The Watch - Breaking Down ‘Lovecraft Country” with Showrunner Misha Green. Plus, the Third Installment of ‘Lonesome Dove’

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

‘Lovecraft Country’ is a big, chewy show in a similar vein to other HBO shows, such as ‘The Outsider’ and ‘Watchmen’ (10:37). Creator Misha Green joins to help break down the first episode (29:26). Plus, the third installment of our ‘Lonesome Dove’ series (49:38). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the Ringer.com. On the other line is this guy named Andy Greenwald, but this is, we got to get right to this, Andy. Before we started recording, as we were just starting recording, we're going to talk about Lovecraft Country today. Misha Green, the show run over Lovecraft Country is on the show today. We're also doing Summer of Dove.

Part 3. Who Gives a shit? Stop the presses. Kaya McMullen is back after a week. in the wilderness. And when I say in the wilderness, I mean it. Because Kaya, I think it's safe to say

Kaya has not read Lonesome Dove. Kaya has not watched Lonesome Dove. But possibly no one has internalized the summer of Dove. Like producer Kaya McMullen, Kaya, please say hello to the people. Hello, everybody. Kaya, do you want to tell your story?

Sure. Tell your truth of what happened to you on summer vacation. So last week, as Chris said, I went camping. And the very first night, my boyfriend and I were camping in the very first night, we cooked some dinner. It was great. We cleaned everything up. We went to bed. And I fell fast asleep immediately.

And then at around 3.30 in the morning, I heard a large crash and a pop. And then something like scurrying by our tent. So my boyfriend goes out first to investigate. He's like, oh no, the new bottle of tequila that we just bought and had yet to open. It's on the ground broken. That was the popping noise. And then he's looking around and then he shines his flashlight into the bushes and he sees a pair of eyes staring back at him. And he's like, there's some eyes, like get out of the tent. This is the time we pause to say that donations and memory of Kai's boyfriend we can provide.

You can send Kyya bottles of tequila too. She accepts that apparently. Yeah. Yeah. We never made that up. But, and so I get out of the tent and I'm like, there's no eyes. What are you talking about? And then I, I too see the eyes.

And I'm like, okay, that's probably a bear. So we like walk away. We panic a little bit. We walk away from the campsite. Wait, wait, wait. I'm sorry. We're going to cut you off for one second here. Cool as a cucumber, Kaya, just said, quote,

we panicked a little bit, but we continued our journey outside of the tent post bear eye discovery. Also, Kaya, if your reaction is I-2-6. see the bear, you should be a four-star general in the United States military because you have nerves of steel and I would trust you with my life and my nation. I honestly think I was just half asleep and so like didn't really like have time to panic. I was just like, it's 3.30 in the morning. Kaya, I don't want to make any assumptions about your loving relationship with your boyfriend, but I am going to put myself in your shoes for a moment.

And even if I loved him as much as you love your boyfriend, the moment he exited the tent. You know, what happens, happens. You know what I mean? Like, there are people who make choices in life and some of these choices result in becoming bear food. And like, this is just the way it is. And for you to be like, the only thing I can do now is to go out and like corroborate his lived experience of being menaced by a bear, a bear drunk on tequila. Yeah, a, yeah, a bear that is just sipping the smoothest of mescal's. And you're, and you're, and you're, And, Kaya, you guys are young. Like, we need you in the world.

Chris and I are old rangers. You know what I mean? Like, we got one push to Montana maybe left in us. Well, the bravery doesn't stop there, though. So, Kaya, finish the story. Okay, so we panic a little bit. We leave the campsite. And when we leave the campsite, of course, the bear is like,

hell yeah, it's like dinner time. Yeah. So he comes back into the campsite and we're kind of pacing around. The car keys are in the tent. We can't, like, sit in the car. Jesus Christ. This is so much like the pilot. a Lovecraft country too, by the way. Why didn't you take the keys? I wasn't sure when I left

the tent that there was a bear out there. You said you saw eyes staring back at you. After I left a tent is when I saw the eyes and then I didn't want to go back towards the bear back into the tent and then get the keys. I'm trying to think of a version of events in which I am in a tent in the woods. And no matter what it may be, I hear someone or something enter the tent begin to toss things around and think, I'll go check it out. But whatever it is. is I'm sure I'm staying here. I mean, unless it was like Spuds McKenzie and a whole crew from an 80s beer commercial

ready to throw you an impromptu party, you've got to get the keys. Well, once again, it was 3.30 in the morning. But yeah, so then eventually we paced around a little bit and then I was like, okay, well, we can't like let the bear have our campsite. Again, this is incredible, visionary leadership. Kyle! Not only what I let the bear have the car.

site now. That's not your campsite. He was like, if I drink the tequila, it's my campsite. You didn't see that sign going in. Well, but okay, this is not my first experience with a bear either. Like, I've camped many times before. I've come across bears before. And they're scared of you. They are. And so what I did is I, we had a flashlight. Thank God. They've never met us, Kaya. Bears have never met Chris Ryan, nor me. They're not scared of all of us. But please, go on. And I remember, like, from, you know, way back when somewhere, it's like, if you're trying to scare when an animal, you have to, like, make yourself seem bigger than the animal. So I got up on top of a post with a flashlight and I just yelled at it. I said, get out of here. And he paused. He looked at me. And I yelled some more.

And then he just trotted back into the forest. There was a moment when you locked eyes with a moment. a bear? Yeah. And she said, and you said, get out of here. I said get. Get. Get out of here.

So I don't want to make you. You are a character in Lonesome Dove. So I don't want to make everything about Larry McMurtry novels, but one thing that happens, less in Lonesome Dove and more in the sequels and prequels, is that characters who have encounters with the Comanche Nation gain Comanche names. And I think that from now on, you are not. no longer Kaya McMullen, you are keys in the tent, McMullen. I like tequila bear.

Tequila bear, yeah. Shattered tequila McMullen? Like, we need to workshop this, but you are a member of a living tribe of some kind. Wow. And we revere you. Thank you. I can't. Like, I was coming into this.

Like, we were going to chat about last week a little bit because, like Kaiya, I mostly took the week off. Some who heard me in the Jake Johnson interview would argue that I fully took the week off. But I was going to say, like, you know, we, Chris and I sometimes chat, and, like, maybe a highlight was that my wife and I got away from our family for, like, our children for like 20 minutes to taste some wine. Where did she put the kids? You were in the trunk. You, the bear was watching. We just tossed the keys to the bear. We're like, keep it running. You stared down wild nature. I didn't know what else I was supposed to do. Everyone in

Lonesome Dove is scared of bears. Like, that is across all four books. even the Comanches are scared of bears, not Kaya. This is unbelievable stuff. The thing is, though, is that there's, like, multiple types of bears. And on the West Coast, you have, like, brown bears and black bears. And then on, like, East Coast, and I think in the Midwest, you have grizzly bears. And if it had been a grizzly bear, I would not have tried to stare it down. At 3.30 in the morning, it's just a bear, honestly.

Like, I'm not, we're not doing a... Exactly. And I wanted to go back to sleep. but I wanted my campsite back. So you took it back and you continued. Yeah, so then the bear left. We threw the cooler and the box of food in the car. We went back down and laid back down in the tent. I had like a lot of adrenaline coursing through me.

So it took me like an hour to fall back asleep. And yeah, that was it. Kaya, your plasma must be pure ambient. How the fuck did you go back to sleep that night? How did you go back to the tent? It's the bear's campground. The bear's God. The bear's God.

Do you think the bear isn't coming back? Like, do you think the bear went back to the other bears? Well, no, because Kaya said, get. And the food is in the car now. There was nothing in the campsite for him to want anymore. That bear is definitely in the backseat of your car. Joining us now on the other line is the bear. Like, do you think the bear went back to its bear community and was like, stay away?

There is a, there's a human drunk on tequila who will. stare at you. This is why Kaya doesn't participate in the video zooms with us even now when we're recording because were we to look her in the eye, we would abandon this. Because she's also wearing a full bear skin. That's true. It's right. Wow.

Well, this was the highlight of our summer. Congratulations to you and to your boyfriend who remains alive. Yeah. Thanks to you. Yeah. I'm just happy to be alive. Still sad about the tequila, though. It's brand new bottle.

It's very telling about how much time I've spent. in my apartment or like going to pick up food at restaurants and that being the extent of my life for the last six months that this is the coolest thing I've heard like this is easily the most exciting thing that's happened to anyone I know in the last five months. Yeah, it was exciting for me too. Exciting and frightening. Kai, welcome back. Nature is healing. Like it's all, it's all happening. Greenwald, uh, hi, how are you? How do we do a show after that? I feel alive now. Wow. Let's start talking about Lovecraft country,

because today we have Misha Green, who's the showrunner of Lovecraft on, I did an interview with her last week. The show premiered last night on HBO's many platforms, many, many, many platforms of HBO. It's been a long time coming. It's been several years in the development, and even I think this pilot,

if I read this correctly, was shot back in 18. Yes, so just a little, because I like to make everyone, everything about me, much like I did when I inserted myself into Kaya's bear narrative. Funny little thing that overlap here is that the director of the pilot, who did a phenomenal job, Jan Demange, was originally attached to be the director of the Briar Patch pilot and chose to do Lovecraft Country instead, did an amazing job, but we were, it was all happening

at the same time. That was all set to happen in the summer, late summer of 2018. And my show's already done and his is just starting. Yeah, and Jan Demand, he has done some pretty sick stuff like White Boy Rick and 71, which is a movie that I thought was quite good. Great movie. And does a great job on Lovecraft on the premiere episode of Lovecraft. What an interesting and wild ride this show is. And I think it's definitely, I'm locked in. I'm locked in for a couple of reasons. One, I thought there was just a ton to chew on. Like, it felt like a very stimulating hour of television. There's a lot of times you'll watch TV and you'll just kind of feel your attention wandering

or you'll feel yourself sort of subconsciously reaching for your phone. And the only reason I was reaching for my phone during Lovecraft was to cross-reference times when I thought I was picking up on a reference. Because it's a very metatechial show that's drawing from a lot of different sources. have pointed out the homage to Gordon Parks' photography that happens in a few of the scenes. There's the James Baldwin speech. They're intermixing, you know, somewhat anachronistic music into the soundtrack. But I just wanted to get your sort of broad stroke points and we can kind of then get into the nitty gritty of the episode. Well, yeah, I mean, a couple things. First,

I want to take one giant step back to look at the macro here. And just as a follow-up to the conversation we've been having about HBO Max, and HBO in general, if you want to know why Casey Blois, who was been in HBO for a long time and took over, it was head of HBO comedy, and then got the top job when Michael Lombardo left a few years ago. And then last week was promoted to be the head of basically all content for the Warner Media company. If you want to know why he got that job, you would be hard pressed to find a better reason than Lovecraft, premiering last night. The run that he's been on with HBO, not just in terms of quality, not just in terms of continuing to not just challenge the narrative, but establish the

narrative for what prestige TV is, is really something. But if you also draw the line from Watchman to, I May Destroy You, the shows we've been talking about basically on this podcast, and I think a lot of our listeners have as well to Lovecraft Country, they seem almost eerily prescient of the moment that we find ourselves in in America in 2020. And that's hard to do. You know, one of the hardest things about being a programmer, being in charge of a major service is that the decisions you make in 2017, 2018, aren't going to bear fruit until, in this case, you know, 2020. And you could predict a lot of things about 2020, but the moment of national peril that people are feeling, and particularly the social undercurrents.

of finally having a long overdue reckoning on race and gender in this country. I'm not saying that Casey Boyce predicted this, but I am saying that he made very strong and very bold and very prescient artistic choices in what he chose to put forward to end up in a moment where this show feels like it was made to premiere this summer. Yeah. And he was bright enough to work with people like Misha and people like Michaela Cole and people like Damon Lentloff and people who probably want to make television that reflect some kind of moment, whether or not that moment is in the headlines,

it's certainly one that exists for people in their everyday lives. So I was, yeah, so I was really, really struck by that. I also, you mentioned like the Gordon Parks photography influences. I mean, there are moments in this pilot, and we are going to get specifically into performances and like where we think it might be going from here. But there were moments of just sheer visual beauty in this pilot that took my breath away,

particularly that shot that was deeply Gordon Parks inspired of the ice cream, ice cream stand and the neon light, but also just the color story, which is the word I learned from the production designer on Briarpatch Richard Bloom, but of Atticus's father's apartment,

the pinks, the greens, and his uncle's place. So it's just a beautiful, chewy show. Last big thing I want to say before we move on, it matters to have shows like this to discuss and to be

the flagship HBO show on Sunday nights for the next few weeks. There's a moment, I mean, obviously the multi-eyed monster bears, Shouts to Kaya, that attack at the end, are going to get a lot of attention. And a lot of the more extreme horror genre, Lovecraft elements took up a lot of the budget and we'll take up a lot of, you know, viewers' time and attention going forward, for sure. But the moment that I most wanted to call out in the show was the moment we're introduced

to Courtney Vance's character in bed with his wife, played by Angenue Ellis, who's also a phenomenal actress. And I was so excited to see she has more to do as well. It's just a weekend morning in Chicago in the 1950s. They're in bed together and there's just this intimacy. And it's sort of sexy and it's lived in and it's established. And you have to point out that like very, very rarely are black actors or black characters in the forefront of a story to the point where they can have a scene like that,

where that there's enough room or real estate for not even the lead characters in the show, but, you know, the strong supporting characters to be completely lived in, realized, romantic, sexual, emotional, complicated people. And just thinking about, like, how much narrative, how much representation we've been robbed of

for years by not allowing that to be at the fore. And how it does matter and how you see people in the world when you get to see them live full lives fictionally. And this is such, I mean, I sound really heavy, I guess,

and I'm talking about this for a show that features, you know, a racist Massachusetts share turning into some kind of, kind of, yeah, right? We werewolf night monster. Yeah.

But my main takeaway from the show was I was very moved by that. And, you know, this is a very limited thing. And I'm not the best vehicle to even deliver this argument. But it made me hopeful about this show, but also about the storytelling, hopefully we're going to continue to get from this moment. It's just a richer, bigger canvas to be drawing and painting on. And that matters. Couldn't agree more.

They poured it on with this show, with this episode. I talked to Misha a little bit about this with, and you've spoken about this too, with the sort of modern style of television show running and writing. And I'd be curious to know what you thought because I think that you, you paced Breyer Patch and sort of had the drip of the faucet a little bit differently calibrated than a lot of shows. But she was talking a lot about just emptying the cupboard, you know, and just going for it, you know, empty it all and then restock it. And this pilot or this first episode, features, like you said, a VFX spectacular blood splattered Sam Ramey confrontation with night monsters, absolutely nail shredding, quote unquote car chase that is forced to happen at 25 miles per hour because of sundown laws in Massachusetts in this time period. A daydream, psychedelic, war of the world's sci-fi. vision that our protagonist has at the beginning of the episode. Featuring Jackie Robinson hitting a tentacle monster in the claw mouth with a baseball bat. A sort of self-consciously

golden age Hollywood backlottish recreation of Chicago in the 50s and the blues music scene and the idea of black life happening, you know, organically and freely in this one neighborhood. And I just thought like, you can't ever say that you were bored by this. show. I thought, like, I really like this show quite a bit. I would say that I could understand why some people might be like the tonal shifts are really abrupt and that it moves so quickly in a weird in a way because it has that propulsion of a road trip narrative. Sometimes I think it moves in and out of scenes before anybody you can really get your hands around what's happening. But in a weird way, I think that that is a really good recipe for success because what it does is I've already

watched this show cumulatively, this episode, two point two five times. Like to go back over and be like, what did I miss in that scene? What did he take from the apartment? What did he say to her? What, like, what records did they pull up? And it's that immediate kind of training yourself to look for these nooks and crannies of the plot that I think usually breed obsessive fandom in people.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I also think that for a bunch of, you know, low, low grade criticism that I could, I could bring up, it's worth saying, like, wait, do I really want that, though? So for example, you're talking about throwing everything in the kitchen sink in a pilot. I would rather go pedal to the metal or at least to 25 miles per hour in the pilot and get us to what the show is going to be rather than Perry Mason it, you know, and start with Atticus at war and then war in Chicago and then eventually get to literally the place that seems to be Lovecraft Country. Now, the casualties of that is a little bit of pilotitis in the sense that you can feel there was some

re-editing, rejiggering. That happens to everything, every pilot. So that some questions get yada yada, like we meet Letitia, the Journey Small at Bell's character, and she's, you know, it's really exciting when she shows up on screen. She's lit like a superhero. She arrives. She sings a blues number with her sister, and she talks about moving in and going to work at a department store. And then the next time we see her, she's getting in the car for the road trip. And I'm like, why is that happening? Do I ultimately care that much? No, I want to get her in the car. But there were like little jumps and leaps like that that, you know, that cause you to scratch your head. But these are not, these are not fatal flaws. This is, let's get, let's get moving. It's a show that has to get somewhere.

What did you think of the tension, the juxtaposition, rather, of the real horror of, of being black in America and especially at this time and especially on the road and basically trying to fact check this guidebook that George has created that helps people know where to stay, where to eat,

et cetera. So that very, very real horror juxtaposed with the you know, almost the almost like unthinkable horror erupting out of the ground or coming down out of the trees or flying out of the forest that we saw.

I mean, I think that that's the tightrope walk that Misha has undertaken. And you definitely can't judge it on one episode. And it's the kind of tricky balancing act that's going to take multiple episodes. In some of the advanced reviews, which I've been very, very, very positive, people have seen more episodes than we have. I've only seen the pilot. There was one review and variety that basically said it isn't until the fifth episode that they begin to have more of a parody between them.

it's really hard. I think that for me, the shooting the lived experience of Black Life in the 50s as a horror movie was more viscerally terrifying and effective than multi-eyed wear beasts. So I was going to ask you, like you're already not a horror person.

Do you mind, like, would you almost prefer it's almost like gory splatter the way it was at the end of, this episode of Lovecraft, or do you prefer it to be closer to, like, alien where it's just creeping dread and it feels a little bit more like in the shadows rather than exploding through a house and people erupting, you know, and their bodies changing and stuff? Yeah, I mean, it's not going to be surprised anyone who listens to this to hear me say I prefer less as more. But I'm curious, you know, because the thing that was interesting and in some ways really provocative

about the end of the pilot is that it has this awful. I was going to say impossibly tense, but not impossible. Just tense situation where the entrenched white power in this place has our black leads at gunpoint on the ground. And they can do anything to them. And it is a real reality-based horror show. And then the great equalizer of extra-dimensional terror leaps in. And suddenly they're all cowering in the dark together. It doesn't work out so well for all of them.

But I guess my question, as the episodes going forward, is what does that equalizing terror, that there's something even bigger that we all have to be scared of? What does that have to say about the way America conducted itself? Well, conducts itself. You know, what is the connection there? I'm curious about that. There's no way to answer it. You know, instead, I guess I prefer to sort of pivot back to the beginning and just say to look at the leads and to look at Uncle George.

and look at Atticus as the types of protagonists we rarely see, which is, you know, the John Carter from Marstuff is very intentionally placed and worthwhile that like John Carter got to have an adventure. And John Carter was a Confederate soldier. So why can't someone who looks like Atticus who loves these books and loves these stories? Why doesn't he get to have an adventure? Well, now he does. So that in and of itself is really interesting to me. The overlaying, like needle dropping, literally of James Baldwin is intense.

These are giant crossbeams to lay in the foundation of whatever you're building. And has it earned them? I don't know. That's not for me to say yet. It's certainly not after one episode. I think that there's something very pulp and very true to the genre to just be wildly, explosively provocative. Yes.

You know, in all directions. And so in that sense, it's very true to the genre that it wants to be in. Yeah. And that genre is something I have a lot of time for, obviously. And I felt like, you know, you know, You mentioned a little bit before about this run of shows that HBO has kind of had that have kind of entertained us since the fall. And I was actually just very excited to know that for the next two and a half months, I'm going to have this on Sunday night to kind of look forward to and get excited about and then talk about the next day. Did you want to say one more thing about this before we move on?

Yeah, just, you look, Courtney Vance, one of our great actors. It's so great to see him in this role, a very different type of role than we last saw him in. a lot of us, and certainly in this podcast, we haven't raved about him since he was Johnny Cochran in the OJ miniseries, the Ryan Murphy American Crime Story. I just want to call myself out on something here, which is that when he calls his wife and says, next time I'm going to bring you with me, I was like, yeah, I saw this when it was called McBain. I mean, that is literally like building a boat and calling it live forever. Sure. And so, you know, you see the leads of the show, Journey Small and Jonathan Majors fighting off these demons or whatever.

You're like, well, they're not really in peril because they're the stars of the show. But I was like, Uncle George, sorry to say, but I think this is going to be your last guidebook trip. And really what I was doing was just falling into the same stereotypes that I would love to fight against or at least champion those that fight against, right? Like it's very intentional in the Simpsons bit about McBain. The McBain's partner is the only black person in the fictional movie within Simpsons because he's going to die before it's over. And here I am playing right into it. But no, on this show, what Misha Green and her co-conspirators are saying is, no, in this show, Uncle George is alive. Right.

And that makes it more interesting and more complicated. And Apollita is going to have her own business. And maybe we'll see more of his daughter's comic strip and stop assuming things have to go the way they've always gone. gone before. And I kind of appreciated that even that self-gut check. Absolutely. So before we get into my interview with Misha, was there anything else from pop culture this weekend that you wanted to chat about?

Did you hear about the time our producer fought off a bear? Yeah. I just kind of want to... I don't think that Ken Burns documentary about that moment has been completed yet. So we can wait for that to air on PBS. I assume you have the Ringer Films folks

on speed dial because I am ready for that. Yeah, DeBondge is already shooting. He's not, you know, he's attached. He's attached. He's tough to pin down, but he's attached. No, nothing else. I'm excited to hear your talk with Misha,

and I'm heartened and thrilled that people are still on the cattle drive with us. Yeah, we're going to do the third installment of the Lonesome Pod slash Summer of Dove. So let's get into my interview with Misha Green. And then we come back from that. We'll get into Lonesome Dove. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Blue Moon. Don't you think some once-in-a-blue moments should happen more often than once-in-a-blue moon? Blue Moon is on a mission to celebrate and inspire more of those moments.

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Blue Moon, Reach for the Moon, celebrate responsibly. Blue Moon Brewing Company Golden Colorado, Ailey. So happy to be joined by Misha Green. the mind behind Lovecraft Country, which is on HBO Now. Not HBO Now, The Service. It's on HBO Now. Sometimes get confused by all the HBO's. Misha, what's up? How you doing? I'm good. I want to talk to you about the first episode, because I love the first episode, but I rarely get a chance to talk to somebody about the first episode after other people have gotten a chance to see it. So we can get a little bit more detailed about what happens in it. But you must have, I know from experience talking to other folks, when they

finally get to the point where the episode is ready, is up and out, and everybody is seen. seen it. You've probably seen this thing a thousand and six times, right? In different... Times two. Yes. Are you sick of it? Was it? Or do you feel like you're ready for it to see it new because everybody else is going to see it? You know, it's a dual thing. You're so, I'm so sick of it. I'm so sick of every detail in it. So sick of looking at these actors' faces a million, trillion times. And then you also, I also find myself being like, I'll be in my house and I'll be like, I could just watch the first episode again. That would be great.

So it's definitely a roller coaster ride of like, you know, you're going through so much with it. But then you also have so many thoughts about it. And you're just like, oh, my God. And then people see it. And they bring all their thoughts, which is the best part. And you're just like, oh, my God, you saw that. Oh, my God.

That's not what I did it there at all. But I like that what you're thinking it is. Now, we're recording this on Wednesday. It's going to be going, you know, obviously. we'll be running the episode on Monday. Are you your plan as of now, are you going to be logged on for this one? Are you going to be looking at the mentions for this one? Or do you need to go into like a secure location and just enjoy it with some friends and family?

No, I'm definitely going to be logged on. I'm sure you'll get some hashtags out of it. I'm sure there's going to be some... Family. Yeah. The people watch you get home. That's right. Is there parts of the first episode that,

because I have my five, six favorite moments I wanted to talk to you about. But I was wondering if maybe after all of these runs through on post and adding VFX and making little cuts here and there as everybody does with these episodes, have you ever like a personal favorite moment of the episode? Personal favorite moment. Maybe like to the viewers eye, you wouldn't know that that was something you were like, we did it. We got it there. I hope the viewers would see it too. I mean, I think the opening, I just. think that was such a challenge. I think that the opening for me was a thing we had, it's the treaties of the episode, the show, the series.

So to get that right, to really understand it was exciting for me. So every time I hear the Jackie Robinson story voiceover come in and then Jackie Robbins, I was supposed to say I'm spoiling things, but this is going to be after. Let it rip. And every time Jackie slices through that monster and those fireworks, works play, that to me is, I'm just like, yes. Yes, that is a, I don't know if you are a podcast host in your other life, but you should be because that is a great segue to my first moment I wanted to talk about, which is the opening

sort of dream sequence that the tick is having. And that seems like an amazingly complicated sequence to pull off because if it goes wrong, it goes really wrong. Am I right? It does. Yeah. You know, hopefully no one feels like it was wrong. I, it's exciting for me because we wanted to open big. I wanted to open big and I wanted you to come in right away and be like, whatever you're thinking is happening in this show, let it go because we're going crazy. We're going bananas. And that's what it feels like for me when I watch that. And then to know that it's kind of two minutes of Easter eggs that over watching the season over the course of

season, people will pick up those Easter eggs from his dream is exciting to me too for people to come back to that. Yeah, I can see the screenshots on Reddit already of just being like, see there, there, there, there. But the thing I wanted to ask you, so it's taking place essentially in Atticus's mind where he's having this dream, he's asleep in the back of a bus while he's reading Edgar Rice Burroughs. I was wondering, one of the things actually touched me about that scene is I remember more when I was younger, but I even now still, I'll sometimes dream myself into fiction that I'm reading. I'll dream myself into pieces of writing. And especially around his age, that's such like a formative time. I was curious whether or not you ever had such a connection to a writer

or a book that you ever dreamed yourself into their stories or would dream about their stories. I feel like all the books I read. I discovered this thing about myself and my brain. I can't have caffeine after 5 p.m. Because if I have caffeine after 5 p.m., all of my dreams go wild. And so anything I consume, I'm in it. So when I was a kid and, you know, I would just drink soda all the time and then I'd be reading it and I'd go to sleep in nightmares, literally the entire time. And it was great because it helped form that imagination. But it was also crazy if you think about, like I've been reading a lot of studies about how the brain doesn't know the difference between the real stuff and the imagine stuff you imagine. I'm like, so I've experienced it when I was a kid.

and all of that horror and the werewolf coming out of the toilet, which is so big crazy all the time. I like that you're blaming big soda and not Stephen King. I feel like it was like the soda is making my brain synapses fire. Stephen Keynes just making the world come alive. Well, that actually, again, leads into the second moment I want to talk about, which is when Attica's and George are hanging out in George's sort of garage office, and Atticus brings the book down off the shelf.

And I really, really loved the letter reading scene. Because for me, it's so cool when you have your POV character and the person that you're going to be spending all this time with, but there's still this added layer of mystery to this person. You don't know all this stuff about them. And you can see it. And Courtney B. Vance is acting where he's just kind of like turned away, but to camera, and he's saying, oh, God, I didn't want him to think this.

But the coolest thing about this scene, the stuff I love the most was the misreading of different words, and the misinterpretation of different words sacred secret oh own and even then arkham and artum dan that must be fun to play around with you know do you guys get like a scrabble board out and start messing around with that like where was that how did that come about well that came from matt's novel he was already doing it from the novel and we just i too love things like that mystery i love characters who you're like i don't are you on the up and up are you not on the up and up what's going on here. And I think that, you know, at the end of the day as well, our show genre and all

those layers, it's still a family drama. And I think a lot about the secrets that we hold and the things are shame that keeps us separated from our families and how you have to expel that, exercise that to become a unit, a family unit. So that was always, you know, from Matt's book to our adaptation, something that was exciting, this idea of playing with words and, and, and, and, and, the mystery of things. Yeah, and you mentioned the family drama part. I thought that the George Atticus relationship is so interesting because it is to me, it can be uncle or it can be that non-central parental figure in your life where it's like,

this person actually, you know, you're in your dreams and your mind, you might be like, I wish this person was my father or my mother. But actually, they don't also have to do like the really hard stuff. And we learn a little bit later when George is telling Atticus, you know, I wasn't always there to protect your father when I should have been. And he's like, well, you weren't there to protect me either. You know, the sort of layers of the onion of that relationship are so fascinating. That must have been something that was really exciting to unpack for you.

Yeah, I think that as you say, onion is exactly it. I like to pill back layers. I like characters to have multiple, multiple, multiple, what are you going to get down to? What's going to regrow over the other layers we uncover? So for me, it was just really excited. to get into all of these characters and they're different things and what, like I said, the secrets they're hiding and unpacking things about them and not having them be one thing. And I think that comes from Matt's novel again.

It was like with Atticus, he was the war, the Korean War veteran, but he was also that geeky nerd. And so playing that juxtaposition of like, oh, wait, that's the kid who like was the head of the cup bottle glasses? Yeah. That's a picturesic club? Like, what? Like, who are you now? And he's diesel now.

Yeah, right. Yeah. So I wanted to ask, the next moment I wanted to talk about was actually, I thought probably the coolest sequence in the show, low-key, was the sort of series of scenes that you soundtrack with James Baldwin's William F. Buckley audio. Can you talk me through that a little bit? Because that is definitely, in a series of moments throughout the show, you're like, oh, okay, so the first scene of this episode is going for broke, technical or hallucinations, psychedelic. But there's something almost even more,

I don't want to say, like, it just grabs your attention in a way that even aliens attacking the planet doesn't is when you hear that James Ballin audio over these images. Can you tell me a little bit about the decision to do that? Because it's a little anarchistic too, because that's a little bit later than when it's set. So can you walk me through that a little bit? Yeah, you know, I think it's what you were saying as well. We just want to grab people and not just have it be about the genre where we're grabbing people.

And so from the beginning, this idea of using found audio and placing it wholesale over scenes and not changing the audio kind of bridges time as well to understand that. Yes, this is the 1950s, but it's today. It's before the 1950s. It's the 1970s. It's all of it. This is the story of America across time and not just one specific. time. And so to do that, we wanted to bring in all of this found audio from different eras. You know, we use a Nike commercial. We use Baldwin. We use all these different things to kind of evoke an understanding that this is out of time and out of place, which also, you know, speaks to the show

and what the show does with genre and going cross genres and all that as well. And so for that, it was, we wanted to go into the heart of darkness to understand that traveling through the Midwest, not the South, you know, is for these characters, like going into the heart of darkness. And that montage and hearing Baldwin's words talking about America and what America is and how and what it means was really exciting to do. And in it, we recreated a lot of Gordon Parks' pictures in live action, which is also was really cool just to see those come off his picture to the screen to see our characters in it. But yeah, we wanted to. to give care to telling this story about an American family as much as we gave care to the

genre aspects. Sure. I know that for Underground, I've seen, seen videos for you're talking about underground where you're talking about this exhaustive show Bibles that you're writing, you know, these sort of 50-page manifesto is almost about like what the show, for a show like Lovecraft, I mean, is the rulebook that there are no rules? Do you have like lane lines that you're trying to stick in, even if it doesn't appear obvious to the audience, what is and isn't in play? Well, we only wrote that exhaustive Bible for Underground because nobody wants to pick up the show. They're like, we don't understand how this is a TV show. So we're like, well, let's take that excuse away and write all the things down that tells you exactly what this show is. But for this

show, there is dense mythology. So we do have our kind of magic Bible where it's like, let's make sure we're clear on all our rules. So we're not willy-nilly saying, oh, suddenly this person can do this, you know. Let's be clear on where our spells come from, what our spells mean, what you need to do to cast them. So we have that very extensive spell Bible, which is, it's just so weirdly it's starting to come together because we also have a language expert

who's creating this language of Adam. And you're just like, wow, we're just created a whole new language just for this show. That's insane. But it's also. Yeah. Doesn't that, though, get back to like, drinking too much soda and reading it though? Like you get back to that almost original creative impulse that you have when you're a kid.

Yeah. And I mean, that's what was exciting about this show going in and pitching it. I said, I want to reclaim all the genre space for people of color. And that is a massive undertaking. And that's, it's just so much fun to get into all of that and be like,

okay, well, now we've got to create this. Now we have to make sure we're doing this. How are we paying homage to the ghost genre, but also making it feel very specifically, love crap country. So I wanted to ask about these two sequences together. One is the 25 mile per hour chase,

which I thought was the most harrowing thing in the episode. And obviously, it feels so distinctly different. And I'm sure in my own biases watching it, but like in it's like the monsters when they arrive at the end of the episode are almost coming at, they're almost a relief in some ways. You know what I mean? And I think tonally there's that shift where it's like,

it goes from this almost like Hitchcockian dread of that 25 mile per hour chase where it's like north by northwest but this is really real for these people to this almost phantasmagoric like evil dead thing at the end that almost becomes like oh god at least there's just like multi-eyed vampire worms coming out of the ground now like we can like relax about the sheriff like when you're dealing with those tone shifts almost is that intentional just sort of be like it's almost the reel is almost scarier. Yes. The 25 mile per hour chase is almost scarier than these things erupting out of the forest.

Yeah. So tonal shifts, I guess it's hard for me because they're not tonal shifts for me. Yeah. Like my mind goes boop doop doop doop do do but for me and this is a thing that was always clear in the process of it. Whereas for me, the people who are monstrous were just going to be as scary as the monster. and that you should always feel, you know, I do feel like being a person of color in America, you are always on the lookout. You're always in a horror movie.

Everywhere you go, you do typical daily tasking. It's like this could go sideways anyway. So that's that for me as a fan of the horror genre and also as an African-American woman, I understand that completely. So that is really easy for me to navigate because that's my life. So when putting it on screen, it's just about pulling it out. And, you know, in the book, The Sundown Town is a passing story that George is told or he tells about another guy telling him.

And I just went, what? A slow chase? Yeah. A slow chase. Not a chase. A slow chase. This idea that you can't go over the speed. but you have to get across a county line before this sun goes down.

I'm just like the tension of that is exciting to me as a big of the horror genre because you can't, again, you create these made up scenarios to get that kind of tension in horror. But that's real life. This was happening. And so for me, it's like that sequence, I was like, I want to make sure that sequence is long and terrified. Yes. when the monsters come, you're relieved.

At least they're eating the racist monsters too. And also, they can, you know, Tick and George and Ledy, they can use their ingenuity. They're like, lights. Let's get some lights. We got that. We can get back to Woody and turn the lights on. With the sheriff, they're just like, oh, God, we're fucked. Like, we have to drive 24 miles per hour. Like, it's a different skill set that they're asked to employ. Let me get to my last one. which is the last scene, because I'm curious for you,

when you've got the whiteboard up or you've got all the index cards on the wall, how much you want to show in the first episode? Because this first episode, it starts out in fifth gear, and we're so in this world after that first stream sequence. And then the last scene is almost as beguiling

and almost as strange and almost as different from the rest of the episode. So for you, when you're sort of pacing out a season and pacing out an episode, how much do you want to show of the wider world that we're about to see in the season when you get to that last episode? And how many conversations did you have about like how many people should they meet? How far up to the door do they get?

How do they get to the door? Do they just see the house? What was the conversation about like, okay, this is the end of the first episode? There wasn't much conversations about it. I wrote it. And then that was the end. Well, that's good. You're the boss.

Yeah, I think, you know, there was conversations. There's always, I feel like, for me, conversations of, are we moving too fast? And my response to that is we're never moving fast enough. I feel like, you know, audience today are so savvy. They don't need things spelled out for them, especially not the genre audience. They all know about every step in a genre episode. And so for me, I never want to feel like we're stalling out because we're. afraid of where we're going.

You know, I feel like if we're never afraid of where we're going, if we know that we can always drink a Coke and create something, imagine something, then let's go for it. Let's push, you know, because there's versions of this show that could have been, you know, the whole Artem trip, the entire 10 episodes. But for me, I was like, we're going, we're going every place. And what is going to anchor us is this family and these characters that we love,

which is going to allow us to go to every place. And that's what's exciting to me in the context of, you know, doing something different, doing something that doesn't feel like anything else on TV is always feeling like in the episode being like, what the fuck could they possibly be next? Right, right. It's that they emptied the cupboards in this one. So what else do they even have in there? Right.

And then when you find that, that's the wild thing. So do you think that if there was, if this was a different time or, I mean, is there a version of this show like you're saying where you'd be like, well, okay, let's pace ourselves. And maybe the first monster thing happens in episode three or the first, I mean, obviously you're going to want to see some monsters, but there's never any conversation about like, let's drag this out. Not for me, at least.

There's no version of Love Crap Country that I would have ridden that would be dragging it out. Because again, I just like to eat story. I like to go, go, go. I did the same on Underground where it was like, they're off the plantation by episode three. And they're like, but wait, I don't understand. They're planning this.

I'm like, nope, we're going, going, going, we're doing it, we're moving. And so for me, there was no version of Lovecraft Country that didn't set out to be incredibly, incredibly ambitious and reclaim all genres, Cycrack, or the mystery story, all of those things in the first 10 episodes, and then push beyond that for seasons going. Well, I'm so impressed with the first episode. You really got me hooked. and really you should be proud of what you did. So thank you so much for joining us today on the watch.

Appreciate it. I have fun. All right, thanks to Misha Green for joining me on the watch this week. And it was cool to hear her break down that first episode. All right, Andy, let's get into Summer of Dove Part 3. So we've been modeling these conversations around the narrative structure of the CBS miniseries. So this episode or this episode of our pod will go up into the end of episode three of the miniseries.

Chapter wise in the book, what is that about? It's a little smeary because it jumps a bunch of stuff around. You know, it's not an even division into quarters, but basically page chapter 90. Yeah, it's chapter 90. So this takes us up to chapter 90 in the book,

but there's a little bit of moving and shaking going on with how the miniseries depicts things versus how the book handles things. Andy and I wanted to talk about two specific things here, but we were going to do it through characters. So the two people we wanted to talk about from the book and from the show today are Clara, who is portrayed by Angelica Houston

in the miniseries, and Dietz, who is portrayed by Danny Glover. And are two of the most beloved characters, I would say not only in the novel, but maybe even in the series itself. So, Annie, explain how you wanted to, because you had a good idea about how you wanted to sort of juxtapose these two characters. Yeah, so I want to talk about Clara first. But the thing that I wanted to say is just to point out again how Larry McMurtry breaks every single rule that you're ever taught about fiction writing or every single rule that even casual readers of fiction might believe matter, even if they have never put it into words. And the reason I say this is because there's an argument to be made that Clara Allen is the best character in the book.

There's an argument to be made that she is the strongest character in the book, the main character of the book in kind of, in a sort of a shadow way. I would definitely say that the treatment of Kara, like the treatment he gives her. I don't mean treatment like as in behavior. I mean like the way he portrays her is the most psychologically in-depth portrait of a character in the novel. frankly, like maybe among all the books I've read. Yes. And in my mass market brick paperback edition, she appears for the first time on page 647. Yeah. So that's outrageous. Let's talk a little bit about the structure of this book, because this is a good way of getting into it. I think for a lot of the novel, there are these dual tracks of the Hat Creek Cattle Drive. And then there's the sort of

the two lines converging where it's July and Elmira and Roscoe sort of meandering their way towards this cattle drive and the intersection and then the splitting apart. And as you're reading along, and I think another character I want to talk about today is Elmira, you know, I think that it takes a while to train your brain to not be rewarded for these two paths immediately. Because when you get to this third part, they don't intersect the way that you think that they are. And they don't quote unquote pay off the way I think we're taught to expect parallel storylines to pay off. Something that McMurtry believes in very much, I think, is, I mean, all writers do cause and

effect. But I think he also believes that there is a cost for every action, that there is a recoil for every rifle shot, if you will. And one of the things that Loansome Dove does that's so compelling, I think, to a lot of people, us included, is that it teaches you how to read it as you're reading it. And so you adventure with Gus and Call for 600 pages. And you know, you see things you've never seen before and you experience things. In some ways, you're distracted by the delight of Newt seeing these things for the first time as you are.

But the thing that you're not keeping track of is the other side of the ledger, which is that to adventure, to range away, means that there's something back that you're leaving behind. and it's certainly not lonesome dove, which is a dried up hole, basically. It's the well that they don't finish digging. What they've spent their lives rangering away from is life as most people live it. And I think Clara, more than any other character, represents that.

She has lived a life and a rich and deeply painful life at that, a life that McMurtry just, it's just dazzling the way he psychologically submerges us into it. Yeah, her domestic life, so to speak, is as wild as the cattle drive. I mean, even the way that McMurtry describes it, her flowers getting destroyed by these sharp winds coming off the plains of Nebraska. The way he describes it is no different than them being stuck without water out on a plane. You know, it's, it's given the same sort of consideration and it's got the same level of danger. The reason why I was bringing up these sort of these parallel storylines of July and Elmira and the cattle drive is because when we get to Clara, I think it's almost like,

oh, we're going to just introduce this other person who's kind of existing as the E plot or the F plot of this book. And this is why novels are fucking amazing, man. And this is why sometimes, you know, you get a book this size, the size of two bricks together. And you get lost in its, It makes the rules. And Larry McMurtry makes the rules in this story. And if he wants to do Madame Bovary in the middle of the goddamn novel, he's allowed to. And when you start to get three, four, five pages into the Clara section of this book, you realize, oh, I'm about to go deep, deep, deep down this hole with this person.

Like, this is who this book, this book is about Clara in a lot of ways. And that is almost unfathomable as like a writer. to just imagine the balls it takes to do that. To have that saved up and just have Clara mentioned, what, 15 times over the course of the novel, but seemingly like kind of as this memory that Gus can't shake, you know, because he goes to the springs where they've had their date and he's like, this is where I want to be. You know, like this is where I was last happy and he's tearing up.

I just think that the gear shift he does is jaw dropping. the crowning achievement of these books. I agree. And I think that it's also the time that you begin to realize, and we've been talking about this obviously, because we've been doing it in hindsight, that this is kind of the root of McMurtry's own discomfort with the legend of the book, because I think that he felt, to some degree, and I think it's borne out, certainly by the way this book ends, and then certainly by the subsequent books, that Call and McRae are kind of failures at life, certainly when it gets down to it when it really matters. And I think Clara is the counterweight to that. You know,

she yearns for adventure too, whether it's in the form of the stories and novels that she orders away from or her affection for the wild horses that she gelds and tames in lieu of her husband. But she also had limitations that she couldn't dance around, whether it's Gus literally, you know, joking and hoaring his way past them or call just ignoring them. I mean, this section of the book corresponds with some dialogue that happens earlier in the miniseries when they talk about Maggie, who is Newt's mother. And there's a long psychological section, internal section for call in this part of the book, where he just sort of circles his failure, where he's like, he couldn't do it, he couldn't go to her,

he couldn't admit anything. And so he just sat by the river night after night. Well, sitting by the river night after night is not an option for a woman in this period in American history. So Clara married someone who was solid. and did her best to live a full life. And not to ding the miniseries too much, although I can't help it. One of the subtle things that I think it got wrong.

And I will back this up with something that I think it did right. It seems minor, but it's not. In the book, there's a lot of talking about Bob's body, right? Bob, Claire's husband, big body who got kicked by the horse and he's... He's basically in a coma. Yeah, yeah. the actor or extra that they cast as Bob in the miniseries is a smaller, frailer man. And I feel like that kind of ruins the whole thing.

Because you kind of have to understand why Clara didn't choose Gus. And I think she chose someone who was physically solid as opposed to Gus who's always laughing and dancing and poking. Right. And so I feel like that undercuts it. But let's pivot to a positive. To me, the Clara section with Angelica Houston, particularly the long conversation that has to be about every. between Angelica Houston and Robert Duvall. That's the high point of the miniseries for me.

I just think that her performance is so rich and warm. Their affection for each other is so palpable, which is amazing, since I don't think they'd ever worked together before they met on the set of this. It could be wrong about that. It has to accomplish so much. And I think one of the reasons why the miniseries is so beloved by so many people is because this dance, this two-handed dance between these characters, where

basically Gus is there to marry her, and she's so happy to see him. She just kisses him on the mouth in front of her whole family, but she can't marry him. I mean, Larry takes chapters, maybe a chapters, but he takes dozens of pages to unwind this in a way that's so fulfilling for a reader. It's somewhat ambiguous

when he's kind of bringing Lorena to Nebraska to see Clara with him, and she is just convinced that he is going to leave her for Clara when he gets to see her. And it's not exactly, I mean, I read it as Gus could be kind of lying, Lorena, where he's just like, oh, come on, I'm not going to, I just want to go say hi, and how could I ever leave you and you're the best and yada yada? And, but like,

going through that whole section, you're just like, I don't know. I don't know whether or not he's just telling her what she needs to hear because she's been rescued from Blue Duck and she's completely shattered as a person and she can't deal with any more abandonment. In the show, a little bit more straightforward. The thing that the miniseries does is in the book you get to Clara and you're like, oh man, another character. I guess this is Clara. I guess this is the person Gus has been talking about the whole time. In the show, in the movie, Angelica fucking Houston puts her head out the window and you're like, oh yeah. Like, yeah, one of the best actresses of her generation just stuck her head out of window. This is going to be really important. And it,

and it lives up to every single thing I could have possibly hoped for from Clara. I mean, That the portrayal by her is so stunning. It's so complicated, and it does so much of the heavy lifting of the internal monologues, basically, of the writing, right? Because you have to convey that this woman is not like other women in this world, that no one has seen anyone like her, whether it's old Cholo, who's, you know, kind of in the margins in the miniseries, but more present in the book, or Lorena when she sees her for the first time. And immediately her heart sinks because she's like, well, course, Gus is going to marry this spectacular woman. But you also need the history and you need the sadness, you know, but you also need the vibrancy.

Because one of the most amazing things about Clara is that she keeps getting knocked down and she keeps living. She keeps living at 110 percent. And it's deeply inspiring in the book. And it's very moving even in its relatively short screen time here. To accomplish all that, I mean, my hat's off to the screenwriter. Bill Whitleff and this. This was where he's shown

because I think he understood how vital this moment was. And this is the part where this book, as we mentioned before, originally started off as a screenplay that Larry McMurtry was writing with and I for Peter Bogdanovich to direct and for John Wayne

and Henry Ford and Jimmy Stewart to star him. So he was thinking in terms of it on screen from the beginning. And it almost feels like at the Clarisse section is when it is fully a novel. It's when it does things that only novels can do. It goes to places that only novels can really go. And so to have it be executed so well on screen is really

a testament to how good this production really is. I think in some ways, you know, you and I have maybe been a little bit more tepid about the miniseries than I even imagine we would be because we just read the novel. And it's almost impossible. to watch a CBS, albeit the greatest, maybe the greatest miniseries ever made, it's impossible to watch them try to capture it when these characters live, for real, live in our imaginations right now.

And in some ways, like, I saw the miniseries first, and, you know, I still remember watching for the first time Jake's hanging. And Duval's Flinch, and the way that scene is played out, and the music that plays, and the way that the different actors react, and the look Danny Glover gives that moment.

And that to me was how I saw it in my mind. But for a lot of this book, I have my personal relationship to this story. And I'm sure you do too. And these characters that just is like a little bit different than the way that the miniseries it. I agree. And I also think, and when we talk about what happens to Jake and we talk about what happens to Deets,

which we're about to do in more detail, those feel very much of a piece with the movie that it was going to be and lend themselves, potentially to epic moments of visual storytelling. For me, the clara section is exactly as you said, which is that's the moment when you can sort of feel Larry turning the wheel and beginning to subvert the Hollywood story that this was initially intended to be.

And that subversion is complete by the time you get to Streets of Laredo and Dead Man's Walk. But particularly because the first, I mean, everything about this book delighted me. And I certainly didn't expect Sean O'Brien to get eaten by snakes on page 250 or whatever. And, you know, we've talked about these other moments that leave you gasping. But the truly subversive surprise is that, you know, we spend all these pages with Gus in this, you know, imagined love triangle. He's going to see the woman that he's loved his whole life. And he's now has Lorena very much in love with him.

And the women choose each other. I mean, that is so wild in any time, period. or any story. And yet it feels so right. And he just slipped it in there. You know, I didn't see that coming whatsoever. But it's, it's beautiful. Yeah.

And it's appropriate. And it speaks to, you know, it's beginning to tell us what we need to know about the rangering life, particularly, you know, in these waning days of the American West. But like that is a moment that is so pure. And I, you know, I'm happy to see it in a miniseries. But I wonder if that, I do wonder how. all that played in 1989 because there's some elements of it like

oh, Blue Duck is haunting this. Blue Duck's the villain. Gus and Loreno, what a classic love story. And it's like, nope. Neither of those things are really true. And it's around here in these late six hundreds and seven hundreds that you begin to realize that. You imagine, trying to imagine like the notes that would have been given to this as a script.

Especially now, the Suggs brothers are not scary enough. You know, the Suggs brothers who Jake links up with in Dodge, I think. Yeah. He's playing cards. And there's that whole thing with the drug-addicted madam that he's sleeping with and all that.

Right. But the Suggs brothers are like every other villain in this story, where you're just like, is that it? So they were just like recklessly cruel? They were just willing to do the thing that nobody should do, which is just attack this farm and ride their horses into this person's mud roof and kill people for nothing. because they're just bastards. Yeah, and then when they catch them, there's that whole thing

where the younger Suggs brothers are like, Dan, ain't you gonna fight him? Ain't you gonna whip him? Like, he doesn't, he's worthless. No, they're fucking bullies. Yeah, right. They're bullies with guns. And, you know, Blue Duck, I think,

is a little bit more mysterious and MoxMox, and, like, the people that are kind of, like, around that, that whole thing is a little bit stranger, but... We should say, MoxMox, not in this book. Oh, sorry. Retconned into the book later.

But, but, like, You mean like dogface and those guys. Yeah, like those guys. It's like those characters have a little bit more aura, but in the same way that the villains are not super villains, maybe not even villains, maybe they're just people who broke bad. The heroes are not heroes.

And then that way, Clara really is like the only hero in this book. She's the bravest person in this book. She's the most honest person in this book. She's the person who is living a life according to certain principles. And her character is sort of, easier to grab onto. Whereas, and I, you know, and I think the other person that you would maybe say that about in the novel is Dietz. Absolutely. Before we talk about deeds, I just want to say

one more thing about the two quick things about the Suggs brothers and the Jake thing. There's a line, let me say it this way, there's something that Jake says when he's caught or says to himself in the book that really reflects what you were just pointing out about the landscape that McMurtry gives us, which is, he says very, I think he says it very clearly to Gus, I didn't see no line. He thought, he was like, you crossed the line and he's like, well, yeah, I didn't see no line. I didn't, I didn't see it. If only I'd done this and not that. And in a very low-key way, that's one of the most profound things in the entire book, that these are people who as Rangers, their job was to ride out where nobody else, no other white people were. And they

made up their own justice, they made up their own rules, and they made up their own country, right? Like, there weren't state divisions. You know, there weren't like postal codes or whatever. Like, it just was country. Yeah. And then all of a sudden, time moved on and Jake's just puzzled at the end. And I think that you're, you know, we've given him a hard time in talking about the miniseries, but he captures that. York does a good job. I think that's a really tough moment where in the book, there's a lot more explanation to Jake

is fully aware of what's about to happen to him. You know, when he gets caught with the Suggs brothers, he's, he's sort of like, uh,

shit. And he's kind of dazed. And he's trying to think. And then so when he says, when Gus says, I just want you to know that I got Lori back. And Jake says who.

In the, in the movie, I think you're supposed to think this is it for Gus's like, hang this dude. You know what I mean? and like, this guy doesn't even care about Lorena. But in the novel, I think it's almost like, he's lost.

Like, he doesn't even, you could say I found Santa Claus, you know, on the other horse here, and he would just be like, what are you talking about? Like, I just can't believe I made five bad misdecision. Because we have all these ideas about Rangers and sheriffs and marshals in the West and how they had this principled idea of justice and the law, and they brought civilization to the wilderness. And that's the mythology. What you read about in Lonesome Dove is,

a bunch of people getting away with what they could get away with. And if they didn't get caught, they were fine. And throughout the novel, throughout a lot of the, you know, any, any stories you read about Gus McCray, he's constantly thinking about cutting quarters. He's constantly thinking about how he might want to just go get drunk or hang out with a prostitute rather than do any work. And he's constantly thinking about maybe I'll just abandon this cattle drive, maybe I'll just go do this, or maybe I should stop here. He doesn't, for whatever reasons, But he never crosses a line. You know, he never does something that costs anybody their life or, or anything like that.

Jake did. And that's what happened to him. And one of the things, and I said this before, I'll say it again, if you're a screenwriter and you're adapting this book to six hours, the first thing you do is cut Will Barger. I get it. You fucking hate that, though. But, and here's why, because I revisited that section, and it really speaks to what you were just saying. in the book for people who have just seen the miniseries, the people that they shoot at where,

where Frog Lipp gets killed and the horses are stolen that sort of leads them on the Suggs Brothers chase that leads them to Jake. The people that they, the Suggs brothers and Jake ambush is this guy, Wilbarger, who's been on his own kind of cattle drive in the margins and has visited them in Lonesome Dove

and then is out in the world. And then they find him dying, shot and dying, and Gus sits with him. And it's one of those really just, it's really a powerful and kind of beautiful scene where Will Berger's like, you know, basically like I should have listened,

you know, I could have listened to my brother and I'd be living in New York with him and you'd be eating oysters, but I never wanted to be civilized. Yeah. And so when I know I made a choice and it's that same thing about making choices.

I didn't want to be civilized. That world exists. I mean, the Edith Wharton novels happened at this time too, just in a completely different universe. And Will Barger was a guy who was like, no, I want to live free and die, I guess, sort of subvert the motto.

And it's kind of powerful and it's beautiful. And just a side note for people who are fans of the whole series or who are looking to be, one of the things that is true about Lonesome Dove, and I wonder if it speaks to its origins as a screenplay, is that it's very agnostic slash averse to actual history. Dietz, and we're going to talk about Deets in a second, is inspired, if not completely ripped off of a real man named Bozacard, who is the scout for a cattle farmer named Charlie Goodnight, who shows up at the end of this book very briefly in the only real

but is one of the characters that that would call him McCraer based on. Yes. And but he himself shows up at the end of this book. He is a bigger character in the sequels and prequels. And I feel like Will Barger is meant to be him a little bit too, a little terse, more educated, more successful in this world. And it's interesting to watch the dance here as McMurtry's like, well, is this the real West or is this my Hollywood West? And then among the many things that he, I think, reckons with in the subsequent books is, no, no, this is the real.

I'm going to start populating this book fully with real characters, whether they're Comanchee chiefs like Buffalo Hump or Charles Goodnight himself or Bo Zickard, who Dease is based on, who shows up in Dead Man's Walk briefly. So we should talk about Deeds. Okay. Let's talk about Deets. because you, earlier in the episode, when we were talking about Lovecraft Country, talked a little bit about McBain.

And the staging of Deats's demise in the miniseries is one of the all-time McBain moments. Oh my God. Now, I always thought it was really, you know, we read this oral history of both the novel,

the whole production process of the novel. It's in Texas Monthly, I believe. And there is, I think, a few Danny Glover quotes, if I remember correctly, but there's one that basically stands out where he's like, I read it and I was like,

there's not much to this guy, to Dietz, in the screenplay. I will imbue him with my own sense of what his backstory is and who he is, and I'm going to do it. And I think Danny Glover gives a deeply felt, if largely wordless performance

in this miniseries. And strangely, the the Robert the Jake death in the miniseries I think is is handled

really really really well and shot really and I it's so deeply moving the deep thing is kind of is kind of hard

because I think that staging wise it kind of comes off a little bit more like the snake attack in the river where in the book this is the part

where you're you will be lucky if you don't just push through and finish this novel because you're so heartbroken by the loss of this character in the novel. I read it standing up in my backyard.

I couldn't put the book down at this moment. It's heartbreaking. It's crushing. It would take someone who's more of a student of filmmaking than either of us to comment on this, but there's something, maybe this was just TV. But the way that this and the snake attack are shot

is so, it's the antithesis of the way things are shot now for dramatic purposes in anything. which is to say that it just it leads you. I mean, it shows the boy with the lance getting ready to strike and then the slow motion and the no,

just like it showed the snakes. I mean, there's no element of surprise and the book just cuts your heart out. So just in terms of the staging, it's all wrong. A. B, there's something incredibly visceral and awful that is really only in the novel where Dietz is being the way he's been for his entire life,

fictional life that we know, and certainly his life in the book, which is that he is decent and helpful, and he's helping. And the scene that he's involving himself in is such, you know, we hear about how scary Indians are and what McCray and Cole used to get up to.

And now it's just this haggard band of children, a blind child and the very old... Eating rotting meat out on a plane, yeah. Just to be alive. And the whole scene is slick with horse blood. I mean, it's just, It's a horror show. Yeah.

And there's something really just, you know, devastating about that. But so, but to speak to the bigger point, there's no room for Dietz in this, in this miniseries. There's just simply no room for them and it's heartbreaking. Now, you could say it's a casualty like Woolbarger of the six hours. I think it's probably something more systemic than that, certainly in the late 80s, through very relatively recent times, considering the way that we just spoke about Lovecraft Country, that if you're looking for people to short change or cut or to leave out of the narrative, you're not going to cut Robert Duvall swaggering around in his pajamas in a river.

So you have Danny Glover, who's a beautiful performer imbueing every moment that he's on screen with something, just robbed of almost everything, which is such a bummer. The book, to its credit, and again, I think that the treatment of deeds on screen, and even within Lonesome Dove is something that in small ways, McMurtry tries to address in subsequent books. Call is basically like, he's the best man I've ever had, the only one that. that they can keep up with them, that can track and do all these things. The other thing that the book suggests that I miss in the miniseries is that like, McMurchy is pretty clear about this, even though it's obviously not his focus.

Dietz and Clara, because of their stations in this world, are much more in touch with reality and the world. And there's a moment before this all happens when Dietz is just like, I don't like it up here. I don't like this north. It's too cold. It's hard to see where we're going, and I don't like it. And Call's like, maybe he's sick.

I don't know what's wrong with him. And Gus is like, he's very sensitive. Like, he knows things. Maybe he's going to, maybe, maybe, he says, maybe we're all going to get killed by Indians in the next two weeks. Which, spoiler alert. And basically what's happening here is Dietz is just like, we shouldn't be doing this. This is stupid. Yeah.

He's like, I never really wanted to leave Texas. I never really did. And the book is so focused on Call's ambition. And the legend and myth of the West is so. fixated on men's ambition to conquer and go and go and go that we fall prey to it and we fall into its sway and it's we want that too we want them to adventure but Dietz is right they shouldn't have done this you know yeah and okay but the other thing is this interesting is like i really take your point about Dietz being marginalized in the adaptation yeah that being said

the kinds of scenes or the moments that Deets has throughout most of the novel are the kinds of scenes that you just don't put in a movie or a television show, which is four or five guys hanging out, drink a coffee, and kind of commenting on the day's events. He and P.I. are kind of like this Greek chorus for their journey. And he offers a certain point of view and P.I. and Dish and, you know, Jasper, all these guys are kind of commenting on this. But for the most part, Dietz is just incredibly, like you said, helpful. He's. is a scout. He's got his own story. But by the time they get to this point in the novel, and I think, as we'll see in the series, and, you know, they, the, the, the, the, the, the,

the, the, the, the, the, the burial in the novel, I think is probably the hardest thing you're going to, one of the hardest things you're going to read. And the, and the, and the, memoriam that's written for him is copied, plagiarized from the, what, the one that Charles Goodnight wrote for, for, for Bose. That, that's something McMurtry's talked about. Right. And, and this is the part where you're like, oh, oh, it's pointless. this whole thing that even if it was hard and it cost all these lives, I thought we were going to get some Montana or wherever we're going and find out this is how we made the West.

And this is the sacrifice. And it was like, nope, this is pointless. It actually wasn't worth this guy's life to do this. I also think you're really right in pointing out. And all the people on that drive agree. Yeah, they do. Yeah. And you're, I really, I think you're right in pointing out the role of deeds plays in the novel.

McMurtry is not some he's not some like radical hero here who is prioritizing the lived experience of black men in the old west he's of his time maybe he's a little bit forward thinking for his time he gives Dietz a great amount of of soul and character

and presence but also there are very few people this speaks to the general tension of the soul project I mean there are very few people who are as adept in both mediums as McMurtry right he's won a Pulitzer Prize for writing this book he won an Academy Award for adapting Broke-Mc Mountain. He knows what gets adapted. Sure. And this was meant to be a script. He knows that Dietz sitting in a cornfield looking at the sky discussing clinical depression before we had those words is not going to make it

into any version of this whatsoever. And one of the really fun meta things about continuing to read the Lonesome Dove series, if you do, is feeling him try to correct those things. And there's a scene, this is not a spoiler, because people know that they're prequels and sequels. So I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Dietz exists again in another book. but like when Dietz and P.I. meet for the first time, there is a scene that is so crisp and clear that it, it's like it fell out of a Robert McKee's screenplaybook. Right.

As if he's saying, here's what we could have done, or here's what someone can do to give him back some live to humanity on the screen. It's just disappointing that Danny Glover didn't get a chance to play because he would have played the hell out of it. But I have to say, that being said, that I think that we judge the series a little bit harshly because we have this book, which is also an un- Okay, but it's an unparalleled achievement

what this novel is. I think if you just watched the series, Danny Glover's portrayal, and a lot of this stuff would feel differently. I think that the other, the reason why we're bashing the miniseries, which is not fair for people who love it, the Claire stuff alone in this and the J. Kang,

I mean, they moved me. I'm not immune to its incredible charms. It's that we're not just criticizing it from the perspective of people love the book. We're also criticizing it from the perspective of contemporary TV fans who know that now it's possible to do 12 hours instead of six or to, to, you know, to just richly harvest something like this. I mean, honestly, like, there's a worse version of it today. Yeah. Pitch Lonesome Dove is a three-year adaptation, right? With 30 episodes. They don't leave for the first season.

Seriously, there's the peri-based version of it. Yeah, I just don't think you could keep people as attention if you were like, don't worry, in 10 hours, they're going to leave Texas. They're going to go on this cattle drive eventually. Yeah. It doesn't really work like that. Anything else you wanted to touch on in this section? I think the next section will be largely about Woodrow and Gus. So I wanted to kind of get a lot of the supporting characters in this one.

I guess, I sort of want to ask you about Amira. I mean, we've had a lot of conversations, the two of us about Amira. I think as I was reading it, I was like, what's your read on the Elmira character? we're supposed to be kind of like learning from this? Is she clinically depressed? Is this, you know, what, was this a portrait of postpartum depression and in a time before we were able to kind of put a name on it? Is she just a lonely, sad person who's unmoored from the world and is like just going to keep chasing her own doom across the plains because she can't be still, which makes her just like all these other people in the book. But she, she is given

so much page and screen time to come to such a sad, brutal ending. Yes, an ending. Is it a lonesome dove? Lonesome dove. But like, what did you think? Her ending is much more explicit in the show. I mean, in the book, it's, you see it. I think for me, it comes back to Clara. I think that Clara is the center of gravity in this book and in this world,

because she's the only one who sees it plain and calls it as she sees it. There's a moment when Lorena's like she's not going to be nice to me because of what I am. And Gus is like, no, she will. And she is. She has this seemingly endless reservoir of kindness and empathy for people, even for Elmira when she crosses her path. And she raises her child after that. But she also has no tolerance for the rules of society, you know, as they should be, as someone else's rules. There's a whole passage about this in one of the prequels that I read recently,

where it's just basically like, why should she live under societal rules set by men that she would never even meet anyway? And I think that just as Jake is kind of on a certain path, but just isn't cut out for it. And bends, I mean, Elmira just wants, she wants to ranger. You know what I mean? Like, she just wants to ranger. That's the metaphor for what all these people want to do.

but she can't. And she did a version of it that was incredibly dangerous when she was living as a prostitute and then did the thing she was quote unquote supposed to do, right? I mean, there's this whole section in this in this part where Call is like he probably should have married Maggie. There were a lot of men who wanted to marry Maggie's. If Maggie's only, Maggie being Newt's mother, that's her path to legitimacy, right? Elmira took the path to legitimacy.

She married the sheriff of a town. I mean, good job, right? Like that's a heroic outcome for a woman. woman in 1870 or whatever, but she wouldn't accept it. And so the thing that I love about the book is that McMurtry never judges her. Sure. He lets her ranger and meet, you know, an awful end. Again, because it's a, it's a, it's filmed, it's not in people's heads. She's tougher to parse in the, in, in the show, I think. I mean, Chris Cooper sells it a lot. I think in Glenn Headley sell it with their performances. Chris Cooper is just so uncomprehending and sad about

that it actually helps you understand how... I think... I would say in one way, I would say that Chris Cooper's performance as July was a lot more illuminating about that character than the rendition of him in the novel.

Like in some ways in July, when you're reading July in the novel, you're just like, especially once he gets to Nebraska and is still showing up outside of Elmira's door and just kind of like constantly, I mean, I understand they have a child together, but just always kind of pawing

at this idea that Elmira is going to suddenly wake up and be like, yeah, let's go back to Arkansas. It sounds great. He's not built for the world. But it makes a little bit more sense as Chris Cooper. His hang dog look and his dignity is different than the way I had sort of read that. I completely agree. And I think that's another notch in the credit of the miniseries. Because the traditional thing you would expect from a character like July is that maybe he's like a different version of Newt, where he starts one way.

And he learns. and he becomes a capable horseman or lawman or sheriff or he somehow uses the experience to become better. But one of the things that make McMurtry books so incredible and it makes him such a keen observer of humanity is that sometimes people don't learn. Sometimes they don't get better. That's certainly the case with Call, as we'll see over the next section when we talk about him. But July just, it doesn't make sense anymore. It's not unlike Dietz saying we shouldn't have come this far north. Once you go where your compass doesn't work anymore, you're kind of lucky to get a job in the side room.

Clara's horse farm. You know what I mean? Because everything else you do, you kind of screw up and even screws that up to a degree. I know. Well, we can put it cork in it there. So on Thursday, we'll do our last episode. Dern it, Chris, I could talk about this book all day. But what I think we'll do is, like you said, we're going to put all these installments together for a bonus megapod. And then hopefully maybe for that one, we could do any questions you guys had or we could do a little bit of a mailbag about Dove for that. But yeah, I love talking about Lonesome Dove. We got one more to go.

Saddle up. We're almost to the Milk River. We'll be back on Thursday talking, destroy you, and I'm sure some other stuff, and we'll have the final installment of Lonsaub. Thanks for listening today. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by Rupal's Drag Race, Vegas Review.

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