The Watch - Breaking Down the First Episode of ‘The Mandalorian’ and Inside the Launch of Disney+ | The Watch

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

‘The Mandalorian’ premiered this week, and although we have a lot of mixed feelings about the pilot, we're willing to hang on (1:38). Then Bloomberg reporter Lucas Shaw takes us inside the launch of Disney+ (28:52) and tells us why we shouldn’t be calling this the “streaming wars” (58:28). Plus: We break down what may be the most controversial episode of ‘Survivor’ in the history of the show (1:10:56). Host: Chris Ryan Guests: Andy Greenwald, Lucas Shaw, and Riley McAtee Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Ringer Podcast Network. As award season continues to pick up through the fall, make sure you're subscribed to the Big Picture podcast with Sean Fennessee. He and Amanda Dobbins will cover everything you need to know about this fall's Oscar contenders, and Sean will be interviewing the industry's premier directors leading up to the awards. You can listen to his conversations with Bong Joon Ho,

Noah Bomback, Antonio Banderas, and more on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, thanks for listening to today's episode of The Watch, really jam-packed show today. I talked to Andy Greenwald about the Mandalorian's first episode. I talked to Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg about the streaming wars and why we maybe shouldn't be calling it streaming wars. It was a great conversation about Apple and Disney Plus

and Netflix and all the other streaming services that are vying for your attention and your wallet. And then I talked to Riley McAtee about last night's incredibly controversial episode of Survivor, one of the most complicated, complex episodes of a reality show that I've ever seen, and I think one that people will be talking about for a long time. So I was really glad to break that all down with Riley. Before I let you go and get you into the podcast, if you haven't yet, we just wanted to drop a quick reminder to make sure you're

following the watch on Twitter at the watch pod. And if you're on Facebook and you want to join in on the conversation, we have a really fun Facebook group. So just search the watch on Facebook. And we want to provide an opportunity for all of you to connect with other Branskis. So come on, hang out, join in on the conversation. Greenwald and I try to get involved when we can. Without further ado, let's get into the watch. 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.com. And joining me on the other line, it's the Mandilorian, Andy Greenwald. Oh, oof. No? Come on. What is supposed to be like, you want me to have something about like blurgs? I mean, we waited 42 years for a Star Wars TV show.

I mean, I like, come on. I expected you to at least hum some of the jub-jubs on from the end of Gen. Andy is here. We're going to talk about the Mandalorian's premiere episode, which came out on Tuesday night on Disney Plus. I'm also going to be talking to Riley McAtee about last night's very controversial episode of Survivor,

and then Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg is joining me to talk a little bit about the Apple and Disney rollouts that we've had over the last couple of weeks, but Greenwald, and how are you doing? I'm great. I'm great. I'm calling you from the parking lot. I think there was some confusion. I think people thought that I was calling

into the show from a lot of different parking lots. And I want to assure everyone that no, it is always the same parking lot just outside of where we're doing post-bogg. Oh, wait, like on the Facebook group, people are like, which parking lot is Andy at today? Is it like a Kroger somewhere? Mine was a Vons.

But those days are behind me. I'm fixed. Should we tell the people who's helping me an edit today? Should I have incredibly Borat voice my wife? It is amazing. Chris's wife is hanging out with me in edit today. And I did say right before we called that she was in charge. Yes.

So very curious what goes on while I'm out here talking to you. All of a sudden, Claire Daines is going to be in your show. Fine. Fine. She'll be excited about the Latigra needle drop. I know that. She'll be supportive. All right, man.

So like you alluded to, we've been waiting quite a long time. We've probably been speculating about what a Star Wars TV show could look like for as long as we've been potting. We've said this is kind of. happen. It has to happen. The market is just right there for it. And now it's finally here after this long, long wait, after so much speculation, the Mandalorian, kind of a funny, like, you know, you expect with Star Wars, like you're anticipating it. It's Christmas when the movies usually come out. You're like, oh my God, I'm going to see another Star Wars movie. Yeah.

This was more like slipped under the, like, the big thing was the announcement of the service and the service going live. And the Mandalorian was right there when you log, in, but it was almost like a kind of quiet, under the quiet of night that it came out. Yeah. Yeah. And for some, it was, you know, the next night entirely thanks to Doug's work as head of IT. That's right. Doug, we really said Doug, Doug up to fail there. I feel like we called too much attention to his new gig. Who could have foreseen potential rollout problems when you have 10 million people sign up for service that becomes available to everyone at the exact same minute. It's really, it's remarkable. I guess maybe third time to jump, we'll figure this out.

But I was able to sign up and I was able to watch. And do you want my, do you want my, just like my log line, like my kind of like quick pitch? Yeah. What a fucking weird show. It's so weird, right? Like. But I feel like you don't mean this in the Twin Peaks, the return way. No, I think everything about this is super strange and super interesting. My opinions about it are right down the middle mixed. I think there are things that were great. I think there are things that weren't great. I think it's absolutely watching it. And I think this is sort of what you were alluding to when you were talking about that Christmas feeling is like that feeling that washed over everyone, I'm sure, was in the first few minutes of, oh, wow, okay, this is really

happening. And it's Horatio fans in a Muppet suit. Yeah. Like, this is it. This is what we're doing here, huh? It's really weird. And I'm only harping on the weirdest to say, for all the confidence we had that it would be good, it could be good, and it still probably should and will be good based on the, you know, just the resumes and the talent and the point of view that they're bringing to it, the challenges baked into something like this, you know, to satisfy all the quadrants of the fandom as well as the expectations of Disney and the expectations that are on it as the first streaming service. It's, and it is super strange. It is 38 minutes, and are these the 38 minutes that I think anybody expected to be shown as,

representative of this whole brave new era in the storytelling? I'm not sure. Yeah. I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, we got and we're going to talk about them. I don't really think of this episode, you know,

typically with a pilot, it's a real statement of purpose. I think that usually like it, it's far more expansive. Most pilots, even though there's a lot of planet hopping and we meet a bunch of different characters and the obvious, like, the tension of discovering this, you know,

spoilers for anybody who hasn't watched the first episode of Mandalorian, but discovering this baby Yoda at the end of the episode is like, oh, and here are the stakes, this game-changing galaxy-changing revelation. But there's something about it, even though I am definitely a guy who fucking loves the Wild Bunch and Yo-Gimbo and Sergio Leone movies and Star Wars stuff that I felt a little, I guess, cold about it. Like, I liked it, but I felt a little cold. And I was trying to figure out, like, so what's that about?

And here's what it is. It's exactly what you said. Yeah. The first interaction you see is a guy in a helmet. interacting with Horatio Sands wearing a blue alien costume. The next interaction is a guy in a helmet talking to Carl Weathers about Imperial Bitcoin. The next interaction is Nick Nulte dressed as a walrus talking to a guy in a helmet. Then the guy in the helmet kneels in front of a British blacksmith also wearing a helmet.

And then there's a shootout with a self-destructive robot and a mute baby Yoda. So if you put all those things together, it's not the most, it's not exactly dashboard confessional levels of emo going on. looking for Alaska. It is so strange and a lot of kind of into the idea that it does not subscribe to any normal, whoever is behind creative at Disney, Disney Plus, or the people of Lucasville have never made TV shows before, or John Favro, who, you know, I knew he was, quote, unquote, behind this. I never really noticed or paid attention to the fact that he was sole credited screenwriter of the pilot. He hasn't written TV. So it's kind of interesting, but it's not

going to be formulaic. I'm not against that. If you have a main character, you should see choosing a character who is not just in a helmet for the entire 38 minutes, but who says early on, I never take my helmet off. With Pedro Pascal, are we sure that was him? Did they cast him later after they shot this and he did the voiceover? Because it is just such a, it's one of those basic rules that, sure, we should flout it, and we should try and see what happens. But seeing a hero's face or protagonist's face so you can emotionally connect and relate to them is kind of crucial.

And it's wild that it's just an icon. iconic, iconically branded helmet. Yeah, as far as much as Star Wars as this planet-hopping, galaxy exploring saga, I really do think about Mark Hamill and Daisy Ridley's, like, wet eyes. Like, they're innocent,

kind of, like, taking in the world. I mean, this is a story for the first time that's, at least right now, being told from the perspective of someone closer to Boba Fett or Han or like a kind of grizzled cynical veteran, whereas usually the avid, like we have an audience entree

into the world of Star Wars from the perspective of the Ray character or the Luke character. So that's a cool shift. Like, I'm into it. I think that we can't be, we can't be mad that we're getting

what we asked for when we're like, I want a more grown-up, a more cynical and more adult Star Wars, a world-weary Star Wars, and then we get it. We're like, well, that left me cold. I feel bad for saying that. I agree with that.

And I do want to come back to this idea of like the sort of grizzled Western for sequence of the pilot. It's not just that we can't relate to someone whose face we don't see. It's a little bit deeper than that. Like, I say this to you, as someone who once on this podcast,

I believe, went through the definition of the 12, as in the 12 most powerful X-Men, circa 1992, in Chris Claremont's iconic run. Yeah, I think they, you know, you actually broke iTunes with that, with that breakdown. As someone who has said that publicly, I know where I stand.

And let me just say, what's a Mandalorian? Are we a little late asking this question? But like, what's that about? So, like, this is... I googled it. It is a word that was never actually said in the Star Wars movies.

It generally has... I mean, everyone knows Boba Fett, and then people said that's a book, and that's something that's been, I guess, explained in the Clone Wars cartoons, which, you know, sorry, I've not delved into, something.

So that's a tricky one because I can understand what a bounty hunter is, but I don't know what the cultural significance of it is. And secondly, I don't care about units of currency, Doug. The focus on that is also a little bit weird. And maybe that stuff is specific, you know, one segment of the fandom that they want to satisfy people who have for years been wondering about that.

But again, that's kind of a tricky bridge into it, entertaining and cool TV show. Yeah, I mean, I think we've talked before about, I think we've talked about this in relationship to the expanse. There's lots of other examples of this. I think you find it as much in fiction as anything else, but when you're reading sci-fi, there's like hard sci-fi

where the thing that's in the foreground is really mechanical world-building, you know, how does this work, what's the currency, what's the economy, what's the transportation system, what's the this, what's the that,

talking about like all the, like, basically like a kutreman of like the world that they're building rather than like the people within it necessarily. Now that's like a pretty simplistic definition of it, but I would, if there's hard sci-fi,

I would actually say that, Mandalorian felt like pretty hard Star Wars. You know, it was, it felt like of the novelizations and of the canon and of clone wars and of a lot of the kind of ephemeral, uh, off-site meetings taking place to talk about like the really hardcore shit of this of this universe and talk about like, how would you pay a bounty hunter in the days after the, the rebellions victory over the empire? How would you do this? How would you do that?

Like even that guy, even Horacea O'Sand being like, I got a, dump out my thorax or whatever, like getting into like the personal plumbing of different species was I was like, we're really fucking doing this man, huh? There's not a lot of like, Anne Owen and Uncle Ben going on here. This is like really,

this is really like, how does this alien go to the bathroom? Okay, so just to be clear, it's... All right. What did I say? You know, so he said Uncle Ben. That's Spider-Man.

That's right. I may have just owned myself by admitting all of them. No, I think I got owned first. I think I hear Mallory Rubin's footstep. So here's another take on it, right? What was interesting about this, and again, I do believe the credit for this to tell, obviously Dave Faloni, who's worked in the Star Wars universe, mostly on the cartoon side directed this, future episode.

Chow and Tychoa Wittiti directed, I think, an alley. So other minds came into this, but this was Fabros thing. This was hitched to them that they picked up on. And because of that, it really reflects thinking of what interest him about what made Star Wars special and about what it could be in 2019. And so in terms of what made Star Wars special to him, I think a lot of it is really represented. It was really well done.

But all the stuff you're talking about, like, let's really see this vision of this world that we created. He probably did as well. And the fact that the show ends with a sequence of like those deep 70s, almost Frank Frisetta style of the characters, that's that vibe. It's a vibe of a world that we always contributed to Star Wars, but it was never really 100% in the movies. It was really the action figures in the world

that we imagined around them or the stuff flies. And I feel like that forward. Yeah, the other thing... I also think he's clearly... Oh, go ahead. Well, I was just going to say the other thing I think is incredibly promising as the Werner Herzog scene. Right.

Yeah. So, I mean, just the fact that they've got this, like, guy still holding the torch for the empire out in the outer rim, looking for this thing with this... weird doctor, and they really let Herzog kind of just over-enunciate and put mustard on every last piece of sourcrow out there. It's really awesome.

That's all really exciting, and Gina Caron are showing up later is exciting, too. But the other thing that he took from the modern sensibility is a little bit of the, we all laugh at ourselves a little bit now in pop culture, Marvel Universe version of it, right? Like, there are laughs in Star Wars, but they're really, like Harrison Ford cracking wise. They aren't meta. They're not, you know, it's not commenting on itself in more recent times. So that kind of humor coming from Horatio Sans or having Brian Pusain, not always in the best ways, but it feels like, okay, so we're going to hold this into the Star Wars world now

in the kind of marveling wink-wink way. Okay, we're going to do that. What was striking is that is the one piece of the sort of contemporary way of telling genre stories that didn't seem to make its way into this, which is other than that mask smelling a woman in the... Which is really noticeable and odd. Right. Yeah.

No, I have no counter to that. There aren't any women in the show yet. I mean, we got the armor. Yeah. When you... And that might be also an example of you hire someone who's, you know, a 50-year-old dude who's just like, here's my version of Star Wars.

And it's like, okay, I guess we're doing that. And I mentioned Gina Carano's joining the cast at a later date. But it did feel like... It felt sort of strange because what the episode I felt like wanted to do on some level was be, wait to repeat to my wife later, to be Metroid. And do you remember the Nintendo game Metroid where you're playing this like, androgynous mask sci-fi hero and at the end of the game, groundbreaking for people who read Nintendo Power Magazine 30 years ago? And this felt like, okay, we're watching someone in a mask, take off the mask and surprise us.

You know, surprise us with who's underneath. But we know it's Pedro Pescal, which, you know, in itself, the show felt to me pitch between a very clearly why he's the right person. is the right person for the job and why we're watching the show right now. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that given its runtime, given the fact that they're airing two episodes this week, so the next one goes up, I would imagine, at midnight tonight, and then it'll be a Friday show going forward. It almost felt to me more, I mean, not that I can claim to have ever really truly experienced this, but a lot of the Star Wars and Indiana Jones stuff that came out of the early Lucas days was deeply indebted to serials that Spielberg and Lucas grew up watching,

when they were kids. True. And that had a lot more of, I don't think it was as cliffhanger based. I think it was almost like you would get to go see these things and like they were like chapters. But they didn't feel necessarily like the way I think now episodic television has been weaponized for binge watching

and also to dominate conversation. With the exception of the very last shot of this episode, there was not a lot of like, well, table flip moment, that's going to be a game changer for everybody. You know, it was a pretty westerny vibe. And in that, there was a lot of space. There was a lot of walking around.

There was a lot of, like, stolen glances. But then at the end, we got that moment. I'll be curious to see how they dole out basically, like, story revelations over the course of the season. And if it feels a little bit more like, you know what, we made a cool, like, we're going to make a cool Star Wars series for more than two seasons probably. So, like, we're going to have to, like, kind of generate activity as we go along. Yeah, and by the way, what you're describing as a model sounds pretty good to me. And I've got to say, my reaction is really just thought as we get you to hear it. And frankly, if this is the show, if it sticks around this 38-minute runtime, which I love,

and it's flying from planet to planet and, you know, has a space battle like this is a very pleasant and not at all difficult watch, and I'm on board for that. And even if I wasn't, the curiosity alone, a quick question for you, maybe I'm the only one who ever had this. you mentioned earlier the big review Yoda who's a 50 year old baby is this going to be a Daddington thing

no I almost that's why I chuckled because I almost went down that path but I decided not to I maybe I'm alone in this I guess I never knew for sure that Yoda was an alien I always thought he was just a really old Oh you thought he was mad old but was like

he was like Mel Brooks at one point but then got smaller and smaller? Yes, or that there was something about, like, since Jedi can live a long time, that, like, if Obi-Wan, if Alex had lived forever, Ehrlich would get more and more stupid, his ears would get bigger, and you would look like that. Right.

Like, that maybe, you know, this was early days. We didn't have the full repertory company of the tentacle Jedi. There is no Wikipedia for us, yeah, right. So I guess this is, for me, it's the first confirmation that Yodas were just Yoda, right? I don't think there's a ton of, of on-screen information about,

because there was like another Yoda in one of the prequels, and I guess we're supposed to assume that Yoda and that Yoda got, had a baby, right? Whoa. I feel like we're really on Dinge Mode's Corner right now. I got the feeling from Mal and Jason that a lot of what they were going to be talking about would be Yoda sex, so I want to respect the brand.

I'll leave that to them. That's cool. But I guess what I do need to know from them and maybe we should do a cross. It is just an alien that's green and has funky years and has a long babyhood. Like, I thought that what made Yoda special was that he was some Jedi master. But if he's special, he's a Jedi master who's also a magical special Christ-like green alien baby, what does that mean?

I honestly don't know, man. I wish I had an answer. I mean, I hope the show answers it, because otherwise it's just going with a green baby to make us all go. Oh. Well, I think what it is also the most fascinating part about this. So this series is set before Force Awakens. And this is a question that I think is going to be central to Disney Plus's Star Wars and Marvel programming is in the past when there has been non-movie storytelling going on.

There has been hints and faints at, well, it's equally important. What happens in Agents of Shield could have. what happens in the next Captain America movie or something. And they never... Jury says, false. Yeah, they never really committed to that. This is very much like, I think we've made this comparison before, but it almost feels like back in the early 2000s

when magazines were first developing websites, and they were like, we definitely want to have some really cool stuff on digital, but we're actually never going to really do anything of significance outside of the print version. This is different for Disney because... You're describing my life at Stint. Yeah, but this is different for Disney. Disney is actually...

actually, this is the most significant investment they've made, you know, in a really long time. Bob Iger has talked about how this is the biggest project he's worked on in 45 years of working at Disney. So what happens in the Mandalorian could impact what happens going forward with the Star Wars saga movies. Well, it's also the same thing with Marvel. Like the thing about the Shield Show and the Daredevil

and the Defender's World and Netflix is that those came from Marvel TV when it was run by a different wing of the company. It was like Pearl Mudder controlled it. and Jeff Lope was running it, and now all of it has been consolidated under Kevin Feige. And so that's why we're having these big flashy shows on Disney Plus, starring the actors from the movies, and the idea that they are all connected now, officially. Yeah. The thing that's interesting about the Star Wars Canada expansion is that there's obviously been no shortage of Star Wars content for the last 40 years

since the original trilogy, or even since the 20 years since the prequel trilogy. But all of it was always a little bit raised eyebrow. they could undo it at any time. All the novels, all the cartoons, all that stuff. Now they've made these next three movies. Now they're continuing to expand and expand with various movie franchises and certainly now with the show. This is now all for whatever it means in 2019. This is all official. This is the story now. Right? Because I think there were many books saying, now we know anything in this fictional realm we're talking about what officially happened. And I wonder if that will make people more excited because, you know, we're built to celebrate stakes these days,

or the bloom will come off. Yeah. Because it's more interesting to be, it's more exciting to have things be unknown than officially known. That's the thing. I think in the same way, to take it back from the beginning

where we talked about like the wide-eyed wonder that we usually approach Star Wars events like events with, it fell a little low stakes ultimately, which is I think actually fine. It's fine to not, you don't always have to blow up a planet at the end of something. But it'll be interesting to see how they sustain the low-stakesness with it or if they feel like they need to up it

and bring in something that could change our perception. of the story. It's also, as much as anything else is, a completely clear and almost perfect, not just these franchises have changed, but how fandom has changed. Because Star Wars was a universally beloved series of film because you could become space hero. Right. That's on some level. That's all it was. And if you could, and then if you were a certain kind of fan or super fan, you would say, well, how does money work? What's the financial system connected? You didn't need to know that. And the movies didn't need to tell you. It didn't matter. It was just a question to be answered later by people who cared or who were obsessed.

Now, the currency is knowing that stuff. Yeah, it's about, it's about hard star. Hard Star Wars is Star Wars. Just caring about like, oh, it's nice that this hero from nowhere did this thing. That's great. Did you know that whose dad was? Like, that isn't what this is about anymore. No, and I think that, you know, the people making it certainly realized that. And the people who are paying money to sign up for the service and to watch the movies certainly know that now too. It's just, it is still notable shift, you know, especially for a

franchise that defined one era of fandom for a generation, ours. And, you know, now we okay, boomer ourselves into abstraction and we better get on board learning about galactic credits, man. Okay, boomer. Like, is there something better he could have used that metal for the a little shoulder thing? Like, right? I don't know. Yeah, like, it doesn't seem like that guy wants a lot. You know what I mean? Does that dude go to West Elm? I mean, he doesn't, seem like he has like a cool, spacious open floor plan apartment that he's trying to decorate. Like, if I

go back inside, which I'm about to do, and say to your wife, Chris got a bonus at work, but he spent it on a new shacket. She would not be surprised. Is that? She would not be surprised. She often will say, what's this box from Amazon? And I'm just like, oh, foiled again.

Oh, it's the worst. It's the worst when the boxes arrive. Yeah. I bought yourself something new, did you? No boy. Andy, so we'll talk on Monday about Watchman and Mandalorian episode two. Yeah, I didn't even receive. This is why this is a servicey podcast. I didn't know there are more episodes coming.

I'm ready. Yeah, there's, it's PTV. There's always more episodes coming. All right, man, talk to you soon. Amen. God bless Pran. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Pepsi. There are a lot of things to celebrate these days in pop culture,

and Pepsi can take all of your celebrations to the next level. Whether your favorite show returns for a new season, your favorite director releases a new movie, or your favorite band drops a new album, when it's time to celebrate, it's time to crack open a Pepsi. So, Kai, this week, it's my birthday on Sunday. Oh, happy birthday. Thanks.

I wasn't fishing for compliments, but I think what I will do is watch Eagles Patriots. Great. I have a Pepsi. And then maybe have another Pepsi to refuel and then go see the Irishman. That sounds like a great birthday. If the Eagles lose and the Irishman is a sad meditation on aging, it's probably going to be a bad birthday. But that has nothing to do with Pepsi. It has everything to do with my state in life.

Pepsi, the official sponsor of the NFL, reminds you to always be celebrating. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, the new action-adventure game from Respawn Entertainment coming November 15th. Jedi Fallen Order is the Star Wars game that you've been waiting for, taking place between Star Wars Revenge of the Sith and Star Wars A New Hope. You play as Cal Kestis, a Jedi Paduan turned fugitive. After narrowly escaping Order 66 and the Jedi Purge, you're at a quest to rebuild the Jedi Order.

Weill the lightsaber, hone iconic force powers, and complete your training to become a powerful Jedi all while staying one step ahead of the Empire. Become a Jedi on November 15th in Star Wars Jedi Fallen Order, available on Xbox One, PS4, and PC rated T-14. All right, I'm so glad to be joined on this week of all weeks by Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw, who is my favorite person to read.

And when it comes to thinking about the streaming wars, Lucas, thanks so much for coming back on the watch. Great to be back. I was just asking you if it had been a busy week for you. But I guess that sort of leads me one of the first questions I had, which was, so what did you start writing about all this stuff professionally? Eight or nine years ago? Right.

So have you noticed, like, is there a market difference between the way in which this, quote unquote, this town operates now that it is kind of a tech hybrid town versus the way it did when it was more of an entertainment industry town? I just sense that among the executive class, there's a lot more uncertainty and anxiety and the lines between everything have been blurred. Agents who used to be film agents, especially if they represented writers now. I mean, they probably still belong to their film literary departments, but they're also selling TV shows because there's just so much more business there.

Sure. And the same goes on executives. People are just adding responsibilities because every company is transforming in one way or another, either to become more like Netflix or to move away from being a network It can just be a studio that creates opportunities for people who are really ambitious, really thoughtful, to essentially land grab or figure out what they want to do or try something new. Sure. I mean, I would imagine that also the information flow is different now, too, because tech companies have such a different way of doing business necessarily than like a studio does. Is that right?

Yeah, or how screenings are done, how information is distributed. You know, you saw with Apple around the release of TV Plus, they were. really controlling about what information came out or didn't. Or just look at the contrast, Apple TV and Disney. So leading up to Apple TV Plus, Zach and Jamie, the two guys running that Apple TV studio, along with Eddie Q, the Apple Services boss, overseeing that service. They don't really do interviews. I think Zach and Jamie did one interview with Joe Adelian at Vulture,

but that, I think, again, ran after the service came out. They'd held a press conference for a morning show. They didn't invite everybody. They didn't invite me. there was a limited amount of press around that, whereas with Disney, they had two executive press days the week leading up to it where Bob, at least in Burbank, Bob Eiger came out and said a few words to us. And then Kevin Mayer, who's really in charge of Disney's D to C initiatives, gives a whole spiel and presentation. And three of his deputies give presentations. You know, Bob Eiger is in the midst of also doing a book tour.

And so he does all these interviews. He was on the cover of Business Week. The week that Disney Plus came out, he did interviews with a bunch of other magazines. And so Disney just has a more traditional entertainment approach. It's still very controlled. All communications at Disney run through Bob Eiger's head of communications who, you know, people do not step out of line when dealing with Niemuka. But Apple just doesn't do that at all.

Yeah. And it's the difference between being a tech company and an entertainment company. And Netflix is somewhere in between. It started off probably being more like Apple, but has some Disney components. And I think now Netflix realizes they've got to do more press because so much attention is going to other people. So that kind of leads me to my first official question, which was about the perception of the two rollouts. Yeah.

I feel like just from my small circle of friends or entertainment industry watchers that Disney is viewed as more successful rollout than Apple. I don't know exactly why. I mean, obviously Disney had a huge content library that they unleashed upon people. And immediately, I think all my friends with kids were just like, I'm overwhelmed by how perfect this is. And what a great service this already is. and also I get to watch The Mandalorian and I get to watch Simpsons. Whereas Apple was kind of snickered at.

I think none of those shows really leapt out as incredible creative accomplishments even though each one of them has their own merits. And also I think there was a little bit of like, what's the point of this? And why did it come out now? And what was the sort of thought here? From your perspective,

did one or the other handle the rollout better? The response, I think, is exactly what you said. and I don't know how much of that is because of how they handled it and how much of just because how entertainment fans and people in the entertainment industry were going to respond to it. I think there was always going to be skepticism of Apple, a tech company, an interloper, what are they doing here? Having been through this process already with Netflix,

which has been very successful but has also engendered a lot of resentment, I think people were ready to jump on Apple and question it. Whereas, especially because, Apple and to your then to the question about the rollout, I just think Apple did a truly dreadful job of communicating what they were doing and why, because the Apple strategy is very simple and it's going to work, in my opinion. It's just, it's not an entertainment first strategy. It's this is one part of a larger initiative here. Right. How do you communicate that to people? Right. And that's not what entertainment people want to hear. If you have a show with Reese

Witherspoon and Jennifer Anderson, you don't want to tell them well. You're really just here so that we can sell some extra phones and maybe make a couple extra billion dollars on services. But if your show doesn't work, it's okay because we have all these other things going for us. Whereas Disney made telegraph for years, and especially over the past couple of years, Bob Iger would say over and over again

that this was the biggest initiative that he had undertaken since taking over a CEO of Disney, bigger than buying Pixar, or at least biggest kind of outside of buying a company, certainly the biggest new strategic initiative. Right. And I think that helped communicate severity. I think Disney also just people have positive associations with that brand.

They're good at PR. So people were both predisposed to liking Disney, and then Disney handled it well. And so those two things together meant that there's a lot to like. And Disney was very careful. I mean, so Disney released 10, 12, something like that, original programs day one. Everything but the Mandalorian is very forgettable. Sure, yeah. Or at least almost expressly for children.

Yeah, or it's behind the scenes of something at Disney. They took one big swing and they made sure that was good. Right. Whereas Apple had three or four, and morning show was definitely the biggest, but C with Jason Mamo is arguably just as expensive just because of all the effects. And by some accounts is the most popular. Yeah. But for all mankind is the space.

Apple had an – Apple was convoluted from the start, which just made it harder for people to wrap their heads around it. And people didn't know the branding on it. It's also confusing because they have the TV app on the TV box with the TV Plus app as an addition to the TV app. But it's not in iTunes if you open up your laptop. Yeah. It's like the HBO problem where they have HBO and HBO Go and HBO Now that's going to be HBO Max. And people don't know what serves what purpose.

Yeah, it seems like Disney is everything you could possibly want and Apple is stuff you're not sure you need. You know what I mean? And so tell me a little bit about, I think we've talked about this before on the pod. But what is this Apple strategy? Well, how is TV Plus part of a multi-year, multi-facet plan for them? Well, they have, so in any given year, I think the numbers Apple sells about 200 million devices. Most of those are phones. That's where they make most of their money.

The growth in phone sales has slowed. And so they're still making tons of money. Nobody's worried about the future of Apple. But one of the things that they've seen an opportunity to do is to make money on what they call services. That's everything from your iCloud account and extra space that you buy there to iTunes to Apple now Apple Music, to AppleCare, anything that you're sort of an add-on to your physical product. And that is a really fast-growing source of money for the company. And they have seen from other tech companies that bundling services like that is really effective. You know,

think of Amazon Prime in some cases as a services bundle, right? You really go to Amazon to shop, but you pay $100 or whatever it is a year in order to get free two-day shipping, and then oh, on top of that, you get movies, and oh, on top of that, you get music. And Apple's doing something similar. They're currently charging discreetly for each one of those, but I think it's inevitable that you may eventually be able to say,

here's an extra $100 a month and you get all these things, or as they've done with TV Plus, if you buy a new device, you get it for free for a year. If you send it for the credit card, you get this for six months, whatever. So anybody, so in, oh, over the next year, maybe not all the 200 million people, but a lot of those people are gonna get a free Apple TV Plus, it's a funnel in, and then a decent number of those will keep it,

and they'll just have a user base. The other strategic part that's specific to video is for years, Apple has tried to create this TV app, which is separate from the TV box, which is supposed to be your home screen, where you go to watch TV, and that pulls in content, pulls in shows from HBO, from Hulu, from anything else you subscribe to.

And this TV Plus is just like another sprint sprinkle on top to try to get more people to use it, because my sense is that has not been successful. Right. So it hasn't been successful, like people have not been migrating over to Apple TV as their new cable box, essentially. Yeah, I think people are still using individual apps, and part of that is because they have not gotten some of the biggest, they've struggled to get some of the biggest players to feature their shows in that app or make it so that you can watch the shows within the app instead of kicking it out. This is a very technical thing where with some apps, if you

watch that, if you select that show in the TV app, you can stay in the TV app and watch it there. But with other apps, it'll actually, you select that show, but then it moves you into the other app. And you have to go sign into Cinemax or stars or something like that. Yeah, it's supposed to be seamless, but it's not always like, Netflix is one of the big holdouts where they don't want you watching a Netflix show anywhere but Netflix.

And so if you tell somebody, yeah, you can find a lot of shows in this TV app, but you're not going to be able to watch Netflix there. You're probably not going to get people to use it. Yeah, let's talk a little about Netflix, because I saw a thread that was going on on Twitter, where you were responding to something that Derek Thompson from the Atlantic, I believe, had been talking about. But I think he was initially responding to something that you had written. It was essentially about the idea that Netflix, after all these sort of changes in the landscape, is now weirdly an old-fashioned entertainment company. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Yeah. Well, if you think about the biggest entertainment or all the streaming services that you talk about every week and that everybody's thinking about, okay, so you have Disney Plus, yes, Disney is the biggest entertainment company in the world, and let's not make it seem like Netflix is purer than they are. But Disney is also an ecosystem play. Disney creates these brands, and they want you to buy toys, go to their theme parks, go to the movie theater. It all feeds into one another. And the prospect of them making a profit just from Disney Plus seems very slight because of how cheap the monthly fee is and how much they're going to invest in it over time. AT&T is a phone company, and yes, again, HBO stands for quality and television, but if you were to, there's a reason that at every presentation, at the HBO Max presentation, AT&T executives go up there and say, if we can reduce churn on our phone company or on phone subscribers by 1%, this is how much extra money we make. So if people stay with AT&T because they get free HBO Max essentially.

Yeah. And so their primary goal, the primary goal of AT&T is to sell phone subscriptions. HBO Macs is a nice add-on to that. Apple, as we just discussed, their primary goal is to sell you a phone. Services are a nice layer on top of that. Comcast, cable and internet company. NBCUniversal is a big part of their business,

but again, their primary focus is selling you cable and internet, which is why one of the reasons that Peacock, their new streaming service, is going to be free to anybody who has a cable subscription, because if you have cable, they like you. Netflix just wants to sell you a service with movies and TV shows. It is the simplest, purest delivery of entertainment, you pay $10 a month or $12 a month, and you get access to this great library.

And that sense, it makes it weirdly a pure entertainment offering, unlike we see from these other companies, Disney is probably the closest because it is still generally an IP and character and story-based ecosystem. But Netflix is almost the closest thing to buying a movie ticket or buying just a pure piece of entertainment. Let's talk a little bit about The Mandalorian in the context of some of this. I want to get back to Netflix, but one thing that's, you know, the crown is coming on Sunday on Netflix. There's always, like, somebody's always tweeting at me like, hey, did you see this? It's like a bunch of people from Narcos, and it's set in Bolivia, and it's a cartel kidnapping story.

And I'm like, oh, I had no idea that existed. Like, Netflix, I think when I, now I've almost come to associate it with, like, the capacity to surprise me as much as anything else. Disney doesn't seem like they're in the surprise business. They seem like they're in the expectation satisfaction business. And so I wanted to talk about the Mandalorian in relation to that because, you know, on one hand, I thought it was incredibly satisfying. On the other hand, I thought about how I've experienced every other piece of Star Wars movie content in my life. I was never really a big, like, cartoons person with that. But they were usually like nine months of hot anticipation to go see at the opening night.

And I got like a text message from my friend just being like, oh, I think Madaloran's live. And then I went and like got it, you know? and watched it by myself and then kind of waited for everybody else to watch it so that I could start talking about it. It's interesting to see a company that's so good at eventizing things kind of let's slip this show out into the world

at like 945 Pacific Time or whatever time it went live. But you don't think that they turn the release of Disney Plus into an event? I feel like there was more press to the earlier topic of Disney Plus versus Apple TV Plus. There was so much around Disney Plus.

And the Mandela's, The Mandalorian was a part of it. It wasn't just about that piece of intellectual property because it was part of this larger story. But when Bob Iger appears at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, he does a panel with John Favro, who is involved in the Mandalorian because that is the centerpiece of the debut of Disney Plus. I think, look, Disney Plus would have gotten a lot of attention without any original programming just because it would have all the Pixar movies and a lot of the Marvel movies and a lot of Star Wars movies and Simpsons. I'm a Simpsons fan who was always confused as to where I should find the different episodes. Now it's very simple.

Wasn't there like a Simpsons app basically? They did the Simpsons world that they tried that was supposed to be kind of within FX. I never quite figured out how it worked. Some of the episodes were on Hulu. The fact that they're now all on Disney Plus really increases the odds that I'm going to watch the Simpsons moving forward,

which I know I'm getting way off topic here, but that to me is one of the best parts of the creation of Disney Plus and Hulu and the Disney strategy and what we're seeing in streaming right now is for so long you had Netflix and to lesser extent Hulu and kind of Amazon. And then everything that you wanted to see on TV, but you didn't watch live because we now watch everything on demand was hard to find. It was in different TV everywhere apps, so FX edits app and AMC edits app and all these different networks. And that meant that I just watched less of that programming because it was harder to find.

That's not true anymore. And I think that matters. That's not true anymore because the content that we're looking for is being made more by the Netflix, Disney's, and apples, or because the other content providers are starting to play a ball with these apps? Because a little bit of both, but primarily because these big media companies now have their own apps. And so if you want to know where to find Simpsons, yes, you might have to pay for something else, or if you are not paying super close attention, you might have to look it up.

But all of the Simpsons is going to be in one place. And you can find it there. All of the office is going to be in one place, and you can find it there. And that's going to be true for a lot of these different programs. and they're probably not going to move around as much anymore. No, I can't imagine. Until there's some other great revolution, how entertainment works. But especially if it's owned by that company,

like Friends is not going to leave HBO Max for a very long time, nor is Game of Thrones going to leave HBO Max ever, probably. What did you think of The Mandalorian as a flagship show? So I guess that if you change the context of it to make it be more like the Disney plus experience is actually what was being debuted and the Mandalorian was a part of that, then the Mandalorian has a little bit less pressure on it, despite the fact that it's this extension of the Star Wars universe and it's something that I would say probably

all of my Star Wars watching friends have been dying for for years just to see this kind of execution. As somebody who is a Star Wars fan, I'm really excited by it. I went in with pretty low expectations. Oh, you did? Just because Disney, the previous Disney Star Wars movies have not thrilled me, and I figured they would, it would be a,

perfectly satisfying project, but maybe wasn't that interesting. You know, John Favreau has made technically ambitious movies, but I was not particularly impressed with the Lion King. I don't think I watched Jungle Book, which I think was his other project. I just didn't see this as being like... The perfect match of like filmmaker and, yeah. Yeah, I didn't expect a story that captivated me, but it looks a lot better than I expected. And it certainly is more interesting to me than most of the other projects that I've seen out of Disney as a TV studio or as a movie studio in recent years.

Yeah, I think the thing that's tough to grapple with with Disney's success, 10 million subscriptions reportedly in the first week, is confronting the fact that I can underestimate the importance of Disney in people's lives, which I kind of remember as a kid going to the parks. and when you go to the parks is when you really feel the almost religious nature of fandom there where it's actually like a guiding light in a lot of people's lives and that it's an organizing principle and that it is what people do with their leisure time

is like engaged with Disney stuff where it's like I think because I don't have kids and also just because that was just the way things broke for me I kind of moved away from that so to see it come back and I you know with the Marvel movies and with Pixar movies and with Star Wars movies you're like tangentially aware that it's all under the mouse and everything. But it's really clear now.

Looking at that app, you're like, oh, my God, man, they own all this stuff. Well, that was why when they made that initial Disney Plus presentation, I think it was in March, or whenever that was, the Disney stock shot up, everybody in the room was blown away. Because when they offered the first look at Disney Plus, it was like Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Disney, National Geographic. Even Stevens. That's a lot. I mean, is it going to be enough to satisfy people long-term? I had no doubt that Disney would get out of the gate strong

because they have diehard fans, the people who will buy those annual passes, the people who show up for every movie, obviously. There are very passionate comic book fans, very passionate Star Wars fans, very passionate Pixar fans. The question becomes down the line, is there enough in the library to satisfy people?

Are there enough new programs? you know, three years from now, will they have ramped up the original programming enough, and will it be at a level that people keep coming back? The answer is probably yes, but that is where I think they run and do more of a challenge. They're not going to have it. They don't have a hard time selling it because they're the one big media conglomerate that has always had a brand. Time Warner didn't have a brand.

HBO is a brand within it, but still not as strong as Disney. And their brand is about to go through a revolutionist in a sense, because now there's going to be gossip girl reboots associated with HBO, which you wouldn't normally think. With regards to Apple, we don't really know what their television brand is per se other than expensive and sort of try to be all things to all people. But I was especially curious about whether or not you got the feeling like there had been a sense of whether or not these shows themselves and not the service were successful

or people were happy with them, either at Apple or around town? I've spoken with people involved in shows. The senses that is positive. I mean, Apple renewed those first four shows for new seasons. Most of those deals, I think, were done before they even came out. They just chose to announce it as a... I think they had announced morning show as a two-season thing.

Yeah, right? Well, it had been reported that they committed a two-seasons of morning show, And then of the other three, I believe that they had done deals already where they commit. I mean, especially early on with a new service, it would be a truly terrible sign for a show if Apple decided that they didn't want to make a second season. Yeah, right. But they're not giving anybody numbers. They're just directionally saying this is what we like or these are the markets where it's doing well.

Yeah. Most people seem pretty positive. I mean, I think that the thing Apple has going for it is that they'll have another wave of shows coming, you know, eventually with amazing stories and whatever else is on its way, that, if you look at Disney Slate for the next year or so, it's Marvel, Marvel, Marvel, Star Wars. It is like what you see now, it's just going to have more of it next year.

Whereas Apple, I mean, you know, they could very well find themselves something that really works. I guess the question is what works? What are they looking for? Are they looking for critical acclaim? Are they looking for a monoculture show that makes everybody say like, hey, it's Thursday night and the new morning show has gone live?

Like, I need to go do that. What do you think that they're looking for? They definitely want critical. acclaim. I mean, they were, they hired and were looking for awards people before they had a show out. They changed the release schedule or maybe even for the app to make sure that some of their shows could qualify for awards. And so they care about that. I think, look, Apple is sensitive to public opinion. They care what their fans say. They care what people say. They try and they try to claim that they don't, but they definitely do. Beyond that, I mean, look, what works is what

works for everybody else. What's interesting to me, as we see the sheer volume of new shows increase every month is how do you break through and what does like you brought up the crown coming out on Sunday yeah i feel like the noise around Netflix for the past a little bit has been much quieter there new shows and new movies don't necessarily capture quite as much of the cultural conversation in part because there's so much conversation about these new streaming services coming forward and what those mean yeah well i was going to ask you about the soft box office that we've been seeing this fall so far with like Dr. Sleep and Terminator, but let's talk a little bit about Netflix too, because if Disney judges their success by the success of like how this works

in this supply chain of experiences and products that we're offering in terms of like, go to Magic Kingdom and then you buy a T-shirt there of Groot and then you get the Disney Plus because you want to watch Guardians the Galaxy a thousand times or whatever, like they can track that. Apple, like you said, services, they want people on have phones and credit cards and everything else. Netflix, for the most part, because we don't really understand their numbers, is judged maybe unfairly by their stock price. And we've talked about this before, their quarterly reports and whether or not you expected them to go up or down. But like you were saying, I think Netflix also counts on a degree of cultural cachet and being part of a conversation.

And you feel like that's softening as well. I'm just, I don't know for sure, but they have benefited for so long from being kind of the only game in town. And I know Hulu is there, and they're very sensitive to moments when I say things like that. But Netflix was very clearly the biggest internet TV service. They kind of created the market. And that benefited them for just for a very long time because people would tune in just to watch that. It was the easiest thing.

They might go and try to watch something. And the FX app get frustrated, watch Netflix instead. Every new show that they released just got more attention because it was on Netflix. And I now see just as a journalist, some of that happening with Disney, where any time there's anything about Disney Plus or there's just more reader interest in it

than there was in stories about the cable business. And I just think Netflix will have to fight more for attention on those shows, especially in the U.S., we can't really speak to what's happening overseas. The rollout of these new services will be a little bit slower, and it's much harder to measure the zeitgeist in some of those places.

But will Netflix shows just take off and pop in the same way that they have consistently for so long. And I realize that there are a lot of Netflix shows that haven't worked. The company gets away with essentially burying large numbers of failed shows because they're releasing at such a volume that people can't keep up with it. Sometimes you don't even know. I don't even know. I anecdotally know people who've watched the Paul Rudd show,

but I don't know necessarily if it was successful. Right. You know, like it's hard to tell. Or El Camino, it seemed like there were a lot of people talking about it. Was it really Irishman is going to get a, has gotten a bunch of media attention because of Scorsese and De Niro and all that it means. But are people going to watch it when it goes on the service? Marriage story is going to be an Oscar contender, but it doesn't feel like a movie that a lot of

people are going to watch. It's still a small indie. Those two are specifically really interesting. A, because I think Irishman is something that might actually lend itself to a Netflix experience where if you have a life that you can't take three and a half hours out of it to go see Irishmen, chopping it up might actually make sense. I know people who, I know this is sacrilegist, watched Roma in that way, and we're quite happy to do so. And as far as marriage story goes, I mean, that film will likely get nominated for Oscars.

And I do wonder whether or not that's a movie that a lot of people would love to go see, but just this makes it easier. It makes the point of entry so much easier just to watch it on Netflix at home. Speaking of that, is there any correlation between all these services debuting, all these services putting so much stuff on them in the last couple of of weeks and the fact that no one went and saw Doctor Sleep or no one went and saw Terminator. Probably. Or is it also LSU, Alabama and the World Series? I just think there's so, I mean, certain executives like to say that Reed Hastings C of Netflix makes all sorts of ridiculous claims about our competition is sleep, our competition

is Fortnite, but the kernel of truth there is that there's- That's awesome. That's ridiculous. There is so much, there is so much noise out there competing for your attention. There's a record number of podcasts being made every year. There's a record number of TV shows being released every year. There's a record number of movies being released every year. There's more video games than ever. There's more apps than ever.

There's just so much calling for you that things have to really be marketed well and resonate with people to get them to show up. I think with Terminator, it's as simple as look at the last three Terminator movies. People are tired of Terminator. Just let the franchise die. Nobody needs more Terminator movies. Right. Because that is an established IP that people just clearly don't care about it anymore.

They voted with their wallets, yeah. But I don't think that Frozen 2 is going to suffer. Probably not. Because, you know, because of Disney Plus. Like, people will both watch Disney Plus at home and go to the theater and see Frozen 2. The Doctor Sleep one, that felt to me like people, the shining means so much in culture and has lived on and memes. But maybe not as much as like, I need to know what happened to him kind of wasn't as pressing. And I'd have to look up the box office.

Was the initial shining a huge hit? It was not a huge hit upon release. And, you know, I think that in terms of like I am literally the person it is marketed to. I like Mike Flanagan. I love the shining. And I would be interested in seeing his take on it. And I honestly just got turned off by the commercials. Yeah.

I honestly just didn't really love the vibe of it. It was like, I was like, that's not why I like the shine. and if this wasn't a shining extension, I probably wouldn't go see this movie. Did you go to see it? I haven't yet. I haven't gotten a chance to see it yet. And if they can't get you, then were they going to get?

Exactly. And that is a weird one where I feel like I'm slipping into, there are movies now that I'm like, I'll just catch it when it gets the Tome video, essentially. I'll read that, you know, where I'll watch it when it's on a streaming service. And that is the effect that we will likely see of the streaming service and that we've already seen,

because of Netflix, because of Hulu, And because of the way the movie studios have responded to that is the movies that work are bigger than ever. They are events. And then there's a whole lot of stuff that doesn't work that people will watch at home. So Disney's whole movie strategy is everything we release has to be huge. And in their case, sort of pre-branded where people know what they're getting. At least with Marvel, they're all stitched together. That's what everybody has moved toward.

With the exception of horror, and it used to be comedy, but even comedy now, comedy movies have not worked at the box office really in a few years, which is why you're just going to see probably a lot, you're going to see a comedy, like a good comedy movie Renaissance on streaming in the next few years. I'm sure it's what we've already seen with rom-coms where Netflix realized like, all those scripts. Oh, right. Yeah. People actually like romantic comedies. If you can make them cheaply and make it easy to watch at home, they will watch them.

You're going to see the same thing with comedy where you'll, it's sort of, in a way, what Adam Sandler has done with his movies on Netflix, you'll probably see on HBO Max or on one of these services somebody really nail. a bunch of comedies. They just give Sefrogan a five-picture deal for that. Right. And it's just like, go ahead and make neighbors or do whatever you want, actually, because we're not going to restrict you into anything.

What are we not talking about? I feel like I'm asking all the questions, but I wonder whether or not there's something that you're like, we're not touching on this and it's important. This is not something that is necessarily not being discussed, but something that has been bugging me a lot the last week, which is the phrase that we've taken to describe what's happening right now is the streaming wars, right?

Sure. It's convenient for us. I was messaging with a friend earlier about how this is sort of a false conflict. Huh. Because, yes, the fact that Disney is going to add or attract a bunch of customers, it's not good news for Netflix or it might not be good news for Hulu, which is part

of the same company. But it certainly feels like the real loser in all of this is cable. Because if you take it as a fact that people are moving from, one world to another, this will just accelerate that. Right. And I don't know a lot of people who are going to cancel the services they have now to buy Disney Plus.

Some really cost-sensitive consumers will do that. Well, we've talked about this. I think that happens next year. I think that if there's ever any kind of like bloodletting, it'll happen once Peacock and Max go live, right? But I just, yeah, I just don't see. I think there's going to be room for a lot of these services and this notion that like today, Disney says they have 10 million customers, their stock goes way up, Netflix's stock goes way down. It's a classic stock market reaction, but it's kind of short-term thinking, ignoring the longer-term

trend of what is really a transformational moment in the history of the entertainment business where all of a sudden your best shows will just not be on TV. Yeah. That is, I don't know if that's being remarked upon enough. That one, I mean, otherwise, you know, sports is still on cable. Yeah, I know, right. I mean, but sooner and later, I mean, the ESPN Plus Hulu Disney Plus bundle is like an really fascinating wrinkle to all this, right? Because it is the thing that I think some people will be like, you know, that's a pretty good deal.

I think I'll do that. I think I will finally cut the cord, even if it means I'm three seconds behind Twitter. And how does Disney manage to slowly migrate yet? all of those sports rights over to ESPN Plus. How is ESPN Plus going to be something that has more than the UFC and European soccer? Yeah. Once ESPN Plus has the NBA, has college football, things like that, it's a way more appealing proposition to people who are sports fans,

but not true, true diehards. Yeah. Yeah, and the international piece is the part that never gets discussed enough. Because that's where the actual growth is. Well, I mean, for these new services, the growth will be in the U.S. But for Netflix, Netflix is already at 60 million in the U.S. I don't know what effect all the anticipation around new services has on Netflix abroad, if it does at all. But the real concern for Netflix is how quickly do these services compete with me abroad

and how much more growth do I have? And then how does all these other companies approach that? Hulu has been around for 12 years, but has really never – It only went abroad once. It went to Japan. It didn't work. They sold it to a Japanese company and retreated. And Hulu has been a U.S. domestic service ever since.

Disney Plus is already in the Netherlands and Canada, but it goes to Western Europe next year. What does that look like? How quickly does it take these companies to learn sort of what Netflix did about selling a streaming service all around the world? So ultimately, we're not necessarily, I think, yeah, right. Like, the streaming war is as, like, a banner is probably inaccurate. Because we're not talking about, like, the end. Anchorman anchor fight, where there could only be one standing at the end of it. It's more the idea that we're probably, whatever, five years away from ABC, CBS, and NBC,

not being how we watch TV anymore. Right. Right. Do you see any interesting storylines developing that we should keep our eye on through the holidays, through the New Year, whether it's Richard Pluppler coming on at Apple TV likely, or any kind of, you know, the Hulu FX deal? Like anything like that that you think there's other shoes to drop, keep an eye on this. This is something I'm watching because it could have an effect on what we

watch next year. Yeah. That's a good question. The FX on Hulu was really interesting, but also sort of inevitable. I think we're entering the phase where it becomes more about execution than strategic shifts, because now the services are out. And so now what you have to do is make good shows and get subscribers. I mean, where the shoes haven't dropped, I guess, or with the services that don't exist yet. There are a lot of question marks around Peacock. Nobody is full sure.

What it's going to entail, how it's going to cost, how it's going to be distributed, how many original shows, how are they, you know, HBO Max and Warner Brothers and Time Warner, this is a little inside baseball, but I think there's probably a lot of shifts that will still happen about how that company is structured and who does what,

because you have multiple parts of the same organization buying movies and TV shows, and they swear they're communicating with one another, but that is always going to be messy, where Warner Brothers wants a movie project, and HBO Max wants a movie project, and they're essentially competing, and why when they're at the same place?

That makes no sense. How did they decide who was going to put up the Steven Soderberg movie, right? Yeah. So those are the two companies where more will change. You know, you brought up Apple. There's been speculation from the day that Zach and Jamie took that job

as to what their future would be at that company. A lot of people read into this Richard Plipler, former CEO of HBO making shows for them. Maybe he's going to displace them. It seems like he's going to make shows for them, and I have been told again and again that he's not interested in going to work for a big company like Apple in that role.

He likes living in New York, all these things. But that's not to say that there won't be changes. I mean, look, Apple got rid of one of their top deputies less than two weeks after they put out their shows. that's pretty unusual. And we got Oscar season. I know. So, I mean, this, again, will have another year of, can Netflix win an Oscar?

How do they mount their campaign? Do they go super traditional? Is the industry ready to accept them? If you look at the theater chains, clearly not. But voters might be. Yeah. I mean, in some ways, the Netflix movie I'm most curious about in the coming months is Six Underground. That one, which is a Michael Bay movie, is really interesting.

And then I don't know if it comes out next year or the year after. that, but they have a Dwayne Johnson movie with Ryan Reynolds and Galgado that is also very expensive, thought to be the first part of a new franchise. But every time Netflix has tried to create a movie franchise, it has not worked. The only ones they've gotten, they've sort of backed into. Well, I wonder whether or not, and this is a topic that I think, I can't tell if anybody cares about as much as Andy and I care about it, but I have to say that, like, I'm really glad I didn't, I couldn't watch all of Mandalorian on one night.

I'm really, it's really cool that we get to talk about it for a couple months. It's really cool that we get to talk about even in our own way, the morning show for a couple months. And, you know, if everybody gets to watch Six Underground in this kind of like fluid way, which obviously that's not going to be like you can binge watch it, but if it doesn't feel like an event, I wonder how they franchise things like that. Are you happy that you can space it out, or do you think you'd be happy that you can space it out if you didn't talk about and or write about it for a living. I've been thinking about this so much

because I was thinking about how I used to watch TV like five or six years ago and the phenomenon of rediscovering a show or discovering a show that was a couple years old and catching up with it and how impossible that feels now. Like how difficult even was for like Peekee Blinders, which is a show that I really liked. But like getting through even short seasons of Peky Blinders

to catch up with the new season coming out, and feeling like I wanted to be on top of it, I find it pretty stressful. And you do see shows like Patriot or whatever that, you know, are perfect shows that if they just stuck around, I wonder if they would have found their audience in the, oh, hey, you know, I was like looking at Amazon or I was looking at whatever, and I found this thing and I just watched all of it in a weekend, happens so much less now because there's always this inundation of something new. If I didn't have to talk about something twice a week, would I care?

if Mandalorian was all there or, I don't know. I find that it's impacted my critical mind a lot more than I ever thought it would because I think more in terms of seasons than episodes. And so even with Mandalorian, I was just like, well, it's the first episode. You know, they're not going to give it all away now. They're not going to pull out all the stops right now. Whereas I think when you watch something like Ozark, you're like, I'm thinking about this thing almost in its totality, or I'm thinking about this in like four or five episode runs because I'm so cracked out watching the next one and the next one and the next one. What about it? you?

I prefer weekly. Yeah. I like having time to digest, talk with friends, go back to it. I like having particular nights or times where I know I'm going to watch a certain show. It means that it means a little more to me. A lot of the Netflix shows will come and go or I'll forget. There are ones that I really care about. Like, Peaky Blinders, I had been up on, and I was then able to finish that new season.

but I did it in dribs and drabs because it was sort of when I had the time to do it or like I'll start something and I'll often not finish it because of that release schedule like there's this absurd hip-hop competition show on Netflix, rhythm and flow. I really like it.

But because it's all there, I'll go and I'll watch it one episode one day and then I'll wait a week and a half and then I'll maybe watch another one. There's no consistency to it. There is something nice because that weekly release

builds anticipation. Now, there's only so many shows you can do that for. But I'm happy to pick the like two or three or four or whatever it is and say, okay, these are the shows that I have time to watch right now. I know when new episodes come. And it's not like this pressure that I'm somehow falling behind on it. Right. Which will feel, I mean, look, I don't know how this manifests itself,

but in terms of things to talk about next year and especially the year after that, I think next year we will surpass probably 600 original TV scripted shows. The year after that, we could pass 700. At what point does that number stop? And how the heck do these companies... And is there ever any contraction? The assumption is that when there's a recession, Netflix will have to slow down

because a lot of the money is from borrowing cheap debt, that you'll see traditional media companies face a little more pressure to deliver profitability or maybe they'll have to change their strategy, I don't know. But absent some economic recession, which none of us really want to see, happen? Sure.

I don't know. This is the reality. Because, again, because we have companies funding things, not just to make money from the project, it becomes easier for them to just spend money. Because Apple, if they go from $2 billion a year to $5 billion year to $10 billion a year, it doesn't matter. To them, all it means is that we'll see more marketing and more promotion and how they put it out.

Disney, it matters more. AT&T, it matters more. but they are not viewing the video service as their main profit driver. And most of them are saying they're going to lose money on these initiatives for at least four or five years. Unbelievable. Well, we'll keep an eye on it. Lucas, thank you so much for coming by the watch.

It's always such an amazing conversation. We'll have to have you on again soon. Today's episode is brought to you by Ray Donovan. Returning to Showtime this Sunday, as Ray navigates the mean streets of New York, we find everyone's favorite fixer determined to become a better man. But past threats resurfaced that requires. the Ray of old. Once again cleaning up after his father, Mickey's mess, Ray is forced to confront a

dangerous enemy from their family's past while avoiding authorities hell-bent on putting the Donovan's behind bars. Will Ray do what is needed to fix his family's dilemma, or will he walk away and finally fix himself? Find out how it all unfolds Leav Schreiber and John Voight star in a new season of Ray Donovan premiering this Sunday at an all-new time of 8 p.m. Eastern only on Showtime. To try a free month of Showtime, go to Showtime.com and enter The Watch. The offer is for first-time subscribers only and expires December 31st. Now I'm joining my Riley MacTee. Riley joins me from time to time to talk about Survivor. Riley, thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is going to be the weirdest conversation you guys we've probably had. So last night's

episode Survivor will go down as I would imagine one of the most controversial episodes of this series. And it's been going on for almost 20 years now. And it will be talked about for weeks and weeks, even, it almost doesn't matter who wins this season because I think this is what we're going to be talking about. This is the defining moment of the season, for sure. For the people who don't know, or if you're going to listen to this because you're curious about what the controversy is,

obviously, like, there's a lot of nuances to Survivor gameplay that Riley and I will try to explain, but just to give you a broad setup of what's been going on. So, you know, Survivor usually starts out with a couple tribes, and then they get to a certain point in mid-season and there is a merge where all the remaining 15 or so players are on one tribe.

That's called the merge. So the merge was last night. were two episodes last night, the merge took place. And usually the merge is a time when there's a lot of conversation. Because people are coming back from different tribes, right? And they're like, okay, well, I used to be on an original tribe with this person, so which my alliance, there's a lot of conversation. Some people have never even met before at that point.

Some people have never even met before. Over the course of this season, in a way in which I don't think I'd ever necessarily noticed before in like my eight years of watching Survivor or whatever, I felt like they were teasing something. Oh, yeah. I felt like there was obviously, like they kept cutting away to a storyline that they... Because usually what happens in an episode of Survivor,

you'll see something, they'll tease something in the beginning that winds up being important at the end. You know, it's very efficient filmmaking. There was a storyline going on with a player named Dan, who they had returned to intermittently over the course of the season,

to show that Dan was it being inappropriate around camp. Right. He was handsy with women. He would put his hand around them when they're sleeping in the shelter. He'll like rub their scalp. If there's like sand in their hair,

he'll put his hand around their hips. That kind of uncomfortable touching that I think we've all at some point encountered. Yeah, witness or whatever. We're unfortunately encounter. Yeah. So Dan had been doing this. And Survivor, the film,

the people who are making Survivor made a point of showing this almost as if, hey, this is happening. Yeah. At one point, I believe earlier in the season, it does come up. Somebody mentions it in a, like, maybe a conversation or something like that. It comes up a few times. It's mentioned a few times. Hadn't been mentioned for maybe a week or two, right?

No. On the last episode, they had Elizabeth and Kelly sort of, you know, conversation kind of talking about it. They were doing the, like, oh, it's like this, and they, like, climbed on top of somebody. They were joking about it. But there was, they made a point in the last week's episode to show this happening again. Right. So we get to the merge and you feel free to jump in anywhere here to start to like kind of like iron me out chronologic. Sure. No problem. I'll do my best. So we get to the merge and essentially in the first episode of last night it becomes obvious that the sort of center of the episode is going to be a player named Kelly who I think you and I both are really big fans of. We really enjoyed watching her this season.

Yeah, really like her. She plays pretty hard. She's really, really smart. very good survivor player. I was thinking she was riding a little in the red. Yeah, playing a little too hard. Well, especially with this modern version of the show, right? Yes. She was very smart and playing very well, but also too obviously playing well

in the sense that everybody understood that she was a good player and that paints a target on her back, which sort of makes her maybe not as great of a player. We've had like a few people like this, actually sort of reminiscent of Zeke, who both seasons, like, made too big of moves and then got, like, the target pained on that.

And Kelly was very creative, but Kelly would be creative in ways in which you were like, if you had just done this simple thing, you probably would have made it to the end here. Yeah. So Kelly, the first episode of last night was largely about Kelly. Yes. And not only did Kelly find two hidden immunity idols, which was remarkable.

Yeah. But Kelly found herself in the center of this controversy about Dan, where she talked in her confessional kind of one-on-one interview with the cameras about feeling like Dan was making her feeling really uncomfortable. So she, in the first episode of the season, she and Dan were on the same track. And immediately she was uncomfortable with Dan's touching. She characterized herself as a germaphobe

and just doesn't want people touching her. And she brought it up to him. And he was like, okay, like, you know, he's kind of an older guy and he was like, this is just how I am, but I have to respect, you know, her wishes about how she's touched and not touched. And now in the last night's episode, if I remember correctly, she actually says

it's not actually that I am like afraid of being touched. I didn't like the way Dan was touching me. Yeah, she mentions another contestant Tommy and she's like, oh, when Tommy comes up and touches you it's not creepy and weird. It's the way that Dan does it that was really putting her off, making her very

uncomfortable. And so then she has, early in the episode, this conversation with Missy, who is another very strategic player. I liked her a lot coming into this episode. And they had never played on the same tribe before. And immediately, they bond over this Dan thing. Kelly, you know, is like, Dan's uncomfortable around me. And Missy is like,

oh my God, same. And Missy actually references something that happens at the merge feast. Like, usually when there's a merge thing, they get to the beach and there's like a huge dinner. And Missy was like, Dan was lying on the ground. They actually show that Dan gives like a quick, like, it's supposed to be like a speech, but Dan's essentially like, let's get drunk. He's like, let's get lit. Dan's like lying on the ground at one point and the cameras show him like touching Missy's feet and Missy being like kind of like obviously like get off of me.

That is so, that is just so gross to me. Like I don't want anyone ever touching my feet ever. Well, so this keeps going on. Missy and Kelly talk about how uncomfortable they are about Dan. This is where it got very like fluid for me where I was like I don't understand exactly what's happening because almost as soon as there seems to be a moment where Missy, Kelly, Elizabeth, and even Nora, I think.

Nora mentions that she's... She does Jamal, where she's like, oh, I'd love to get that guy out. She says he's disgusting or whatever. There seems to be like, okay, we're all in agreement that this guy should get voted out just for like sanity's sake, for like to keep things chill around camp. And then, so crucially, they talked to Janet about this. Janet, older woman, she's a lifeguard. She and Dan had bonded as to...

of sort of the older tribe mates. So Dan is her ally. But when Kelly comes and talks to Janet about how she's feeling and Elizabeth does the same, Janet says, you know, I haven't experienced any of this, but I can't ignore what they are saying. She makes a moral decision. And she is like, even though this is not the best thing for my game, voting out an ally, not in your best interest, she's like, we are going to do this. We have to get Dan out.

Somewhere in there, in a real, it's a real bang, bang, bang kind of cut. Lauren goes up to Missy and says Missy Kelly has been saying your name Kelly wants to get you out So after So the way that this happens is

I was just rewatching this Kelly has a very tear-filled confessional that will probably become iconic She is just has so much clarity about the situation And the complexities at play

And being like nervous about saying like I don't necessarily want this experience to find my survivor experience. And she talks about how she needed the reassurances from other women to make sure this wasn't just something that was isolated to her or that she was imagining it or that it wasn't that big of a deal.

It's when she talks to Missy and Elizabeth and whoever else and they all confirm what she's feeling that is super empowering for her. Now remind me, there is also a moment where a couple of the players get together and there is a discussion about playing it up a little bit, right? So then that happens is Missy and Elizabeth get together. And Missy is like, hey, I just talked to Kelly. This Dan thing is a thing. When you talk to Kelly, play it up.

Like say that, oh, in camp when you're sleeping, like he's like uncomfortable around you, et cetera. And so their goal at that point, Missy and Elizabeth's goal, is to make sure that if somebody is the target, is Dan and not them. but it's pretty clear that Missy was playing it up a little bit to Kelly. And Elizabeth then goes in very explicitly, like follows the marching orders and plays it up to Kelly. Yes. And after that, Nora comes to Missy and says, Kelly is throwing out your name.

And we get... It's Nora, not Lauren? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Lauren's like dead ass. Like, I've never been more real with somebody, like Kelly has said your name. You know what?

Their name sounds kind of similar. I mix them up. It's Lauren. You're right. And it's before. that that Kelly says, you're right, she doesn't want it to define her game. And she's a very strategic thinker. And she says, you know, I'm super uncomfortable around Dan. I'd love to get him out for camp life. But for her game, that's not the best decision. So she is still operating

under this plan where she wants to get Missy out because she recognizes that Missy is a major strategic threat in the game. So in your brain, this is kind of like where I kind of, Riley and I are being very, very many layers to it. It's very hard. I, you know, I, I think one of the things that really leapt out at me was the unreliability, you know, which is when you're watching like any documentary, it's like you have to understand that even the most objective-minded filmmakers are bringing their subjectivity to it. And in the context of a even two-episode night of Survivor, lots of stuff is getting edited. Chronology is getting shuffled. They're in Fiji. You're not like, oh, obviously it's later in this day. It's earlier the next day. There's a lot of like, I'm not sure

how this is working in what order did people talk to one another? Now, while all these conversations are happening, the fourth wall gets broken. Yeah. Because when Kelly gives this sort of tearful confessional, the producer from Survivor says, if this is an issue, you've got to

say so, and I will do something about it. Because it's not, this goes beyond gameplay. And Kelly is like, I understand. We have a cut to black. There's, like, text where it's like, the producers met with the Survivor players as a group, and then with the survivor players individually

and then specifically with Dan to remind him about appropriate behavior. And they characterized it as they gave him like an official warning about this. Yes, right. So this is playing out. They have an immunity challenge, which Kelly does not win.

And then it's really one of the most remarkable 20 minutes that I've ever seen because you basically go from a tribal council where Kelly brings two idols to the tribal. So we should say before this, Kelly wanted to get Missy out,

but they end up switching. Like, Jamal brings up the idea, and Janet also brings up the idea, and they actually do switch to Dan. Okay. So they're going to vote out Dan. Kelly was, and votes Dan, yeah. Yes.

It's not Kelly gunning for Dan, but she's like, okay, sweet, let's get out Dan. And they assume that Missy and Elizabeth and certain other tribe mates are also with them on this. But in the meantime, Missy, Elizabeth, Aaron, I think Elaine.

A couple of other people. Yes. Tommy and Lauren. All decide we're going to get Kelly out. Kelly is basically too good. You know, like they, Missy's probably pissed that she put her name down. And they're also like, Kelly is running this game if she gets through this. Yes.

So we go to tribal. Kelly has two fucking idols. It's unbelievable. I don't think I've ever seen someone go home with two idols. Yes. James did famously in China. I think that, I don't know if it's happened since then or before then. but...

It's unreal. She loses. It's a real bummer. Two idols is so rough. And in what is probably a wise decision on the part of CBS, although often they'll put two episodes together, we go right into the next episode. So we don't have to wait a week

to find out how this has received a camp. And immediately... I think that that was smart to get right into it. But it essentially undoes the game. So Janet goes, what the hell? Because she flipped on her ally because she believed these younger women,

telling her that they were basically being sexually harassed by Dan and she goes with them. And she makes a decision for her game, like a bad decision for her game, you know, out of her moral fiber. Janet's in tears. They're back at the beach. It's night. Janice and Tiers. And Kelly and Missy go to Dan.

Or no, Missy and Elizabeth go to Dan. And they're just like, don't believe any of that shit. You never made us feel uncomfortable. We've always like, dug you. Don't worry about it. And we never said anything about you. Janet goes to Dan and he tells him everything. He's like, here's what they're saying about you.

Here's why I flipped on you. Here's what's been happening. And when he goes to Missy. That producer meeting was about you. It's like this is third party now. Which obviously he knows because he was given an official warning. You should already be aware of that. And then when Missy and Elizabeth go to him and he's like, well, here's what Janet said.

They said that you were saying these things about me. They go, what? She's a snake. They literally say that. They're like, she's lying, we never told her a thing. She's a snake and she's trying to play you. And Janet calls him out and brings Missy and Elizabeth out and is like, did you not say to me that Dan was making you feel uncomfortable and you wanted him out?

And Elizabeth was like, yes, I did say that. And so we basically get to a point where what is the boundaries of gameplay? Like in a game where you're supposed to betray people in a game where the whole thing is like deceiving people and blindsides are the most treasured experience as a viewer you can have, is like, oh my God, this blindside. you're now getting into using accusations and sexual harassment as tools in a toolbox to win a million dollars. Yeah. And that also puts the show in a really questionable ethical spot. To say nothing of the fact that it's not lost on many people who are watching that this is a show on CBS,

which has historically had some pretty awful things going on there in terms of a culture of sexual harassment happening at the network. As Les Moonvez and others, you know, you can. just look those stories up to see what I'm talking about. So Survivor is putting itself in a position where they're basically trying to adjudicate a Me Too moment that's happening on their own island. Yeah. And so then it's that subsequent tribal council. So Kelly's already gone.

She's on the jury where it all kind of gets out into the open and they really start discussing it. And credit to Jeff, he like really did not let Dan kind of gloss over it. Dan, like, multiple times is like, let's just let this go. Yeah, he's like, Dan kept being like, so we're not letting this go, huh? Jeff is like, we're never going to let this go. And he finally rings an apology out of the guy that was kind of, Dan sort of starts it with, well, if Kelly felt a certain way, I apologize.

But then kind of got a little more sincere as his apology went on. Granted, it was not, that was not great from him. It was so interesting because you're in an environment that's already isolated, that you're being filmed all the time and yet you're still in this world of telephone, of essentially like conversation after conversation making the original intent and idea mutated. Even Kelly was like, I wanted Dan, but it's better for my game,

but this, that, like everybody's still playing Survivor while also processing these emotions. And then on the flip side, you've got essentially Janet who is like, I'm going to step outside of my game and do the thing that I think is right because these girls came to me and then two of those girls essentially used her. And everybody, yeah, everyone is operating with limited information.

Yeah. And so one of the things that Missy and Elizabeth think, when they hear that Kelly is throwing out Missy's name, is that Kelly is playing up the Dan stuff to distract them. Yes. Like, which they then do back, or had already been doing back, actually, the way that it's presented in the show, where they play it up.

but it's after that. I think once all the votes actually go on Dan and they realize that Kelly was being truthful and Janet comes to them and is so upset that them when they go, their strategy then is to just lie and deny and basically gaslight. That's what it gets to come out.

It's really, really ugly. So Janet gets a confession out of Elizabeth but doesn't have a secondary conversation after that. And in fact, I thought if there was one huge flaw, I mean, there was a lot of flaws in the episode, but one of them was that apparently Elizabeth just decided to stop talking about this for the rest of the episode

she doesn't talk during tribal she doesn't really talk that much at the beach after during the deliberations she gets she gets like one confessional where she says that she was never uncomfortable and that she thought it was all kind of a joking thing and she's like I'm just playing

she's like maybe we shouldn't have been joking about it but it all just comes across is you are still going to use sexual harassment to move your way up in the game. Right. And they have this tribal council where Aaron blames Janet and says Janet's playing the victim. The Aaron speech at tribal council is he's not getting enough blowback for that. It starts with him being like, I have a mother and a daughter. Like just that classic framing and then goes into Janet's playing the victim. And oh, by the way, if anything was actually happening,

I would have known about it, which makes no sense at all. There's also all of these people, there are cameras running 24-7. There's video evidence of this. If there's something happening or not, we will find out. We'll know, it'll be on TV. You look like a fucking idiot saying but nothing was happening when we know it was.

One of like the most watch reunion episodes of all time to say nothing of the Ponderoses, which are the episodes that they have like, I think on YouTube about like people hanging out at the like the residence once they've been voted out. So the show ends, the second episode with Kelly is on the jury. She's not allowed to talk because she's on the jury.

So she's sitting there watching this happen silently. Right. Jamal makes an impassioned kind of case about why what Aaron says is fucked up and why, like, what's happened here is fucked up. Jamal loses and gets voted off. I really like Jamal. I did too. Because they had, like, the episode before he, you know, wouldn't let Kelly make fire, basically. He was like kind of an asshole.

But then he also had the episode where he very eloquently explained race relations. To Jack. Yeah. Jack, who made a comment about called his buff a du rag, which was, like, very offensive. and Jamal is like at time, he's one of the most complex players that they have put on the show in the sense that they at one time

show him to be so eloquent and insightful and well-spoken, but then at other times they're like, you know what, he can kind of be a dick too. Sure. But I really liked him. I mean, it's a very complex season.

He was the one who got it at this tribal and just understood. And then he gets it again because he gets voted off. So what we wind up having is Janet nearly quits and considers quitting. Because she's like,

I guess they just hate me. because they think that I somehow is a snake here. And everybody sort of is like, no, Janet, we don't hate you. Like, this is crazy. It's just a game. I think that's like the real turning point. Is Missy and Elizabeth see this as a game? They think that this is all fair.

All's fair in love and war. Janet obviously is like, I was led to believe that I was doing something outside of the game for the good of these people. Right. And Kelly, playing pretty hard, still seemed very sincere about like, I don't like Dan fucking touching me. you know, and I want this to be over with. That was completely genuine, yes.

And you get into this idea of survivors' self-perception of this microcosm of actual society and a place where these things can play themselves out and that somehow the rules of survivor and the environment of survivor is an appropriate place for these things to take shape. And Jeff being essentially like the judge, I guess. I mean, I suppose the jury is the jury,

but Jeff is deciding who gets to talk and who gets to say what and who has follow-up questions. And then ultimately the showrunners are the ones who are deciding what we see. Right. How did you feel about all of that? I mean, it's, I felt like they did, it's hard to know because we don't know the real thing, but it seemed like they did a good job at giving everybody the different time to show the different perspectives that were going on. Granted, with the exception of that Missy and Elizabeth basically do not talk at that last tribal count.

They get very little in. And their actions were sort of the ones I was most interested in exploring because it felt like they really went outside the bounds of the game. I would just say also, anecdotally, like they are the ones catching the most heat today. Absolutely.

Like on, if you look on Twitter or on the Survivor, people are like really out on Missy and Elizabeth as humans. Really out. And that is like going beyond like, oh, that was a bad survivor play. Like, they're like, this is fucked up. And we're going to get to see them more.

I think that, so, what's interesting is, you know, we saw like behind the curtain a little bit with production saying that they stepped in, they had these meetings with the different players. I feel like there's a case that maybe Dan should have just been removed from the game. I'm not sure because, you know, Kelly actually says that she doesn't really want them to intervene. She doesn't want her game getting blown up over it or, you know, anything going sideways. I kind of feel like if you go all the way back to the first episode where when this started happening, with Kelly and Dan, and they talked about it. Producers should have stepped in then. That should have been his official warning. Like at the very first time that happened, and I wonder if they'll be more sensitive to it going forward. Well, I think that there's a really interesting conversation to be had

about what is acceptable for popular entertainment consumption and what is something that needs to be shut down. Like, they obviously have a storyline that runs through this season, a narrative that runs through this season, and they want to explore that. and whether or not it's their responsibility to actually police it rather than exploring it, is really complicated. And I know that last night watching it, man, I mean, like, I...

It was brutal. I felt really uncomfortable. I felt really uncomfortable being like, this is like a piece of pop culture that I enjoy. And it's strange to be watching these people's lives, like, kind of falling apart in some ways in front of my eyes. There is a part of me that as hard as that episode was to watch. and when I go for Survivor, I'm looking for kind of popcorn entertainment. Escapeism. There is a part of me that is like it's good that I watched it because it was such a clear example of how these things can play out in the real world.

Like Kelly, not knowing if what she's experiencing is real or not and not feeling totally comfortable coming forward because it would have negative impacts on her status, basically. And then other people either minimizing it or weaponizing it for their own gain. And in the end, you know, the person who is the ultimate victim ended up suffering like the most consequences of coming forward. And the person who's the perpetrator goes on largely unscathed. It's just so the parallels are so like powerful that it's almost uncanny. So I was watching this last night with my wife. And the first thing, I mean, throughout the episode, especially during tribal. And when Kelly's sitting there and Janet's like getting is on the verge of quitting.

And then Jamal gets voted out. she was like, what kind of message does it send? And I was like, well, I don't know that they are they responsible for the message. It's a bunch of people. Like, we often talk about the moral responsibility of art when we're talking about fictional works. You know, it's like whether or not there was, you know, appropriate amounts of representation in stories or whether or not different viewpoints are expressed.

In a reality show, they have no control over who these people are. Right. They don't script it. So I don't know what the responsibility is for the message If ultimately the message is this is a really fucked up world If they uh yeah I mean if they had any influence on it They could have nudged Kelly and been like player idol and then Dan would have gone home and it would have been a completely different season I feel like it it's just so much more brutal in the sense that she she goes home even though she did nothing wrong

Jamal and Kelly being on that jury completely changes who's going to win final three Because there have been a couple of survivor seasons recently where you're like, there's just no way that, you know, even Devin's, Devin's lost last year, but you were like, man, Devin's definitely going in the final three if he doesn't get him out. Like, you can kind of feel the momentum

and they are good at, like, picking the character and being like, look who's going, look who's going, look, is going, Aaron is not going to fucking win Survivor. No. No, I mean? Like, absolutely not after that speech. No.

I can't imagine Aaron being on the final three and a jury of Kelly and Jamal saying like, yeah, definitely that guy. No, I don't, I don't know. And if they vote Janet out, like, that's the thing. It's like when, like, now you have to get into that part of it if that's where your brain goes. I'm very worried about who could be on the final three. There are a lot of combinations where it would just be, I would want no one to win.

Right. But I don't know. I hope that like in the end of the episode, there are people who maybe they don't have the best understanding of this stuff or haven't paid the most attention to it, who see this and a light bulb goes off in their head and they go, that's how it happens. because imagine this happening in a workplace where you don't have 24-hour video surveillance. One of the things in this episode is that when Kelly was talking about different things that happened to her, they would cut to all of these flashbacks like the tow thing with Missy and show it. They had B-roll.

It was where you could see other cameramen in the shots. The boom mic, yeah, totally. I mean, they really broke all of their rules about filming it. Yes. And, you know, in 99.9% of scenarios where something exactly like, like this occurs, there's no evidence at all. It's just someone's word. Yeah. And, you know, who knows? That would lead to a person like a Kelly in real life feeling like maybe they're just being oversensitive and denying like the things that they're actually feeling. I mean, she was pretty explicit about like,

I think she drew the parallels pretty closely where she was like, there's like a world and like, she's like, I don't want this to define me, but also like I don't want this to be the thing where it's like, it's going to stop my upward trajectory in life to be like waylaid by this controversy essentially. It'll be really, really interesting to see how this plays out over not only the next few episodes of Survivor, but the end of the season and also like in the real world and see how the show is essentially reacting because the show's over. Like I think Janet was like tweeting last night like don't get mad at Elizabeth and Missy. She was, yeah, or Instagramming it or something. Yeah, she was on social. These people are home like they're watching a play out or whatever, but I don't know how it's going to play out.

It's going to be one of the more interesting reunion episodes. I usually skip those. I'm kind of curious about that. And I'll be very curious to see about how it plays out. And whether they continue to address it or whether they're like, we finished it in that episode. Yeah. I mean,

I assume they'll have to address it. I'm not. They certainly didn't tease it in the coming next week. It was not like a very, it did not seem to be like next week. We pick right back up with this argument. Oh, I thought you meant in the reunion episode.

Oh, no. I mean like just even next week. Maybe not. I'm not sure. I mean, especially as long as Janit's in, it'll always kind of be covering there. Yeah.

But, yeah, I don't know, man. All right. Well, let's check in on in a couple weeks. Thank you so much, Riley, for coming on. Yeah, hopefully it picks up. Yeah. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by Pepsi. There are a lot of things to celebrate these days in pop culture.

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Pepsi, the official sponsor of the NFL, Go Eagles, reminds you to always be celebrating. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by Ray Donovan, returning to Showtime this Sunday. Everyone's favorite fixer is back knocking heads as he navigates New York's corrupt mayor and a looming threat to the Donovan family they never saw coming, starring Lee F. Schreiber and John Voigt. Ray Donovan is back this Sunday at an all. all new time of 8 p.m. Eastern only on Showtime.