The Watch - Is Streaming TV Broken? Plus, What’s Going On With the DC Universe and ‘The English’

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

Chris and Andy talk about the news that Warner Bros. Discovery will be canceling several more shows, as well as taking shows like ‘Westworld’ off the HBO Max platform (1:00). Then, they try to decipher what is going on with the DC Universe after James Gunn announced that he’s writing a new ‘Superman’ movie and that Henry Cavill will not be returning (35:02). Finally, they make their pitch for why you should be watching ‘The English’ (46:08). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, long-time writer with the Atlantic Magazine on tech, culture, and politics. There is a lot of noise out there, and my goal is to cut through the headlines, loud tweets, and hot takes in my new podcast, plain English. I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know to give you clear viewpoints and memorable takeaways. Plain English starts November 16th. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know about one in three people with plaques psoriasis? may also develop psoriatic arthritis, which causes joint pain,

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Imagine being a million miles away. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Trimphia. Tap this ad to learn more about Trimphia, including important safety information. This episode is brought to you by Brooks. Running connects us to a rush of energy that flows through our world. The cheers of friends that unlock a new gear within us, the intersection of interest that inspires a run crew,

the support that gets you over the finish line. Connection is why we move forward and what inspires us to keep going. Let's run there. Learn more at brooksrunning.com. I need supports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan.

I am an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me on the other line about to throw it all away to become a James Gun reply guy. It's Andy Greenwald! What a week to pivot to Twitter. You know? Like, I love the way this guy zags. I'm into it.

Andy, we're going to talk about everything that's going on at the Warner Brothers Discovery Company because in the world of television and movies, there's really only one story and it's that. Obviously, there's other things going on, avatars coming out. Tons of stuff. But we're really going to focus today on some very interesting cancellations, disappearances, removals happening on the HBO Macs Service before it becomes Max

before it becomes whatever. And then we're also going to spend some time talking about Jim Gunn, little Jim, and his stewardship of the DCU. We don't spend a lot of time talking about DC movies, but we are sure fascinated by the way that franchise is being run. And then we're going to spend the second half of the podcast

talking about a late breaking revelation in the world of television, the English, a show on Amazon Prime, starring Emily Blunt, written and directed and created by a longtime favorite of ours Hugo Blick, who did The Honorable Woman, and Shadow Line and Black Earth Rising, and has made himself a fascinating Western that I can't wait to talk to you about. And to be clear, we're going to talk about it first. This is all going to be in the back end of the pod, but we're going to talk about it.

We're going to make the case why you guys should watch it, and then we are going to either blast an air horn or Kyah will play the Chernobyl music. and then we will talk about the series with spoilers because Chris and I both finish the series. Now, this is a really like offsetting podcast today because Kaya and I are in the studio and Andy is on Zoom. But I just realized I never really get to see Kaya

and whether she's laughing or not. How's it going so far? I always just assume that she's muted because she's just hysterically cackling and also then being like, wow, what an amazing observation. I like to be a silent, um, butzman. the people want more Kaya. So as much as you can give us.

I'm jealous, by the way. These two guys are just hanging out, DTLA, you know, just the arts district, just experiencing culture, a real city in a room together. It's like Friday night in Palermo down here. It's also, I must say, again, this is, no one cares about this except me, but I have a microphone.

It's very different view of my guy. Yeah. Like usually when we do this on this, Zoom, you know, it's pretty standard facing front image, but now I got the three-quarter kind of angled in. I see the jeans, you know, which long-time listeners know, stay on 24-7. So that's no surprise. But, okay, but we'll make it work. We'll make it work. Okay. Andy, you know, I was going to say there's usually not this much news at the end of the

year in the world of entertainment, because I just assume that everybody who makes TV and movies goes to Stad or Vail or whatever. like the day after Thanksgiving and then they come back and you know for the Super Bowl but perhaps because of that assumption that's why Warner Brothers

Discovery is doing the most right now just to get it all all family business settled before Christmas and we can start whichever one you want you want to start on the TV side or do you want to start on the Jim Gunn's side when you say family business do you mean

because this week has mirrored the last part of Godfather too exactly yeah and then the The last shot is just going to be Joanna Gaines sitting in a garden that she has recently redone. She just closes the door of her beautifully remodeled home. Leaving Chip out. So Chip is Kay in this version?

That's right. Got it. I think we should start with TV because I know that it is all one corpo beast, but the DCU stuff is its own kind of bizarro island at the moment and there's more fun to be had there. I do think it's worth, since this is, you know, started as a TV podcast. now it's mostly a podcast about our personal lives and cooking at home on the weekend. I think that we should start with the TV stuff because it is really indicative of where this industry is and it's not great. Yeah. So it's one of those things that as a much more of as a consumer of this stuff, it's hard to tell whether or not this impact. Like when we talk about like, oh, did you see that this guy got a development deal or this show is happening or did you see that this company might merge with that company?

or this production company is being rolled up into that. Oftentimes, I feel like I can't really ever see that on the screen. And I suppose now this is a really good example of a new story where you are going to see that on the screen, or rather you're going to not see that on the screen because a couple of shows are being removed from the HBO Max service. So as follows, Westworld, the Nevers, raised by wolves, Fuckboy Island, the favorite of Andes,

legendary, Finding Magic, Head of the Class, the Time Traveler's wife, Gordita Chronicles Love Life, Made for Love, the Garcia's and Minks were all pulled off of HBO Max. Some were outright just liquidated, and the studios that produced those shows were given the rights back. So in the case of Minks, for instance, I believe Lionsgate, which is the producing studio of that show,

and Minks is a show we've talked about before. We had Jake Johnson on to talk about it. They're in the middle of shooting season two. Minks was given back to Lionsgate, and Lionsgate can take that to market. They can take it to stars. They can take it to Amazon or whatever. In the case of something like Westworld, which I think is the most eye-popping title on this list of shows that has been not only canceled, but since pulled off of HBO max, which this is not a matter of not enough room on the bookshelf. It's just terabytes. You can put as much stuff up on it as you want.

Westworld is HBO essentially like, I don't know, basically liquidating a better part of a decade-long investment that they made in this show that was at once, at one time was one of the biggest. shows on cable, it seemed like, especially in that first season run. And now it's gone. Now, where is it going? There's a different answer for almost every one of these things. The best explanation I have for what's going on comes from Joseph Adelian in Vulture, who does great work covering the industry at large and the trends that are affecting it. And he said, and I quote, long story short, there are legal rules and regulations allowing a company like Warner Bros. Discovery to write down costs incurred as part of a post-merger restructuring, but only for a short amount of time. Taking shows such as Minks or Westworld out of the HBO Max and more importantly, WBD Library

will apparently help the megacorpiration make its future balance sheets look a lot better. And that's just really the bread and butter of this podcast. It's what you want to hear. It's what we're here for. That's the stuff that we get up in the morning because I care about WBD's balance sheets. I guess I do, you know, in the sense that I want HBO to. keep making shows that I like. But what's your read on this? Well, I think there's two ways to come into this. They are both connected to the same larger story. I do want to start with Minks because I think

Minks is a really good show. It was on my mid-season top 10. It was on my long list for the full year top 10. It was created by a really smart writer named Ellen Rappaport. It stars Friend of the Pod, Jake Johnson, one of the best guys in town, one of the best podcast guests ever. Minks was rewarded with a quick renewal. They are about, I believe, Jake said about like a week and a half, a week away from finishing filming the entirety of season two. And they get the news that they are canceled effective immediately and the first season's being pulled.

Now, they are finishing filming the second season. So there will be two seasons of minx, one scene, one not yet seen out there to market, as you said. That's correct. But I want to highlight this because this is fucking gross. it's just gross. I'm not going to we're going to pivot. We're going to talk about the economics.

We're going to be sensible and not just sensitive. You know, this is a business. But you invest in people who are creative, who create something, and you just yank it for a tax write-off a week before Christmas. It's gross. I mean, that's just traditionally,

I know this is a little pie in the sky's stuff. This has never been a very clean or decent industry. But that stuff just wasn't done, right? you just didn't do that, both because you respected the people that you were in business with and the creative efforts involved in making anything, but also because you wanted to work with them again or work with other people again. And you wanted to create a place that felt like a haven for a creativity. Because as long as this is considered a worthwhile or profitable business, you want to have worthwhile stuff and you want people to work with you. David Zazlov clearly does

not share that point of view. That's not his MO, which has been very successful in business. And I get that. But it is a rather rude awakening, I think, for people who thought they were in business with a creator-friendly company that it has historically been. I also just, you know, just while the soapbox is out, they did this to Glow too. And Glow and Minks are women-created shows that tell really interesting, diverse stories primarily from a female point of view. And it sucks. It's just a shitty way to treat shows like that when there aren't enough of them and they're both worthwhile shows. So I'm angry about that. I think it's stupid. Yeah, it's, it sucks when you get basically the accounting for the decisions made by other people falls on people who had nothing to do with

that decision. Nobody who is making minx was like, what we need to do is have 400 scripted television shows on the air at some point. You know, like, nobody who's making minx was like, this corporation needs to merge with this corporation and there needs to be a secondary streaming arm of what already a successful cable company like HBO. And, you know, I'm sure that the, basically the strategy or the philosophy of, like, remember, there was that whole deck that came out that was HBO Max's lean in and HBO is lean out and this is for women and this is for men and this is going to be like comfort TV and this is going to be appointment viewing.

And it seems like that's kind of all gone up in smoke. And I can understand why you don't need multiple streaming services like this. I think the saddest part for me outside of the, obviously, I feel for the people, making minx, I feel for the people who were working on any of these shows and who thought maybe like they had another one going. I'm, you know, is where this is all headed, which is what I want to talk about next. So there is a lot of talk about many of these shows or some of these shows being directed towards fast, which you're probably like, what's fast? Fast is fucking television. Fast is free ad-supported TV. A lot of, what you'll see now is like you've got your free V. Amazon

has free-V. I think there's Pluto, there's the Roku channel, there are essentially streaming services that are cable channels in name only. I guess maybe there is like some on-man nature of it, but essentially like when I watch high school, a show Andy and I liked a lot with the Tegan and Sarah, on a biographical Tegan and Sarah show set in Canadian high school in the 90s, there are ads for depression. There's anti-anxiety medication. Like you watch ads. in Amazon's app while you're watching this show. And it's like, I pay for Prime Video. You know, like, there's like a certain,

there's like a consumer element to this where I'm like, this is getting kind of gross where let's say I was the world's biggest Westworld fan and liked nothing more than watching all of the seasons of Westworld continuously, which I don't and which if you do, I think you probably need to talk to somebody. Maybe some anti-anxiety medication.

Wasn't the whole promise of this like, situation that we're on where we're like paying $15 for six different stream services that this wasn't going to happen. Don't get me started. Okay, get me started. Let's just consider what these are the after effects of and the decision making that led us here. It's not enough to say that the full-throated embrace of a show like minx by HBO Max from an outside studio Lionsgate. And we could put an asterisk there and explain that a little more clearly for people who aren't on the up and up about that. The embrace of it, the promotion of it, the funding of it, the renewal of it, those were based on the previous regimes thinking of we are launching a streaming service

and we are open for business. We are a new network, a new service called HBO Max. We have a different programming team because that's how it was launched than Casey Blois and his team at HBO. Kevin Riley was there, a lot of other industry veterans. We're doing our own thing and we're bulking up. And we've seen this happen a few times as new services have entered the marketplace with flashy announcements and reboots and product content. Then they sold to Discovery. And, and, you know, and, you know, And people were like, wait, why are their two programming teams? What's the difference between HBO and HBO Max? My God, where are Chip and Joanna?

And then also, now we actually have to pay for this, or maybe we're actually just strip mining the studio to sell to someone else. Who knows? All of those decisions are now happening in real time, affecting people who are just, as you said, heads down, doing their job and doing the best they could. But really, let's run the tape back further, which is to say, when you and I started this podcast, and for the first few years of it, there was a little something called, tell television. And television had been pretty much the same since the 80s when the cable packages

debuted and became mainstream. And do you know what was incredibly fucking popular and profitable cable television? Maybe the single most profitable construction in the history of entertainment. They had us pay for channels. We didn't watch. And guess what all the channels got every month? Tons of money. The reason we had the boomed, in prestige television that we did is because AMC was just showing Shawshank Redemption reruns 14 times a day and getting an enormous kitty of cash. And then they were like, well, maybe we should do something with this cash. Let's just make shows. And let's make the shows no one else is making. So people will pay attention to us and not think of us as just the place to rest your finger briefly while flicking through the rest of the 98 channels.

Yeah, the thing to do for the 30 minutes before the Knicks starts. So that got us where we are. And then some bright boys in the tech department were like, you know it would be really cool blowing this all up and making you not pay to one place, but pay us directly. Bundled into this, and I guess I use that, I can't decide if that was a good choice of word or not, was a very mid-teens desire to build subs, to build direct email, like to have the direct data from the consumer, to take away the middleman. So you were not just paying the cable company who was paying Spike TV, which was part of Paramount, you're paying Paramount. And Paramount can reach you directly. That was sort of the goal. But it was also a lot of these companies, even before the tech companies got involved directly, like Apple and Amazon, looking at the tech companies and being like, boy, they're just growing and growing. That's where all the money and the growth is, right?

This idea of like perpetual shareholder, showing returns to shareholder by perpetual growth. Also, money was so cheap that they were able to raise so much funding for content because they could just say like, yeah, in 2040, we're going to. going to just be like, this will be the only game in town. But here's the thing, guys, they broke it. It's broken. Like, we're going to keep doing this podcast and we're going to keep talking about great TV shows because they're going to be a lot of them and we're lucky to have them. But this system is broken. They broke it on both ends. And suddenly, money isn't as cheap anymore. The economy is questionable, right? And these new overlords are coming in and being like, okay, but where do we see profit? And Bob Chapec is like,

Interesting use that word. I can show you a $1.5 billion loss. And they say, well, we can show you the exits. Suddenly, all these channels that were built on the balloon promise of just forever growth are expected to show returns. And guess what, there aren't a lot of anymore? New potential subscribers. Maybe people don't actually want to spend $14.99 to nine different places.

Yeah. Because it's easier just to have cable. So all of these channels, their latest innovation, is they're going to reinvaryingingual. vent TV. They're going to bring back ad-supported cable TV, but they just own it. It's insane. And it sucks and it's nonsense. And it's squeezing people on all ends. It's squeezing the consumer who can't find the shows that they want to see and don't know who to pay and subscribe to. It's squeezing the creatives because now there's no such thing as residuals anymore. There's no back end. You're making...

Well, that changed because of fast. Like, will the Nolans make money off of Westworld going to fast? That's a great question. Well, I... It's probably not in their original deal for it, right? Yes. Well, in theory, these deals have trigger payments for when your show sells and sells again. But right, but if you originally sold a show to Netflix, you got like 10% or 15% sweetener on top of the deal because it was never selling again. The silos are breaking down slightly. We are going to see more shows being sold to be on freebie, to be on 2B, Pluto, whatever. I thought a really interesting article that you were talking about Joe Adelian and Vulture. He had a I think it was this week about BBC's strategy.

And I thought it was incredibly smart, not just his observations about BBC, but BBC's strategy, which was basically looking at the landscape over the last six years and being like, we know we can't compete with Amazon. So we're not going to launch the BBC streaming service in America. We're going to sell our prime content to the highest bidders.

That had been, Paramount's philosophy had also been, we're also an arms dealer, right? Wasn't that Bob Backish's idea? The idea was like he was going to go, go around and he was like, we'll put stuff on Paramount, but we're not shutting the outbound traffic of our shows. And now we're back to that, by the way, because all these streamers are basically doing the same thing in December, trying to fix their books or cook their books, and doing all these weird

shortcuts that make them look better in December, like letting actors deals laps and figuring they'll make it clean when the show gets renewed or whatever, and then they have to pay double and then they either lose the actors or they're out of money next year, but that's next year's problem. There's a lot of these sort of financial shenanigans going on. But it's also like these streamers are kind of not open for business because they're not buying right now. Right. Because they feel like they can't afford it. So they're like, the studios are, it's making things weirder between, you know, PTV, a Paramount Studio and the network. I, you know, the specifics of all this are what they are. Those tech companies are probably like, we really don't know what our

budget is next year. And we don't know if interest rates are going to keep going up half a point every couple of months or if all of a sudden things are going to loosen up. We don't know what's going to happen with all these different world events. And they're just not in the business of buying stuff. So I do think there's more to be learned about specifically to stay in the Warner Brothers world about what all of this means. I don't think, I think you were right to highlight Westworld versus Minx. I don't, like, people will be able to watch Westworld again. And it just seems like Westworld was both cheap for the, it was a money saving thing to both cancel it and take it off of their current service, but that was also probably the juiciest piece of fruit they could put

onto their new fast service, right, without offending creators who are currently in business with them or whatever. Jonathan Nolan and his wife, Lisa Joy, they're at Amazon now making the peripheral. So there's a lot of other stuff going on there. I wouldn't necessarily say that the people who made Minks or Love Life, another show that we really liked and would hope to see more from. I don't think they're celebrating their soon-to-be arrival on fast yet. Maybe they'll be there, but I don't know. And I think that's a bummer. And we're harping on Warner Brothers. there's both because they're in the news, but this is happening everywhere. I also feel like, and I hope we'll get to talk to him about it, maybe even on the podcast,

and this is absolutely just saying the quiet part loud, but like Casey Blois at HBO, it's a pretty delicate balancing act, right? To be the face of and the main arbiter of what we were just raving about the other day on the podcast of just a certain type of prestige TV that we still look to and we get excited about and that unites people, honestly, in the way they love TV. But he's operating within that same ecosystem, and that's got to be really hard. Because we all want to protect HBO, but how does that mean in a world where, I would say the wolves are at the door, but raised by wolves is off the service.

Right. I think what I'm trying to get my mind around is how can you count on something, you can't count on it, but how do you make something successful in a landscape like this? And it makes White Lotus's success that much more unique. obviously there was a product of White Lotus emerged out of the pandemic as very much a product of pandemic anxieties. You know, it was both at once escapism

for people who were like, I can't go to Hawaii, this is amazing. And also like a lot of the sort of things that were out and about in the discourse at the time. So that made it like a kind of unique sort of thing. And then the second season is an example of just something that seemingly only HBO can do, which is take something from Mike White

who you would not call a blockbuster showrunner leading up to White Lotus, a bunch of people who I would not describe as top billing marquee stars who people drop everything to go see. And then you put it up and it becomes this sort of second half of the year's success story. And I just don't know, the more you break up and chop up the sort of distribution channels, how much more likely that's ever going to happen. I mean, Kai and I were chatting before we even started the podcast. And I was like, well, this is on. And she was like, is that on? Peacock and I was like, that's on Paramount. This is happening, but this is like, where do you find that?

And it's like, I don't know how to recommend people watch high school. You know, I don't know whether free V is available to everyone who has Amazon. I don't know if it's available on people's Apple TVs or whatever, but it's not even like a two-step process. It's like a three-step process. And also, you've got to watch anti-anxiety pill medication, you know, ads while you're watching it. We broke it. It's broken. I mean, and I'm concerned. You know, I think obviously the pipeline is very full. They're companies like Apple who are totally immune to this entire conversation and the vagaries of the economy or writer's strike next year, which is likely to happen. They're fine.

There still will be good things and good creators. I'm not actually like existentially worried. But this is from everyone I speak to professionally and personally, one of the grimmest moments in Hollywood. And it's not a one-to-one with what happened in movies, certainly. but remember a lot of the conversation as the blockbusterization of the multiplex happened over the last 10 years was when Kevin Feige or whoever was running DC at the time would release essentially a Google Doc that said June 22nd, 2023, untitled Marvel film and the economy would shift under its feet. That was at its heart an attempt to do what people in the quote unquote arts business, which is an oxymoron, have always tried to do, which is scaffold some structure onto chaos.

We can control our profit margins and our expectations because we know a Marvel movie will have cost this much and make this much five years in advance, right? That's not exactly what's happening to TV, although there are plenty of Marvel TV shows now as well, but the idea that we can somehow, you know, spreadsheet profit loss a business that needs to encourage people to take chances and that at its heart and at its root,

nobody fucking knows what's going to be popular, which is true. And I think the best executives will admit that. I don't even know why we're talking. I don't even know why I brought up popularity in the first place because it doesn't matter because people, what they really need is for people to subscribe to these fucking services. And after you have two or three, most normal people can't afford more than that. Like how many different cable like streaming services do you think the average person wants to be engaged with? And instead, like, because there's such a fractured landscape, and because when you most times,

now into that 10, do you know that when I'm, like, trying to find the rewatchables movie I have to watch, it's kind of surprising if it's on a streaming service? Wasn't that the opposite of what it was supposed to be like? Wasn't it supposed to be, hey, you're going to be able to watch any movie. You're going to be able to watch all these shows at your fingertips.

And now it's like, no, actually, that's $4.99. It's like, really? Well, I already thought, like, I paid $100 a month for X, Y, and Z services. we continue to be, or maybe it's just generationally, maybe younger people are smarter about this, but Lucy with the football, right, in the sense of like I, when we moved across the country,

I sold the majority of my CDs because they were as a whole shelf that was moving from apartment to apartment and then to a house and it was just like, enough's enough. And I saved my favorite ones or the rare ones, the imports, because why did I need them? Right? I could rip them and it was all streaming. And now I really wish,

I wish I had them because I never know what's on streaming. Everything that I ripped into iTunes library, some of it wasn't official. Sure. And was off a mixtape or something. So Apple's like, you cannot listen to this. And I don't have it. Movies, you know, DVDs, same thing. Like, boy, it would be nice to just take out a physical object and play it. And now we've come full circle with TV as well. And our buddy Patrick Somerville was railing about this on Twitter. And honestly, rightfully so. Because when he sees things getting pulled off HBO Max, now, is Station 11 getting pulled off HBO Max? No. Not. today, hopefully not ever. It's the best show of 2021. But Warner Brothers didn't make it.

Paramount made it. And it was bought by HBO Max and aired on HBO Max to live in their library. Who knows how long it's going to be there. He's not in control of that. And they don't make Blu-Rays and DVDs so often anymore. Shout out Sean Fennessee and Tim Simons, the Blu-ray games. I know. What a podcast. The physical media, if you want it, you kind of going to have to have it. And people know that. This isn't just like, I don't think this is an old guy yelling at cloud. I think people are realizing. This is a whole other conversation.

But for most of our lives, and we were watching television, we didn't have a choice of what we were watching. You turn the TV on, and there would be like four or five things on, and you'd choose one, and maybe it would be a night light, or maybe it would be something that you actually wanted to engage with. And then as time went on and DVDs started becoming popular, where you could watch the entire season of Lost or entire season of 24, or entire season of Sopranos, that became like the binge sort of became

an activity that you could do. And I think that the proposition being made by a lot of these streaming services, I'm actually surprised to see something like FBoy Island getting canceled, right? Because I can't imagine that that's a very expensive show to make. And it's exactly the kind of thing that is on TV. If you were a subscriber to a streaming service, it's the kind of thing that you would look for as a library offering.

I fucking love Station 11. I only think Patrick would say it's an easy watch. It's not something that people put on casually. And it's probably something that's like a little difficult to discover and to get your mind around what you're about to watch. And once you do, what are you going to watch like one and then stop and then watch another one three weeks later? Like the whole point of putting out all this, these hour long dramas and all these shows, I don't know if that's actually how people engage with television where they're like, I have a hundred dramas to choose from right now. And that's why the show that we're going to talk about in the second half of this episode

is maybe going overlooked. The English is a perfect example of a kind of show where it's like, I don't know what night to tell you to watch this. I don't know what mood you need to be in to watch this. I don't know whether you have seven hours to dedicate to this show. And I also know that it's sad

that it's going up against an absolute landslide of content to try and make itself known. And yet, it's a small miracle. Yep. It's unlike anything else. it is a joy that it exists. I can only imagine the battles that it took to get it into existence.

And we're going to talk about it more later, but like, it's worthwhile to plant a flag on it and be like, no, this matters. It matters. And I don't know what the role of this podcast is or who we are as professional people or just fans to engage in this conversation. But it does feel like we are heading towards

a pretty serious tipping point. Not that this is a new conflict. This is, again, show business. I mean, art, the business of art. I mean, this has always been the conflict. But, you know, I saw there was something in the newsletter of The Anchler this week about this as well, which is like the indie film business,

the idea of making movies that are worthwhile. Brooks Barnes had a piece about it in the Times, and then the Rushald wrote about it in the Ancler. Yeah. But like, Tarr, the film with Cape Blanchette, written and directed by Todd Field, the world, in my opinion, the world is a better place because this movie got made.

I think about it constantly. It fills me with joy and delight and wonder. I cannot wait to see it again. And I guess the headline is that it's lost a ton of money or it hasn't made any money. But there has to be a way to account for that. There has to be a way to stand up and say this matters and maybe we'll make three more moon nights for every tar or whatever. But maybe that was the business for a while and maybe that's not a sustainable business

in the current model. clearly the bottom has fallen out of the indie film market in theaters. It seems to have fallen out now as well in terms of like, well, Netflix will give you four million to add this to their library. And certainly it's fallen out in terms of we'll release this. It'll hopefully get Oscar nominations and then it'll break even. None of us really want to live in a world where that doesn't get made. And whether your tar is my tar, I mean, you could use whatever you want as your example. You know, most of your broad strokes Americans tar is Avatar and God bless that.

But maybe they need to rebrand as part of the way of the water expanded universe. That's right. If they just put Avatar 3 was just tar? Yes. Or if they rebrand the movie and instead of Lydia Tar, her name is Ava Tar, and it's the same fucking movie, they could really trick above people to break even. But this is an old and probably uninteresting argument. But whatever economic model we emerge into, I really hope it's one that accounts for things

that are good and worthwhile. Because every so often, by the way, things that are small and misunderstood and taking a chance on it are the bear. Now, you know what I mean? Like, it's still possible to do that. And you cannot get the bear, the show or its success,

out of an algorithm. You can't. No, I know. And I think that they still have a long way to go to figure out what, what watching something on a streaming service, what value that has. It's easy to say this did this in the ratings, which means we can charge this for advertising, which means it means this much to this company. You can say TAR made this much

at the box office and this much in the secondary home video release or streaming video or VOD release, and that's how much it meant to this company value-wise. If Andor and Obi-Wan are drastically different like in quality, but mean the same thing to the bottom line of Disney, which means, who knows, people were probably already subscribed to Disney because they like Star Wars. How do you tell the difference about which show meant more or did better? This is an important distinction to make. And in this case, look to Netflix, which was the canary in this hellish coal mine, because they were doing this first.

And every company that started a streaming service was essentially chasing Netflix. And look at the evolution of Netflix over the last five to six years. Yeah. When they entered, they entered. Yeah. Only from marriage story to red notice is a very decided arc. That's just on the movie side. But it's the exact right point, right?

Like they entered into a landscape where they were like, we want to be taken seriously by the creatives in this town. We want to be respected. We want people to sell to us. We want to work with them. We want to win awards. And we want to do things the traditional way because everyone was like, who the fuck are these nerds?

So they outbid HBO for House of Cards. So they make Master of None. So they make a whole bunch of shows that used to be on our top 10 list every year, and then they got complete market saturation and dominance, and maybe they grew too fast, and they went global, et cetera, et cetera. And they don't make those shows anymore. They're not interested in making those shows anymore, because why would they? I mean that in a purely value neutral way. Why would they? Why would they spend all this money chasing clout that isn't monetizable in their subscriber-based model? Right. So they don't. And I think this has been a reckoning for all these

companies chasing them being like, wait, why are we doing this? Why are we doing this? Like, if HBO Max has a certain subscriber base that makes it profitable, then it should just be rebranded as HBO Chip and Joanna. No disrespect to them. Right. You know, but you're absolutely right about like, what value does it bring them to continually offer David Simon tenure? Like, huge value to the world, artistically, huge value to us in this podcast, huge value to the city of Baltimore. But those shows don't get nominated for Emmys. They're not extremely popular from the data that we understand.

And at a certain point, whether it's David Zazlev or someone like him sitting in his chair is going to be like, why do we do this? Right. But I think that the original idea behind an HBO Max or an HBO Go or whatever the streaming service was, was that these are shows that people do actually return to. They actually do go back and watch sex in the city. They do go back and watch six feet under. they do go back and watch the Sopranos.

So to have them all sitting in one place that costs X amount of dollars per month so that they have access to their stories is I get that. What I don't get is the unrelenting, constant need to expand and scale and then be like, fuck, we went too high, we went too far,

we went too fast. We should keep it moving because I do want to get to the English, but I would be remiss if we didn't talk about Big Jim. And I'm not talking about Jim Cameron, James Gunn, who has been tweeting through it, which you would think it honestly like after his past experiences on Twitter, he would have a slightly like slower Twitter finger. But I'm going to try and sum this up. When you're doing a Jim Gun summary,

it's almost impossible to know which way is up and what day something happened because his deadline tag, like if you go to Deadline.com and it's the James Gunn tag is like pages and pages in the last three weeks of stories. But I'll try and summarize what's been happening. As you know, if you listen to this podcast, James Gunn, director of Guardians of the Galaxy, director of the suicide squad, the sequel, the guy in charge of peacemaker, the HBO Max show with John Cena that was very successful. He and Peter Safran took over the DCU. As Walter Hamada exited, they were brought on to bring a unified theory of DC movies to life.

And in the last, I'd say 10 days, some of the highlights of what has happened. There was a whole, Superman is going to be canceled. again story where it was like oh now after announcing that henry cavil was going to come back to wear the cape in october it sounds like superman is going to be canceled that was a story in like variety or hollywood reporter and james gunn was like some of this is accurate some of it isn't some of it is completely made up so that was what sort of started it and then since then he had actually i think he put up a tweet that said he stood he was standing with henry cavil like he like supported him and that that seemed like henry cavil was coming back there was the axing of wonder woman three

Apparently, Patty Jenkins had brought a treatment for Wonder Woman 3, and they just straight up were like, this franchise is canceled after two relatively successful films. James Gunn tweeted, we're not going to make everybody happy when the news of that broke. He has been taking time to basically debunk any story he sees on the internet that he doesn't find to be accurate, which is fair enough. But then also gets into this world where he's like tweeting back and forth with Matt

Reeves about the validity of whether or not the Batman will be integrated into the on Wednesday it was announced by Gunn on Twitter that he was writing a new Superman movie. So I like the idea that like Jim Ursay in the Colts, he had done a thorough and exhaustive search for a new Superman script. And he was like, I have decided that I am the best man for the job. He Dick Cheney did it. Yeah. Tried and true. So Gun is now writing a Superman movie.

I imagine that this is one of the reasons why he was brought on in the first place is that he was probably like I have a Superman dig. but that means no Henry Cavill. Henry Cavill is no longer playing Superman. I don't really care about that. The funny thing about it is that this entire thing is taking place in social media. And I actually now have come around to feeling like this is actually genius from James Gunn

because he is creating so much chaos and so much speculation and making himself the main character of this narrative that he has automatically vaulted himself into the figy level of the person you associate with these movies. there has not been a James Gunn DC movie since Suicide Squad under his sort of I am the CEO command and yet I associate DC with James Gun unequivocally.

It's the first person I think of when you ask me about DC. So in that sense he has done the thing that he was sort of hired to do. I would imagine he was hired to do. The other thing is I don't even know what people can get mad at because so much is happening. It's honestly Trumpian.

It's like I'm just going to create so many different fires that the firefighters don't know where to go. Are people mad about Wonder Woman? They might be, but since then, they've had five other things to get freaked out about. Also, who set the fires? Like, the previous regime being like, Dwayne Johnson, would you like to be in a movie? Why don't you tell, doing the Kramer doing movie phone? Why don't you tell us what movie you'd like to make?

Oh, an obscure Shazam villain? Okay, but maybe you fight Superman in the post-credit sequence. And then Henry Cavill gets in front of his skis and it's like, I'm back. And everyone, I guess, who, you know, Twitter bombed the Oscars, promoting Zach Snyder's Justice League are like sweet, our king returns. Yes. I do think that, as always, Twitter is not real life. So the relative popularity or importance of any of this is wildly, wildly overstated.

I do, and I joked about this at the beginning, I think that it is a fool's game to be like, I am Vox Populi, and I am just going to get into the trenches and be the one-man firefighter for social media as if any of it is in good faith and be like, I'm talking straight with you. so that when we address the fact that Gallagodata's Wonder Woman and Patty Jenkins making that movie was a unmitigated success, like absolute win for all involved. And truly the first like four quadrant win for DC. And then within a short period of time, they released a weird, bad movie directly to streaming during COVID and now it's over. Yeah. Like what an absolute fuck up by an entire corporation.

But then James Gunn has to get in front of it when Patty Jenkins releases their state. Saban and be like, just so everyone on Twitter knows, we had very cordial relations when we met. Like, we're good. Don't need to know that. You have to understand that this would be like if every time we recorded a podcast, like Kaya tweeted, these two cucks were crying over where Westworld is going before the podcast came out. It's extremely funny to me to visualize James Gunn and Henry Cavill at like lunch.

and then one guy is like, I have to go to the bathroom, I'll be right back, and is tweeting like, just talked to Henry Cavill, thanked him for his service as Superman. Think him for his service as Superman. The whole thing about this,

here's my vision for this, Andy. It's like, they have a 2023 slate already. The fucking completely beshitted the Flash movie is supposed to come out. There's another Aquaman movie coming out. I think there's a Shazam movie.

So they have like, three films that are in the can and coming out, and I don't even think Zaz would be like, I'm fucking liquidating these movies. So they're going to get through 2023 of these movies. They still have another Joker film that might come out next year. They still have Matt Reeves working on the Batman and the Colin Farrell Penguin HBO Max series,

which I kind of have a weird feeling may not happen now, but maybe I'm wrong. And so there's an entire 2023 worth of stuff. Are you telling me 2024 Warner Brothers Discovery is still going to be a company when these fucking James Gunn movies actually start getting made?

I have no idea. I defy you to find someone who knows what landscape that will be in. But let me also, in the spirit of you and in the renegade spirit of James Gunn, who 15 years ago was making like sub Roger Corman trauma things with porn stars

and now is in control of both the DC universe, Twitter and this podcast apparently, so kudos, let me, let me zag and say. Is it a zag or is it a zaz? It's not a zaz. Well, you know what, it is a zaz. It's an honorary zaz. I think James Gunn writing and directing a Superman movie, unaffiliated with Hollywood legend

Henry Cavill is a good idea. Okay. I almost said great idea. I think it's a good idea. I think that people know my opinion about this, but all of these movies so far have been very bad. exception of the first Wonderway. I don't care about Superman. I feel the same way about Superman as I do about Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe. I appreciate that. But what about the Richard

Donner's Superman? It's fine. The first Superman movie. I don't really care. Yeah. I think it's a really wonderful movie and it really wonderful because it captures something that I think is more universal about the character than the fact that he's the strongest person alive. It's that he spends most of his time. I mean, it's the Peter Parker Spider-Spiderman thing. It humanizes him. He's an alien who cosplays as a dorm. He's a working journalist and it's really hard out there for journalists right now. Listen, if they could just capture some of the box office mojo of she said and folded into the DCU, who says no? Do you think that James Gunn take on Superman will involve Superman as a disinformation journalist? It's kind of like a Ben Collins kind of thing where he's just like, I've been studying Q&ON.

No, it's Clark Kent as Matt Taibi being like, I have gained access to the files about the website that is secretly paying me to talk about it on. Like, I think it's just, he's going to blow the lid off his own whole thing. I love it. I think there's something universal about it. And I think the idea of cleaning the decks and being like, here's someone who actually loves the thing that he's doing, it loves the character, and has an opinion, and has a track record of making big, surprising things about characters that he loves that have universal appeal. That is a smart business and artistic decision. It's good. I don't, I think this whole cluster fuck on social media has been bizarre and hilarious and disrespectful to everyone, honestly. But yeah, they should. clear the decks. Yeah. Like, they should clear the decks.

Just because it, it's not like being poet laureate. It's not like being general manager of the Red Sox. He played Superman in movies that are

mildly tolerated. I mean, I don't understand, I don't understand the level of emotion about all this. No, no. But what I don't understand

is why they announced James Gunn in November and made him do all the executions. Like, why not have basically some guy who's like the VP of

of fucking your day up at Warner Brothers Discovery be like, we've decided not to move forward this. We've decided not to move forward this. We thank you for your service. And then the day after Guardians of the Galaxy 3 comes out or whatever, we're like, and now Big Jim's coming through to save the day.

And he's got a Superman screenplay in his hand. But maybe isn't this actually the proof that if the argument was going into this, the argument that Zazlap happened, I dinged him or more at the top of the podcast, I'm saying something positive now. If his main thing was, we need a fight, and we did a partial part of a podcast saying that like is that relevant anymore or is anyone like that is that a good thing this is the proof that he was right because who else is going to put out these fires they're raging everywhere right and none of it made sense

there was no unified theory there's no plan there's total chaos who let the rock be like yeah i want to do this and also i'm deciding who's superman now because there can be many supermen like i i i that's just a bad creative and business strategy, right? So maybe this is the way it's supposed to be. I just really, really think the social media aspect of it is ridiculous. And it just all feels... I don't want to make too big a statement here, but like everything we're talking about.

And even just the little headlines that have come across the transom in the moments before we were recorded, like Lee Isaac Chung, who made the beautiful Oscar film Minari is now directing the Twister sequence. You know what I mean? Or like, which, by the way, great classic action film. That's awesome for him. What a great payday and opportunity.

I love it. Right. But also like, the wheels are coming off a little bit, right? Everybody? You know what I mean? Like, all of this is, this is no longer noise. This is signal that all this weird chaos shit is happening in the industry right now. It just is.

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Manage your activity with our consumer protection tools. Should we wrap up by talking about something that's cool, common collected, like a six-episode piece of long-form television from Hugo Blick. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to try and convince you to watch the English, assuming you haven't. So we'll spend a few minutes doing that. And then Andy and I are going to talk a little bit spoilery about that, and we'll have, we'll notify you when we're going to do that. So it's a six-episode drama on Amazon Prime. The entire season is available. I'll just do the bullet points here. How's that? Yeah. Okay. So from Hugo Blick,

honorable woman shadow line black earth rising Andy and I've talked to him and about him quite a bit Hugo Blick goes west to make a punk rock classical western with Emily Blunt as an upper crust English woman named Cornelia Locke who is bent on revenge and Chaskey Spencer who plays Eli Wip

a Pawnee Army Scout at the end of a long tour of duty. They meet under unlikely circumstances and form a bond as WIPAIDS Locke in her quest but because it is blick it is not that simple so along the way the show digresses into a murder mystery, intertribal conflict, the settling of the West, the eradication of the Buffalo, magic astrology, ranching 19th century healthcare, and what it means to be an American by a British man. I think you've done a great job. I also, as part of the conversation and the

argument for this, you know, as I love to say, I am off of Twitter. I have Chris Colate printout and send me, mail me, James Gunn. on Sundays I see things or I see them on Instagram stories. You were like, this is extremely normal and you said it be a tweet. I just want you to be accountable to me. So my bit about you printing out tweets,

that's not going to fly on the spot? What I do is, okay, so Chris doesn't know this. I ask Chris's staff to do it for me. Chris, you know, Chris is across a lot of things at the ringer and Spotify, so he has a pretty robust team. That's right. And they backchannel some social media response to me.

And one thing that did stand out that I kind of appreciated was some people being like, well, I mean, the normal stuff. Like Sam is very chill and cool. But then past that, they were like, we'd love a pot. I saw one person be like, it would be great to do a podcast just of 20 to 11 on your list because the opportunity to do victory laps for the shows that you love and cover is welcome. But talking about the unheralded stuff or surprises. Stuff that you don't know about is.

Is welcome. And for me, not just am I really happy that I put the English at number 10 on my list. I finished the series now. It would stay at number 10 on my list. I'm really happy about that decision. But this is, I want to lift up in the parlance of the day this show as an example of what the promise of the last 10 years of TV was and what it still could hopefully be. Because it is absolutely idiosyncratic. It is absolutely surprising.

It is 100% not what you think it is, either from Chris's description or from the opening moments. So, for example, again, this isn't a spoiler. we're going to get into the series in a moment. But it begins with this overt sentimentality and romance and lusciousness and indulgence visually. And you're like, what is this? And then it's funny. And then it's violent. And then it's all of those things at the same time.

And you cannot, fuck algorithms. Like you can't find many creators who are as interested in these things, these sumptuous visual pictures, these weird looking sideways at an entire birth of a nation as Hugo Blick is doing here with performances on this level from the known, like Emily Blunt, one of our greatest working actors, and Chaskey Spencer, you mentioned,

who I was not familiar with. Yeah, I mean, I remember him from Twilight, you know, but I, yeah. He rules, you know, and other great actors show up along the way, like, you know, Stephen Ray, who was in The Honorable Woman, would you ever think to put him in a Western? And now do I only want to see Westerns

with him in it? Yes. This show is so, so weird and dope. And I just feel like there were moments when I was watching it where I was like, oh, uh-uh. There are moments where I was watching it where I was like, did they skip an episode? And I really do think everyone's mileage may vary, but I really do want to make the case for engaging with things that you might not adore.

You just might be challenged by and surprised by and then really, really have a lot of feelings about. So you mentioned, I would say that if I had to give anybody like a heads up, it's that sometimes this show doesn't make sense. Like on a fundamental... 100%. I have subtitles on and I am reading the recaps after I finish the episode

and I am going right into the next episode and it just seems like they cut 30 minutes out where somebody is now in a different part of the West and is talking to a character that they have not been introduced to yet. And it's like, I think that that is a choice and not like, oh, this was flawed, this was cut down from eight episodes.

Because in my reading of interviews with Blick, he's like, yeah, you might not understand it. like there are parts of it that you might not get. I think that he made a lot of choices, I think as you alluded to, for pacing purposes, and to make it not feel like work because a show like this could.

There's a 10-hour version of this show where it's way more like of a chore to watch. And you're right, man. It looks like an Anthony Man Western. It looks like a Clint Eastwood Western. It looks incredibly classical. They used very heavy older cameras. They shot this in Spain and they used these older...

I mean, not even... I don't even know what kind of... of cameras these, but like the lenses, he talked a lot about... The color saturation. Yeah, and he was like, so we couldn't move the cameras that much. So basically, because of the arc lights that they use out in the West or out and like the outdoors, and because of the cameras, it's like essentially this very painterly compositions. And in other people's hands, that might not work.

But I will say this, I love Emily Blunt. Like, I've always been a fan of Emily Blunt. This is by far my favorite Emily Blunt performance. and it is the perfect combination of she has incredible. Sahanara Mary Poppins returns. She has incredible chops, like acting chops, and she is also a fucking movie star. And so when you're like, man,

I've just been watching these people ride horses for a minute, you know, or like another situation where somebody is having a long stilted conversation in 19th century dialogue, Emily Blunt is selling the hell out of it. And the weird part about it, which I don't think is a spoiler, is to say, Emily Blunt is just part of an ensemble in the show.

It's being marketed as the English, and you think she's the English, and it's Kill Bill, and she's out west getting her revenge. Is she in two-thirds of the show? What she is also is the rarest movie star, which is she's also an incredibly generous ensemble player. And there are moments, and we'll talk about it more in the spoiler half of the conversation,

but the British actor, Rafe Spall, shows up midway through the season. we've been waiting for this performance our whole lives in some ways. He's an all-time villain. His performance is so on one. It's so extra that it can only exist if someone is willing to be the balance in the scene. And she does that without any ego. It obviously holds her own because she's a superstar,

but there's a generosity to it. And in an anecdote, I tell people sometimes about living in L.A. and the things that I like about it. It's like, I love things about living in L.A. But I've never seen anyone love L.A. The way British people love L.A. Like one time I was at the Shet, this isn't this humble brag.

One time for work, I was at the Chateau Marmont. And the entire pool was just British people. Was it like 63 degrees in overcast? And they, I've never seen people so happy. British people were acting like it was Ibiza. Yes, screaming, like just drinking, having great time. And there's something really unique and interesting often when you have an outside perspective of your own place and your own country. Now, Wyoming in the 19th century is not my place.

Right. But the green walls had not late. No. I would say that we stuck to the cities. But although apparently I had a relative that went out to San Francisco during the Gold Rush prospecting and then went back to Milwaukee for this tail between his legs. But did you get that from 23 of me or something? Is that just family lore? No, I found a a 12-page typed letter from my great-uncle detailing the family history that he knew. That's amazing. If you go to London again or take a vacation, I will just read that letter for a podcast because I probably won't have watched any television.

So look forward to that. I just want to say that, like, Hugo Blick's love of the Old West is in quotes to a degree, right? Like, he loves it from a distance. And the show is in many ways about that. So is this, quote-unquote, accurate? I mean, he spent time in Montana, and he also worked very, very, very diligently to make sure that the customs, language, traditions, everything about

the native indigenous experience in this show is somewhat accurately, like as accurate as it possibly could be. And that lands. And it's very powerful, I think, you know, as a white viewer of the show. But the way that he just can't help himself with the vistas and the flowers and the wheat and the skies, like, it's done with this sort of love and distance that I really, really admire and respect. To your other point, one thing that's fascinating about the show, I think, is even while loving it, even while thinking this is one of the best things of the year and one of the most unique things I've seen in a long time, I was like, there's a case to be made that this would be better at two hours or 12 hours. Because 100% you guys, when you watch the show, you will be like, did they skip an episode? They yada yada yada stuff that is just unyata yada yada-able. There are villains on the show that are so imaginative that I can't, I,

I was like just buckling up to be spending some time with them. And then they are gone. There are great actors who show up for a surprisingly limited amount of time. Well, that's the thing that's weird is that there's part of it that feels like it's like a Bertolucci movie. And then there's parts of it that feel like it's gunsmoke. You know, where it's just like Emily Blunt just needs to get through a boss level and then she'll go up to the next episode. Why don't we start talking some spoilers here? So if you haven't watched the English.

And I think Andy and I will try to touch on this again at some point maybe. but you know. Should we say like if for people who have not watched the show, thanks for listening this week. And thank you for listening to the Watch podcast. Great job. Now, English averse Baranskys.

In three, two, one. God, I didn't expect to find that much syphilis in the show. Wow. Yeah. I would say syphilis is a main character in this show. I would say if Fleischman thinks he's in trouble just because he goes on some dating apps, Can you imagine the trouble he would have been in in 1890s, Montana?

So I found this show when I was watching it to be one of those rare things where everybody who's in the show is aware of the fact that they're in a show about the creation myth of America and are actively talking about what America means and what you have to do for to be American. What this country is. And by the way, we should have mentioned this in the first part. It's called the English because as Emily Blunt says in voiceover, right, that like for everyone who came, whether they were German or French or whatever, they were just the English. And they're the invading virus, the syphilis, if you will, into the physical body of this land.

And fascinatingly enough, I think most of the roles in this show, if it's not a native actor, it's a Scottish, British, Irish actor, right? It's like an immigrant. It's either immigrants or natives. And it is like a very conscious choice about how it's depicting the way society. basically evolved in the American West. In the same way that everybody is sort of aware that they're in a show about America, I thought that the, I guess, emergence of syphilis as basically the plot engine of this show was at once very on the nose

but also incredibly effective. I know, no pun intended. Yeah. So I guess we can sort of explain out the plot. A lot of this show hinges on a massacre that takes place in Wyoming that Rafe Spall's character participates in

of Shaihan people where Rafe Spall's character and several rogue cavalry soldiers take part in this massacre. Who witnesses that massacre and what happens afterwards and where those people go afterwards

basically reverberates across the better part of half a century or 30 years and it winds up that Rafe Spall's character contract syphilis at a brothel after he participates in this massacre, and then goes back and gives it to Emily Blunt

after raping her in England. And then that sets off the chain of events. She basically has a child. That child dies of syphilis. After that child dies of syphilis, she comes back to America to exact her revenge. In the beginning of the show, you think she's going after this guy Trafford,

who is sort of this roguish rancher, but it turns out it's this character, David Milmont. David Melmont is one of the most unique terrifying creations I think I've ever seen on television. What an absolutely amazing piece of television that fourth episode is. Yeah, that's the showpiece episode. I mean, I think every episode has incredible set pieces and incredible performances. But like, isn't it just kind of wild that English actors just have a secret extra gear?

Like, all of their dials go to 11 if given the right opportunity or the wrong opportunity. It's not that different than the guy he plays on Shadowline, though. I don't know if you've ever got a chance to see that. but he is a maniac on that show too? It's the thing about the performance and like seeing him in the different context because the show introduces him in that episode, right, as he's just like riding next to Trafford.

He's the bookkeeper. And meanwhile, Trafford has been introduced as potentially what we believe to be the villain. That's complicated very much by what happened to the next few episodes. But his introduction, right, is when he's just like, you're going to honor this deal you made

because I've already, knowing that you were going to welch on it, I've arranged to have your wife murdered if you don't go home and signal that you... Melmont's introduced as like a fixer, bookkeeper, minder for Trafford, and then flips it where he realizes that in America, unlike England, you're not bound by the class you're born into,

and that he realizes that he, if he's willing to do what others are not, he can take on much more personal wealth, much more personal, you know, growth or whatever. But it's the juxtaposition of, Like, in England, I'm just this guy. I have to know my place.

And in America, anybody can be anything that they set their mind to. And you know, what's interesting, we were talking about at the top of the show, like, I guess one of the central conceits that was compelling, I guess, about Westworld, right, was the idea that there was a game that you could play where you could indulge in your basest or most wild fantasies of violence, of sex, of anything. And then you could go back to your life, right? And what this show suggests is that there's no game, that the Wild West was not siloed off from the rest of planet Earth that the Cornelias and the David Melmonds and the Traffords could go there and have a role to play or, or, you know, be their truest in some ways, you know, horrific selves. and it plays out in all of them, right? I mean, Cornelia does archery

because that's what ladies do, and then she uses a bow and error to kill a dude. Right. It's really remarkable, even just moving off of the specifics of the plot, for anyone to try and wrap their arms around a story like this and communicated on so many different levels, right, of like what America is and was to so many people

that the villains are the heroes or the heroes are the villains and in the end, everything is built on top of bones. And the names that we remember might not be the ones that we should, right? It's very complicated. And I think the show has a remarkably deft, considered touch on those details. The native characters are fully realized, to my mind, and incredibly compelling and complicated, whether they're, what's the guy? I was telling you how much I like the guy and I'm forgetting the name.

the performance that is killed on the water. Oh, yeah. Like, who is shot, who is lit and shot and introduced in his one, basically his one scene as like a mob boss to this compelling white moon character, who's a young man who's rescued, who then finishes the series, playing our previous lead, Eli Whip, in what Cornelia calls a circus, touring the world. And what should he be doing? you know, what is the world that is being promised him or left to him?

It's really, really naughty stuff. And I love that maybe it took a very specific Englishman to just take a real big run at this. Because nothing in the show is friendly to the viewer or easy. But it is funny. Absolutely nothing. And it is sweet. But that's the thing. And it is a love story.

It's romantic. Yeah. And it's super weird. And Uncle Brownie from reservations. Doug's, Gary Farmer, is in the show. Yeah. You know? And, like, Kieran Heinz and Toby Harris and, like, all these other really, really top-notch

actors, just, they're there. You know, it reminds me of Andor. It's just, it feels like something that was gestating as long as Andor was gestating with Tony Gilroy. It feels like something where every single piece of set dressing, every photograph on a wall, everybody's backstory, everybody's motivation, everybody's purpose. has been completely thought through. I bet if we asked Hugo Blick about, like,

the fourth corporal in a photograph, he would be like, well, that guy was at this thing, and then he did this, and then he did that, and that's what he was doing. There are, like, thrown off lines that explain the entire life story of characters. So it's, like, almost... I hope people check it out, man.

Like, I think that I would be really curious. I've seen some discourse about, like, just being, like, the second half fizzles because you don't really understand what's going on, or the show seems to think you understand, understand what's going on and treat it as if it's like obvious, but it's quite, it's not obvious at all. But I think it's one of the most unique and thrilling things I saw this year. I don't know where I would put it if I was redoing my list or anything, but yeah. There was a moment when people were

describing TV as novelist, you know, like novels. Yeah, yeah. And that episodes were chapters. To me, this is a novel in a different way, in that if you were in a book, when you are as immersed in specificity of aesthetic like this, when you are sort of adrift in a very, not quite realistic, but almost sensual, even when it's horrific world of extremes and characters and quirks, you give it the National Book Award. You know what I mean?

Like, those are good things. You don't put down a Cormick-McCarthy novel and say, well, wait, what were they doing? Yeah, right. You know what I mean? Like, that's not the way that you read great works of literature. And so that was my experience watching this.

And honestly, sometimes I was like, I wish this was a book, too, because I would, A, be able to be more immersed in it for longer, but also because I wouldn't have that kind of TV itch in my brain being like, okay, but what was the plan? You know what I mean? Like, it functions on that level, which I found really compelling and interesting just on its own. So, again, people's mileage on that aspect of it may vary.

But I do think that regardless of how you feel, about it, when you get to the scene where the face-ravaged ghoul McClintock with his gatling gun is on the roof of the fucking cabin, you're going to be watching. I mean, this is top-notch visual entertainment. Like, it's just wild. And it's a fucking Western. Yeah, there's, I wouldn't, it's not homework. It's like, if anything, it's pretty, I would, I would say it's closer to kill Bill than it is to like an art film, you know? I hope people check it out. I just, and to put a bow on this entire conversation for the few people. Is Kaya still there, by the way? She didn't leave, right? More of this. Please, you know, I don't want to hear anybody be like

BBC and Amazon lost money on this or whatever. I don't care. Please, please people out there in the industry who listen to us, please try to make more stuff like this. Yeah. Just pure emo request. Just do it, please. We can wrap it up there. Thanks to Kaya for producing. Thanks to her for hanging out today. Kaya, how do you feel? We're now three in a row pushing an hour. Like, Kai, are you okay with this? Is this? I'm going to start cutting your mics at around 45. That's what I usually do. I have like an internal alarm clock where I'm like, and that's it. Great job, Branski's. I'll allow it for the end of the year.

Kaiya, do you get hazard pay for overtime if we go over 60? You deserve it. I just want to know if it's. We'll be back on Monday. Then we're taking Thursday and Monday off. We have one more, we have one more Monday show and then we'll do a mailback for the end of the year. Yeah, so get your questions in, right? Get your questions in. We'll send out a prompt for that. Thanks to everybody for listening. Hope you check out the English.

Thanks to James Gunn for the content. Talk to you soon.