The Watch - Affleck Back to Batman? A New Spider-Woman? Plus, Lonesome Dove Pt. 4

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

Following announcements about upcoming Spider-Woman, Kraven the Hunter, and Batman projects, Chris and Andy weigh in on the news and the stars who could be behind each project (8:15). Then, in preparation for the finale of 'I May Destroy You,' they break down the latest episode and discuss the success Michaela Coel has had in her first season (27:50). Plus, the last installment of the 'Lonesome Dove' series (38:40). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by the NHTSA. Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. You could get in a crash. People could get hurt or killed, but that still doesn't stop everyone. You could get arrested. You could incur huge legal expenses, and you could possibly even lose your job. We all know the consequences of driving drunk, but one thing's for sure, you're wrong if you think it's no big deal. Drive sober or get pulled over.

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by VH1's RuPaul's Drag Race, Vegas Review, Rupal is opening a live Las Vegas residency. Go behind the Queens as six of the most sensational drag race superstars put on the show of a lifetime. It's Viva Yas Vegas on Rupal's Drag Race Vegas Review. New series premieres Friday, August 21st, 8-7 Central, only on VH1. 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 the Ringer. and joining me on the other line, soon appearing in David Cronenberg's Scarlet Spider story.

It's Andy Greenwald! That was really good because, you know, little housekeeping, people could assume, but they don't know that just before we hit record, you asked me for the lamest Marvel story possible. I came up with the clone saga, which actually is the perfect story for David Cronenberg's entrance into the Marvel Cinemate universe. You got it. I'm getting a little older, but sometimes the engines still fire

up there, you know, the pistons. I love it. How are you? Oh, I'm great. You know, we should give people the rundown because we got a lot of stuff today. We do. Are you trying to get through this quickly? Because usually we have like a chat about the weather or some of the ventures and culinary.

What you caught me off was, and Erica keep this, this is gold. This is our best stuff. Oh, Erica knows. It's just, we're basically going live at this point. No, just that I wanted to alert people that if they like the watch, they can have the watch on their rewatchables. It's the watch watchables this week. I completely forgot that we did that yesterday. We did a two hour and 15 minute podcast yesterday about a movie that no one can see that's hugely

important to us. And our podcast with Bill Simmons is longer than the movie itself. Yes, I would say that you actually can see it. You just need to look at some of the responses to that tweet. I mean, it's like on archive.org, you can see pump up the volume or you can watch it on YouTube. So whether those things will still be there in a couple days, I can't say. But you can watch the movie online. And you should. And I said this on the rewatchables, which you can listen to on the Ringer podcast network, obviously on the rewatchables feed.

And I'll say it to our listeners as well. I'm really curious if this is a generational thing, if people younger than us, older than us, have enjoyed this movie. Because this is a foundational text for both me and Chris that we didn't know each other at the time. It helped define our cinematic taste, our taste. our taste in women, our taste in music. A romantic ideals, I think. Yeah, right. Yeah. And it also, I think, informed both of our trademark anti-establishment ensucians,

you know, that continues to this day by just speaking truth to power into microphones. So let's do it. It's an origin story for us. Please listen to the rewatchables. We pump up the volume episode with Andy. Andy. It was great. It was great to hang out with him with Bill for that hour and 40 minutes, I think we went. It was so long. Greenwald, today we are going to do a little bit of news at the top with some of the superhero movie adaptation headlines that have come out this week. I may destroy you the penultimate episode before the Monday's finale.

And then we're going to do the fourth installment, the final installment of the Summer of Dove, Lonesome Pod, The Lonesome Dove Breakdown. Can I ask you, before we get into that, because some of our trademark bans, people are asking for it, lost power yesterday. it's a tough time here in California. Yeah, you want to see Liz Warren. Yeah. It was funny too because you were like, I need to see Liz Warren. I'm like, aren't you aware that the Sixers are down 22? I mean, put your weird priorities.

Let me reiterate, I need to see Liz Warren. I need to see someone who has a plan for something. Let me put it this way, Chris. I do not endorse Elton Brand for Secretary of the Treasury. I do not think he has earned a position in the cabinet unless the government next four years of pandemic response involves spending more money to lose to the Celtics in a worse way. So no. I wanted to ask you this because power outages are never good.

They are, at least in my experience, somewhat less frequent here, although maybe that's changing than they were on the East Coast. And I'm wondering if you, Chris, like, if you were to lose power, what would be your first move? Like, would you immediately take all of the, I don't know, Blue Moon or whatever sponsored beer is sponsoring us and throw it on the freezer so you could have like peak coldness? Would you, what is your, what is the thing that you need to do first to get through this time? Remind myself that the power is out and I won't be able to charge my phone so stop using it. Like, I know, right? Like, endlessly, essentially, which is always a problem where I'm like, I got to make sure my phone is on 100. And then I, like, spend three hours watching a basketball game and reading, like, Twitter.

And then I'm like, oh, God. The first thing I did is, so the day before, our friend, a recent watch guest, the great Jason Concepcion, had been tweeting about how he had lost power. And he lives pretty near me. And he was tweeting about, like, hand crank generators and shit. So immediately with no power, I text, I text ad network. And I was like, how long's your power been out, blah, blah. And he's like, yeah, it's out again.

It was out this morning, too. And then we just started texting, like, emojis. And I'm like, wait, this is the problem. We don't need the power we have now. This needs to go to a hospital instead. So I am calling on Tim Cook to make a hand-cranked iPhone. Oh, my God. So you'd really have to choose.

You would absolutely have to prioritize. I mean, I, so it's funny you mentioned that. I was like, looking at my phone, I was like, we've got to reduce battery usage in this crisis time so that I can continue to tell Chris which political speeches I'm sorry to be missing. So I did the thing where you go to the menu and you see all the apps that are open, you know, and then I see that I have not one, not two, but three different mapping programs currently running. Are they all for your jogs? No. Oh, I had that one open too. No, it's just that

like I, you know, clicked on a contact and it opened Apple Maps six weeks ago. And in the background, Eddie Q is just like making the Jonas Sarah face being like, boy, he's really staying close to him. This guy respects a quarantine. I'm pretty, you know. On top of my apps. I got to keep that stuff out. I get the apps out of there. Yeah. So I think that the most important thing would probably be phone.

Next up would be, boy, I don't know. You know, like, it's like, I believe in the Los Angeles utilities, you know? And I believe that those guys are doing their best and that they would just try to get it back as soon as possible. So I don't know what I would toss out. It's just, and I don't think this matters for people who are not following along with us in the cattle drive that is lonesome dove. but like one of the things that is both pleasurable and kind of like I'm sure there's a German word for like a sweet delicious pain is just understanding the degree to which we wouldn't survive three days in that era like nobody was suggesting that you or I could could take advantage of a dead horse by skinning it for meat you know like nobody thinks we can do that however it still would be amazing to turn to Captain Woodrow F call and be like just want to let you know sir that I attempted to bathe my child last night in a bath, only to remember that our hot water is electric.

So instead, we had to just sort of use ice, like cold water to just sort of sponge off her feet. And she was like by candlelight. So I'm like, we have, we, we deserve this country that you helped, help settle for us. Absolutely. Should we get into the superhero headlines that happened this week? Because I think, I think that's for the best.

You know, I, well, thing that you've, I think we've both remarked upon and I've heard other people talking about is, you know, we've talked about how the shows and the movies, the movies essentially are all on demand and thinning out at that. It's not uncommon to go a week and just kind of be like, oh, it's nothing really here on these on demand services that I want to watch. And the shows themselves, I think we're down to like two or three at any given time that we're watching, maybe one or two. But what's not stopped is the news, which is I kind of had a feeling that this was going to happen as we went longer and longer

into quarantine and into this era where there's, it doesn't cost anything to make an announcement, but it definitely drives, you know, attention and conversation. So there was just a flurry this week of very odd announcements coming out of Hollywood from different studios, different, different superhero franchise temples. number one was it was announced that Olivia Wilde and Katie Silverman are going to be the brains behind Booksmart are going to be doing Spider-Woman And not official but it's pretty clear that's what they're doing and Olivia was tech like Instagramming like a picture of her child in a Spider-Man costume like it's pretty clear that's what you'll be doing So that is going to be a Sony operation as will just announced today J.C. Chandor's Craven the Hunter,

which is, again, in that sort of venom-morbius spider verse, I guess, right? The villain, yeah. And then there was another piece of news that just happened before we started recording today that Ben Affleck, who was free. Like, Ben Affleck was walking out of Alcatraz. You know, like, he was free from Batman,

and he is going back to the Cape to be in the flash movie of all things. Andy Machete, the guy who directed It and It Too, is doing a flash film, and it's going to be the flash forward plot line, correct? It seems to be because I also saw that Michael Keaton is going to be playing. Yeah, and then news about Affleck comes via Michael Keaton,

so who knows if Michael Keaton is just popping off and maybe that doesn't come through. But I thought we could take these one by one, because I've got a comic books expert and a Hollywood insider with me here today. Me and you. Let's bring him on. No, but let's talk a little bit about these announcements.

Okay. So one thing that is smart, I think, is Sony is making hay. Well, they can. A lot of these projects, as you alluded to, are they're throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. There's not even any certainty that these movies will get made. But as we've remarked repeatedly, we're not really sure what's getting made full stop right now or in the foreseeable future, even though a lot of things are slowly inching their way back toward production. So at a time when Marvel and their direct competitors, and they are competitors, and Sony is just churning out content to keep the Spider-Man license, basically, at a time when Marvel and the competitors are stuck in neutral, why not put the floor it, right?

Like, it makes a lot of sense. Marvel probably not only would have released movies like the Black Widow movie by now, but they probably would have at Comic-Con made some more clarifying announcements about the movie. the next phase, the post- for Eternals and stuff like that. Yeah. Phase and what it was building towards and what it might mean and what it might look like.

And they certainly don't need to. They're doing just fine, but they haven't done that. So there's a vacuum and more attention can fall on this stuff. What I'll say is the spider woman deal, well, let me separate them. Say the Craven thing first.

Fine. My response to that is fine. Craven the Hunter is a kind of silly, campy villain that is basically beloved, if he is at all, not just because he's a member of the Sinister Six when all Spider-Man's villains team up, which is clearly what Sony is also hoping to do at some point.

But for a storyline called Craven's Last Hunt, where he's literally hunting the Spider-Man, and it was quite dark and respected at the time in the 80s, this seems to be a movie like the Venom movie, a Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man. And I guess if you squint and you get a filmmaker who is interesting, like J.C. Chandor is, regardless of what you thought of the movie he made with Batman,

the Triple Frontier. I think quite highly of it. I think we all remember that, but. If J.C. Chandar wants to make a movie about, you know, a crazed big game hunter, well, this is the way he's going to have to do it in today's studio system economy. So maybe it's going to be that kind of thing and it could be good and we'll see. So that's that. But I do put that in the venom and morbiose like shrug emoji.

Maybe we'll get lucky with one of these category. I mean, they did with venom, right? And they got quite lucky with it. Quite lucky. $800 million of lucky, yeah. Which I, that's still wild to me, but great. Good for everybody. But I'm a very positive person generally.

But the Spider-Woman 1 is really exciting to me because there's opportunity not just to take advantage of a piece of IP that they happen to control, but there's an opportunity to grab the wheel and make your company-run franchise something different. And the reason I say that is because Spider-Man is. they're always going to make Spider-Man movies. Spider-Man is very popular. You and I have a pretty good amount of time, I think, for the Tom Holland Spider-Man films, and I like Tom Holland and The Diet together.

Very much so. They're very charming. That is actually probably my preferred version of Spider-Man. Yes. That's been filmed. I think that's probably true. I also think that that version of Spider-Man is very much feels like a product of the MCU than its own, like, visionary thing.

You know what I mean? like those even those Sony Spider-Man movies have so much been about other than the high school stuff which you and I really like have been about spackling the edges about like of that universe like oh we miss Tony Stark so much so there's a chance if they want to have their own thing which they do to do something here because the Jessica Drew Spider-Woman character if that's the version of the character that that they're talking about or that they're not talking about but one day we'll announce is kind of a cipher she's pretty cool now but she was kind of a joke of a punchline from when she was created in the 70s until Brian Michael Bendis, the great comic writer, kind of resurrected her when he took over Avengers at the beginning of the millennium. So she's a pretty cool figure that is the best kind of blank slate to the mass public in the same way that like Guardians of the Galaxy were, where you could say, I'm going to, I'm going to show you something. I'm going to tell you what it is.

And then if you like it, this can be its own thing. It's not like all these other movies which have all these asterisks and caveats. because they are they're all adjacent to the main thing, right? And the next piece is book smart is a fucking classic movie. I wish that I watched movies when you do. So we could have had a more robust conversation about it. But I adored it. I remain floored by it.

I think I mean, I didn't even know I was going to rave about it without realizing that the writer was attached to this as well. And I think Olivia Wilde has proven already to be a really, really talented filmmaker and savvy judge material and talent. and I'm really excited actually about this. It could be its own thing. And I'm really ready for one of these movies to be its own thing. There are a lot of different things that I want to unpack here.

Every time one pings into my head, I realize that it's something that we've talked about for years. You know, whether or not it's, is there any part of you that wishes there were three or four more Olivia Wild films before we got to her superhero franchise movie?

Or do you, are you just kind of totally past that point? where you're like, this is, there's a tradeoff involved here, but if that means that Olivia Wilde's going to make a big, big top movie, like, I'm in for it? Yeah, I, it's a great question. I think the reason why I'm asking that is because we just did the pump up the volume podcast. And I was just thinking about, like, rejections of power systems in that way.

I mean, I know this sounds ridiculous, but I was kind of like, oh, yeah, like, there was a time when that was considered, when this was considered, something that people were like, I guess if like, that's not what I want to do with my art. Now, Olivia Wilde could bring a beautifully rendered character to this Spider-Man world and I'm sure it would be a great movie. Well, I'm curious whether or not. It's a great question. It's early enough in her career that it's not, you can't actually answer it in her directing

career. Obviously, she's been a successful actor for a long time. But one thing, one response is, I don't believe, although maybe she has designs to be, that she is a full autore and that she's not writing and directing, right? So it's very possible that this just fits in with something it she wants to scratch in terms of, I want to see if I can direct this kind of movie and bring my style to it, and then I'll move on to do something else. The other thing that I would say is the model to be a young director in Hollywood in this decade.

I don't think any longer it's, I mean, if it ever, I mean, hopefully it was for a brief time, But like PTA, Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson were, where their heroes were independent filmmakers of the 70s, right? Then we went through this phase of directors who almost uncomfortably worshipped Spielberg and Lucas, who really were just popcorn machines, right? And they wanted to immediately jump to that. And so 80s babies. Yeah. 80s, when you see Colin Trevoro make a cute independent movie and it's immediately like, give me the keys to the Velociraptor mobile. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Because that's what he really wants to do. The model for this decade, I think, is Ryan Cougler, who seems to almost effortlessly synthesize everything about filmmaking these days in that he is really smart. He has his own style, which we saw in like Fruitvale Station, which was not a superhero movie. But he also is able to bring his own person. He has such a strong vision and personality and savvy, which matters these days more than it ever did before for directors, that he has.

that he can bend a big franchise or a big entity like Marvel to him and to his needs. And I don't think anybody after seeing Black Panther and even hearing that he was going to make Black Panther too thought, bummer, we're never going to get the Ryan Cougler Art House film we all want.

Because A, maybe he doesn't want to make that movie, but B, he probably will. He can do that too. Yeah. You know, there's no, I don't have the feeling that he's going to be corrupted by the system. And my sense of Olivia Wilde, who I don't know at all, but having survived as an actor for a long time

and being at a certain point in her life and career and being as smart as she is, that might be her model too. I'm going to go do this because that's cool and it's not going to mess me up on my trajectory. Yeah, and it's interesting that the Craven, the Hunter, the attached director to that project is J.C. Shandor, who is a director I have a lot of time for,

but has been kind of plugging away at the margins of in between art house and mass entertainment for the better part of a decade now with margin call, which is an incredible movie about the stock market crash or the housing crash.

All is lost, which is basically a one-hander with Robert Redford lost at sea. The most violent year, which is a... Really like that movie. You know, but is a very serious and stoic crime drama.

And then, you know, even Triple Frontier, which I think some people could say, it was like, oh, you're going to make like a big like muscular action movie in the vein of Sicario was like essentially a man versus nature movie for the second half of it and he's been doing these movies for about 10 years making his own movies

and maybe he's like you know what I like I like the weather over in this part a little bit better that would be that that that would be like in there's a world in which that's Olivia Wilde's career so I kind of get it I kind of get being like I'll do Spider-Woman let's do it because the other thing about J.C. Chandor is I want to try and see if we can separate some of our own preconceptions of what director's career should be just because if all those movies you mentioned are good to varying degrees, which is hard enough. Making movies is really hard.

Making good movies is really hard. The flaws in any of them, if people want to pick nits, it's never the direction, right? He's technically really talented and he has a really good sensibility. Maybe I want to see him do something out there where the pressure to deliver like the character or the script or the story beats is on someone else and he can just execute. You know what I mean? Like this might not seem like the same point, but this is a digression, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

The other day, I was driving in my car. This is just, you know, this is like the New York Times story where they go to the diner. We don't go to die. Nobody goes to diners. No, they go to the diner and they're like, where is everybody? Yeah. So the takeout options are over here. And there's a big poster up in Hollywood right across.

The Netflix building is on sunset, and they have a big, they have a wall basically that you can see from the freeway where they put up their most recent project. And there's a big thing for a movie they just put out called Project Power or something. Yeah, it's a Jamie Fox movie. I've not seen it, but it's Jamie Fox. And I was looking at it and I was like, okay, Jamie Fox, good for you. And Jamie Fox has, in my mind, had one of the most confounding careers because he was in Living Color. And then he was also a singer. And then he was an Oscar award winner.

And then he was like the fourth villain and baby driver. And then we're like, what, like, what are we doing here? And then at a certain point, I saw that poster and I was like, I nodded because I realized I relaxed and let Jamie Fox have the career. The important thing is he has a career. And he seems to have worked hard enough and long enough that he has outlasted any preconceived notions anyone has about it. You know what I mean? Like you could tell me tomorrow that he's been chosen to be the new Iron Man in this face of the MCU going forward. Actually, not a good idea.

I know. Or you could tell me tomorrow that he is going to be a recurring grandfather character on the latest spin-off from Blackish, you know, and just be on network TV seven times a year. And I'd be like, well, he's working. He's doing what he's, and I thought of that when we were talking about J.C. Chander. It could be more different, but I just like, maybe it works for people. I think J.C. Chander's major failing as an artist is that he was not in living color. I think his major failing as an artist is.

is that he was not featured on the track, slow jams with Twista and Kanye West. That's right. That's right. Maybe you dodged a bullet there in retrospect. All I'm saying is Chris, like we're all hung up on these categories, man, but it's a new era.

I want to get to, I may destroy you, but the thing I was going to mention is with the Affleck news is just how almost in awe I am at the chaos, like chaos reign, sort of ideology of Warner. And to some extent,

even this idea of doing, a Spider-verse and having a fleet of movies that doesn't really actually feature your flagship character. You know, and it has like a tonal difference from the actual Spider-Man movies that get made. I mean, Phenom is much darker and weirder

than the Spider-Man films that have been made since they moved to Disney. What's amazing to me is, this is something we said before, like DC's strategy now is let a thousand Jokers fly. Multiple Batman's because this bat, like the Batman is going back into production in September with Patinson.

And there's a flash movie and a TV show and versions of supermen have appeared and girls have appeared on that. I mean, they're just doing whatever that is they need to do to keep it moving. That actually mimics my experience with comics in the 80s where I looked at the choices, and we talked about with Jason Concepcion the other day about how X-Men was my gateway drug or whatever. But I was like, these are the X-Men. This is what they're doing.

They're like five titles a month. I can figure this out. And then I looked at DC and they were doing like crisis on infinite Earths and they were trying to reconcile the fact that there were 19 Captain Marvel's and Marvel was the name of the other comic company and who was Shazam. I just I didn't understand any of it. And that was my barrier to entry. And now not necessarily by design, the movie universes are kind of the same too where Marvel is super tight, super focused with a point of view that you can understand. And DC is just like the, this is this is fine dog, except that dog is floating in. space. It's, you know, and it seems to be working, although we didn't talk about this in the

podcast, it was just a huge shakeup and a lot of layoffs at Warner Media. Yeah. That affected the comic division seriously. Like a lot of veteran people were laid off. So they, I don't know whether they're going to attempt to streamline even further. I just find it fascinating because the model would be the model of the MCU and the idea of you having this figy figure who is pushing this lever down and pushing this lever down and pulling this one up and kind of calibrating everything so that it pays off with one of the biggest movies of all time and then you can reset and do it all over again

which is presumably like the goal. I think almost the danger involved in doing that and not getting it right is just so great that why not just throw everything at the wall and see what sticks to go back to what you said in the beginning of the pod. Yeah, it's actually a lesson that happens over and over again in Hollywood but that Hollywood refuses to learn, which is that the time you can take chances

is when you're at your lowest. And the reason, among the many, there are many reasons why Marvel succeeded, but one of the main reasons is they had given away all their good characters. Like, the MCU would not have worked if they had the rights at the same time to X-Men and Spider-Man and Fantastic Four

in Avengers. Instead, they had to just give it a shot with a relatively unknown character in Iron Man, and they poured everything into that and built it out from there. And then people forget the same thing, second movie was the Hulk movie with Edward Norton. That didn't really work.

But instead, companies that are fat, basically, with profits or, you know, or excitement about becoming Marvel have greenlit expanded universes where they have, they're just pouring way too much money and way too many egos into it, like the universal dark universe, right, where they did a big photo shoot with all like the, all the actors who were going to be in this movie and they stopped making the movies after the money. But these guys, they're like gamblers, man. They can't fully walk away from the table. I mean, Invisible Man probably revived a degree of interest in those movies.

Yes, but that's not the same version that Johnny Depp was going to star in and cross over with Russell Pro and whomever else. But it's the same lesson that we talk about when we talk about the prestige television boom, which is that only AM... Every other network could have made Breaking Bad and Mad Men, but only AMC had enough, you know, what the fuck gumption to do it. Let's get back to our roots and talk a little prestige TV and let's talk about I May Destroy You, which is finishing up we say the first season, it could be the series. I'm not, I'm not sure what Michael Cole's plans are for these characters and for the show going forward. You know, this is a show that was greeted with pretty much unanimous critical acclaim. I think everybody recognizes what an achievement it is.

I had heard from some folks that the only thing it really had going against it was the length of the first season. It's so funny now that we're like, 12 episodes. that's quite a few. That's a big lift. Yeah, whereas, like, you know, we were used to growing up, that would be 22 or whatever. I was curious whether or not you ever felt that over the course of the first season and whether or not you felt that with this penultimate. Sorry, first I just, I was just imagining this in the air of friends,

or it's the one where Kwame has sex with a woman. Like, I can't imagine the 24 episode mid-90s. So when you say you heard it from people, you mean people, who are on the fence about the show or from your industry connections. It's just like the only thing that that goes against the show is that there are points in the season where it feels like it's lagging. And I've never felt that. But I also, I think once you and I get inside of a show and kind of commit to it, you don't always see it from the wider perspective. I mean, the main reason why no is because it's 30 minutes.

So it's, you know, it's shorter than an eight episode drama is longer than this in total. You know what I mean? So I haven't really felt it for that. I think the other reason I haven't felt it is because until this episode, I still wasn't entirely sure what the season was. I enjoyed going in all of its different digressions and learning about, you know, learning backwards and forwards and time about these characters and their experiences and their trauma. But it expanded my mind about what the show could be to the point where in this episode, when she essentially solved. the crime at the end. I know that's a very pat way of putting it.

That's not exactly what happened. But I was stunned because I thought we had moved on from that. Yeah. I did not know that was going to happen. Similarly, less traumatically, I didn't think we were going back to her writing a book. You know, I didn't know that was important anymore. And all of a sudden, not only is it important to her growth,

suddenly she's putting in the work. And so it's not conventional, but it was a bend back towards a narrative structure that I might have expected in the beginning. And if I had expected it, to bring it full circle, I probably would have said, you need 12 episodes for that? Yeah, I guess so. I mean, it's the difference between short stories and a novel. I think that there were moments, especially around like the alliance where I was like,

this is so fascinating because she's just basically going to tell the life story of these three main characters, but devote so much emotional real estate and perspective to these tertiary characters. Even the woman Quama goes on the date with. You do get like a relatively full and she came back. So to see and I, you knew that they weren't just going to leave

this as a blank spot in her memory. Especially as Zane had said to her in this past episode, Zane's like I thought this novel was about consent. And I think what is what is there about so? She's like basically it was like so did I but it's not. I think what it is is about it's about memory. I mean if I

I'm guessing I haven't seen the final episode. episode. And that seems to be what these last few episodes in almost a, you know, a symphonic way where she plays a little bit about her family and she plays a little bit about her love life and she plays a little bit about like her relationship to her friends. And sometimes you know things that you don't know and sometimes you don't know things that you should know. And that seems to be where it's going. I'll reiterate this now. And maybe I should save this for when we talk about the finale, but why save your good material? One of the things that has, I think, stunned both of us from the beginning of the show is just how confidently and creatively it strode into some of the most challenging subject matter imaginable. And one of the reasons I think why lesser filmmakers, lesser creators than Michaela Cole shy away from making stories about sexual assault or consent is because they are fundamentally non-binary arguments, right? there's, which isn't to say it's not a right and wrong issue. It's just that there's so many more, there's just so many more details there. There's so many more nuances to any conversation. So many more sides to every story, which I even regret phrasing it that way, because I'm not trying to both sides this. I'm just saying there. I know what you're saying is that like there's, there's so much depth to the story rather than the initial flash across your screen.

And you run away. And most writers probably with good reason would run away from that. And what I've learned over these 11 episodes is the real genius of the show is that she made the show on a DNA level about that messy, uncomfortable, but we have to live with it, nuance. And this was the episode where a lot of that came home to. At the end of the previous episode where Terry's own culpability came into play and Arabella very emotionally confronted her and accepted her up to this episode where Kwame has achieved something he didn't expect to achieve in his personal life with Tyrone, but also attempts to make something better and it's rejected. It's not going to be better. He can't smooth that out. And then the whole business was Zain, which was totally unexpected, really

complicated and really compelling and interesting because of it. I mean, he talks about conflict, equaling stakes. I mean, there's a lot of meta stuff going on now that she's actually creating work based on her trauma. And that's what we saw in play here. What did you think about the Sundial, Zane moment, the reveal that he is the pen name. I loved it because it was so not internet. I mean, the show has rejected internet logic so strongly that I admire it all the more, right? That like all these things can be true. A black woman who was assaulted by a man reads a piece of work under a different name and is deeply, deeply moved by it.

and then is confronted with the fact. And I believe, I mean, right, like when she's writing to him, her on Instagram, maybe I've overstated. Maybe I don't know if there's an assumption that they are both completely similar in background and experience, but at the very least she's connecting

on the level of being a writer and a woman, and that it's not, you know? And she still liked it. Like, that both of those things can be true, and you cannot reconcile that in a tweet or even a think piece, but you can present it in a half hour of a TV. show and yeah i thought it was a very nuanced moment i mean like even i wasn't quite sure whether the

implication was that susie henny had sold the book that she had always wanted from arabella anyway and just basically like crafted this new thing with zane i mean zane's fiction but that she had she had basically taken from what she knew of arabella but just bet she's just never going to come through and potentially look yeah it's something she wanted it was an abstract she didn't care where it came from. And obviously that's also been written into the show with a lot of the sort of uncomfortable racial dynamic between what's her name, Susie and Arabella. Before we wrap up a conversation in the show, there's something that I need to bring up, which is we have to talk about Ben. Now, I almost texted you. Is it weird that I'm worried about Ben? Yeah, so I almost texted you

to say, the most two 40-year-old white guys talking about I may destroy you thing. We could ever do would be to devote a segment to Ben. The guy, the white roommate who's defining characteristic is that A, he's there, B, he's nice, and C, I assume he's been really excited about Tim's Twitter listening parties, but Tim Burgess from the Charlottons has been doing all summer with classic Britpop albums. And then I started to write it to you. And then I didn't write the text because I was like, oh my God, this is the episode where it's going to reveal that Ben was the rapist.

like there's becoming the Ben being there and Kwame being like you're nice Ben is starting to become a thing that's making me assume the opposite I see I was worried freaked out and that it's not the case it's not the case right and I was more worried that ben is incredibly lonely you know and that and that he's not leaving the house and that he just sort of stays home and watches television and he's trying to connect with his plants that he's growing. Although there is that parallel between Susie's plants, which seem to be more, I am taking care of these plants because they basically satisfy an idea of myself, like an ideal of self-perception, whereas Ben is clearly very invested in these plants because

he doesn't have much of a life outside of them, it seems. Yes. Look, the show is fine if it never gives us any more of Ben. In fact, that last piece, he's watching a like a headspace style animation about being lonely. And how lonely people have gotten in the digital age, yeah. It kind of just presents it as an alternative, right? Because we joked in the first few episodes when, you know, when the show gave us room to joke basically being like, well, this is making me feel like no one should ever go out, ever.

Like, it's just a horror show out there of, you know, just over intimacy, not enough. Like, it's just a mess. And so Ben is the control. Like, he's just not doing anything. and he's not really happy either. That's fine. That's a useful narrative thread. The other thing is it's also kind of a fun commentary

that the most, not even secondary, not even tertiary character on the show is the white indie dude who has been the star of literally every other show for the last 30 years. So I'm fine with it, but it did leave me wondering at the very end. Well, we'll see what happens.

We'll talk about destroy your next Thursday. Let's take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to do the fourth installment, the final installment of our Lonesome Dove. deep dive. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by VH1's new series, RuPaul's Drag Race, Vegas Review. In this new reality series,

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And I think, you know, obviously the last few hundred pages of Lonesome Dove, the novel by Larry McMurtry. We've been talking about this for a couple weeks now. We, you know, we're going to put together all four segments of the Lonesome Pod so that people can just listen along whenever they get a chance to watch the show or listen to the novel. It will be available as a bonus episode. We've spent a lot of time talking about a lot of different things, the genius of Larry McMurtry. Last week we talked, last episode we talked a lot about Clara and Dietz. We've talked about some of the differences between the miniseries and the novel.

I wanted to try and focus more. Weirdly, we haven't talked about this as much as I thought we would have. I want to talk more about Woodrow and Gus, the central sort of friendship, partnership, the two characters, what they meant to us, how they're rendered on the screen. and what the end of this book says to us about those people and maybe what McMurtry was trying to say through them. So generally speaking, I guess I wanted to ask you,

I don't know whether to start at the very end or start as we sort of move up. I mean, how would you like to kind of open up this combo about these guys? Well, I think one of the places to start is to say, again, for people who are doing the TV half and not necessarily the book half, is that we have been maybe not. top hands in the management of that particular part of the herd. But I wanted to begin by saying that this fourth and final episode of the miniseries is to me the best of them.

And it might well be because of the way it focuses on that relationship and brings it into much sharper relief than I think it had been before. And also that I don't want to overlook the fact or gloss over the fact that in 19, a time on television on CBS. So not a context known for its free, autourish artistic visions. Bill Whitliff and Simon Winster and the producers, they did Larry McMurtry's story.

And this story doesn't end the way you might have expected it to if you were just coming to it blind being like, oh, there's a Western epic and Robert Duvalls on a horse. And it's grim. And it's bleak. And it's really surprising and unsettling. And I wonder, and I hope people will fill us in on this, if you only saw, because I'm watching it, like you are, Chris, hearing the missing pages in my head, hearing the missing internal monologues in my head, wondering how could anyone get the full weight of what it means for Gus to die, what it means for call to do this? How could they be processing it with a degree that we are?

And I guess I'm wondering, because there's less fanfare in internal thought processing and monologuing or whatever, is it even more brutal? Is it even more surprising? I think it's more surprising. Was it more satisfying? Because again and again, it's like, well, he made it. He made it to Miles City. Oh, he has a doctor. Oh, look, Woodrow made it there.

Oh, no, he's, none of that's going to matter because he's still choosing to die with most of his legs rather than live with none of them. I feel like that's the story of this story. I feel like the going to great lengths to do the right thing, P.I. walking across this barren wasteland, essentially, naked in the novel. In the book, it's a hundred miles naked. Yeah. And seeing the ghost of his dead friend guide him to safety. And then that safety, and he gets there, and he delivers the news,

and call goes to rescue Gus. and he's not too late like Gus died right before he got to him. He's too late because Gus is like, I don't want to lose both my legs. It's just vanity. And I've decided, and that's what this book and these books over and over and over again teach you is that you do the thing that's right because it's right, not because you're going to get the result you want. To me, because there's also the whole other lesson of Lonesome Dove, which is the world is just fucking brutal and kills everyone you love.

And that's tough to swallow sometimes. So I like to look at the moments of heroism, even if they're not necessarily heroic in the minds of the people who are committing them and being like, sometimes you just do what you're supposed to do because it's the right thing to do even if you can't save the person. You have to try. Or save yourself. And that's a recurring theme in this whole book series as well,

this idea of duty and honor and following orders and giving structure, literally giving frontiers to what is a, in structured existence, let alone country. And the Gus and Call thing that we've been talking about was interesting. I think someone on Twitter said this at us or maybe he was on the Facebook group, basically because we've been talking about each section of the story with the hindsight that we have from having read it, let alone the other books, someone was wondering like, oh, do you even like these guys?

Are they anti-heroes to you? And first of all, I adore them. And I love their partnership. I love in all forms, whether it's in a prequel, whether it's on screen with Duval and Tommy Jones. I love it. And I was thinking about why it feels so primal and why it's connected to people so much. And I what I what I settled on was I mean, these two guys represent a vision of America that America has for itself collectively, which is work hard, play hard. One is work hard. One is play hard. One does nothing but work and one does nothing but sit on the porch and drink whiskey and make amusing comments

about the work. And it's very telling, if not downright grim and depressing, what McMurtry says about that here as the country turned into the 20th century that birthed him and birthed this novel, which is that play died. Sure. The spirit of adventure died when everything was settled. And which one survived to build the 20th century? the one who is grimly going about his task without room for poetry, basically.

The fact that a miniseries that we have at times criticized for its lack of, you know, this is so unfair, but here it is, you know, of like of cinematic grace or novelistic depth really does devote its last 25 minutes to a stern, unemotional, deeply broken on some level, man trucking around a cart full of a corpse and memories. Yeah. And to return to nothing. I mean, that's really intense and powerful. You know, one of the things that makes it difficult to talk about Call and McCray

is that I have learned all of my life in school and then in writing about writing and movies and television or thinking about these things to try and put things in boxes, give things shape, think about things in juxtaposition to one another, this person represents this and this person represents that, and the collision of these two things means this. And the thing that I think that I found so bracing, I guess, about Lonesome Dove reading it, was even though you can tell,

and McMurtry has said this before, that he essentially wanted to write a story where you had a pragmatist and a romantic who were sort of bound together and the ways in which they saw this world, you know, go through those filters. I don't know. I forgot about those designations after a while. They just really do feel like people.

And you think about the people in your life and you think about people that you might have lost over the years, especially as you start to think about them as memories, you start to think about how complicated they were and how they weren't just one thing. They weren't just an intellectual or a class clown or physically gifted

or always there on time. Enough about me. Enough about it. No, you know what I mean? But that's the thing of, But how amazing is it that? And I want to give some credit to Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall because I did see this first before I read it. And I think a lot of my emotional relationship to these characters and to this title are tied up in this last episode.

They're tied up in probably the shock of when I first saw it and seen McCrae die. and also the just absolutely brutal last half hour or so of it from when he refuses to give Newt his name through Clara being like, you're a piece of shit essentially, to him burying a guy going all the way back to zero and finding out back at zero, it's less than zero because the town has essentially been raised

while he was gone. Lonesome Dove is essentially... And why has it been raised? Because of the love of a... Irrational, love for a woman, which is the one thing that Call has never understood. Right. And then you get the last scene. And I think that in a lot of the same ways that Call is sort of an apparition

through some of Lonesome Dove as a novel, you know, he is this, he's an Ahab, but without a boat or something. Like I can't even describe what he is sometimes in the novel. I think that Tommy Lee Jones steps fully into his pass. Like, you know, he's like, he's like, he, finally gets his moment and he just absolutely fucking crushes it at the end of this smithy series. I mean, what's amazing about this is you could say in the novel you have two characters who are willing to ranger as they do in their previous life out beyond the border of what

they know with some confidence that they'll be able to come back. Often any job in the creative field is like that because you don't actually know what the product is going to be and you watch Lonesome Dove the miniseries and all you can leave feeling is that Duval and Tommy Lee Jones knew the ending when they started at the beginning. Yeah. They knew where they had to get. They had to get emotionally. Yeah.

Yeah. And they, and they, it's all, you know, it's one of those things where I bet if you ask Tommy Lee Jones, he'd say, fuck off. Because I've heard he's very ornery. But then he might say, yeah, you're goddamn right. I took this part for what I would do at the end, you know. And I wanted to see if I could chart the best course to get there. And to your other point about the diversity of.

human experience and people not being just one thing or the other. I mean, hey, that's why you do 900 pages. That's why you do six hours. But also, it made me, this reminds me of the thing that I texted you about, but I wanted to bring up anyway, which is, I just, it seems simple, but it's not to have the generosity of spirit and of talent that McMurtry has to present without question or judgment or putting a thumb on the scale, different views of the same person. I mean, there's a reason why a lot of writers tend to do first-person perspective, right? Because omniscient is really hard for a lot of reasons, because you're juggling a lot of personalities. You also have to spend time thinking about different people's emotional reactions to the same thing.

And not everyone is as good at that. And that is the thing that Larry McMurtry is better at than almost anyone I've ever read, all of which to say, endless respect for the white, hot loathing that Clara Allen has for Captain Woodrow call across not just a mini-series, but four fat books that span different eras. The one constant, the one true north of the Lonesome Dove saga is an alien.

She fucking hates this prick and never hesitates to tell him. And he's nominally our hero or certainly half of our hero. And that's true, right? It's like what you're saying. We get why she hates him.

We get why he hates himself secretly. But also we know why he behaves this way and we have empathy for him. It's such a fascinating image of, well, it's not even an image. The idea that Clara obviously blames call for Gus's death. But especially in the series, I feel like this came across

where she is saying, just bury him next to my sons. Like, I want this guy to be with me forever. And he's like, I won't do it because that's not what he wanted. Yeah. Yeah. And he, Call is just sort of so stubborn about if a person says that this is what they want, they make you promise. if you say you're going to do something,

if you have put a task to mind. It's what a man does. That's what you have to do. And it doesn't matter if along the way, multiple generations of people are like, I loved this person more than myself. Please let me have this moment, this experience with them.

He's like, I can't do it. It's out of the question. When he's like, do you want me to go to the South Pole because he would do it. He would do it if that's what he was asked to do. And one of the things that I really appreciated about

the clarity of the mini-series is that Whitliff did a brilliant job in this in the Gus's deathbed scene of which I reread this morning before the podcast and it's you know it's a knockout and I said I said to you that I spent the next two weeks just occasionally catching myself staring off into the middle distance thinking about Gus McCray I mean that's how powerful this book is and was and is in my life but he he boiled it down to the essentials to a degree that was really helpful so that the line where Gus is like, I have two favors, one for you and one for me. The one for me is take my corpse to Texas and the one for you is take my corpse to Texas because you don't want to be a rancher and you would get bored and you would die and I need

to give you an adventure and my last gift to you is one more because that will sustain you. And that that reminds, I mean, that's everything. It's a thesis statement that we've been building to and it just drops like a jackhammer. And I think that this the crucial thing and the crucial. failing of woodrow is that he can't do the other thing that Gus asks him to for. No. And so let's talk about that scene for a second. First of all, I now get it.

I now realize that the mustache you've been growing was an homage to Ricky Schroeder's. I've been on the trail for one year. And now I'm a grown man and the ranch boss mustache. So it is a beautiful tribute. I ain't got no kid in this world. Yeah. Two, like, let's talk about that. Because the miniseries also does something different in that it puts in his, it basically

pushes the call as his Newt's father chip earlier, much earlier, and does its best to keep that central because it kind of is. And then it plays out relatively quickly in the very end, right? Like, there are a few shots that we don't really, we get a sense of in the book, but it's much more explicit to see it where call is like, I'm the proud smile. That boy is good with horses like you are. And then he can't actually bring himself to do anything about it. And it's, you know, I don't want to disparage Ricky Schroeder,

who is not on the same level emotionally in that moment as Tommy Lee Jones is. I appreciated the way the watch, like basically, like he's willing to give any object that he can give. Because for him, like duty, these are concrete ideas. he says to Clara, I value the animal more than the name. It's a very convenient and structured way of thinking about something that's actually bullshit

because a watch that you've never seen before doesn't mean anything unless the person that came from was your fucking grandfather, not the guy that's employed you for all 17 years of your life. But I don't think that call is arrogant. That's the thing. I think when he says that to Clara,

he's not lying. He's not saying... No, it's honest. It's the most honest thing he says. I think he's saying, I am just a vessel for work. And I may have some good qualities and I may have done some things that were good and some things that were

terrible. But ultimately, my name means nothing. You know, my name is nothing is nothing compared to like the horse that I gave him. And yeah, I think that the way it's done in the book where it's sort of an open secret, but no one says it. And then when it does get said, it drops like a hammer, especially when Clara talks to, especially when Clara talks to nude about it. It just means a lot. But in some ways,

it's one of my favorite parts of the book because I know, we've read interviews with McMurtry where he says that essentially that's the story he wanted to write. It was this guy, this kid, Newt, who wasn't sure who his father was.

You know? I mean, there was about a boy growing up. And in some ways, in the same way that we were talking about Clara kind of taking over the narrative and Clara taking over definitely the psychological depth of the story. Newt's emotional journey

is both the central one of the book and a complete, like, fizzes. It fizzes out. It does it. It's actually like, oh, so your dad does not, like, ever recognize you. And he just gives you a horse, and he leaves. And also, what lasts in this world?

You know, I mean, the, there's the list of the day. that called Delivers to Ball at the end where everybody is buried. That's how he says, how is everyone? He's like, well, this guy's buried here, this guy's buried there. He brings the Hat Creek Company sign back on the wagon. And by the time he buries Gus, there's almost none of it left. And he has to use a rock to scratch AM into a piece of plywood that's on a pile of rocks

in a place that doesn't even have a name. None of this is going to last. I mean, as Gus says earlier, this country, this world is a bone yard. It's so dark without those fleeting moments that you're not, call isn't wrong. The name doesn't really mean anything. But call also can't give him the recognition or the validation or the emotion or anything that he requires. Did you feel, since we're, this is in my head since we're at this section of the story,

the one thing that I wondered if it was intended to be a little bit of a sop to those who wanted more resolution at the end of the story is Lorena stays up all night by the casket and then faint. This is not in the book. And Dish, who has traveled blizzards to become July's, you know, gelding pal, is up all night watching her and then rescues her, lifts her and carries her into the house. And that's our last vision of her. Those of us who read the book and even subsequent, well, I won't say anything.

Those of us who read the book know that, much like Clara and Call, like Lori's just like hard pass to dish is a bedrock of her character. But was this an attempt to be like, Young Love might flourish after all? You know, I thought that that was probably like we need to tie up some loose ends and unless this is going to be seven episodes or however long, like,

we can't do every single page of this book. You know, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Lorena is the major character of Streets of Laredo in a lot of ways. And that her story goes on and it doesn't get any easier, but that it does go on. I thought it was interesting

that they did it that way because her story in Streets of Laredo is not that. It's not, I fainted and dish-grabbing me and we lived happily ever after. Couple more things before we even steer towards the conclusion of the ride.

I do want to talk about specifically the way the writing in the book feels at the end before we wrap up. A little more credit to the mini-season. series. And I just kind of want to get your thoughts on it having watched it before and then rewatching it. Because for as much as I've I've kind of dinged it, it really, in a lot of ways,

invented contemporary television, maybe too early to have fully taken advantage of it or dazzled us in a modern way. But that year, 8990, I mean, Lonesome Dove and Twin Peaks are the things that probably hold up the most. And in its devotion to, um, grandeur and scale and scope, its willingness to engage in tough stuff and not wrap it all up and not smooth everything out. It's wild, truly wild cast,

movie stars doing TV, the idea of an event series. I mean, all of this is the bedrock of our last five years, let alone 20 years of TV. And there it all was then. And it was deeply beloved, although as we said at the top,

much less rewarded by like the Emmys than we, expected. Sure. It's, I would never ever really want anyone to remake this. I would never want anyone to take another shot at it. This is the one thing where I'm like, I wish they'd let James Cameron go in and fix the snakes and fix the Diet scene, you know, like, just get a little bit of VFX going on a couple of these things. Because I don't think for as much as my imagination is greater than the sum of what you see on screen in the in the show i do think that deval and jones own these parts so significantly and so truly that it's hard for me to imagine them trying it again i think they could do dead men's walk i think they could do comanche moon i think they have uh in the past but yeah you're right i mean

in some ways it was a little early for its time in some ways i wonder whether or not if we could have just gotten this in 2002 or 2003 is this a different looking a different feeling movie miniseries, but it does feel like such a perfect time capsule and a real peak at what was to come. The other thing I wanted to say in terms of context, that's contextualizing the show, contextualizing the book,

we started this series talking a lot about Larry McMurtry and why we just unapologetically stand for him and adore him. And that's going to keep going. I think I said that when I was at a used bookstore the other week, I got six more. Just keep going. I just finished Dead Man's Walk, and I'm about to start Camachi moon tonight, probably.

I'm 250 into Comanchee. The thing about this book, and Larry McWartry himself has resisted and fought this as his, like, one of the people surprised, it's the thing he'll be remembered for. It'll be the first line of his obituary, if, you know,

hopefully many, many years from now when that is written. But it's not just because it's so great and it is so great, but because it is him distilled. What I mean is, it is unapologetically, epic and it's also unapologetically pleasurable. But inside of it, as it develops, as it

unburdens itself, it twists and it turns into something that is just inarguably literary and inarguably intellectual. You know, I mean, call is a classic hero of complicated American literature that gets taught in college. He's like Gatsby, right? Like, he just doesn't know when to stop. He just keeps going because that's what Americans do. It's mentioned in the show. It's made more of in the book. He almost kept going into Canada. There was no end game here.

There was no point, right? And Dish calls him on it. And you see that in the miniseries and in the book. He only stopped because everyone was going to quit. And then he immediately almost turned back around or it started, in this time to start building the cabins. It's so fascinating to discover this book as we did later, not later in life, but like we've been reading books that we thought were like,

popcorn paperbacks and heavy stuff and trying to find the sweet spot where they overlap. But this is the sweetest spot that I've ever found where it is absolutely both all at once. You know what I think that is? There's very little pleasure in this book. Sex seems bad. The drinking makes people go blind. Any kind of wound could lead to amputation or death. You basically ride over unforgiving country to get to a place that you thought it was going to be, you know, Eden, and then you turn around and go back to hell. The pleasure is in the writing. Yeah.

It lonesome dove is essentially about the pleasures of reading, you know, and you wind up loving and caring and getting deeply involved with the people and the places that they go, even though he is not blinking about who these people were and what these places were what these people did to take these places away from the people who were there first. And I think that that's a really meaningful accomplishment. And, you know, the miniseries obviously canonizes some ideas people have about cowboys and about heroism. And I think that Jones and Duval are so irrepressible that you can't help but feel like these

guys are a little bit more larger than life. But one of the great things about the book is that throughout the novel, they're going to these towns and they're saying, I'm Captain Woodrow Call. People are like, who are the Rangers? Like, who are you? Like, this is San Antonio now. This is Austin now or whatever. Like, we built this place.

We don't need you guys anymore. And it's basically like a victory lap with no victory. And yet, throughout all of these sort of moments where they are deflating what should be triumph, triumph, you're like, fuck, this book is good. Man, I'm enjoying myself. I love what you just said because you're absolutely. right. There's that great Gus line from the book where he's just like, how humiliating is it to be killed by an arrow in this day and age? He's a relic who got killed by a relic by accident.

But you're right. Like what's, what are the moments of actual pleasure in this book? Gus's Biscuits, I think. The picnic with Clara, the picnic day. But they have to like sleep on the ground. They seem to have no trouble with that. That seems to be okay. The picnic day is nice. That's about it. I guess the water in the Yellowstone is kind of fresh and refreshing when they get there after five months and multiple deaths. But you're right that the pleasure here is the experience. And it's totally changed me. I mean, I'm now someone who buys nonfiction histories of the Comanche Nation for pleasure.

It's changed my view of the country, which speaks to maybe how ignorant I was of all of this stuff. And not that this is a historical record by any stretch, but just the the scope of the imagination required to call this up and the era that he's obsessed with and keeps returning to was new to me. and I'm now equally obsessed. But I wanted to call out, we've mentioned a couple times the essay that the writer Jeff Dyer wrote about reading Lonesome Dove. And he quotes another great writer, Wallace Stevens. Basically, Wallace Stevens referred to the greatest experience in reading.

It's like a magic spell where, this is a quote, the reader became the book. And this is Dyer now saying, it's an experience I've had multiple times. I'm paraphrasing, but with Lonesome Dove, it was stronger and stranger. I was not reading a book. There was no book and no reader. There was just this world, this huge landscape in its magnificently peopleed emptiness. And it's an experience that I just am so glad that so many other people have chosen to share with us and with each other and with the book. Because it absolutely, you know in like Black Mirror episodes where there's an alternate virtual reality and there's the moment where you see them touch the button attached to their retinas and then it zips you into the underworld where they are, like remember the Jesse Plumman's spin.

base captain episode or whatever, the Star Trek one. Yeah. That all ends well, right? But that is the, this is the closest experience to that kind of movie moment that I've had, where I would look up and I'd be in my world and this world, and it's a very challenging world in its own ways at the moment, and I would put my head back down, and I would be somewhere else totally and completely enveloped by it. And that's no small thing. Right when I, right before I read Lones of Dove, I reread all the pretty horses. And, you know, Blood Meridian, which is another Cormack McCart, all the

Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. It's considered one of the great books about the West ever. And it's absolutely astonishing. And, you know, McCarthy and McMurtry a little bit linked, I think McMurtry has at least been public. And he's not always like high praise from McCarthy, who I think he thinks is very good, but also has his like hangups about him. But I had read, you know, I read all the pretty horses and I had kind of been paging through Blood Meridian as we were doing this conversation. And I was thinking about the differences, which are many, but one of which is that McCarthy spends a lot of time talking about the land

you know and there's a lot of description of what is you know the rocks look like what the trees look like and what the dirt feels like and what the sky looks like and it's honestly like some of the best writing I've ever read so it's not a knock against him but I realize how little of that

mcmurtry actually does and the thing that you're talking about is your imagination that's a 900 page book, but think about how long and deep it is because of your imagination. And I don't mean to sound like I'm on reading Rainbow. I'm being serious. I often will read a book and start thinking about it in visual terms and as if it's happening in a movie because a lot of

books are written like scripts. A lot of books are action. I mean, even if you read Elmer Leonard novels and I think his books almost read like scripts. He's like dialogue. There should be no description. There should be just like you're moving through. story and telling character through dialogue. But when I read Lonesome Dove, like, it's not like I see it on a screen. It's like it's happening to me or something. It's almost it's an experience that's pretty unique in my life. So it's

been lovely to actually have somebody to share that with in that regard. And it is like, Jeff Dyer says that in his essay, and we behaved this way, that bears it out. It's something that's passed to people. You know, it's proselytized for it's not recommended. And there's a reason for that. And it's a beautiful experience. And I think just in terms of house cleaning for our conversation, I think it's worth mentioning next steps for people who have completed this drive.

And so on the filmed side, on the TV side, the chronology of this is, it was a big ratings hit, as we've said many times, CBS wanted more. And so CBS commissioned and made a miniseries that is also streaming on stars called Return to Lonesome Dove. This is deeply non-canon. We are not going to be discussing it. And in fact, Larry McMurtry disavows it, had nothing to do with it, and kind of think that some of the choices, although he was writing the sequel, Streets of Laredo at the same time, might be intentional thumbs in the eye of it.

It is exactly, at least by description, exactly what you'd imagine a sequel is. Call, who's played by John Voight in this miniseries, is like, I think I'll go back to Montana now and turns around and goes back. And Newt has more adventures and Clara has more adventure. And only a few actors returned, the dude who played PI and Chris Cooper among them. So feel free, not canon. What McMurtry did next, and we cannot recommend this enough, and maybe one day we'll do a minipod about it, is write a sequel called Streets of Laredo, which is the original title for

the script that he was going to do with Bugdanovich that turned into Lonesome Dove. And it is one of the most bleak, powerful, devastating, and overwhelming books I've ever read. in my mind, it is burning brighter and hotter, honestly, than Lonesome Dove in some ways. Partly because you can't have one without the other, it is the recoil of the shot. It is him dealing with in a really gnarly way. I think all of his frustrations with the reception and misunderstanding of Lonesome Dove, the phenomenon of Lonesome Dove, but also really having a pretty visceral reckoning with things that he and others may feel that he overlooked or downplayed, such as truly the experience

of being a woman in this world, truly the experience of being Mexican or Native American Indian in this world. He forgot about trains. He said that in a number of interviews. He completely forgot the trains and train tracks existed when he wrote Lonesome Dove. Not a problem, Streets of Laredo. Trains are a big part of it. And all of the threads that we've been trying to pick out about Woodrow Call and what makes him tick and what makes sense or doesn't make sense in the world anymore are just pushed spinal tap style all the way to 11 in that book and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

I will say one thing about this. Yes. If you are going to do Streets of Laredo, do yourself favor and also then read Dead Man's Walk. Yes. Next. So chronologically, he wrote the sequel next and then he wrote two prequels.

Yes. And I want to tell you, if you've been listening to us talking about Wonesome Dove, if you haven't done this already and you wanted to go do Streets of Laredo, which in some ways I think I agree with Andy I think I have a little bit more mixed feelings

about the writing in Streets of Laredo in certain places, but the end of Streets of Laredo, the last 200 pages or so, are among the best things he's ever written and some of the best things I've ever read. Do yourself a favor. Make it a project. Go read Dead Man's Walk next because...

Next, after Laredo. After Laredo, because you are going to want the chaser. Let's just say that. Yeah, and Dead Man's Walk is an excruciatingly gnarly, gnarly book. It's not about, it's not a live man's walk. You know what I mean?

But it is about the formative experiences in first rangering days of Gus and Call and Call. And to be able to do what he does, basically take these characters that we only knew in one stage of their life and reinvent them for us and make them feel like the same people is astonishing. Comanche Moon is chronologically the second book. It was the last book in the series that he wrote. and that's the one that kind of fills in the gaps. It gets you from Dead Man's Walk, basically up to Lonesome Dove, and you'll meet people like Dietz and Clara and other characters again. That's the order we read them in, it's the chronological order he wrote them in. It's worth it.

I imagine if you've read this far, you might want to get into it. There were mini-series of all of these, some James Garner, one with Steve Zahn as young Gus. I can't recommend them, but they might be fun to check out. but what are we going to do about the West once it's settled we got to watch TV now you got to talk about Ted Lassow I'm ready to do it I just think that you know Chris and I if we've made bones in this business they weren't buffalo bones they've been talking about TV but on some way our first love and one of the things we first bonded on was great books and to be able to do this was a total pleasure and I I feel like we should end this by quoting

one of Gus McCrae's greatest lines, not the one about pokes and how he wants pox and now he'll pay $50 for a poke. But what he says, McBain's style with PI before he gets hit with what turned out to be fatal arrows. He says, I like being free on the earth

across the hills where I please, which really is a great motto and our attitude towards podcasting, which is why we've spent hours this week alone talking about three decade old of entertainment. I loved it, man. We'll be back on Monday. We'll be talking Lovecraft. We've got a bunch of other stuff. I think we're going to do a crossover episode with The Big Picture next Thursday, but we have tons of shows to talk about. So thank you so much for going on this adventure with us.

Give me the whiskey. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by the NHTSA. Everyone knows about the risks of driving drunk. You could get a crash. People could get hurt or killed, but that still doesn't stop everyone. You could get arrested. You could incur huge legal expenses. And you could possibly. even lose your job. We all know the consequences of driving drunk, but one thing's for sure, you're wrong if you think it's no big deal. Drive sober or get pulled over.