The Watch - NBC Enters the Streaming Wars and September Television Stays Winning | The Watch

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

NBC launched its streaming service Peacock this week, and its backlog of shows like ‘The Office’ and ‘30 Rock’ make it an instant contender (1:00). September continues to be a very good month for television, with shows like ‘Top Boy’ (7:30) and Ken Burns’s newest documentary ‘Country Music’ (27:37). Plus, we have to talk about this week’s episode of ‘Righteous Gemstones’ (43:09). Host: Chris Ryan Guests: Donnie Kwak and Jason Gallagher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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 am an editor at the ringer.com and I am still in Philadelphia and I promise I'm not going to monologue the entire show. I'm not going full coward. Today on the pod I have Donnie Kwok joining me to talk a little bit about top

Boy, Season 3, which is on Netflix. It dropped on Friday. This is incredible UK crime drama. And we talked a little bit about Drake's involvement in the show and why we love it so much. And then later in the show, Jason Gallagher, making, what is like his fifth appearance of the summer. My Real America correspondent, he's coming to talk to me a little bit about Ken Burns' country music documentary and also a little bit of Righteous Jumpstones. I am aware. Righteous Gemstones is advertising on the show today. If you're going to be in the big, in the pocket of big something, it's good to be in the pocket of big gemstones.

But we really just want to talk about misbehaving. I hope everybody watched Sunday's episode. But before we get into all that, I wanted to talk a little bit about the peacock. I have to come up with, maybe I got to get together with Greenwald and put our heads together. We have Disney pluce.

There's a couple of ways you could go with the peacock. I think I'm going to go with the bird. Kai, do you like the sound of that? Yeah, I just giggled to myself. Good. The nickname for the peacock is a, the bird. The Peacock is NBC Universal's streaming service. So that was announced the other day. And I think there's some really interesting stuff to talk about. Now, obviously, we're in the

pocket of big gemstones. The Watch podcast is also in the pocket of big S-mail. So, you know, we saw that it was announced that Sam is going to be not rebooting Battlestar Galactica, but doing another story from the wider Battlestar Galactica universe. Battlestar Galactica is one of the best shows of the decade or the century. According to me, it was just an absolute masterpiece of television. I can't wait to see what Sam's take on it is. The Peacock is also launching with a new Mike Scher show, a reboot of Punky Brewster, a reboot of Safe by the Bell.

But the original content here is not actually what I want to focus on because we can speculate all day about like, oh, they're going to do this, they're going to do that. The Peacock actually seems like the most significant Netflix competitor to me in some ways. because of, I can't believe I'm calling it the peacock, the bird, the bird seems like it could be the biggest Netflix competitor to me in some ways. What does Netflix have? It has library. It has the turn it on when you get home, turn it off when you get to sleep, feel. It is new television. It is the way that we used to engage with television where you could just have the office playing. You could just have friends playing. You could have oranges the new black on or whatever you want on in the background. Schitt's Creek. There's so much stuff to do. you could just kind of move through. It's got hours. All these other services that are launching now, they have to build up their libraries

and they have to teach the audience what's in there. So Disney Plus is going to have a lot of stuff for families, a lot of stuff for kids. It's going to have Star Wars. It'll have Marvel. But it doesn't necessarily off jump have that, oh, I'm just going to have this on. I'm just going to go check out what's on Disney Plus.

And I think in some ways, that's what the bird has. Because it's going to have apparently 15,000 hours of content on launch day, including the archive, the entire archive of Saturday Night Live, as well as the office, as well as Friday Night Lights, as well as Parks and Recreation. You know, obviously, Seinfeld is going to Netflix, but the bird will have Brooklyn 9-9. Like basically any NBC stuff that you're watching with the exception of Seinfeld, a lot of the NBC stuff that you're watching on Hulu, I think, is going to be on the peacock. and once you can get past actually paying for something called the peacock, I think a lot of people are going to sign up for this. Now, I have a lot of questions. One is, as we say, every time we do streaming worse conversations,

is how many of these things are people going to actually pay for? There's going to be an ad-supported version of the peacock. I think there will be ad-supported versions of several of these services. HBO Max continues to build up its original programming announcements. But I do wonder whether or not the peacock will actually function as a hybrid streaming service cable network because they're going to start out, this is launching after the 2020 Olympics,

so it's going to have a huge platform with which to announce itself. And then it sounds like they're going to make a real commitment to sports and news. Now, I don't know the particulars of whether or not, say, this streaming service will swallow NBCSports.com and we'll start showing Premier League games, for instance, or any of the other stuff that NBC has,

like golf or NASCAR. I don't know whether or not NBC News or MSNBC will necessarily be folded within this streaming service if you want to watch that stuff online. But it strikes me that that will be something that they're looking at. And they've talked a lot about news and sports as core functions of this. And that's going to be something that is a little bit of a differentiator in the streaming wars for this service. So you have these beloved huge volume sitcoms like Parks and Rec, like Brooklyn 9. like the office. Then you've got live programming to some extent, news and sports.

And then you have to imagine that the stuff that we've heard about, Battlestar and everything else, in terms of original programming, that's just the tip of the iceberg. So I'm not necessarily saying, like, I'm going to get a peacock tattoo. But as far as like all the rollouts and announcements that we've seen, with Apple kind of being very much, you know, despite the price point being $499,

we still don't really know what we're getting. We've got a couple of trailers. but we don't really have a full idea of what the experience of that service is going to be. I feel like I can kind of understand what the peacock is already. And I kind of wonder whether or not this will be one of them that in five years will still be standing. Because I don't think everybody can be. Maybe I'm wrong, but especially like Lucas Shaw said a couple weeks ago when he joined the watch on Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw, he was talking about it. It's like, what's going to happen if a recession hits, people are not going to be signing up for eight services.

and who's going to be left standing when all that's over. So that's something really interesting to keep in mind as we go forward. We'll be having more conversations about some of these streaming services going forward. But that was the thing that really jumped out to me about the peacock. So without further ado, let's wrap that up. And let's get into my conversation with Donnie Kwok about one of, honestly, again, just like earlier this week when I was talking about unbelievable and undone, one of my favorite shows of the year.

Again, top tens get filled out by September. this is a conversation I have with Donnie about Top Boy season three on Netflix. So Donnie is here to join me today. It's a big show today. Donnie's going to come on and we're going to talk a little bit about Top Boy. I'm also talking a little bit about the new NBC Universal Streaming Service. Peacock. And then Gallagher is going to come on in a little bit, Jason Gallagher.

And we are going to talk a little bit about Ken Burns' country music and a little bit of righteous gemstones. But Donnie, I wanted to get right into Top Boy. with you. So for people who don't know what it is, why don't you talk a little bit about this shows. It's a Netflix show and it's got an interesting trajectory, an interesting development trajectory. Yeah, I'm actually not the biggest top boy expert, but I've kind of quickly come up to speed watching this new season that just premiered last week. So essentially, it's a BBC drug crime drama. Originally it was, and the first two seasons aired, I believe, five or six years ago. It's only a total, I think, of eight episodes, and those are all available on Netflix. It was canceled.

And then the legend has it that the artist Drake was a fan of the show and actually shouted it out on Instagram. And then one of the show stars, a grind rapper called Kano, who plays solely on the show, responded to that Instagram post. And then, you know, one thing followed another. Drake bought the rights. And then years later, five or six years later now, Drake is the executive producer. of this third season of Top Boy, which is 10 episodes. And like I said, it premiered last Friday. And pretty much everybody I know has been totally absorbed by it.

Yeah, it definitely feels like it came. I know Micah wrote about it on The Ringer a couple of days ago. It came out like on last Friday, I believe. And Donnie's right. This is basically a show premiered in 2011. It was directed by Jan Damage, who's gone on to do White Boy Rick and is kind of a really big up-and-coming filmmaker right now. And it was written by Ronan Bennett, who's a Northern Irish.

screenwriter and novelist who had been living and working in London. It had been kind of inspired by what he was seeing around him. But the show feels so evocative and specific to a place and a time in London. And it's got one of these sort of miracle runs where it comes on in 11 for Series 1, to use the British way of talking about seasons. Series 1, Series 2 is 2013 kind of goes off the map. They cancel it on Channel 4 in England. And like Donnie's saying, like somewhere along the line, Drake just decided this show needed to continue to exist. And I, for one, bow down to our new Medici's. If Drake wants to bring Top Boy back, that's great. Like, like, Donnie, I am like what I would call a, I was aware of it and had watched a little bit of it on YouTube,

but was not like a big, I couldn't, I couldn't run through every plotline and every character. Yeah, exactly. I was the same, vaguely aware of the title, the fact that it was a cult classic. Drake had even mentioned the show in his lyrics. And, you know, as Drake has become more of a sort of UK file in the last few years, it's like it felt like the momentum was right for the series to come back. Yeah, and also it is, so the series is now back and it's a 10-episode run. And this is just a fantastic show. Now, there is kind of like a sort of international crime show syndicate right now,

a lot of which is on Netflix. you've got Gomorra narcos, obviously Top Boy. There's money heist. It seems like every country has its own kind of like crime syndicate show. But Top Boy, you know, it's been often compared to the Wire, but I feel like it has almost a more cinematic feel when it comes to the filmmaking. You know, it's got this score from Brian Eno.

And the performances are a lot more naturalistic. I feel like then they are on the Wire. Like the Wire, there was still a lot of. of like everything was kind of running in a lane so that it was, and it was all going towards the same toll booth that paid off at the end of every episode. And there was a certain essayistic quality to the wire. Often it's described as this, the, you know, television show as a novel.

But I always felt like the wire made it, had a thesis statement at the top, and then had a conclusion at the bottom of every episode and that there was like a thematic coherence to it. Whereas Top Boy is essentially in a lot of ways, like it's just like a hyperviolent soap. opera in a lot of ways. I was about to say it's like a soap opera. And like you were saying, you know, it hues pretty closely to the conventions of these types of drug crime dramas where

you have kind of an upstart versus a veteran and their cronies and then different, you know, hustling stuff and revenge and all of that. But I mean, I think the milieu really to me is what is such a draw. We were talking, joking earlier about the slang. But it's one of those, the specificity of it is the universal. I mean, I know that. I'm a cliche now, but there's so much kind of intricate knowledge of London and the way they speak. You know, there's part of it takes place in Jamaica. And of course, you see the big West Indian influence in London. All of it feels so fresh when you're watching it that despite it being a little cliche as far as how the narrative is going, it's really, really compelling.

And I've been speaking fake London slang now for, you know, since I started watching it. I mean, let's not be funny. Like, that is definitely like 50% of like the reason to check it out is just like so that you can then adopt like a hundred new sayings. Like even if it's just like just saying chat instead of talk. The language of it is just so incredible. And especially as an American viewer, even if you're not familiar with like UK Grime and UK hip hop slang, it's like this really weird feeling where you like understand it if you don't know it. even if you don't know the language entirely and all the vocabulary and all the, um,

and all the little sayings, like you still understand what everybody's saying. And you can always just watch it with, with subtitles on on Netflix. You don't watch it with subtitles on? No, I tried not to and that I was like, I'm not,

I have to do that with pretty much any English, like any UK show. Like I had to do that with dairy girls. I have to do that with like almost anything like now. My brain has just become like completely mush from, from years of the internet. You know what's funny with watching with subtitles on this show, this particular show, is they suck their teeth a lot, characters do. And so there's so many times you see bracketed like T-S-K, and then also exhale sharply.

There's a lot of like little short size as, you know, like one problem builds on top of another. Are you familiar too, though? Because I'm not even like that well-versed in the grime scene. So I knew who Kano was. But, you know, most of the primary characters here are coming from the grime world. And they're really, really good. Yeah, Dave is in it, right? Dave's kind of, you know, he plays Modi who's in jail.

Kind of a smaller role. But even Dushane, he comes from the So Solid crew, apparently, which I found out through research. I had no idea. He's a tremendous actor. Ashley Matthews, I believe is his name. I think it's Ashley Waters, right? Oh, Waters? Walters, sorry.

Should I look that up? Your deep knowledge of So Solid Crew is not a requirement of being on the watch. Yeah, I mean, he's kind of like the emotional anchor of the show, I would say. And I mean, I think Michael wrote in his piece that you mentioned, his face conveys a wide array of emotions with very minimal effort, it seems. Yeah, it's also, I think, worth noting that this is obviously a show that started and captured a certain youth culture in 2011. And the 2019 version of the show reckons with the aging of these characters.

So these characters, a lot of which have been on the show throughout the three seasons, are kind of staring down middle-aged. age. And it's, it's kind of a fascinating, like, Dushain and Sully specifically are, they both talk about, like, in the early parts of season three, about being 35, 36, and not having girlfriends and not having families and not having the kind of lives that they had been dreaming of when they were kids. Relatable content. Yeah. And I know. Seriously, it is. It's a, it's really good midlife crisis content. And I thought it was really like, that's, it's actually quite touching to watch these guys. I mean, the other thing that's really huge is, you know, as I've talked with Greenwald

over the course of the year, watching him make Briar Patch, and also when I got to go down to New Mexico, I saw this firsthand, but I don't know whether the rules are different, like the tax laws are different, the permits are different or whatever in England when they're making television. But the locations that they get into on this show are unlike anything you really see on American television. I mean, the wire had some really like, obviously like true to life. like they were in the mix and stuff, but you almost felt like they were returning to the same block over and over again

because they had permits for that street or whatever. Like, this show seems to just go wherever the camera and the characters want to go. And it still maintains a real, almost like a Verite Michael Mann feel, kind of has a feel of like some of his later stuff like Miami Vice. But it is so wild how they'll just be in a Turkish cafe.

They'll just be in a Dalston market. They'll just be in a new condo complex that's being built by cocaine dealers. It's just amazing how they get in these places to say nothing of the Jamaica stuff in the first episode. Yeah. And also, as you mentioned with Dushan and Sully and all of the characters that returned from the first two seasons, reckoning with where they are in 2019. It's also sort of Britain in 2019, too, because there's like an immigration subplot. You know, Brexit is kind of in the air.

There's gentrification. London in 2019 has changed a lot, I guess, over the last decade, as many major cities have. And I think it's kind of an interesting portrait of that as well. No, I mean, my cousin actually lives over in Dalston, and I've just spent a little bit of time there. Obviously, nothing like I haven't had experiences like the ones we see in the show. But you can feel it's like New York or like any big city that's like just constantly in flux. And part of the fact, like the kind of energy that comes out of that city is the collision of culture. and is the collision of economic circumstances,

and it also produces a ton of different anxieties, which you can see on the show, the thing that's, you know, I think people have compared it to the wire for obvious reasons because it's this chronicle of the drug underworld and the people who are kind of trying to make their way through it. But I think that the thing that I noticed that was, I don't even know, I feel like this is pretty specific to this show.

I thought it was really well rendered on Top Boy is the constant, kind of having to steal from Peter to pay Paul nature of being in the criminal underworld. Like Duchesne, Sully, like all these guys are basically constantly living hand to mouth even if not like actually financially.

They're like they have to like pay off a Jamaican supplier to make sure that the Turkish dealers don't come after them. Like there's so much anxiety and dread in the show they really render that well. Yeah, there's not a lot of glamour in this drug drug. trade. I mean, you don't ever see them. Usually with some of these drug crime dramas, there's always a montage or a scene of them reaping the rewards of their hard work and, you know, like, and selling. And here it's just a constant sense of anxiety permeates every episode. It's actually quite violent, too, you know, more violent than I had expected.

Dude, knife crime. How about that? And gun crime. But hard pass on knives, man. Like, that looks terrible. Like, there's a lot of knife crime in early in season three. So, yeah, it's pretty violent. It's just a fair warning. But I think that people have been listening to the show and checking out, like,

crime movies and crime television that we've recommended in the past. Like, I really highly recommend Top Boy. It's like yet another example of why September's just been such an incredible month. Do you have a tendency? Like, do you think that you're a little? bit more curious at this point about international crime shows necessarily than domestic ones? I can't say that.

I mean, I think I kind of lean towards these shows in general anyway. I haven't, I haven't, the other shows you mentioned, I haven't seen, but, you know, I find myself after watching Top Boy more interested in crime music, though, or like grime artists or rap coming out of UK. I mean, it's already kind of trending. I was a fan of Dave, actually. I knew of Dave before this show. So it's certainly my interest.

Because Dave is the Tiago Silva guy, right? He's in that video. I don't think it's his song. Oh, okay. He did Stratham, though. Stratham. Yeah. Streatham.

Yeah, Streatham. I don't want to slip into the patois. Yeah, you know. I was tweeting this earlier that Drake's had a hell of a summer, though, because he's executive produced two critically acclaimed television shows, Euphoria and now Top Boy. So, I mean, shout out to Drake for being like a TV mogul now. Yeah, that's the thing that sort of.

Strangest. And Maverick Carter and Spring Hill are also involved in the revival of Top Boy. But Drake is, as is proving himself to be, he could very easily go out and try and find his, you know, whether like he could try and executive produce like an animated movie, like a secret life of pets type thing, but with like rappers voices. Like there are way easier paychecks in the world than making euphoria and top boy. Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that he doesn't have his own production outfit or does he? He doesn't.

He's just... I think that they... I think that he basically has Drake Industries and they're getting into production now, but this is a pretty savvy move for him because, as you pointed out to me before we started potting, but this has been, at least according to obviously,

Netflix's internal and never shared metrics, a huge hit in the UK since its revival. And Euphoria obviously really captured a post-thrones bounce and was kind of like the talk of the mid-summer after Thrones went off the air on HBO. So, like, he has kind of had this incredible four or five-month run with shows on the air. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of, you know, unprecedented, actually, I think, for a rapper to have, you know, that kind of influence in terms of making programming. The interesting thing is also the origins of this story, being written by this guy, Ronan Bennett, I can tweet this out, but really interesting character, this guy who wrote and created the, the, the, the, the show who's just basically like, you know, a Northern Irish novelist and screenwriter who did the first two series and then lost his wife, actually, and actually has put, sprinkled in some stuff about his relationship to his late wife into series three. And there's a really, really great article he wrote for The Guardian about working on series three and some of the stuff that came from his personal life that wound up in the show itself. but really like open-eared empathetic piece of writing from this guy.

I think it's really well executed. Yeah, I mean, I guess he's essentially the David Simon of Top Boy, right? I mean, do you think he basically obviously wasn't living in an estate and running drug deals, but somehow, you know, he's written something that I feel is very authentic, obviously not having experienced it. Yeah, I mean, it seems like for the most part he did a lot of the kind of, journalism work that David Simon did. He doesn't have necessarily that background, but did a lot of that kind of research. And then Rinaldo Marcus Green, who made Monsters and Men, directed the first three episodes of Series 3. And I think he just brings such like an incredible eye to the show.

I mean, like, even there's a, the opening scene of episode two is just this, a drone flying through an apartment complex, bringing drugs and a phone to one of the characters. And the way that they shoot it and the Brian Eno score, I mean, Brian Eno. know did the score that's playing over it is just so awesome. Yeah, that's another thing that you see a lot with the subtitles. Whenever the score comes in, it says tense ambient music plays. Yeah. Yeah. I was listening to some of like the soundtracks that are on Spotify and they're pretty amazing. So Quack, are you watching anything else right now besides Top Boy? I'm pretty monogamous when it comes to television. I know that's weird for someone that works at the ringer, but no, that's really good. That's

really good. I've been having this crisis right now because I feel like I have to, I can't decide like how Catholic I need to be about finishing what I started with shows and making sure that I've gotten to the end of all of them. But so like when you start Top Boy, you just finish Top Boy and then it's time for something else. Well, actually, that's a lot because I'm watching Succession as well. But yeah, for top, I'm also, it's hard for me to binge, you know, like I'm kind of old school in that way too. Maybe like I'll watch one or two episodes, but my attention starts to kind of wane in the third hour. So I've been kind of consuming it in twice a night, two episodes a night,

but I'm up to episode seven, I believe, of Top Boy. I think, yeah, but it's still been super compelling. You know, I was starting to feel like there were too many plot lines, but now, as I probably should have expected, they're starting to converge. Yeah, you could kind of see, I mean, like, if you're familiar with wire, this is the one thing I would also say that David Simon's a huge influence is. you can see the, you're like, why am I watching this plot line about these two kids starting a burger stand? Oh.

I should have seen it coming, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, Donnie and I obviously highly recommend Top Boy. Maybe we'll get back together in a couple of weeks once we're both finished the season. And we'll talk about the sort of more spoilery discussion of Dushain and Sully's exploits. Isn't it? Thanks for joining me, Donnie. I'll be back with Jason Gallagher in just a minute.

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The half-hour comedy airs Sundays at 10 p.m. only on HBO. I'm now joined by Jason Gallagher. Jason joins me intermittently to talk about one of three subjects. Theme parks? Yeah. Religion. Country music. Yep.

Today we're going to talk about two of those things and not theme parks. What's up, Jason? What's up, man? Thanks for having me. I'm, like, actually honored I have this corner on this podcast. I'm just telling you. Well, yeah, you're my real America correspondent. I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Ken Burns's country music, which, so, you know,

like I'm home with my mom right now. I'm visiting Philadelphia, and, you know, you got to make compromises. Yeah, absolutely. When you're chilling with mom, you just can't watch succession four times in a row, and you can't watch a lot of golf instructional YouTube. You've got to find stuff that you're both into, and my mom is the target audience for Ken Burns' country music. I think I am too. I mean, I really, really,

really adore his work. I will say, in full disclosure, I don't always finish them. Sure. I don't always see every minute of every episode of these incredible works of scholarship and public education.

But I just think that you could say that he sort of does the same tricks over and over again and the kind of somber music and the Peter Coyote voiceover and the zooming in or the pans across photographs or whatever. But God damn it, if he doesn't teach you and inspire you when

he's doing these shows and country music, which is a subject, I would describe myself as like medium high interested in. I'm very interested in American music, but country is not my favorite. Sure. Has been absolutely captivating over the last couple of nights. Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree. That medium high is is higher than I would have thought. Every time I listen to a country song, you're like, is that high? I'm a typical annoying asshole East Coast City guy in that like my country music tastes are predictably alternative.

Yeah, you know what I mean? And so when I was growing up and like Alabama would win every country music award or whatever and Vince Gill and Garth Brooks were huge. I was just like, this stuff is completely whacked to me. And then as I got older and I started listening to Willie Nelson, and Whalen Jennings and Outlaw Country and some of the more, you know, like some of the 60s stuff. And then really got into like Graham Parsons and some of the more cosmic country stuff. Like that's not necessarily straight up Nashville stuff.

But I obviously really like it. And then I really like No Depression. Country rock bands from the 90s and 2000s like Wilco, obviously, and Uncle Tuplow. And you have a much more traditional relationship to it, though. For sure. And I actually think it's like really telling. that Ken Burns decided to kind of stop in the 90s, which is probably,

which is probably, you know, a testament to why a lot of, you know, people like our colleagues and, and I don't want to like say you, but kind of you, we're probably,

you can say, it's probably why you were a little out on it because it feels like such a, the more mainstream country feels like such a departure from really what it was sort of all about. You know, there's obviously some really good art.

like Miranda Lambert and people like that. But when Florida Georgia Line starts getting involved, it's like, well, the opposite of what I'm watching on the Kinvernd's documentary. But yeah, yeah. So I just loved, I've always loved country music, as you said, I kind of grew up on it. And the 90s stuff actually did hit home to me.

I mean, I was a child, so it was whatever my parents were listening to. But, you know, this journey into this, this documentary was really interesting because I've never, I've never for one second of my life been like, I wonder what the history of country music's all about. Yeah. Even though it was such an impactful thing on my life. And I texted you that I just, I genuinely found it pretty moving. Like hearing some of the songs that even were like a huge part of my childhood, you know,

Will the Circle being broken was like a song that played. Yeah, some of the Carter family stuff, right? Yeah. It was like all over. church and the radio, like still, like, we listen to it, like, a lot. And, and it's just kind of crazy. I never thought about, like, just how, like, part of the earth it seemed. It was so fascinating to hear some of these songs that were just like, and they came from the British Isles. And you're like, wait, so who, where did it come? Like, who wrote it, though? You know, it's just like,

they talk about it, like, it's a plant they found. Do you know what I mean? No, I mean, these were folk songs brought over from Scotland and England and Ireland and then, you know, and then, you know, And they went through the rural kind of, they rolled through the mud, essentially. And when they came out on the other side, there was all these, there was blues and there was jazz and there was country music. And there were these American musics in the 19th century

and into the 20th century. I mean, obviously, Kemburn starts with, you know, the introduction of the fiddle to America. Yeah. And so it's a really painstaking genealogy lesson, essentially about how these different forms of music emerged out of these different parts of the regions of America and why and how and the impact of the intermingling of slavery and also rural white, like not blue collar, because I don't even know collars really, but like rural white farmers back then in the 18th century and 19th century and the emergence of these forms over the course of hundreds of years. and then it really sort of starts to pick up steam in the early episodes

when it talks about the emergence of radio and the introduction of technology, not only recording music, but broadcasting it. That's where it really jumps up a notch, right? And in the first few episodes, like the relationship of the music to radio and the way that radio made these people into stars, you might as well be watching it taking place in the 50s or the 60s or the 80s or even today and substitute the internet and for the radio.

Yeah, totally. And seeing some of the people who sort of emerged out of that, and I had sort of a moment where one of the guys, I think it was Bob Wills, and they were just talking about the Texas swing guy. Yeah, and they talked about how he would just sort of adapt to whatever was coming, you know. Same with Gene Autry. They would just sort of like, you know, moving pictures and you can talk in the movies now. And then they would hop on that. And I was like, man, these guys would have. crushed it in the content space in 2019. Gene Andre would have been the lord on TikTok. Yeah, I had that sort of moment. But the radio stuff was fascinating. And I loved that they kept coming back to the guy who was like, and this guy was a pioneer in radio. And he wanted to sell a goat testosterone for men who had like issues with like arousal. Who had the devil in their underpants. Yeah, yeah. It was just like they kept cutting back. And I'm like, this guy is really like a huge pivotal person in country music and sharing it to the rest of the world or, you know, the United States or whatever.

And it was like he just really wanted to sell the ghost stuff. You learn about like the radio stations were basically they were content arms of huge corporations like Sears and Roboc or insurance companies would start radio stations because they thought it would help them sell. they would help their door-to-door salesmen sell insurance policies. And so they were like, sure, we'll start a radio station. And then out of that became the radio minted these stars. And then you've got like, you know, Andy and I have talked about the monoculture in terms of television, but it applies to music as well. And you've got people selling, I mean, what, 20 million copies of singles at certain points in the 20th century, you know? And the sort of, so they've been showing two hours a night.

for the last couple of nights and then I think it comes back on Sunday to do the last four. The last two nights my favorite parts were on I believe on Tuesday night they did Hank Williams and on Wednesday night

they covered Ray Charles and Patsy Klein and Johnny Cash not their full lives but they were major parts of it so Ray Charles's Modern Sounds and Country and Western music was featured. I was watching the Hank Williams section,

which is pretty long and very detailed. And I was like, oh, they got to make a Hank Williams movie. Who should play? I was like, who should play Hank Williams? And I was sort of in my mind. Like, who should direct it? And then you keep watching it. And you're like, they don't need to make a Hank Williams movie.

Like, this is the Hank Williams movie. It is so fucking gripping the Hank Williams stuff. I don't think I knew a lot about his biography. I just knew the hits pretty much. But you're just like, oh my God, this guy's life. And also, he was essentially. Tiger Woods, like when he would show up. 14,000 people would just show up with him, you know?

That's what's so, like, fascinating about so many of these guys. You know, I take notes when I know I'm coming on the watch. And one of the things I wrote in bold was just like how much some of these guys accomplished in their lives or like how much life they lived. So I'm on, I've only gone through two episodes, only four hours. Only four hours. But like so many of these guys, I think it was Jimmy Rogers, and they were talking about his life,

and they were talking about how he used to, you know, play dice, and then he skipped town and then joined the railroad and blah, blah, blah. And they went through like what felt like a full biography. And then they were like, and he was 13 years old. And I was like, holy shit. It's so nuts. That was the same thing. So with the way that he does,

I really think that it's at its peak when it's mixing media and it's showing footage from Hank Williams' concerts and news broadcasts and television broadcasts of Hank Williams

and then also mixing in still photography that gorgeous, incredibly moody and atmospheric life magazine style photography that was so prevalent at the time and the Hank Williams stuff

does that so well the way it chronicles his last few months as his body deteriorated as he was just ramping up the drug and alcohol abuse is just so gripping. And there's like shots where there's like this stuff during the Patsy Klein section, another person who I did not know died at 30. You can see the texture of like the satin of her dress. I mean, it is like amazing the way that you can like the way you feel like you are in a room

with Johnny Cash and his first one. wife is just stunning. The way you feel like you, you know the texture of Patti Klein's blouse or Hank Williams's jacket because of the way that they're filming the photography is so cool. That was so much a part of why I loved it. And like mixing, mixing those sort of visuals within, you know, these tracks, these songs that were just like deeply, I mean, they're meant to be emotional. Like country music, I think, you know, one of the one of the interviews, somebody was like it's about you know tragedy and murder and love and it's just like there's very you know surface level emotions um and so you're hearing these these lyrics and this like you know sad sounding music

and then but then you're seeing like you said even some of the old old photographer photographs felt that way too um yeah it was i don't know i i did not expect i had i did not expect to get as into this as I as I did. I was really into it. And then you know, Ken Burns, usually in his films, there emerges like one or two

of the talking heads becomes kind of, oh, this is the guy like Shelby Foot, obviously in the Civil War documentary and in the Vietnam documentary, I was deeply moved by the stuff that Tim O'Brien talks about. In this doc,

in the first few episodes, it's definitely Catch Seacor, this guy from the Old Crow Medici and Rianne Giddens, who's a contemporary sort of hybrid. I mean, she's an amazing musician, but she does a lot of stuff with She was in the show in Nashville. Right.

And then in the later episodes or the middle episodes that I've seen, Marty Stewart kind of comes to the forefront as just like this incredible talking head. But the thing that's really amazing about this one is that some of the people who are talking

for the documentary are like the kids of the people they're talking about. Or they, I mean, Nashville does seem like a very tight-knit community. Country music seems like a very tight-knit community. And you've got this personal connection to the engineers, the musicians, the label people.

There is like a familiarity with the entire industry of country music with everybody who's talking. And you don't really get that all the time. You know, it's really amazing to see Carter and Cash children talking about their parents or grandparents or uncles or Hank Williams's son talking about Hank Williams. Yeah. And then furthermore, the impact that those iconic performers like Patsy Klein and Hank Williams had on people like Tricia Yearwood and Vince Gill. Yeah.

Yeah, 100%. And to speak to sort of the legacy stuff, like it's sort of crazy. and maybe this is just like my skepticism towards life, but seeing how Pat, not only like just super passionate these kids were about their parents and their music, not saying that like we wouldn't be passionate about our parents, but they, the way they just spoke about them with this like genuine, sincere appreciation for what their parents did

and the love of like the music that their parents created was really cool to see as well. Like I would see like last name Carter and I'd be like, this woman really likes this. And then I had to Google it and it was like, yeah, this is good, yeah. I don't know, it's really cool. And you'll see pictures.

He has photos where it's like Johnny Cash looking at June Carter while his first wife is in the room and his kids. It was just like, oh, that happened. Speaking of country music, before I let you go, I just wanted to talk a little bit about, so you came on last week and talked about gemstones. I don't want to belabor how amazing it is. but obviously shows have like takes the leap episodes

and I definitely think interlude which was Sunday's episode it wasn't necessarily like the funniest episode it wasn't necessarily like it didn't it definitely made this show it gave it a huge layer of of I think sophistication that it didn't have before even though in the show it's mostly about Walton Goggins feeding young Jesse Gemstone Kors legs at a perfect point. The silver bullet.

No, you said it's sophisticated. It literally opens in a restaurant to which Judy is like stabbing Jesse. Yeah, is it Judy, right? Yeah. She's just stabbing Jesse in the leg with a knife. But we finally get to see the specter who's been kind of looming over the show this season is the image of Amy Lee gemstone, I guess. You know, like played by Jennifer Nettles.

and it's Billy Freeman's sister who marries Eli Gemstone and kind of baby Billy and Amy had like a singing group but she decides to leave him to go sort of be full-time the Tammy Faye to Eli's Jim Baker but we do get this flashback to

I guess the 80s and this we get this musical performance from Walton Goggins and Jennifer Nettles that has since gone, I guess gone viral. I don't even know if that's appropriate. It's definitely in the culture now. Yeah.

And it's one of those things that a show kind of waits for it to happen because I think as this thing gets more and more spread, people are going to be like, well, what's the deal with righteous gemstones? And it's this performance of a song called Misbehaving,

which is, I guess, supposed to be Amy Lee and baby Billy's classic, like they're smash hit. And they announce on Amy Lee and Eli's show that they're going to go back out on tour and do a performance of misbehaving, which involves a clog dance

and lyrics such as running through the house with a pickle in my mouth. And somebody who obviously likes country music and somebody who obviously is familiar with megachurches and Jennifer Nettles, who obviously people don't know is in Sugar Land and is a huge country star, what did you think of this scene?

I was, oh my God. I was looking at, I had like so much joy inside of me. Wasn't even like really take, the first time, I wasn't really taking the lyrics in. I was just kind of like just laughing at the spectacle of Walton Goggins. Like Jennifer Nettles, I told you, I told you like there was, she was born for this part. She basically played late 80s, Jennifer Nettles.

When she performs in real life, she's super corny. She over sort of overacts a little bit. And so her doing this was, but seeing Walton Goggins basically just earnestly performing this song. And then the fact that they played the whole thing through, there's a moment where it cuts to the audience and it seems like the song's going to end. And then they just like bring it back with another verse. And it's like a good solid three, three and a half minute performance. I was just blown away. But then you dive into the.

then you dive into the lyrics about these kids that are that are you know I guess acting acting out or whatever and Jesus is the answer but some of the things they're doing are like playing with the stick yeah oh my god leaving a pie on the window yeah yeah and it's so good and for I love it because it is genuinely catchy like you you sit there and you sort of you know whenever somebody's like, yeah, they're a huge band in like a show, you're just sort of like, well, it better be good. Like, I remember, I remember watching La La Land and John Legends band was like the one that was sweeping the nation.

And I was like, the nation would literally never listen to this, it feels like. This one, it's like, it seems like the, in that, especially in that time period, it definitely seems like a song that would have taken off. And I was reading like some of the, like, there was like a mini oral history published somewhere. I can't remember. On Fast Company. Yeah. And, you know, McBride was talking about how, like, a lot of the people on set

thought it was a real song, thought it had existed. And that's like... Yeah, they were looking on iTunes to see if they could buy it. Right. And that's, like, such a good telling thing, especially for a show that's sort of centering, not centering, but, like, has this storyline about this musical, you know, brother-sister duo. But, oh, my God, just pure joy. Somebody hit me up on Twitter and was like, was this the best TV moment

since Teddy Perkins. And I, you know, that, that's debatable, but it was this show's Teddy Perkins moment. For sure. It was the shows like, holy shit, did you see that last night moment? So I only hope we get more nettles. I hope there's more nettles in our future. Yeah.

And obviously, I hope Gagins just, for me, like personally he took a leap, like in my personal, like, I already loved him. But this episode was just like his conversation with Young McBride, that performance. it was just crazy. When he first gets introduced on the actual televangelist broadcast in the 80s

and he's been such a shit bag he's basically dressed like a fucking broke down Don Johnson and drinking beer and like scandalizing people and then he goes on the Gemstone show and they introduce him. It's like oh and it's baby Billy Freeman

and he's like it's just silly baby Billy and it's like he just turns on this crazy level of charm and like superficial showmanship. It's such good acting though. Yeah. It's really, really great. They did their research, man.

It's, it's great. And like even Nettles is like massive sweater that she wears during it that's like colorful. It's like that's exactly what it was like because she had to sort of dress like she had that sort of like preacher's wife but performer thing down. It was just great. I don't know. Yeah. All right.

Well, thank you for joining me to talk about all things. and God. And God and country. Gallagher, I appreciate it. We'll wrap it up there. I'll be back Monday. We'll do some Emmys stuff. We'll do obviously some Emmys wrap up.

If you want my predictions, my predictions are essentially, I think this is going to be Game of Thrones' Return of the King run, where even though, I guess you could make the argument that Return of the King is the best Lord of the Rings movie, I wouldn't,

but I think it's going to win as like a victory lap. So regardless of how people felt about the last season of Game of Thrones, I think it's going to clean up. That being said, and I know that you're going to think that I'm just betting on the horse that got me here, I kind of watch out for Ozark. Oh my gosh. Because they've been pushing Ozark, like the campaign, the brand is strong. And the campaign, they've been like Elizabeth Warren in Iowa with this thing. So there's a lot of Ozark buzz.

I wouldn't be shocked if that was the surprise one. I don't think it's going to be killing Eve. I don't think Succession yet. I think Succession is year is next year. They don't have an acting nomination, which is pretty wild. So, yeah, I would think so. Yeah, I think next season,

once everybody is kind of caught up, Succession becomes one of those awards horses. As far as limited series, I just feel like Chernobyl is a mortal lock. But we'll see. It'll be really interesting. It should be interesting Emmys. We'll have a wrap up of the Emmys.

We'll have a wrap up of Succession episode. I guess it's seven, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yes, seven. Seven. Seven. So we'll do seven on Monday with me and Jason. So until then, thank you Gallagher for joining me.

Thank you, Donnie, for joining me. Thank you to Kaya. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Chris. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by The Righteous Gemstones. Don't miss the Righteous Gemstone. From the team behind Eastbound and Down and Vice Principles comes the story of a popular megachurch slash money-making enterprise.

Starring Danny McBride as a bad boy preacher, Jesse Gemstone, John Goodman as the family patriarch, Eli, and Adam Devine and Edie Patterson. as the younger gemstone siblings, The Righteous Gemstones, airs Sundays at 10 p.m. Only on HBO.