The Watch - Ep. 17: 'The Watch' Re-up

Episode Date: February 6, 2016

On today's inaugural re-up episode of 'The Watch,' Chris and Andy give their picks for the weekend, including 'The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story,' 'The X-Files,' and Massive Attack's new EP. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to the watch re-up on the channel 33 podcast feed. My name is Chris Ryan and I am joined live from a Bristol sound clash. It's Andy Greenwald! That was my sound clash voice. What's up, man? I like that. Remember the pirate radio days? Oh yeah, of course.

Just blasting out the rhythm. Andy, this is a special version of the watch where we're just going to do a short, punchy, recommend people some stuff to check out over the weekend, some stuff that we've been messing with this week. It's called the re-up. Probably only about 20 minutes. Just TGIF it. And we want to just go through a couple of things

that we really enjoyed this week or are enjoying right now. Sound good to you? Yeah, I'm J. Simpson. That is pretty much number one through five. I definitely just think also I'm going to start learning a lot of random statistics about different athletes so that when I walk into a room,

I'm like, Kevin Durant! You guys know Kevin Durant? 37 points against the Washington Wizards. Game winning shot, 2016. That's what I'm saying. What is the name of the commercial that they're showing all the time with Kevin Garnett as grandpa and Kevin Love? Oh, Meet the Hoopers, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so I'm just saying we should always remember things like that. So if, you know, when Kevin Love, I'm not going to say he's going to commit a double homicide, but let's say, you know, maybe he'd jaywalk. Right. We can be like, you know, the guy from Meet the Hoopers. Kevin Love from the Hoopers. Here's the thing, though. We're going to talk more about this on Monday. are obviously super psyched about people versus OJ because we've seen more episodes than have aired

and we've enjoyed all of them. I just think this is fun, man. People are talking about the show. They're chirping. The ratings are good. People are into it. People are taking very strong opinions on John Travolta's eyebrows. This is going to be fun. And next week's episode, Bronco Chase, very strong episodes. So we're not, that's not on our list, I guess, of today's recommendation. But if you haven't watched the first episode of OJ, you should watch it in time for next week's episode that you can be a part of the conversation. That's what this is all about. Yeah, we need more Courtney B. Vance heads up in this.

Let's talk about another show that is, that it is airing now, surprisingly, since it is quite an old show. Also a little bit of 90s nostalgia. Andy, the third episode of X-Files, season 10 aired on, I think, Monday, correct? Season 10? Is it like, they should be forced to count the years they weren't on the air. This should be season 24. That would be kind of awesome.

This one was called Mulder and Scully Meet the Were Monster, and it started a Rees Darby from Flight of the Concords as a, well, I don't want to give it away, but it was basically one of the X-Files monster of the week episodes. And we had talked about this when we first previewed the X-Files comeback a couple weeks ago. And you had mentioned that the third episode was rumored to be really good. And it really delivered. It was definitely the most engaged in alert David DeCovini has seemed on this new run. and the ripartee between him and Jillian Anderson was great,

Reese was great. It was a very, very entertaining, very humorous episode of X-Files this week. Do you remember when Owen Wilson, who's playing a young Cormick McCarthy-type novelist? Yeah. And he's talking about Custer being killed a little bighorn. And on the Larry King's surrogate show, he's like, what if it wasn't? What if he wasn't? Yeah.

I just feel like that is a dominant idea for television 2016, which is to say, I know that everyone in the business's brain space is dominated by this idea of continuity as important, earned baggage. But what I'm here to say is what this new paradigm for the industry presupposes is, what if it didn't have to? Yeah. And the parts that people want about the X-Files, I really think. And maybe not the Moli Sculler Shippers, OX Bleach for saying that. But maybe they don't want this. But I think the majority of people

that made X-Files a very, very mainstream popular show, they want to be on their toes. They want some months or the weak stuff. You know, they want to investigate some things and move on. They want essentially the smart, surprising procedural that the show was.

It's what allowed it to run for the first 23 seasons or whatever the case may be. Right. So I think that's what they should have come back and steered into. Now, by the way, the ratings for all this reboot would have been really strong. So we'll probably get season 27.

I think they should do this on the Sherlock schedule where they just do three every 18 months. I watched because, you know, I know that I'd been joking about how I was not, you know, I didn't watch X-Files because I went out at night during the time it was on the air. But I went back in.

When you say you went out, you went out at night, I'm picturing Jamie Dornan and Gillingham at another show to fall. They're like, that's not cool. Hey, fam, I know you're watching the X-Files season eight, but I just got to go out at night.

You're going to go take a jog in Belfast. What do you think of? all that, Mr. President. I didn't even need to put the accent ball on the fungo tea. You just started swinging. I went back and been just watching a couple of random X-Files. The entire run is on Netflix, which is a super convenient service.

People should check out. I'm also recommending Netflix. And I watch an episode from season three called DPO that was written by Howard Gordon, who went on to do Homeland in 24. This one was about Boulder and Scully. they go out to Oklahoma to investigate a series of suspicious lightning deaths, people who've been struck

by lightning, and it turns out that there is a disaffected young man out there who can summon bolts of lightning from the sky, and that person is played by Giovanni Rabisi! He is dressed in a baggy vandals,

the band Vandals t-shirt, like Nitro Records, like, and he just walks around in this like maroon, ugly t-shirt with baggy jeans, drinking beers and throwing his empties into a cow pasture. And it was a real, like, blast from the past to see Rabizi just going for it in a bit part on X-Files. You love Rabisi, though. I mean, we got to be clear about that. I love the vandals, too. This one is episode, it's called DPO. It's from season three.

A show you can think of that would not be improved by the presence of Giovanni Rebisi? I don't know, maybe Scorpion. It's kind of hard to imagine how he would fit in. That's the dream team, you know? Because that's a tight ensemble. Yeah. It's actually a good question. The answer to that. How do you improve the closing lineup of the Warriors? You know what I mean? That's right. It's a trick question.

The answer to that is dad. Yeah. Buc's dad. Right. Andy, what's another thing? If you're talking about doing deep dives on the X-Files, the one that I would point people to, which I guess is now streaming on. What's the name of this obscure service you're talking about? The Flix.

You can find old TV shows? Yeah, you just type in shows and they come up. It's called Flickster or something. Anyway, I would really recommend people checking out an episode called Drive. It's the second episode of the sixth season, and it's basically the origin story of Breaking Bad. Because Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan wrote the episode. He cast Brian Cranston in this role, which is a very, very different role, isn't the dad on Malcolm in the middle.

And it was actually tape of this episode that convinced AMC ultimately that it was okay to cast Brian Cranston as Walter White because they initially had been pretty resistant to it. So it's pretty amazing to watch this episode and consider all the things when you watch it. It's also just a good hour of TGC. Look at the deep get from Greenwald. All right. That's great. That's what I'm here for.

What's another thing you want to recommend to the folks this week? Well, look, robust podcast life away from you. I think it's important for any relationship, any couple, really, to have some time apart. And, you know, once I did a recording with, you know, I don't think this is news to you. I feel like I can tell this to your face. I did a recording with Juliet Litman, who I think you know. Yes. And she and I talked about a little show we watched called Top.

Here's the thing, though. And I think Julia and I are going to talk about it again, maybe when I'm out in LA next. But this has been a really bad season of Top Chef. It's been very frustrating. And in times of trouble, in times of woe, and in times of poor food, I like to turn to an old friend that I feel like I've never talked about, which is probably the best food show there is. And that is a web series on VICE's Munchy's channel called Chef's Night Out. Are you familiar with this show? I'm not.

I'm only familiar with the work of Action Bronson on Vice, the food thing is. Oh, sure. Well, I think he's... Yeah, I think he's on the same Munchy's channel. So it's basically like we're in the same neighborhood. Because he... The episode where he goes and tries to find the perfect bowl of pokey is one of my favorite videos I've ever seen on the internet. But that's also like...

That's right. That's at least 40% of what people do out there now, I've realized. People are really... People super into like Furukake now, right? Like, you know all about that. You know like peppers and seasonings to put on fish bowls. Yeah, but I feel like if the ingredients are pure, and good and fresh, the flavors be for themselves.

Wow, it's beautiful. Well, you fit it right in on Chef's Night Out. No, you wouldn't. But here's the thing about the show. Here's why it's good. Because the thing is, you know, a lot of food TV is purely aspirational, right? Where it basically takes people who have a certain set of skills and then squeezes them into these boxes of performing hero narratives, basically, an unscripted reality program.

You're trying to win a contest. You're not there to make friends. You're there to, you know, to overcome whatever obstacle is thrown at you at the last minute, by Gail Simmons and Padma. The thing that that negates, for the most part, is the reality of a chef's life, which is that it is generally incredibly hard and punishing. And for the most part,

you're either working your ass off or you're getting blackout drunk to recover from it and eating a lot of food. So it's exactly like Bradley Cooper and Burt. Yeah, and like the first three years of Gremlin. So what Chef's Night Out does is it goes to really good chefs and really good restaurants and really good restaurants cities and it meets them at the end of service with their buddies or wives or whomever.

And then they go to their friends' restaurants where they proceed to get wildly drunk. And then at the very end of the evening, they are brought back to their own restaurant where they ill-advisedly cook a meal for their remaining friends. And it's actually, I'm making it sound debauchous in some episodes are debauchous, but it's actually really fascinating because one thing that chefs do is they're very nice to each other. So when they go to their friends, you get a little insight into the way these people's relationships work, but you also see the generosity because they bring out the good stuff for each other.

Yeah, I was wondering what kind of stuff do they cook for each other? Well, in general, like, they go to their friends' restaurants and they're like, well, we're just a little modest, we'll order a cocktail and like maybe some shishito peppers, and there's still light nibble. And then they get crushed by their friends because their friends see the cameras. And they're like, oh, oh, what do you know about unii toast for the whole table? You know what I mean? If you want your fresh seafood ingredients.

No, but like the other thing about the show that's really good is they've made it international. So there's great episodes in Paris, in London, in Tokyo, and Mexico cities. You kind of get a sense of the, of the food culture in the cities that maybe you aren't able to visit. I'll throw a couple. What do you know about the culinary traditions of Belfast, though, sir? Where's the Belfast episode? You know, it's interesting because some of them end up to be done, end up being duds, right? Like there's a chef Enrique O'Refi Elvera from Mexico City's restaurant Puyol, terrific. His restaurant New York, Cosme, terrific. His episode is just like, I think I'll go have a small sip of mescal with my wife. Daniel Patterson from San Francisco just goes on a date with his wife to one restaurant and refuses to participate in the charade.

You contrast that with the dudes from the restaurant Joe Beef in Montreal. Oh yeah, I love those guys. They were on Bourdain. Those dudes... They bring truffles in butter everywhere they go. Not even truffle butter. That is basically what they do. Like they make life seem like

a supernova. Like something that should only be lived in quick explosions that negate all life thereafter. It's pretty exciting. But even like, you know, when I've been in L.A., you've gone to restaurants that Joseph Santano is done downtown. Not that exciting an episode. But anyway, you pick your spot.

Glad you're outlining all the ones that aren't good. I don't know why I'm doing that because I'm sort of forgetting some of my favorite ones. But start with Joe Beef and work backwards, all right? Yeah, the Joe Beef episode of Parts Unknown is also really good. those dudes but this is just engine show and the best thing about it

in addition to watching people get crushed with Unitos is that every episode is 10 minutes oh perfect just like this podcast so that's Jeff's Night

out Vice it's on Vice the Munchy channel Munchy's dot vice com All right very quickly Let's go through

these two records that we wanted to recommend to people and we'll get out of here one is old one is new by people who are old the first one is

Massive Attack is back with the ritual Spirit EP is the first time they've released new music I think that they had like that burial collaboration a couple years ago, right?

I see you not nodding. The last full length was in 2010. Okay, so, and then they had like a burial remix that came out. But this is, not only are they back, not only does this sound really a classic massive attack, just that creeping dread, amazing atmospheric back like music, but they brought two people that we are particularly fond of along with them, Roots Manuva and Tricky. Andy, we used to really, really ride for this 90s British Bristol, pop sound.

Yeah, that was massive attack in Boston in like 97. I do think that I wrote some short fiction in which somebody's listening to the first tricky record and having like a relationship with an androgy person. I can't remember. I remember. I do think that, you know, I'm going to say this out loud. We didn't actually say this on a podcast. We said this then that like of all the great cultural erasures that make no sense,

like the fact that REM just has no bearing musically on. anything anymore is interesting. I'd take that a step further. Tricky was the biggest deal there was. Like, Max and Kay when it came out in 95. Pre-millanium tension, too. For us. Yeah.

And pre-millium tension, like, those were the biggest records of those two years in many ways. Like, we were much more moved and wilding out to those records than we were to, like, Oasis or even super chunk for a minute there. And yet, it's not really spoken about. Like, that whole, I mean, it sort of devolved into, like, you know, like, AT&T and commercial background noise. Yeah, well, a lot of that stuff, like that was, was that post or, yeah, it was like post Bjork album, tricky, the first two massive attack albums.

There was a bunch of other stuff around them where it just became the standard music you would hear if you walked into any coffee shop or clothing boutique in New York, London. Or hotel lobby. Yeah, exactly, or hotel lobby. And Teardrop became like the house theme song. So it's just, or is it, Teardrop or was it angel? I can't remember. But anyway, the, um, the, um, the, um,

your drug. Yeah, the, like, that music just became wallpaper, so it was kind of interesting to go back, and tricky sounds great, and these, these tracks sound great. I'm actually a fan of late period Massive Attack. The album before this that they put out was called the Broken Windows one? No, I, uh, Heligoland, which is named after- Yeah, that was the 20-20s. Yeah, and I really, really like that one that has, Tunday from TV on the radio is on that, I think, and Damon Al-Barns on that. So that's a really good record. People should check for that, but this EP ritual spirit is really good. It's really dark. It's just what massive attacks is good at. It's just worth noting. I mean,

we just went off on a jag about Tricky, but basically Tricky broke with them after their second album, Master Protection. And so a lot of the verses that he puts on protection, which is still an unbelievable record, he then just took for himself on Maxen case. There's a lot of overlap between those records

and the massive attack song. And last 23 years of X-Files, yeah. But I would. But I still feel. I feel, there's still something a little weird about Massive Attack, right? Because right after we saw them in Boston, the third member that could do Mushroom left, and I feel a little bit responsible for that. But then, like, Daddy G left, too.

Yeah. I feel like we said something wrong to them. Because you remember, we went backstage for some reason, and we were, like, just hanging out on couches, and it's like we had nothing to stay to them because we were 20. Don't those guys were also smoking blunts the size of, like, small car engines, too, though, right? That's still we weren't backstage. We just hallucinated it. the enormous amount of second end up

smoke we were just thing. But Daddy G quit the group came back post-Helagoland, I think. Then it had just become 3D's weird. It's just 3D's, yeah, soundscape project or whatever. Just like laptop project.

Yeah. But Daddy G. didn't touch this EP. So basically going to be another new massive... Interesting. It's as if they have like... Oh, it's like... Isn't that like how modern family

gets made with like the one show writer takes one episode, the other takes the other? All the best lines. It is exactly. like modern family. But it's interesting. Okay, so like the last recommendation we wanted to make is

it's sort of a sad one, but it is on Monday the 10-year anniversary of Jay Dilla's Donuts album. It's going, I believe, it would be reissued on vinyl. There's a cool 33 and a third book about this record. It was made largely in the hospital in the months

leading up to Dilla's death, which occurred just three days after it was actually released. This is, so because J.D. passed away so soon after the record was released, it becomes one of those things that's almost like Nirvana unplugged where it becomes a window into the last days of someone's life. I mean, I think people have been talking about David Bowie's Black Star in the same way. This far on, it's, you know, while I still mourned for JD, it's cool to have something kind of a little bit

detached from the context around which it was made. This record is still so good. I was listening to stopped the other day, the one with the Jadicus laugh. And, you know, the thing about this record is it's kind of like, it's not dissimilar to say like a classic record from guided by voices when they would do genre hopping around on these albums that had like 25 songs. And you would just imagine not that they were all made by one band, but that there were hundreds of little bands that had just contributed to this record. And sometimes with this JD record, you'll be, the distiller record,

you'll be like, oh, my God, like this is some weird Detroit funk record that I've never heard before. and then it goes into this sort of psychedelic space rock or glitchy electronic stuff. It's just really, really still such an incredible record. It's so influential over people like Kanye. It's never a bad time to revisit. Right before we started recording that, you said something interesting. You said he thought that that was like the,

in many ways it was an obituary for sampling in hip-hop as well. Yeah, I mean, I think they, in some ways, he's sort of the endpoint of all the Pete Rock and premiere stuff that we grew up on, where the sampling was taken to such a high level that you couldn't discern between whether it was a sample or whether it was a live band. And Just Blaze was a really big person with that too

where you couldn't tell if he had the Blazettes playing or if it was a sample or if they were playing a sample. But this is kind of like just this gorgeous tapestry of records that are looped together. It's so great. Do you feel, do you hear any influence in, say, Kanye stuff now? or do you just feel aesthetically I mean when he uses

I think I think fantasy for sure yeah and bound is basically a Dilla song yeah yeah this is a somber note

okay so we recommend this week OJ X-Files the most recent episode that came out on Monday and two records Chef's Night Out on the Vice Munchies channel and Jay Dillah's donuts

which is 10 years old on Monday and the new EP for Massif Attack called Ritual Spirit both of those are on Spotify and I'm sure other streaming services, but you should give those people your harder money. Andy, anything else? How big people smoke also?

That big is car engine, sir. I don't like a question in my memory. We'll be back on Monday or Tuesday with the regular episode of The Watch. We'll be talking to OJ and many more things, probably a little better call Saul. Please subscribe to the Watch by checking out Channel 33 podcast feed.

You can find us on iTunes, SoundCloud, and Stitcher. Check out Jam session. Check out all the cool stuff. There's a Cohen Brothers podcast that I did with Sean Fennacy that's up today. Shout out to everybody. Have a great weekend.