's sense of humor here. But yeah, a lot to recommend it. So I guess we can now pivot to For All Mankind.

So our sci-fi fantasy pairing now goes to the sci-fi realm. So here we have a mere five seasons and shorter seasons to catch people up on. But some similarities. So this does very much fall into that Apple TV netherworld where the show, to my knowledge, has never charted. it's never been a Nielsen raking top 10 kind of show, or if it has, it certainly hasn't been for quite a while. And as you said, there are mainstream crossover Apple TV successes. Mainly Ted Lassow would be the biggest example. Coming back soon.

Severance, pluribus, silo back soon. Dads love silo. Hijack. Your friends and neighbors. Nobody likes that show for you, but okay. Presumed innocent. I mean, these are just, you know, hit by Apple. TV standards in some cases and in some cases kind of actual hits.

And then you have your sort of prestige plays. I mean, that's a long list, but the ones that actually succeeded that won awards the studio, right? It's not like that's a ratings phenomenon, but it's a Emmy phenomenon. And maybe that's worth something. Though I prefer Platonic personally when it comes to Seth Rogen, Apple TV shows. But this one falls into the, well, it's gotten to five seasons, and there's one more to come. So this will end after six seasons.

someone must be watching it. I swear to God, it's Tim Cook. There is no other explanation. I might just have a champion internally, but Apple's business model for Apple TV seems to be burning millions or billions of dollars of the company's almost unlimited money to make shows that appeal to me personally,

if no one else, which has worked out fine from my perspective. Sure. I'm not an Apple person in any other realm. I'm an Android guy. I'm a PC guy. Fascinating. So it was tough for me to say,

can I be an Apple guy? But I'm not to stand for any streaming series or streaming service. But if there were one that I'm constantly saying, got to check out Apple TV, that's the one. And part of that, at least, is for only kind. So this show sort of scratches that itch of it's hard sci-fi. It's also silly and pulpy sometimes. And also, at least at the start was compelling cast, well-acted. twists and turns, and now in its fifth season, I think, has fallen off in some respects,

though I will certainly follow it to the end. But tell me about how you joined the family. What appealed to you about this show initially? Yeah, I, this was because it was among that early slate of Apple shows. Yeah. You were just obligated to watch it. Yeah, because it was like, what is this new thing? Yeah.

And that list included this show and The Morning Show and See a truly abominable series. And it really was like, do they not know how to make television? Could they not pay someone to figure out? I mean, Morning Show figured itself out eventually, but that early season is not what works about that show. Speaking of Pulpy. And it was really laden with weird Me Too things. And I watched the beginning of for all mankind and loved the production values, love, you know, I'm a big sucker for we're doing interesting time period, like alternate history things. I love the, or counter histories where you, one thing changes and then you watch all of the different things on furl.

And the one thing that changes here is that the Russians beat the Americans to the moon and also the Russians. have ladies that they send to space. Yes. And more to come on that. Yes. And it was really compelling. Like the idea of it always gripped me more than the execution did for those first several episodes.

And then I got to the end of the first season and it did that Ron Moore thing where it was like, I'm going to kill some of these people. I'm going to kill some of the people you liked. And it's going to suddenly. you're going to be looking around and being like, I don't know who put these stakes in, but they're here now. And I'm curious about what's going to happen. I don't know when they showed up. And so for me, season two is still the high watermark of when this show is operating at full blast, both in terms of its ability to make absolutely inexplicable choices that should never have been done. And why did anyone not

come in and be like, what are we doing here? This is absurd. But then also, just so balzy to have these incredible fight scenes, these, you build the world, you understand the world, and then they're like, yeah, we're going to blow up the world now. It works so well when they can pull it off. And it also is so good at here's a thread here, here's one over here, everything comes together at the end of the season. and you see how all of the puzzle pieces connect.

So satisfying. Yes. And when it has been able to pull that off, which is an uneven record on this show, it goes so hard that you're just like, why is not everyone screaming about how great this thing is? And the transition into the later seasons of this show have been, frustrating and interesting for me because I think this most recent season is actually better at

that early kind of all of the pieces are coming together and the world that you were watching get developed is now they're they're perfectly happy to threaten it in ways that you kind of thought they weren't ever going to do yeah and I feel that momentum again except that the casting is not as good yes it was it's a problem yes it's a real problem It is, yeah. And I think there are a few threads that make the show appealing and maybe to different audiences in that it has some of that sort of utopian Star Trek future of humanity. Things are improving, you know, in fits and starts and sometimes going backward and there's discord and there's conflict. But largely it is sort of a positive vision of what humans can accomplish. And that's nice at any time, but maybe especially now.

You know, when we're defunding space programs, it's nice to see, hey, this is what it could look like, sort of in a bittersweet sense. But there is that sort of, if you're into sci-fi, which I am, then you want to see where they're going to go and how are they going to do this. And, you know, it's not full commitment to scientific accuracy. It's, you know, probably better than Outlander in that respect. But, you know. The gemstones. Yeah. There's creative liberties and license taken here, understandably.

But there's that. There's just, hey, we're exploring the solar system. This is cool. But there's also sort of this, you know, the alternate history, the butterfly effect, what would happen. And it can be a bit gimmicky, right? At the start of every season, generally, there's this montage that catches up us, catches us up on the time gap of 10 years or whatever. It's so stupid and I love it every time.

There's always John Lennon's alive and here's what he's up to now. Every time. Hey, I wish he were. But, you know, there's that where it's just, you know, we're sort of like deep faking politicians who are president now or not president now. And that's compelling. It was more compelling probably at the start. Yeah. And that's a problem with any show probably that has this sort of time gap, especially if it's an alternate history scenario.

Because the further removed you are from the world we recognize, the less kind of concrete it is. It's just completely in the realm of speculative fiction now. as opposed to this is like the world we know, except with this dial turned a little this way, right? And, you know, as you get further from Earth and also from our time, that grabs me a little less. Then there's also just the interpersonal aspect of any show, right? Which you need.

It can't just be, here's the cool tech that we're using or whatever. You have to have compelling characters and relationships and actors. And sometimes this show is firing on all cylinders and checks all those boxes. is sometimes not. Sometimes one of those things is working, two of those things are working. These days, it's rarer for all three to be working.

And this is also just sort of an institutional hazard, I guess, whenever you have a show where this much time is passing. On Outlander, you at least have the core duo of Jamie and Claire, and you're introducing other characters and you're saying goodbye to other characters, but you still have your bedrock, your foundation. Whereas on fam at this stage, we are just about out of the OG cast. Yeah. And I miss them. And maybe it's okay if you- Except for Ed Baldwin. Well, yes.

No spoiler territory yet. But yes, when season five starts, you've got Ed, you've got Danielle sort of out there, sidelined. You have Margot. But like, Margo's in prison. You have Danielle, who's not part of the core cast. anymore. Yeah. I miss my faves who have either expired or gotten out of the space business or whatever

it is at this point. And some of the characters who have replaced them, who are in some cases directly related to the characters that we met at first, in some cases not. Some of them have kind of graduated to that level where maybe they've been there since season two or something. Yeah, I care about them as much as I did the originals. Others, not so much. No.

Yeah. And maybe that's the writing. Maybe it's the portrayals, but whatever it is, I am just not quite as compelled by these characters as I once was. And the thing is like, it is always hard when you have to transition to new casts, but shows have done it. It's not like this is a science that no one has ever figured out. I mean, if you think about ER, ER ends with like seven casts later. Yeah. And sure, there are always parts of those.

transitions that do and do not work. But there are a number of things that a show in the ER era had working for it that fam is really challenged by. You do not have that same as we were talking about an outlander. You don't have as many episodes to build in all of these people. Every season is driving to one particular ending. And so you don't have time for as much of that sort of directionless but important character development stuff. There's no constant setting a hospital that people are cycling in and out of we're going to Mars, we're going to the moon. Yes, right. You're transplanted in every respect.

And the thing that makes the show so compelling, these incredibly intense stakes that you end up in by the end of each season where the whole structure of whatever civilization that you've built is teetering on collapse also then makes it so that you don't allow characters to ever get comfortable enough to just be people in the world doing a regular job. It's a buffy problem a little bit. They have to save the world over and over again.

And eventually you're like, I just kind of need to see him be a bartender for a bit. Yes, I have seen this, you know, in House of the Dragon, a lot of people bounced off it because we have time jumps. And even if it's the same characters, we have different actors playing them now. And this is jarring. if you haven't read the source material, or another great Apple TV sci-fi show that no one watches except Me Foundation, which... I have seen many an episode of Foundation. Lee Pace does not have a belly button in that show.

Yeah, that's true. And doesn't have a shirt. That's not the headline for you. That's the headline for me. Yeah, you know, I guess that stands out to you, but there's just so much of Lee Pace to take in in the show. True, fair. That's fair. But that is a selling point for many people.

but there is the same sort of uprooting, even though there are some constant characters in Foundation, you're talking about fast-forwarding centuries in some cases. And so in each season, now we're reestablishing a new colony. These are the descendants of these people. Do you remember them from three years ago when the show was on? And each season in Foundation, typically, it takes some time to establish these characters and warm up.

And then some of those seasons, nothing but bangers for the back half of the season, but you've got to get up to speed and acclimate yourself to this new reality you find yourself in. And FAMM has something of the same problem. Yeah. I mean, the thing about a foundation is ultimately it's mostly vibes, right? Like they're like, we're out here in the future and we have to figure. We have to preserve all of everything and he's drowning for some reason, but nobody knows why.

And you're just like, it looks, I think I wrote this in a review of foundation at some point, but it is almost indistinguishable from when an Apple TV. goes to sleep and then you get these beautiful landscapes that play over. Like, that's just kind of where you are. Yeah. The thing with for all mankind is it cannot let itself be in that, like, we're just in space having a good time or bad time, but we're making it day to day kind of the thing. Yeah.

They are doing full on, like, the intergalactic trade war is laid out in these seven regions, and you have to be able to follow which. countries are aligned. And I love that stuff. I love a trade war. But it is difficult to combine that with also then giving me new cast members whose performances are not very strong and whose job often is to be like, hello, I am the representative of this side of the argument. Yes. There's a little less romance than an outlander, which is the case about every show other than Outlander.

but especially in this one, it's a little more sanitized and you could say sort of anticeptic or sterile at certain times, you know. But it's true that the current cast the season five cast, yeah, there are some weak points and they're sort of load-bearing weak points from a story structure standpoint. Yeah. That's a problem. It is. And I just miss my old faves and I want the back again.

Except for Ed Baldwin. Except for Ed Baldwin. And so Ed, played by Joel Keneman, who is essentially the star of the series or the closest thing to it. The Jimmy McNulty, if you will. Yeah, he gets older and older and older. And unlike Jamie and Claire, he actually looks older. Sure does. Kind of in that old Star Trek way where they would have people who looked older, but clearly in a I'm wearing prosthetic sort of sense, it's a little bit better in family, but only to an extent.

And Ed Baldwin, look, he inspires strong emotions, I think. And I kind of was happy for his presence at the start of season five just because he gives us something to cling to, you know? But every time he's on screen, I can't not think of the I think you should leave sketch. Whereas I just got all this shit on me. Yes, it is very much that. But because he's the last link, really, to the original series, I still want. And he's constantly making the same mistakes over and over. He's impulsive.

He's impetuous. Erascible. Doesn't play by the rules. He's my problematic fave. I don't care. Ed Baldwin. My colleague Roxanna Haddadi feels very similarly to you. I know that there's a spectrum of Ed Baldwin feeling.

Yes. Yes. But just the consistency that he brought to the show, even if it became kind of ridiculous that he is still doing these things at this advanced. age and actually looking his age, still I want him there and I miss him when he's not there. Are you current on Pham? I don't want to. Oh, I'm very current. Okay.

All right. So I guess we will stray into spoiler territory here for season five. Ed Baldwin is no more, sadly, RIP. They finally let that man. And I was surprised to see it happen because I kind of thought there's only one season left. We've gone this far, you know. Now, this I do agree with. If they were going to do this much,

they should have just done the whole thing. Just go all the way, just go whole hog, make him look even older. Old man, Methuselah, should have been teetering around Pluto or whatever. Yes. And so to get him midway through season five, and you know, the ailments are piling up.

He's got some sort of incurable cancer, but you're figuring it's Ed, he'll figure it out. It's true. But because Ed is stubborn, He doesn't want the experimental cancer treatment because he's old school, I guess. Yeah, they cured that with spit and cigarettes back in the day. And he doesn't want to be bedridden. If he can't be out there taking the controls, then...

From a person who he really should not be taking the controls from. Then why is life worth living? So, you know, he lived to the hilt and died to the hilt as well. And so with Ed gone, now suddenly the baton has passed to Ed's... adopted daughter and grandson. Yeah. I just apologize to Kelly, but never quite clicked. You know, I like a lot of them.

This is another Brianna from Outlander thing. Yeah, and I hope I'm not sounding sexist. There are, you know, Aleta, for example, is good, you know. I like Aleta who kind of came in and took over as Margo's protege and now. has advanced to be the CEO and is in charge at all times. You know, she is a great addition to the cast. Like there are others who have filled those shoes and there are others who have not. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And unfortunately, the ones who have nots are getting a lot of screen times these days. I actually don't mind Kelly as much. I have a real problem with Miles. Miles is also a problem. Yes. And part of it, I guess, is that he's just sort of a milk toast. kind of character. It's just sort of a sad sack. Like he has this, he's the guy who's

nominally in charge on Mars now, but he has this secret that he's hiding because he sold out the Marses years ago and no one knows. And he's hailed as this hero, the leader in the community, but he's harboring this betrayal. But he is, I guess, the voice of reason in this series. And he's sort of always the one who's like, let's rain it back a bit. We don't want to do that. But then also in the finale, he's maybe going further than is advisable perhaps. But yeah, he just doesn't have a whole lot to work with, really. He is not also bringing that much to the table. No. And it is, it is a real unfortunate detraction because I do think on paper there's a lot about this season that I am really, I am maybe more compelled by than I have been the previous couple seasons.

I like setting up the kind of Mars insurgency against Earth. I like the kind of political parallels. I wish it was more Andori. But I think that's rich territory for them. I like, I have always thought the show is quite good at the physical logistics of what happens when an invading force shows up in a space base and then has to wander around. in a very different kind of territory than they're ever used to. That's fun. I like the whole Saturn thing, even though it is Kelly's business.

But like I was suddenly back into the delight and joy and surprise of space exploration. Yes. I'm on board. I welcomed that aspect because we were becoming kind of static on the show, whereas initially it was we're pushing farther, faster. we have a moon base now and a moon landing and now we're going to Mars and then we're sort of stuck on Mars for a while and there's plenty of Mars material. But kind of the thing about Mars is that it sucks.

Yeah, which also in a way, you know, the whole Mars independence movement here and it sucks, but it's our place that sucks. Which, relatable. I'm sympathetic to that, but also part of me is thinking, and maybe this is because I'm an Earth guy, but I'm thinking. Wow, the bias is really sure. I know. I'm planetist or something. something here. But I'm thinking, would it be so bad to go back to Earth, though? Because, like,

you're just sort of stuck in a mousetrap here. There's just a lot of corridors. Oh, but Dev is going to build a whole Apple campus up there. Eventually, maybe, I guess, whatever he has in mind. But yes, part of that was just, this doesn't seem, I get that you're born and raised here in some cases you feel some ownership, but also, gosh, I don't know, it'd be nice to, like, go outside without a spacesuit sometimes. That's just me. But I think also we've sort of seen this before in various other shows and fiction and book series

where we colonize the solar system and suddenly it's Earth's hegemony. And like do we feel connected to Earth even like in foundation or in the expanse a show that this is often compared to? And so I kind of feel like, okay, we're setting up the Mars revolt, rebellion. I get where we're going. I've sort of seen it before.

And so I did want the, is there life on Titan? Sure. Okay. Even if it's microbial life. Sure. That's not bringing much to the table from a character standpoint. It's the equivalent of the bees and outlander. You don't know yet.

We'll see. I mean, maybe season six. But just that sort of we're pushing the boundaries and there's a new frontier that I thought was lacking. And I'm glad that that's back on the show. Yeah. No, I agree. By the last couple episodes was like, there's going to be aliens. Just give me the aliens.

We're just trying to get to the aliens. Just test the fuzzy thing on the outside of the court. Just somebody climb up. Although I did find in the finale the way that they find the aliens involves somebody treacherously and unwisely climbing up a cliff, which this show loves to be like, let's have everybody get on a carabiner. I know. And it's going to be fine. And I was thinking, you know, the gravity on Titan is actually so low and the atmosphere is so thick that it wouldn't actually be that hard to climb this. But that's just me being a pedantic space nerd.

Well, speaking of pedantic space nerds, like I watched this with my husband who is a chemist and who is always a bad sign when he reaches for the remote. Uh-oh. Is he not like the methane-based? They go, this life is not even based. It's not carbon-based at all. It's methane-based. And he goes, click. And I was like, oh, God.

And he was like, oh, God. is made of carbon. It's made of carbon. And I was like, okay. Okay. Fair. Fair. Okay.

Yeah. That's true. But I guess I'm glad that maybe, so we take another time jump. I guess the final time jump, at least the final between season time jump at the end here. We're now we're at 2020. We're almost up to the present day. And there is. What you know because the weekend is here.

That's true. Yes. And also I guess there is a tease. Part of the issue maybe with this season is there is kind of a backdoor pilot aspect to the new spinoff. There is a for all mankind spin off now called Star City out now today as we were recording this. It's out there for everyone, which seems highly improbable. But I'll talk about that in a second. But because you're sort of reminding people of the characters who the younger versions of them are going to be in Star City.

And so you have to do a little bit of that kind of the final season of the boys problem where it's, rising coming soon and you're going to care about these characters. And so suddenly we're sidelining the characters that we actually already care about in order to service these characters that we're trying to establish. It's franchise building, right? It's the pitfalls of that. But I hope that in this season we take a final time jump. Maybe, you know, there are some more compelling characters. I don't know what the big narrative, what initially maybe there was a roadmap for even more seasons. It's kind of incredible that they got. even this long.

Yeah. It's like foundation when they start out and they're like, we're going eight seasons. Good luck with that. I hope so. I'm doing my part. But, yeah, the budget already shrinking and dwindling there. So I'm not sure that that's going to be the case. But I hope that at least they have the foreknowledge that this is coming to an end,

that they can resolve it in some satisfying fashion. And as a fan of the expanse, I see a lot of fam fans. I'm sure there's a lot of overlap there. And people are essentially rooting for fam to become a, a prequel to the expanse, I think, which had not considered that crossover, but sure. More or less, they are setting the groundwork for that, not literally a crossover, but, you know, we're kind of gumming up to the point where now humanity has advanced and spread across and we have aliens.

And, you know, so we've gotten to that point. And I don't know what the final crisis or conflict that season six will be driving toward is. But I hope that whatever it is that they have had the time to plot this out so that it does not feel abrupt because we've invested a lot of screen time in this show too and also a lot of in universe time. Yeah. I mean, I think there's plenty of room for the glowy aliens to sort of construct a new Ed Baldwin. That would be wonderful. I would, we can bring him back. We can rebuild him. That's right. Yeah. It can be the proto molecule from the expanse and Ed Baldwin comes back. I'm in. Okay. Yeah. There are some frustrations. I was going to mention this when we talked about

outlander, you know, how everything is fated to end this way. And when they're in that final season, trying to sort of revolt against the, can we avoid this fate? They don't try very hard, though, which I guess I get it because we're building up to this anyway, what's the point? But if it were me in that situation, I'm always thinking, if I were in this world, wouldn't I just leave, though? Because if you know you're doomed to die in this particular place at this particular time,

be somewhere else at that time. Sure. And maybe the concede is that fate will bring you back. And also, Jamie has to sacrifice himself for his family in the future of Fraser's Ridge and everything. But, like, still a source of some frustration to me where I'm thinking in my. Why would you just stay in North Carolina? Just be anywhere else in the whole world. This is the one place you can't be.

It's not like they don't go a lot of places. Exactly. We're in France. We're in America. We're in. Yeah. Anyway, that was just a minor frustration that I had to get off my chest. But there's a little bit of that with fam.

But it's because it's not really based on source material the way that Outlander is. Which is really nice. It is nice. For all of my frustrations with like just having Dev be on Mars and then do nothing and just sort of stand in a little castle and be like, hmm. Like. He does a lot of brooding. He, it is really so refreshing to have a fiction that is not constantly checking in with some other mommy text. to be like,

yes. Am I allowed to do this? Am I behaving badly right now? And I am particularly pleased about it because I get so tired of the homeworky fandom response that I, I am myself, I will find myself falling into it constantly whenever I know the source material of a thing. It was like this. It was like that.

You should do that. And I feel like it never leads to the best TV adaptation, which should always. which should always be its own good thing first. Yeah. And also as a spectator, and this is something I appreciate very much about severance and pluribus, too, because those are also telling original stories. We're all in the same boat, you know? And look, as culture coverers, we can make hay with the, I've read this thing,

and maybe you haven't, and here I am to explain it to you. Yeah, yeah. A lot of the Ringerverse podcast is based on that. But it is nice when we're all in the same boat. And we don't have to do the dance where we tiptoe around. You might not know this thing yet. and also how much do I want to divulge? And I know this and I feel slightly superior because you normies don't know what happened

which maybe you experience with Outlander to some extent. But here, we don't know what's going to happen. Yeah, it's really nice. Just finding out as we go, which is great. Make new things. Yes, please. Yeah. Yes.

Sequels are great sometimes, but also new IP. You can make new franchises. But did you ever watch The Last Kingdom, by the way? No. A great show on Netflix also recommend. but that's another one where it's very much like a leading offender when it comes to how old is this character now? Uh-huh, uh-huh. Great, great. Utrecht, son of Utred is, I don't know, 80 by the end of this, and he's just running right into battle.

Good for him. Yeah, you know. You know. 80's the new, whatever, 30 in the whatever century we're in now. So, Star City. Yeah. I watched the first couple episodes, which people can check out now. I hope they will.

I doubt they will. This is one of the Apple TV decisions that, again, feels catered to me, tailored to me perfectly, but I can't imagine the decision that happened in some boardroom about whether, because these are not inexpensive shows for all mankind. I mean, there's a lot of money on the screen. And Star City is, I think, a tough sell because it's a prequel, it's a spin-off, it's a prequel now where we are in fam. It's essentially it picks up where FAM originally did, but it's telling the Soviet side of the story, the aforementioned women who go to the moon. Yeah. Now we are following their story in greater depth and detail than we ever did before, and we're seeing all the machinations at the Kremlin and all the spying and the scheming and the surveillance state and all the rest of it.

But I just have to think that, gosh, we're in season five of FAM, which is coming to an end now, some percentage of committed fans. Sam diehards like me are going to sign up to watch this thing. But are you going to start here? It would be a weird place to start. And given that fam's audience is not huge. That we know of. Then you're thinking we're taking some subset that wants to now, you know, tough sell, I guess, to a predominantly American viewing audience.

Hey, now we're spending time with the Soviets. And also they're better at putting people on the moon than we are, which was, you know, part of the concede of the series. hook, but now we're spending all this time in this kind of bleak, gloomy, the Americans aesthetic. Yeah. And also rewinding time to events that we already kind of know happened. That said, I enjoyed the first couple episodes. I like a bleak, gloomy Americans aesthetic.

You're saying it like it's a bad thing. Yeah. No, that's a selling point. But I think there's plenty of, I mean, the Americans also never a show that like swept the world. world in fandom. Critical fave, yeah. Real critical fave. And so, you know, there's, it does have a tone. It has a look. It has a mood. Is that mood pretty depressing? Yes. But, but I do think that is, it has an identity, which is more than many Netflix shows can say. And actually, frankly, more than some Apple shows can say. Because often the Apple show identity is they have Apple products. And so there's, I think there's that that's interesting. I like that they're Russian lady spaces. spies. I like that it is, I like the surveillance world aspect of it. The tension of receiving all of this information and then needing to make decisions about who you care about whether you're going to turn people into your superiors, whether you're going to cover for them. I find that all

quite compelling. I think Anna Maxwell Martin is a really great sort of villain. She's really good it standing on the screen and being disconcerting. I find that it gets hairier for me when it is doing these space missions. I am actually quite compelled by the way that they got to the moon faster was that they put them in a Campbell's suit can, barely soldered it closed and then shot them to the moon. And my memory for Early Fam is not so great that I actually know exactly. Right. Like, what's going to happen?

But I, but they are doing so much less of the careful engineering stuff that early fam seasons did, that I, I am missing some of those, like, but, but if the hatch doesn't close as tightly as it's supposed to, then when will the, like, I want to be really concerned about some quite small detail. Yeah. And they're a little bit, they fly so close, so far by the seat of their pants. That they're truly just, I also think it's really cutesy, and I'm not quite sure what to make of the fact that the guy who sort of developed their whole space program played by Reese EFans doesn't have a name. They call him chief designer. One other curious decision, which is kind of a pet peeve of mine, is that we're set in Soviet Russia here. Everybody is British.

Okay. I know this is not a first. I mean, this is sort of the Chernobyl-isation of everything. And you get used to it and you go along with it. But it's really off-putting it first because I get that maybe there's no perfect solution for American audiences because either you have to have your sort of stereotypical Russian accents for everyone, but they're still speaking English. So is that actually any more realistic? Or you have to inflict subtitles upon everyone. Right.

So damned if you do, damned if you don't. And so we've decided everybody's British. for some reason. I don't care about that. I have this new podcast with my friend Alan Suppen Mall. We did an episode where we talked about Star City. And he, like you, was full,

and I think more egregiously than you, fully spinning out about the British accents thing. And my argument in that conversation was like, I don't know, in sheep detectives, the sheep talk. And their voices sound like whatever actor you cast as the sheep. And what I need is like the end. internal sense of who this person is.

And I don't particularly care that English is coming out of their mouths, but there's Cyrillic on their papers. I'm not, I am not saying that it is wrong for anybody to have this hang up. Yeah. We all have our things. It's just, it's the Cold War setting, especially with the Brits being the Ruskis. It's just, it's charing. I can't get it up for this one, but I applaud everyone who is going to go increasingly

mad about it. Yes. Yes. I'm getting decreasingly mad about it. So I started at Max Mad. You started at Max Mad. I'm getting used to it. But it's an interesting decision. I would have liked to be a fly on the wall for that discussion as well. Because you know they weighed the various options. Do you think they made Anna Maxwell Martin? They were like, what's your Russian accent? Oh, maybe. And then it was. And then it was terrible. And they were like. Okay. I think it was one of them. We can all guess who it was. That's my guess. I'm glad that Brits get to be Brits. Because so Often they're forced to sound American. Yes. But yeah.

Anyway, I had some reservations about that. But despite even this being sort of, am I into this even as a big fam fan, I guess? I'll give it a shot. And I'm in. I will watch as much of this as they make. I'm shocked that they're making any of it, frankly. But it's pretty well written. And there's part of it that, you know, because we're flashing back now to sort of the heyday of fam in some respects, like, I miss that.

I miss that aesthetic, even though it's very different because we're in Russia now. Sure. But still we're at least in that time period. No, I like it. It was kind of peak fam. So again, we have this is a franchise somehow. I never expected that to be the case. But we've been blessed with more Outlander and more fam.

And hopefully there are other people who are watching this who are also in this Venn diagram that we're in or we have perhaps convinced you to join it with us. So come on in the water's warm. I guess, and I will not force you to sing the Skyboat song with me in case you'd care to duet. I'm always down. But tell us where people can find you and listen to you. Please plug your various projects. Yes, sure. I write at Vulture, New York Magazine.

I have been there for a number of years now. I think Vulture is doing always, you know, interesting and exciting culture work. I write a lot about comedy there. So I'm not working on a big piece about that right now, so you can look for that. I have a brand new podcast with my friend and neighbor. And ringer contributor. And ringer contributor, Alan Seppinwall. He has been looking for a new podcast home for a while.

I also love to say my rough draft thoughts into a microphone. It's a useful, like, work process experience. And Alan and I basically have been. and doing, you know, a text thread of like, have you watched this thing yet? How do you feel about it? And I think we, the two of us are a little bit of an outlander for all mankind, Venn diagram TV-wise. I was going to say, you're really chasing ratings with your Star City coverage here.

That's right. Just playing the hits. Yes. Well, I do think, like, he likes the Knicks, and I like gardening and he had rivalry. And so, and like, and Love Island. And so I do think there is, there's something really fun about and has been for a long time as we talk about television with each other, attempting to convince the other person that the thing that we're watching is interesting and like what is interesting about it. And so that is part of what's the podcast is called TV is good. And so we enter into it with the understanding that the thing that we were watching is at the very least worth talking about, which is not to say that we were not also going to talk about Apple TV's sugar, a show.

that I have turned into a real bugbear. But some of it is covering new shows. We try to cover new releases like Star City, but we are also trying to pair them with older shows. Alan in particular has this really incredible encyclopedic knowledge. And so we're talking about, for example, next week, Vampire Listott and also Buffy and sort of vampire TV shows. And I really have been, it's been so fun getting this thing going.

We have a Patreon. We're talking about Mad Men's The Suitcase. I do a lot of predictable yelling about bottle episodes. And yeah, so come on over, check us out. We are just getting started, but I think we're both really excited about it. Vampire Wistat and Buffy pairing would fit in right at home on House of Ar and also with me because I love Vampire Wistat or am very much looking forward to that. Yeah. And, yeah, you have covered other Apple TV shows in case we haven't recommended enough.

Maximum pleasure guaranteed. Yes. It was a real Apple TV spring right now. Widows Bay is the talk of the town. I'm quite enjoying that as well. We could have recommended that here, except we're covering out another podcast. Check out Joanna and Rob on the prestige TV show. But incredible show and very much up the Ringervverse Alley as well.

Dark Matters coming back. I'm not a fan. Okay. But it's all coming up Apple. You also are writing a book, the book, about Bluey. I am, yes, I'm running a book. It's called The Bluey Years. It will be out next spring because there's going to be a Bluey movie in August.

Yes. So it's a little bit timed to that. I covered Bluey. I wrote a big feature about it for New York Magazine in 2021. And became really fascinated by Bluey as a parenting phenomenon, but also as a really interesting TV show. So the book is designed to be an answer to this question of like, why is this show, world domination for a thing created by one man that's just kind of about him hanging out with his family is a really fascinating prospect. So I have a lot of original conversations with the creator and with animators,

but then it is also really attempt critically to grapple with what that show says about parenting, what it expects, what sort of good childhood looks like. And yeah, I'm almost done with the process of getting that book to final edits, and I'm really excited about all of the elements of that. A blueie book for real life. For real life. Yes. And I don't know if the reading level is above five, then probably my mind.

My daughter will not pick it up day one. But eventually she will grow into it. And I will certainly be reading it. There had to be a bluey book. Someone had to write one. This is literally why I wrote the book. Yes. I was writing about the last episode, the sign, this big sort of finale thing.

And I had all these thoughts and feelings about it. And I like went and took a walk. And I was like, somebody's going to write a blue book. And then I was like, oh, damn it. I'm going to have to do it, aren't I? Yes. The responsibility falls to you. You must pick up this mantle.

That's very exciting. Bluey is in heavy rotation in my household and every parent's household. So I look forward to that. Thank you. I just recommended the new Bluey video game on my video game podcast, Buttonmash. My daughter could write the Bluey book if she could write, but your version will probably be great, too. So thank you for doing that. And thank you for being here. This was a great pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so happy to be able to come and yell about Good Night Moon and Ed Baldwin. two topics that I'm just perpetually saying. Evergreen. Evergreen. That's right. Well, that was a treat for me. Love reading, Catherine, love listening to Catherine,

love talking to Catherine. Hopefully you did as well. And hopefully we have fed you well if you are an outlander and or fam fan. Or we have convinced you to become one. Again, we highly recommend these shows and their spinoffs. Lots of upcoming coverage, Ringiverse, House of Our, we will have Masters of the Universe episodes. We will have Vampire List. On Buttmash, we will be talking about summer showcase season.

Lots of big games that are about about 007 First Light. Mino the Hollower, it was a huge May for video games, but we already recommended those on Butmash. Thank you, as always, to Steve Allman for producing this episode, to our Jonah Ramgapal, who is on vacation, Bon Voyage, but as always, he supports us in our efforts here at the Ring Universe. And thanks to you for following us. You can write to us at ringerverse recommends at gmail.com.

Send your nominations for future months. Send your requests for future main spotlight conversations. If there's something you'd like us to cover in June or beyond, we want to hear from you. Inbox is always open. Ringervors Recommends at gmail.com. And until next time, I will tell you that Grumpkin is doing great. She's not allowed in the studio,

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