The Watch - New TV Alert: 'Atlanta,' 'McMafia,' and 'Looming Tower' | The Watch (Ep. 231)

Episode Date: March 2, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald preview the return of Donald Glover’s award-winning show ‘Atlanta’ as well as the Donald Glover/Childish Gambino persona (5:00) before reviewing 'McMafia' (16:00) and 'Looming Tower' (27:00). They also set up biggest night in film, this weekend's Oscars (42:00). More on Donald Glover, McMafia and the Oscars https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/donald-glover-cant-save-you https://www.theringer.com/music/2018/2/28/17062250/donald-glover-evolution-childish-gambino-origins https://www.theringer.com/tv/2018/2/27/17056126/mcmafia-review https://www.theringer.com/oscars Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Microsoft Surface. The new Surface Pro gives you the power you need when you're out and about. It has a super fast processor and all-day battery life so that you can play up to 13 and a half hours of video without needing to charge. It's light enough to take anywhere and works with your iPhone so it's synced with your life. The New Surface Pro is the lightest, most powerful Surface Pro ever. Today's episode of The Watch. It's brought to you by Hotel Tonight. Here is a little insider travel secret for my first.

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advance in top destinations and up to a week in advance everywhere else. So if you want to start scoring amazing deals at incredible, hotels, download the Hotel Tonight app now. I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio.

He's literally sipping the tea. It's Andy Greenwald. I am your meme made flesh. Sipping the tea is cool still, right? Like, you could still say that? Yeah. I mean, I'm doing it, so it's accurate because, you know, I'm a little,

You know? While you're sipping the tea, let me tell you about some blog posts you should bookmark. Wow. On your browser. This is 2018, bro. This is theringer.com. We're really hitting our stride.

Everything that we thought we were going to be, it's what's happening right now. That's incredible. Wakanda forever. No, I'm just playing around, man. Let me tell you a little bit about what's going on, the ringer.com this week. A bunch of great features.

So I want to shout out to Michael Bowman, who wrote a great piece on Beto O'Rourke and his run for Senate in Texas. Do you think Beto O'O'Rourke was as excited as you were when he got the promo of the new Ice Age album in his email? You know, Beto O'Rourke was not to drive him, man. Don't you watch your mouth. I know. I'm on board. So there's great pieces all over the site this week, but I do want to shout out Sean Fennesse's pieces about the Oscar races.

Almost every category he's covered. I think he actually has covered every category. He's got one more coming tomorrow. If you're just starting to read about Oscar movies, if you feel like you've heard it all about Oscar movies, there is something in there for everybody. I also really, really, really highly recommend. K. Austin Collins on Zero Dark 30. Me too.

That was a little bit earlier in the week. Kind of looking back five years since Zero Dark 30 and probably the most reasonable, rational, interest, curious and passionate piece of movie criticism I read this year. It's just a fantastic essay. It's weird the way it's generous in interpretation and thought toward differing points of views. It's weird on the Internet. I like that. Zero Dark 30 is an interesting lens through which to view one of the shows that we're going to be talking about. today, which is Looming Tower.

Ah, I was hoping, hoping it was ugly delicious. We're going to talk about Looming Tower a little bit later. We'll talk a little bit about the Oscars a little bit later, but we're going to start off the conversation, talking about two shows that we like quite a bit. Before we talk about TV, should we say that we're doing an Oscar show? Oh, man, we definitely should.

I mean, I'm here to do promo. I don't know what you're here for. Yeah, this is all, it's all promo. We are going to be live in this studio Sunday night. Before and after the Oscars with Amanda Dobbins. Sean Fennessey talking about the show beforehand, kind of trying to get a last second feel

for what's going to happen, and then we will go live immediately after the show to talk about what did happen. This proved fruitful last year. Yeah, that was good look by us. Yeah, because last year, obviously, we had the Loll and Moonlight. Snafu. Snapoo. But this year,

you know, who knows what's going to happen? With this preferential ballot, with these nine movie, you know, best pictures, everything that could happen, anything could happen. As long as three billboards doesn't win I'm fine. We'll get to that. I'm sure you're going to want to tee off on that.

Do you want to do that today or you want to wait until Sunday? I'm just going to let the day take me as a day. Wait until you're wearing formal wear to go to an execution? I've got so many things to say. Okay. Let's talk a little bit about Atlanta. We talk often about the belt. We talk about shows that our consensus are beloved by a consensus of people.

They're really, with the exception of Thrones, I think, isn't one like Atlanta. Obviously, the numbers are completely disproportionately in the favor for Game of Thrones. But I think that those two are the two most beloved. shows on television right now? Look, you say we talk a lot about the championship belt. We don't, according to our producer, Zach Mack, or his alter ego in the question to Alan.

But here's why. Because how do you give it to anything when Atlanta's coming back? And Atlanta comes back tonight for the second season. It's March 1st. It's on FX. Atlanta's the best show on TV. It is not close. There is simply nothing else on

television at the moment that is as artistically, creatively, brilliant, that is as thematically challenging and curious and surprising and thrilling. And funny as hell. The season that's coming back, it's been interesting reading some of the reviews. You and I've seen the first couple episodes.

We're clearly fully on board. We will talk more about this in depth. Yeah, I don't really want to get too in depth into that because it's just part of the great feeling about watching this first episode is the surprises that come. Yeah, so I won't even speak. I won't say any detail. I won't spoil anything. But all I will say is that if you are the kind of person who reads reviews or at least follows critics who have written reviews of the new season, a couple of the headlines are basically, the show returns a little bit more conventional than when you last saw it.

I got to tell you, throw that take out, honestly. Because what they're saying is the episodes that we've seen thus far do not veer wildly in tone the way they did last year so far. They track the characters moving forward through time and space and fledgling rap careers. But there is just simply nothing conventional about this show. I would say that these first few episodes

to me were closer to the original pitch that we had heard before the first season about that it was more of like a comedy set in a Twin Peaks version of... Twin Peaks with rappers.

Yeah, Twin Peaks with rappers. It feels more like that than it does last season of Atlanta in a great way. Yeah, it is... It just does your head in and it spins you around. And for me, the experience of watching it, you know, we've been talking and we're going to talk today about how this year so far, maybe in general, we are in this era of like B-minus TV. Things are fine.

It could be better, but they're fine. Atlanta is a full 4D experience for me. I am watching it. I'm thrilled that I'm watching it, and it feels completely alive. And I wish there were more shows like it. I'm excited to be talking about it with you this season. Any other takeaways for you, as we, you know, again, no spoilers on the season, but how the show is returning, the world it's returning to, and the press coverage that has accompanied it. Yeah, I think that there's, it's interesting to see how different shows have processed the election, internalize them, externalize them, talk about them explicitly, talk about them implicitly.

I've just been watching a few episodes of the season of high maintenance in which the election looms over the season as an unnamed event that. that is referenced quite a bit but is never quite explicitly spelled out what has happened. And so I guess it's open to interpretation what it could be, but it's hard to see it as anything else. And a lot of the jokes

that they sort of derive are jokes that you could have derived from behaviors after the election. Atlanta, and this is discussed in, I would say a compulsively readable New Yorker feature by Tad Friend about Donald Glover that was released this week.

Atlanta deals the election as like a phantom limb. There's something out there, right there. We don't really know what it is. And it's also, as those guys have discussed, as Stephen Glover and Donald Glover have discussed, they moved the action from Atlanta. Season 1 is a summer show. It's sitting outside.

It's soaking up Atlanta in the summer to a very dark, very rainy, foreboding winter in Atlanta. Robin season. season, holiday season, when people want things from you, people are taking things from you. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about that New Yorker profile. Before I do, I should mention that we have launched a new show called The Recapables, hosted by Amanda Dobbins, which will go up every Thursday after the episode of Atlanta airs, and you can get your quick fix of analysis and

recap of season two. By the way, I did text Amanda today and ask if we could do a special one-off episode of The Recapables for the Sweet Bitter trailer, which dropped today. It's the new show coming from Stars. Amanda and I both read the novel, and I'm dying to talk about it with someone in public. Okay. She said no. Okay. But I'm just putting it out of the universe.

Recapable sweepitter. I'll run it by Bill. No, just recapable sweepeter trailer. What did you think of the New Yorker profile? I want to talk about the New Yorker profile briefly, but I want to circle back to what you were saying. I agree with you completely about the specter of the election hanging over the show. But I also think there's something about this season that feels so granular and lived in to the true lives of these characters and the true lives. lived experiences of people like these characters and the place.

It so cements you in their skin that you... Well, I'm saying this because the idea of Robin's season, it seemed like it can see sort of length of season together. There is a lot of larceny in the first few episodes. But there is also this deep, deep-born sense of disappointment, but lack of surprise in how the universe treats these characters and what's coming around the corner and what's next. It is a lived-in experience of disappointment in, whether it's in Atlanta or in the country or in the society writ large.

And one of the greatest things that came out of the first season is Brian Tyree Henry's performance as Paperboy. It is only grown in the second season. And his face, when he just looks at something is give him all the awards, put him on Mount Rushmore. And that face of disappointment is the show to me. And it feels so experiential that it's just unlike anything else on TV. It's wild how much television there is. and there's so little life on television. That's what I'm saying.

And that's what this show is. It feels so lived in. Not necessarily real all the time. No. But it feels real, because it speaks to an experience of poverty on many senses. Yeah. I mean, obviously, people are flashing money

occasionally on the show, but lack of opportunity, lack of money, just lack of everything that is baked into the characters and the social strata that the show is set in. It feels artistic. profound to me when I watch it. So I wanted to ask you about the New Yorker profile,

just because there was a big conversation topic, and people can check out Cam and Justin talking about it on damage control too. I've been asked by plenty of people, not to be like everybody's coming up and asking me about this. My opinion is that I can't tell if Donald Glover was fucking a tad friend. Sure, but I think that's also part of the fun. I mean, look, I think an essential companion piece to this New Yorker profile, and sorry to make this podcast

like sponsored by the ringer or something. But the Rob Harvilla piece about Donald Glover that you guys put up the other day is great because it mirrors a lot of my own experience with him, which is you read this piece by Tad Friend and you're reading the way Donald Glover talks about himself about his abilities and his talent and how he's basically messianic at this point.

Yeah, he's like a computer program who can copy behaviors and is so talented. He's the T-1000. Yeah. And you read this and I'm like, well, he's full of shit and he's crazy, but also maybe he's the most important artist working today. and can it be both?

And I really appreciated that Harvilla in his piece is like, Childish Gambino was bad. Those albums were bad. And that the apprenticeship took place in public, which is different than the way artists used to really work. Exactly.

We've spent a lot of time framing the debate about the emergence of artists these days being like, oh, we're so lucky because we were before live journal, our college newspapers where we were doing record reviews aren't available. We didn't have to fail so loudly in public

and does that curtail an artistic journey. Donald Glover's arc suggests the opposite that there is some validity to doing your 10,000 Malcolm Gladwell hours in public, because look, the work speaks for itself, you know, I mean, it's pretty incredible the ride he's on right now, and I have no reason to doubt him. The profile is great because it really explains on a lot of different levels, not just how TV sausages get made, but celebrity sausage and music and careers. I also really appreciated the way he went right at the elephant in the room of race and how it has played in Donald Glover's career

on his relationship to the network and his relationship to the larger world. The show's relationship to it, you know, is this Black Seinfeld? What does that even mean? The extra layer of expectation that comes baked in when, you know, as Kenya Barris,

who's the showrunner of Blackish says, and his quotes in the piece, you know, if I screw up, I'm screwing up for the culture. It's been a secondary debate about Black Panther. What if it was bad? What if it was bad, exactly. Nobody would have treated it like it was Thor Dark World, but they wouldn't have made a Thor Ragnarock.

That's right. It's a great point. Thank you also for saying the full title of Thor Dark World and Thor Ragnar. You're disdainful of colons. I think it's a really impressive piece. It's an impressive performance by Glover. It's an impressive performance by Tad Friend. We don't actually know if they were collaborating on the same article, but I like the article that came out of it.

Sure. And, you know, so if you read this and your takeaway from this is, boy, look at all the shade he's throwing at FX. I don't see that because FX puts the show on the air. FX empowered him to make this show. I mean, I don't see anybody coming out of this poorly, except maybe Lena Dunham. Yeah.

It kind of reminded me a little bit of, I guess, Jesus-era Kanye, maybe even before that, a little pre-that. Well, we famously hate that. What? Jesus-era-Ga-Gne. We kind of love that. The way in which he... I just wonder if he had interviewed him on a Wednesday

if he would have said the same things he talked about on a Tuesday. Let's put it this way. He did name his son legend. Right. Right. So, and the stuff about the basketball stuff where he's just like, I was okay. Yeah. I decided I need to not suck.

Yeah. So I basically practiced as hard as I could until I didn't suck and I could pretend that I was good. And that's a very candid way of talking about, I mean, it's an almost, there's an app for that way of talking about genius and talent and skill and craft and art and sports or whatever. And that's usually you can't get that far in life by faking it, or at least we tell it. tell ourselves that. At least we don't like it when our heroes or the people that we love say, I'm faking it. We don't like to see them sweat. We don't like to see the effort.

This goes back to what you're saying about the Harvilla thing, is that he is a different kind of person. Now, I actually don't really care about the whole Childish Gambino side of this. I mean, the music part about it is sort of tertiary to my entire appreciation of Donald Glover. Atlanta is so far and away the most important thing I've ever seen him do.

but I find him a fascinating character for sure. And you can take issue with certain the distance with which Tad Friend seems to be approaching this subject at various points. Well, I think considering who Tad Friend is and his age, it's fair. Yeah, but I think that what happens is that to me, sometimes the best profiles

are not actually endorsements or takedowns. They are kind of these ruminations, and their meditations on a subject. And I really enjoyed reading this piece. I mean, it was a very fast multi-thousand-word read, for sure. Yeah, I think people should check it out, but I think the most important thing is, look, this show is back. It's so great that this show is back.

I wish other shows, I don't want them to copy it. I just want them to take a minute, sit with it, think about it, and learn from it. This is a good way to go forward. So I want to talk a little bit about, we'll talk about McMafia the first episode now. I think we'll continue to hit it from time to time. Yeah, we're going to preview.

review McMafia and then after the break Looming Tower. Is that how we're going to go? Yeah, well, McMafia, the first episode came out earlier this week on Monday. So let's just quickly go through that because I think you liked it. I loved it, but we can hit it more in depth and then we'll talk about Looming Tower afterwards. Did you like it? Dude, what did you think? I mean, I've kind of

been big up in this show for a while. What did you think? So just to remind people, this is on AMC Monday nights. It's a co-production. It was a very expensive British show. It's filmed impressively, apparently all over the world, based on a nonfiction book from 2008, I believe, with the same title, talking about the rise of global crime syndicates. And this story set with a family of Russian emigrays to London,

who left behind a shady past, and the shady past comes calling. James Watkins and Hussein Amini adapted the book. Yes. And it stars James Norton. James Norton, David Stratharine, yeah. James Norton, who sounds like the air to a computer security dynasty and acts with about as much charisma. Yeah. My take on this show, so you're very, very hype on this. Yeah, I think I agreed with almost every single thing that Alison Herman wrote about it, which was that it is the-all-I-saw.

I'm psyched on that. It's the successor to the night manager, and it's big little lies for dudes. I think that's fair. I watch this and immediately, I mean, you're right, it ticks many, many, many pleasure boxes in terms of a global crime show. There's intrigue. I love the way it looks. I love the reach of it.

And I do appreciate that it is based on a nonfiction book. So it is attempting to illustrate something, even while it is basing the narrative in a particular story. My issue with it is essentially the story that it's basing everything in and this family is not so compelling to me, mainly because I think this lead actor is, I would relate him to this table. I would maybe cast him as this table that we're talking about. He's been divisive.

I mean, if you look at all like, this show's already aired in England, And if you read through comments and recaps, it's a very divisive performance. I think it's tough because the show is basically trying to riff a little bit on The Godfather. The main character that he plays, Alex Godman, is separate and apart from his family's Shady Pass. He's doing well as a hedge fund manager, and then he's drawn into this shady underbelly, and he seems to have a knack for it. Right. I'm less interested in seeing this hedge fund manager get scuffed up a little bit. I find him uninteresting at the beginning, and then I find his descent into this world also not particularly compelling.

the show itself dramatically got me. Like, I'm into it. I enjoyed watching it. And in the way that you said, like I watched the first half hour on Monday, and I wasn't sure, then things pick up considerably once caviar is served. Yes, we'll just put it that way.

I'll put it that way. And the next thing, anyway, I found myself watching the next two. So I have, I am in. I sound more reserved than I probably am because I'm enjoying it. I really do love the fact that they had the budget to go to Dubai,

to go to India, to go to Russia. There are these little performances, sneaky performances on the side, like the guy who plays Alex's father, who is a star of a bunch of Russian films that did well of the art house films like Leviathan, who I think has now offended Russia more

than the Democratic senators on the Intelligence Committee by his comments. Have you seen this? No. He was basically like Russia is not a good country anymore. Oh, really? Yeah. It's kind of a wild thing to say. Shout to you, Leviathan. Yeah. I like those things on the side.

the David Stratharine part, I mean, I like the check actor. Here's the thing I'm into about. So let me just say, my big picture thing is this fits almost too neatly into my recent theory that I'm developing that this is, we're kind of in this B-minus era, where I wish it was better. Boy, look how lucky we are to have this. But if you had cast it a little bit differently, if you had, maybe people weren't busy, it's just a limited talent pool that could have elevated this material from being something

not just serviceable, but very entertaining and well done, to something maybe transcendent. Yeah. So I think that this is not a new kind of project. People have been, they've been doing it since Sieriana. They were doing it before Sieriana, where you basically try to take something that's in the water, something that is a headline, is something that people are talking about, whether it's the rush for oil money in the Middle East or in this case. It's the, or traffic.

Basically the Russian mafia diaspora, you know, and what it means, and what this interconnected world means to the underline. underworld. And that's the thing that fascinates me about the show. The family drama is the family drama. I personally enjoy it. I think it's rendered fine. You know, I don't, I don't, I, would it be slightly different if James Norton was more fired up? I don't know, but I also don't know that it would have really been appropriate for the character. Do we have these bottles on set with us? These are vodka bottles, yes. Because the one thing I must say is my man's father just, just stays slugging stolly out of the Poland Springs bottle.

Yeah. Like with deep gulps. I think that as the season goes on, you'll see that it actually gets pretty far into both the superficial and the real ways in which it's weird to be an immigrant in London, a rich immigrant in London, when you actually feel part of or not part of a country and a homeland. And that winds up being a theme throughout the season. I guess we should say, here comes a spoiler, it's a shame that Boris leaves us so fast. Because he's actually the most alive character.

David Denchick, who's this great actor who was really, really compelling in Top of the Lake China Girl that was on last year, really steals the show early on and then exits the show pretty early on. And that's a shame because you're right. I mean, he is just, he's on another level. And when you think he's going to be part of the show, it adds the human drama to what is otherwise a chilly drama about people as pawns. Sure. But, you know, it's also, I got to say, it is interesting to watch this show, and this leads into our conversation about Looming Tower, which we'll have in a moment. The world feels scarier. I'll say, I'll use an eye statement.

I feel like the world is a scarier place recently. You know, whatever privilege needs to drop from my eyes, sure. Sure. So when we're talking about, like, a Russian criminal influence on the world due to unchained capitalism, it strikes a chord. And so when I'm watching the show. You don't even have to nail it that specifically. It can just be the impact at clicking a button on the, computer can have on the world, which is another thing that really is a major part of this show,

is just the idea that this movement of money through these shadow accounts can somehow influence thousands and millions of people's lives. Yes, and I'm glad you pointed that out, because there's a common criticism I would make between these two shows that I don't even think we intended to link in terms of reviewing them, but it kind of makes sense. Sometimes I wish both shows had been a little bit more aware of the power of what they were playing with, and to hadn't felt the very TV need to gild the lily. And what you're speaking to, there are repeated moments in McMafia where our man Alex clicks his mouse, money is moved, and then we physically see the money go into a duffel bag and be handed to someone at a port in Mumbai. And all of a sudden

that abstract act is made real. That is a very powerful idea and worthy of dramatization and itself worthy of, I mean, that's enough. You know what I mean? And I think the show then runs in 100 different directions because it wants to have more and more and more give us more context or we need to see someone being thrown off a building, you know, which is always fair. Sometimes you do need to see that. Right. But it does start to feel like one of those shows where the parts of it that I'm most interested in are zooming past me as the car drives down at Backstreet in Prague to throw someone off of a car mall mall. Okay. You're in a McMafia and you want to revisit. Oh yeah, I've already, I've watched it. I highly recommend it. I think it gets better as it goes along. Tell people why. I just,

I feel like I don't want my last word on this because you've seen more. Get people to stay on the train. I think that his, you alluded to his dissent, it very much follows the godfather arc, you know, and I think that if you're hoping for, you know, that he's going to go back to regular hedge fund managing soon he's not going to. I definitely, it makes me want to ask my kids to start calling me Papa. Papa, yeah.

In a very gentle voice. No Papa. I think that his arc, even though his performance might be, might be, have some problems. I think the character's arc is really quite thrilling to watch. Interesting. Yeah, so check it out. Maybe we'll hit it back in a few weeks.

We're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, and then we'll talk about Looming Tower. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Caviar. Andy, life is too short for bad food, for mediocre delivery, for settling for what they're slinging down the street. You're hungry for something better. So let Caviar deliver. Caviar brings you quality eats like Suvla in San Francisco,

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and the Netflix model where you put out 14 things a week. Hulu is somewhere in the middle. They have this incredible library, obviously. They keeps people coming, but they are building up their original content, whether it's The Path, whether it's Handmaids, like we said. And Looming Tower is probably the biggest profile thing they've done ever. I don't even know if they thought that Handmaids was going to be their... No, this was their big play.

Yeah. So based on one of the great... nonfiction books I've ever read, honestly. Did you read it? By Lawrence Wright. Yeah. Uh, booming tower. And it, it really goes a long way when you, when you think about what the book does that the show does not do. I am, I'm not a fan of this show. Yeah. Um, I remember when I first started getting into freelance writing when I was really young. And there was a thing that would often happen. I know it happened to you too, especially when there was like fewer magazines and fewer outlets to write for. So there was this idea that you had to,

your ideas had to compete for space. And, um, one of the things you'd always hear back from an editor, maybe after our first draft, or maybe even just when you were pitching an idea, was, why this, why now? I don't think that that's getting asked enough in television anymore. 100%. I think it's either sounds good,

or we've attached these people, let's go forward with it, or it's we'll figure it out once we get the ball rolling. And television actually has this unique opportunity to do all these different things with visual storytelling that the movies can't do and to see it in the case of Looming Tower

reverting to an almost pre-prestige model of storytelling the same way that I feel like Waco did as well where it's kind of just like we haven't thought this through beyond we got a couple of people to play roles you might recognize or circle things that you might recognize

and we're just going to kind of take it from there and have it be a docudrama. Yes. It's like, I'll just watch 48-hour mystery, man. Like, I don't really know what we're doing here. Why would you get Michael Stolberg and Peter Sarsgaard and Jeff Daniels and tell the story about the infighting between the FBI and the CIA in the years leading up to 9-11 and just treat it as if it's this kind of like office procedural and have the performances

by these incredible actors be so generic and the writing be so generic. And there are a lot of people behind the camera and in front of the camera that I love. And I can't kind of comprehend how much this missed. And to base it off of a book that did so much to help us understand this moment. How we got there.

And to understand not only what was happening in the West, but what was happening in the Middle East and the things that, the little things that created all of this and these decisions that people made and the sociopolitical movements that led to these horrific events and it kind of yada yada that into Jeff Daniels

walking into a lanes and being like oh is that a gun in your pocket are you happy to see me? It's like that kind of shit it's just sort of like why bother who is there to say why this why now Lawrence Wright was involved in this I know I'm not trying to knock Lawrence Wright

I mean like I'm not trying to knock give me I'm not trying to knock anybody involved in this personally it's really just more frustrating because I'm like you guys could have done something very special Yes. I very much agree with you. I think I have more time for the show than you do, but not with any great passion. I know nothing about the origins of this project or how it went down, how it ended up on Hulu, how it was developed. But I think that there clearly was a failure of development here. Yeah. I think those questions weren't asked enough. But I also think based on nothing but from watching the show, there is a real aroma of notes in this, which is surprising. because Dan Futterman, who wrote it, wrote Capote,

worked on in treatment. A very talented writer. I mean, you and I are both in agreement. The people involved here are an All-Star team. We'd want to see projects written by, directed by, developed from, starring almost all of these people. But what's strange about it, and this relates to my point from McMafia

where maybe they don't understand the power of what they have and they feel the need to put hang lanterns on it, make it clear, make it more TV-like. The example I'll use from the show is this. The Watch All-Star Bill Camp is in the show with an all-time mustache. You put him as a rumpled FBI guy working in the New York office in the 90s,

yes, I buy it. I mean, his performance, just a few scenes he's in in the beginning of the first episode, and the first three are available now on Hulu, we should say, are enough to make me believe everything he's doing in where he is. He's that good, and his presence is that strong. He goes to Nairobi to invest. investigate something.

While there, he has a pleasant interaction with a beautiful black woman who is a CIA operative working in Nairobi. We learn in the second episode or subsequently that she has slept with him. And there's been a one-night stand. And then when there is a terrorist attack, sorry, spoiler, but it's history, on the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, and he goes back to investigate, he is desperately searching for this woman that he slept with. And it is so insane to me that they've added this subplot. First of all, you don't need this. You're talking about global terrorism. You don't need this. We understand.

We feel terribly about people who died in this attack. Yeah. If you just show this woman that he's had this moment with she helped him in the office, we worry about her. We don't need to worry about her because she slept with this rumpled paintbrush of a man that she just met. And It is just idiotic, frankly, storytelling, and it's beneath everybody involved that they've wedged this in. It simply doesn't make sense. You don't need to earn our trust. We believe that these people should not have been blown up in a terrorist attack. And there's that element to this whole project that is bewildering to me.

Jeff Daniels stars as a real life. John O'Neill. Very compelling character. Whose own life story arc, which I won't say, even though, again, it's available on Wikipedia, because I'm sure the show will tell us this, is almost preposterous. When you read about his life. And in the book, he is described as this larger-than-life figure, and there are things that he does in the first episode, the first two episodes, and you're watching,

and you're like, this is insane. Like, nobody who worked in the FBI wore double-breasted suits and loafers like this and acted like a Corleone or like a New York fixer. I mean, he is, he is almost larger than life. Well, they seem to have written as the character note, what if Will McAvoy from the newsroom, but he fucks? Right.

Because it's super weird. Again, there's these, the second episode, I'm getting into it, and I was enjoying it. And I was getting into it and enjoying it because there are moments in the show when it strips away, not history, but pretense. And I'm like, okay, you're doing a procedural. You're doing a cop show. And the interesting tension that I believe does derive from the book is the tension between the CIA who get a lot of blame and credit, speaking of Zero, Dark 30, for everything that happened in the war on terror. But the tension between the CIA and the FBI who are attempting to investigate all this also. And the FBI were trying to run it like a police investigation, and the CIA were treating it like...

An intelligence operation. But not just that, but like a... But the FBI were 20th century investigators and the CIA were trying to predict a much darker 21st century even before we got there. That collision is interesting. So seeing Daniels' team piece this together like police work, that's great. But then midway through the second episode, there's this bizarre music cue where we're hearing like Arabic music but with a hip-hop beat. And then it cuts to Daniels just grinding, just putting in his... over time, over a young woman that he's not married to.

And I don't know what we're doing here. I literally don't know what we're watching. We don't have time for this, but we don't have time for either because we're trying to be everything to all people, which, to go full picture back to what you were saying at the beginning, that's what TV used to be. Right. TV is so old-fashioned again all of a sudden. TV was everybody's baby the rescue of Jessica McClure.

Yes. That's what this is. And that literally is what this is. But there are glimpses where you see the budget or you see Bill Camp or this interesting French Algerian actor To Harah Rahim, who's in The Last Panthers. A show that you love. A show that you love.

Incredible, yeah. And then you see him, I guess the thing is, I enjoyed watching these two episodes. I might watch a few more. But like with everything we've been talking about recently, except Atlanta, I'm just a little disappointed. There's a scene in early on that is set at one of my favorite secret West Village restaurants, mustache,

which just has great, great, great PETA, by the way, which you see. And you talk about shows being set somewhere. I'm like, yeah, I went there in 1998 in Manhattan. It's a real place. That's wonderful. But then a few minutes later, the character that he's playing, who's a real FBI agent, who went through a lot of this,

has to have a big, like, hashtag not all Muslims scene in London. Because we need to underline this and underscore it. And the show is working so hard to get us places where we don't need to go. And it's frustrating. And I think one of the deeper frustrations is, can we get a show tethered to reality in any way that can transcend the bonds of Wikipedia?

What I mean is a John O'Neill type character who bucks the system but divorce him from reality, focus on him, that's a show. Yeah. You know, stay in one place. If you're going to cut out

all the stuff from the Egyptian prisons that created... Isn't that what a character says in an airplane? That created the forces that led to this in the first place. If you're going to cut out the character from Luming Tower, the book, who travels to Colorado in his youth and is exposed to the West, but then winds up retreating back to the Middle East, there's all this built-in history that this show could have played with.

But if you're going to cut that stuff out, cut it all out and choose one person. Do John O'Neill. And I have to say, you know, I think we've been spoiled over the last five or six years, where even your sort of standard Netflix procedural, or even something like dark, which looks like a billion dollars. Just euros. It's right. And it's quite a time.

It's your basic conversation scene is directed with enough technical virtuosity that you don't realize you're watching a TV show. And you do when you're watching Looming Tower. There are scenes where there are guys in the conference room, where there's a bunch of people in a conference room. and I like a bunch of Alex Gibney's documentaries. Oh, I know what you're saying. There's like, it'll be like Jeff Daniels being like,

oh, you fucking kidding me? Get out of here! And it's like, and then it waits on him for another two seconds. And I'm like, this isn't, what's going on here? It's just like very standard flat direction, which I think probably was a choice to say, hey, we want to make this almost like it's a documentary. Want to make it like it's there.

But it's actually, if you overdo that, you rob the show of drama. There's, there is. There are a couple moments like that. They go a little further. When Bill Camp arrives back in Nairobi, he's just acting the hell out of it. I mean, I buy him when he's on screen.

And then he gives some instructions to one of his subordinates, and the guy looks like a Calvin Klein model whose last appearance was on Marvel's agents of Shield. I'm like, no, no, sorry, no. That's a TV actor. That is a broadcast network TV actor. I do not buy that he is on the FBI away team in Nairobi. actor needs to look like Shea Wiggum, but you need to like give it some thought.

Yeah. And it's strange the holes that it fell into. I think that what we're coming up against again and again, and this isn't the sexiest hook for what our podcast has been over the last few weeks as we've been trying to talk more, engage more directly in TV week to week, is TV has gotten so much bigger, but it does seem to have forgotten the value of being small. Now, not small in your imagination, not small in your rigor, your attention to detail. But the lesson from Atlanta isn't get Lando Calrissian to do a comedy. The lesson of Atlanta is let someone who has a point of view cook. Let him hire his friends, if need be, develop it. And again, I don't want to make it seem like this emerged like a phoenix just from the ashes of whatever the Glover brothers were smoking that night.

This show was developed. You know, they even talk about in the New Yorker story about how, the Trojan horse diversion of the show The notes process that they went through. Sure, they did. And they talk about things that are the same kind of like pre-prestige ideas that I'm talking about. Like this character needs a win. What does he want?

Yeah. But Paul Sims from News Radio is an executive producer on the show. There's DNA there. But the bigger thing is they went specific and then they exploded it into a galaxy. And TV has been reaching for bigger and bigger and bigger hooks. from recent history, from, you know, as evidenced by what Amazon just did, the works of Tolkien.

Yeah, it's using history as a concept. It's like what's the high concept? The high concept is history. The high concept is people remember this. The high concept is we can retell something that they have kind of a nostalgia for or a reminiscence of, but we'll fill in the blanks with famous actors.

Yeah, and, you know, Waco, which you mentioned correctly as an analog to this, had an idea. I think the show wanted to be... It has ideas. The show more wanted to be about how we ended up in this place of militarization

in law enforcement, among other things. But it also had to tick boxes of the historical record or it felt that it had to. Yeah, and also the raid starts in the second episode. So it's four episodes of the standoff,

which of course would be the major part of the show. But if you spend one hour with people before this stuff happens, you're only going to have X amount of an investment in the characters. It's super weird. Like SARS-Gard,

mention is on the show playing a not just mustache but full beard twirling CIA villain. It's just deeply uninteresting to me that he's so cartoonish and bizarre, just a bizarre choice. I got to give shouts to Stoelbarg, though. Because when that guy came out on the scene in Coen Brothers is a serious man, I was like, respect to this respected theater actor, just putting it on for nebishes everywhere. I'm like, who knows what his career will be like. Turns out he will work more than anyone. anyone. I mean, that guy has had quite a year. He is in everything. Yeah. And I was very surprised to see him on this as counterterrorism is Richard Clark. He is in Call Me By Your Name this year, which is one of the Oscar nominated films. Let's quickly... Was that your segue? Yeah. That was a good one. Thanks, man. I'm, you know, it's... Have you been doing podcasts in your spare time getting your Donald Glover reps? I can't know if you can tell. Give me one shocking surprise that you think could happen on Sunday. I will have watched all the nominated films by Sunday night.

Okay. It's been touching go. Thanks, Ebert. It has been a race to the finish line. Yeah. One shocking thing that I think? Yeah, give me, just throw one out there. I think it out is going to win Best Picture.

Okay. Is that still shocking? I haven't been reading it. No, that's like, that's the drumbeat now. It is? Yeah. God, I was really thought I was going to, I thought that was going to be that guy. It's preferential ballot.

It's, there's all sorts of reasons, but that, that was a couple weeks ago. There was a rumor about it, and now in the last couple days, it's really heated up. I mean, it is such a strange, crowded, but muddled field that it wouldn't surprise me. I mean, I don't know if there's conventional wisdom anymore, is what I mean. I think it has become a lot more, I mean, preferential ballot when you say that is a thing. Do you want to explain specifically? Yeah, it just means that if there's not, Sean did a really good, we did a bunch of videos about talking about conversations about it, so you can watch the one that Sean explains this pretty well in one of these. it essentially means that if one movie doesn't get more than 50% of the vote, essentially,

it starts wading it towards what got second place votes, what got third, you know, like that kind of thing. And that get out can be basically enough people's second place that it could win. Yeah, and I wonder, I don't, I mean, maybe Shape of Water really is this, like, industry phenomenon, but I don't see it. Guillermo del Toro is a truly gifted director I wouldn't be surprised if Nolan won for Dunkirk I just I don't there's no narrative in place that suggests that will happen I hope you're right about this that level of surprise because I think the acting

awards are pretty much locked up I am so angry already about McDormann and Rockwell yes Sam Rockwell he's been a guest on my podcast a kind guy on your podcast I guess back when it was the Andy Greenwood show. I thought about it for a minute. It's been folded in. It's fine.

It's in the mothership now. He's been on our podcast. Great guy, great actor, a garbage role in a trash movie. Like, I am so heated about this movie because I watched it this morning. But as people follow me on Twitter learned, I'm just, I'm truly shocked

because I thought that I was really ready to be on this. You know, look, it's just movies, man. Like, let's calm down about picking sides, hashtag sides. I don't really want a culture war over the best picture nominees. I don't think that's worthwhile. But I didn't realize that I think it's fundamentally a garbage movie because I think there's not a single genuine moment in it, not because... You think it has bad things to say about society. Well, I think that Martin McDonough has never set foot in America.

Has nothing interesting to say about it. His opinions on it have no value. It is set in a zero place with zero observed behavior or emotion. truth. Okay. I was stunned by it, but I also think it's clumsy storytelling that gives us nothing. Yeah, the political, like, is it politically incorrect and seems to love that? Yeah. And that's, that shit's real boring to me. But I really loved in Bruges, you know, I don't mind when characters say, say salty things. Yeah, I'm going to stop you there. That's not a good movie. But, but yeah, so I'm, so I'm really bummed when I see actors that I admire a lot. Yeah. And actors are

actors, you know, they do their best with material they're given. But McDormon, I mean, she's, She's fun. She's great to watch. But what is that part? It's just a bummer in a year with truly great performances surrounding them, you know, that that's probably going to happen. So I hope there are more surprises. Okay. Well, we will find out on Sunday. You can join me and Andy.

What's yours? Whoa. What about your surprise? My big surprise. You think Boss Baby is going to unseat Coco? It's not going to happen, but my surprise would be Lori McHaff beating Alice and Janie. See, I would love that too. It just doesn't sound like it's going to happen, but I think.

Do you know that Lori McHaff has been on our podcast? Yes. We talked to her together. Yeah. Allison Janie, no show. She just keeps, she keeps shutting us down. We requested the parrot.

Yeah. We couldn't even book that. I, Janie. Okay. Sunday, pre-show and post-show. Andy and I will be joined by Amanda and Sean. You can watch us on video with the pre-show. Video with the post show.

That post-show will also be the watch on Monday. Oh. But we've got some pretty cool stuff coming for you next week. Oh, yeah. We've got some people coming in. We've got some stuff to do. Yeah. So we're excited about next week.

Keep watching McMafia. your leisure. We'll figure out another show to do the chapter review of pretty soon. And we've got to get you guys a double down book club next week. We'll select one soon. Next week, we'll just, we'll pick one next week. All right. Until then, happy Oscars. Great job, Brans. See you Sunday. Hey guys. This is Sean Fennessey, the editor-in-chief of the Ringer. And I want to tell you about a podcast I host called The Big Picture. Each week, I welcome a different filmmaker to talk about their latest movie and how it was made. I've talked to the directors of some of my favorite movies, including Jordan Peel, Greta Gerwig, Ryan Johnson.

Barry Jenkins and dozens more. You can find new episodes on the Channel 33 feed every Friday by going to the ringer.com backslash podcasts or by subscribing to Channel 33 wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you'll check it out.