The Watch - Processing a Monster Opening Weekend for 'It' and Amazon’s Recent Shift (Ep. 184)

Episode Date: September 11, 2017

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald unpack the $80 million opening weekend for ‘It,’ while considering what makes a good horror film and which Stephen King IP projects are still primed for adaptation (0:30). Later, they discuss Amazon’s sudden content shift (22:00) and their early impressions of 'Top of the Lake: China Girl' and 'The Deuce' (32:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio. He just got back from the annual meeting of the Losers Club. It's in at Greenwald. It's actually quarterly now.

Oh, is it? Do you guys have dues there? Is that? We pay a dues. By being a loser, we pay our dues daily. That is a dope reference to, It, the blockbuster horror film sweeping the nation. Shocked by this.

Are you shocked? Well, we can get into that. A little bit. It's Monday. We just want to say, actually, at the top of the show, obviously, we talk a lot about fun stuff. We talk about peak TV, the peaks and valleys of TV and pop culture here. But our thoughts are definitely with those affected by Hurricane Irma this weekend.

It was terrible. Watched a lot of coverage this weekend and hoping everybody stay safe down there and that The recovery is swift. Keep Houston in your thoughts in prayers. Keep Florida in your thoughts in Paris. Absolutely. Moving into the pop culture stuff. The biggest story coming out of this weekend was definitely the fact that this horror movie about a clown made almost $80 million.

Who is ready for some takes from a guy who didn't see the movie? Biggest. I saw it. I know. I meant from me. I love having a discussion with you when you're like, I haven't seen it. But we can do it anyway because I want to get your takes on a couple of things here. I've got thoughts.

It made $80 million almost this. weekend domestically. And it is like straight, it's like a hard horror movie. Like it is a like a kid gets his arm bitten off in the first 10 minutes. It's for real. And I think that if this has had such a fascinating development process that we can break this down in a lot of different ways. It's always interesting to me, typically what happens when a movie like it that had such a tumultuous kind of development process, when you get it to the theater, it tends to generally perform according to how rough or smooth it took to get it there. Often.

And often does. This has been obviously a huge success despite the fact that Carrie Fuganooga had been attached to the project for many years. Wrote a script has a screenplay credit. Andy Machete came in and replaced him after Fugganaga walked away from the project. It had been

not unlike Dark Tower, also been debated about, like, are we going to do this as like a movie and then a series or a series and then a movie? Is there going to be, how many components to this is there going to be? At the end of the day, they decided to make they broke it up, whereas it the book, I think, covers obviously quite a long period of time. A thousand-page book, I remember.

It's a classic Stephen King, 80s. Brick. Ellis from Die Hard type writing experience. For real. This one is just the kids. They updated the story so that it's set in 1988, so when they jump ahead 27 years later in the sequel, which is all within the book, it will be more contemporary. This is just the first part? It is just the first part.

Wow. kids. Just the kids. It's the it expanded universe. Yeah, but you know what? The it IP, if you will. Yeah, but I would say for as much as it's just about the kids, this is a movie for adults. Oh. Because it's pretty violent. And I think, you know, when I was going into it, there had been some people who had been saying like, oh, this harkens back to like early 80s, pop horror, Spielberg, Tobe Hooper, like, Poultergeist, a little bit of Jaws in there, like that kind of feeling. Fright Night or is that too funny? Fright Night? It's a little bit too comical. There's some funny bits in this movie. right night's about as deep as I went. Yeah. I will say this.

Here's my review. I'm ready. It was too scary. And I don't mean that because I was scared. I just mean that the success of horror movies for me are a lot. A lot of it has to do with what's happening in between the jump thrills, you know, in between the scares. That's what people say about pornography.

Just a classic thing to say. I'm there for the stories. Is that pizza going to get delivered? I want to know. It's getting cold. So this movie starts out and doesn't stop with just like scene after scene after scene of don't go down there. Oh my God, don't go down there. Oh my God, that clowns in the sewer.

Which is another kind of pornography. I don't know. I can send you a link later. Dark web. So dark. I think that horror is successful because of what happens in between the scares. And it actually suffocates itself with too many scares. There's actually not that much suffocation in it for what it's worth.

but there's just a lot of scene after scene after scene of some terrible thing happening. And not even always with the clown. Like there's these town bullies. They're harassing these kids and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, just like this movie is really good. I always remember, I personally don't think it's as great as it's box office number would suggest it might be. But it is a very well-made movie that does manage to sustain interest over the course of two hours and 15 minutes, I think.

So I'm kind of coming out mixed on it. I personally as a horror fan was a little bit mixed on it. I think as a movie fan, I understand it's success. Yeah, well, I think the best takeaway from successes like this are often the second takeaway you mentioned. It's not this is a triumph of cinema, and we should ape every artistic choice made in it, but rather this was well done.

Yeah. And let's try and make things that are well done in the future. And that's the lesson that never gets learned. Yeah, I think it's notable that they did not try to PG-13 this, and they just have like the kids curse all the time the blood is like very it's a very graphic film yeah um and you know it's it was just kind of like i was trying to remember when you were a kid because the funny thing about these kids all being like 11 or 12 or whatever in 88 is like that's what we were yeah my god did you ride bikes a lot did you like ride bikes with kids around the neighborhood a lot uh

i rode bikes a lot yeah maybe with like one or two kids yeah i didn't really have a gang um but i definitely did ride bikes around the neighborhood. That was a thing to do. Were there parts of the town that you weren't allowed to go to on your bike? I was the sort of kid who wouldn't have pushed and tried to find out. Oh, really? No, but there were a secret plate. I think it was, that is a very potent idea, at least still for our generation. The idea, I remember there were like places that you could only get to by bike. There was like an alleyway behind the drugstore and the pizza place that you could go in the back door and like get a slice or a vanilla Coke or whatever.

Like that was the topography. Yeah. They had vanilla Coke? They had a soda fountain in the house. the pharmacy. This is, I grew up in 1950, by the way. Fun story, I'm immortal. There was a pharmacy and they still had a soda fountain and they would make, they would take a soda fountain. Didn't you grow up like 20 minutes for me? Yeah, dude, this was, this was, what's the name of the pharmacy? It was on, uh, Harford Avenue and Manoa. And they had like a soda fountain there. Yeah,

wow. Small. Damn. Boy, it tasted real good. Yeah. It was sweet. Anyway, but these are the sort of things you could, you know, freedom was not unlimited, but the small amount of freedom you got when you got wheels, such as you did, was a very powerful thing. And that's, you know, that is part of the appeal of stranger things of it, I would imagine, having not seen it. Well, they do a good job of showing haunted spaces. Like, I remember when I was a kid, we used to play stickball, like, off Lombard Street somewhere. Oh, you grew up in the 50s, too. Yeah, no, we would play, like, it wasn't stick ball, like, with a stick.

It was basically, like, we used the yellow wiffle ball bat, but we would stuff it with newspaper to make it, like, heavier and have more impact. That sounds like prison rules. And then we played with either, you know, those pink rubber balls or a tennis ball. And, but, you know, every once in a while we hit the ball into this underground parking lot that was there. And the rumor was that there was guarded by a Rottweiler. I don't think I've ever saw it. But there was just like a lot of like, you know, you'd run down into this dark place. And like, if you didn't go, you know, you were, you were ridiculed, honestly.

But I think that that's speaking to something that Stephen King always understood, which is the richest parts of your imagination. are formed in childhood. And that is a, you know, tell me if I'm wrong. A lot of this is coming from my opinion about horror films, a genre I do not engage with. Yeah. But if you look at movies like Friday the 13th and Scream, there are all these essays written about or people making the connections that, you know, it's the fear of teenage sexuality and it's about becoming a grown-up in a scary world, those are very interesting themes

and clearly have produced a lot of movies that people have liked or been scared of. But I don't know if that is as innate. to all of us as don't ride your bike down there? I think that there, Cam wrote about this when he was, he wrote his review on The Ringer last week and he was talking more about the book, but about, you know, how it reflected the time in which it was written, even though this book was set in the 50s, it had a lot of stuff in there about 80s era, Reagan era, like AIDS fear and a lot of stuff. And I think that horror movies have a tendency, I don't always buy like, that nightmare

on Elm Street is about teenage, the sort of terror of teenage sexuality as much as, or Friday the 13th is, as much as it has, you take it out of the vacuum and it's like, that was a movie that was made in a particular time in history and why was that movie exciting for people, you know? And I always, and I think the farther way you get from some of these horror movies, the more interesting it is to watch something like Friday the 13th, because you think about like this was a pre-information age time of like when fear could grow out of last. of information. Urban legends.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You could tell people like, there was a, in Philly, I remember there was this whole thing about, like, remember Taney Park? Sure. There was like the Taney Gang. Yeah. Did you ever hear about that?

Yeah, my mom worked near there. Right. Your mom worked near there. Like, I'm sure your mom was not like really watching out for the Taney gang because like apparently one kid got his bike stolen. And it lasted for like eight years. It was like, don't go at Taddy Park. Don't go in Taney Park.

It was nice. It's a really nice part. Yeah, it was pretty cool, actually. Still is. Yeah. Maybe the people who hung out there. But that stuff just like. invented it to keep you away.

And I actually, the only time that I got jumped in Philly were like three blocks from my house. Really? Yeah. You got jumped? Yeah, you know, like jumped. Like, give me your baseball cleats.

Maybe they didn't like the way you stuffed your bat. Let me say a couple things here. I want to just say a few words in favor of the miniseries hive. Sure. The only Pennywise we recognize. Did you see that? Is Tim Curry. Yeah, I did.

I watched that on ABC television in 1990. Well, I have to say, I would have put some more checks on what you could and couldn't watch in the early. 80s and early 90s. I had unfettered access to the American broadcasting company in 1990. Did you watch Miami Vice? Twin Peaks. Miami Vice, I saw a couple times when there was a sleepover and you kept the TV on late.

Yeah. That was past my bedtime when that was on late 80s. That was like a 10 p.m. show. But it, I mean, think about the cast. I mean, we talk about prestige TV, Peak TV. It miniseries had Harry Anderson. Still trailing flames like an NBA jam player from Nightcourt. Okay.

It had young set. It was actually just his magic tricks that he would do. Had young Seth Green. Yeah. It had John Ritter. Ritter, that's right. I believe weeps at one point due to the terror of this clown. Yeah.

Anyway, I just remember it being okay. Look, I'm not actually repping for that. I think what's fascinating to me about this before we move on, twofold. You mentioned it in terms of a, not tortured, but a long development process. The reason why that's a red flag to me, or could be or should be a red flag, is the reason why the Dark Tower was made. The reason why it was made is because we are still in the dregs of the great IP scramble of the 20 teens, meaning the movies became one thing when Marvel exploded, which was we need to be blockbuster, we need to be franchise, we need to have these linked universes. We need to take advantage of preexisting intellectual property.

And so the Kingverse has, despite sitting there forever, was ripe for the picking. So all of those projects immediately were plunged back into development. you got the sense of the Dark Tower, which completely flamed out this year, much like Harry Anderson after Nightcourt, that they were going to make that movie regardless. It really didn't matter what the movie was. They were so dead set on making a movie with the name The Dark Tower that this weird thing that was released still born in the theaters is almost irrelevant. What's interesting to me about it was that whoever stayed on top of this, whether it was the producers or whether it was, Fukunaga's chem trails that he left behind the project, whatever, or the new guy, Andy Musgetty, they stayed true to it.

They had a vision for this movie, good or bad, and apparently it was good. Okay, so that said, the second thing that's amazing to me is how wildly successful it was and how suddenly it seemed to be inevitable that it would be successful. Going from being troubled to, now, there are a couple things that we know. When horror movies have good word of mouth, they tend to do well. There's two reasons to go to the, like, at the end of the day, there are two real reasons to go to the movie theater. Spectacles like Dunkirk

or scary movies like this. Like you can see anything there. It's great to see the big sick and a big screen with a bunch of people. But there's something about being in a theater full of people as that tension mounts in a horror thing that is pretty addictive. Yeah.

Like you can feel it. Still, this level of success, I think it's the highest grossing R-rated film opening weekend since Deadpool. And it would have been, I think it's now the number two or something like that. That's really surprising to me. And I wonder, and maybe we can talk to Sean Fennacy about this because he's tracking this.

He's the major domo of box office mojo these days. But like there was some talk this year that Rotten Tomatoes suddenly had an undo effect. Yeah, outside effect on box office. And so is the reverse true now? Is that the buzz was so positive and people are so just really want things that are good, just baseline good, that that carried us over the finish line? The Rotten Tomatoes thing, I think, is it's convenient because they've given it a statistic. they've given it a number that you can just be like,

this is, I have an idea in my head about where I want this to be and if it's below or above it, I'll see it or not see it. But my dad used to be a movie critic, and his reviews on Fridays were like, he would get phone calls from just regular readers being like, I disagreed or I went to this movie because you told me to and it was bad, or I didn't see this movie because you said it was, or I did see this movie,

but you said it was bad, but you were wrong. Like, this is just a new way of telling people whether or not they should do something and they're going to get upset or not about it. Now studios are upset because they think, well, there are a lot of people here who may not have read through a 500 word review or just would have taken our word for it that they should go see Hudson Hawk or something 30 years ago. Did your dad say that? No.

No. My dad was pretty bad about like genre movies, though. Four stars for Remains the Day, though. I remember that well. All day, every day, man. Great film, too. Merchant Ivory. We love Merchant Ivory.

It's how my house got built. Before you pivot, I have one question for you. I want to put a bow on the IT IP. Stephen King, so hot right now. Yeah. Castle Rock coming on Hulu. It's like the Stephen King verse show. Anthology show starring, I would say friend of the potty came on once.

Nice guy. Terrific. One of the best actors working, Andre Holland. Very excited about that. I just was curious, is there any piece of ephemera in the King IP universe that you are still hungering to see adapted? Yeah, you know, that's a really great question. I know we were talking about that the other day and it was like, oh, I can't believe they've have made like Tommy Knockers and there's a lot of good, uh, short stories that he's done.

And Sean actually was telling me, like he was like, you know, when you think about it, like a lot of his short stories are the basis for the best thing, the best movies that have been made of them. Like Shawshank? Yeah. Uh, and stand by me. The body, yeah. Do you have one?

Did you read a lot of Steve? No. And by the way, we didn't, we've never, I haven't watched Mr. Mercedes. Have you? I have not watched Mr. Mercedes. No, I don't have direct TV. I do. But I still haven't watched it.

I like, I like Brendan Gleason. It's just, to me, that's just a weird thing that there is a Stephen King show starring Brendan Gleason that just exists. I'm very excited for Castle Rock, to be honest. Castle Rock I'm excited about. I guess the thing that's interesting to me about it is one of the reasons the short stories have succeeded is because they are very compact and limited and then give a lot of opportunity for adaptation and for the creative voice of the filmmaker to come in and steer it through. For a long time, I think what hampered Stephen King's stuff from being adapted was that it has. had the perfect medium already. He is a very specific storyteller. He is a very, uh, verbose storyteller. His books are very, very long. Yeah. And he has a very specific voice. And when we

were in a world where TV shows were network TV shows and movies were two hours long, they didn't really fit into those boxes very well. So the thing that you were talking about, how is the dark tower going to be broken up into different medium? Is it going to be a movie franchise? As daunting as that can be, that does suggest ways to adapt things more creatively. I still love the stand. I love the book. I love the experience of reading the book. The only thing that I will say, though, why I am pessimistic about its chances to be adapted is the stand in many ways is the DNA of every major dystopian storytelling that we, I mean, there's threads of it in The Walking Dead. Certainly a huge influence on the passage, the Justin Cronin book series that we were big fans of

that's being adapted to a miniseries on Fox. Is it going to be a miniseries or just a straight series? Mini-series. Okay. But I think multi- gosh, talk about something that's gone through. Multi-year miniseries. And not just that, it was greenlit.

They filmed it and now they're redoing it. Oh, wow. It's been problematic, as they say. So it's weird. It's almost as if the moment is, at the moment when it is most suited for some of his most beloved work, it's been just sublimated into the culture to degree

that we might not need it. Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors and we'll be right back to talk a little bit about Top of the Lake, the deuce and also some shifts going on at Amazon. Are you calling Top of the Lake 2? Top of the Lake of the Deuce? Today's episode of the Watch is brought to you by Seekek. Andy,

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We'll get to that down the line. That wrapped up at second season this week. And then two new shows came out. One is the Deuce, which we've talked about kind of extensively. We had George Pelicanos on a couple weeks ago. He's one of the co-creators of the show with David Simon. And that was this pilot episode that aired on Sunday had been available on HBO go for a little while. And then Top the Lake China Girl is on Sundance.

I thought we agreed. Top of the Lake, colon, China, girl. I like hashtag TOTL. How's that? TOTL 2. Yeah. But I wanted to talk about this under the umbrella of an article that came out, I think, on Friday, in variety, which is about a philosophical shift at Amazon.

And Amazon is, we don't talk as much about Amazon shows as we do about Netflix shows. I don't think. and maybe Jeff Bezos has noticed that. I don't think that we're the barometer for this. He's a big fan of the watch. But I would say that Amazon had transparent and has catastrophe, and both are very lovely shows. Man in the High Castle, Bosch.

And Man in the High Castle and Bosch. I think those are the two sort of big ones. Goliath, a couple other, you know, like, but they do their odd, like, here's all the pilots. You guys let us know what you want us to make, but in reality, probably they're like, we know what we're making. Friday on the 8th, a piece went up on Variety about a new mandate coming from Seattle, from Jeff Bezos, that's basically like Find Me Game of Thrones.

That they want to have a conversation starting high-end drama that makes a global impact. And sort of along those lines, they have gotten rid of some shows. They got rid of Z, the beginning of everything, which was the Christina Ricci, Zelda Fitzgerald show that finished its first season. and that had been after the head of Amazon TV, Roy Price, had said, yeah, we're going forward second season, and then it was like, wait, no, we're not. This happened with Good Girls Revolt, too, a few months ago. Yeah, and I think they did this to the, was the last tycoon in Amazon show? Yeah.

So, could I be clear? The Fitzgerald verse is dead. Yeah, the dream is dead. If you want to know why this happened, let's just run the tape back and realize that they had just aired two F. Scott Fitzgerald dramas. Yeah. What were they doing? I don't know. I don't know.

What were they thinking? Now, there are a couple ways into this story. This is 100% this is true. Yeah. This is not just variety reported. This is something that I found out from meetings over there, that this was a subtle shift. And then that suddenly became a very forceful shift. So would you describe that shift?

So I think there's like a way to look at the story and just be like, this is a nothing burger. Because like, the idea of it big shows that can make the biggest difference around the world is like, sure. Yes. I think everybody would like those. But here's the difference. Yeah. Amazon has unlimited money. Yes.

And if you think about it, it's actually incredibly strange that one of the biggest companies in the world entered into a space as competitive as original television and did it with the highbrow reserve of merchant ivory to call them back. Yeah. They entered into television like an art house programmer. Yeah. Now, there's obviously very good things. can come from that. They made some very, very smart international co-branding deals, catastrophe, fleabag among them. They greenlit transparent, which had been in contention at HBO,

which immediately put them on a sort of cultural map, if not a national consciousness. It won them awards. It got them nominated. It got people interested in working with them. It was in terms of- Which can't be underplayed. And that's why you get to the point now where Matt Weiner is coming to them. They got Matt Weiner. They have this David O. Russell show with Robert De Niro and Julianne Moore coming. They got Woody Allen to make a TV show, regardless of what you think of it. I mean, their film division, which is not exactly what we're talking about, hired Ted Hope, who used to run Good Machine.

And, you know, they put out Manchester by the sea. There is an imprimatur of quality on the stuff that they're doing that is worthwhile and valuable to the world. But if you think about it, it's overall incredibly strange. that not just were they investing in smaller ceiling to pieces, which is a generous way of saying things that are never going to be nationally, internationally blockbuster. It's that they continue to do it in a way that seemed like a strategy, which leads them to green lighting, not one but two F. Scott Fitzgerald projects.

The ceilings of either are relatively low. So it makes sense that they want to play with the big ones. Yeah, and I think it's worth saying in the context of what's happening in the larger industry that, and I don't have any inside of information about this, but I would imagine that if I worked at Amazon and my job is to make decisions about stuff like this, I would hear the footsteps of Facebook and Apple coming. The Apple one is the big one. Because for a while, Amazon and Netflix seemed to have a checkbook, an unrivaled checkbook,

and when Facebook announces that they're going to spend a billion dollars on original content, and Apple has been making more and more noises about how they're getting into the content game. And think about the way Apple is getting into it. It's by hiring the heads, of Sony TV. Yeah. The heads of one of the largest independent studios who know how to make hit shows, who made everything from Breaking Bad to Community,

they are now in charge of TV for Apple. That is not just hanging a shingle saying open for business, that's throwing open the doors in a very major way. Right. And we're actually, I mean, and I'm sure that the folks over now, a lot of what's interesting about this variety thing is the, a lot of it is about the data that they've been pulling, the Amazon has been,

and they've kind of run this multi-year, experiment of putting out these shows and they kind of let I think the creative executives do their thing for a few years and now they're like look we're a data driven company we have access to incredible amount of droves of numbers about what people are watching when they're watching what they want to be watching more of and this there's like we're going to make a change creatively and what we're doing now what I think is interesting about this is how digital companies like Amazon and Netflix maybe have a leg up on some places that are like, you know, like, let's just do this.

Or let's just, they're a little bit more intuitive. Now, I'm sure that there's a lot of data that goes into the decisions that somebody like ABC makes, you know? Yeah. But it's, it is fascinating to me that when you work for a company that may not be like, you know, a studio exec at the head, it's a guy who's like, I sell vacuum cleaners and books and groceries and television. But let's think about two things.

There is a, things, you can often ascribe behavior and companies to physical location. Amazon is in Seattle. Their TV business is in Santa Monica. That's a divide, and it's a cultural divide as well. And you know there has to be some friction between each city, the data-driven city being, like, we know how to run this business. And the people they hired from the larger TV and film world being, we know this business. Yeah. A couple of years of figuring that out has led to where we are. now, and I think it's worth noting, to your point, the one advantage that Amazon, not one,

they have many advantages, but one particular advantage that might be overlooked in this is actually ties into our Stephen King conversation, which is we live in a IP-obsessed universe. Everybody wants the next adaptation, Game of Thrones itself, was adapted from books. Amazon can have a vertical chain, basically. They can sell you the book, and then they can sell you the TV show. here's another thing they can do. They probably don't admit this in a public way, but everybody knows it's possible. They can put their thumb on the scale and make a book a bestseller.

Sure. They can just put it in front of more eyeballs. They can sink it, and it doesn't even have to be nefarious. They have the data to say, well, if you bought Charmin, you might also like the work of George R. Martin, and we're going to put it in the corner of your eye, and maybe you'll buy it. They can link things on a casual way and an advertising way, honestly, a native advertising way that a lot of these other services can't. So to not harness that is kind of foolish. Look, I feel like we can use our own experience of this.

Like, we do this podcast twice a week, and I think that for a large part of maybe the last 10 to 12 months, we've definitely felt that there just isn't a, there isn't like a coalescing around a show any other shows besides Thrones. People really like other shows, but there hasn't been that feeling. Like, say what you will creatively about Game of Thrones this season, and I think it was, you know, not as successful as past seasons creatively, but still had a lot to like, a lot to love.

It definitely felt like, like clear out, get out of the pain for this show. For seven weeks. For seven weeks. And you could see across the internet, this sort of just this surge of content about the show. And I think that if you're someone who pays a lot of money for original content,

you're like, I want the return. That's the return I want on my investment. I don't always, I mean, yes, the Golden Globes and the Emmys are great. But what I want is for kids to be walking around in the streets wearing winter is coming t-shirts over the shirt. And I want to sell them that shirt.

And that is ultimately the kind of game. And this is how Hollywood arrived at we're going to keep making Transformers movies. Because these are the things that matter on a global level, even if nobody likes them. And I think they let that one get away from them. But this is how you start making like, what is the most popular thing and can we make a lot of stuff about it? Amazon and Netflix are publicly traded companies, and one thing to remember about publicly traded companies is that growth is what matters most to investors. In many ways, they have a similar business model, which is let's not, they don't worry. And this is how Amazon has been the darling of Wall Street for decades, despite never, it's sort of unclear whether it's ever even turned a profit is because it's constantly growing.

It's constantly growing its business in 100 new fields at any given moment, and that is attractive to people. Netflix operates under a similar mandate. And the biggest growth often, this is the case in Hollywood in general, but certainly for these companies, is global. So the shows they are making need to be global. Amazon is making two seasons they've committed to making two seasons of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel from Amy Sherman Palladino. That's one of my favorite pilots of the last few years. I loved it. I raved about it on this podcast.

I can't wait to watch the show. I don't know the traction that that's going to get in Asia. That's not that kind of show. I am okay and enthused by the idea of them betting on the monothe. of culture, as you're saying, making a show that everybody loves. And there was a lot of, there were a lot of jokes when this news broke on Friday from TV critic Twitter being like, make the next Game of Thrones. Oh, is that all? Yeah, right. Sure. Everyone has that mandate, but, you know, Amazon has the wherewithal and certainly the money to try. I don't, and I think they have the smart to not just make that actually what they're doing. They're not just going to throw money at people with swords. They hired a very smart executive from Bad Robot to lead up a division in charge of this. And, you know, I won't name names, but I will say that in meetings I've had with studios and networks, only, this following quote was only given to me at one place. Money is not really an issue over here.

I'll let you figure out which company that was. Of the stuff that has been bandied about as some of the new Amazon shows and ones that sort of follow this new mandate, the one I thought I would mention is Tong Wars, which is a show coming from Paul Otnazio, who wrote one of our favorite shows of all time. Homicide. He was one of the original writers on that show and has done a lot of like kind of fair to middling television since then, but also wrote The Good German, which was not particularly well-received Stevensonberg movie. He is doing Tong Wars with Wongar Y. So holy shit. There's some Seth Rogan stuff in here. It's like they're going to look around. They're going to

look around genres and they're going to try and find something that's big. The reason why I use all of this as a way to talk about these two shows, both of which were quite fond of. And I think we can talk a little bit more about Top of the Lake is that I do kind of wonder whether they are the last of their kind. Not to be defeatist about it. People will make a time and a place shows, I'm sure, for years to come, and they will never get tired of dead girl shows. But there is something very, it's just there it's something really invigorating to watch jane campion and david simon and george pelicanos present their specific visions of these stories and be allowed to take their time and you know if jane campion wants to make a you know really eccentric show that talks about like surrogacy and feminism

it's a show about motherhood yeah and and and all this stuff in australia and then david simon there is no porn in the first episode of that's what the show is about that's the logline yeah yeah right and there is no crime like so to speak of the like we have to solve this crime in in the deuce and these are kind of shows that are going at their own pace in their own direction with their own where they're not thinking about like are you going to get a deuce t-shirt are you going to get a china girl t-shirt and that's fine like they're not every show has to do that but when you see these companies that we're like we're all about like getting these creatives to trust us and work with us. And then you hear something like, well, maybe we want to get some dragons involved in this

thing. You wonder whether or not shows like this will have as much of a leash going forward. People are making more TV than ever before and that hasn't changed. But it is worth tracking who's making it and what they're making. Is the latter getting pulled up to a certain degree? People like Matt Weiner, you mentioned is making an anthology show called the Romanovs, where the theory, what I've heard, the only thread between the various short stories, if you will, that are going to be told, is that one character believes that they are heirs to the lost empire of Russia.

That's not porn either. You know what I mean? Like that is not a poster selling, a movie selling line you put on a poster. David Simon and Pelicanos have a sinecure at HBO where they can do their thing. And it's a beautiful thing. And in this, when we've talked about it and we will continue to talk about it through the season, in many ways the deuce is their most commercial project to date. It is the most quote unquote fun, even though there's a lot of difficult subject matter.

That's a good point. That said, though, they have earned the right to make this show. Vince Gilligan can make any show he wants to make. Jane Campion, being an award-winning filmmaker, can pull together the international financing to make this in the same way that a young pope can exist due to these arcane financing. And Jane Campi is no dummy. I mean, the thrust of these shows is essentially like what happened to this person.

It's a Jane Campion crime show. Yeah. The question is the next generation of filmmakers. I mean, you mentioned people who just missed it. Paul Atenazio, who has a remarkable CV, you know, is making a genre piece for Amazon that's in their Blockbuster department. Now it's with Wongar-Wy. This is not a hardship in any way. Yeah, right. But is it, are we starting to see in TV a similar case where unless you are... Damien Chazel, who just got a Netflix musical series.

Unless you are a certain level of filmmaker who already proved your bones or had this incredible, you know, a fluke success or whatever, do you have to marry your talent to someone else's IP or to someone else's some other network's vision in order to monetize your creativity. Has that era passed where anything can get greenlit from anyone and take wild chances? Yeah. I think those are two separate questions now that I've said them out loud. Almost anything can get greenlit anywhere. Yeah.

Clearly. Yeah. But in terms of people being able to tell a story at their own pace in their own inimitable style, I mean, you know, that was the thing that we said to Pelicanos, and I hope people go back and listen to our interview with him from the other week, that the thrill for us, I think, watching the pilot of the deuce that most people got the chance to see last night or you can watch on demand was that it didn't begin with a series defining question. Who killed her? How is this guy going to get out of this predicament? Right. How does porn start? A flash forward and then a flashback.

Porn starts for the delivery guy. We all know that. We all know that. But porn starts with a very suspicious pizza order at a very strange time of night. But, but, you know, but, you know, but, and, But right, the thing about the deuce that was so exhilarating was, here is a completely realized world. Here are some people who live in it. Okay, let's shake it up and see what happens when they all start bumping into each other. And for me, that is still a really exciting way into TV. And what's shocking to be saying this about a David Simon and George Pelicano show is that that feels old-fashioned. It feels like, in a way, a setup that we would have been saying 20 years ago about a, you know, NYPD Blue.

Well, here are some characters who work in this police department. Yeah. What's going to happen to them? Well, and if this was like a, if the deuce was made in the 90s, if they ever would have been able to make something like this, they would have done it in sort of like, I think that the, I think the stars of the show would probably be cops, you know? I think that there would be two cops who work vice in Times Square and there's maybe like a murder that they have to solve while all this stuff is happening on the margins. One of the best things about this show is that they've chosen so smartly, the star of the show is the location is Times Square. And here the people. Jason wrote a really good piece about that last night.

Yeah. Yeah, about Times Square in New York. Here are the people who are drawn here, who in otherwise, would never come across each other. People of all walks of life, all classes, all races, all backgrounds, who are united in the pursuit of something, something bigger than themselves, whether it's money or fame or survival. And there they are in this powder keg. And in a typical Simon fashion, no good guys, no bad guys, in typical Pelicanos fashion, there's a little tiny bit of flash to it. There's a little bit of genre pulp to it. Yeah.

And swag to it, which is a good time to remind people, we're telling you to read it. his book. Read the Sweet Forever. Side note about this. I'm reading our old Grantland pal, Jonathan Abrams. Oh, yeah. Oral History of the Wire. All the Pieces Matters. It's coming out at the beginning of next year. I'm reading. I read it. It's terrific.

There's so many good stories. We'll have the Abrams on to talk about it. We will. So many good stories about the making of the Wire. One side note, the reason Pelicanos went to work on the Wire, I believe in season two, is because David Simon's wife, the crime novelist Laura Lipman, forced him to read a Pelican's book. and the one she got him to read. I mean, they crossed paths at a funeral and got along,

but the one that he read. My parents met at a funeral. No. For real. For sure? Isn't that weird? Really? My parents met out of a blind date.

That's better. Better story. My parents met when my mom ordered pizza, actually. Did you know that? The book that David Simon read that sold him on Pelacano's writing for the Wire was The Sweet Forever, the book that you guys should be reading for the double-down book. So we're basically responsible for the wire.

That's kind of what I was getting. getting to. My big thing for both of these shows, I know, do you want to talk about China Girl? And I mean, the first two episodes came out last night. The next two are tonight, Monday, and then the final two are on Tuesday. Is that correct? Yeah, I completely, when I spoke to Lizzie Moss last week, I completely was wrong about how the show is being released. Released to us. I got the day wrong. I didn't understand they were doing it like a miniseries like this. Get on board with the show. I, you know, it's, I love Top of the Lake. One and two. They are completely. perplexing, challenging, confounding shows that don't operate under the rules that you're expecting if you think this is going to be a crime show or an international crime show. The thing is for both this and The Deuce, but for China Girl, I mean, and for both of the Top of Lakes series, I watched the first two over the weekend. It's just like, it's such a good detective show.

It is such a good detective show. And like I, these are just my favorite kinds of shows. I'm unabashedly excited for True Detective Season 3 in the Ozarks, even though there's already a show in the Ozarks. There is something about the genre that allows for so many different tellings and so many different shades to go into it. And let's remember if there's been criticism I've seen of Top the Lake China Girl, and I've not finished it, and I've heard that it gets confound, even more confounding as it goes on. The main criticisms I've read are how unlikely that there would be this overlap between the professional and personal life of Robin Griffin, Elizabeth Moss's character,

how it's not a proper investigation because they didn't, you know, tick these boxes or whatever. It's like you're doing crime fiction wrong. If you're watching it for that, watch a documentary or go do a ride along with your local police department. This is why you and I were not very big fans of the killing is because it actually was like both were wrong. Like, first of the investigation, I can't even remember. But they didn't do enough work to make the actual investigation. The actual story around the investigation interesting. You want to spend time in the world with these remarkable characters.

And there's this small thing in Top of the Lake China Girl where this other Robin Griffin, Elizabeth Moss's character is partnered with Lizzie Moss. I just wanted, I didn't want to confuse you, since I don't know if you can call her that. With Gwendolyn Christie from Game of Thrones. By the way, Lizzie calls her Gwen. I don't.

I haven't earned that right. You haven't had that formal introduction. No. Or informal introduction. They're partnered and there are these male detectives who are sort of shadowing them or supervising them. And the Sukai just keeps hitting on her. Yeah.

And it's hilarious. And it's so surprising the way it keeps happening, and it doesn't feel particularly, like, weighted or evil. Yeah, Gwendolyn and Christie's character is a scream. And it's funny on the margins in these ways that life is funny in the margins and surprising. And for me, that's worth all of it. Like, there's this joy and anguish and the margins of other shows that is front and center. It is an emotionally driven show, not a cerebrally or intellectually driven show. And I really appreciate that.

Yeah, but I would just say about both of these shows is that they are once, like, very, entertaining and enjoyable or you know engaging to watch but are really do not insult the intelligence of the audience they really assume that you can hang that you can follow the characters that you're here you are the story and that's the best kind of TV man that's why that's why we're in this game that's what don't forget about us word price look just shout to bezos we believe in you greenwald uh we'll be back on Thursday just for our listeners you guys know you may or may not know we're doing a mailbag episode shortly an overdue mailbag episode shortly an overdue mailbag episode So send any questions to at the watchpot on Twitter.

Just hit us up. Let us know what you'd like to talk about. You haven't until then. This was a great job by you. Have an amazing week, brother. Great job, Bernski. Bye. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by Rudy's Barbershop.

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