The Watch - Ep. 74: 'Mr. Robot,' 'Atlanta,' and Netflix's 'Easy' Re-up

Episode Date: September 15, 2016

The Ringer's Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald discuss how 'Mr. Robot' is playing with reality (8:00), the wonderful third episode of 'Atlanta' (23:00), and Netflix's newest show, 'Easy' (30:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Jaguar, the art of performance. To learn more about the all-new Jaguar XE, visit jaguar USA.com. I need sports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch Reup. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm editor at the Ringer.com and joining me in the studio. Never ask if we cried during sex.

It's Andy Greenwald. Let's never explain that. And hope that people who don't watch this the robot. You just piqued their interest. Yeah, whatever. I mean, like, if we did a podcast called Crying During Sex, it'd probably be more popular than this one. It would be a lot more popular.

Wait, is the podcast in which we ask people if they do? Or is the podcast, like, field recordings of people weeping? Alan Lomax. Put them in the Smithsonian. Just go into, like, West Hollywood and just hold the microphone up to people's windows. What's up, Andy? This is the re-up. We are. We're going to be talking about Mr. Robot,

which is the sort of first part of the season two finale aired last night. Yeah. And we're also going to hit Atlanta. Atlanta, which we love, which is also the third episode aired this week. And we'll talk a little bit about the new Netflix series Easy, which is coming soon. I do also want to jump in before anything and say, it's really good to have you back. Oh yeah, that's right. I really just realized that.

I wasn't sure if you were going to be back. And I also feel like we should update people, just some house cleaning. We are doing some fun Emmy stuff. stuff coming up. Yeah. We are going to have a special Emmy preview pod and with video that'll probably drop tomorrow, Friday, ahead of the Emmys. You can enjoy that up to and you can enjoy during the Emmys if you want.

Emmy Sunday night on ABC. Second screen it. Second screen that thing. PIP. Do people still pip? I like to pip. I'm going to bring pip back. That's great.

Let's bring pip back. You can never see the smaller picture. No. And why would you want to? It's just very aggravating. But if you wanted to pip, Sunday night is the time because, Chris, Chris, you and I are going to do something. We haven't done this before, really.

We are going to be live on Facebook after the Emmys. We are going to talk about everything that just transpired. Our winners and losers. And hopefully we might have some fun people calling in. We don't know. It's live internet television. So to find that on Sunday, and we'll be promoing it again. But to find it on Sunday.

We'll be Facebook.com slash ringer. As soon as the Emmys is over. Yeah. Just turn us on. We'll also be on the Ringer Snapchat channel during the Emmys? Will we? Yeah, apparently. Will someone, quick follow it?

Will someone explain Snapchat? to me. Yeah, that's the... Is it like the picture and picture of the smartphone era? It's the pip of the smartphone. Okay, good. Andy, speaking of house cleaning, I just wanted to mention that if there's a little bit of tension here today...

Oh, I was going to mention this. It's because I actually did help Andy clean his house yesterday. I had to help you move some boxes down a very precarious... ...dark hill. Now, to be clear, the hill wasn't mine. And neither were the boxes. So then I get out of Andy's house last day on 8 o'clock. I've worked a very long day in the content minds.

my face covered in soot from all the uniques. Yeah, all the unique, but also the blowback, the soot from the heat of the takes that you were editing. And then I start to drive down, Andy lives on a very quiet street on a hill in Echo Park, Los Angeles. Do you want to give people the geo code? This is a weird turn. So, but I'm trying to basically paint a word picture

where people understand that it is like a one lane, quiet hill that I'm driving down. and I turn around from Andy's house and I am in bumper to fucking bumper traffic at 8.30 p.m. on a Wednesday night and I'm like, oh man, the old baseball Dodgers must be here. Sure.

People must be going to... Playoff race. To pay their respects to Vince Scully or to... Welcome chooch to the neighborhood. Yeah, exactly. Whatever it is. The pennant race is heating up. And I'm just like, God damn,

but this is serious. This is some serious Dodgers action. And then I start to see some young ladies not wearing pants. They weren't wearing Chase Utley jersey? No. And they were basically wearing like girdles as they were walking up the hill.

And I was like, it seems... To be clear, you're framing it as if they were walking up to the hill to my house. No, no, no. What I'm getting to is that Beyonce was playing Dodger Stadium last name. Yes. And you can find Beyonce tickets wherever she is on Seatkeek. Oh, look what you did. Was that what all this was?

No, it was more just me saying like that was fun last night. I just want to say, thank you. I really appreciate it. I realize now, you know, I'm new. I'm new out here. I don't know how things work. And I realize now that asking you to just swing by after work for a quick, quick spot of help, without checking, like, ways. Yeah.

Or just like. This is the New York equivalent of being like, can you pick me up at the airport? Right. Or can you meet me at the Maritime Hotel on a Saturday? It ordinarily wouldn't be that big of a deal. It was just the fact that I then sat in an hour of traffic. And for some reason, my internet wasn't working. And so at one point I was really frying out because I think I had like, I had a podcast with streaming,

but nothing else on my phone was working while I was sitting in this traffic. And somebody was going by me on an Uber. And they were like, it was a bunch of girls dancing to get your freak on by Missy Elliott in the backseat. Yeah. And they looked at me and go, that guy's angry. First of all, they know how to read a room. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah.

I do appreciate it. I only wish people could see how nimble you were on these dark stairs. I mean, we almost lost me a couple times. We did. We did. It was almost the things they carried, and the things they carried were my wife's wardrobe boxes. Thank you.

I do think, you know, for deep, deep watchers, this added frisson of actual personal time is only going to make our show better. Seriously. What I did then, when I got home, was I turned on the Mr. Robot on the USA Network. And started crying during sex. Let's talk to me about this episode a little bit.

I know that I feel like you have a lot more enthusiasm for it than I do. Yes. That possibly could have something to do with the context around which I watched it. I mean, I think that there is a degree to which I think this season of Mr. Robot kind of reminds me of the Nick. And you almost have to be in the right mind space to watch it. And I really, really, really think that season two of Mr. Robot would play better watching it in like two to three to four hour bricks. I agree. Then wait a week comes back, the kind of mystery of how long it's going to be.

Here's the thing. I think that if you're watching this show week to week, which we are, there's a very strong argument to be made that this was a weak or disappointing episode. Initially, there was talk that this was going to be, that both parts of the finale would be aired on one night. Yeah. I think that probably would have been a good idea because so much of this episode was set up and tone and vibe and not so much resolution or forward momentum.

It was kind of... I mean, I hear what you're saying, because I was able to take an enormous amount of pleasure out of the episode because I was just basically going scene by scene with it. I think that the Angela playing Zork, like, real time... Do you remember that game Zork? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are these games that, for...

People of our generation know, but maybe other people don't. But, like, when Chris and I were younger people and we first got, like, our Apple 2Cs or whatever, really the only thing you could do with it other than the logo, which I still don't, I feel like it was a fever dream. We all had, and we were eight. That's like 10, go-to-20? No, it was just like, go-forward. That's basic. And Logo were these things that we knew how to do.

And Sam is, Sam SML is our age, so I'm sure he knew them too. But there were these games, and one of the best of them was called Zork, and they were basically, like, role-playing games. they were all text. And so they began very often with text on the screen like the voice on the phone said to Angela, like you are in a room, what do you do? What do you do? And they were so evocative

because you couldn't see anything. So absolutely this was a, to have that happen, this weird twin-Pecksy-in, analog, just fucking bizarre scene with a fish and a little kid who looked like Leanna Mormon from Game of Thrones.

Or a young Angela. Or a young Angela. It was such a, it was such a head-spiningly, weird choice, and it was so committed to the weirdness of the choice, that I really loved it. And it gave me the kind of nostalgia freak out that I think Stranger Things gave a lot of people. But this was in a much more surprising sort of sideways approach. Similarly, like the scenes of Philip Price or the scenes with White Rose, like, I just thought

these were great scenes. And I really enjoyed the filmmaking behind them. But your other point, I think your bigger point is correct, that this was a lot of what has been frustrating about the season was writ large in this episode. the idea of Elliot stepping outside of Mr. Robot and watching him was a cool idea, but then all of a sudden he just became him and we sort of yada yada at it and it didn't actually achieve anything other than another way to sort of demonstrate to physically show their relationship. The return of Terrell was very confusing, which I think was probably the intent, but it didn't

feel momentous. And I wonder if that's because of the way the episode was edited or the way the finale was expanded double the length and then split up over a week. It just didn't feel that it delivered what it intended to deliver. And I think that some of that has to do with some of these stray plot lines. If you just have this all in one episode, I think the mysteries surrounding Darlene and Cisco. Which was dropped almost entirely. Yeah. It doesn't, it's mentioned in the beginning. It's obscured by some fancy pronoun work. Yeah, and she says, I want to be in the interview, which suggests that someone is alive. And I think anyone watching the show will assume... But many people have died.

But some people have died, yes. But I think it's probably safe to assume that the person whose name is in the credits is the one who's going to be interviewed, but we don't know that. And I think that it was another potential failure of editing that we didn't resolve that. You know, when I did the live show last week, the big question about that we had to play off of us. Who got killed? Who's alive? Who's dead? And then to just really not give us anything was frustrating.

So I think that shows like Lost did do stuff like this. They would take a mystery up into the last scene of an episode, and then the mystery wouldn't get picked up again until the episode after the next episode. The same thing with the Elliott reveal in prison. We didn't see him next week. But they felt a little bit more clean in terms of the lines. You know what I mean? And I think that Elliott in prison did as well.

I think also just there is, like, one thing that I keep coming back to with this is this idea of not changing goalposts as much as changing Truman Show biodome that we are living in and whether or not the background changes on that and whether or not now we've arrived at this other point where you have White Rose talking to Angela in a very dreamlike situation about basically starting to pull the thread a little bit about what is reality and that would go a long way in terms of the heightened sense of it's sort of a hyper reality or a slightly

left of center reality and is especially the way that everything is framed in this show, how even the most generic conversation between two characters that's just really getting action from one point to another is framed in this incredibly extreme, isolating, shoving people into the corner way. Left of center, quite literally. Yeah. And then just also like what you're saying, Elliot doing Dream Olympics to be able to like hack Mr. Robot, who is in turn hacking another program to get to... To get into a taxi to... Yeah, exactly. that we are, and Elliot's saying, by this point you know I'm not a reliable narrator explicitly.

Yes. That we are basically, I wonder how big the shoe is going to be when it drops next week. I'm very curious to see what's going to happen next week. I also wonder if there is anything that can drop that can be satisfying to the divergent fan bases what people want from the show. show and more specifically what they want after going through this season. So just in the briefest of terms, what are, give me the two camps there. Who are the, what, what, there's, well, well, I think there's some people who

definitely watch it for the mind fucks. And there are people who are like, if next week White Rose pulls the curtain back on reality and we realize this is, who knows what it could be. There's a whole other layer to this internally or, or that there was another delusion or that they aren't where they think they are, that someone isn't what they think he is, or whatever, some people might be looking for that. I think I'm probably more in the other camp, which is I would really like some, you know, more like bread and butter narrative momentum and clarity as to who's fighting for what and

what they want and where we're going from here. In thinking about the season as a whole, and I should say I'm very hopeful that we're going to have a chance to talk to Sam about this and bring these concerns to him directly on this podcast. But if you look at this season and you look at this season and you look at the, you know, the peaks and valleys and you look at where we are now, I'm starting to think that the biggest flaw in the season has been a very, very simple storytelling one,

which is, what does anybody want? You know, if you go down to, and I don't even mean to bring this down to like a Joseph Campbell hero smith. I just mean like any... The person with the clearest, like, character direction is probably one of the most successful characters of the season. That's Dom. Dom has a case to solve.

Yes. And so when we, so that scene last night, the almost indulgent scene. With Alexa. And I say indulgent only because the show has earned the right to take some time and give a secondary character, this long scene with a robot or a digital assistant. It didn't feel indulgent because she's a clear line character, A to B, and it's been hard for her. I think that's a really good point.

I think it's always going to be a problem on a show, no matter how ambitious or unambitious, if you isolate your protagonist or multiple protagonists and you say what do they want and you have trouble answering, then it's going to be problematic. I don't mind the winding road. I do think that when you, I do feel like I, not to mix my metaphors,

but I do feel like sometimes I will feel like a page is turned and then we start flipping back. So I do feel like I will have an understanding of the mechanics of the Elliott robot outside world relationship and what people are seeing, what they're not seeing, what he's seeing, what the Slater character is capable of doing. And then I feel like that gets jumbled up.

And the same thing goes for Angela and what she is doing. Is she working for E-Corp? Is she a mole? Is she now, has she seen some greater truth that we don't understand yet? Or is she now doing a triple kind of agent thing where she's pretending to be, pretending to be on White Rose's side of things? whatever that side is. And the only character whose motivations

have truly been revealed, or at least enough so that we can talk with some confidence about them are, say, Philip Price. Right. And the Masters of the Universe isn't the scale, isn't the perspective that the show succeeds on.

It's really the people trying to bring them down or trying to fight them, or trying to fight them off in some way. And if you think about it all the way back to the first season, a lot of the championing of Mr. Robot that I was, we were both full-throated

in championing Mr. Robot, A lot of it had to do with this sort of acrobatic trick of pulling this off. I mean, the pilot introduced something that is essentially impossible on TV, which is an unreliated, I mean, not just the voiceover, but a profoundly unreliable narrator that we are going to be following not just for two episodes, not just for 10 episodes, but presumably multiple seasons. I don't know, I mean, a lot of the, I keep calling them problems, maybe they're hurdles, I do actually think that Sam can find his way out of it.

these things because he's very talented. But think about Elliot slash Mr. Robot and what they want. It's essentially a hamstrung main character because what the character wants is basically siphoned off into Christian Slater. It's his raging id that he has no control over. So what he wants is to be free of his desire, I guess, that's his desire. That leaves him in a very compromised place as a protagonist. But it's interesting because these people who are all interacting with, I assume the Mr. Robot's side of Elliot are like, well, here's phase two. You got the ball rolling. Like, it's your vision is coming.

I think it's the disparity between, like, we're not even getting a sense that the actual Elliott, quote unquote, wants any of the things that are happening. And I think that often when you think about those kinds of relationships, you think of, well, subconsciously, you must want this. Subconsciously, you must want to save or destroy the world or whatever it is. you must have this vendetta against eCorp. But when your present self is so muted and confused, before we move on, and this is something I definitely want to bring up with Sam

if we get a chance to talk to him, is something that Sean Fentasy when he wrote about Mr. Robot a couple weeks ago kind of played around with this idea of it being like unlikeable television, and that it's almost willfully... It's rejecting it. Yeah, rejecting it. Everything from the pacing, the editing, the titles of the episodes themselves are oftentimes inscrutable.

And I kind of wonder at some points whether or not the show itself is a commentary on prestige television. And the idea of the illusion of control, which is like a major theme of the show anyway. And the illusion that we can control the story, that we have like a grasp of what characters want and that they have to have quests that they go on. And that we are bringing this sort of vanilla TV serialized sensibility to something that is explicitly rejecting it. All the fixes, the prescriptions that I'm sort of doling out here are pretty like network executive. Yeah, right. You know, what does he want?

What's his motivation? What if he was a little less of a robot? Exactly. Or the other thing I was about to say is I feel like this season needs a Shayla. Which is a little bit, on the one hand, yes, because Frankie Shaw was fantastic, that relationship was interesting. and it developed as a side plot to the bigger hack. So it gave some humanizing, it gives something else to care about. If he's going down a rabbit hole,

that was a much more understandable and relatable floor of the rabbit hole. But it's amazing. The show has turned us into those people we rail against generally in our idea of what development is, because I'm basically saying there should be a girl that likes him. Sure. Like give him someone to save. This is pretty, these are not really great notes.

And the show, I think you're right, does kind of bristle against them. And I think that's also part of the transformation of the era of prestige TV into an era of TV is the venue where filmmakers go to tell the stories without limits. Yeah. Which we're going to touch on a little bit when we talk about Joe Swanberg series for Netflix. Easy. I mean, this is, there are few shows. We talk about people as autores on TV. You know, we often would talk about like Matt Weiner on Mad Men.

Matt Weiner didn't direct every episode. Matt Weiner, you know, he was worried about like the production design and stuff, but he wasn't as in. control, ultimately as Sam is of this show. So that's kind of an interesting thing. Last note, did you take note of? Do you have any thoughts on the, any thoughts on the, the, the, the, all the Back to the Future references from last night's episode? Were you up on that? I took everybody's, I saw people talking about that. I can't begin to understand, like, is this happening in a, in the future? My thought is, Sam has been very upfront about the fact that he loves Back to the Future, specifically he loves Back to the Future.

Two, which we loved because someone told all of us in all of our schools that hoverboards were real, but the government had outlawed them. I've never seen Back to the Future 2. What's that? I've never seen Back to the Future 2. What? Or 3. I thought you were Steenberg in Head like me. She's delightful in 3.

You never saw Back the Future 2? No. This podcast... I've never seen Back to the Future 2 and I've never seen Clockwork Orange. I think I've seen all the other movies. I do think you have seen. I will vouch for the fact you've seen all the other movies. I feel like this podcast is based on the...

a lie that we had basically the same childhood. Like, when Back to the Future 2 came out, all of us... I think I was watching, like, Commando, man. I think I was just like way... You were watching Running Scared with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines. God, you're the enemy. No, all of us were told that hoverboards were real. Like, this was like...

There was no snopes. I got all the Cliff Notes, yeah. Okay, anyway, I think that with White Rose's obsession with time and what it is, I think he was having fun with that. And I also wonder if he was having fun with our friend Sarah Lewitton's theory on Reddit, which is basically the back to the future theory that Elliot is Tyrell's baby grown up, and she started talking about this last year. And Sam read that.

You can find it. You can Google this. I think Sarah wrote about it for the website Decider this year. Sam absolutely knows about this and joked about it on the first hacking robot that we did. So I wonder if he's trolling all of us. I do not think this is an alternate reality. But what do we know? What do I know?

We have one more week. Did you know that actually Tyrell Wellex baby grows up to be Gabriel, locked character on suits. That's amazing. First of all, I don't know in names of any of the actors on suits. I thought that was a name you were making up. I actually thought you were saying grows up to be Ashley Schaefer's son, Gabriel, from East Bend and Down Outtakes.

I'm just going to say again here, I'm just going to throw my hat in the ring. I really, really want USA to hire us to do after suits with the only caveat that we never watch the show. Littman would be so mad at us. I would love to do an after show for suits. I feel like it demands one, but I don't want to watch suits. Okay. But Juliet loves it.

She adores it, yeah. Is Gabriel Mac like her Michael Weatherly? I think she's just, he's the guy who plays Harvey on that show, right? I literally don't know what that means. Like, is Harvey, what's Harvey? Harvey's a lawyer. We should get on to Atlanta. We'll take a quick break, and then we'll be back to talk about Donald Glover's new show.

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Well, you recorded it two weeks ago. I think that went up the day the show premiere. By the way, I want to apologize because I think we were a little confused or confusing. We talked about the premiere and we alluded to things that happened in the second episode. I didn't realize it had had a two-episode premiere. Yeah. So everybody saw the things that we were talking about. I think we actually started to talk about stuff that happened in the third episode.

That was when we were talking about, like, not having any money in your pocket. Oh, yeah. So another great episode. I just think that here's what I want to say about this show that has also, been incredible for me is that we are definitely living through an age of incredibly high concept shows. I think half of the network shows that we didn't talk about on Monday are about talking dogs. Like for real, there's like three talking pet shows. America loves talking about. But there's just like a lot of like what if and then it's like a seven step plot and you're like how do you do more

than the pilot of that? Yeah. I never had that issue with Atlanta. It was obvious the show you talked about this too where this show can go wherever it wants to go and be whatever it wants to be because of the world it's created. Just watching the third episode, I can feel like this show could just be anything. It's elastic. Yeah. And it can be a rom-com. It can be a trenchant look at the way we live now. It can be absurdist Cohen Brothers, Labowski-Stoner humor. I was going to say Cohen Brothers, too. That whole thing with Migos. I think I think that Coen Brothers. I think that Coen brother's stuff is like all over the composition of the shots and the pacing and like the characters. But it's just that scene in the restaurant with him when the waitress comes up and is like,

you know, what about dessert? And he's just like, yeah, you know, like, I'm good. And she's like, well, I'll wait for her to come back from the bathroom. He's like, you're killing me tonight. What about when he goes up to the bar and tells the dude that he ordered something that was market priced? He's like, I got to know what the market price is. This is, the show is, so many ways. And there are a bunch of shows that I think could hold this mantle, but this I think is the best of them. This is the number one argument for diversity on television. And I don't even mean that in terms of the racial makeup of the writing staff, which is noteworthy because it's relatively unique in TV. It's the diversity of voices and experience that you're

bringing to television. Because this is not a show about a setup or one big question that needs to be answered. This is a show. Will a paper boy make it. This is a show about a world. And it has dropped us into a world with real confidence and real creativity, and we're just content to be there. And you're talking about questions in other shows that might not, you know, how could you do more than a pilot or more than a first season of them? It's not just that. It's that sort of escalating Jenga word salad of conceits, you know, that we were joking when we were going through some of the fall pilots the other day. And there's the one that you were all in on with Haley Atwell conviction. Hayes Morrison, first daughter and lawyer? keep coming back to that because it's just like it's not enough that she is a lawyer she's also

has to be the former first daughter plus also this plus also that and it's because which i'm still not over but it's like because it's a legal show yeah it's a legal show and because they're always going to be legal shows because they generate story there's always going to be medical shows always going to be cop shows so you have to you have to be like a drop out of the del close academy and just be like yes and yes and yes and let's make it more preposterous and more unsustainable. But these newer shows, these more elastic half-hour shows, and I would put Master of None in there as well, they're just about people telling stories that maybe we haven't heard on TV, or maybe we haven't heard in these ways, and they can be anything. Let me ask you

this. This is an easy enough way to get into easy, too, because I think that one thing that we're seeing is that these half-hour shows that are sort of dromedies have started to, the there's an umbrella, and I think a bunch of different critics have used this term. They're basically cult of personality shows. They're about a relatively... I don't know how to phrase this. Basically, like, I'm talking about shows like Master of Nunn, Better Things, Louis, even shows where it's like relatively domestic, relatively not particularly probing,

but kind of like wandering. Like one Mississippi, like Lady Dynamite? Yeah, and I think that... there is something to the way that Atlanta, it has some elements of this is a show about a story. There is a story to Atlanta that seems very clear. They haven't crowded it over, they haven't overcrowded it with characters and they haven't overcrowded it with anything else. It's like, Paperboy making it or not and earn making money or not and whether or not he stays with Van are like three very distinct, easy to follow plot lines that like I think that they hit on every

Whereas sometimes I think that people think that it's just enough to have like, here's a bunch of people living and loving. Wandering through their life. Yeah. Yeah. Which is not a, like, and those shows can be successful or not successful in varying degrees depending on the writing and the talent. Like love, like casual. Yeah. I think that there's, they're almost like those are the new soap operas, you know, where it's like I don't really know.

I can't really tell you what happens on season. If you ask me to describe what happens on togetherness, it would take me a while because it's a lot of stuff about like building a charter school and whether or not they're getting back together. You don't remember Dune that well. Yeah, it's more like, I think it's like a portrait of these people at a time in their lives and it's like anything that they can kind of throw at the wall there.

This feels just a little bit more hyper-specific. Am I on to something here or am I just like... Well, I think that one of the reasons why it crackles the way that it does, Atlanta, because it does have a skeleton. There is a framework here. Yeah. There is a perched on the precipice.

of fame, you know, of making art, or following your dreams, or flaming out. But it's taking its time with that story. But that story is there as a driver as opposed to an Master of Nunn, which is what peaks Aziz and Alan's interest next? Yes. Which is fine, because I think they're interesting,

and I like that they are so able to go from one thing to another. And it's really cool, but there is a degree to which you're like, you know, it would be cool as if it's Nashville. Right. And that can be very fun to follow along with. but this one, you know, the thing about Atlanta, like, just these little details before we move on, like, the guy plays paper boy, Brian Tyree Henry, like his acting, his silent acting in the scene with Migos. He uses his frame really well.

He's so funny and so present without doing anything. I mean, he's just incredible to watch as an actor. And the fact that the show could be so goofy at times, but still have the menace, so that when they go, that whole scene when they approached, you know, where Cuevo's like holding court in the trailer park, whatever in the middle of the woods, you actually don't know what's going to happen. You don't know if someone's going to die

because someone does apparently get shot, but it's also ludicrous. And being, and that's the same thing that I do like, I think it was well observed with something like Louis, which is it's kind of cool to be unsure of where you stand and what's possible. Because we didn't mention it specifically, but it aired.

The scene in the second episode, when he's in the holding tank in prison, Where it goes from this moment of everyone laughing at the guy, the guy getting beat in the face, was just, that's one of this more stunning, I don't even how long that scene was. Yeah, but the thing is, I think part of the reason why it's so impactful is that they didn't play it for,

they played it as like the kind of shit that can happen in some people's lives. Not like, here's the strings, here's the, like, the car comes out and teabones you, and then it's parenthood, here it's parenthood music. It's not teaching a lesson. Yeah. It's not trying to, it's not trying to educate us in a way.

It's not a very special episode. It's avoiding, you know, and this is what, I think you mentioned it last week. This is what Donald Glover talked about with Rembert and his piece that everyone, I think, should read from New York Magazine, which is he's trying to avoid claptor, which is like the sort of the polite, oh, this is good for us. You touched on a good issue here, yeah. Good for us kind of thing. Tell me a little bit about easy. I mean, I watched the trailer.

I just didn't. I mean, you and I enjoy the films of Joe Swanberg. Joe Swanberg is a, he came out of the Mumblecore movement. He's a guy, he's younger than us, early 30s filmmaker. In a way, we all did. All of us and Hannah took the stairs when necessary. But he's incredibly ridiculously prolific, and he works in a very sort of like digital video Cassavetti-esque vein

where he gets people he likes together and they make a movie in a weekend or in a week at his house in Chicago or on a set or a borrowed place in L.A. And he's sort of been inching more towards mainstream because he's made these last three movies that he's made, drinking buddies, happy Christmas, and digging for fire.

two of which starred Friend of the Pod, Jake Johnson, were really, I think, steps forward for him. And he never stops working, and he directs episodes of some of these other shows that we've actually mentioned. I think he directed an episode of love for Netflix. But so, as excited as I am

for more work for him, from him, because he has this anthology series from Netflix debuting in, like, a week. It's insane to me that I didn't even, we didn't even know about this. So I just, I was reminded, minded of it because I was thinking about this too with how Transparence coming back. Transparen's one of like the five best shows on television.

Absolutely. And is adored. Yeah. And I in my mind in the same way that when there's a big album coming out or a big movie coming out I feel like there should be like weeks of We should be clearing our throats I should know that like transparency's coming on and I I drive by billboards and I maybe I'll see it. The billboards went up last week. I've been here three weeks now so I know when the billboards go up. It's crazy. This is what PT TV feels like. The fact that there's a show with Orlando Bloom and Iy Cash and whoever else is in easy. Mark Marin, Hannibal Burris, is just on Jake Johnson. Is going to be on Netflix next week is nuts.

And it is, I think it's a terrific opportunity because basically from what we understand, it's a eight-episode, half-hour episode series. I don't know if there's any loose connection between the episodes or if they're all just sort of about people figuring stuff out at Chicago. Sure. this is a great medium for Swanberg to play in. It's what he does anyway, and he has access to these great talents. It's what Netflix should be doing, bankrolling people who can do their own shit and then giving them an outlet for it. Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's the perfect tradeoff because he gets creative freedom and he gets an outlet for his stuff. And they get content. And they get content. But it is bewildering that this is just dropping. Yeah. And then maybe everyone's moved on to something else. It's the trailer, they did put up a trailer today. It looks good. Stranger Things, the trailer for Stranger Things came out like two or three weeks before it just was there.

And then I remember distinctly being like, oh, Stranger Things, I guess I'll check that out. And bang. But this is, you know, we end up saying this at least once a month, but. We'll be saying what about Bloom, though, in a couple weeks. I'm like, when Bloom is the huge meme. He's the huge breakout? I think he's already become a meme this summer. I think he's a meme for other reasons when he was paddle boating with an interesting paddle.

But I think we end up having to say this like almost once a month. but all of media, and I include you in this, your website editor, you're a thinker. All of it for generations has been built around the anticipation of something. You do the press before, and you get people excited ahead of time. Netflix's entire content model is built on after.

All of their emphasis is on having the thing. When you discover it, doesn't matter. When you watch it, doesn't matter. They just want to have it there. And so they're already on to the next. The crazy thing is, though, is that Swamberg is a guy who used to put out one or two movies every 18 months in Art House Cinemas. And obviously that had a different promotion cycle, but this could be the way things work from now on, where these just outside of the mainstream directors who make very human non-cgigy, non-existing IP movies, just go straight to Netflix. And they're like, I hope you find my stuff.

Woody Allen just did that, or it's about to do that for Amazon. There's a Woody Allen TV show coming this month. It's absolutely bewildering. And, you know, we're going to, as I mentioned, we're going to be doing an Emmy preview, and I think a lot of this conversation is going to thread through our Emmy conversation because the Emmys are such an interesting barometer this year because of, I think they've done a very good job of wrapping their arms around the breadth of TV, but also by doing so highlighting the lack of consensus about TV.

So let's do a little bit of housekeeping. Sunday night, just so people know, again, Emmys. Emmys will end around 11, 11.30 East Coast time. We'll have some Emmys content up over the next two days, video and audio. Sunday night after the Emmys 830 PST or whatever it is. 830 PTSD? 830, yeah, at 8 or 830 slash 11 or 1130 live. Hit Facebook.com slash ringer to see us do Facebook live post show about the Emmys.

Monday, we're doing a special podcast with some buddies. I think we can, can we safely say that? I'm pretty excited about Monday. Let's just say that we are going to be talking about a new fall show that we touched on last week with two colleagues, friends who are uniquely qualified to comment on. That's a very good way to put it. And then Thursday, we'll talk about the robot finale. Yeah. And I guess Atlanta.

Yeah. Hopefully with a special guest then as well. And what was the show? I wanted to talk about Gomorra. What did you want to talk about? I feel like we should. And I think after we get through some of these events, that we have planned. I think we've got to revisit

who's got the belt for the fall. I think probably Atlanta, but I think there are a couple contenders that we haven't even folded in, such as Gomorrah, such as Queen Sugar, such as Wine Show. Yes, that's right. These things are looming. That's huge. Okay, so check out our Amy stuff until Monday. We'll talk to you later.

Great job, we're going to get.