The Watch - A Check-In With Andy, the Premiere of ‘The Deuce’ Season 2, and a Mid-Season Review of ‘Ozark’ Season 2 | The Watch (Ep. 288)
Episode Date: September 10, 2018The Ringer’s Chris Ryan is briefly joined by Andy Greenwald to give an update on the production of Andy's show 'Briarpatch' (1:00). Then Alison Herman joins to talk about the second season premiere ...of HBO’s ‘The Deuce’ (7:21) and David Shoemaker gives a mid-season review of Netflix’s ‘Ozark’ (23:36). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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I need sports to have to clear the room.
Stand up and walk now.
Hello, and welcome to The Watch.
My name is Chris Ryan.
I am an editor at Theringer.com,
and joining me on the other line,
he just can't quit me.
It's Andy Greenwald!
Whoa!
We only have a guest appearance from you today.
What's up, man?
You know, I just got a little nervous.
You were moving on so easily without me.
Yeah, you know, I mean, we're just going to keep going to the bullpen.
We'll see who we find, you know, Katie Nolan any day now.
So it's just one of those things.
Man, young Wally Pip here in the high desert.
Yeah, how's it going?
It's good.
You know, I just landed back here.
I was home for a nice weekend.
Didn't connect with you because you were up Northwest.
Oh, I love Seattle so much.
I was up in Seattle and I was up on Orca's Island.
And Greenwald, I had the best pizza I've had since I left New York in Seattle.
Wow.
Yeah.
Big talk.
At Delancy, have you?
Do you know about that spot?
I know about Delancey because the co-owner used to run this blog Orangette.
So I read about her journey to making a pizzeria up there.
It's really good, huh?
It was sick.
I had a pepperoni pie and a chocolate chip cookie with a scoop of vanilla ice cream,
and I was ready to go straight, straight to my grave.
Stuff.
That sounds like you were about to put on your shoe.
I know.
I know.
It's definitely like what dad gets you after you hit a double.
Greenwald, what's going on with you?
What do you want to talk about?
I've just just given a heavy-duty parenting. I've been doing the last couple days.
But can we be transparent? You're this is production Eve, isn't it?
Yeah, man, we start filming tomorrow. What is the first shot you guys have to do?
Nice. We do not for no. And he's asked me that no, no fewer than five times in the last few weeks.
That's cool. I did a solid 10 minutes telling my mom over her iPad phone how to turn off her iPhone today.
So.
That's much worse.
So let me assure you, we do not shoot in order.
Okay.
But we're in a very, just something you do for fun here.
Just to loosen up.
Is Jay Ferguson okay now that the Cowboys are residing in the basement of the NFC East?
I'm really glad you asked that question.
For people who I'm so excited that in our incredible might even rank higher.
Like just cowboy shorts, every time we meet he is wearing.
And they're so great yesterday.
Yeah, it's the wrong time for him to try and troll Philadelphia.
Philadelphia fans because Dallas sucks and the Eagles haven't lost since last January.
I'm just saying he has gone radio silent.
I bet.
Is there any pop cultural observations you wanted to share with the listeners before we move on?
I got Allison Herman here to talk about the Deuce and Shoemaker to talk about Ozark.
I love the Deuce.
How come people aren't talking about the Deuce?
I mean, I know you and Allison are going to and I'm thrilled.
Quiet, it felt like culturally quiet return it had this weekend.
I think football had a lot to do with that last night to some extent
because people spent 13 hours watching games and the Sunday night game was
like ridiculously good last night.
So I imagine that kind of blotted out the sun a little bit.
But I think that this is sort of an issue and I'm going to talk to Allison about that.
There is a little bit of like a reliability, the sort of reliability fatigue with David
Simon George Pelicano shows, which is a terrible thing.
But it's basically like, of course it's good.
Of course it's insightful.
Of course it's very sensitive and urban about like the state of the world back then and
and what it means now.
Do you think people just get tired of it being good?
And that would be a shame if that's the case.
I'll say that the, you know, in this episode was one.
I was so excited to see everyone as if they were much.
That's still what I like in my TV show.
All right, old fashion.
I'm going to let you go.
Good luck tomorrow.
Hopefully we can keep these little check-ins going.
It won't be Emmy season without you.
I can't let go.
You're going to pry my knuckles off of the hands.
All right, brother.
Take care.
Thanks, buddy.
Thanks, everybody.
Bye.
All right, now I am joined by Alison Herman.
Allison, I wanted to have you on to talk about the deuce.
I love talking about the deuce.
Let's go.
Are enough people talking about the deuce?
Andy and I were just chatting for a second there,
and he was just like, did this, like, the reception felt a little muted last night.
I don't know if Twitter is like a really good barometer of deuce passion.
But, like, I said because last night was also like, start the football season.
so maybe it wasn't as much like, hey, Frankie and Vincent are back,
but I can't tell if people are excited about this show like we are.
Well, I think we're operating in a TV landscape right now
that really does not prize consistency, which totally makes sense.
I mean, even just putting the giant sports apparatus
that just kicked into gear last night aside,
just speaking in terms of scripted TV,
last night was the second season premiere of The Duce,
but it was also the premiere of a new Jim Carrey vehicle,
which is the first TV show since,
in living color and also this, you know, we were joking about it before it aired, but Lifetime has
this new kind of funny dromedy U, which is a little creepy.
Yeah, it's just sort of like there are too high to semi-high profile releases, and then in the
middle you have David Simon giving like the unsexiest possible portrayal of the sex industry.
And also we should probably mention there are probably some behind-the-scenes considerations
in terms of, I'm not sure HBO wanted to necessarily put this as much in the spotlight because
there's the whole James Franco of it all
that they have to deal with.
Sure.
So I didn't get the sense that
I saw one David Simon interview in Rolling Stone.
I saw a few advanced reviews
from people who were like,
this is a big HBO drama,
so I owe it some coverage.
But I don't think HBO was really like
pulling out all the stops
the way they were when they first launched the show.
Everything about this show in a weird way
is traditional.
Like even the trailers were very like,
you know, hey, it's 1977 in New York,
and here's all the characters.
And here's a couple of things
that are sort of galvanizing, you know, incidents.
But there's not like a lot of heightened high concept drama
the way Westworld and True Detective
have these sort of basically movie trailers
to introduce their seasons.
So yeah, you're right.
The promo on it was a little muted.
Do you want to talk about the James Franco of it all?
Because I think one of the interesting things about it,
aside from whether or not he should be allowed to be in this show,
basically, based on the allegations against him,
is the specific role or roles he is playing in this
and the way in which he is interacting with this world.
Yeah, I definitely want to refer your listeners to Sonia Soraya
wrote a really great piece in Vanity Fair in which she makes,
but I think it's a very compelling case
that a lot of the specific allegations against Franco
had to do with his actions as a director
in terms of filming sex scenes.
And so much of the thematic points of the deuce
are about how this stuff is presented.
And, you know, the arc of Maggie Gyllenhaal's character this season
is all about her being a director
and what it means to shoot porn from a female perspective.
And basically, she made the argument that allowing Franco to retain such a prominent role in the show directly undercuts a lot of the themes and arguments that the deuce is trying to make about the exploitation and possible not exploitative applications of the sex industry.
I don't have a definitive answer.
I will also say, you know, George Pelicanos talked on your show about how they were going to make these big time dumps in between seasons.
and it was almost going to be kind of an anthology.
And one of the things that just surprised me about the content of this episode is it's a five-year
jump that does not quite feel like a five-year jump.
There's some progress in a lot of these characters' lives,
but basically all the ensemble remains in place as it was in season one,
and the changes are not necessarily as drastic.
Like, I was particularly surprised to find that, you know,
one of the central tensions of season one is these pimps who are primarily African-
American men facing their own redundancy as things move indoors and more legitimate in
towards the porn industry.
And lo and behold, Cece, the Pimp character, is still acting as this kind of de facto agent
slash unprofessional hanger on to Lori.
For Lori.
Yeah.
So I think I was just surprised as a whole that they didn't necessarily make as much use of
the time jump as I thought.
But also that presents an opportunity to do some cast turnover that they did not do.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
And I think that, you know, so sometimes there are things that happen that feel like they are kind of pulled from the center of the Venn diagram of the things that I'm interested in.
And definitely 1977 New York and punk rock and the cultural explosion that was happening then are among the things I am most interested in the world.
And I grew up like listening to punk rock and really idealizing New York City in the late 70s and early 80s and the art scene that came out of that whole area.
it's sort of funny sometimes when you get that.
You know, when you get to watch the thing that you're so, so fascinated by, the thing that
really threw me off watching it, and it basically took me until the scene where Maggie
Gyllenhaal and David Crumholtz are discussing editing techniques of pornography is basically
adjusting back to the rhythm of the show and to the rhythm of like the Simon Pelicanos way
in general.
I think it's very deliberate.
The scenes are all moral.
less paced the same way.
They were kind of pitched at the same,
especially in this episode,
at the same frequency.
And after I think a week of watching
Ozark and American Vandal screeners
and this sort of like,
maybe even Saul where it's like this high concept
or really tense,
quick silver kind of feeling
to go back to like,
oh, okay, somebody's going to walk into a room.
And then they're going to have a little bit of a chat
before they discuss what they're actually doing in this scene.
And then they're going to finish that chat.
And then we're just,
going to move into another one. And I thought that there were some incredible moments, though,
in the premiere. And it is a hang. And I think what's really interesting about, you know, the way it
works. First of all, I thought the 77 of it all kind of came more into focus with the aesthetics of it.
Like the fact that Margarita Leviva's character, Abby, is managing this bar and she's basically
turned it into a punk haven. Yeah, she's got Penn Smith hair. And the gay bar is a lot more
of a disco. But also, you know, the thematics of the season, as we're watching,
the like, I guess you would call a gentrification of the sex industry.
A lot of the frisin of danger that comes with having a cast that's about, I think last season,
basically half the characters were streetwalkers.
When you move it indoors, not to say that the porn industry is not dangerous and rife with exploitation,
I would not be surprised we see a character overdose, for example, this season.
You're not getting that, you know, one of the climactic events of last season was a prostitute
who was killed by a John pushing her out of window.
And you're not really getting that, you know, little bit of, you know,
life or death to it all
and then you just get the
the Simon and Pelicanus rhythm as you mentioned
you're just watching people speak
good words and for me at least
it's massively pleasurable and I feel like
I haven't actually said that I still really
enjoy this show and I think this is a great season
it's just not a flashy season
yeah and I think that I wonder
whether or not for people like us
I would imagine for a lot of the people listening
to the podcast if you're watching a lot of TV
this now feels
like an experiment whereas in
fact, it's very much in line with everything that they've been doing since the Wire, but it actually, in the face of a lot of television now, feels almost experimental in its pacing. And it's basically an ideas show. It's a show about individuals being crushed by institutions and being crushed by history because we know what happens. And it's like a plotless show, right? It's not, you know, I conducted an extremely unscientific Twitter poll just based on, I had a couple of real life conversations. I had a couple of real life conversations.
where people told me basically, I like the show.
I recognize it's objectively a good show,
and yet I found myself kind of trailing off after four episodes
because I didn't feel like it had a sense of direction,
which was more or less borne out by what I heard
by my followers who responded.
Thank you to those who did.
But yeah, exactly.
It's not a show that really grabs you in a way
because you don't really know.
You're watching history unfold in a thousand very small and subtle ways.
You're not real.
The question is not, you know, is Vinnie going to make it?
It's not, is Maggie Gillenhall's character Candy going to be a huge star?
Even though you can tell the general trajectory of everyone, you're really there to just watch Maggie Gillenhall and David Krumholtz, who's looking great, by the way.
You're just there to watch them, like, talk about the female gaze in this, like, art porn movie she made.
You're not, I'm not really like, oh, is she going to make a visual reaction when the lion is chasing the zebra?
Or the orange being crushed.
Yeah.
Right.
Like, that's what I'm around for.
Yeah, and I'm around for, I think that they do,
Pelacanos' crime fiction is very straightforward.
It's not straightforward, but it's not florid, I would say.
I think it has a journalistic kind of energy.
And Simon obviously comes from a journalistic background.
And I think they do a lot of almost framing the themes of their shows
in an almost journalistic way.
They put like a thesis statement or a topic statement
in these scenes so that you know why it's an important conversation
is because it's about the encroaching gentrification
that will happen to Midtown,
or it's about this kind of last moment of,
I think Matt Silvercites referred to it
as kind of like the Vimar Republic era of New York City
before AIDS came in.
Yeah, because the AIDS crisis is coming down the pike.
Absolutely.
Yeah, so like you kind of have these signals of like,
oh, yeah, and of course, like they're playing new rows
and stuff like that, you know.
But I think that ultimately there are these moments
of quite moving poetry.
Like the scene of Maggie Gyllenhaal
in her Unitarred on the desk
dreaming about making a musical
is like almost just like Lynchian
in the way that it's shot
and the way that she's kind of acting.
I thought that was remarkable.
I mean, speaking of thesis statements,
there's literally a line in this episode
where Maggie Gyllenhaal says,
who would have thought that fucking
is the most boring part of horror?
That is the show.
Like, I don't want to say
you don't need to watch the show
after you hear that line,
but that is definitely they are telling you
exactly what they're trying to do.
and what they're trying to say,
but it doesn't feel like a hammer, I guess.
Yeah.
I'm very content to just watch this show proceed
and watch over me in the way that...
They're very different shows,
but almost like when I watch Mrs. Maisel,
which is the Amy Sherman Palladino,
and you're just like, oh, this person knows how to make TV.
And those shows show are a very important connective phone
because Lenny Bruce is in the doze.
Oh, my God, yes, I forgot about that.
Kirby, who plays Lenny Bruce and Mrs. Maisel
and plays Ed Koch's sort of Midtown...
enforcement lieutenant in the deuce.
And I actually thought that that was actually
that was really cool how he brought, like, I think he had like
a little bit of a different energy to bring to the show.
I hope we get to see a lot more of him this season.
Oh, totally. I think we will. But it's also really
interesting to watch, you know, the slow
role of history, speaking of, it's last
season, the gentrification was, we're going to
take these streetwalkers and we're going to push them indoors
to these parlors. And now it's like, we're
going to take these cash-only businesses because they don't
result in income for the city
and we're going to convert them into money earners.
which totally fits with the Simon thesis of it always comes back around to capitalism.
It feels like an extension of the John Lindsay administration last year.
It just feels like a really interesting, the fact that you can, I think it was an interesting
choice for them to go to 77 and do the Weimar Republic instead of going straight ahead
to like what happens when porn goes to video, what happens we don't have to deal with, you know,
the AIDS crisis.
But that's a little like, okay, so we're getting this intermediary step.
we're getting the next stage of this very gradual process that eventually is going to end in an M&M store.
Yeah, right. And I think that the thing that I like the most about or the thing that really hits home the most is that when you, these guys are all living and these women are all living in this land of vice.
And I think we sometimes, at least initially you associate vice with indulgence or with self-satisfaction, if not self-annihilation.
But there's something about it that's supposed to be indulgent.
and then you convert it into a job.
So everybody, you know, in the end of the episode
and the mobster is telling James Franco's character, you know, enjoy it.
You know, like this is the life we live.
Like we get to have these suits, these cars and stuff like that.
But he's been basically awake for three days running after his brother
trying to find him because he stole all this money from one of the peep shows.
And every character on this show is basically increasingly getting ground down
by the professionalization of their industries.
And you also get the labor consciousness,
which I thought was a really interesting part of Abby's arc.
And I think I can disclose.
I've seen like three more episodes of this season,
and that's something that they really touch on,
which is, you know, it's all capitalism, this is work,
and the people who are doing the work are laborers.
They're not lost souls.
They're not fallen women, but they are, you know, they're a class.
Yeah.
And it's fun to watch them, you know, draw that line
in a way that I think resonates with certain issues of the day.
today. Of course. Yeah, it's a, it's a miraculous show in a lot of ways. So I hope we come back
to it later in the season. Thanks for joining me today, Alison. Thanks for having me.
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All right. Now I am joined by
my
Lake brother. David Shoemaker in New York City
to talk about Ozark Season 2. Now Shoemaker and I
we didn't really agree on like let's do the first three episodes or let's
do, so we're going to talk generally about season 2. I finished it last night.
Shoemaker still got a couple left. So we're not going to spoil anything
in terms of, I don't think we'll spoil anything major. We won't spoil any
any possible character deaths or anything like that.
We're going to talk more about how we are feeling about this season.
And Shoemaker, I want you to go first because I'm still sorting it out.
I will say that, I remember the last time I was on the show,
I had to make up some things I was not looking forward to
or I hoped wouldn't happen in season two.
And one thing I said was I hope they wouldn't just keep introducing the next big bad,
you know, that just took the place to the last big bad.
Sure.
They absolutely did that.
And I think they did it about four times in the first three episodes.
And I was totally wrong.
It's just as great.
The show is just as great as it ever was.
It's like, in some ways it like doesn't.
I, you know, I'm all in the bag for this show,
so I'm just going to make excuses for it.
But the bigger and weirder the show gets,
the more the focus is, I mean,
the more the bird family is just put into relief
and it makes it just so much kind of more interesting and compelling.
Yeah.
I think that what I wanted from this show
was a pretty unique ask
that would have been probably not a good television show this season,
which is essentially to keep moving at the same pace
and to keep moving in a world without morality,
which is essentially the thing that made it so,
such a strange watch and such like an intoxicating watch
in the first season is that Marty is moving so fast
and moving his family through so much turmoil
that he never really stops to have the like,
am I a bad person conversation?
You know, and he's basically spinning so many different,
not lies, but he's covering up so many different numbers and he's moving things around and he's got,
you know, his life are these little shell companies. And when he finally has to do a full accounting,
which I think happens over the course of the second season, there are some more traditional
aspects going on in terms of a reckoning of who he is, who he's becoming, what he wants to be,
who he feels like he should be. But that being said, even though it kind of lost some of the thing
that made it completely unique in my mind,
I thought this season was quite entertaining.
It was really, really, really, really fun.
Well, I mean, that, that, that hectic pace
and that, like, you know, the no stopping
to reconcile morality actually becomes sort of a plot
or at least a minor plot line in the show.
Increasingly, as the second season goes on,
they are sort of self-aware in that way,
and I think, you know, that's really interesting.
Yeah, I mean, I think that you're right,
that, like, the perfect version
of this show is maybe a little bit hard to nail down.
It's at least hard to sustain, right?
Like, you could have done a seven-episode season
that just moved at the same pace as the last season.
But I look at season two as actually more of an extension of season one
thematically and narratively, rather than...
Because I was kind of thinking what they'll do is the casino will be up and running.
You know, like I thought we would join them six months, nine months,
13 months later and they would have this casino and then something else would happen.
And instead, it starts relatively soon after the first season ends.
Yeah, I think that that's a really smart way of looking at it.
In some ways, this second season has been just sort of a sidebar or a sequel to the first season
in a broad thematic way.
I mean, the first season was very much Jason Bateman's show.
And I think almost all of the shows that we love,
in season one or about one character
or you can think of them as being a sort of like
protagonist driven show and then they expand out
into these huge universes where like
the 18th most important character
actor is just as important as the main character
or who used to be the main character
and in season two you see them giving a lot of
of time and significance to the other members of the bird family
I mean Laura Linney in season one might as well have just been like
a bump in cue rating for the show
You know, I mean, she was really fantastic, but there was, I spent a lot of time wondering why that
Laura Linney was there, you know?
I think the second season is our answer.
Oh, absolutely.
And, you know, I mean, for all the great shows, you know, I mean, no knocks on watch favorites
like the Americans, but there have been a lot of shows where the casting of child actors has gone awry.
And, man, they just, like, lucked out so much with both of the kids in this show.
But Jonah especially is just like, he's just like a proper actor, man, and he's like carrying scenes.
and storylines and stuff.
And it's, you know, without giving too much away,
there is, you know, he becomes as significant
in the sort of paralleling season one aspect of season two
as anybody else.
I think one of the things that sort of defines the second season
is three women who sort of rise to power
over the course of the season.
And that's, obviously, it's Darlene, Jacob Snell's wife.
It's Helen, a cartel boss
played by the great British actress Janet McTeer.
and obviously Laura Linney.
And Laura Linney,
you know, without,
she basically has a Michael Corleone arc,
you know,
and she,
I think one of the things
that's fascinating about this show
is that by placing essentially
like squares in these really,
in this criminal underworld
and asking them to
sort of find out who they are
when they're living without a net
and without the sort of
cottoning of,
of everyday regular life,
they find out that their lives are actually
perhaps they feel more alive than they did before
and I think that that happened a little bit
in the beginning of the first season with Marty
and it certainly happens this season
with Laurelini as Wendy
and she's fucking phenomenal in this in this show
yeah she's really really good
I mean there's no doubt in the world
obviously that she's an incredible actor
but the way that she is
just as her character is like
suddenly thrust in this weird world and has to
inhabit a new sort of persona in the Ozarks.
Like, Laura Linney is carrying scenes in a show that seemed to be, you know, through season
one sort of entirely built around Jason Bateman and, like, character actors doing twangy accents,
you know?
I mean, so, like, Laura Linney is, like, a full anchor of this show now, and it's fantastic.
I kind of wanted to talk a little bit about that idea of whether or not second seasons
and whether or not shows in general need to go wider or go deeper.
because I think they chose to go deeper
with mostly the same cast of characters
with a lot of the same sort of end goals
for each of those characters
rather than bringing in a ton of new people
which I think they could have done
had they done just straight to the riverboat
or done a little bit more of a time jump
did you feel like over the course of the episodes
that you've watched that you came to appreciate characters
like Jacob or
you know Wyatt Moore
or was there a party that was like
I kind of wish there was like a different group of folks interacting here.
I mean,
this show is still relatively young.
So I don't,
I mean,
I'm not,
I'm not upset that we don't have a whole bunch more people.
I think that,
I mean,
there's certainly an aspect of the show where it feels like
they're a little bit too in love with their cast.
And I don't know,
I guess that's the wrong way of saying it.
Despite all the craziness that happens on the show,
I mean,
plot-wise and everything else,
there's not,
you know,
this isn't a show where you feel like
all of your favorite characters,
are in moral danger all the time.
You know, and maybe that's just because of the being on Netflix.
I don't know what it is.
I just don't, you know, I don't expect, you know, when, I hope it's not too much of a spoiler
to say that Rachel, Jordana Spiro's character, reappears this season.
And it was sort of a, it was presented as a sort of twist, but it was no surprise, right?
I mean, the way that she left, but also just the vibe of the show.
You know, we had a couple of deaths last season of significant characters.
But then there's a point in this season where characters die,
and I think it really helps to keep you on your toes
and realize that, like, you know, this show is, it gives some fucks,
but it's, but it wants you to know that, like, they're, that it's willing to go to the excesses of, of its predecessors.
It's, at certain moments.
And, you know, I mean, again, it's, this isn't like some terrible,
this wouldn't be a terrible spoiler even if I said it, but I'm not going to go into it,
but there's one character who was all, it was around the entire first season,
really becomes like the emotional core of season two.
And, and, and he just, it's just a great example of someone who like, I,
it was almost just like a bit, like not a bit part, but just a bit.
Yeah.
And I, and I was so happy to like care so much about that, about that character.
So anyway, it's interesting that, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned both the Snells.
They, they become simultaneously more sort of lovable and more hateable.
But I would say, I mean, they were set up as just villains in season one.
So I guess they're definitely skewing towards more lovable.
And meanwhile, you know, both of the birds, I mean, both Jason Bateman and Laura Linney are put in just in situations that you, like, cannot like them.
And I think part of that is because their goals start become very muddy.
You know, their stated goal is to protect their family.
Their stated goal is, like, everything we're doing is because our lives were in danger back in.
Chicago and every decision we've made since we got to the Ozarks is to basically prolong our
survival. And in fact, there's greater ambition involved there. And I wrote about this when I wrote
about the preview of this season is that ambition and survival are two instincts that can feel
very similar because they're very passionate. And I think you see that where there's a lot of confusion
about what are we actually trying to do here. Are we trying to become kingpins of
of this backwater, you know, lake town, or are we trying to get an exit strategy?
And that's the tension.
And then what happens is that we see over the course of the season is just like in any
family where maybe some decisions are made without consulting with the other person
or there are different alliances or different pockets of power going on,
that's getting exploited on like a criminal level.
And it winds up being, you know, it winds up maintaining them such a dark place.
because it basically becomes punitive
towards one another.
People are saying,
well, you made this decision without me,
so I'm going to make this decision without you.
Yeah, exactly.
There's no relation, I mean,
there's no pure relationships in the show.
You know, I mean, even, I mean,
the purest one might be the Snells,
you know, and they have some moments
of discord this season.
You're absolutely right, though.
I mean, that level,
it's, I mean, they make light through,
I mean, at various points in season two,
of the concept of, you know,
what,
they, what, what their stated goals are, right?
I mean, they're, they're, if they're not always fully aware of it, then the people around
them are, right? And it's like, and their, and their kids sort of calling them on their shit.
Like, it's, it's always there right in the subtext that, that there's a question as to whether
or not Marty would, you know, dreams of being, of actually being a kingpin, um, or whether
he just is only a problem solver and that continues to lead him down these roads.
I don't think, I don't think, I don't think as many times as he tells himself that even he would, you know,
even that character believes that they're going to get out at the specified deadline or whatever.
It's just, it's a never-ending cycle.
And I think that, you know, they're coming to grips with that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we'll maybe jump in in a couple of weeks when it feels like more people have gotten a chance to watch the whole season,
aside from crazy people like me and Shoemaker.
And maybe we'll do a little bit more of a spoiler conversation about it.
But, Dave, thanks for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me, man.
I love this show.
Me too.
All right, that was David Shoemaker on Ozark and Alison Herman on The Deuce.
And we'll keep talking about both of those shows later this week.
I have an interview with Carlton Cuse and Graham Rowland, the showrunners of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan on Amazon,
which has been out for a couple of weeks.
I'm really excited to talk to those guys.
And we'll probably hit on Better Call Saul as well on Thursday.
So put Andy in your prayers as he embarks on production for Briar Pratch.
And I'll be back on Thursday.
Take care.
