The Watch - September TV Lineup: 'Unbelievable,' 'Undone,' and 'Succession' | The Watch

Episode Date: September 16, 2019

September is shaping up to be a great month for television. We talk about 'Unbelievable' (1:15) and 'Undone' (14:34), two shows that premiered over the weekend on Netflix and Amazon Prime, respectively. Plus, breaking down 'Succession' S2E6, "Argestes" (22:51). Host: Chris Ryan Guests: Kaya McMullen and Jason Concepcion Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Succession is an Eminem in a lot of ways. With Eminem's Caramel, we can all agree that caramel is more fun than ever. go grab some M&Ms caramel today and let your taste buds go for a ride. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union. Navy Federal is proud to serve over 8 million members, including active duty military, the DOD, veterans, and their families. You'll receive a lifetime of membership benefits with Navy Federal and you can easily access accounts, transfer money, pay bills, and deposit checks with the Navy Federal mobile app.

Visit NavyFederal.org slash watch for more information. call 1-888-842-6328, or download the Navy Federal Credit Union app message and data rates may apply. I need supports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello, and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com. And joining you today, it's just me.

It's me and Kaya. I'm calling in from my mom's house in Philadelphia. So shout out to my mom. Shout out to Philadelphia. It's humid here. And we are going to talk about Succession in a little bit with Jason Concepcion. It's the audio from our Succession After Show, number one, boys, which you can watch every Sunday after the East Coast airing of the episode of Succession.

Last night was a banger. And me and Jason talk about that extensively. You can watch us on Twitter on the ringers. Well, actually, it's on the watch pod Twitter feed, I believe, on Sunday nights. And then you can also catch us on YouTube. So whichever for your viewing pleasure you want to do, every Sunday, I guess at like around seven it goes up. on the East Coast. So check that out. And it was an amazing episode of Succession. And it kind of

hit me last night, Kaya. I've been out of the office for a few days traveling, so I've had a lot of time to catch up on stuff and get ahead of stuff. And we're having kind of an amazing little TV moment right now. Here are a couple of things I'm watching right now. So we've got Succession. Obviously, one of the best shows on television, having a remarkable second season, which is often challenging for some shows. That's Butchers by Righteous Gemstones on Sunday nights, which I thought had its best episode last night, which was a flashback episode that featured young Walton Goggins. It was still baby Billy Freeman, but played by Walton Goggins. And a lot of it had to do with the sort of the Gemstone's matriarch character played by Jennifer Nettles, Amy Lee. And there was just an

amazing musical sequence in it. It was hilarious and was also like really heartfelt. And it was a real extra gear for that show that I didn't even know that it had. So that was awesome. And also, you know, the deuce is back. So you've got those three shows on HBO. I think people are still catching up with the boys and Mine Hunter, which were exceptional shows.

Mind Hunter was, I think, it's going to be hard for not to be my favorite show of the year, but I'm open to anything happening. But people are catching up with the boys. People are catching up with Mine Hunter. You've got Righteous Gemstones, the Deuce, and Succession on HBO. And then two new shows that I,

just really, really, really wanted to recommend, one of which is unbelievable, which came out this week on Netflix. And Kai, I know you watched a couple episodes of this, too, right? Yes. So this weekend, I did not watch Succession. I have not seen any righteous gemstones, still working on Mind Hunter. But I did watch five and a half episodes of Unbelievable. Five and a half. So I watched three. So for people who don't know what this is, It is a show from Susanna Grant who wrote Aaron Brockovich and is a TV screenwriting veteran. And she worked with Michael Chabon and Iolette Waldman on the scripts for this show, which is based on reporting that was originally published by ProPublica and the Marshall Project. And it chronicled the hunt for a serial rapist in Colorado and Washington between 2008 and 2011.

And the show itself stars Caitlin Dever as a. a woman named Marie Adler, a young woman named Marie Adler, who's the victim of a rape. And these two extraordinary performances from Tony Colette and Merritt Weaver as the investigating detectives in these different counties in Colorado,

who find out that there are some similarities, some through lines between their cases that they're working on and they join forces to try and find this perpetrator. And there's a lot of different ways we can unpack this show, Kaya. Why don't you tell me, actually,

First, like, what did you think of the episodes that you saw? Yeah, so I was assigned to read the story that this show is based on back in college for one of my journalism classes. So I already have a little bit of familiarity with the plot itself and kind of like understand the beats of it. That's interesting. So you're almost looking at as like an adaptation. Yeah, exactly, exactly. That's interesting, yeah. Yeah, but I mean, I really enjoyed it as much as you can enjoy. content like this.

So yeah, I watch five and a half episodes. I'm at a half because it was like 12 a.m. last night and I was like, I need to go to bed and I'm not going to be able to sleep if I watch any more of this. As a person who is living alone in a one-bedroom apartment, I was like, I'm going to turn this off now. Right. I can imagine. I mean, but I would you say, I was wondering about this.

Like, I watched it with my wife and we were kind of like, we were, we were, we were a little bit hesitant to like dive into it just because you know you get to the end of a week and you're sort of like well what what would be enjoyable to watch and I found it very like obviously trenchant and demanding but not necessarily punishing like it's not exploitative at all yeah I agree and I think it has a lot of like moments of lightness that make it a lot more watchable than something say I think it's the most obvious comparison to this show it's probably mind-house right? Because they're both Netflix. That was what I was going to say. Yeah. So they're both Netflix. They're both like crime dramas, like procedurals. And I think the difference here with unbelievable is like I think Tony Colette brings a lot of like comedy to this almost in a way that still feels respectful to the story. Yeah. Well, in a lot of ways, I mean, so Merritt Weaver and Tony Collette are complete revelations in

this show. And I would recommend it to anybody listening to the watch who's like enjoyed some of the crime stuff that we've talked about in the past give this this show a shot. The characters sort of show up in succession over the course of a couple of episodes. So it really isn't until episodes three and four when you really have like the full mix of actors on screen at any given time. But that being said, like if you're a fan of detective

fiction, if you're interested in cop dramas, Colette and Weaver are amazing in this show. The humanity that they have, but also the rough edges, the humor like Kai I was alluding to. It's just like this incredibly nuanced and new read on kind of the old detective buddy cops trope. And they're not even like buddy cops. Like they're just detectives trying to work through a system. And meanwhile, Caitlin Deaver's character, Marie Adler is trying to make her way through a system that's basically turning her from a victim into a perpetrator. I mean, they're charging her. She gets charged early on. This isn't a spoiler,

really. You can tell something bad is going to happen from the trailer. She gets charged with false reporting. Right. It's basically she's lost in the bureaucracy of a post foster care life. And it's really like about how if you get trapped under the foot of the state like that, like your life can become a living hell to say nothing if you go through something as traumatic as a sexual assault like that. You brought a Mindhunter, Kaya. I thought that was a really, that's a very apt comparison.

Not only because obviously the platform is the same. but in some ways I feel like Unbelievable kind of completes the circle with Mine Hunter. Mind Hunter is essentially concerned with investigators trying to understand the minds of killers or criminals. And Unbelievable is far more interested in investigators essentially trying to understand and empathize with

but also find justice for the victims. And I think oftentimes when you're watching a crime show, the victims can be, really they're really manipulatively used in shows. Like you think about like Broadchurch, you think about the Andy and I've talked before about like the bad news relay, like how you'll know something bad has happened to a character and it gets really drawn out so that you are like,

the emotion is sort of ramped up and ramped up and ramped up so that when this person finds out what you already know as a viewer, it's like that much more tragic because you've been anticipating it for a while. That kind of stuff doesn't really happen on unbelievable. It's very naturalistic. a bunch of the first episodes are directed by Lisa Cholidenko. I think Michael Dinner comes in and does a few

and Susanna Grant does one at the end. But for the most part, it shares a certain sensibility with Mind Hunter in that it feels like the dialogue could be pulled from case transcripts. It's not very stagey. It's not very theatrical writing. It's very, very matter of fact,

which might be kind of surprising if you know the fiction of Michael Shabon and Islet Waldman, but it really sticks to the facts. Did you find it to be a particularly accurate adaptation? Yeah, you know, I did. And, like, I think the way they handled showing kind of step by step how,

especially with the case of Marie, like, unfortunately, and within the justice system, like, this is something that happens a lot more than you'd like, where a woman goes to report sexual assault and, like, just the way that it's handled makes her feel that she doesn't have a safe space to report. And so I think it did a really good. job of like, you know, it seems like insane that she would like want to recant her accusation, but I think the show makes you able to understand like why she decided to take it all back because she's like, I just want my life to go back to normal. Yeah. And and the normal that she had

wasn't that good. You know, the normal that she, she says that thing where she's like, my whole life, there's a line in the show where Marie says like my whole life has been about things that adults want for me, that's things that they want to do to me. things that they say to me that are just like terrible. Like, how is it that crazy that I just wanted to get out of this situation? Yeah, and I think the show does a really good job of drawing a parallel of like a rape case that's handled really well and a rape case that's handled really poorly. So like Marie's case is handled poorly.

The male detectives aren't respectable of her. They keep making her relive the trauma over and over again. The nurses aren't very like they're just trying to get through their job. And then I believe it's the second episode with the second case where you are introduced to Merritt Weaver's character. And she's like an extremely sensitive detective. And like also I think really importantly, she's a female detective. And so she goes out of her way to make the victim feel comfortable. And the nurses are really nice.

And like it just draws a parallel where the same thing can happen to two people. And because of like where they are and like in no. fault of their own, the case can go into completely different directions. Yeah, and the juxtaposition of those two cases is really where I feel like this show starts to take flight. And it kind of reminded me a little bit of the wire, which did such a good job taking, obviously,

depicting things that were happening on both sides of the law, but showing the similarities of the bureaucracies and the infrastructures around those environments. This show does this with different ways of handling criminal behavior and victims rights, right? So when Marie goes through this process with these male detectives, everything is about like expediency, about kicking the tires on whether or not she's telling the truth, about not wasting their time. They're always saying, like, my job is to protect the public. And if you're taking away from that time, like if we have to sit in this

interview room talking to you, that's a waste of our time unless you're telling the truth. And then basically as soon as the case presents any challenges, then immediately resort to the idea that she's making it up. It can't just be that it's a particularly remarkable case. It's just that, oh, no, it couldn't be. Because it doesn't check these five boxes, it can't happen. Whereas when Merritt Weaver gets involved, when her character gets involved with a case in the second episode,

like Kai is saying, it's never explicit. No one ever comes out and says, well, because I'm a female detective, I obviously have like a lighter touch with these things, or I understand the psychology of somebody who's been through this. She just does your job. She just does your job in a different way.

And the sensitivity and the warmth with which she treats the victim and also the curiosity with which she goes through the case, even though she's just as demanding as the male detectives, even though she's just as exacting. And even though she also cares about expediency and efficiency and making sure people are doing their jobs, it's just about like their goals are just slightly different. And I can't recommend this shore more highly.

I mean, it's such a great accomplishment on its own, but it's really interesting if you've come off of watching Mindhunter to get this kind of 360 view of things. Yeah, this is honestly probably one of my favorite things that Netflix has put out in a while. It's also like a testament to good job spending your money Netflix. Like this is just like a really interesting show about a really important topic done it in a really respectful way. Like just nice job, guys. They do a lot of it. Yeah. Like you guys can just spend a billion dollars on Seinfeld,

but just make sure you still do stuff like this. And you know what? The thing is, I will not say that this show is not like eating your vegetables, though. Like, it's not homework. It's gripping. It's like really, really good crime drama, but it's also really important stuff.

So the other show I wanted to talk about before we get into succession, Kaya, was this show undone. Right. I've seen a lot of people comparing these two shows this weekend. Yeah, well, I think just, I mean, like they both have, obviously they film are protagonists

and they're both on these streaming services they both came out this week. I think they both are testaments to what you can do on television right now that you certainly can't do in the movies, that there's really no room for this in the movie. I would say that both of these shows, there's this, we did a rewatchable's 99 about this movie The Insider.

I would hope a lot of people listening to this have seen the movie The Insider. It's this Michael Mann movie from 1999. And in the movie, Christopher Plummer is playing Mike Wallace, the 60 Minutes journalist. and he has a line when he's describing these people, one of whom he's about to do an interview with on television that's going to be a huge scandal.

And he says, somebody's making fun of the people, and he says, they're just ordinary people under extraordinary pressure. And that is my favorite kind of drama. I mean, we talk a ton about superheroes and Star Wars on this show for good reason because we love it. And also because it's the sort of corner of the realm right now and it's what's driving this industry is that kind of franchises about superheroes

and about space and about almost this escapist kind of entertainment. But great drama comes from depicting ordinary people under extraordinary pressure. You get that in unbelievable. And you get that in Undone, which is this, I'm breaking my no drawing rule here by recommending this,

but this is one of my favorite shows of the year too. It's created by Kate Purdy, who's been working for like 10 years as a writer on TV and worked on BoJack Horseman. and the creator of Bojack Horseman, Raphael Bob Waxper, they created this show and it's directed by a guy named Hiscoe Holsing, and it is rotoscoped. So, rotoscoping is a style of animation, I guess, that you would call it,

where essentially you take actual filmed footage and then do animation over it. So this was most notably used, I guess, for me, in two Richard Linklater movies, waking life and a scanner darkly. And I would say that Undone has a little bit of linklators kind of lost at sea philosophizing. And a Scanner Darkly, which is the other Richard Linklater, Roroscoped movie, is based on the work of Philip K. Dick.

And I think Philip K. Dick actually is also an influence on Undone as well. So the show is about this woman named Alma, who is a hearing impaired daycare employee, who is just kind of trudging through life that is so repetitive and normal that it's becoming, almost unbearably boring to her. And she has a fight with her sister. They live in San Antonio, and she has an argument with her sister, and she gets, Alma gets into a car accident. And she goes into a coma, and when she wakes up,

she can see, she thinks she can see, her late scientist father, who is played by Bob Odenkirk. And he died years ago and is sitting in her hospital room and is like, you have a special gift, and I want you to use that special gift to investigate the circumstances around my death. His death had been thought to be just a car accident. He's claiming he was murdered.

Turns out her special gift may be time travel. And over the course of the first few episodes, she starts to explore those powers all while also kind of sifting through the wreckage of her own personal life, which includes a romantic relationship with the guy, a sort of tortured relationship with her mother, putting back the pieces of her relationship with her sister who's engaged and kind of also trying to figure out her place in the world and whether or not it's

better to live live a boring unexamined life or a tumultuous examined life, I guess. And there's a lot of stuff in here. There's a lot of stuff that they start to unpack with this show. It's a family drama. It's a detective story. It's science fiction. I think it's like a star making performance for Rosa Salazar, which is sort of strange to say about a rotoscoped production. But what happens is basically they're doing stuff with the rotoscoping animation that they never would have been able to afford, I don't think, in a regular television program. I don't think that they would have been able to do

the special effects necessary to depict time travel in the way that they are in this show, or at least Alma's experiences of time travel. And that's not to say that they couldn't have done special effects or VFX to do that,

but it almost wouldn't have been as effective. Because what happens with this rotoscoping is that the special effects feel like an extension of the reality. Whereas most of the time when you're making a non-superhero movie that involves special effects, the special effects feel tacked on. They feel special in some way,

in a way that kind of takes you out of the story, but that never happens with undone. You always feel like you were in this weird, slightly altered version of San Antonio. They do these little details about San Antonio. They're so fascinating if you've ever been there, you'll recognize them. And Rosa Salazar is so good in this thing

as somebody who has to act as like the audience avatar for the person who's constantly like, what is happening, what is happening, I don't understand what's happening to me, but also as the, almost her own antagonist, because a lot of almost behavior is self-defeating,

she has a lot of unforced errors, a lot of self-inflicted wounds. So she's almost the protagonist and the antagonist in this show. And I just think it's remarkable. I can't wait to see where it goes. I've watched five. We'll talk about it again

once people have maybe had a chance to see all of it. But it's just such an interesting show. And one of the things that gets, gets into is whether or not Alma, who may or may not be dealing with relatively significant mental illness issues and whether or not she actually is gifted with these essentially powers or whether or not this is extension of her illness or whether it can be both at the same time. So both those shows, that's a lot to watch right now. That's undone, unbelievable,

gemstone succession, deuce is back, boys is great, mind hunters, amazing. That's a ton of stuff to watch. You heard it here first. Chris Ryan liked animated TV. I know. Who can believe it? You love to see it. Standing up for people who love drawing. So we're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll have the audio

from number one boys, the Succession After Show that I do with Jason Concepcion. That's on every Sunday at 7 o'clock on Twitter, on the watch Twitter, and on YouTube, and you can listen to that audio here. We'll be back with that on Sunday. Thursday, I'm hoping to have a pretty cool guest.

from the Succession World, tease, tease. But until then, thanks for listening. Let's get into my talk with Jason after these messages. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Kroger General Stores. Did you know that one in eight Americans struggle with hunger? Yet 40% of food produced in the U.S. gets thrown away, and a lot of that food waste happens at home. When food waste is sent to landfills, greenhouse gases are released, so it's a problem for our planet too. Think about this. If we redirected just one third of the food we waste to people in need, we would more than cover the unmet food needs across the country while helping to protect our planet. That's what Kroger is doing with their Zero Hunger, Zero Waste Foundation.

Last year alone, Kroger donated 325 million meals to local food banks, and they've got some great tips to help reduce food waste at home, too. It's all part of their goal to achieve zero hunger and zero waste by 2025. Check out Kroger.com slash ZHZW to learn more. That's Kroger.com slash ZHZW. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Pepsi. There are a lot of things to celebrate in pop culture these days, and Pepsi can take all of your celebrations to the next level, whether your favorite show returns for a new season, your favorite director releases a new movie, or your favorite band drops a new album.

When it's time to celebrate, it's time to crack open a Pepsi. I'm actually on the East Coast right now, so I need a little bit of a pick-me-up over the course of the day when I'm watching football because everything's starting later. but, you know, I was getting all jacked up for Sunday Night Football last night with the Eagles. And I just had myself a lovely Pepsi to have with my dinner. And it was just like smooth sailing through the rest of the night. And it made me so excited for Carson Wentz and the Eagles to come on and then they lost. So that made me less excited.

Pepsi is the official sponsor of the NFL, by the way. Reminds you always be celebrating. Welcome to number one boys. A succession after show from The Ringer. This is Jason Concepcion. I'm Chris Ryan. and we are here to talk about Succession Season 2, episode 6, Argestis. Our jesties.

The northwest wind that blew Jason and the Argonauts to the land of the Amazons in search of the golden fleece. The golden fleece vest. The G-fleas, as we talk about, in investing circles. We're going to get right into Buy or Sell because we had a really rich text this week, and Jason and I are moving our money around a lot. It's just a fluid time right now. We're not entirely liquid, but we'll get back to that. Right, right.

But we can slurp it up if we need to. What I want to buy this week on Succession is the Ideas Conference. Davos, Aspen. Our jesties is obviously like a stand-in for Sun Valley, Davos, the kind of things you're talking about, Jason. But, you know, we hadn't seen this before yet on Succession, and it was a really great rendering of this environment. I wondered how many liberties they were taking. But, you know, I went back and I actually read some old David Carr columns from, back in like 2007, the late great David Carr.

and he used to write the deal book blog for The New York Times, among many other things that you did. But his dispatches from Sun Valley in Idaho in 2007 are pretty much succession with, without the Logan Roy throwing up at the breakfast table. It's the altitude. It's just getting down. It's just the altitude. It's just a very tough. Digestion. It's the heat lamp, too. But so Sun Valley is where you get all these moguls from tech, media, big business, finance. They're all gathering together to try to fix the world's problem. Obviously, Succession is lampooning that, but based on what, like, you can read about these events, they are a super casual pretty, like everybody's Lucy Goosey walking around. There's a couple of events, but, like, you will see Rupert Murdoch, Eric Schmidt, you know, whoever at a breakfast table, chopping it up. Oh man, is that the Zuckerberg playing Jenga?

Yeah. No, that's the kind of environment. So I thought that they did that really well. And it was also, I was buying how each character has a very specific relationship to it. It's like, Roman is too cool for school. Nan is just thinks it's completely beneath her. Tom is consumed with whether or not the lanyard he's getting is the perfect lanyard.

Did I get the cashews that I wanted? Yeah, was it the fruit and nut box or the champagne box? So there's all these events and stuff like that. But like Succession is so good at coming up with these reasons for all these people to be trapped with one another. And this was a great one because they've got a ticking time bomb with this story that's coming out about the cruise line, and they need to get this deal done. So it turns almost into like kind of a heist movie. It's wonderful. I really love that shot of Kendall coming into Argestes

and surveying like a landscape of all his enemies. You know, all the people who have a reason to put a knife in his chest. Sandy's there, Stewie's there. They're all there just waiting for the moment that the Roy's and Kendall slip. Really smart to get like, you know, we will talk a lot about Stewie on this episode. We lament the lack of PT for Stewie. Yes. But the fact that a Stewie is just like there at these like random times is like the perfect way to build the world of the show. Like the guy from Volter was at Argeste's. Hey, listen, new media, cutting edge. I like it. Kendall likes it. What are you buying? I'm buying Schadenfreude overall is the thing I'm buying the Roy's are under pressure, as we just noted, all their enemies are assembled here, and they would

just love the opening to pour some shit on Waystar Royco. But I think I'm going to buy more than that, I'm buying Rockstar and the Mole Woman. So we get another wonderful Roman and Jerry moment in this episode, and a little different this time. Roman comes to Jerry's room with an offer saying, hey, I'm going to, I'm the out front person, the rock star, the wild Tarzan running around with my tiny little dick out, making waves, making news. I'm stupid, but also everybody's looking at me. And you are, you know, you're like, I think he says something like, you are like an extremely efficient and quiet filing cabinet. You make the numbers work, but nobody ever notices you.

What if we team up? You're the CEO and I'm the chairman, or you're the chairman and I'm the CEO, whatever it is, What if we got together and made this work? Because, as Roman does note, she is actually on the papers if Logan should die this very minute. And she was like, I don't think anybody would take that seriously, but still. But still, legally speaking, there is a basis for Jerry being the person who would be handed the keys, at least in an interim basis. Yeah, absolutely. And that segue is right into what I'm selling this week, which is Shevin Kendall.

Yeah. So I wouldn't necessarily call this a critique of the show. it's just a question I have of the show, which is what happens in these sort of intervening moments between, the interim moments in between episodes. Yeah. And episode four, safe room, we're left with this incredibly tender moment between Kendall and Shiv, where Kendall is like, it's not going to be me who's going to be the heir to the throne. And I would just hope that if it's you, you look out for me because I basically need taking care of.

And somewhat in episode five, and especially in episode six, it just feels like that's like really, kind of, that's falling away. That's falling away. And they are back at each other's throats. They are back being territorial with one another. Why is she on this call? Right. Why didn't I get invited to this conference? I'm not going to do this. If he's going to do this, you know. Step back. You don't know. You're not involved in this on a day, daily basis. You know what you're talking about. And that comes to a head when they're trying to decide who's going to go on stage and do the panel talk to respond to the New York magazine article. But I kind of want to know what happened there, if anything did happen. Because

if it's like, maybe Kendall has had second thoughts about whether or not he's, He's so giving, magnanimous with his, what he seems to be thinking is his inheritance. Yeah, we also don't know, like, what his drug mixture was at that time. Sure. You know, like, what, where he is now? Where he is on the cycle of, like, using and not using and coming off of it. We also don't know how much time has passed. As we noted before, like, I would love to know how much time has passed.

Yeah, I think there's probably a way to map it out, like, seasonally, and there's, like, references. I think Nan references a date. Yeah. To Rea later in the episode. talk about that in a bit. But, you know, I think that it would be kind of curious to know how much time has passed from four to six. And whether or not we're supposed to intuit, yeah, like, there was this moment, but it's pretty much disappeared and Kendall is now back on his bullshit. Yes. Or whether it's like, should we consider the idea that Kendall and Shiv are working

a long game? What do you have for buy herself? I am selling Rea Jarrell. She got got, folks. Folks, we got her. Pour out a bottle of your most expensive wine. Don't even hyperdecan. I'm just going to do Vosswater. Is that okay? That's fine. Pour it right out into the street. Because Rea, as the point of contact between the Pierce's and the Roy's, was involved from the very start of

this proposed deal by Waystar RoiCo to acquire PGN. And she has been pushing that deal with ever diminishing subtlety as Logan is raged, get this going, get it done, at least get them to sign a letter of intent. And it culminates in her calling Nan,

urging her to come to Arjessis against Nan's will. And finally, that seemed to raise the warning flags for Nan, whether it's the suggestion that, well, can't we just sign the letter of intent today? That seemed to set something off for Nan. Nan got on a phone call with the family after having a phone call, after having a discussion with Raya, and they gave Nan the power to do whatever she saw fit.

And then somehow she came to the realization that Ray has been doubled in. She obviously had her investigated. She knew her cell phone calls and everything. She's been doubled dealing. She was at Waystar HQ at that time, sometime in the past, talking to Logan Roy and she comes out with it at the end of the episode is like, did you ever have a discussion with him? Like before we had our discussion? And Ray, I can't even hem and ha. She just hits her with it. Oh, is that, are you trying to figure out something that your lawyer would tell you to say?

Right. She says, I can't recall, right? Yeah. And it, and it results in Nan asking for her resignation and surely lawsuits to follow. Yeah. And the parallels between the Pierce's and the Roy's continue. Nan obviously views working for her as an act of you're in the family. And so she distinguishes Rea by saying in much the same way that Logan has done to Frank or done to a number of people over the years is by saying, you know, you don't work for me, you work for yourself. And that is actually just like objectively like, well, yeah, most people do.

But it's that outsiderness that Rea kind of was using as leverage. And at the same time, it obviously came back to by the. in the ass. So that's by herself. Who do you have for number one boy this week? Oh, man. Because I think it's actually a pretty competitive field this week. It's a really competitive field. Personally, I'm going to go with Nan for that eye-opening moment where she realized, hey, these people don't have my best interest in part. She also is just like flexing on Logan the whole time where she's like, I can't make a decision until I order it. I have to eat. I can't with a menu open in front of me. I simply can't make a decision. Oh, gosh. Hello, sir.

What kind of water? I need five kinds of water. I'll just have whatever water you'll, have. Okay, sorry, Logan, are you waiting on something? You seem upset. Can we have... And then at the end, when she's just like, she gives him like the straight up blue blood dressing down? Just the and the hard brush off. So get your dirty mitts

off my company, I'm out of here, sir. Good day! I think that the only other competitors, really is probably Shiv. Because Shiv just like perfectly enters the controversy and rides it to a moment of assent, you know? And

And really interesting moment and performance from Shiv. Because on the one hand, she very clearly does not want to be the face of this looming controversy on Cruise's, which she knows all about because of the debrief that she had on her wedding night from Tom. So she knows in detail how bad it is.

Where the bodies are buried. And they're in the ocean. It's a sea burial. God. So she knows how bad it is and clearly is like, well, if I'm going to be the face of this, I need to ride that. The payoff needs to be. Right. The payoff needs to be, I have some power. I have some juice after this. And I think that she has accomplished that. There's one disturbing factor about this. Yes. Is that there's two ways to kind of try and take over for Logan. Through him or despite him. Right. And she seems to be going somewhat of the path that Kendall went down last season. which is, I will do this with or without his blessing.

Right. And so she gets up on stage. She's like, I'm going to handle it, and she makes the dinosaur crack. Clearly pointed, even though she would, oh, oh, I think I made it very clear that that was not about, yeah. This is like the couple episodes in a row where she was just like, can't you take a joke, basically. Like, she's screwed with what she's doing. She's like, she really pushes it. So let's, we'll split it this week.

Number one boy, one A goes to NAM, one B goes to Shiv. Let's get into our biggest burn of the world. This is a special edition of Biggest Burn of the Week. It is all Stewie, everything. My guy came off the bench, did like 16 points in eight minutes, three for three from behind the arc. Some Flip Murray stuff out here for Stewie. That's the kind of game you get a three-year contract off of. Stu Sanity.

Stu Sanity. That's what it was. The Knicks are back. Give me some of the best Stewie. Stuey Josei, Housani, Kendall's one-time friend, his Coke bro and former Bearhead co-conspirator. He's back, baby. after an extended absence. We're going to talk about the big burn,

but he really comes in... It was like a seven-layered dip. Just comes in throwing those like Jezel-neckian shirkins where it's like, I'm laughing at this, but simultaneously I'm analyzing my own morality, like if I shouldn't be laughing at this. The first one, so he greets Kendall

with Daddy's Boy. I hear your staff were all killing themselves now. A reference, of course, to the ATN staffer who shot himself in the building, thus causing a lockdown. That was awful, but I guess also factually correct. So on the merits, I don't know, I guess we have to give him that one. Then there is, after the cruise news breaks, thus imperiling the PGN acquisition, which Kendall mystifyingly had bragged about to Stewart. He can't help himself.

He can't help himself. Why are you even mentioning it, dude? Anyway, Stewie comes up with, he says, well, I guess if you did have something going on, you know, like deal-wise, it's kind of dead in the water, right? Like some of the women that went on those cruises. I mean. Also, he does it with the turtleneck on.

With the turtleneck on? Like, drop the mic. The mic falls into the ocean, sinks to the body, of the ocean into the Marianas Trench and is like... There's fish down there who can't see because they can just sense where they are. That have been alive for like 5,000 years and have never been seen by humankind. And eventually the mic is like swallowed by a Cthulu. That's like what a savage and morally bankrupt burn that was.

It was so wrong. And also like I was laughing at it. incredible stuff from Stu E. Hoseini, our Burn of the Week, and really, the burn of the series. Maybe Burn of the Series. Maybe Burn of the Series. The Stewie Burn of the Week. For Line of the Week.

Oh, man. I'm going to go with Tom. Yeah, that's it. Tom can make anything seem super wholesome. It is the genius of this character that he is often drinking his own semen, you know, backstabbing different members of the Roy family, making moves within

vaguely right-wing news media. But he always makes it sound like he's made of peanut butter and jelly sandwich and he's like you come over and hang out. So my favorite line was, you don't hear much about syphilis these days, very much the MySpace of STDs. So sincere to Logan Roy about that.

What was your line of the week? I just picture like that, you know, that iconic picture of MySpace Tom sitting in his desk, only he's got syphilis. We had a lot of cool references on this. episode, Chithoulouse? It's MySpace, Tom, the syphilis.

I just briefly want to bring up Tom's, uh, Tom during his talk going, what is the news? It's new. New. New? News.

News. Unbelievable shit from Tom. I'm going to go. I love he had the, the mic, the face mic. Those are such a bad beat. The TED Talk made mic. Nobody has ever crushed it wearing that mic.

No one ever in the history of anything. You didn't use that mic? John of Kennedy. You know who else? Jesus on the Mount didn't need one of these. Martin Luther King, no mic. No mic. No face mic.

So you're doing a TED Talk and you're like, this is why everything we think about this, it's like, just shut up. You can't drop one of these. You need a stick. Yeah. I'm going to go with, I'm going to go with Greg responding to Tom after this. So they're trying to figure out like what's the catch line of Tom's talk going to be. And it can't be we're listening because they figured out like the set top case. ABLE boxes the ATN produces actually are listening to what people say.

So they come up with, we hear you. So Tom says, we're listening, we hear you. It's the same problem, isn't it? And Greg, it's maybe less active. It's more, couldn't help glimpse you changing unless we put a spy cam in your shower. That's line of the week. Let's get into Finance 101. Oh, thank God.

Look, there's short term. And then there's long term. Well, there's some medium term. A little bit of median term. But, like, you know, I play on the extremes. So you're just threes or lay-ups? Yeah, it's suckers in the media. And when he says threes, he means 300.

We're talking 300 years. Three Cs. We're talking, we call it centuries. Millennial Planning. That's right. What is the earth going to look like when it is just the crust is left? I'm thinking of what my children's, children's, children's children's, children's, children's, children's, children's, children's, children's, children's children's children's children's children's children's children's children. are going to need from their investment portfolio.

Right, because they're just going to be ones and zeros in a disused jewel. So they're just going to be floating in space in a jeweled cartridge, and that's going to be your family member. Here's our tip, straight from the number one boys to you. Fresh water. Buy it. And E6. That's right. Let them eat cake.

It's the crazy rich moment of the week. I referenced this in the cold open, but I really, really enjoy the Airbus cultural and leadership walk. Like you had to have your walk in the fucking woods sponsored by Airbus. Yeah, like, what? What are you talking about? Why does Airbus need to sponsor that? It's not even in the air.

It's not flying. It's just the guy's walking by a creek. It's got to be sponsored by something. I also love the one guy who's like, yeah, the trees and the stream. Like, we've got to preserve all this. So we're thinking, you know, Airbus, what if we bought it? and then charged for people to come see it, you know, and then it's the nature is preserved. You know what fucking rules to? Leadership YouTube. I get into like these like kind of deep dives,

like sometimes we're like, fuck yeah. I just watch like a hundred dabbo-sweeney videos. I love that shit. And he's like, it's all about struggle. That's right. And then it's like a nine minute video of him just repeating the word struggle and being like, my struggle to win my assignment, your struggle to beat your man, our struggle as a community to beat Alabama. And it's like, and you just realize like, this is nonsense, but people think he's like, they're like, oh my God, hold on a second. The Buddha of South Carolina, it's pretty good stuff. You should get into leadership YouTube. It's an offshoot of coaching YouTube. So cultural leadership walks. That's our crazy rich moment of the week. I love it. Predictions.

I believe that there is some kind of. coming, whether it's Roman and Jerry together, Roman Jerry and Shiv, Shiv and Kendall, Shiv Kendall and Frank, yeah, Shiv Solo. I think Logan is beginning, he's got, you know, he's saying stuff that is out of pocket and he's looking physically weak and, you know, he's looking more and more in Shiv's words like that dinosaur as the meteor is coming in. What are they going to do? I think the time is now to strike. The wild card that you didn't mention there also is Sandy and Stewie. Yeah.

The proxy fight's not over. They could still come to take over. Syphilis is treatable. Syphilis is like what they're doing with drugs right now is amazing. It's just like you put some like amoxicillin on that and it just fain. The cream in the clear. We could have like saved French Impressionism if we had that back then. We'd still have those beautiful twilight.

Beautiful. Yeah, I think San Diego. and Stewie are coming back. Yeah, they're coming back. Because if they can't buy Pierce, that's right, unless that guy who had loafers made out of human rights activists. Right. Young MBS, whoever that guy was. Who was just like, the news, but independent, but positive. Unless that guy comes back with a huge check for those, for, for, for Wastar, I think they're very vulnerable right now. It's just a matter of which, if any, Roy winds up coming over. So we'll have to keep an eye out, but the coup is

coming. We will be back next week after the East Coast area. of succession in all the usual places, YouTube, Twitter, etc. For Jason, I am Chris, this has been number one boys. 300 years. That's right. Today's episode of the watch is brought to you by Navy Federal Credit Union. Navy Federal is proud to serve over 8 million members, including active duty military, the DOD, veterans, and their families. You'll receive a lifetime of membership benefits with Navy Federal and you can easily access accounts, transfer money, pay bills and deposit checks with Navy Federal's mobile app. Visit NavyFederal.org slash watch for more information.

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