The Watch - Ep. 84: HBO's Fall Sunday Night Slate

Episode Date: October 10, 2016

"The Ringer's Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald discuss the mysteries of 'Westworld' (6:00), Sarah Jessica Parker's return on 'Divorce' (28:15), and Issa Rae's bright new comedy, 'Insecure' (37:45). Disclosure: HBO is an initial investor in The Ringer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio. I definitely think he just broke his hand. That is not a TV reference. It's Andy Greenwald!

Look, we're in new spaces a lot here. We're learning a lot about each other and our physical limitations, and I definitely probably just broke my finger by slamming it in the studio door. But look, all that does is sharp, my focus. I know. Maybe I was feeling a little bit flighty today, but now my insights are razor sharp because adrenaline is a byproduct of extreme physical pain. You're going to be on that,

see, maybe you should model the rest of your life off of Paul Bettney and the Da Vinci Code. Can I be honest with you? Yeah. I'm sort of hoping two future medics run up behind me right now and inject me with something in the neck just to get me started. Speaking of Paul Bettney and the Da Vinci Code. Are you going to do this? Sure. Can I tell you something? This is the space for it. I'm so hype for young Pope. That's all I wanted to talk about, too. That's not a joke. Yo, I know we're going to talk about...

What about the Pope, though? Listen. Listen to me. Listen, for real. Like, I know we're going to take this podcast now, and we're going to talk about... We're going to talk about Sunday Night TV. And we're going to talk about the three shows

that are on HBO last night. We're going to talk about Westworld and Secure and Divorce. But as I was watching those shows, on what about HBO go, though? I watched the promo, though, for the young pope. Directed by Palosurantino, though! I don't even understand everyone who's listening, whether you're a TV fan, whether you're in the TV industry, whether you own a TV or not. Now, you just started doing Jude Law Young Pope voice just there, whether you own a TV and that.

What are you even doing? The Young Pope is coming for your throats in Q117. Young Pope is roaming the defensive backfield like Steve Atwater. I'm not kidding. Like, I want to be very clear with you. I am so hype on this. I don't know if people know about Sorrentino, though, and I'm not even trying to make that,

I'm not even trying to do that bit anymore. Have you guys seen the great beauty? Have you seen youth? This dude makes really, really interesting and really compelling movies. And somebody was like, what about TV, though? And he was like, yeah, here's the thing. sopranos but at the Vatican. And not just that.

The thing to remember about this guy is that a lot of the filmmakers who have come to television are bringing the kind of movies they make are maybe visually compelling or they know how to string a good story together. But they are generally operating within a familiar narrative structure and are interested in familiar narrative structure. And maybe it's just that they can't make the movies they wanted to make in the theaters anymore. They can make them on TV. Maybe they want a different challenge. Even someone like Kerry Fukenaga, who is a beautiful stylist and director, you know, his movies, you could sort of put them in categories of movies you had seen before.

And that's not even a dig. Right. They're not hallucinatory. Exactly. Serentino is a lot more David Lynch than he is Fukenaga. Yeah. And the fact that he's making the show, like, anyone who saw this and are like, are they serious? That's the point.

Yeah. Yeah, so this is like, you should go look at this trailer up because they ran up before Westworld, I think. And I'm very hype for it. But let's get into it, though. Let's talk about our Sunday night shows here. Okay. I want to say my piece about that. Could I?

About Sunday Night shows? We should start with Westworld. Yeah, we'll do Westworld, and then we'll talk about Insecure and Divorce. I was wondering, so I saw this episode when I saw the first one a couple months ago and then I watched it again. And I was trying to wonder why I just was leaving me feeling cold. Because so far the show is leaving me feeling a little cold. Yeah. And I've got to be honest with you, Chris.

It might be a little bit of the point. That's a good conversation to have. But I do wonder. Are we human or are we dancers? That's what it's asking. I know the answer to that question. Well, I've always been dancer. Chris, I just feel like on a Sunday night,

I didn't need two opportunities to get a glimpse of a dystopic nightmare world where men can do anything they want to women without any fear of repercussion or punishment and be accepted that way. Right. Was there something else on Sunday Night besides Westworld? I just feel like sometimes fiction feels like it has limits. And we are in one of those times. We can talk about this for a second.

I do think that, I mean, this is funny because I was actually going to talk a little bit about, I'll get to my West World thing in a second, but it is hard to look in and outside of bubble sometimes. and I don't know what, you know, like what it's like for other people necessarily who don't, aren't professionally obligated to be hooked into the internet. There was something like, there was an interesting, I can't remember where I read it, but somebody had a line a couple of days ago that I read that I liked, which was like the days when you had to get on or get off the internet, like, you can have like DSL or whatever, but like you didn't take the internet with you everywhere. Right. When you had to go to the Apple store to check your email and so ho. Or just even like you would look at your computer for a while and then go do something else, you know? And that happens less and less.

And so the way in which things that you know are important, like the debate, can start to creep into your life in a way that like in places where ordinarily, whether it's like you're reading a book, but you look at your phone because you want to see if something happens. And then here's the thing about this election that I think has been driving me insane is that I would love to be like, nothing happened. Why am I keep looking at my phone? Right.

But something's always happening. Yes. No, I understand. that. And I think that, you know, one of the things that Jonah Nolan, I don't even mean to be trite by making this a little bit about TV because Sunday night TV last night was Sunday night. I think that we are even seeing it as like a site where we're talking about. You mean your, largely sports and pop culture. Yeah. And you have a feeling like until November 9th, all of this stuff is just like off to the side of the stage to some extent.

I think that Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy want to make the viewers of West. for world feel uncomfortable. I think disquiet is one of their primary colors that they're trying to paint with. I think that it is a challenge, and believe me, if all the things happening in this election season, my reaction to Westworld

does not rate at all. But I felt awful last night. You know, I watched the debate, and I felt pretty disgusting and degraded by what I watched, what I feel like our country had to watch, what I feel like has happened to any sort of

Convention of Civility or the body politic or government or respect. And so to then watch a show that is trying to ask you questions about that in a provocative way, and I have to say in a resolutely humorless way. So far, yeah. It's not suit. I'll just put it. I mean, when I say this, this is a personal reaction to the show. It didn't suit what I needed right now because I watched the show and I just bump up against one thing,

which is they are absolutely. asking these questions in the hush tones of complete solemnity and seriousness. Like, what if robots were real? What are we doing to these people? What are we doing to our lives? Literally, the characters say to each other. Like, the jackass with the black hat with Jimmy Simpson. By the way, they're not friends.

Can we just start with that? Like, this is a convention, a lot of pop culture, where it's like the wacky friend and the reticent friend. And they're like, I can't wait for us to be friends again, friends. Yo, these dudes are not friends. The guy, Logan and William? Just try harder. You know what I mean?

Oh, you mean like, but like I think that William's character says, like, I'm not actually, like, that's not like my friend. It's like a work guy and like the work guy's like you got to come with me or something, right? Why you got to go? Anyway, that's a separate. Because he's got to go. That's a separate point. But they have the conversation. Okay.

You know, where he's just like, I can't wait to see the real you that's lurking inside of you in this world. And it's like, I know. I see everything is being set up on these ten poles of seriousness. this and it's just it's a it's a it's a it's a dissonant right now it's a bad moment for me to try to for me to want to really settle in for 59 minutes and scratch my chin i can't think of it i had and then i lost like an analogy that i thought might work for this but i do think that we've talked a lot whatever we talk about the belt we often talk about how

the belt should go to a show that not only is beloved it is not only uh critically like excellent or aesthetically like pleasing but also draw some sort of like extra television conversation like something that like that people are coming in to talk about on the day after that it airs. And that's to some extent that's happening with Westworld. I think I like it a lot more than you do.

But I do think that this is a very busy time for television and it's a very good time for television. There's a lot of really good stuff floating around. Yeah. And that it's hard to have this is, we've talked about this last week. It's all in on this show. You either like this is either going to work

or it's going to fail completely. It's not like they can fix it. It's not like it can get funnier. You know what I mean? I mean, it could. But it's not like you could all of a sudden, I would feel weird if all of a sudden Danny McBride showed up on the ninth episode as like,

the town jester, you know? Oh my God. Can I just ask everyone to just hold in their mind the image of when he gives his nephew the automatic rifle and he just shakes his body. You just wanted to be Black Biker Week in Westworld? Just do that gif of Black Biker Week and I would be back in on this show. But I think that because there's so much more to choose from, that might have something to do with you.

Yeah. Like, do I need to do this? It does feel like homework. It does feel like an obligation to a certain degree. One question I had about it, and I want to know what you thought about this, is a lot of the more interesting writing about the show and ideas behind the show. This is what I was going to ask you. Come from, I don't know if it.

Well, you don't know. This is a spoiler. You might not know what I'm going to say. is about this idea of like Grand Theft Auto or like, you know, Oh, that's not what I was going to ask you. See, I thought so. I was going to surprise you. Still surprising each other.

After all these years. Sort of what is the morality of a person who can be one way in Friday and one way. And that, I actually do think that that has some relationship to our current state, like, of like what happens when you take the safeties off of people's personalities? Well, you know, it's just locker room banter, Chris. You can gun down a room full of prostitutes and it's no big deal. Listen. But one thing.

that I haven't been a gamer in some time, to be honest with you. Yeah? But my understanding of Grand Theft Auto Games, even if they've gotten like super... Did you not play... Well, like the early ones, but like recently as it's become more just freeform

and you can run around doing whatever you want. You can die too, right? Like, obviously you can always respawn. And like, but you have a life, quote unquote, like in the same way the video games you've always had that. Yeah, you just have to, like, you don't have to stop playing the game, yes. Well, that was my question,

because the thing that, the thing that, that, you know, this episode really pushed, you know, drilled down on is that if you are playing the game, you are invincible because you've paid for the privilege to be able to do whatever you want. So, so, and I, it was interesting to note, like in the Ed Harris scene with, by the way, Clifton Collins Jr., not so many good actors were crammed into the show. Yeah, yeah. He plays Lawrence in the show.

In that scene where he basically annihilates their family, the cousins. Yes. I didn't notice this as much the first time I watched. the show as much as the second is that he gets quote unquote shot quite a bit he he is not Ed Harris yes yes but it doesn't matter right like the sniper the the the bartender it's not that he is so good at playing the game that he plays it flawlessly he just can yeah I think that his behavior is somebody who has played the game apparently for 30 years and in a way at a sense he was born here figured out it's like the same thing with when you're

playing Mario and you're just like if you die and you have to go back to levels to do something, you're like, but I know how to do all of this, so I just skip past all this stuff. But even in Mario, you had to still do it. Like, the times when you'd get really good at a game like that, it would be very frustrating if you died at the big boss because you had to go back to a save point or to the beginning of the game, like we're talking back to NES. Right. This idea is something that I bet is probably going to come into play at some point where there will

be consequences for the real people as well as the robots. That seems to be a rich place for the show to go. But I was wondering if that affected my enjoyment of the show or my, my, you know, reception of the show because there's this, and again, it makes sense that it's early on in the narrative, but there's this omnipotence. I think also it's worth noting that while GTA has come up a couple of times, I believe, I can't remember if it was Lisa Joy or Joan and Olin said that Bioshock is a huge influence on the show, and that he, one of them was like, it's like one of the most important pieces of entertainment that's happened in the last 15 years. By the way, just as a

side note, I believe this fully to be true, and maybe we should have Jason Concepcion come on, Because one thing that Jason Concepcion can say to us other than, you know, literally everything that happened in Game of Thrones or just make us furious because he's still making fun of the Sam Hinky Sixers, is that Jason, I basically every few weeks or months will write to Jason being like, this game looks dope. Can I come over to your house and play it? Because he keeps up on this stuff. And I just had to let that stuff go.

And I do feel that if we are supposedly cultural commentators, we are missing these great. I mean, I don't know if they're great in sense that we would like. love them, but things like Bioshock does seem to be influencing how storytelling happens in the world, and we are essentially blind to it. I also think that, and this is what I was going to ask you about, so you're talking about what you've been reading, and I've been reading some about it too, and it does seem that this show is immediately, and part of this is like the content industry, but it's immediately spawn theories.

We've talked a little bit about this last week, but the idea... Are you checking out your boards again? I'm on the boards. I'm in there. I love Chris's Bords Corner. Grabbing the board. What is it? What it would be?

Banging the boards. So this is basically a mystery box TV. You know, this is, we had it with, well, obviously, have it with Thrones. We, and to some extent, it impacted Night of, like, all the theories of what could have happened with Night of. This idea that you need to solve a show before the show gets to that conclusion itself. Yeah. So, I mean, earmuffs anybody who really cares, but, like, there's a theory, for instance, that the Man and Black plot and the William plot are how. happening on separate timelines and that they are the same person.

Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Like, for instance, and that there is, like, evidence to suggest, or not evidence, but there's, like, clues where it's, like, the train station that William shows up in is actually, like, much nicer looking than, like, another shot of the train station. I guess. So, anyway, but the point being is, like, this is not a television show that I think you're going to get any kind of, like, real emotional resonance.

from last week we were like gosh what about Hansel? What about Luke though? What about like the point of view character, the cynic, the big bad that we understand and right now it's very diffuse and even somebody like William is like I'm just a rube and I'm just

making my way through this. Everyone's a programmable archetype on purpose so the big thing for this show is more about it's puzzle pieces but when you finish the puzzle it's still probably is not going to make you feel like, oh, gosh, that really, like, hits me, you know? It's a very interesting point.

Because when you describe this. It's entirely about formal invention, is what I'm saying. Yeah. Which makes me feel like this fits into a larger conversation about this bespoke era of television where, you know, where shows can be so micro-targeted that they don't need to appeal to anything, you know, a larger audience. What I mean is what you're talking about, this idea of cross timelines or where are we really or what might be revealed.

I love that stuff. That's catnip. If it's grafted onto a series of characters. For me. Exactly right. I love Lost. I still love Lost. I think about it a lot.

Me too. And that sort of storytelling I miss enormously in TV. And one of the reasons why I really do like Game of Thrones is because it's not like lost, but in the sense of you can completely lose yourself in an interlocking narrative and interlocking pieces that all fit to something larger and hinted something bigger. I mean, that is why. I fell in love with TV and books and everything to begin with and comic books, too. But to just tease that out a little further, what you're saying is, you know,

if you want a show that it's pure character and nothing like this, we have shows like that for you. If you want to show that's pure procedural, we have that show for you. Pure laughs. We have sitcoms for you. Sitcoms without laughs. We have those for you. And so maybe what Westworld stands is as the first, like, it's pure PhD-level fan theory. I mean, that's the Nolan's brand, right?

Just to take genre and then send it to Stanford. What's the least interesting part of Inception? It's the Marion Cotillard, Leo DiCaprio, like, whether or not he gets back together with this wife that we don't even know, right? Like, it has, there's the signifiers of an intense emotional relationship there and people cry. That's what Interstellar does do. Right, right, exactly. I mean, I think Interstellar has, like, got different problems. Inception actually is, like, this incredibly well-weller.

put together like puzzle, which if you remove one piece completely falls apart. But the emotional core of that movie is supposed to be like, I have to do this one last job to get back together with my wife who's lost in limbo is actually not that interesting. What's interesting is Tom Hardy in Morocco. It often feels like, I agree with you, but it often feels like maybe it's that it's a movie, maybe that they spent more time obsessing over every puzzle piece because that's how movies get made and certainly that Christopher Nolan makes his movies. if you think about Inception for too long,

I mean, you will probably break down into a quivering puddle, but if you think about it too long, the construction of it, it does feel like a very smart kid trying to game the system. And he's like, well, they told me it needed to have heart. So I'm going to reverse engineer a heart onto this story that is actually just kind of a cool idea. Right. And it worked.

And you have amazing performers, and you take these beautiful images, and Marion Cotillard's face in these flashbacks that are interlayed throughout that movie, you know, movie, to sit in a movie theater is essentially manipulative, so the guy who hasn't sat in a movie theater in two years. But that's okay. And I think that it works in that context.

What would be interesting to see is that TV is essentially manipulative too, of course. And one of the ways TV is manipulative are in these very familiar draw you in, make you fall in love with characters, things that in lesser hands can be referred to as soap operatic. All the best shows play off of that. And in a weird way, it's going to lead into our conversation about the other two new HBO comedies as well. It would be interesting to me to see, or will be interesting to me to see if Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy begin to play on those tropes as well to draw people into their story. Well, that's what Game of Thrones does. As it throws forward, like, this is, you invest, you invest, you invest, and then the bottom falls out of the market.

You know, and they've only done that so many times and they really earn it. I have to say, I'm much, I think I'm much more into the Westworld than you are. And I also, I think part of that is just my affection for Westerns, but also the, I do think that they are playing around with some interesting things about collective memory and what constitutes a memory. The Thaddy Newton stuff was pretty fascinating. That was, that was, that was on 100. First of all, the only person who loves Tandy Newton as much as me is Tate. and Tate's on the position where you can yell a support, but I know that.

She's terrific. He's too busy getting an orthopedic surgeon in here for your head. I hope so. I need Dr. James Andrews, but she's great. And also the imagery from those scenes, like those are the moments when you sort of, you get a glimpse into what they're trying to accomplish and what they can accomplish.

And how big it is and how far back and forward it expands. So I remain really, really into this show. I remain frustrated by it. Okay. But not. I'm not out. Right. A show that it is capable of imagery,

such as was in that sequence when she wakes up and runs into basically an avatar. Right. Can I ask you one more question? Just like, what do you think? It still hurts, yes. What do you think? Oh, another question.

He says I have something new, Anthony Hopkins at the end of this episode. And it's the black, no, they've mentioned the white church. Now there's a black church in the desert. Did you know William of Ackham was a monk? Who's that? When they're talking about Ackham's razor. Oh, yeah, yeah. Sorry.

No theories about... Tell me the question. Like, what do you think is next? Like, what's that? What is... Why, why say I have this new idea for a story, but the story, like, the image that they show is possibly the oldest story, which... Or one of the oldest stories, which is... Right.

Well, my sense... I know nothing. But the vibe I was getting was that he is becoming intrigued and maybe at peace of the idea that something has become sentient, that there is some storyline that he is not... That is not... That is something that is not by his design. but that he is allowing it. Or that maybe the characters become the hosts.

Something is brewing that is indicative of these malfunctions are actually part of this larger story that he's no longer in control of. And so that line where he has the rattlesnake and the kid and he's like, you know, everything is magic here except the magician. Do you think that kid is a younger version of him? Yes.

Okay. But he also had a face in that, but his face when he saw the spire suggested wonder or surprise. Sure. So the magician was being surprised. I love surprising magicians. Let's take a quick break. Hear from our responses.

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That's Casper.com slash BSPN, code BSPN. Terms and conditions apply. Andy? Hey, man. Let's talk about being young and getting old. Well, yeah. Because I think that might be the central tension. Not the tension.

I mean, these shows aren't oppositional. But for divorce and insecure, I think that they have some elements in common. They have some things that are completely different. But there is like, you know, you were talking about, I don't want to have to think about this on a Sunday night like with Westworld. It is interesting to be confronted with, because I'm, you know, you and I are both in our late 30s, so we're kind of like right in the middle, probably closer to SJP than we are. You don't have to keep talking. You just leave that.

Actually, I think we're equidistant. Yeah, but like, you know, we have insecure as a show that's about trying to like discover who you are. and divorce is about a show trying to save what is left of you. That's beautiful. It's also giving, like, you know, maybe like... It's giving divorce a lot of credit. There's also just, like, it's also mad just jokes, you know what I mean, for both. I mean, first of all, I just want to say, like, one of the amazing things, this is, like, the biggest evidence I've ever seen of, like, the post-live viewing world.

I can't imagine the overlap between insecure and divorce. divorce, just in terms of audience. Raising my hands. They're just both half-hour shows that HBO made that we're ready to go in this slot. I think they're assuming that each will find its audience. I'm not saying people can't like both. What I'd like to say is... Fing up protagonists navigating the murky world of love?

I really, really, really liked Insecure's pilot. I really, really disliked Divorce's Pilot. And before we even get into the specifics, I just want to to go back to that point about the sort of stereotypical but not in a bad way storytelling of television, how it draws you in. And for me, the baseline is for all shows, whether they were on must-see TV in the 90s or whether they're on Hulu in 2016, is this a world you want to spend time in? Is this a world you want to return to?

Insecure, the answer was yes. You know, immediately I was drawn in, mainly because, you know, the arrival scenes into Los Angeles in the opening with Kendrick Lamar playing really spoke to my experience here. just a short month ago. Frequent open mics. Divorce, I was like, get me out of here as fast as humanly possible. And it's not just because there was snow on the ground. You know, it was a toxic sort of gross, moneyed meanness that I sort of see maybe they were shooting for like a Tom Wolfe parody or satire of this world.

But it didn't get there. And so it falls, instead of reaching for that. place, it falls down into just sort of assuming that this is in some way normal or okay. Like there is a baseline in this world where it would have been okay for any of these people to behave like this or to entertain us in this way? Yeah, but like that, so do you think that there's a place for television where people behave in a bad way, though? Well, most shows have people behaving in a bad way.

I'm just saying think about, so Sharon Horgan, we can skip to divorce, I guess, but Sharon Hogan, who is probably a genius, I think, inarguably a genius in a lot of ways. and she created and stars in Catastrophe, co-created with Rob Delaney, her star, and then she created the show and wrote it and was behind the scenes. And she did pulling. And pulling as well.

Catastrophe, you know, some people come away from watching that show and they're like, boy, they say crazy things to each other. Or some of the supporting characters are very broad in a broader sitcom-y sense, while the main characters are not. The show is sort of based in a place, though, of, sometimes love, sometimes worth, sometimes affection. It's very, very hard to make a show about people hating each other.

And then everything cascades from there. The idea of like the main characters being a little bit normal because there are a way in and the supporting characters being wild buffoons is standard sitcom stuff. I mean, we talked about you're the worst in the first season, like the way that show, which has been excellent again this year, and we should get back to it. But the way that show sort of normalizes Jimmy and Gretchen was by making, Edgar and

what's your name? Catherine Donny's character. I can't forgot it. Lindsay. Making them like crazy town. And then the show sort of examined that and examined that going forward

and flipped it a little bit. This was just, to me it was just, it starts with kind of unpleasant and then we have, you know, your man, Superior Donuts, Tracy Letts, Puehl's surprise winner for American drama.

August? For August. Osage County and your former favorite head of the CIA on Homeland. Just having his, literally having his heart explode at a dinner party, it's just, I just found it, I just found it real bad. I just found it really bad.

And it... Investigate this a little bit. Besides, aside from, like, I mean, so what I think that this show is probably suffering from, I kind of enjoyed it, but I guess just because I thought it was witty and I think Sharon Horgan's a great writer. I didn't think it was witty.

You can say that out loud. We're on mic. One thing, simply is that it just felt like it was being performed in translation. I thought that there was like a real tension between... So I often found that when you have something that's sort of like a scathing black comedy,

so whether it's like, I'm trying to think of like what a good example of this would be. No one on Veep behaves well. You know what I mean? And I think Veep is maybe the best comedy I'm getting to. I don't... No one on Veep, behaves well, but people in VEP are aware of how fucking ridiculous things are, like, you have

Kevin Dunn's character to just be like, what is happening? You know what I mean? Like, this is just also ridiculous. Anna Chomsky's character is like aware of what is happening. Just as a side note, Chris, when we went, you know, we talked about this before, we went to that HBO party after the Emmys. And the only time we were really starstruck was Kevin Dunn was there. That's true. Kevin Dunn is America's greatest actor at this point. But you know what I mean, right? Like, There's nobody on divorce who is, like, isn't this also absurd really yet? I mean, after one episode. Right.

It's asking you, right, that's a very good point. I think there are one thing that some shows do is create, well, all shows, create a baseline for their own reality. You know, on Parks and Recreation, basically everything was skewed happier, more positive, you know, more support, even though there were darker things or characters who didn't buy into Leslie Knope. Like, we were in her reality and everything spun along with that. And the best comedies, find that.

find that tone. That's very hard to do. It usually takes up to 10 episodes to even find that tone, but they find the tone and then they hold it and then they can, you know, make us buy into it.

Divorce was basically asking us to come into this world that it's just very sour and very unpleasant. And for me, just very uninteresting. I just don't, I don't care what happens to these people.

Not because they're acting badly, but because I don't have any reason, I don't know why I would care. I think there's also the issue of what I like to call the triple SJP paradox. Whoa. Are you about to

drop Jonah Nolan's science on this? So do we need to shut down production on this podcast so you can come up with a common theory of SJP reality? Sarah Jessica Parker, when you see her act, you're like, I want you to be a good person because you are inherently charming. This is my take.

I know this is not shared by everybody. Then what happens is you put her in a show where she seems to be almost pressing against like the needs of the character because the character is actually having this kind of midlife crisis. But she is Sarah Jessica Parker.

So it's that suspension of disbelief is very difficult to believe that. And then there is the triple part of knowing that Sarah Jessica Parker is actually a savage because she went on the NERDIS podcast and said that she has a theory of sex in the city where Miranda, Charlotte, who's the last one?

Betty. No. Veronica. Miranda Charlotte. Samantha, could actually be figments of Carrie's imagination, and that all the episodes are just columns of hers, and that they are actually all her. Yo, Sarah Jessica Parker, closet Westworld fan.

She would be the man. First of all, let's not have any illusion. S.J.P. is the man in black? That would be, yes. And they'd be like, those aren't robots, and she just shrug. What I'm really trying to get at, though, is I can't decide whether everybody around Sarah Jessica Parker is wrong or Sarah Jessica Parker is wrong.

I think that one of the things that made her, with good reason, very, very popular and very successful, is that she, on screen, you know, everyone, certainly all stars, have certain things that they register. Sort of registers they exist in, certain emotions they trigger when you see them, you know. And for her, I think that she has always been a magnet for audience empathy. Yeah. When she's on screen, you sort of, you root for her, you feel for her, and that is an interesting point. place to begin at, you know, and that is also, like Sandra Bullock is like that too, probably, and so she's had a good job playing in and around and off that, but she's never really able to play a bad person because America doesn't seem to want to accept her doing that.

Sure. In this part is written by Sharon Hogan, like, I'm trying to articulate this just on the fly, but if you look at Sharon Horton, also, by the way, that's hugely reductive of me to even suggest that Sharon Hogan only writes Sharon Horgan surrogens. If you read the profile of her in the New Yorker, it suggests that she does mine her own personal life very heavily, as many writers do. But if you watch her character in catastrophe,

there's a character who fundamentally doesn't, isn't sure if she's good or bad, and seems pleasantly surprised when good things happen. It would help if she would maybe stop in a, maybe at a red light in a car and say, am I a good person? You know, if... Am I a bad man?

To be clear, if catastrophe was made for a, primarily for an American outlet, she would. That would have been a note. Sarah Jessica Parker in this show as Francis on divorce seems to believe that she is this very good person worthy of sympathy, although the most interesting part of the pilot for me is that she might not be. Not that people are quote unquote bad if they stray or whatever.

Yeah, Lindsay wrote about this on the ringer where it was like the way that it inverts the Thomas Hayden Church. Like typically it would she be done wrong by the husband. She would be wrong with her life. That's interesting. It was an interesting idea. Also, you know, I like shows that begin with a mystery. And for example, in Quarry show we should come back to on Cinemax, the very first image,

we don't know what time frame we're seeing, but there's basically a gun battle and someone is killed and someone, you know, so we don't know, we assume we're going to catch up to that story. It ends in divorce. That's where Quarry ends. It'll jump forward to 2016 Westchester. That's fine? The question that's really, I want to know.

And it's an iconic question, much like, you know, guys, where are we in the pilot of lost? Is did Thomas Hayden Church shit in the coffee can? Are we going to see him shit in the coffee can? You can't ask a question that big and not return to it. So I guess, I've talked myself back in. I want to know. Yeah. Is it, when he shits in that coffee can, is he the one doing defecating?

Or is there a character we haven't met yet existing in a separate timeline? Right. Perhaps in Westworld. Do you see where I'm going with this? the Grand Unified Theory of HBO. Of coffee cans. Where does Insecure fit into this? Thankfully, nowhere.

I loved it. I really, really loved it. I had no familiarity with Issa Rae. I had not watched, I mean, other than the fact that the show had been in development for a while, and I remember our pal Rembrandt wrote about her, but I never watched Awkward Black Girl,

which was her web series. And so I wasn't quite sure what we were going to get going in, and also knowing that this show had gone through a lot of very long development, process. And I thought it was the best case scenario for that. It felt like what I like in a pilot, which is, here's a world. And you get it, you know, the first scene where she's presenting herself to the class is like a really well-chosen first scene. I think she's an incredibly appealing performer, very funny. And the woman who plays her friend, who I came in here, prepared

to say her name, and then just blanked on it as we've been talking. But Allison Davis wrote about her and did an interview with her on the ringer today, which I really loved. There is a show in that friendship, and I think it was very, very smart of Larry Wilmore helped develop the show, and Prentice Penny, who was one of the funniest guys behind happy endings, who took over show running duties when Larry Wilmore was called away, basically, to do his show. To realize early on that there is a show in this friendship was really, really, really smart to me. So I'm psyched on it. I just think that it, in, you know, in its 28 minutes, it gave us a range of emotions, it gave us a whole, a whole specific world.

It gave us very good jokes, like the one about how all black women who went to college love Drake, you know, which as a black woman who went to college, I responded to. I thought it was just, I thought it was bright, and I don't mean, like, bright and smart. I just think it was bright and engaging, and I was pretty excited about it. I think it's a testament to how much I'm used to, like, what kind of shows I'm used to, that I was, waiting for something like truly awful to happen or just somebody to just like just be terrible. And I think that there's probably a lot of humanity in this show and that's a nice. Like she would sleep at her friend's house and then wake up in an abattoir of robots. Like she would go back to Molly's house and Daniel would be there already, you know, sleeping with Molly or something like where it's because I...

Yvonne Orgy. Yeah. That's the woman's name. By the way, fun fact, she's amazing on the show as Molly. in real life, she doesn't curse. This part is profoundly based around how funny Yvonne Orgy is at swearing. Yes. And saying crazy-ass things.

In real life, this actress is a devout Christian and will not curse at all. And so when they're doing rehearsal, she'll say like, apparently according to this interview that's on the ringer.com, she'll say like, fudrucker. So I'm very impressed that she's willing to like unleash the. devil basically for this role because she does. All right. Well, let's wrap up there. I think we have a re-up on Thursday. And we might have Trayvon from Bill's show come through.

We're going to talk a little bit about it. Trayvon had some notes. Yeah, Trayvon had notes for us. And is there anything else we're talking about on Thursday? Oh, you know, there's a lot out there, man. I don't know. We got to do, we got to do Atlanta, of course. Maybe we'll do a little bit of a music roundup.

We haven't spent some, I really really just want to spend some time with, with you about Boney Bearer. Well, there's a lot of, a lot of anniversaries. Oh, yeah. Is this It? You were feeling very moved, but is this it turning 15? No, I'm more of a room on fire guy. Did you?

I think Room on Fire is a perfect album. What? Yeah, we can get it to this on Thursday. Reptilia is a great song, but that whole album? Yeah. I'm shocked by this. This is a really hot take. All killer, no filler.

I thought, you know, our buddy Chuck Closerman was on Marin, and he used the strokes as an example of like how he no longer trusts his opinion about time as he gets older because he still feels like if someone says they're into quote new bands he thinks they're talking about the strokes and I kind of when you said it was 15 years ago that is the sit came out like that's just that's crazy because I kind of feel the same way also because as much as some people want to claim that the strokes are like you know career artists me is that what you're just I'm I'm only looking at one person in this room and it's not the Michael Jordan poster they kind of just they did it man See them on for Thursday.

They were Thursday. I don't think people are ready for this fire. Talk to you then. Great job, Ranski.