The Watch - Ep. 123: ‘The Young Pope,’ the TV Championship Belt, ‘Big Little Lies,’ and ‘Crashing’

Episode Date: February 20, 2017

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald unpack the experience of watching ‘The Young Pope’ (2:05), debate which show is most deserving of the "TV Championship Belt" (14:40), and discuss last night's premieres of ‘Big Little Lies’ (20:40) and ‘Crashing’ (35:50). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Thank you for your help, listeners. 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'm an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio, but really in his mind, overlooking the Pacific Ocean from his mid-century modern mansion.

It's Andy Green World! What I'm happy about on this, by the way, happy President's Day. Hey, man, happy President's Day. What I'm happy about is you finally saw me the way I've wanted to be seen. Yes. That's actually... Wearing black stretch pants. That's Adam Scott caresses you.

That's a bearded Adam Scott. That's actually how I am every day on this show. Andy, welcome to the watch. It's Monday. It's President's Day. We're going to be talking about big little lies. We're going to talk about the end of the young Pope. Crashing.

Yeah, girls maybe. Sure, if you want to. If you want to throw a little girls in there. before we get started. Thursday we are doing an Oscars preview podcast. We're going to be joined by our buddy Sean Fennacy.

If you have questions about the Oscars that you would like us to address on that podcast, hit us up on Twitter. At the Watchpod is the Twitter feed. So you can hit that and Zach will grab those and we'll have some questions to answer.

You still have time to read Zoo Station, which is our Double Down Book Club selection. That's by David Downing, Zoo Station. It's about a journalist living in Berlin at the sort of precipice of World War II. It's an incredible read. talk about that probably in early March, I hope, in the next week or two. So send in your thoughts,

comments, questions, discussion items. Yeah. And I think that's it. So what do you want to talk about first? You want to do Young Pope or you want to do Big Lobis? So let's see Young Pope. So Young Pope wrapped up last week, I believe, so we didn't get a chance to talk about it that. We caught up. It took us a minute. We had to go into Confessional. We had to work some things through. And, oh, man, was this a great show? This was a great show. Now, Chris, I feel like you and I, I don't have we talked about this publicly, but I think, like maybe many who embarked on this journey with us, our faith started to flag a little bit.

It was tested. We became a little more Pope agnostic midway through the season. But boy, was our faith rewarded in the long term. I was kind of like a desolier with this show. You ended up dead in a field in Guatemala? I mean, I think that the weird choice there wasn't breaking his priestly vows of celibacy. It was choosing the wife of. of the biggest narco in the country.

Yeah. And I guess their limousine driver. Of all the gin joints in Honduras. Seriously. Like if you're good. I mean, I guess if you're going to go, go big. Yeah. I think that this was a truly remarkable, beautiful, very moving journey.

I love this show in a way that I didn't expect to love it at the beginning. Now, you know I love this show. I came on so hot on this podcast, basically saying that I had not been happy since the first Tuesday of November. And then I watched the young pope. and I felt lifted a lightness in my soul, that was big praise. I did not expect that I would find this show to be as emotionally engaging and rewarding as it became.

Because one of the things we talked about when we started talking about Young Pope was how it was completely a specific, aesthetic, and artistic journey led by Paola Sorrentino. And it was okay to laugh because it was very funny. It was over the top at times. What we didn't know, because we didn't know the end of the journey when we started it,

was how he really felt about these characters. Was he commenting on them too? Was this all a bit of a, you know, was it in a sense a performance commenting on people who are devout or people who find themselves in these situations in life like Lenny Ballardo did? As it turns out, like what I think Sorrentino, like most great artists, loves his characters. And though the trappings were ornate and often outrageous,

this was a story about a boy becoming a man. and it was a story about a guy who was a child and trapped in childhood and then learning to become an adult and let the light in and let the smiles in. And in a very profound way, it was a moving story about people. I did not expect that. I so would have admired it aesthetically if it had remained broad. But in fact, it went very deep and cut very true and had these moments of just surreality and beauty that I found just deeply affecting. I was a little less enamored with the Freudian stuff in the show than I was with, the inner workings of the Vatican and the Voyello stuff, and especially Voyalo's deep, deep involvement with Syria soccer.

But Voyello's jersey is low-key, the greatest thing we're going to see on TV. Also, the guy, the magistrate who's just like, he's like, why did you do this to me? And he's like, because I'm an inter fan. That was awesome. I, yeah, so a little less interested in sort of the daddy issues as much, but I was just fascinated by the Vatican stuff and fascinated by the relationship to God stuff. the thing that I will take away from the show ultimately is what an amazing act of imagination.

When you think about your, and I do think in some ways that for his aesthetically tailored and painterly and technically proficient as Sorrentino is, he's trying to get at this feeling of the feeling of like when you're a kid and you're imagining a story. And when you imagine, you know, we talk about world building all the time and you're immersing yourself. But that's your peak at being able to do that when you're a child

because you can just lose yourself inside of a story. And you know, like, we've talked about this before, but like when you're playing Star Wars, when you're a kid, and you just are developing layer upon layer of narrative for these action figures that you're holding and, you know, relationships that don't exist in the actual story.

There's no rules. Just like the depth of feeling is something that I felt while watching Young Pope. That this was someone who imagined, like, well, what if I made a show about a young Pope? And then just went off on this journey that was like, it never, it never, it never doubled back.

It never felt self-conscious about what it was doing. It never, for all the winking that was done towards the camera, it was never a winking about the actual premise of the show or the seriousness of the content. Or the emotional stakes of the characters.

So that we get to this point where the Voyello's Sister Mary relationship is played for laughs. It's funny, the idea of these characters clashing with their vestments and sitting in these gardens. But all of a sudden, they loved each other, and that made sense.

And the show respected that. You know, I think that if anything, if the show had any sins, it was, it was, it's maximalist. I mean, it's, there's too much of it. Yeah, I definitely, this is interesting, because I wanted to ask you on a, on a, we can talk about this in a second, but this idea of these limited series is being not limited enough. Yeah. And we've had a couple now where I think strangely every show seems like it could lose two episodes and be even stronger. Yeah, I mean, I think that if you ask any filmmaker, um, what they wish they had more of, they would, want more time, right? That's one of the reasons why studios like to restrict final cut,

because directors are going to fall in love with everything, and they want to show everything that they've done, and they want more and more, more. When directors hopped to TV very often, they do so with things in their contract that say, okay, you can do more and more and more. So I think you could definitely make the case that this could have been eight hours and possibly be a little bit tighter. And, and, you know, I'm thinking about it now. Somewhere in my head, the scene between Lenny and the prime minister of Italy is still going on. Yeah. Yeah. It did not need to be that long. But I actually really liked those debate scenes. That one, especially this scene about abortion between Cromwell and law in the beginning of the ninth episode, that's just sort of a 10-minute take in this huge room

where they're talking about the biblical precedent for why abortion should be, whether abortion should be outlawed or not by the church. Yeah, and I think that you sort of have to, when you approach these shows, you sort of have to take the bad with the good. And there's there's just no way you're going to have room for those things unless you're going to have these indulgent scenes if you're going to have these incredible scenes of beauty. I mean, I can't get over the fact that the ninth episode ended with the publication of his love letters, which is, again, this is a New Yorker, no less. Who is that writer supposed to be? Do you think that that is that supposed to be Seymour Hersh or something? I don't know. Look, I mean, it didn't follow the rules.

A guy in the Vatican told me that. Like the archbishop, yeah, the archbishop. The archbishop, which is, you know, the Archbishop sex scandal thing, which is laced in the beginning, and it doesn't show up basically until the eighth episode. That's not how you plot a television show. That didn't make sense. But it led to something kind of powerful. And the ninth episode,

just to remind people, ended with a woman who's never identified, but is clearly the woman that he was in love with in California, reading these love letters or hearing about them, and then going out to her family and juggling oranges. And reader, I wept. I don't know why. I don't know why she juggled them.

I don't know what Sorrentino was thinking that day. I don't know what it meant, but there was something so pure and beautiful about that. And then the oranges later... Yeah, oranges come up so much in the show. I don't know what they're exactly supposed to represent. You know, it's just so many things that don't make intellectual sense, but make emotional sense, which I found very powerful.

You know, I was trying to think back over the last few years of TV and trying to suggest that maybe there are two lists we should be keeping because there's a list of, like, the best television series. that we would identify as television series in the traditional American sense. And it's hard to get better than madmen or on the sitcom side, like a Parks and Recreation or something,

or Breaking Bad, the Americans, throwing whatever show, justified, whatever show meant a lot to you in a certain way. Thanks for throwing me. I wanted to look at you. I saw the look you started to give me

when I said, the Americans. I want this to be an inclusive conversation. I want it to be unlike Pious 13th Church. I think there needs to be a side list of just astonishing, experiences. Yeah, like the shows that will look back 10 years from now and be like, wow, like that was an astonishing experience, not even necessarily an influential show or a show that changed the way we would make shows after that, but shows that are just like little

miracles in and of themselves. And that did not follow rules established by TV, but could only have happened on TV. And other than the young Pope, I would put top of the lake up there. I throw the Nick in there. The Nick possibly, yeah, the Nick could deserve to be on that. We're in some ways girlfriend experience, but yeah. The other one would be Honorable Woman, a show that we love, the miniseries that we love, where it's breathtaking in what it can achieve just tonally, emotionally, aesthetically.

But just to come back to this again, like Jude Law's performance is outrageous and amazing because he's doing something very surfacy, right? Like, I mean, it's a very expressive performance. It's not a understated performance. He's playing a baby in half those scenes, you know, like this pampered renaissance baby.

But again, like, this was a show about one person and his own psychology. And, you know, the rigidity of his sort of punk rock aesthetic at the beginning and how he learns to let that, let that rigidity go, the way that character is, not just Gutierrez, who's just an amazing character and a beautiful performance. But, you know, the happy Spanish-speaking cardinal

who has the one big scene in like episode nine or ten about being in a good mood? The guy's the editor of Catholic universe, yeah. What? Like, that guy was there to give that speech. And it ended up being one of the most profound things for the character in the show.

The job is to put people in a good mood that that counts for a lot. I just can't believe that this existed and that it was about religion and it was about reaching higher and that he did Pilates to a Bell and Sebastian's song and it all somehow worked for me. Last question we're left with

that I want to ask you about is, do you think there should be more young pope? a second season of this show? I can't imagine what the not the stakes

because you could come up with any number of real world political scenarios to impose on the show but I can't imagine what the emotional journey for Lenny would be since it's already done this complete arc. Where he's lost his family, both families his real family and his surrogate family,

sister Mary, Spencer and he is an adult man at the end who can now be a father to someone else. It's having heart attack. Like any adult man. Well, but that part too. I'm curious what you thought about that because the way that it happened the first time, it clearly is a physical manifestation of loss.

It didn't strike me as him having a real heart attack. No, I was just being... No, but I think you could also look at the last moment of the show and be like, well, that's a wink, wink, cliffhanger. That's Sorrentino's version. It's sort of like a Christlike, you know, a sacrifice happening where he's like taking on the sins of the world. Or

like a true, complicated Catholic saint or hero or he's just sad that his father, Richie Tenenbaum, left or maybe all those American spirits in the kangaroo gardener catch it up with him. I don't know. But it could be all of those things. I do not think there should be a second season of young pope. I almost said true detective, and that's exactly why there shouldn't be a second season of young pope, because for these limited series where they leave the door open for a little bit more,

I'm sure Paulus Orantino would have more to say. I'm sure there are more drive soundtrack like, keyboard synth tracks you can put over people falling off of the basilica that would be amazing there is a young pope playlist on spotify that is it's pretty good yeah and i think shout out to lebradford making a huge comeback from mondo kim's idm experimental rock decks to do to HBO um i just think that when you have it's okay to have these things be complete statements if you're going to do a limited series make your full argument don't then go back and be like we all loved lenny and we all loved like watching him like parade around, you know, dressed up like a 14th century king.

Just, just let it go. It's over. Yeah, I think so, too. I mean, as much as I... Make another show. Make a show about that prime minister. Make another show. Yeah, I would love to go...

The thing is, though, I would love to go back to this world, but that's the TV part of me talking. Like, it left me with a feeling that good movies left me with. Yeah, right. You're not ready to leave. Okay. So, by the way, a worthy belt holder in the end. I'm very happy to report.

So here's the issue with the belt right now. And we're not trying to take this two. seriously, but like, let's just break this down. Young Pope had the belt, so usually what would happen is that any, now that it's over, something else needs to get it. Andy and I had sort of thought that big little lies was going to get it. And while I remain very

affectionate about that show, which we were about to talk about, Andy was not as much. Now, we can't give it to Legion because Andy worked on Legion and we can't give it to taboo because Andy does watch Tabu? So I'm the problem here? No, I'm just saying that like here's these are a serious, I mean, I'm sure. Do you think in a, I think

And you can critique this comment. I think Legion would probably deserve it. And I say this as a fan of what it looks like and the way people are psyched about it. But I do agree that it's disqualified. Yeah. So why don't we say that it's almost like the belt is in escrow somewhere?

Yeah, I'm not, someone's got to come snatch it. Right. And personally, like this is sort of the fun thing about it is that Andy and I could make personal arguments for various shows. Like I, you know, like I have not gotten more.

joy out of watching television this year than I did with the first good fight, which aired last night on CBS. Joy. Yeah. Just like satisfaction. You know what I mean? Like just utter like. I heard they swear on that show.

They sure do. What's that like? I mean, dude, Del Rolindo and Christine Bransky are like. The leads of the show. Yeah. It's crazy. It's such a weird gambit for CBS to like take a spin. This show would probably be a marginal hit on CBS.

It was kind of a big hit last night anyway. I had seven million viewers. But they are now taking. it away and putting it on a subscription over the top internet service that they want you to join but the people who will be most attracted to a Delroy

Lindo Christine Brent's. Don't know how to start like their own computers up. Exactly. I was on the, I was on Tony Cornheiser show last week and he asked me, I was recommending a show and he said, is that show actually on TV or is it on Netflix? He was literally like, because I cannot watch it unless it is on television.

Yeah. And this is a media professional. So I worry. I worry. I worry about CBS's gambit there, but they have enough money for us not to worry. That's great. Anyway, yeah, so we're not going to give it out today. Although, if we wanted to go, I'm just going to say this here,

if we wanted to go to a more fluid belt system where it can hop around short term. I think it goes episode to episode, yeah. If we did, then I would actually argue for sliding it, keeping it on HBO, but sliding it over a half hour to girls because last night's episode of girls, the second of the season,

was outstanding, I thought. It hit all the notes of a successful girls episode and that it was crazy funny and actually reached some points in the Marnie Hannah relationship that were, I found very affecting. And very effective too, because they really were in many ways the bookmark, not the bookmark,

the end of the chapter that was started with what I thought was the best moment of girls maybe still to date from the third episode when they just danced to the Robin song in the first season. Oh, yeah. In that moment, they were very young

and they're dancing in their apartment and Hannah tweet something about being adventurous. But it's not really adventurous. What a world. I know. But it's not adventurous to be dancing to Robin

in your apartment. It's just sort of exciting the way being young and exciting is. In this episode, all of a sudden, there's blood on the floor. One of them is married to a lunatic and life has happened.

And they've grown up. And in that moment, they say, I don't know. I have no idea what to do or what's happening. And that is a weirdly mature statement. Yeah, it's definitely a good episode. Next week, I think, is the best episode, maybe the best episode they've ever done.

So we'll obviously talk about it a lot next week. And actually, we have an interview with Lena Dunham coming next week, too, where she talks about it. I'll tell you what, we're going to put up a Twitter poll. And people can vote on who we should get the bell. Like, at least we can have a people's champ for a week while we have it in this limbo. But I agree. Like, there's a lot of competition for it right now. Okay.

So do you want to get into these other topics? Yeah. Before we get on to big little lies, let's just take a quick break in here from our sponsors. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Blue Apron. Guess what? Not all ingredients are created equal. Fresh, high-quality ingredients make a real difference. So it's important to know where your food comes from.

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anything you keep. That's jackthreads.com code BSPN to save 20% on anything you keep. Never buy before you try again. Let's hit Big Little Eyes. So adapted by David E. Kelly from Liam Moriarty's 2014 Australian sort of... It's not Australian too, is it? Yeah. Like the slap? What's going on in Australia where everyone's hitting and choking the rich kids? Australia, relax.

Maybe we need to have our president call you again. This is, you know, Kelly wrote it, Jean-Marc Valet, who directed a... Dallas Byers Club and Wild is the director of the, I believe it's eight episodes. Yeah. But this is the Reese Wilder Spoon experience, man. It's about a few families in Monterey, California, of varying levels of on the class spectrum, who all know each other through this. I would say all of them are on one end of the spectrum, and then your girl, insurgent is a little bit lower. Shailene's working on it.

And it's set in this very rich community, obviously, where there is taking views. Yeah. And there's obviously a crime at the center that they are trying to unpack that will slowly unfold over the course of the season. So slowly. In flashback. And yeah, I mean, this is Ruthen, Rees Feather Spoon, Shailene Woodley, Nicole Kidman, Lord Dern. Starrs. Adam Scott and Alexander Scarsgaard and Zoe Kravitz.

So I will let you go first because I feel like you're teed up. I, first of all, I bow. I recognize no queen except Reese. That has not changed. I want to be clear about that. This show looks beautiful. It has very high production values.

I love when John Mark Valle does the thing where he cuts the images of the people doing things that aren't related, but then he cuts them some more. That's his stick. He did that in Wilde in Dallas Byers Club. Like juxtaposes them? He juxtaposes some images of people doing some stuff,

maybe a little bit out of... That's just editing. I love the way his editor does these things. But I think all of the people production values and the smart aesthetic choices and the production values and the acting obscures one essential. One essential flaw, which is that this show sucks. This show sucks. It was terrible.

I'm shocked that you enjoyed this other than, unless your love for it purely was Reese in Lulu Lemon Pants, wrecking shop and a Buick, which, you know, if that's the log line for the show, I'm into it. But I could, I really could not believe that this show, when it started, was just going to be the slap with lens flare. I was shocked that it is basically, once again, about incredibly entitled people doing incredibly cliche things and trying to mind drama from it. I just find the foibles of rich private school parents in enclosed communities, not that interesting. I just don't find it that interesting. and you know who finds it interesting. Celebrities who send their kids to these schools also.

I think that that's limiting about who finds it interesting. Tell me more. I'm saying they find it interesting enough to get this made. So you're rejecting it off of the socioeconomic makeup of the characters? It's not, so far from one episode in, it's not satirizing it. It's not actually satire. It wants, it's, it winks towards satire that there's something here worth, but, you know, that there's something here worth satirizing or poking at or exploring,

but it's really not. You know, it's the same problem with the slap where these people were just sort of moaning about things while they were talking about how much vinyl meant to them, but it didn't mean to, it wasn't clear, it wasn't clear enough on tone to be funny. So you have Jean-Marc-Valle filming this, you know, like he's filming a Malik movie.

It's beautiful on the waves and the ocean. And then you have Reese Witherspoon on one, just on one, just on 11. And then I don't know what anyone else is doing because they're all in different things. And so we have these conversations where it's like, when Laura Dern is just like, well, I'm on the board of PayPal. now, so that's a whole thing. Okay, that's an interesting choice she's making, and that's a comment.

But in the context of the larger show, the show doesn't know what it wants to do with that comment. Is it making fun of it? Is it supporting, supportive of it? And then with the Greek chorus of parents being like, she never should have fallen or else the whole thing, it's just, it was a deeply confused show that was taking itself very seriously on a subject that I don't think deserved it. Yeah, I don't get into the deserve because I think that if you start to use that as a litmus test for television shows, you're just going to have like five television. shows. You know, like, I just don't think, like, why, what makes this any more valid than crashing? You know what I mean? Like, or what makes this any more valid than...

Tone. Your way into the story. Sure. I mean, I think that what happens here is that you're confusing the need for satire with the need for camp. And I do think that it has a good sense of camp. I think that there is moments where they're playing up the sort of caricature nature of what they're doing in a way that's, like, incredibly, uh, knowing. You know what I mean? And even if it isn't necessarily lamb basting or skewering this like these like fat cats living on the mountain. I think that there is a degree of self-awareness. Yeah, I know. One thing I really liked about this show was the incredibly safe pair of hands that seemed to be guiding it.

Like I've gone through a lot of watching Man in the High Castle and just being like, I cannot believe how long this episode feels. Even though it says it's 52 minutes, it seems like it's seven times longer than that. Television is not there might be a finite amount of like people who know how to make television. Like that the explosion of content doesn't necessarily equal like the explosion of competency. And the one thing you can say about David E. Kelly, which I thought was just really noticeable, was that this thing hummed. It had like a degree of rhythm to it. Like scenes did not go on too long. Like they knew how to cut between different storylines and set up a world in a really

economical way. I just think that I, you're everything, this is what I mean. I don't mean to belittle this. Everyone involved in this is a professional. who's very, very good at his or her job. I just don't think it's a good match. No, and I think I understand what you're saying where you're just like, if you take these four people who are like four of the best people in the world at what they do, Reese, Laura Dern, Shailene Woodley,

and Nicole Kedman, and you're just like, you guys are out for replacement level actors, actresses. You have a, you are very close to, like, absolute car crash. But you didn't, you know what you mean? Like, this is what happens when you put Reese Witherspoon in a soap opera. It becomes like electric, I think. Yeah, but it's still,

an electric soap opera. You know, I feel like you have what could be, is this an Alexander Payne movie? Like, what is it, what is the tone that it wants to be? What is the level of engagement that it wants to have with the subject matter?

A couple weeks ago, we were like, oh, the good place, it's like, it gets to have like a first season to figure out what it is. Like, can they have,

you know, it might just be that this, this pilot was shot, they're figuring out the tone and it, they settle in on it a little bit more. I would disagree only because, I could be wrong,

but I would disagree only because this is a prestige one-off project that very may well have been shot block shot like a movie. I would imagine that it was to accommodate everyone's schedule. So I just think it's a mismatch of subject matter and talent. Like I just think that Sean Mark Valet has made two very fine movies. I think I like Dallas Byers Club. I totally disagree with that.

I like Dallas Byers Club fine. Okay. I liked Wild Fine because of Laura Dern and Reese Witherspoon, who by the way played mother and daughter in that movie and are just like frenemies in this one. I will tell you one thing about his films. do not get the sense that he has a sense of humor from those films. No, that's why this is where DVD-D Kelly comes in.

Right, but it's just, it's, we've talked before about examples of, particularly in movies where the friction between a screenwriter and a director can create something interesting. You know, maybe the best example of that is a social network where Sork and Fincher could not have less in common, but somehow made the best work of their careers when they work together. This seems like such a deep mismatch to me. And it also seems like the kind of thing that was, even though it was a mismatch,

was steamrolled due to the talent. Like, Reese Witherspoon obviously likes John Mark Vellet, so she brought him in on this. She's an executive producer on it. I don't, there's no one in the kitchen in this project who can be like, well, maybe we should make it better this way. Here's my argument for Jean-Marc Valle. Is it going to be in French?

No. It's that he is very, just the same way he was and making parts of, you know, 80s, Dallas into a seemingly romantic environment. even when it was dealing with squalor, he is the right man for the job for the real estate pornography going on in this show. Absolutely right.

And the wine pornography and the food pornography. Like everything about like, and I think you're right about the tension part and the Fincher Sorkin point is really well taken. But I think the thing you have to throw in there is that the reason social network works is because of Jesse Eisenberg was like born in a lab, was created in a lab to say Sorkin dialogue.

Yeah. and Rees Witherspoon clearly has like a very, very, very clear understanding of how she wants Madeline to come off and is capable of, it's not in the writing and it's not in the directing. It's really her when she's in a kitchen and she's just like, I'm going to start a fight. I'm actually going to act wounded. Now I'm going to be that like, and she is like a wind turbine. It is amazing to watch her like cycle through all these different emotions within like one scene. I think it's like a really, really good performance. I understand exactly what you're saying.

I'm not trying to be like, dude, how can you say this? This is like Battleship Potemkin. But it's like, it's like I find it incredibly entertaining. Now, it's a difficult time to be like, I just want something so light and airy as this. And then that also has like arcs towards pretence of pretensions about, you know, being about class or being about the secrets that we keep or whatever. I don't find it, I mean, to be clear,

I don't find this distasteful in our current political climate. Sure, sure. This stuff has always bugged me. I mean, we did, and you know, we did eight weeks of podcasting about the slap, which, by the way, was so preposterous and it gave us such a good time that, you know, I almost miss it. Because this one is done so professionally that even the parts that are worth making fun of are sort of glossy and have been smoothed out and sandpapered. So they're not even really there anymore in the same degree. You know, like, I think this one needs to have a much larger influence of Greek, for example. You know, I feel like Zachary Quinto should be out there.

It's just stuff like the other thing that took me out of it was this entire show, at least so far, is based on what happens in the school, right? Sure. With the teacher being like, point out your assailant. Sure. That's not going to happen. You know what I mean? Like, that's just not something that happens at schools, maybe in Australia.

I don't think it should happen. And then it's super weird. You don't think it might happen in some weird like Monterey school, like some like very richly everybody here thinks they're getting something for their money. That's where it definitely would not happen in front of other people because that's when they would be lawyered up and know you never make a public spectacle of anything. You know, and so then that scene happens and then like 20 minutes later someone's like, she probably shouldn't have done that.

She's like, no, doy. You know? Like that's my Betsy DeVos Board of Ed opinion about that scene. So, yeah, I just found it so, the only thing that I found interesting in it is Reese Witherspin's performance, which is, as we noted, on one. I mean, sometimes you can see, you refer to it as a turbine. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, I've criticized actors like Amy Adams for quote-un quote-to-quote showing their work. What I appreciate about Reese Witherspoon is you're not just seeing her work in the character.

you see every single bit of energy and blood, sweat, and tears she used to take this project from the proposal slush pile to HBO Sunday night. Like, you see the entire just arc of production in every crinkle of her insane eyes. Yeah. So I respect that. What's up with Kidman? I do feel like she didn't get the note a little bit. like it's a weird performance for her.

I actually am, I'm not particularly, I've never been under the Nicole Kidman spell in terms of me either. Her as like a great actress. Except for Deadcom. Yeah, and I think she's good in, in Eyes Wide Shut,

and there's things that she is good in. But like, I always feel like she is, um, petrified at being on screen. Like, there always seems to be like a little bit of, like, a stunned nature to her performances. And in some ways, that actually works well for the character

she has to play in this show. But a couple of times during this episode, I was like, that's Nicole fucking Kidman. I know. On television. I mean, maybe she's just like playing, she's like playing like facilitator in a scene between Shailene Woodley

and Reese Withersen where she's just like, oh yeah, what do you think? I mean, maybe she's so wild, man. Like that's wild that has happened. That she's coming off the bench basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe, I mean, maybe she's,

she's saving her shot, you know, for later, later in the series. It's like when, you know, when a team trades for somebody at the trade deadline, and then they're like, you know, actually we're not going to play you. So why don't you just like, see it like, you just like look good on the sideline for a second? I think, um, before we move on, we should say the greatest decision, the greatest choice made in the show is just the personal grooming of Adam Scott to be, he is so perfect as a vinyl collecting 40 plus.

Vice president of the American Cowlneck Association. Just doucheback. Like, just like the way, every choice they made for him. Yeah. And for him to be, our old colleague Sam Donsky tweeted, has Adam Scott been on too many podcasts to plausibly kiss Reese Witherspoon on screen? No. I just think that's the right question.

He's asking the right questions, but that's the point of casting him. Let me tell you something about Adam Scott. Very, very popular with the women of Los Angeles. Yeah. Are you talking about our wives in particular? Yes. That's fine. but even my Adam Scott apologizing wife

had some issues with the relative thickness of the beard versus the thinness of the head hair but again like that's that's the point like he is an actor this is his body in his face or instruments sure you know but they love that little guy don't they

they just love them they love that little bird guy wonderful you're not mad at all though about her loving Adam Scott I love Adam Scott yeah look I watch party down I was in I was as in love with him as I was in love with Lizzie Kaplan. Okay, well, we'll revisit Big Little Eyes a little bit down the road. Does that mean I have to keep watching it? You know, it's a free country, man.

I wanted you to start sending me, like, postcards from Monterey. I could do that. Can we just make this? I think Dobbins could just come in here and hold it down. By the way, we have to reiterate on air. Our colleague and friend Amanda Dobbins owes us a visit because she is taking issue with some of our takes recently. Because I thought that the, I was surprised that the crown was

real. Because you didn't know that there was a queen in England. And apparently, I don't recognize that there's a queen in our country named Reese Witherspoon. All right. Let's wrap up by talking a little bit about crashing. Yes. This is Pete Holmes's show on HBO. It's a half hour comedy. And it's basically about Holmes plays like an aspiring comedian who's been living off his wife, who's a teacher in sort of the New York suburbs. This is all very much his life. And he comes home one day find his wife in bed with a guy named Leif. Yeah. A very, very, very funny performance by the guy who plays Leif. That may have been

lately fictionalized. Um, and he winds up, you know, being sort of homeless uh, going into the city and just really pursuing his dreams for lack of anything else to do. Uh, crashing is sort of about his delayed, uh, you know, adulthood or his delayed sort of entry into

the real world. And, uh, you know, it's from Jod Apatow, very much creation of, of Holmes who you've had on your pod before and it's got a very very interesting tone i actually have watched a few episodes of this so i don't want to go too far into it other than to say that it gets much better i think the first episode is fine but it has a lot more to do yeah i think the show is just delightful and really really good and uh i've watched five or six of them um because i found it incredibly fun and pleasurable to do so i think that um what you

see, I think it's a very good pilot, but I mean that with like a lot of the caveats that are attached to pilots. It has to get the plot going. And also the things that Judd Apatow brings to this project as the sort of, you know, the godfather of it and the executive producer are the positive things that he brings to it are really evident in the episodes to come. I think the biggest problem with the show is front and center in the pilot, which is that Lauren Lapis, who is really funny and has been in, she's like in Jurassic World and Orange and the New Black, sort of is bent into an uncomfortable shape playing the kind of, you know, the cuck-holding wife. They do more work with her later, but it's kind of a thankless part, at least in the pilot,

and sort of a familiar one from a bunch of Apatau things. Going forward, though, what the show is about, it's not even so much about Pete Holmes' own growth, and this is, again, based very much on his own life and what happened to him. But it's really this incredibly effective love letter to comedy as a profession. Every episode brings a real, guest are basically playing him or herself. And Pete has to sort of crash on their couch, hence the name of the show, and learns about their style, their point of view. Artie Lang in the first one, but T.J. Miller in the second, Sarah Silverman comes on later.

I think once we get to T.J. Miller in this second and third episode, the show really takes off because he's just fucking hilarious. But also, the show does this really amazing thing of articulating something that I think in podcast world, and Pete Holmes obviously is a very successful and very good podcast called You've Made It Weird. we are in this world where comedians are incredibly front and center, both for what they do on stage and the way they talk about life offstage. And there's sort of a, and I think we even said something about this when we were talking a few weeks ago.

This role of the comedian is like sort of a night errand, like wandering the world, experiencing things, putting emotions front and center, telling personal stories, processing politics, being on the front lines of all the conversations and hashtag fights that we're always having on Twitter. This show kind of personalizes it. It makes comedy feel like a very vital, valuable, and art form worthy of respect. Especially because the thing that Pete Holmes does that I think is really impressive is he modulates his own comedy so that when we see him on stage in the first few episodes of the show, he's pretty funny. He has some jokes. But as everyone tells him, he's not actually cutting skin.

He's not drawing blood. Yeah. And that's an interesting distinction to watch develop. So this show has a that thing you do problem. It's not a problem. So it has that thing you do issue So in that thing you do They're this band from Pennsylvania right

And they write a Beatles-esque pop song That winds up becoming like a regional And I think that national hit The one hit wonder The issue with doing a movie or show About something like that is that that song has to be good By the way, that song is pretty good And that song is really good

By Fountain Williams For Pete Holmes Do you remember they asked Bob Pollard to do it first? Did they? They did. Somewhere out there there is a version of that thing you do written by Pop Pollard.

Is it one minute long and it's about UFOs and it was recorded with a Fisher Price? Yeah. Okay, so for Pete Holmes and if you're gonna do a show where you're a stand-up comedian

and you're a stand-up comedian that other stand-up comedians are like, you're really talented. It's very, very difficult to find that level of like, you're right, Pete Holmes in the beginning of this series is like funny

and especially funny off-stage but on stage, it's very awkward and is trying to do lots of wordplay comedy of like, Have you ever noticed that this word is like this? Very gentle bits.

Right. And they're very like, they're very vanilla. And it's such a hard thing to do where you're doing any, if you're making art about art to figure out how to represent what the product is in that. And that's what I'm talking about. I initially was just like, is this going to be about how this like average comedian keeps getting told he's amazing by like other comedians?

Because there's like a really like, that is actually, you have to suspend disbelief to some extent. It gets a lot better as the show goes on. I just don't know if they nailed it in the pilot. And when I was first watching, I was like, this is amazing. Are we really going to pretend like this dude is funny? Like, this is incredible. I think he's pretty self-aware about it.

And I think he, his performance is really good too because he's so guileless. I mean, he's just sort of, he's this. It's not a character you see, you see the white man comedian who, like, has a tough time with his wife or girlfriend and then winds up everything working out. It's not often that you see such a, like, baby. in the woods who's like kind of like views in a very like illicit and kind of dark world but like maintains a sense of innocence in that world except for the young pope it's very similar no but but but to your point like yes the pete holmes character on the show is a is a man child in a way but he is not like the you know the jack black man child of movies for the last 15 years he really is kind of a baby

came from a christian background uh he has a very intense relationship with his mother as as we see in a later episode. And he's very egosess about that. And to me, and in terms of the Apatow connection, obviously the Rolodex is pretty deep, and he can get a lot of people to be on the show. But, you know, there's an episode where Pete is out, you know, flyering to get time,

and he's surrounded by these young comedians, who are young comedians in New York, and they're all just as good as Artie Lang is and we see him on stage. And, you know, you take a movie like funny people, which has been pretty much, I think, forgotten. the best parts of Judd-Apita's funny people are when he gets titular funny people just riffing.

Generally, that's actually the best part of all Judd-A-A-Petau movies is when you just have really wonderful people on screen making each other laugh. And comedians making each other laugh is such an, it sort of feels exciting to get to watch it. It's why I like, I still ride for comedians

and cars getting coffee because the moments of these characters, the characters, people, funny people actually making each other laugh, which is the highest praise, are really, it's really exhilarating to watch. And so this show is about that. It's essentially a chance to peer in on something people care about very deeply,

but it's not wedded to the motion picture. We have to solve someone's life in two and a half hours that funny people was. It's just vignettes as a guy tries to put his life together. And also, T.J. Miller's a Titan. T.J. Miller, just getting ready for that episode. Okay, so we are going to wrap up now. We're going to do our Oscars preview on Thursday.

So if you have Oscars questions, hit us up at the watchpod on Twitter. And then are we doing an Oscar show? And then we're doing an Oscars live show. I think we'll probably cut in a little bit beforehand and just say hi, but then we'll do an after show, much like the one we did with the Emmys and the Globes. We'll have special guests for that. Until then, top off your shardin-A bro. Welcome back to TV, Beransky.

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