The Watch - Ep. 13: 'The Watch'

Episode Date: January 20, 2016

On today's episode Andy & Chris discuss the new Showtime drama 'Billions', wonder if there's too much TV that's just good enough(21:00), try to make sense of Oscars season (38:00) and plot career paths for Alicia Vikander, Tom Hardy, and Leo DiCaprio (46:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I need sports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch on the Channel 33 podcast feed. My name is Chris Ryan. And joining me in the makeshift studio, he'll tell you Cash is King every time. My very own Bobby Axelrod, it's Andy Greenwald. Sell! Sell! Sell? That's all...

That's your... No, man. Cash is king. It's a bull market. Can I say something about this? We're going to talk about the Showtime Show Billions, right? Yeah, man. We're also going to talk a little bit about Kanye's new song, which we touched on a couple weeks ago. We got Oscar nominations to talk about. We're excited. I'm happy to be here. It's good to see you. Hey, you're looking a little vapor trail right now. I'm tired. You know, I come out to L.A. and, you know, no more parties in L.A., but definitely some podcasts in L.A. And that time change, that'll bite you.

So I might say some kooky stuff. But what I wanted to say, before we get into it, about this Showtime show billions. Tate, let's turn off the Clippers, man. I feel like we got, I feel like we got to cut the clippers off. The TV's on in here. I just, I think I hallucinated. It's a loose, it's a loose vibe. But I think I just hallucinated a movie about Jason Sudakis defeating Hitler.

Did I make that up? Yeah, he's in this Jesse Owens movie. I didn't know that. That's a thing? Yeah. That's cool. Sudeikas is putting in work. Sadekis has always been putting in work.

You just haven't been paying attention. Sadaicus is the MVP of that David Blaine special. You ever that one? We talked about that before? What an honor. I feel like I've brought this up a few times where David Blaine makes Harrison Ford cry because he like pulls a dollar out of an orange. Remember that?

I really think I'm tripping balls right now. I still think I'm on that JetBlue flight. Listen, all I want to say is this. You know, Chris, you and I, we engage with the culture. We talk about the culture. Watch it. experience it. Yeah,

but it takes a very special project to, like, get you through the transitive property of enthusiasm to just basically take on the mantle of an entire field of work or study. A couple years ago, okay, a decade ago, you went on a doctor house binj.

Yeah, right. And basically thought you could prescribe medicine. That's right. You watch so many episodes. I'm still not welcoming a couple of bars in Brooklyn. You would go to people and you would palpate them. Yeah.

You would be like, I would just be like, paddles. You would be like, it's not looping. No one asked But, you know, that was That was then

I saw you today And you immediately Started telling me How to manage my 401K That's right You now think that you are A financial advisor From one episode

Of a new showtime show You are so fired up about this And let me know why though Because so billions In new show on showtime Written by One time You know, former

Not even one time Multiple times Grantland Contributed by a compliment Who also wrote rounders. This is with his writing buddy, David, David Levine. And also Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times.

The New York Times, the Grey Lady. Is that what they call it? I want to sell you out and make you feel really weird. But no, that is what it's called. So this is a new show. It's about, stars Damien Lewis, who I enjoyed very much in Wolf Hall. You mean the best miniseries of the year? And Paul Giumati, is this the first time Paul Giamatti's led a television show?

It seems like something that should have been happening for the last five years. You clearly weren't a fan of HBO's John Adams. Boy, like John Adams, just like... I definitely forgot about that the whole thing. Here's the thing. Just like in life, John Adams just got sunned by Hamilton. I have to admit that just basically on the... Like, basically miniseries don't phase me.

So you can't come at me with Olive Kittrich. No. No, but Jammati's been trying to get into the TV game for a minute. He had a really cool FX pilot based on the novels of Charles Williford, who's a great Florida crime writer that I highly recommend. based on the hoke character. Who's running that show? Scott Frank.

Oh, man. Like, that is a show I wish existed. Gosh, can we just go off on a little tangent right here? I feel like that's generally what we do, yeah. Let's talk a quick second before we get to Billions about some shows that never were. Okay. Because when I was watching Billions, one thing I was thinking about was... This show exists and others don't?

Well, David Milch's Money. Yeah. Which was about a Murdoch-style media clan. Played by Ian McShane. was the top line that show. That or Brian Cox. I can't remember. I would watch either version of that show. Or like Ray Winstone or Brendan Gleason, maybe.

So what we're saying is a perhaps a thick-middled Britishman. Yeah. Britisher. But that's like that script is actually floating around some place in the ether if you happen to come across it. But this is a show that I think they filmed the pilot, but it never went to see. Yeah, but just show, because I was watching billions, I was like, what a ripe, what a ripe subject for like,

a multi-season television show. And I was surprised that nobody had done sort of New York power, money, Wall Street in a minute. And you're going to tell me that I'm wrong. Dirty sexy money on ABC? Yeah, I guess I mean like in this style. You know what I mean? And this is like the way that I have to give them a lot of credit.

They really just have like, they're not like, what if there was a guy who got a job at this hedge fund and is coming up through the ranks? It's like, no, it's the most powerful guy on one side and the most powerful guy on the other side. And they're just going to go right at it. And it's like by the end of the first episode, so the battle lines are drawn.

That's a really good point. And I was almost thrown by that at first because you definitely, there's definitely some thinking that you need an audience aligned character, a point of view character, to enter you into the world. And the show does not give you that.

It starts right at the very top. And it's interesting, like I feel like making the show at this moment, you can maybe get away with that. I mean, and we're doing something which is generally unfair, so we're not really judging the show. we're talking about the pilot.

I think I got six episodes sent to me, but I've not watched them all yet, so we're just talking about the first one. But, you know, does the show want us to have sympathy for these billionaire titans of industry, or does it want us to, you know, throw eggs at them? I feel like the show sometimes can't quite figure that out. Yeah.

And I don't know if that matters, but it definitely is the kind of show that would have been different in 2006, different in 2008, different when money was being made, I guess which was 11 or 12. and then, and this is the version of it they can make now. Here's something I want to clarify as we get into this conversation.

I tweeted a little, sometimes I like to give people a little insight into our planning, because you and I, we do a lot of planning. Sure, yeah. You know, just like Axelrod. You know, you got to know all the angles. You got to know what's in the warehouse. So I like to give people a peek of what's inside our warehouse. Sure.

And, you know, I was telling you hadn't watched it yet, and you were like, what's up with that? And I was like, well, Jammati gets peeped on. Like, that's, like, if you're in the, full water sports with the dude who played pig face or whatever his name was in private parts. Like, this is going to be your jam. If you're, if you,

if you ever wanted to see Rhino from a Spider-Man 3. If you ever want to see the second president of these United States get treated like a common lamp post to Manhattan, this is your show. And you just were like, you would the context, it was a context for, no, but I also wanted to say that you would just been like,

I'm all in on this and you just wrote, you know, you wrote billions. I wrote billions. Because you were excited. Yeah, because I was down. And I feel like people... Not because of the particular fetish.

No, I think people misunderstood because here's the thing. I like the show best when it is fully committed to playing up the extremity of its subject matter. Yeah, it's little trashy. It can be a lot trashy. It's super over the top. On the flip side, it's like they didn't even wait very long to have Damien Lewis like save a pizzeria to have his inward bread. Just like, hey, Dr. Hollywood over there. What?

How long is there right amount of time to wait for Brody from Homeland to save a pizzeria? You know what I mean? Like, what does Robert McKee say about that? How do you save the cat slash pizzeria? That's the problem. That's why Deadwood got canceled. They're like, God damn it, Milch! What are you going to save Big Sal's slice of heaven?

Can you imagine that like in Deadwood in the sets, like you go past the horror house? This guy's like, I invented pizza. And it's like Giovanni's. Gene Honey's Italian pirey or whatever And he's just like, why I know I liked my pizza? This is good. Why do I have cholera? That's a deadwood joke, guys.

Deadwood joke. Yeah, it's important. But can I also just say, the little things. They filmed the show in New York. That pizza looks super bad. Yeah, it's also the interior. It's like that was not like a,

I mean, I guess there's probably a good pizza area that looked like that. I don't know. It looked like it was in Glendale to me. Let's talk about this. I'm going another tangent for you. Because, okay, you guys, big picture, we're talking about billions, but really, we're just talking about storytelling. We're just... We're just...

You've got to know when to cut bait on a loser. Yeah. Stock, you've got to know when to get out of there and limit your losses. That's right. Or when you buy the pizzeria. And another thing that happened, you know, what I like to do when I'm out here in California, is I like to tell people about my plane flights. And I'm not really going to do that other than to say I watched X Machina on the way out here.

Okay. And yo, this is a tweet. from March, that movie is the greatest. That movie is so good. Does that even have like the barest relationship? It does. Because here's what I want to say. If people, if you haven't seen this movie, you should see it.

It's streaming on Amazon Prime right now for free. And so you have no excuse if you get free shipping on your paper towels. And, you know, it's a great sci-fi movie. Performances are incredible. Year of Oscar Isaac, now I understand why he was good in all four quadrants this year. He's good in everything. Right. With hair, without hair, with a little bit of hair, with some hair.

Um, three quarters the way through this movie, which is about humanity and dread and artificial intelligence, just when you think things are about to get super, super gully, there's a dance sequence. Yes, this is like reading a vulture post from March, but I know, but I just want to say they start dancing, right? Yes, yes. And I was so happy by this. Uh-huh. It made me so happy that there was room in this movie. Oh, for like a little, like a curveball. Yeah.

For a complete tonal curveball that could have come from no conference, no, like, room full of people. Like one person, in this case, Alex Garland, was like, no, that fits the movie I'm making and I'm doing it. I want more dance sequences in 2016 in everything. Right. Narrative dance sequences. Exactly. Right. And I think that the thing about billions, pilots are impossible.

You have to do 100 things. You have to introduce the characters, the stakes, the world, the story they're going to be telling in season one. It's people literally saying their name a couple of times. Sure. I mean, like, this is what I do for a living. This is my job. Yeah. Look, Chuck, I'm just your assistant district attorney of the Southern District.

You're the state attorney of the state of New York. But the things that Copplin and Levine do really well, and, you know, the movies that they're best known for are Rounders, which is really, really enjoyable movie, and Oceans 13, right? But the reason I was thinking about those movies is that those movies in particular are, movies about bluster, right? They're about confidence and bluster and artifice and performance. And, you know, in many ways, like a performance of masculinity. There's room here for this to, it doesn't have to be a... Solitary man.

Oh, yeah, that was the movie. I think Brian just did that one alone. But the point being, there is room, plenty of room in this overinflated hyper-masculine world to play with that sort of stuff, to play with performance, to have fun with it. These guys are... And I think that the version of this show, that I am much more into is the version that allows there to be a sense of playfulness and a winking sense of humor about all of it, you know? And that's not always present in the pilot,

because, again, it's a pilot. So we don't know what the show is going to be. I thought that probably something that might have turned people off to the show is exactly what kind of turned me on to it, which was just the insane amount of jargon. A lot of a lot of jargon. And for as expository as some of the dialogue was, where it's like, look, we've been married, what, eight years? You know, and it's, Let me check my sundial. Oh, it has been in years. There was just an incredibly dense and exciting amount of just financial rhetoric and legalese.

And I thought it was really exciting to get thrown into the deep end of the pool on that part. And those are both worlds that I'm always kind of excited by. Are you? Yeah, I think I really like margin call. I like big short. Like I think these kinds of. Are you a boiler room guy? I like boiler room.

I like movies where people talk fast and, and, and, and, and, and, and, you know, I'm, and kind of have like quick minds, you know? And I like when there's a profession that's sort of right out of my intellectual reach, like I don't really understand what those guys do. No. Probably not supposed to because that's why they get away with what they're doing. Right. And same thing for underground poker.

The same thing for bank heists. It's like there's like a degree of expertise and professionalism that I can't quite grasp without the screenplay, the screenwriter, is taking me through. I completely agree with that. And I mostly feel the same way. I think that the impediment for me, though, with this show in particular is I don't, Is Gio Body getting pissed on? No, I was into that.

I've often wanted to see that. I think it really would have improved any number of his other roles. Yeah. Have you seen the blooper reel from Straight Out of Compton, by the way? It is just like the Bellagio fountains of urine, just flying over, crisscrossing over his head. They're like, oh, Paul. Paul loves a pistake. Class of Be Real.

From G-Man. No, but I don't care about, I find this world very hard to care about. like the super, super rich, I don't have the escapist thrill thing of it. Sure. And I find it all pretty gross in a lot of ways. And I don't know if the show is going to, like, I hate to, I mean, interrogate that. I guess it will at some point. It's sort of hard to when you're, you know, the guy fighting for the little guy, so to speak, is just as rich as the other one, right?

Yeah. Like, they filmed Jammadi's house in, you know, it's like this mansion in Park Slope up on 8th Avenue that's like, not even a place where a human lives. It's just some... I think it's like a... Brownstone? It's a... It's bigger than a brownstone.

Right. Anyway. Well, it's a historical landmark is what you're saying. Basically. And it's like... It's where John Adams was bored. It's where John Adams was pissed on. It's where so many great men throughout history

have just... have just been rained down upon. Just make it rain. Um, but yeah, like, can we talk about, the other thing that I thought a lot about watching, and we're talking about it a lot just because, you know, a lot of shows are coming up in the next few weeks, but this was sort of interesting. It was a high profile show. Sure.

And I think it's going to do pretty well. And I think that it's definitely going to do well for Showtime, which can be a curse because, as we've talked about before, showtime shows are built not necessarily to be great, quote unquote, but they're built to be well-run machines for seven to eight years. We don't think that Bobby Axelrod will be hung in Tehran next year. You imagine. That would be pretty wild. I do want to talk about Damien Lewis, though, because the other thing I thought when I was watching the show was, you know, TV is such a chaotic business. And they buy this, you know, someone buys a script.

And then it's like, okay, well, now we want to make it. So who's available? Who can we get? And that's so many moving pieces. And by the time you go into production with a cast and crew, you hope for the best. Yeah. But very often you don't know what you've got. And you certainly don't know how it's going to shake out in terms of chemistry or whatever.

And, you know, you say that you have Damien Lewis. Emmy winner Damien Lewis and you have Paul Jammati, um, human sponge, uh, in the cast for something. Steady. Sorry.

Um, you're going to get put on the air no matter what. I like Damien Lewis on a lot of things, including Homeland. Um, I don't know if he's right in this part. He is certainly charismatic and likable, um, with a, you know,

he can play dark, but he's not, he's not a dude from Queens. You know what I mean? And you just kind of spend, malon Ackerman's not a, a lady from Inwood. No, she is not.

And that was probably the main part. Even though she says, I'm just a girl from Inwood like four times. And then at the end, she's like, that's just how I do it in Inwood. Of all the things I learned in Inwood. Threatening 9-11 widows. That's just how I do. Can we talk about your favorite scene? Yeah, it's not like, I want me to characterize it as my favorite scene because there's

that, there's a scene where Damian Lewis's character. You mean Bobby Axelrod? Bobby Axelrod is giving away college tuition to the children of, his coworkers who perished in 9-11. He worked, I guess, like a fictionalized Canter Fitzgerald. And there was a moment where the first kid that they named,

the first kid who gets the scholarship is named Freddie Aquafino. Which made me excited because I was pretty sure that Tommy Desani was named after next wood. Earl Evian was the fifth. Pete Poland Springs. I was really actually, you were talking about, you know,

having an Oscar Isaac dance sequence. What would you have done if the next 35 minutes We're just him reading off names in alphabetical order and handing them in envelopes. Well, people have started to fidget more nervously. Slow TV, dog. Why not?

What's the rectify version of billions? You know? Why not? But, you know, we're just riffing on this at this point. Like, it, I think we enjoyed it. I think we're curious to see where it goes next, especially if they steer into that skid of just having more fun with it well. You know, Maggie Siff is, I really like her as an actress.

But, you know, Alan's, Seppenwald's review of it, I thought was a pretty interesting review. And one of those ones that you might want to just like, even if whether you want to watch the show or not, like bookmark this piece that he wrote about it because he's pretty good at keeping his finger on the pulse of what things are going. Instapaper, it, pocket it, whatever. Are those things that people do? Yeah.

It's fascinating to me. What's an RSS feed? Seriously, do you know what that is? No, I've never known what that is. Well, I'll explain it later. Do you think, what about slow podcasting? What have you just explained it to me for the next 20 minutes? I think we're investigating that today.

We are. No, he was just basically saying that. it like, I think you use Stockholm Syndrome as an example for a show like this, which is that in, there's so much TV out there and so much of it is so competently made and there's so many good performances that it's possible to immerse yourself in almost anything and begin to like it, basically. He wasn't saying he didn't like it. He was just, the sense I got was that there are, you know, a dozen other things he probably

would rather watch. But after watching six episodes of this, he was like, yeah, I'm down, sure. I know it's been a while since you've, been like writing about television for on a weekly basis but I want to

share one of my personal experience of my own over the last few weeks and see if it matches up with you I feel like I have I don't know

whether I would pin this to the end of what was like the last sort of procedure that ended I guess it was really Mr. Robot I can't remember when it was like

that last show that we talked about at Grantland really significantly maybe he's after a true detective I just feel like I've kind of

regressed to some sort of television appreciation mean where I like a lot of it. Yeah. But I haven't, I think that I have kind of grown out of or like, like, aged out of needing a show to be the show. Right. And I have, because I haven't had an obsessive show in a while, right? And I think Mr. Robot might have been the last one. And I think I've seen a bunch of stuff over the last few weeks that I think are like pretty good. Yeah. You know what I mean? And, and, and one of the other things I wanted to talk to you about, with the TCA's going on this weekend, which is like the television critics association,

they come out to Los Angeles and heads of networks and their show panels, everybody gives these speeches about the state of the television union or what's going on with their network or their show or whatever. And a lot of the debate has been about Netflix's numbers. Yeah. And whether or not there is, so Netflix doesn't share its numbers publicly in terms of how many people are watching these episodes.

And NBC, or someone who works at NBC did a presentation It's, it's pretty sketchy. Yeah. That was like, here's what we think. Yeah. And they, I mean, I might be wrong in my read of this, but it sounded like some of the way that they were like detecting what people were watching was through like sound like sonar. Like, have you seen the movie X Machina? First of all, it's really good.

A lot of good vulture posts on it from like March April. You know, in that movie, there's a lot of data like mine. Yeah, data grabbing. Yeah. cell phone stuff. So I'm sure that's what NBC did. Well, whatever they did, it's... I don't really think that.

By the way, litigious members of the NBC Universal Family, I don't think you did that. In any case, their numbers didn't sound like totally accurate. But at the same time, I think that the overall message that they were trying to send, they were sort of successful in sending was even if these numbers aren't accurate, Netflix's sort of hold on the popular imagination of how popular their shows are, is that like, Master of None is not. more popular than the grinder. No, right.

So basically they were like, our sense is that like every episode of Narcos, whatever is watched like three million times. Three million viewers per episode. Or Jessica Jones is it four million? Our sense of that or that's what they said? That's what they said. Roughly that.

And Amazon had said that man in the high castle was this most popular show. Which means not. And I think that they had their number at 2.1. This is what this report said. And these numbers have all been disputed. You know what I mean? And Netflix came out and was like,

those are all wildly wrong. Right. But the thing that's so fascinating about this. And I think that other people have made this argument, so I will repeat them when I say it. Netflix basically is in a, they can do whatever they want, but their position is pretty untenable because basically they are saying, we won't tell you our numbers, but we'll brag about them. Yeah. What they're doing, though, is really brilliant because even if I think it's super, super shady, because we've already talked, we've talked about this a lot, but in general, I think people understand that, like, the wide gulf between the conversation. economy and actual economy?

Yeah, this is a good conversation. So basically, you know, the fact, you remember there's that quote that Pauline Kale, the New Yorker critic had about like when Richard Nixon won reelection, she's like, how could you have won, no one I know voted for him? Sure. Yeah. For people, certainly who have podcasts, so they talk about TV, but, you know, but people who really love having conversations about television the way we do, Mad Men, you watched it.

You had to watch it. Yeah. and you knew watched it. Mad Men's ratings were very, very small. You know, Mad Men's ratings were like one-twentth of Big Bang Theory. But the people who watched it loved to talk about it and love to, you know, in the same way that, you know, like a comic book show, like the Flash on the CW has, I don't know how many viewers per episode, but every one of them will buy a copy of Entertainment Weekly if the star of that show's on the cover. Yeah, the engagement is very deep. Right. And so what Netflix is able to do by not actually putting a number or

face on those numbers, on that enthusiasm, is just act like everyone lives in Pauline Kale's neighborhood. So making a murderer, which is a show that was very popular with people that I follow on Twitter, is on the cover of People magazine. I don't know if they have any sense of how many people actually watch this, but they figure people who watch it care enough to buy it. So that's the economy they're working in. Well, I think that making murders, I think that making murders are a little bit different.

I would put Narcos and Jessica Jones, a master of none in this. most recent run of Netflix shows that I think got quite a bit of coverage and quite a bit of discussion, but probably did not put up numbers that were commiserate to the amount of conversation that was happening to them. Right. And not only did they not, you know, AMC can't hide how many people watch Mad Men, but we don't even know if anyone was really watching this outside of like the 500 people who were basically writing about it and reading about it.

Madmen or something else on Netflix, these Netflix shows. I'm sure they did fine. Here's the only, the counter to it is that you have to remember that everything, the Netflix is doing is it's the goal is different than an episode of grandfathered yes because what Netflix is doing is building its business and its company and building its library because they know they saw this coming in a very smart way but nobody wants to give their stuff to them anymore right nobody you're not going to be able to like binge watch the future whatever breaking bad is in the future it's not just

going to be waiting for you on Netflix anymore so they need to build their catalog so I almost thought it was pretty funny that the source or the like the association of this report was with NBC. Yeah. Because who's killing themselves or this is like, while they watch friends turn into a phenomenon. Exactly. 30 years after it was on or whatever, or 20 years after it was on. And they were sitting there watching Netflix be like Netflix and chill pretty much like comes out of people be like, I'm watching all of friends.

All of friends. Yeah. All of friends all the time. And it must be absolutely maddening to see that happen. Exactly. And so when you look at like, I don't know, four million people watching it up. episode of Jessica Jones, that's 4 million people who've watched it since it premiered in the last two months.

Right. Netflix plans to have it there forever with future seasons, which will make more people buy it, more people trust them, more people work with them. So when they announced they're going to spend $5 to $6 billion on content, that sounds insane, but that sounds insane when you're comparing them to, you know, CBS. It doesn't sound insane when you compare them to their number one competitor, which is Amazon, and Amazon's business model, since, you know, for the last 20 years, has basically been, we will keep spending money to invent things to increase our perceived value and our potential value.

And that alone will make us profitable. That's, you know, Amazon, I think until recently had never turned to profit. Because they had pouring things back in the company. They just kept pouring into the company and innovating and innovating. And then like the thing that's actually making the money is their cloud servicing, which was like not even something they were paying that much attention to. But, you know, regardless. This is like a long way of saying, we've talked for so long now about the,

and John Landgraf at FX who gave his speech this week about, he was sort of the original person who said, Pete TV is coming. This was, there's going to be 400 shows on 2016 and we're going to be overwhelmed. And I think, you know, it's,

I've read a lot recently about the scarcity of attention, basically, like the idea that tension is a finite resource that, that we're maybe maxing out in terms of how much you can, what kind of return on investment you can expect in a piece of content because of just how spread thin people are. Yeah. And I just mentioned it because of, and this is like a very, only barely related to billions,

but I do feel almost now more like I did in, you know, the like end of high school and college when TV was just on. Yeah. And I, I really liked billions, but I would be fine checking in on billions in three episodes. Yeah. Or saving billions and then watching it like on a Sunday or something like that. Like, what else is out there that you feel differently about? Like, I think, like, Better Call Saul comes back next month. Yeah, I love Better Call Saul.

We love the first season. Yeah. But I don't have it as much as I love Breaking Bad, though. No, but you know what? It's different, but I mean, I really like it. But I just mean that Better Call Saul is not in that world. No. I mean, there's a different context around Better Call Saul.

And it's actually almost a little bit of a show out of place or out of time. It moves slowly. It has its own rhythm. It does throw those dance sequence curve balls at you where they'll do an episode about a different character, or it'll be funny or it won't be, or it'll be really, sad or it'll be about... You have no idea what the season is going to be. And I feel like I want to watch it every week basically when it's on, but there's just so much more competition for eyeballs right now and for being what it, like, people, I can think of like 15 shows

this year already that I'm going to be like, I pretty, I kind of want to check that. I don't want to check out London Spy. I want to see Unreal season two. I want to see all these Netflix. I want to see the get down. Maybe the get down looks good, but that's not coming to August now. I think maybe one way to look at it is tears. And so the way I think of a better call Saul, I think is also the way we... So do you put Saul on Thrones level? No, not at all.

What I'm saying is there's Thrones. At this point, Thrones is at the top, you know, both because it's good, but because, and obviously we're professionally engaged with the show, but in covering it and having fun talking about it, but that it is so, it's just infectious when it's on because everyone cares about it. It is a leftover holdover from that era, from the Breaking Bad era in terms of just like for those 10 weeks, it's just so fun to think about and talk about and engage with. Another tier that I think is a little bit, that this type of television isn't new, but I think singling it out or separating it out from the pack in this way might be, is the tier that I would put Better Call Saul and Fargo in, which is, boy, it's great, boy, it's fun. And boy, am I just happy that it's around? I'm so, it's like joyful. Right. It's pleasurable to watch these shows and it makes me really happy.

Right. Have there been weeks when I skipped to Fargo or I skipped a better call, Saul, than cut up to the next week? Yes, because it's not on that level of I need to see it at that moment, but I'm just thrilled that it's there. And then there's a, the third, the third level, which is, don't make fun of me, but I've seen the fourth season premiere of the Americans, which you know is my favorite show.

and it is so good. It is just devastatingly good. It's one of the best episodes, I think they've done. It's also an episode that is basically shrugging its shoulders at the hope of anyone new ever watching it. Right. Every first, every season premiere up to this season. We've talked about this, where I was like,

I just feel like, at this point, I don't have the time to go back and watch a lot of Americans. And actually, we mentioned before Alan Seppin-Wall was saying this to me when we were chatting about the American's lack of Emmy nominations, which is just being like, it's never going to get any because that mass of voters isn't going to catch up now. The show has now seemingly acknowledge that. It has the ratings it has.

It has the safety that it thankfully has on FX. It's fine for this season and maybe another one, who knows. But the other season premieres have cast a wide net and been like throat clearing, here we go. This is our story for this year. This episode is, oh, remember what happened last season? Let's just drill deeper. And that was wild for me to watch.

It was artistically thrilling and really engaging in the same way that like the first few episodes of Transparent Season 2 were. But those felt like very... Like it was going inwards. Privately tailored introverted experiences. Yeah. Which is different than what we have been talking about before. But that is the direction the TV is going in in general.

Right. Man, I wonder whether or not, you know, to hear you talk about it and to think about, you know, the thing that you said about some of those DC-CW shows. and how they kind of have like a core passionate audience that's super into them and then like I'll watch like

five seconds of one of those shows and like I don't know what's going on yeah I mean I'm not not dissing I'm just saying like that's just what happens I wonder if that's going to keep happening I wonder if television will unless you catch like a generational comet by the tail in terms of like a thrones or a walking dead or

this is and we're talking about a very specific kind of television Because on the other side, there's, like, scandal and how to get away of murder and all those CBS shows that still have pre-mass audiences. Yeah, or even sitcoms, like, like, the blackish, the Goldberg's fresh off the boat. Like, those are really good, strong. Yeah, actually, I mean, I've enjoyed, like, I watched a couple. I really enjoyed the Grindr. I mean, it's, you know, nine million people are watching it, and that's nothing compared to what sitcoms used to get. I threw, I pulled that number out of my ass.

I don't know. It's something, it's a bunch of millions of people watch that show. but we're not talking about it the way we're talking about these right i mean i don't think sitcoms ever really unless they're kind of groundbreaking or because you know i don't think they they really um resonate tends to to spark the kind of conversation that happens to the other shows but i wonder whether the future will be an archipelagio of of television shows where that aren't really connected to a massive monocultural conversation but you'll have like a bunch of people who are just like unreal is the best thing on television and a bunch of people who are

People who will be like, no, I mean, yes, sure, it might be, but in my world, better call Saul. We're there. Yeah. And that's actually one of the things that made me, um, okay, that basically that's why I got tired of being a, you know, a daily or weekly TV critic or whatever I was at Granland. Because imagine, imagine being an Australian coast guard. Sure. Australia is all coast.

It's pretty big. There's so much coast you have to cover. Yeah, great food scene too. And you can't. It really sounds nice, especially a lot of places in Sydney opening to compete with Melbourne. Anyway, I don't know how you. can cover all of those bases and cover them thoroughly, especially when a lot of what the coverage you're going to be doing is, okay, I'm going to check in with the Berlanteverse and check

out Supergirl. Boy, this is well done. This is fine. It's not for me. But I feel that I need to touch base and check in with this. Here's another new thing. I got to keep up with that. I got to check in with this.

Meanwhile, it's unclear if the model that I'm enacting, the way that I'm covering these things, is that even servicing the way people are watching TV? Because, for example, just to pull something out of nowhere, someone on Twitter today or yesterday was like, thanks so much at me for recommending fortitude, which was a... Oh, yeah, the bare one. Which is a British...

It was a co-production, and it was on... It was on Pivot. Stanley Tucci and Michael Gambon. I mean, it was very good, very enjoyable, very small show that I think I reviewed last January. Yeah. the whole point of the TV business now is to be profitable a year from when you debut or two years from when you debut and to have this long shelf life. But to cover it in the moment is, I don't know who that's servicing.

Yeah, it is probably like hurting kittens a little bit. And then the other thing about it is you pointed out to bring this full, full circle, NBC was, you know, crying foul about this. But NBC's model is the one that depends on no one upending it. For Netflix, they couldn't care less. When I'm like, oh, I don't like the binge model because I enjoy having the conversation, keep the show afloat, and I like watching it at the same speed as other people. Or even being cynically professional, being like, I can't keep up if I'm writing about every episode if you do it like this. They don't care about any of those arguments. That is not their business.

And now we're seeing it trickle down and seeing other people experiment with it. Because like TBS with Angie Tribeca, which is the police squad like ridiculous. I mean that in a good way. Like the naked gun style. Goofy naked gun style comedy with Rashid. Jones, they debuted the show by just running the entire first season with limited commercial interruptions on a Sunday.

Right. And now they're going to show the show because they're like, we bought this thing. What are we going to do with this thing? It is absolutely not like week at a time. So do you feel like what happens is then these shows come on and there's a ton of talk about the beginnings?

And then you can go and find conversation about the endings, but because there's not the week to a week, here we all go together holding hands into the season finale of Mr. Robot or the season finale of Game of Thrones thing. And it's like, oh, you'll finish Jessica Jones

when you finish Jessica Jones. By the way, I would put robot in that first tier that we were talking about. We should check or we should say that this is sort of a personalized worldview of like, I mean, because Walking Dead arguably should be in that tier too. We just happen not to like that show that much. Yes, but I also

feel like the thrill and enjoyment of just being caught off guard and rolling with it and having fun with it. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong. I think people really enjoy, you know, millions of people really enjoy watching Walking Dead and seeing who gets eaten or not. But the show is what it is at this point. It's not like innovating or surprising in the same way. But anyway, I interrupted you. No, no, no. I was just saying that there's a way to look at this. And we're talking about tears. We're not necessarily making qualitative distinctions as much. We're saying, I mean, maybe we are.

Maybe we are sort of saying. We're just inventing this as we can. Yeah, right. I don't know. I mean, I think that. I find that I haven't had as many conversations with people or even just like read stuff online where with these streaming shows it does feel like it falls off a cliff after the first initial. Like did you watch the first five House of Cards or the first five Jessica Joneses? And sometimes you'll just see stuff and it'll make reference to like, we're talking about that thing that happened in episode six of Daredevil. And I was like, well, I didn't get to episode six yet.

You know what I mean? And I'll just read about that some other time. And I think it's a difficult way. I mean, I think that there's a little bit of attention from the way we talk about television and from what television actually being consumed now, probably, where it's not exactly, they're not as harmonious as they were four years ago. Right. And, you know, to go back to what Landgraf said, they're making, there were 400, I think

he ended up counting 412 scripted shows in 2015. They're going to be more in 2016. That's just a lot of people coming up with a lot of story and spending a lot of money on making a lot of expensive productions. And it's not, they're not going to get watched. They're going to get watched eventually, maybe. But I think there's going to be a breaking point, they're not a breaking point.

There's definitely going to be a point of friction or rupture when you tell these people who are pouring their hearts and soul into writing the script or performing on location or doing any of the things that they're doing, that everyone has an ego. They want people to see what they're doing. They want people to engage in it. and they want to have that hit of validation or engagement quickly.

Yeah. To be told that you're just, well, you're adding long-term value to the content bank of a major corporation. That's sort of tough. You know what I mean? Like, you kind of want, the people who make things, actors, writers, producers, they want to surf that wave of attention. Right.

They don't want to be told, you know, it's nice that they're getting paid to make it, but I don't know if it's as gratifying ultimately to be told, well, we made it. You made it, but, you know, hopefully someone searching while stone. at, you know, three in the morning, seven years from now, will come across what you've made. Right. Well, speaking of actors who are searching for attention. Yeah.

I thought we would talk about a business that's in no trouble whatsoever. Sure. Has no image issues. Definitely not. That's the movie business. Yes, the movie business. Going great. Good job by you, movies.

There are actually other, we want to talk more about just sort of some of the nominations here. The Oscar nomination. Yeah. Did you have any takes on the diversity stuff that you wanted to, Did you want to talk about that at all? Well, I think that it's, it's, I think that it's tough. I think it's absolutely disheartening to see that all of the nominated performers are white.

I don't think that's reflective of the country. I don't think it's reflective of the talent in Hollywood. But I also think it's tough to save the ire for the Oscars, because the Oscars are just, you know, a made-up party that they throw to celebrate themselves. The Oscars itself, they're not the ones making the movies with the opportunities. They're not the ones casting people. They're not the ones making those decisions. And I think that institutional bias exists in institutions. I mean, it's right there in the name, right?

But to ascribe specific motive case by case when you're like, well, isn't it insane that the only nominations Creed and Straitta Compton got were for the white people involved in the movies? to ascribe specific examples of bias like that to an amorphous organization of thousands of people is challenging. Yeah. I think it was pretty heartening that the head of the academy wrote a letter today, you know, applauding the success of the nominees, but saying this does not reflect the industry or the industry the way we want it to be. And so we are going to do some serious things to investigate our voters,

not investigate the voters, but the makeup of the votorship, which is important. Yeah, I hope that this is like the convulsion that the industry has to go through so that in three or four, I mean, like, hopefully sooner years, we're not holding up creed as like, but what about creed?

I hope there's like 15 creeds. I hope there's 50 creeds. Yeah, I hope there are films made by a wide variety of people of diverse, backgrounds telling diverse stories. Remember our buddy Rem from from Grantlin and from just like our buddy, he wrote a piece in New York Magazine for Vulture for both,

I think that was about a feature on Ryan Cougler and Michael B. Jordan. And one of the things that they just kept hammering home was just like, we need to be telling our own stories. And we need to be telling stories that are set. You know, whenever they're set, they need to be told from our perspective. And Cooleer was talking about, you know, you go and you have meetings with these guys and you're just like, just put me in the room. Like, just give me the opportunity and let me tell this story.

Don't, you know, don't try to, like, market test this into existence. Just you've got to give people the opportunities. And that's one of the things that I think, I hope, comes out of all of this stuff is beyond awards. Screw that. Like, I just want to see more movies. Yeah. I want to see more interesting movies. I want to see unique movies.

I want to see versions of stories that I've never seen before. And to your point about Ryan Cooooke, I hope people also check out a speech he gave about the importance of film criticism. And specifically, he's talking about the variety critic, Justin Chang. The speech went viral. You can find it on probably on your Facebook feet. But the point that he makes is really, it's really crucial. It's in the arts, but it's kind of a life point.

And it's exactly what you said. Like you just, we want new stories. We want new voices. We want new faces. You know, there are a lot of, if you go, line by line, like, in terms of the people who are nominated. My feeling this year, you know, if you look at the acting categories, I don't think, and correct me if I'm wrong, I don't, for me, there was no one that I was like, there's

nothing I found egregious. Yeah, I mean, there's stuff I haven't seen. There's stuff I haven't seen and things that I have seen. And in general, like, respected performers who often do good work and they probably did good work here. I don't think there was bad intention or bad motives behind some of the people being nominated. But it was just like, well, who else could have been? What else could have, or big picture, what else could.

could or should have been in 2015 to push the academy and to push the industry forward. Right. What else stood out for you from all of this? I guess that... Oh, sorry, go ahead. I just remembered one other thought I had about the diversity with the Oscars. Yeah, go ahead, because let's finish that. Which was just that I was getting on, when I was getting on the plane, not this,

I went, I was gone on a plane to Florida, and as I do. And as I was in the flight from from New York to West Palm Beach is generally an elderly flight. Let's put it that way. And so I was getting the flight and there was some older people, older folks behind me. And as we were like making a way into our seats, they were having a conversation about the cinema. And one of them was talked about Creed. And I was like, oh, boy, I wonder what these older folks think about Creed. And they loved it.

And they were talking about how much they loved it. They were like, and that star, oh, I love him. And the other one was like, he was on Friday Night Lights. And I was like, wait for it. And they were like, that's my favorite television show ever. Oh, I love it. And I was like, yes, grandma, yes, I love you. And they were going, oh, it's so wonderful.

Isn't it wonderful to see him succeed? He's so good in movies. And the other one was like, he is. Do you know what he was really good in? And I was like, come on Fruitvale Station. Come on, Fantastic Four. And they were like, straight out of Compton. They were like, did you see that?

And they were like, I think they called it Compton. And they were like, oh, he was very good in that. He was very good in that. And I was like, oh, grandma. But honestly, I think grandma was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences. That, I just felt like that was... She could probably name Eddie Redmayton's entire filmography. But I feel like that was reflective of what we're talking about here.

Yeah, sure. We want the best for the one person we can think of. And then we're not really engaging in this on a more serious level. I guess, you know, when I was watching the Golden Globes with a bunch of friends out here and we were sort of... I think when the Revenant won and also when you were kind of looking at the list of nominees. I mean, I liked a lot of movies from 2015, but I think when it gets boiled down to the Revenant versus Spotlight, you're kind of like, eh, is anybody going to remember this year? No, I mean, because I'll say it again, I think Spotlight was essentially perfect, but I agree. That is

the kind of movie that wins because, boy, is that a good movie. Right, exactly. I, you know, I think the- Which maybe that's all needs to be. I made it sound like that's a small thing. What's interesting for some of these people, younger people that are up for some awards, and we were joking around about this earlier, we were going to say, like, rather than guess who's going to win, oh, yeah. We were kind of maybe going to talk about what they should do next. Or what we like to see them do. What we would like to see them do next.

And, you know, we're not going to presume to tell Charlotte Rampling what to do next. She's been slacking. I like your pitch. You had a pitch for what she should do next. That she should be in... She should be in 14 hours, the sequel to 13 hours. The secret soldier of Benghazs, Charlotte Rampbell. Europe's secret soldiers.

Yeah. Let's throw a some out So let's do Alicia Vakander first What do you think Alicia Vakander should do next? Whatever she wants I gotta say this about your girl I was a little dubious Because every time

Like every year there's a new actress That is the actress that year Who gets all the parts Like who sort of Gretchen Moles the game And no disrespect to Gretch She's been on the come up for a minute though She has and just because I hadn't seen the movies Doesn't mean she doesn't exist

Right So and then I saw this film that's called X Machina. Do you know about it? Have you seen this movie? Maybe you don't read Vulture.com. At least not less spring. Yo, she's so good.

She is really good. And here's what I want to, you know what I want her to do next more than anything else? I want her to do a born movie. Oh, wait, she is? Is she? Yeah, she's in Born 5.

But Real Talk, here's what I want her to do. I want her to do a born movie where she gets to be born. Oh, right. I'm really excited that she's in the new Matt Damon born movie because we are going to do, you guys aren't ready. We're going to do a week full of commemorative shows about this.

We're going to do a show for each board. We're going to do a show where we're just fighting each other with phone books. With rolled up magazines. That might be tonight show. We're going to do a show where you have a microphone and a portable rig and I'm in a field somewhere with a long distance rifle and you have to find me in the field while I slowly bleed out. But you know what I mean?

I would like to see her do a movie where she gets to be. I agree with you. She was great. She had, she had, she said such a great couple of years. She was great in Anna Karenina. Oh, yeah. She was great in a man from uncle. People were talking about royal affair.

I see Tate nodding his head back there. Real heads know the deal with. Really? Yeah, late period, Richie. Is Tater Richie head? Wow. And I thought she was obviously amazing at Ex Machina. I did not see the Danish girl.

What do you want to see from the homie, Tom Hardy. Wow. Because Tom Hardy is sort of like one of the real true thought leaders in the game. Yeah, can I be real about that? Sure.

I don't have an answer for it because he's going to show it to us anyway. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Tom Hardy can do anything and really, really would like to do anything. I will just say one thing about Tom Hardy. Yeah. He has been hiding his inception charm

from us for a while. Oh, yeah. And he's been like, what I need to do is be a guy who's been scalped. That's a really great point. And quotes from the Bible or wears a bane mask either in Batman or in other movies because he's got that bane mask on for most of Fury Road too.

In many ways he's always had it on. And he has, he's got a hell of a movie star in his locker. You know, he doesn't always let it out. He likes to do the like Brando immersion. He can do a Carrie Grant thing. Yeah. And it's like, and I just, I just miss. He's so frigging good in Inception.

Who's going to make the, who's going to make charade again? Like obviously not like Jonathan. Demi remake his trade, but like put him in a movie like that. Have we not talked about Hardy for Bond? I think we've talked. I think people have talked about it. Yeah. Because I feel like it's either Idris or is who else gets talked about. I think Hardy gets talked about

I don't. I don't want to see him do that. I want him to see I would like to see him. Because he's going to play another fur trapper now, right? I'd like this. No, he's in that show. He's got the show that he's like working on with the guy who does peeky blinders, right? You could make a case that James Bond is the original fur trapper. But

But yeah. You have been so ribbled tonight. I'm so tired. I just assume that these mics aren't on. Yeah, he's doing an FX thing with the dude who made, who made Peaky Blinders. Yeah. And that movie Locke, which we love. Right, which is all about getting the poor right.

Getting that deep pour. Okay. I got two for you. Has anybody ever made a Locke tribute video where they just lock, they play like, different future tapes while he's driving around. I assume. Can we get Tate? How long would it take you to make a mashup video where it's lock driving around listening to March Madness?

I think Tate has probably been doing that this whole time. Yeah, two more before we, then we should jump out. What do you want to see Leo do? Leo's going to win this year. Oh, I got this already. DiCaprio's going to win the Oscar. Good for him. He's great.

Leo stays winning. What would you like to see him do? I'd like to see him not play a historical figure. Yes. Yeah. Just, just, I, Leo is due for, you know, he's due to be in like a Will Ferrell movie. And I don't want to diminish the brand. But I feel like once he wins this Oscar, can we just chill for a second?

Yes. And he's really, he's really ripe for a self-lampooning comedic role or just something where he plays a lawyer. Grisham book, you know what I like it when he, like the Kualud scene in Wolf of Wall. street. Like, I like it when he undercuts his own power, charisma, and authority. Sure. Maybe we end on that one. I mean, I...

Yeah, that's good. Who else do you... Anyone else on this, in any of these lists the year? No, I was going to say Runi Mara, but... Just wake me when Kate gets nominated. Okay. Stay with the right Mara. Stay winning. We're going to let Andy go to sleep. Thank you so much for listening. We'll be back next Monday.

I'm sure we'll keep the Billions Talk alive for the next few weeks. Sleep well, Berensky!