The Watch - Celebrating Philip Roth, Plus Answering Your Mailbag Questions About ‘Watchmen’ and More | The Watch (Ep. 260)

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald celebrate the life and impact of the late author Philip Roth (2:00) and discuss Andy’s experience at a Paul Simon concert (9:3 0). They also discuss the New York Times interview with the cast of 'Arrested Development' and the backlash surrounding Jeffrey Tambor’s behavior on set and how that coincides with a larger trend in Hollywood (15:00). Later, they open up the mailbag and answer listener questions ranging from their most comforting episodes of TV of all time to their thoughts on the forthcoming 'Watchmen' series by Damon Lindelof (28:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Philo. Say goodbye to expensive TV bills. Philo is the simple, powerful app for watching TV. Get access to more than 35 of your favorite entertainment channels like Investigation Discovery, HGTV, AMC, VH1, MTV, A&E, Nick Own, BT, Discovery, Lifetime, TLC History, WETV, and Paramount. As well as live TV on-demand and Unlimited Recording, all for only $16 a month with no contract needed.

There has never been a better. deal. Start your free trial instantly with just a phone number. No credit card is needed. Go. Dot philo.com slash the watch. That's go. dot P-H-I-L-O-com slash the watch or text the word the watch to 744-5-6. Hey guys, thanks for listening to The Watch. As always, Andy and I talked a lot about Damon Lindelof's upcoming Watchman adaption for HBO. We also spoke a little bit. Philip Roth and Paul Simon. Great. So it's a millennial pod. We answer some of your mailbag questions. Be sure you're reading

the ringer.com. A lot of great TV stuff this week. Kenny Herzog wrote a cool piece about what kind of Westworld watcher are you. There's an amazing Westworld content up right now. Claire McNair wrote about evil genius and killing Eve. Alice and Herman, as always, is all over the TV beat. So you should definitely be checking out the ringer.com. And make sure you're listening to Westworld, The Recapables, David Shoemaker's Westworld podcast with Danny Hyfe. It's Micah Peters. I think Juliet Litman is coming on. Alyssa Beresnack was on last week. Really, really enjoyable way to follow along with Westworld. And make sure you're listening to Channel 33. Some of our best pods.

Damage control, big picture jam session, the press box, some of my favorites. Right there, you just subscribe to Channel 33, the Ringer podcast network. And without further ado, let's get into The Watch. I need sports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello. And welcome to The Watch. Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio,

another perpetual runner-up for the Nobel Prize for Literature. It's Eddie Greenwald! I really thought this was my year, but you know, they're not giving one this year. RIP to Philip Roth. Seriously. Wow. How's that one going down for you? I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility that most of our listeners were like, they're getting a Roth pod this week. I think there's like a core 30%. No, I'm going to go core in 9%. I thought we're going to say core 9 people. 9% of our audience was like, I bet Roth's coming.

I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised to see how much the Ringer was devoting itself to remembering the great, great American novelist Philip Roth, who died this week. I was impressed. Yeah. Yeah, it feels like his passing, obviously different ages and completely different impacts on the world, but his passing kind of felt a little bit like Bowie and that it signaled the end of something. Yeah. And it was, you know, obviously, 85 had congestive heart failure I met, I think was the... I haven't even heard the cause of death, but what's amazing about this guy, and we'll talk about a bunch of things. We've got mailbag coming in today.

This is a little bit of a chit-chap show. But this is the loss of one of the greatest novelists of our time, someone that we both admired hugely. And it's truly a remarkable career for any number of reasons, but the two that stand out, to my mind, is this guy came back with a vengeance in his 60s. I really admire that, a writer who... It's my plane as well. That's what I'm getting to. Obviously, I relate to different things at different ages in people's lives, but this is a guy who was a sensation when he was young with Goodbye Columbus.

Although the real stand is no letting go. It's where it's at. We're going to get to that. How much time could we spend on Philip Roth before we have no listeners? I know, I'm just saying, though, all of a sudden in his 60s, in the 1990s with American Pastoral, I married a communist, Sabbath's theater. And then the dude was like, you know what? I've been writing my whole life, and now I'm done six years ago.

and was just chilling and reading history books. And just walked away. Yeah. Look, the reason we're telling you this now, nothing is unintentional in this podcast. Obviously, we are both big fans of Philip Roth. We are fans of literature. But also, this is basically Chekhov's recently past great American author

because both of us hope to move to England for a time in our 40s and 50s. Yeah. And then come back strong with a great podcast in our 60s and then walk away. It's the LeBron thing. I'm resting while playing. Yes.

So my 40s and 50s, I'm not going to disappear. Uh-huh. But I think I'm going to consider. conserve energy. What, you know, I think... And then I'll start a really great blog in my 60s. I think true listeners have realized you've been conserving energy for a minute on some of these takes, but we'll move on. So you want to, so how did you want to frame this for this?

I mean, should we give our listeners... I guess I associate him with a very specific time of my life when I was an English major for the most part. I mean, I majored in a couple of different things, but none of them really panned out. How's the podcasting major going? Filmmaking. I was in a film school for a year, and I was a journalism major for a year. And I just was like, let's just do English and not overcomplicate this.

When Spotlight came out, were you like, that should have been me, Robbie? Was that what your dream was? Yeah, that was my idea. But when I was an English major and I was reading a lot more literary criticism and I was probably trying to make my way through the then-established sort of modern American literary canon, you really got the – it really introduced me to this idea of like the centrality of the novel in American society, which is something that I think comes and goes now, but we haven't – necessarily had like a literary sensation that it appears, I'm not saying it always was this

case, but it appears that is making an impact on society itself and on American culture itself. And a lot of these, whether it was Saul Billow novels or John Updick novels or Philip Roth novels, each of them have their problems, each of them may or may not have aged particularly well, but there was something about what Roth was able to conjure that it was really very important me, the idea that a novel could be something that changed the way a mass group of people thought. And that's something he wrote about a lot. He obviously, one of his great subjects was writing. I'm sorry.

Go on. Writing and authorship. Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely true. I thought that, I think you sent this to me, but Zadie Smith's piece in The New Yorker is what we would really recommend people reading because she really put right in, she really foregrounded this idea of the power of fiction, a belief in fiction, the ecstatic possibility. abilities of fiction. And this is a guy who wrote for much of his life throughout tumultuous times and kept pushing, pushing on himself, pushing on the ideas of certainly of masculinity, of being a member of the world, of being a Jewish person, of being any kind of American, really. And the idea of him not being there almost as a sounding board, as a reflection against

other novelists, other writers, is really hard to fathom. Yeah. I think that people tend to separate his work into the early stuff. the kind of postmodernist stuff, and then the later... Sort of Great American novels. Oh, my God. Not even the actual literal, like the actual title, Great American novel. Which was a book of his. Yeah, right, which Mallory wrote beautifully about and the...

I love that everyone... Appreciation that we put up on this site. I love that everyone has different favorites. Yeah, mine's American Pastoral. American Pastoral is probably just the masterpiece in a lot of ways. I think that people should always be reading Goodbye Columbus just because that was his first. It's a short story. It's kind of amazing when you read the early works by people who,

became Titans and you realized they were just plucky, plucky young, young bucks. You don't have to dribble out of the three-point line. Yeah, man, so he wrote Good by Columbus and then he wrote this novel called Letting Go that is in no way relevant to the rest of his career. It's really like this big sweeping Buildings Roman, like, I am going to be a novelist and it's very, very heavy with weight and intentionality and importance. And it's fascinating. In the same way, like digging in the crates of your favorite artists and maybe finding their first record or early demos can be. Yeah. in that this is a master of the forum and a huge talent,

but he doesn't quite know what to do with it yet. And I find that both exhilarating, fascinating, but also kind of affirming when you see people who became great at something struggling with what they're going to be. I think that's always an interesting place to be. Ghostwriter is the other one that's kind of not anything I just said, but that's kind of a postmodern classic.

Yeah. I like Deception's the one that's just dialogue, right? That's one of the later ones, I believe, when he was just sort of down to one-word titles and just sort of sketching it out. Did you see, I'm just going to... Jody Rosen, who's a writer that we knew in New York, put this on Facebook, and it wasn't his story,

so I'm going to tell it also. Okay. He said this was an Adam Gopnik story from the New Yorker about Philip Roth, and this is how we'll leave it. You joked about the Nobel Prize in literature. Apparently Roth really wanted it, which you're not supposed to say,

and now he can't get it because it's only given to living writers. And I think the year that he was hotly tipped to win like maybe an American hadn't won it in a while. Wouldn't have been around 97? No, I'm talking in the last few years. Oh, okay. And you know who won it that year was Bob Dylan?

Oh. And so apparently Roth was in the hospital at that time and wasn't doing great. And Gopnik went to visit him on the day that this happened. He was like, oh, my God, he's going to be in a real, he's going to be in a mood about this because fucking Bob Dylan just won this over him. And he walked in and apparently Roth looks up and was laughing. And he said, great news. I've just been elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

So read Philip Roth books. Good. Challenge them, interrogate them, be appalled by them. But, yeah. And speaking of deep spirituality and baby boomer aesthetics. I wanted to ask if you had any other deeply millennial experiences. I just wanted to say, my religious way of handling the loss of Philip Roth was to go to see Paul Simon last night. That's representing two of the three pillars of, like, how I came to understand Judaism as a cultural, a hungry cultural whatever in the 80s.

I'll never know this side of you. Well, come over for Pesach sometime, you know, we could really chop it up. And I just wanted to tell people, like, obviously Paul Simon is a master and a genius, go see this concert. I just, I just, this is pure standing because this is supposedly his final tour. Homeward Bound, it's called, he's doing the whole country, he just started a few weeks ago, or even a few days ago, I think. It was a revelatory concert. This dude is 76 years old. He's dancing to Zytoe on stage.

He sounds great. But what was truly exciting about it is not just the length and breath of his canon and like incredible songs and from all parts of his career. The realization that his later work, like we're talking about Roth, is just as interesting and questing as his earlier stuff. It's that this dude is messing with arrangements and reinventing songs that you think you know in a way that is truly exhilarating. When was the last time you went to a concert and you were like, I've never heard this or I've never heard this like this and I'm enjoying it more than my favorite song? Probably you got in 1999. That's exactly right. Did he bring Cabadonna out, or was Cabadonna driving a cab in Baltimore at that point?

He was just dancing to Zydeco. It wasn't even really a concert. Maybe I'm not selling you on this. I'm a Paul Simon fan. I'll just say that if you are ever on the fence, like if you think you like his songs, you know, you like Graceland, whatever, go see the show. LA is a touchy town for him, too,

because there's the whole Los Lobos Graceland thing. Yeah, they were outside. They were just... No, it was like the idea that basically there were some accusations that he may have borrowed heavily from sessions he had done. Well, the myth of fingerprints, the last song, I think, on Graceland was a co-write that they somehow didn't get co-writing credit for. Gotcha. I mean, there's a lot of that.

There's a lot of appropriation throughout his catalog. But I would just say it was fascinating. Bryce Destner from the, I mean, here's a millennial reference. Bryce Destner from the National. It's not as millennial as you think it is. Here is a Gen Y reference. He did new arrangements for two particularly interesting songs. And it was just really, it was a great night.

And it was a great way to sit Shiva for Philip Roth. Give me a underrated Paul Simon album outside of... Hearts and Bones. Great. Hearts and Bones is my jam. That's my favorite record. You had that in the back pocket. You're ready?

I wasn't... I mean, can we do this? Guys, are we doing a Hearts and Bones pod? We just did 11 minutes on Philip Rath and Paul Simon. We're in the dark lands. We'll move on to your questions. But Hearts and Bones is the, oh my God, I was married to Carrie Fisher for 10 months. What Just Happened album?

and I really recommend. Anything else you want to touch on before we go to the mailbag? There's a couple of things. We're really excited about a few things that are coming up. So we're just chit-chatting today, but I wanted to mention that in the next couple of days, we'll have obviously push a tea. We're going to talk about it a bit.

It's coming out tonight this Thursday. Solo is coming out essentially tonight. We'll do a podcast on that next Tuesday. We want you to enjoy your Memorial Day weekend. We will also obviously hit the finale of Killing Eve. on that Tuesday. And then one thing that I'm very excited

about talking about is Succession, an HBO. Yeah, where are you with this? I'm very, very pro. Very pro. I'm interested. Have you watched the screeners yet? No.

Yeah, they're good. Yeah? It's good. Oh, I'm glad to hear that. It's very good. The resume of the show is interesting. Adam McKay produced it. Jesse Armstrong is that the guy's name

who's written for Veep wrote this. And it's the first one that's got into screen. They've been trying to do a kind of a money to New York. Yeah, there was a David Milch script called Money that was floating around a couple years ago that is, I think, a little bit more, a little darker than this one, as you might imagine. Yeah. But it's basically the story of a Murdoch-esque media family, an empire and how the father is going to divide up this empire and if he is going to divide it up at all. And that's what this one's about.

This has a great cast as Brian Cox and as Kieran Culkin. strong, Sir Snook, yeah. I guess my only take on it, I'm going to watch it. I'm glad you hear it say it's good. I've sort of felt like it's a little, it seems tone deaf in a way, just because I see these posters everywhere of like a rich family,

and I just feel like culturally, I don't know if that's what I want to watch right now. What do you want to watch right now? You know, I want to watch my kids grow up in a world where they have security. No, I mean, I want to... Are you ready for Congress? I just want to relax, man.

Is that okay? No, I just mean it seems like a strange moment to make a show about incredibly rich people who have outsized influence in, I imagine, politics and New York City and the media. But if the show interrogates that in an interesting way, then it could be great. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that necessarily, I definitely like lots of television shows, is the criticism of while also reveling in the lifestyle of the people. Billions-esque? I don't know if it's necessarily as like check out this dope restaurant and isn't this actually kind of fuck you cool. But it's also not as like tongue and cheek as fill in this is, I think. What about before we get into your questions which are coming, are you, let's take this in two parts.

Were you or are you excited for a fifth season of Arrested Development on Netflix? Because that's coming in a week. I don't even know if I even watched the third season of rest of it. Like I was not like a, I think it's pretty. The Netflix season was the fourth season. Yeah, I know. I don't even know if I walked the end of it on Fox. Not that it, you know, I obviously found the first two seasons to be really funny.

A lot of debate right now. So obviously Andy's alluding to is that there was a New York Times article yesterday. That was a roundtable conversation among the rest of development cast featuring Jason Bateman and Jeffrey Tambor, who's obviously been in the news a lot, Tony Hale, Will Arnette, and crucially Jessica Walter, who plays Lucille. And in this piece, in this roundtable, it is revealed, somewhat. I don't know if it would have been discussed before.

There was a Hollywood reporter interview with Tambor before that I think had alluded to this. So basically, Tambor is off of transparent. He's been fired from transparent. Due to an investigation of his behavior on set, accusations were levied against him by two trans women who worked on the show in different capacities about abusive language and behavior on set.

The investigation went forward. He was removed from the show, and the show was struggling with how to make a new season without him. He went ahead and made the next season of Arrested Development, which was already contractually on the books, but I think filmed after this went down. I don't know if it, it may have filmed before he was fired, but it definitely filmed in the midst of this.

As part of a media rehabilitation, or at least a media re-entrance, he did a feature interview with Hollywood Reporter a few weeks ago, in which he was basically given the microphone to explain what had happened. And I think where you were going with it was that he has basically not admitted any wrongdoing in the case of transparent. But what he has admitted to is behavior that could be seen as boorish or, or, or, he wouldn't say inappropriate, but aggressive, right, that he could be cranky or temperamental or artistic. Yeah, and your management issues.

Yeah. And implied, again, I don't know if names were named, but implied that that behavior has followed him, including it arrested development. Yes. And in this interview, there's a discussion about, like, Jessica Walter says, you know, you made me, it talks about an incident in which Tambor blew up, made her cry. Well, it made her cry during this actual interview, but that she says in the interview that she had never been yelled at like that in, I think, what, 60 years of working on. Yeah, right. Decades of working in Hollywood.

And so there's obviously that. And then there is also what people are reacting to is the perception that Jason Bateman, Tony Hale, and Will Arnett are kind of brushing aside Tambour's behavior as part and parcel of working on a Hollywood set. and that there are difficult personalities on Hollywood sets and that you kind of work on it and that there is a kind of omerita slash family atmosphere where it's like things happen in behind closed doors,

people have their processes, there are difficult people in Hollywood and you, and they all sort of say, like, I would work with Jeffrey Tambor again. But the problem is, is that they basically are forgiving and forgiving of Tambor and, qualify Walter's statements and her, not accusations. I mean, she's, they're, it's true.

And it just doesn't come off. It's just not a good look for anybody involved on that side of things. Because it's not just that they forgive it. The behavior in the moment is almost as appalling as the erasure of her validity of her complaint because they sort of joke past it and they push past it and they sort of apologize, pre-apologize for Tambour. while leaving her out to drive. Yes. And that's the way it appeared in the transcript,

and then the Times even released the audio of it as well. And then since then, Bateman and Hale at least have made apologies for, apologize to Jessica Walter and apologize to people for their way that they sort of seem to brush aside her. And I got to say, I think this is sort of an appalling failure on just a number of levels. Right. You know, I think that a lot of this comes from the fact that we're not talking about, what's really going on in a lot of these circumstances. We are behaving, this is actually true with a lot of society right now politically too.

We are acting as if the machinery that has been used for decades to explain things, to articulate things, to apologize for things, or make light or basically change the story, that this machinery is still functioning in this current age and climate. And one thing that no one can say is that everyone had a big financial interest in Jeffrey Tambour returning to a rest of development. everybody wanted him to return everybody maybe the exception of jessica walter has a fond memory like they want to do this with him they want him not to have done the things that he is accused of doing they want this to be okay and there i guess whether that is just sentimentality or or finances

they're doing it they are doing this you know there's there are many points along the way where whether it's mitch herwitz or netflix or jason bateman or anyone could have said you know i'm not comfortable with this this reflects my experience or jessica walter's experience we're going to pull the plug on this. You don't need more. First of all, we don't need more arrested development. I'm sorry, World. Fourth season definitively proved that, you know? This is not getting the guys back together in Armageddon, too, to like stop the meteor from hitting the earth the second time. The next meteor! Spoilers! This is not that big of a deal. But they're doing this for money. You know, that's why they're doing this. And so we have to sort of try to put lipstick on this particular

pig. Now, the second point that I think was particularly worrisome, but also notable is that nobody wants this to touch them. You know, nobody wants to have to have these conversations. Nobody wants this to be in their home, in their place of business, in their family. There was a really strong piece on Vulture that Rachel Corey, the comedian, among the comedians who accused Louis C.K. publicly of masturbating in front of her or asking to whatever he did. She went public, which is part of the thing, you know, when this was all going down last fall. And she wrote this piece being like, I lost then and I keep Louis. Like this is not a I don't want to be this person.

Right. And it comes on at the end of a week where there's been a lot of talk about this stuff. Obviously it's being reported that Harvey Weinstein, Weinstein is going to turn himself in tomorrow for sexual. There's an ongoing investigation. I think it's like a charge. I just wanted to get that right. There was a Bill Burr interview earlier this week that David over at Vulture did where he talks about what the proper punishment is, what kind of purgatory Louis needs to be in. Sarah Silverman gave an interview in the GQ comedy issue about the same topic. Tignataro talked to New York Times about how she doesn't want to hear about, you know,

when will Luis E.K. be back because it's not, that's not what the focus should be. And today Morgan Freeman. And today Morgan Freeman was accused of sexually harassing. It just, I think one of the themes of all this, whether they say it explicitly or they say the opposite in ways that are worrisome, all of the focus remains on the perpetrators. Yes. Protecting them and rehabilitating them and whether they apologized enough. And to see this happen in real time with an accomplished actress, who I'm sure if you ask Tony Hale or Will Arnett or any of these people individually what you think of her, they would say, I think the world of her. She's so kind or wise or talented or whatever. But the group think that immediately runs to defend this guy who for your, because you don't want your friend to have done bad things. You know, maybe he never behaved that way to Jason Bateman. Maybe he's been wonderful to him. Both can be true. But this knee-jerk running to defend people before they've even articulated anything is disturbing.

but then also to see something that is true in people's workplaces and certainly true in Hollywood, and I've already seen it, that when there are four men in a room, particularly men who are doing bits, the women are not being hurt, you know, and it was incredibly, there are a lot of things that get blown. You know, there are articles and there's Twitter that can blow things out of proportion, but I thought this was a really instructive and fascinating moment, and it's a shame. Yeah, I mean, I don't have a ton more to add to that. I think that this is going to continue to be a lot. and on stage debate, it's not a criminal,

it's not happening in criminal courts as much as it probably should, frankly. And a lot of these things are being adjudicated in the court of public opinion, and they're being adjudicated through HR departments and network investigations and job site investigations that are not necessarily staying secret. And you're just going to have a lot of errors. You're going to have a lot of unforced errors. And honestly, frankly, like the semantics of whether or not, I think that the real question will eventually be like instituting an institutional change on the sets

and in the offices and in the trailers and in offices and in factory floors all over this country to create a much more sensitive and humane workplace. Also, don't be assholes. You don't have to be assholes. But you can see what, I think that what, it doesn't matter. This is the thing is that like for the sake of conversation, I was about to say, say, like, I understand that for, like, most of these people's lives, they've worked on sets where people are throwing shit or having meltdowns and that that's part of their process

or that there are difficult people. And it's like, I honestly, I understand exactly what they're saying. I've been in workplaces where there have been, uh, like, emotionally violent people. I've been worked like from the time when I was 13 years old and I first started working jobs. But I think that doesn't make it okay. I'm just saying I understand what he's talking about. Oh, no, I don't think you're, I understand that too. I, I, I, I understand that too. I, I, I, I, I think the reason why I wanted to talk about this particular case with this, the transcripts or the audio from this interview, is that I think it's incredibly instructive precisely because this is not a legal matter. In this interview, no one breaks the law. No one harasses anyone or touches someone or assaults anyone. That's not what they're talking about. No, I know. And what I appreciated about this, seeing this so put it just right there in print was the way it played out, you know, and the lack of thought that people who I think are probably quite thoughtful. brought to this moment, and it was caught. And Tony Hale and Will Arnett and Jason Bavitt should not be run out of Hollywood. If anything, I hope their apologies ring true. Because we've all done

things like this and not considered people who were around us. And so I think it's more instructive in a way to see something that is on the surface appears benign, but is much more prevalent than an act, I hope, than an actual active monster like Harvey Weinstein. An article like this with hopefully good intentioned people exposed for everyday mistakes, I think hopefully could go a lot further than a giant tabloid court case. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, we'll leave it there. We'll take a quick break to hear from our sponsor, and we'll come back.

Questions? Answer your questions. Zach Mack, our producer, Unleash the Bagpipes. Play a Danny Boy in the background as we welcome. And as we welcome in another note from the big homies at Thomas's English muffins. Muff life! The Kran gang! The Nook Life.

Nook Squad. We've been in a serious relationship with Thomas's for a couple of weeks now. And I don't know that I'm overstating it when I say that the effects are real. This isn't a podcast advertisement. It's a movement. It's a revolution. Have I shown you my new Thomas's gang sign? No.

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I think what it basically is, is I have some breadcrumbs at the bottom. And so I inevitably set off the fire alarm. And my wife found me this morning enjoying the crispy edges, the soft warm center. The alarm sounding, smoke surrounding my body like a dragon, a Thomas's dragon. You can use a fork to split them, just don't use a knife. Next, you lightly toast each half and then top them right away with butter. Watch how the butter just melts and pulls inside those amazing little nooks and cranny spaces. It's a delicious burst of flavor in every warm, toasty buttery. Andy, if you haven't had them already, you have to toast and butter some Thomas's nooks and crannies, English muffins. They are truly like no other. They are the official

English muffin of this podcast. You've got mail. All right, we're back. We're here to do some mailbag. Like I said, Tuesday we'll do solo and killing Eve. And I would get ready to start watching Succession because I think that it will be a positive force in your life. Are we going to dip into Patrick Melrose?

Are we? I'm just asking you. I wasn't planning on it. We're just vibing on the mics right here. I'm really excited Mike White is going to be on Survivor in the fall, so I'm looking forward to that. As what? Is it like the showrunner?

season? No, it's David versus Goliath. Incredible Survivor last day finale. Amazing. Do you watch Survivor? I do. Yeah. That's fascinating, you just watch that, and that's a part of your life and you have opinions. My wife and I watch Survivor every Wednesday. Wow. It's incredibly, and it's also great because there's

so few shows that you can like legitimately talk over. And Survivor has about, it's like a baseball game. There's like seven minutes of action. There's good stuff, but you can like, once you've seen them do two or three of those obstacle courses, you've seen them all. So you can just kind of chit-chat about it and talk about the edits and talk about who we think is going to do it.

I was legitimately shocked last night. I think people know this because I've said this before, but I will say it again. I have never seen a minute of one episode of Survivor in the 18 years that it's been on television. Maybe you should start watching it with me. One of the questions in our mailbag. Yeah. Thanks for your questions, by the way. Yeah, and these questions were great.

Jennifer Risk asked, and she had another question in here, but the one that she wanted to ask is if there was a particular sitcom episode that we returned to over and over again, For example, Jennifer goes to Ludacrismus from 30 Rock when she needs to laugh after a tough day. And, you know, we could extend this to do you have a survivor? And I know you've talked before about some of the food TV that you love to dip your toe into and you love queer eye. But is there a sitcom episode that you ever go back to to have like, I just need two laughs in 22 minutes? I mean, I think Parks and Recreation is a balm for many ills. and that's always a great thing to watch.

When my first kid was born, and I assumed then, because I was also a semi-functioning television critic at that point, I assumed that I could finally use some of that time and lack of sleep to watch the stuff I was supposed to watch, but psychologically all I could do is just watch Parks and Rec and 30 Rocks. Did you really have, like, I'm just going to go back and watch all of Hill Street Blues?

No, I thought like Sons of Anarchy would be like a real chill, like 3 a.m. feeding kind of hang. that, you know, and Cheers is also always calming. But I will say, I don't think there's a single episode. Okay. Although the episode, the Batman parody episode of 30 Rock, where Liz is the super villain because her gym clothes smell very bad, is a very good one. The one that I think my wife and I go back to the most, or at least quote the most,

is the Seinfeld episode where Jerry and Elaine go to Del Boca Vista. They go to Palm Beach to visit his parents, and she sleeps on the couch and messes up her back. and then needs to take the painkillers and then yells subsella. I mean, you've seen the episode. I think that's probably as close as you can get to the source. Okay. I'm going to say for me, my sort of go-to sitcom episodes would be how I met your mother,

and it's either Slapsgiving or Three Days of Snow, those episodes. Really just a hell of entertaining show. How often do you go back? Like once a year. Okay, yeah. That's still a lot. Like a lot of people, you know, with the, the ready availability of certain sitcoms on Hulu and Netflix,

and I'm sure this isn't really your vibe because you're betting, you're putting down young children for the night, and then you're... Sometimes not even my own. Having a half a sip of Merlo before you fall asleep sitting up. How dare you? The red wine at night is not my friend. Oh, that's right.

You're more of a Casamicos man. Yeah, Randy Gerber and I like to go horseback riding on beaches. Did you see that, like, the weird rumor that Clooney and a mall at the Royal Wedding was like somehow SpanCon for a Casabir. There was like a large conspiracy. Is that sponsored content? Ponsored content, yeah. By the way, at the Paul Simon concert last night, I referred to people's behavior in line

to get in as agro. My wife said, what does that mean? And I said, that's short for aggressive. She said, A, she'd never heard that. B, she'd never heard me say that, so why did I start saying that? You say agro. To you? And then C, she said, just say the full word.

And that's how I feel right now to you, SponCon. I didn't see any of that. I'm not, you know. The tequila's doing great. Save it for jam session. I just meant, I didn't know. My point was, like a lot of the younger people who we work with, I often will wind down my night with a streaming sitcom that I have already seen.

Interesting. So I'll watch Happy Endings or How I Met Your Mother, Office or Modern Family, just to like, they're so easy to get through. You don't even need to, like, care. You could literally, I wish there was a random button. Yeah. To just pick any episode of the office to watch. I would do that, too. I agree with that. It's funny. Last week we had the long conversation about things,

it was essentially nostalgic in some ways for the era of broadcast television. A part of that conversation that we didn't really get to was the importance of these broadcast sitcoms when they were in syndication. Sure. When, you know, Seinfeld would be on twice every night or cheers or whatever at 7 p.m. And that's kind of gone, too. The syndication market. Yeah, the whole race to make five to six seasons of these shows in the first place to make syndication. Yeah. But that comfort and familiar. is more pronounced than ever because of the streaming.

The wind down show, if I have time to wind down, I really, really enjoy Chef's Night Out on Munchies, Vice's Food Channel. You're the best. Because it's just people just going, just really drinking a lot and eating a lot in interesting cities. No, so that's the one where, wait, no, it's not action. Action doesn't host that one. No, this is one where they...

I love that show, Chef's Night Out, I love that show. They go to a great restaurant or chef, and they, interview them, they're talking heads the night out. They do the guisados guys, right? Yes, they do the gosados guys, and then they do it in different cities, and then basically the concedes, you meet them at their restaurant, and then they and their buddies or fellow chefs often, go to three to four places in a van, and they just get smashed, not just on liquor, but like their friends who are chefs, destroy them with comtes. And then they all go back to their restaurant and they cook, right? And they just drunk cook very unsafely for their friends. Yeah. It is both my dream and my nightmare

to one day be invited to one of those. Okay. Because while I would love to eat these foods, and drink these wines and hang with these people, I don't want to get sloppy on camera. No. Like, this is as close as I get. Like, I'm coming unhinged right now because we're in a minute 30. Andy, Michael Cassidy wants to know. This is, I'm really excited to talk to you about this.

It's a little bit of a tight rope because I know that Damon Lindelof has in the past enjoyed our podcast and has been on the podcast and engaged with us. But Michael Cassidy, I thought I asked a really good question, which is thoughts on Damon Lindelof's letter about his approach to the watchman. I don't know if you saw this. I did. is the Watchman, which is an HBO show, conducive to allowing Damon to do what he does best,

which is mystery, plot, twist, character development, spiritual undertones, humor, et cetera. So there's a couple of conversations we could have here. We could talk about whether Damon is suited for the Watchman, which I think he is. And we could talk a little bit about this letter, which I thought was incredibly Damon. That's the correct thing.

And both the glorious kind of like, is anybody feeling this much right now? And like his passion for television as a medium is so inspiring. It makes me want to do this podcast. Not that you're not enough, obviously. But his kind of like relentless pushing and investigation and prodding of himself and of his staff and getting after big questions and putting them on the screen is fantastic. There are a couple of really interesting lines in this letter.

And you can find it on Damon's Instagram. it's like a five-page letter that I think is written somewhat in the vein of in the style of watchmen dialogue in a lot of ways. I was just going to say it's also fascinating

because it is both an announcement of purpose and a pre-apology. That's what I was going to bring up. So the two most interesting lines in the note, one is, quote, I am compelled despite the inevitable pushback and hatred I will understandably receive for taking on this particular project.

This ire will be maximally painful because of its source. That source being you, the true fans. I don't know if I've ever seen a more succinct description of not only Damon's relationship to fandom, but modern popular culture's relationship to fandom since so much of what we're consuming now

is something that we as fans feel ownership over in the first place. And you can see that in Star Wars and Marvel and Damon's Project Here on The Watchman, but you can see it and something is small as Riverdale. You know what I mean? That everybody has preconceived notions and even with things that are nominally,

quote unquote, original, people so immediately get so attached to what they're partaking in that they kind of consider it to be they who should have say over what happens. We are very close to choose your own venture television, guys. Like, this is going to happen. But Damon kind of articulates

his very specific place in the face Fandom. Well, it's also, I saw this, someone made this joke on Twitter, and I apologize for not attributing it. Maybe many people have made it. It said, find someone who loves you as much as Star Wars fans hate Star Wars. That's where we are with fandom and with geek culture. It is a very specific kind of, and I mean this with affection, young love and obsession, almost teenage or adolescent love and affection, which veers very close to obsession and ownership,

comes along with it and the desire to control it, you know, if something meant a lot to you, and it held you close and you held it close, the thought of someone taking that away and messing with it, separating psychologically this idea that we don't lose something of someone else, we don't lose our memory of a toy if someone else plays with it. Yeah. I mean, I think people should spend more time watching Toy Story 3 than Batman 3 is what I'm saying. Sure. That's what that's about. But all that said, I was excited that he did this. It is peak Damon. I assume he's going to hear this and nod his head. He, as he says in this piece, he does care a lot about what people think.

I think that that sensitivity is responsible for a lot of heartache and stress for him. And I think it's also the source of a lot of incredible work because of that sensitivity and how much it means to him, as you said. I did know a lot of the stuff that he talks about. Sure. We talked about it and what he was doing with Watchman. I was glad to get that out there. He put the letter out, I think, because he knew news would start to break as it did yesterday.

Some casting announcements happen with Regina King is going to be the star. Lewis Gossett Jr. and Don Johnson. Really interesting cast, Adelaide Clemens, who's a really underrated, I think, unknown actress who was on Rectify. Let's talk a little bit about this project because in case people don't know really about it. I think the reason people reacted with shock and horror is because Watchman is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest comic books of all time. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons published this in the 80s, 12 issues, essentially a riff on, the Charlton comic book characters pushing the idea of... Who are the Charlton comic characters?

Sorry. He wanted to take a universe in the same way that there's a Marvel universe and a DC universe and see what would have happened. Like play it out with adult concerns and actual history of America. What would have happened to these quote unquote golden age superheroes?

DC, I think, had recently acquired this catalog of characters and he wanted to play with them. He was told he couldn't, so he made up versions of them. I think Rorschach is either the question or the specter. I don't actually...

I can't roll that deep. Sorry, guys. But it's an original story that takes all the things the comic books were in the 40s and 50s and runs them through the meat grinder

of the 60s and Watergate and into the Reagan 80s. And it is beloved and Alan Moore walked away from it. DC cannot stop fudcing with it.

In a way that pisses off Alan Moore, pisses off fans. Zach Snyder made this slavishly devoted movie that basically recreated it frame by frame,

which was in my mind a complete artistic failure for that reason. But which now has its sort of cult admirers. Well, everything does. Anyway, so when I was announced that they were going to do a TV show and that Damon was going to be doing it, there was a lot of concern of like, well, can't they just leave this alone? Why is he going to do the same thing that Zach Snyder just did?

What he confirmed in this message, and which I can also confirm from talking to him, he's not doing that. As he says in this letter, that's Old Testament. That exists. He's going to try to understand what Watchman was thematically. Yeah, he says we have no desire to adapt the 12th. 12 issues. They will, however, be remixed because the baselines in those familiar tracks are just too good, and we'd be fools not to sample them. And I think it's, I think that's thrilling.

Yeah. I just, I'm really excited about this, and I'm excited about it in the way I was excited about the leftovers once, you know, once they tweak some things out to the first season, which is this feels like the kind of project that is perched on the edge of a cliff, and it could spectacularly fail, and Damon probably broke out in hives when we said those words just now. But it really could be something exciting. And the spirit with which they're doing it is super cool. Whether he should be pre-apologizing, that's not for me to say, but it's very, very much on brand for him, and the work will speak for itself. This one's for you, and I don't know if you really want to get into this now, or if you'd like to get into it a little bit farther down the line, but what elements, since you

are now developing a television show, what elements are obligatory for any pilot episode to have in order to work. I think you should really focus on the public services in a particular American city, like one that has a fire department, a police department. Maybe the FBI could visit, and then you can just really, like,

stay in that lane for as long as possible. It's a good question. I mean, my position is, it's difficult to answer because I wrote a pilot script and then sold it, and then, so this wasn't, like, I wasn't writing to order,

basically. And so I'm learning, though, for example, that now that I'm, we're in pre-production on the pilot, and I'm writing the second and third episodes that, boy, it was a lot easier when it was just one episode. You know, there are things that you have to consider. I think the most important thing, obviously people will always say there have to be compelling characters

that you'd want to revisit. There has to be some action or inciting incident to make you curious to see more. But for me, the thing has always been very dependent on tone and vibe. You want to be in location. You want to be transported to a world where you want to spend more time, even if you don't think you could survive there because it's an apocalyptic hellscape or it rains all the time like in dark.

I don't know why I was just thinking about dark. But even in dark, for example, it's rainy Germany, not a place that I have on my bucket list to visit, but it was so evocative and so committed to its look, and it was a place that I hadn't quite seen before, and I was curious about how it worked. And it seemed as if the people making the show had given a lot of thought to how that place worked.

felt like to live there, what it smelled like, your damp clothes, who was related to who and why. And, you know, like with any journey, you want to trust the person driving the bus before you get on the bus. So those thoughts are very, very, very, very, very much in my mind and will be consuming my mind. I'm sure we'll talk much more extensively about the sort of making of this in some of our own. Can we do a pre-opening diaries like Dave Chang? Anything you want, man. I mean, don't you think? It's your major domo. And then when Jonathan Gold savagely reviews my TV show, I can just.

speak about it? Do you think that the peak TV, this is Adam DeVries, do you think that the peak TV bubble will ever burst a la the stand-up bubble of the 80s? And if so... That's his example? Well, I mean, I think what he means is like the bubble of recruiting stand-ups to come do my show,

which is essentially a riff on my act. I was trying to figure out which AMC show is the equivalent of Howie Mandel blowing up a surgical glove on stage. And if so, what do you envision the post-peak era to look like? And then there's a follow-up question that I will ask. Aren't we? I feel like we're already in the post-speaker. Yes, and I agree with you.

Yeah, I think that we are in the... And the reason why I think this is something that Andy and I've talked about a thousand times at this point. But you can make arguments about whether TV is better or worse now, five years ago, 10 years ago. But what you can argue is that the way in which we talk about television and the way in which we consume television has irrevocably changed. And, you know, there's another question on here about,

what did you think would be happening like what's something that was happening five years ago that is no longer happening that you would never have believed would be the case. I never would have believed that we would have gotten away from a point where Sundays were the sort of dominant

everybody gathers around the television night. I thought that that would stay the same, be the same case forever. I can't believe that there are really two conversations starting shows on HBO anymore and that that is now most of the shows that we consume, we consume at our own leisure in our own way.

I guess I'm surprised by how, I shouldn't be, but I guess I'm surprised by how radically the financial fortunes of big players have changed due to the arrival of the, literally the budgetless entities like Netflix and Amazon and now Apple. Five years ago, AMC seemed better positioned than almost any network to thrive because it had both the mass market, I think Walking Dead had premiered five years ago. Walking Dead was the highest rated show on cable, but it also had this pipeline to brilliant creative talent and Vince Gilligan, who still has a show on the air there,

and Matt Weiner. It just seems like AMC, which still has quality shows. I mean, the terror was just on it, right? And I haven't watched it, but the people that I trust are telling me how incredible it is. So I promise I will try and get to it. They still have good taste, and they make good shows. Better Call Saul, certainly their preacher we both like.

But in terms of how it can function in this marketplace, there are a lot of co-productions, a lot of will give that an American run, which is a harder way to become dominant. Not to harp on AMC, I think my other feeling is the same as yours, not just the loss of Sunday night, but a loss of a Sunday night show,

whether it aired on Sunday night or not. I just had this thought the other day, maybe even yesterday. I just missed Madman. Yeah. You know, and just the quality of it, but the quality of the conversation around it. And feel free,

millennial listeners between flipping through Philip Roth novels and listening to the national, the youngest people among us, feel free to push back on us and say that we're just remembering the good old days because they'd much rather have all the options they have now. And really, I'm just being nostalgic for a time when I could write a recap and people would respond to it. But I am surprised how quickly what we thought of as the new paradigm five years ago has just completely crumbled. Yeah, I think that the same way for me, the Shear volume is just astonishing. So just the feeling that if you fall an episode or two behind on billions,

it's almost more effective to save it for August. Right. You know what I mean? Like save it for a time when you have like a week off and you're looking to binge a show rather than I have to watch three or four hours of billions before the next billions comes on. And I think that that's happening for a lot of people I know around the office where when stuff comes up like basketball or real life and you just don't have the time. And there's just the dissolving of the television programs.

programming week is just astonishing to me. I never thought we'd get to the point where really, you know, there were the broadcast networks. You had some things like, you know, Atlanta or an FX show that comes on on a Wednesday or Thursday, but for the most part, things are getting streamed, things are getting released in huge bricks, and maybe we'll see a change. I think the other big change is that I don't really know what to call TV anymore, and that kind of leads to this next question from Austin Cassidy. I feel like a lot of the recent documentary films and docu-series are running way too long. It often feels like no effort is made to tighten and sharpen our project's narrative through editing,

have streaming services made documentarians lazy. I don't know enough about the documentary filmmaking business, but I did want to bring this up in that, you know, HBO would do a miniseries, they would do a made-for-TV movie, and they would do their series. So they've always played around with what they would show, and obviously they have their library of films.

But one thing that's sort of getting complicated is, I don't know if Wildland Country is a show or a movie anymore. And I don't know whether when Deerey makes, the last thing he wanted with Anne Hathaway in a year or two with Netflix, is that going to be a movie or a Netflix movie or a TV movie? Those things only matter in so much really is what kind of awards they get submitted for. But those awards do matter for what D. Reese is able to make next. So there is an important thing.

As to Austin's question specifically, I think it's about filling hours. I think that they need four hours of evil genius, and they want six hours of Wawa Country. And you may watch it and be like, this feels repetitive or this feels like they're really stretching out an unnecessary part of this. But those documentaries, the value proposition of them is innings eating. Yes, that's exactly right. Look at those Marvel series that started with such promise, Daredevil or Jessica Jones.

Luke Cage, the first seasons of all three of those shows had three plus excellent hours that we enjoyed and talked about. none of them needed to be 10 or I think they're 12 or 13 episodes long. They just don't need that. But the mandate is that they will make that. And in fact, much like Warner Brothers picked the release dates from movies it hadn't even written or made yet years in advance, the Marvel deal was that they would deliver this many hours of content. And then they hired the creative teams.

It seems reductive to say that Netflix and Amazon are in the widget business any more so than NBC or ABC since they were just making content to go around the commercials years ago. And there are creative people who work at Amazon and Netflix and Hulu and Apple, who are as creative as any executives in the history of television. I mean, there are great people working there who believe passionately in their projects.

But I do feel strongly that I don't know what great art has ever come from a circumstance where a benefactor was like, take all the time you need, have as much canvas as you want. Don't worry about the amount of walls we have in this museum.

We'll build more museum to accommodate it. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is coming back for its fourth season, I think, splitting its last season. I love that show. show, it is funny. I think Robert Carlock and Tina Face, and their writers still write the best jokes per capita per minute than just about anybody else on television. I don't think episodes need to be 35 minutes long. I do think a network model of that show, which wouldn't work, NBC didn't

want it. Right. But a network model where there were 21-minute episodes probably would be more enjoyable on some level. I understand that no one wants to cut their jokes, you know, and they have such good ones. But that's just the way I feel. And now, again, ask me how I feel about that a year from now when USA tells me to, no, we can't do a 96-minute episode despite the... I will lord that overview for the rest of your life. If you're like, I'm trying to get this 96-minute fit off. No, man. I've said a lot of wild things out loud, but telling everyone that I just want to get back to like 45-minute episodes, might be the one I come to regret the most.

Box yourself in a little bit. A little bit. We're going to wrap it up there just for time constraints. We will definitely do another one of these very soon. We always appreciate your questions. And thank you so much for the lively debate on the Facebook group. You can find that at facebook.com slash the watchpot. We'll be back on Tuesday, not Monday, to talk solo and killing Eve.

Yeah, the other thing, we haven't talked about this, but I wanted to put up another Spotify playlist for people barbecuing this weekend in the summer. he was asking for that. Yeah, so we should, we'll put something together, but people should go out, enjoy your weekends, enjoy your holiday weekends. You enjoy your holiday weekend, man. I'm just going to be grinding for the people, you know. I've got to go see a Star Wars movie.

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