The Watch - 'Special Ops: Lioness' and Taylor Sheridan's Worldview. Plus, the Disney Cable Dispute and 'Winning Time.'

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

Chris and Andy talk about the ongoing dispute between Disney and Charter Communications that is leading to Disney channels like ESPN being blacked out on Spectrum (1:00). Then they talk about 'Special Ops: Lioness' and where it fits into the Taylor Sheridan–verse (22:15), before discussing the latest episode of 'Winning Time' and the finale of 'How to With John Wilson' (57:26). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's your boy Johnny Bananas, and I'm going to be covering a brand new season of the Challenge USA on CBS that, of course, I will be completely dominating on my podcast, death taxes and bananas on the Ringer reality TV podcast. Head over that feed and follow us on Spotify so you never miss an episode. Did you know about one in three people with plaques psoriasis may also develop psoriotic. arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness, and swelling? Does this sound like you? Listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away. Trimphaya, Gusalcomab, taken by injection, is a prescription medicine for adults with moderate to severe plaques psoriasis, who may benefit from taking injections or pills or phototherapy, and for adults with active psoriotic arthritis. Serious allergic reactions and increased risk of infections and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, your doctor's should check you for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection,

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Learn more at brooksrunning.com. I need supports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio, my Hackney Diamond. It's Andy Greenwald.

Chris, it's great to see you. It's great to see Kaya. Happy Labor Day, everyone. It's post-Labor Day now, right? Well, I hope everyone, you know, took a moment to reflect on the labor movement in this country. I did. And now, as we were just saying before we hit record, the silly season of the summer is over. It's back to school time.

It's below 80 degrees in Los Angeles. Feels great. Guess the lines is back. I'm about to go fucking apple picking out in this piece. Are you really? No, it's September, man. I love it. I love it.

Today on the podcast, just to set the little table of contents for everybody. Okay. Carriage fees. How do they work? We'll talk a little bit about why the Disney channels may not have been available to you if you dialed up your cable subscription on your cable box and sort of channel surfing. And then you just got like a weird terse message saying the Disney Corporation is trying to screw us. So we're not going to carry their channels right now.

We'll also talk a little bit about winning time. and maybe how-to with John Wilson. What's this? Maybe. Definitely how-to with John Wilson. And then, Andy, a segment that I know that you've been looking forward to for eight weeks. No, seven, because the first two went up at once. The Return of the Lioness Tamer. I can't wait.

By the way, we should start with that once we get through our news and notes section, front of the book stuff. You want to do Lioness up top? Yeah. I came here today to do two things. To chew gum and listen to you talk about, enhanced interrogation techniques and I'm all out of gum. Okay. I'm all out of enhanced interrogation techniques. I actually have gum, but Kaya said that's just really bad form to do that.

You remember when Jacoby used to, when we first were doing hollow prospectus at Grantland? Yeah. And Jacobi used to have a lot of notes on mouth sounds. Yeah. Yeah. Jacoby had a lot of notes on everything. I think that was because I was doing a lot of nicotine gum back then. And the reason why I was chewing nicotine gum is that when I moved to Los Angeles,

I thought David Jacoby was going to be my smoking. buddy. Yeah. We were all going to smoke in Los Angeles. And I got to the offices of Grantland on like day one. And I was like, hey, brother, what I have a light a dart outside? And he was like, oh, I quit. He did that to you?

Yeah, he was a cold turkey. I quit. Wow. I thought that he was like a New York smoker when he lived in L.A. You know what I mean? Like you cross the middle of the country and then it's okay. You know, like everything east of the Mississippi is like Vegas for your lungs. That's right.

That's not the case. No. But then you power quit yourself? No, I mean, it depends on how you describe quit. Oh, boy. It's like, is nicotine still a part of my life? Yes. Yeah, you still have a relationship with nicotine.

But not with cigarettes, yeah. Most of Jacobi's notes, however, were about how we shouldn't banter at the top of a podcast. How are you doing? Wow. How are you doing? I feel great. Yeah. I feel really good to be here.

You made a reference to Hackney Diamonds. The new one from the Rolling Stones. Here's my thing about this. I'm thrilled. they're making a new record. Fantastic. Great for those boys. Yeah. It did say in the metadata that this is their first album of original material since 2005's A Bigger Bang, which I believe had a strident anti-Bush Doctrine Street, which I'm sure has aged. Better than Keith Richards' lungs. But I was going to say, I don't want to tell those guys how to do their job. They're the best rock band ever,

and they actually were that when we were born. Yeah. So that's cool. But if I had one eye on the mortality clock, I wouldn't let two decades elapse between records. I'd put something on wax. I think those guys were busy, you know? I think those guys were they were touring and making billions of dollars while doing it. And they're probably like,

I imagine if you're in your late 60s, 70s, I know that they're in their 80s now, but let's say like 10 years ago. Right. And Keith Richards is like, oh, man, you've been a UK gross. did you say that he's trapped in a UK garage or he's listening to a bit of... How about we interpolate a bit of UK garage?

Like a little bit of breakbeat culture into the Rolling Stones. And then by the time they get to that, it's like, oh, that moment is past. Do you think someone played Keith Richards the Artful Dodger record and was like, Keith, mate? He's time in it. Mad for it. I don't think so. We have a British show coming up that we're going to watch a little bit of the gold. Also on Paramount Plus, along with the Lioness.

The Lioness? I wonder if I should start calling it The Lioness. I like that. Maybe we should start calling shows just whatever we want. I think it's, that was what's his name did. That was the Matt Reeves thing where it's just like, you don't take Batman seriously enough. Yeah, he's the Batman. He's the Batman now.

Andy, do you have a cable subscription? I don't. Okay, I do. I know. And this weekend was the opening weekend of college football. I had not really been paying attention to the entertainment trades because I knew we had this long weekend. I knew I had plenty of time to count. You just wanted to unplug?

Yeah, a little bit. And so I flipped around, I think, on Friday, Saturday. Were you going to put on the U.S. Open maybe? No, I was going to watch a little college football. And I was able to do that, but only on the Fox Network. Hmm. And it's because I subscribe to a, or I'm a customer of a cable company that is in conflict with Disney. This is actually, this is hitting home for me.

Wow. So for people who don't know, let's tell them a little bit about the situation. Essentially every year or whenever these contracts come up, the cable companies, your spectrums, your whatever's, Xfinities, Xfinities, yeah, they negotiate

with content distributors, the studios essentially, right, on carriage fees. I'm like, what it's going to cost for them to carry per customer, what are they going to I mean, that's how it passes on to the customer. And when I look at my cable bill and it is incredibly high,

I see like you're being charged this for this package and this for this package of things. And some of it is like, movies and whatever. Are you paperless or do you still get like a sheaf of papers? No, I like, I like a, I file cabinets of all my bills. That's great. Yeah.

That's useful. You're going to need those. No, actually, you know, my mom does do that. Yeah. And it's just like, what are we doing here with life? I think my parents do it too, but it's hard to see underneath the, the boxes of Sarah Lee products that are on the counter, but I think that they act as a paperweight and effect of paperweight.

Yeah, right. So essentially what happened was Disney, which owns ESPN, which, which owns ABC. tried to ask for something, I don't remember what the exact fee up charge was, but I think it was like a $1.50 more per customer or whatever they were doing. And Charter put its foot down. Charter is this major cable company said,

we're not going to, we're not paying more for this. Or if you want us to pay more for this, we would like for our customers to have access to your OTT product. So that would be like ESPN Plus, Hulu, Disney Plus. the sort of products that are, according to Bob Iger himself, the future of Disney in terms of their television offerings.

We have arrived at, you know, Matt Bellany wrote about this. There's a bunch of stuff from Benjamin Mullen, the New York Times. It's very illuminating about all of this. The reason why I wanted to ask you about this stuff is that we are in day 100 plus. 29, I think, something like that. Well, for the writer's strike, we're deep into this strike. we're entering another season, another queue of uncertain, like, content offerings.

And then on the flip side of this, we have this moment where on the precipice of college football season and with NFL starting on Thursday, NESPN and ABC being like a major NFL offering, NFL distributor, a major cable network is just like, we can't do this anymore, not unless you want to offer us a backdoor.

These backdoors are pretty common. I think for a long time, I don't sure if they still offer it, but if you subscribe to HBO through your cable company, you get HBO Max for free. There are, like, often when you see these things, it's like log in through your cable provider. So there are traditionally ways to have these backdoors into the OTT products,

but it's just wild to me that we are seemingly arriving at this like crossroads where a bunch of these things are kind of falling apart at once. I think it's fascinating. And it's, you've zeroed in on the part of it that actually is fascinating, I think even to the layman, which is charter saying, you have been saying the quiet part loud for so long now that we need to talk about this in public. And the quiet part is the cable bundle is dead. And that is not part of our future. That is not part of our great nation's future. And we are, we are systematically dismantling our commitment to those consumers and to that industry. And we are putting our prime resources towards. streaming. Now, you pointed out that, like, you could subscribe, if you were paid for HBO through your cable plan, you could get HBO Go or HBO Now or HBO Max or all these now defunct services. That was primarily during an era when that was your, that was your easiest

ability to watch the content you subscribe to on demand or on the go. Yeah. On your devices. I'm often on the go. And that's often when I want to watch HBO. HBO Go in some ways suited my lifestyle. It did. Just like, for a long time, I was like, Chris, a healthy alternative in the morning would be yogurt. And you were like, I can't, how could I do that on the go? And then I pointed out in the kids aisle, the gogert product. And you're like, this appeals to me. Yeah. This is my sensibility. But it's tough because I already have my phone in my hand watching HBO go. But that's the beauty of the gogert product, no sponsors, but you can just squeeze the tube into your mouth while going. Going in any whatever capacity you need to go. Um, so they are basically

saying to Disney, you are taking these things away from us and you are forcing us into some pretty challenging existential waters here because you've publicly said that you are making programs for people who pay for the Disney Plus product or plate for the ESPN Plus product or whatever. So, okay, let's talk about it and let's hash this out in person and person in public and say, how are we both going to survive this? This is, it's funny, Bob Eiger took the time in Sun Valley to be like the writers are being a little bit inconvenient. This seems to be a lot more inconvenient, I would say, in terms of the company's bottom line.

because in the midst of all of this tumult, the carriage fees for ESPN are still money printed for them. That's still a huge bulwark of their plan. And if you listen to Matt Bellany on the town, he even recently was talking about how one of the things, Disney is in rough waters right now, but they do still have some revenue streams like cable, like apologies for the rough waters comment,

but cruise ships like amusement parks. You take one of those planks away, plus original content being made, then you're really talking trouble. The big picture about all this that I find really interesting brings me back to the writer's strike and the current labor unrest in Hollywood. This was phrased to me really well the other day, and I think this is probably a good way to understand where things stand coming out of Labor Day, which is the studios did their big public leak of their offer, which they felt, and of course they would feel this way, was quite reasonable and made significant concessions monetarily in terms of potential, basically raises for the right. writers. This was met with a lot of derision, not just because of the leaking of it, but because it was not nearly enough. And one thing that the A&PTP does not seem to understand, and hopefully they

will soon learn to understand or come to understand, is that this disagreement has gone past being financial. It is philosophical. We are not talking about deserving a 10% pay bump versus a 5% pay bump. Writers are talking about, can you prove that you value writing as a profession so that it can be a profession in this town. I think actors feel the same way. That's a very, very different argument. Now, I think that actually understanding that would be a path towards some sort of resolution. But once again, we have these financially driven, shareholder driven old school capitalist whales like Bob Eager trying to fix a philosophical problem with financials. Yes.

And that is ugly, but it's also very indicative of where we are at this particular moment. Yeah. I just think that the, look, I mean, I mean, as Matt pointed out, as Bellany pointed out in his, what I'm hearing column, his newsletter that he sends out through Puck, he was like, this is sort of a tradition unlike any other where a cable company and, you know, whether it's, you know, Dodgers games in L.A. Like, it does seem like seasonal that it gets into a staring contest about, oh, hey, you know, we're going to pull.

Yeah, this isn't new. We're going to drop this. This has happened before. And often what happens is around sports and people demand. essentially to get the NFL and there's some sort of there's some sort of compromises made. I find the whole idea

of offering people who subscribe to a cable company this free membership essentially to or some tranch of studios OTT offerings to be fascinating. On one hand I'm sure it helps

at times to kind of inflate eyeballs and minutes spent and, you know, all these other things. But you do wonder whether or not if ESPN is eventually going to turn into ESPN plus or if ESPN Plus is going to be a huge hub for most of their stuff. Like, whether or not the fact that all those people who are watching it via, say, a charter or spectrum are not paying for it is actually like, that's a Wall Street thing

where they might be like, yeah, I know you say all these people are spending this amount of time watching the featured group of the U.S. Open or whatever it is that you've got or the featured group of the Masters, but they're not paying to watch that. This is like what Skarsgar did with India in the last season of Succession. That's right. There are two Indians. There are moments. I mean, yeah, again, we are not fiduciaries.

But, yeah, I'm not even, I didn't even bring this up to be like, let's break down the numbers as much as between a bunch of blockbusters seemingly moving to 2024, Disney movie. most of its Marvel content to 2024 after Loki, the strikes, the strikes, as you said, becoming post-financial and now philosophical, where you see people being like talking about some of the ideas and being like, I will strike on this forever, you know? And now you've got like this sort of collapse of the, this oncoming collapse of cable. We're in this incredibly tempestuous time. And it's fraught because this is happening, this shift to Philadelphia. philosophical debate, let's say, is happening concurrently at a time when money is no longer theoretical, right?

I mean, this has been underscoring a lot of the conversation over the last year and a half, but at a time when interest rates were what they were and you could borrow against whatever, you could prop up your bottom line with just shareholder growth. You didn't have to say how much they were paying or in which of the two Indias they lived in. I bought so many vape stores. Did you? Money was cheap. That's incredible by you.

Now the bill is coming to. Are they still operating as vape stores? Are you considering pivoting? I might just start showing ESPN there. Oh, you know, in the same way that like during a hot day, cities open like cooling centers, you could go through Los Angeles and be like, watch the Clemson came here at this abandoned vape store. Yeah.

And if you want to suck down some strawberry banana. Smoke. Deep's? Like, go for it. That's your genius. Yeah, I mean, this is a, that's a little tough because bottom line does matter. And you can't just write checks that your company's ass can't cash anymore. You have to actually be able to cash them. So, I don't know.

I wonder if Bob Eager wakes up every day being like, why did I come back to this? But at the same time, then he looks around and he's on the yacht that's attached to his larger yacht, and he's probably like, this is fine. I have to imagine that. I don't want to put it as simply as like he likes being powerful and he likes being loved but he's really only one of those things right now. Yeah.

So I think that when he exited, it was just like this guy brought us the sort of avalanche of Marvel and Star Wars that all dorks inside of adults wanted and he also has just overseen this pretty much uninterrupted run of growth and public adoration for Disney, and then he goes away, and it gets bad,

and now he comes back, and he's like, I fix X, Y, and Z, and this is going to be great, and we're back in theaters, and we have Disney Plus, and I'm going to oversee, Indiana Jones is coming back. You know, we're building off that Eternals momentum.

And it just seems like, I wonder if that guy, when's the last time that guy's had, like, a good day at work. He's interesting as a case study, because as far as I know, he's the only example we have an American life of someone just clinging to power too long? Yeah, I mean, most people are just like, it's like, why would I make hackney diamonds when I could just, when I could just coast off, you know?

Yeah, like, what more do I have to accomplish as, you know, the leader of my party in the Senate? You know what I mean? Like, it's hard to imagine. But yeah, but it's also, look, the bill always comes due for this stuff. And, you know, when Iger left, and he was like, look at all the things I acquired at a time when it seemed like expanded. and acquisition was the future, and they were positioning themselves to have the biggest larder for the upcoming content wars, everybody was thrilled. Now you're getting digging into it, and now the only thing that I hear about, like, for example,

the Fox acquisition is what a genius Rupert Murdoch was to sell. And what a dummy, Eiger was to let Universal bid the price up, so it became prohibitively expensive, but he had to do it anyway. Now, this is always, you know, the takes of the moment are always going to shift, but he, did have a strange opportunity, perhaps a unique opportunity, to just be like, look what I did. Now you clean it up. Yeah. Yeah, I don't, it's very, very, very, very messy. And I guess probably the best way to just put a button on the conversation is for as much as we've talked about the strike, and as much as the strike has dominated some of the coverage of entertainment, unless you are a huge

late-night TV fan or something, you still haven't really felt the impact of it. That is going to begin this week when there's no fall TV season. Sure. Right? If you are a cable subscriber and suddenly you can't watch sports this weekend, the strike is not... It's literally the only reason I have cable

is to watch sports. Yeah. Like without any like, oh, my internet's down or something like that. Ironically, my internet comes through my cable company, so it's like... Well, there you go. Damned if you do.

So do you have... If you don't mind me asking. Wow. Do you use YouTube TV? No, no, no, no. I'm still a fool with direct TV. Oh, okay. Okay, really? Interesting. Didn't you have some issues? Oh, yeah. Okay.

Yeah, but I'm too lazy to unbundle myself. I'm in too deep. If I had to guess, there's three people in this studio right now. It's you and me. It's Kaya McMullen, our producer. I bet Kai is a cord cutter. Hardcore, right? Yeah, I haven't had cable since I left my parents' house. I think I don't want to put Kai on the spot, but I think I heard she recently got some new passwords for herself on some of her streaming services. You know what I do do is use I do have my own Netflix account now Thank you very much Thank you I'm a big girl now

I use my dad's direct TV login On the occasion that I do Like you want to watch the Oscars Yes When I want to watch the Oscars Or when I want to watch like a stray Warriors game Stray Warriors game I didn't know that

Yeah I'm from the area I know when we learned he's just I just never heard you been like Hey did you see that Warriors game last night Well I mean I don't have a lot to add when I watch NBA games. No, but this is how people like, you know, like this is how we become friends just by saying, like, hey, see the game last night? This is the biggest Chris's smile.

We've been working with Kai have for like three and a half years. What were you talking about a couple days ago where you were like, I love like when something, what was the thing where it's like, hey, just see the Knicks and your friends like, what are you going to do with this team? Oh, no, it's my great friend, John Carlo, was brilliant composer, composer of my show and worked on many other things. Rock, et cetera. He's a lifelong New Yorker, does not really care about sports, and wears a beaten up Nick's hat. It's his favorite hat. And he wears it out in public, and people will be like, what do you think of the game last night? And he goes, what are you going to do? And that's always accurate, right? Yeah. What are you going to do? Can you believe how good these guys are or how bad these guys are? It all fits on what are you going to do. Or he just goes, this team. And it gets

and the other person, like, I know. And it could be good or it could be bad. Yeah. No problem. It is a great equalizer. You should do that more often. I think that would be like an interesting curveball from Kaya. If she just showed up in a Dramon Green jersey? That would be a surprise. Kaya's more of a Jordan pool guy. Wow.

It feels like generationally he's more of a like, I don't have my own passport to Netflix. I know enough about sports to say I'm not a Jordan pool guy. That's Joe House now, right? It's Joe House's problem. It's his cross to bear. This episode is brought to you by Amazon, Prime, ever have a plan come together out of nowhere and realize you're missing something? Like a last minute beach day, a spontaneous hike, or an outdoor movie night you didn't plan for.

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it earns unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases. Say it with me, the Active Cash Credit Card from Wells Fargo, be a 2%er. Learn more at Wells Fargo.com forward slash active cash terms apply. All right. Do you want to talk about lying this first? I really want, I mean, when you say talk about, I really want to hear you talk about it. I am not. Here's how I've prepared this.

Before, can I just put a pre-apology? Because I feel like last week, there's a couple things you really wanted to do. Like, you're an easygoing guy. You know, you get the nicotine in you. You're fine. You're fine for, you know, 60 to 90 minutes. You last longer than that. You really wanted to talk about Ferrari.

The trailer for Ferrari, yeah. And I couldn't get there. with you and I feel bad about that. That's okay. I think that we all have, it's okay to have different tastes. And I often, I think, on our podcast, because you and I were just best buds,

you know, like we try to be there for each other. If one of us is not watching a show, we're just probably not going to talk about it very much. Not too much. As drops of God, it's not like you don't do your thing. You know what I mean? And I do my thing.

You mean when we're not recording? This is just going to be a little bit of an experiment to see how interesting of a conversation we can have about a show you haven't watched, Okay. And what I've done for everybody is I've prepared a quick recap of the season you missed. Oh, wow. Some of these are just notes to myself. So they might not be like, I'm not trying to say like this is a total synopsis. If you have not seen Lioness, I would stop listening and just know that as of right now, Lioness is probably in my top 10 shows of the year.

I just want to clarify for people, but if they haven't clicked off yet, should they stop listening forever to this podcast? back to this episode because we'll be talking about winning time and how to as well. I realize I should have gotten in front of this with the holiday weekend looming. If I had known you were going to do like a deep investigative dive on the season, I was hoping you could do it in the style of Seymour Hirsch. You know what I mean? Like reporting. You mean have one anonymous source who tells me everything I want to know?

All the bad things that happened. Yeah. No, I don't have that. Do you think it would be useful for you to know what happened on this season? Is that not what you're going to be covering? No, I have that, and then I also have some observations. I really want to know, genuinely and sincerely, as your friend and as someone who's just devoted to content, I want to know why you love the show so much.

Okay, I'll just skip to that. No, no, no, no, no. It's not like I have a stand-up routine based on this. I was just going to give you the highlights of what happened. And are you going to include the highlights on the field of combat and the home front? Yeah, well, that's one of the, that's one of the, that's one of the highlights. but that's one of the things that makes this show pretty interesting. The conflict exists in both spaces.

The war at home. Wow. I've never seen that done in a show. Okay, so spoiler alert. Cue the Lion King music for Lioness. Special Ops Colon Lioness, but I can pretty much tell you that they wanted to call this show Lioness. I think that they put the special ops there because...

To build a franchise. Because it seems like they might want to build another franchise. Chris, did you know that recently in New York City I took my daughters to see the Lion King on Broadway. And one thing that show, this is relevant, really brings up is that, you know who does the hunting in a pride? The Lioness. Did you know that from the show?

No, they don't really even get into too much why they're calling it the Lioness program. It's really about people. But we've solved that. We know why. So, Andy, you watched the first episode. I did. So you know about the setup.

You know about Cruz, Manuelus, who's our sort of, not really our protagonist, because that's Joe, played by Zili Sadania, but like this, this sort of person left behind by the world, it's kind of like marginalized by her relationships in life,

by her family life, by her access to opportunities in the world. And she finds her calling when she crashes through the glass door of a Marine recruiting station on the run from an abusive partner. And the Marines, steps in between in this conflict and then it seems like

you want to be a Marine. And she does. And she becomes a Marine and she excels at it. That's how you came to be the owner of a chain of vape stores. She just crashed

into the wrong Hesher's establishment. That's right. Seems like you'd like to own a vape store. So I think a lot of people anecdotally were turned off by the second episode,

which you did not see. No, I was turned off by the second episode. Okay. So where she is put through advanced interrogation techniques to see how much

she could withstand where she ever captured, like her predecessor was. Her predecessor who is unceremoniously executed with a drone strike ordered by her own boss because it's essentially as like a mercy killing, but it's also to clear the sort of slate of like any evidence of the Linus program existing. It's helpful to sort of, you know, if you can get past the second episode, which I admit is tough to take. You know, it's, it reminded me a lot of the infamous fourth episode

of Kingsdown, which I think I've mentioned to you, which is about, like, Jeremy Renner essentially orchestrating the murder of a meth dealer. Taylor Sheridan is just... By pitting multiple prison gangs on this guy. He's just built different.

Yeah, it really is crazy when you have to say these things out loud to people. As the season goes on, though, essentially you get the idea of, like, who Cruz's target is going to be, who is this financier for terrorist organizations. and he is operating as an oil dealer. He basically moves black market oil essentially to Russia and China,

but his other job is acting as a bank for a lot of terrorist organizations. He's like he doesn't need another job. No, I mean, you'd think, you know, but like... It's tough out there. Yeah, I mean... Wake up and grind, right? If he's got one hand on HBO go and the other hand on the go-gert, you know? That's right.

And so as the season progresses, the way that Cruz sort of gets close or attempts to get close to this financiers through his daughter, Alia, who is getting married in some future episode. And so she is like kind of on her bachelorette stag due run where she's going to the Hamptons and she's going to New York City and she's partying because she's going to get married in a couple of weeks to this guy who is essentially her father maybe in the making. he's a financier, not for terrorist organizations, but it's working in investments. But seems to have a lot of access to security information. Okay, so as the season goes on... Are we invested in this couple? Like, are we like, let's hope these crazy kids make it?

Well, funny you should mention that because what starts out as obviously a professional job for Cruz becomes more complicated when her and Aliyah consummate their relationship. Oh. Yeah. And they start to fall in love. So...

Whoa. Cruz's main issue here is that like she's not trained for matters of the heart, right? She doesn't, she doesn't know like how to deal with her feelings for this woman when she's also trying to get close enough to her father to execute him, essentially. There's a whole other subplot going on about some incursions into the homeland to the United States by some terrorist organizations. And there's a couple of really dynamic set pieces throughout the season. one and pretty much ripped right from the Sicario highway traffic jam shootout. It's not plagiarism if you wrote the first version. If you wrote the first one.

And then there's also, I mentioned a kill team in a safe house in San Antonio a couple weeks ago. You seemed pretty interested in that. I am. I mean, again, it's cool when like you're calling yourself a kill team. Yeah. You know what I mean? Well, it's QRF. It's a quick response force.

I think. Oh, no, no. That could be anything. So while all this is happening, we get to know a little bit more about the Zoe Saldanya character. Joe and her relationship with her husband, Neil.

They're in a little bit of an open relationship because they were having problems with their marriage. And she's a kind of absentee mom because she's constantly being called away to these far-flung places to oversee some pretty gnarly shit. So Neil's really watching the shop,

but not watching it. well enough because at some point during the season their teenage daughter not only gets in a massive car accident, but it's found out that she's pregnant when that happens. So there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes on the bat. But it's more functions as a reason why Joe is, like, distracted and also wants to stop doing this and get a desk job.

Anyway, what you really need to know is that everything kind of builds and builds and builds. We learn more about Nicole Kidman's Caitlin character, who's Zoe Saldi's boss. Do we learn where she's from in order to be speaking that way? I really don't know. I don't know what's up with the eyebrows. I don't know what's up with the accent.

I'm going to talk a little bit about the appearances of certain actors in this show. Essentially, it all culminates with a lovely looking wedding in Majorca. Oh, they do get married. Yes. And spoiler of all spoilers, Cruz kills the shit out of both Alia's husband-to-be and her father. Wow.

Really, really, really does a number on them. This is in the finale? And escapes, yes. And when she escapes. escapes from lioness too or escapes from... Well, she gets back on the boat and she essentially says to Joe, look what you made me into.

Like, look what you've done to me. And she's like, you're a fucking liar. And all I did today was change the price of oil. Like, the whole idea is essentially, this is like a completely hollow exercise and that has nothing to do with, like, protecting people or patriotism. There...

Was this in response to how to blow up a pipeline? Do you think they exist in the same? I don't think so. So this kind of leads me to my... first point about what makes this show pretty interesting to me. Was the kill team invited to the wedding? In a sense, they were on a yacht off the coast. They were around.

Wearing flippers and holding silenced machine. They were ready. Yeah, they extracted. Oh, okay. All right, sorry, please. So, I would say that one of the most interesting things about this show is that on surface, you could probably say, what a fucking piece of imperialistic, jingoistic, like nonsense and propaganda. I think it actually is not anti-war, which is what you might respond to or what someone might respond to.

And it certainly romanticizes, and for lack of a better term, lionizes, especially the special operations part of the military. I think it has a pretty low opinion of American foreign policy and American government. And that is actually something that's pretty consistent with if you wind up in YouTube rabbit holes watching Navy Seals talk on podcasts. Yeah. They're very much like, what we do is very special and we're like new gladiators, but like the government itself is a bunch of fucking nimrods. Yeah. It's don't hate the players, hate the game.

Exactly. So that gets articulated through the show pretty interestingly. And I think that's the politics of Sakaria, too. Oh, yeah. I mean, I love that movie. I'm not anti-Taylor Sheridan's kill team shenanigans. Yeah. The thing that you really, so I mean, because of the military stuff and the way that they

handle it and they're kind of added. they have about it. You know, John Hillcoat directed like four, four of this eight episodes. Like, this thing looks great and the actions at pieces are actually, I'd put them up against a lot of,

like, 75% of the stuff you might see movies these days in terms of, like, you saw that first episode, the opening strike, like it's pretty incredible stuff. There is something to the way that Taylor does these shows that I want to try and unpack with you, even though I know you were not like a subscriber to his brand.

I'm a charter subscriber, I've lost all access to, not charter in the sense of first, but like, that's my case. Taylor Sheridan is not Aristotle. Right. For as much action as there is in his shows,

I do not think that the action defines the characters. Like, you know, the idea that action is character or character is action or whatever it is. It's like, his characters are constantly telling you who they are, what they believe in,

and what they are going to do. And in that sense, he is like almost, he is like a pure TV writer. Like he really does understand the storytelling economy of television where he is not letting you kind of wonder, what's this person in it for? Right.

Why is this person doing this? They're like, they walk into a room and they fucking say what they're doing and why they're doing it. That can be a little reductive and maybe it doesn't allow much for the imagination of the audience. But it certainly works when you are trying to move through scenes quickly. And specifically the way that he has constructed a lot of these series where they're essentially

like miniseries. You know, Kingsdown, I think, is the only one that I would say seems to be operating in Yellowstone, obviously, where you're like, oh yeah, this could go on for as long, I guess, as you wanted it to. Like, he really does, like, drive your attention. He really grabs your attention over the course of these sort of like, I don't know, like six, seven to eight episode series. I mean, I think 1883 was the best example of this

where it was like, oh, like anything can happen in this, it's really like all bets are off when it comes to what I'm used to in these kinds of stories. And we've heard enough anecdotes to suggest that there really might be some truth to the fact that the powers that be at Paramount were in the dark as anyone else about the future of 1883. They were like, we have it blocked out that you'll be shooting season two here. And he was like, did you not read the scripts? Yeah, right. Like the conventional thinking, people expect something more conventional.

Yes. And I will be interested to see they did not end Lioness in any way where it would be like, they ended Lioness in a way where it could very easily be a second season of this specific story. Or because they have called it Special Ops Lioness, there could be another story set in this world, perhaps tangentially, like, related to it. Maybe some of the characters that we see a lot in the situation room, I mentioned Morgan Freeman, I mentioned Michael Kelly and Bruce McGill and Jennifer

Ellie and like all these people who are kind of in the more the Washington, D.C. side of this world. I could definitely see that being a thing if they wanted to do more of it. And if Zoe Saldaño was like, that was the season that I wanted to do. The other big thing to know about Taylor Sheridan

and why I think his shows work really well is he is a fucking melodrama merchant. Yes. Like there is a Grey's Anatomy skeleton underneath all. all this muscle and masculine. I totally agree with this. The stuff in Joe's family life,

you're watching and you're like, right, they're going to gesture to like the kids being annoyed that she's always gone, but that's going to be way in the background. And in the middle of the season, he essentially like flips the kind of foreground background of the series itself. And like her family life is essentially like two episodes,

full episodes, so a quarter of the season. And it winds up becoming, while ridiculous, like in some ways, pretty engaging because you're like, I'm way more interested in this person's home life now because the show is. The show isn't just saying like, oh yeah, don't worry, man, Joe and her marriage and her kids,

but really what we want to do is have more extraction scenes and more like fighting going on. They actually do completely like turn the access of the show around. I do think it's fascinating. I think it's one of the keys to Taylor Sheridan's enormous popularity and also why he may just be one of one, not just his ability to crank out endless scripts that he seems to possess.

But his, like you can't really hide who you are, your sensibilities in TV, and especially when you're making this much TV. And he has such a, frankly, bizarre combination of CBS and cinema. You know, I can't think of anyone else like that. Because when we talk about the ways he's pushing the genre forward, I mean, some of them are, in terms of clearly budgets

or the extremity of what he wants to do in some of these shows to some of his characters and the unpredictability of it. 1883 being the prime example, and I'm sorry that we're spoiling it for people, but there will not be in 1884, as guaranteed by the end of 1883. But at the same time, when I watch the shows, I find it hard to settle in

because some of it feels like something that was on TV 25 years ago. Yeah. There's something structural to it. When you read the plot descriptions of some of his shows, they are not that different than reading a plot. description of like brothers and sisters or once and again or some of that like early 2000s hour long network drama about a family who has a company and also a bunch of different love interests there are numerous kettles to draw friction from yeah right you need to have as many

as possible um usually when someone comes from movies and says i'm an autore i'm in a car out of the space for myself they don't just naturally gravitate towards that kind of storytelling which also makes it why, that helps understand why CBS Paramount are so heavily invested in him, because he makes their shows. He just makes them through his own particular lens. I still think, like, when you describe some of the things that make you, they make lioness compelling to you and the people that show up in it, I am interested.

Yeah. Because as I said, I like Sicario. I think, to me, I still am not comfortable with that collision of those two sensibilities. Like, everything that you're describing in Lioness to me, in a vacuum would work better as a movie because you wouldn't have to

backfill and front fill and side fill all of the stuff or the people walk in the rooms and say, actually I'm a trauma surgeon. You could just be like this is a fucked up

slice of a moment and walk away from it which is what Sicario does best, I think. So that's the part where it starts to lose me. But frankly, that makes my argument irrelevant

because that's where it gains millions of Americans because they're watching it on their stories. I also think that it just appeals to more than just guys who listen to special ops podcasts on YouTube. You know, it winds up making it a little bit more three-dimensional,

even if those dimensions still feel like, particularly like soapy sometimes. Like there is a lot more to it than just like this person, her training, her spy story, and then the military action around it. I do also, I appreciate what you're saying, though, because I do think it's really, it's not just pointless. I think it's actively lazy to be reductive about one guy's policy. or the politics of a show because he doesn't fit neatly into any box. No, and I don't think actually he's, I think he obviously has some opinions about like the way the world works and clearly has a really like masculine, pretty like maybe outdated masculine way of like writing dialogue or what people say to one another.

And then funnily enough, like often will make a woman the lead of his show. and in this case the three main characters played by Zoe, Saldaña, Nicole Kimman, and Lila Dio Oliveros are all, you know, it's like that they're essentially like the three like most on-screen people here. But also I think the coverage of this is, the coverage of him and his shows is, is outdated as some of our political coverages too, because it does strike me from the shows of his that I've seen and the interviews that

I've read, that he, his main takeaway, and you were alluding to this, is that the way, systems work in this country are fundamentally broken and have been corrupted. And there have been betrayals to Americans and to the America's contract with the larger world. What's kind of interesting about this moment is I think that people from all binary spectrums of political thought feel that way. Yeah. It's what do you do about it? Well, there's a, and what are our responsibilities towards that? So there's a really interesting moment on this show that I think some people might like, you could, you could show this in a focus group and I think the focus group would be split. There's a moment where Cruz is starting to doubt whether she can do this anymore.

Like she's just like, I think that like my heart is in play here. I'm not trained to be a liar. I'm trained to be a soldier. And I'm not trained to pretend to be somebody that I'm not. And she's like, I think that I need to pull out. Like, I can't do this anymore. This is once they've become romantic. And on their way to Spain to go to like the first staging area before they go to

this wedding, the Joe character makes Cruz watch footage of terrorist incidents that have been linked to the target, the guy who's financing these incidents. She's like, I'm going to make you watch hours of footage of terrorist incidents that we have. And you could watch that and be like, that's propaganda.

Like that's this person being like, what we're doing, which is essentially like paramilitary, like, non-sanctioned assassinations is justified by these these terrible acts but I kind of watched it and saw somebody being indoctrinated into a cult and I think that when the show ends

when the season ends she has broken that spell and is like that was a fucking lie and she even says like all you did was kill an old man and guarantee that Aalya's eventual kids will grow up hating us because they'll hear about what happened to their grandfather You know, and is it told in a bare-knuckled way?

Yeah, but I think it's a lot more nuanced than just like America always has the right answer to these things. Well, also, we're existing in a world where the entertainment options of how we talk about America or American power are either stories like this or literally Captain America. Yeah. Well, they have to be like viewed through the lens of like allegory or fantasy. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, again, this is. easy for me to say as someone who chose not to watch the show.

And somebody wrote like a graduate level thesis on the Socovia Accords. I did. Thank you. I feel like my work is often repurposed, but rarely cited. Yeah. And I know that on Twitter you like to go around and just be like, I've been writing about the Socovia Accords for quite some time, and I would appreciate you're, you know, you're seeing me. Do you mean X? I do that on X. I'll wrap it up just by saying that there are parts of this. of Taylor Sheridan's work, where I think it suffers for him not having maybe the same level of accountability that other television makers have, where they're like, I have to satisfy like my corporate overlords or, you know, there's other creative partners who are telling me that like they think it should go one way or another. Much has been made of Taylor Sheridan's comments

on writing staffs, you know, and we've talked about that before. There is one thing that I think happens, though, is that sometimes there's like weird shit remains in the show. And the weirdest thing in this show is by far the marriage between Caitlin, played by Nicole Kibman and her husband, Errol, who is played by Martin Donovan, who is... Martin Donovan's on the show? A wildly powerful and successful trader, you know, like financial guy. Right. And the extent... I think they must have shot him in two days. All their scenes take place with him in a room looking at his like Bloomberg. terminal and then essentially giving a monologue about like the way the world really works. Yeah.

And they trade information. She's essentially like I'm going to Spain. He's like, oh, okay, so you're going to Spain. So that means this is happening. You know what I mean? Like there and then he'll be like, you should know that the reaction to this will be this if this happens.

You know, and like there's a whole idea of like whether or not like the people who are in charge of the Gulf states need an opposition. need like a basically an element like this to be out there to stay in power because otherwise people would start asking questions about economic inequality in those areas leave that to a much more knowledgeable podcast but in another show either there's like a reason why these people are having these conversations every

second episode or they're cut I think right like I just don't know what other show you have these like kind of a Greek course about the state of the world that has no dramatic impact on the rest of the series. Well, that's what I meant also when I was like, you can't really hide when you're producing this much content.

Sure. It runs counter to what we normally think of as artistic or atorish, but like, he has the runway to just do shit, do weird shit, to leave those things in. And to hear you talk about it, like this is a much more interesting television project

that should be considered it, you know, when, if we get a future and people are like, well, in this era, this is what was going on. This is more interesting in a way than winning time, other than the existence of winning time. It's just like, no, no, no, please, let's look backwards. Please, please, please, stop looking at the moment. Yeah. This weird collision between reasonable skepticism and outright paranoia. It's interesting. But to me, it comes down to also the ask is pretty great. to be a tailorologist, the way you are,

requires quite a time commitment because he produces in volume. I still know when my hand isn't great with him. Like, I think I got an episode or two into Kingston season two. And I was like, I think this was maybe one season of ideas here. And the dynamics that he sets up a lot of the times is like it's so tense.

And the sort of stakes are so high. that it doesn't really lend itself to a... I mean, it's what's happening with Yellowstone. It's like Casey on Yellowstone has killed like 50 people. You know, like, there's just... And there's no world in which this guy is still like, I work for, like, the Bureau of Land Management

or where the fuck he works. Like, he's a murderer at a certain point. And that's the TV problem. If it was a movie... Yeah, Casey would be... Like, the movie is the first two episodes of that show, which are fucking incredible. And then there's a couple of movies within it

that are pretty interesting. But to have it be going into season 5B or whatever it is and going possibly what's going to end apparently on 5B and then turn into something else. But yeah, the Taylor thing, it requires a commitment. I was not a fan of 1923, and I was not a fan of Tulsa King.

So it's not like I'm just like blank check for Taylor for my time. Can I just small digression? Yeah. We're talking about movies, talking about the great Martin Donovan. Have you seen that the Hal Hartley collection is on Criterion? Yeah, do you want to know how you saw it? From you?

Yes. Okay. I was trying to do a bit where we're like chatting. Chris told me about this. Kyah leave that in. I want people to know that sometimes I make a mistake. You're welcome. I wanted to know, speaking of things that are maybe or maybe not relevant, like for people have heard us talk about, I think in passing the films of Hal Hartley, who's a great indie filmmaker from the 90s that was incredibly formative to me, I believe to you as well. His movies have been really hard to see or almost entirely unavailable. I have VHS tapes of some of them. They are now available on Criterion. We're not getting a lot of content, as much content in the next few months. Could we check a couple out and talk about them? Could we do a Hartley pod?

Of course we can. Because I'm curious. We've talked about this too in other contexts. I am interested. I don't know if this will result in interesting podcasting, but I would be really interested to see things that meant so, so, so much to me at a young age and see whether the magic is still there, whether I can see it or even, I don't know. I mean, we could see if Kaya can borrow her dad's criterion login,

and maybe she would want to watch one to see if these movies have any spark. Yeah. Okay. So anyway, they're up there now. My favorite was always simple men, but unbelievable truth, trust, amateur. We'll circle back to those. Yeah, absolutely. I would love to do that.

That actually, like, the Martin Donovan part just leads me to, like, the last point I would make is that he is now kind of doing one of... Oh, he's one of the lead actors in all the hell of Hartley's movies. Yes, by the way. I didn't actually say that part out loud. And you will recognize Martin Donovan, a very busy character actor, is in a lot of streaming TV. What Taylor's doing right now where he is often minting new stars, and I would say I was familiar with Di Oliver's work

from a horror movie that I really liked called In the Tall Grass that's on Netflix. This is like star making for her. She's incredible in this. The physical stuff she has to go through and the physical aspect of her performance is unbelievable. He's also good at finding new roles for people that you're really familiar with. So like Dave Annabelle,

who was in Yellowstone briefly and has been on TV. Brothers and sisters is a big thing. But like he plays Neil, the surgeon who's married to Joe, and it seems like a nothing part until it's not. And to see him in this context is really cool. And then,

look, man, I don't know what the paycheck is. I don't know if it's just the material I've remarked upon how I don't understand how there's just this show and Nicole Kidman and Zoe Saldania and Morgan Freeman and Jennifer Ellie and Michael Kelly and Bruce McGill are in the situation room together

but we get what we get and somehow he is really he's got Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford to be in a show he got Sylvester Stallone to be in a show he got Sam Elliott and you know like he is writing these parts that are very attractive to actors

to big, big actors, and it's pretty cool. I could not tell you, other than the EP credit, why Nicole Kidman is in this show. It is not a big part. It's not a part that has a lot of meat on the bones unless maybe next season they get into who Caitlin is. She kills it. She's really weird.

It's a weird performance, but, you know, shout out to her. I guess it diversifies her portfolio, but she's like doing the thing. She's basically Chris Cooper in Born Identity. in this show. Do you think she's getting backroom Jerry Bus deals? Like, does she have points on the Paw Patrol package now?

Yes, right. But like within the larger Paramount Company, there's a certain level of frustrating. Every time ridiculousness is on MTV, she gets a dollar. Yeah. You know, one thing that I do think can't be overstated is that Sheridan was an actor.

Yeah. Actors know how to talk to actors. Yeah. And make compelling cases for them. And right towards the things that they want to spend their time doing. Yeah. That all matters. I mean, Martin Donovan gets a speech in this last episode where you're like, oh, that's why Martin Donovan did this. Aside from the back, but Martin Donovan probably likes to work.

And he gets to pay his actor. Like there is the normal, much like the Linus program, there is a special discretionary fund inside of Paramount that is for Taylor's cast. I would just say Zoe Salania, fan of hers. Yeah, she's really good. Huge fucking fan of hers. She's got that dog in her.

Great, great performance on this show. And the last thing I was just saying is, like, he's very crafty about whether or not these things are going to have legs to be a different show next season and more of the same. I do not understand the economics or the time management of being Taylor Sheridan and writing every episode of Lioness and every episode of Yellowstone and all these things. and having like his own imprint on this stuff, but he is also pretty savvy when it comes to creating a universe, a storytelling universe around his personal interests, around his creative interests.

I have, before we segue, out of the Taylorverse, two small things. One, a strong Jacoby note that I'm hearing in my head, even though he's definitely not listening right now, is it was pretty wild for me, for us to say, like, only Taylor shared and fans listen to the next 16 minutes the podcast. And then you sat here and listened?

No. And then in the middle of the Taylor Sherrod in part talk about the films of Hal Hartley. Thus guaranteeing that any Hal Hartley fans of the watch will have no idea that we're talking about this. Although you're reaching across the aisle. And for my absolute debased lionist heads, they're now like, all right, I guess that was like when AOC and Matt Gates co-sponsored legislation.

Is that what that was like for me? Did that happen? It did. It did. The one about how people in Congress shouldn't own stock. Oh. They shouldn't own stocks.

AOC because she believes that it's a conflict of interest at Matt Gates because he can't probably he's not legally allowed to own stock anymore. The other piece was, you said that Zoe Saldania has dog in her, I agree. I just want to put this out as a plea.

This has come up a couple times. I love this. This is something that Chris believes in now that separates not the men from the boys but from the people with dog and people without dog. And when you say it, you're thinking of the image that we've seen of like the x-ray of Darius Slay's ribcage

and there's just three dogs standing there. And I think you need, someone needs to give you a template to put the dog x-ray on any picture. Right. But it's like, the only Photoshop guy we know is Damon Lindeloff who's busy. Yeah, but it's like at the watch we're going to probably more often than I give the dog, that dog in her to Elizabeth Moss, you know, more than Darius slay. Right, but that's what I'm saying.

So we could easily crowdsource dogs inside of members of the NFL. Yes. But less so stars of Hal Hartley films. Right. So that's something we need to work on. Martin Donovan has that dog in him. Does he? I think so.

Okay. I mean, over his life, he's had some dog in him. Yeah, okay. But other times not, and that's okay. I thank you for indulging me. I thought that was fascinating. Okay. I hope, I mean, it was probably not as funny as you were hoping.

Kai, start recording again. Okay. We could pick a pod back up. I want to talk about winning time? I do. I got to talk about this episode. Did you, so you watch this week's episode? I did.

I also know about basketball. Okay. This is just like it. This one's getting a little. Yeah. First of all, I had no idea. Yeah. I had no idea Pat Riley

became the coach of the Showtime era Lakers. That was a curveball. Yeah. I did not see that coming. No, this was probably, I would say this was the best episode of the series. Yeah, it was great. Yeah.

Like, here's the thing about this show. We can spend five weeks being like, why does this exist? What a weird expenditure of Warner's dwindling fortune. This is just Wikipedia with pantsuits and weird film stock choices. Okay. But when you stumble into a moment when what is it, when history and poetry align, when like this is some dramatic shit happened.

And then you have Oscar winner Adrian Brody playing a very famous and compelling figure. They needed to, I think that what we needed is two things. Over the last two episodes, it has slowed down. yes and no it slowed down and then sped up really weirdly yes but yes but it's I think maybe

better than slowed down is it focused and it focused on the Westhead Riley quasi rivalry friendship whatever and magic and like who gets to decide

where this team goes and why they want what they want and I think that that like really clarified the show I mean I didn't mean to be snippy about it's like yes I know what happens

in basketball I thought that this episode also was just really well done on a visual level. Did you feel like the show gave short shrift to Pat Riley's innovations in the 131 defense, which is actually what won them the titles over the next few years? Was that your main takeaway throughout all of it? Yeah. That like when he was... I'm not trying to be like I'm friggin' Bob Ryan.

I'm just like... I feel like Chris's main problem was that when Riley was like yelling at Michael Cooper, he didn't say, but fundamentally you're one of the strongest defending guards in the league. And history will win that will fucking prove that. Was that your problem? No, it was not. It's just an entertaining hour of television. I just had such a great time with it.

And I think we said this at times in the first season, that for a show that seemed to want to be very Adam McKay and be very innovative and we're having fun with history and we're playing fast and loose with it and we're saying something about now by saying something about then, the secret sauce that made the season work was when it became a sports movie. Right. And then whether you know about sports like Chris does or know about sports but doesn't talk about it on Mike like me. Right.

Right. Big defensive guru over here. No, you're just like, yeah. You're one of the only sports fans who doesn't like to talk about what you know about sports. Yeah, never. Yeah. Never. I just talk about which players have that dog in them.

That's my way to relate to it. This was just a sports movie. Yeah. And Brody's so good in this part. And that scene in the locker room was awesome. Yeah. It was great. I really enjoyed it.

And also, this is one of Jason Seagel's best performances. I'm glad it's over, though. Yes, it was, there was nowhere else for it to go. Yes. I think that it was calibrated specifically to be like, this is not a long-term thing. And he was on for obviously a season and a half of television, so it's not like it was a guest spot. No, and he did a good job with the turn of we're rooting for him as an underdog to there is no dog in him. But I did feel like the way that he,

calibrated the performance of the way that they've designed, the performance made it so that it was like there was really, even if you didn't know what was going to happen, it would have been hard to imagine Jason Siegel's version of Paul Westhead lasting with that team. Absolutely. And again,

however much it wants to try to suggest more complicated contexts or narratives about the past, it's still the good guys are the heroes. The good guys are the winners. And they're they're the ones we care about.

Whether it's magic or whether it's Riles or whatever. But hugely, hugely, hugely entertaining. Yeah. And it is actually, from a sports fan's perspective, really kind of cool to see Brody playing these moments of Pat Riley before he's Pat Riley. I feel like, you know, like there are some of these characterizations are very much like,

you'll know me later on when I become super famous. And it's like, Pat Riley is like, fuck, man. Like, am I going to make rent? Am I going to have a job? And because it's a longer-term arc and because Brody's playing him, the father stuff works for me more than it did with the Larry Bird episode or the portion of that episode. I also have never, I haven't done this up to now with this series,

but I did go on to the internet computer. And I watched the actual press conference where Jerry Bus was like, there are two coaches of this team. And then Jerry West was like, Pat Riley is the coach of this team and nobody understands. And I thought that was really interesting, too, for what the show what it wants to do and what it like it takes tons of liberties mentioning Larry Bird

like on in the winning time version of it Larry Bird drops out of school and then comes back and he sees his father's committed suicide that actually happened while he was in high school like little things like that that seemed to suit no one but the writer of the episode but

the press conference is verbatim including the interruptions from members of the media saying with or four yeah like they just showed it to them and they just did it. I wish there was more stuff like that in some ways. You know? Watching the video, I recommend it. It's really interesting. And then also in that whatever YouTube clip I saw, there was a follow-up with Pat Riley who is wearing that weird brown sweater and does not seem like the Riley that we know. And his demeanor is,

as you're saying, as someone who was not the person that he was about to become. I really, I really dug it. Let's wrap up by talking about the end of how to with John Wilson, which is a show. He's sort of adopted very late as a talking point on this show because I think the show itself demanded that as it got into more meta commentary about like its own existence. Now, I don't really know a ton about him and I don't know a ton about like the sort of project that he's embarked on here. But I have found this season to be utterly captivating both in the way that I think other seasons have been where there are just like these observations on life, but then also as like acts of filmmaking and also commentaries on the idea of making a show of found footage and like how

you actually like kind of create that. But this sort of seemed to, this last episode seemed to speak of like larger questions that John Wilson is trying to answer for his own life outside of this TV show and perhaps why he is not going to make this show anymore. This show is a miracle. The show is brilliant. This show, three seasons of it, I hope will live on and be watched and be considered as important, as much as silly as that word could be. If it takes one to five houses of the dragons to fund something like this, okay. I will take that. I will align with you, Congressman Gates, and I will sign onto this legislation. This is a healthy trade-off for me. Clip that. Yeah. Clip it and put it on our socials? Yeah, just like, I align with you

Congressman Gates. The end. Sometimes what I give you are weapons. Do you know what I mean? You can use this. I trust you. I would never. And I feel the same way about our diverse listenership. I want, I'm not saying that I want our listeners to Photoshop your face onto Mitch McConnell, freezing up's face, and then also Photoshop a dog in him. But what kind of dog?

Is the dog sleeping? Is the dog distracted by a shiny ball? The dog's chasing his tail for 30 seconds. That's, what is that dog up to? Not enough. I think the show is just totally unique and really beautiful. And, you know, I've seen people write about the end of the show focusing on the prominence of the importance of New York in it.

And this is such a love letter to New York. And it absolutely is. And with all the found footage of just the insane things that one sees just by walking on a normal block in New York at any time of year, it captures that better than anything else I've ever seen. Yeah, it's funny you say love letter, and I know what you mean, but I also think it's like, it's just accurate. It's just like when he films, like,

coming out of a bodega in New York and then almost getting hit by an SUV and three people weirdly standing on the sidewalk, I'm like, that is exactly how it feels. Or when he goes to like Mass Path to, like, check on his package, and there's just a guy in a box being like, nope, that's living in New York.

I did that once. I can't remember. It wasn't Maspeth, but it was somewhere like at the end of the A. And they were like, yeah, we don't have your package. And this is before you could like, check. Was the guy...

Because it was just like the tag that got left for me was like your package. We couldn't deliver it. So now it's at the facility. And I was just like, well, I guess I'm going to be on a subway

for two and a half hours. Was the package a month shipment of nicotine lozenges? No, it was probably honestly like a promo CD. I thought his mouth was full of lozenges. He was like, nope.

I'm going to be good for 60 to 600 hours. Is that a better timeline? What I meant to say was, though, it is the New York part matters, But the curiosity and the empathy towards humanity on this show is staggering, just as a project. Just the way people reveal themselves in ways big and small and the way that everyone he meets has an idiosyncrasy or a story or a passion that is so important to them that could be, I do think he handles delicately.

And we're talking specifically about this finale when like he ends up, he starts with, you know, a FedEx package and ends up with literally an organ delivery service, and then in Arizona with cryonics. Cryonics company, yeah. At a convention for people. One of the guys the cryonics convention is like shows him his spreadsheets of hundreds, if not thousands of hours of cataloging every action ever taken on every episode of The Bachelor. Yeah.

Do I have feelings about that as a use of time? I guess I do in a judgmental place of myself. I think John Wilson does too. I think he's like. But there's a delicacy to it where he frames a question and then he walks away. I don't think he's making fun of him because everyone

on the show himself included is just a roiling collection of foibles, right? Like it's just everybody is the way they are for a reason and he films them in their spaces that they've chosen and that they are comfortable in and sometimes they look like the house of that guy who ends the series almost

with a really startling confession about what he's done to himself. It's a staggering portrait of just people. Yeah. And it's funny and it's sad and it's so weird. And I'm really, I am sad that it's over, even though clearly like this is a guy

who has his obsessions and his passions and he cannot turn off his camera. So there will be more. He did say thank you for watching my movies, which was also an interesting way. Yeah, I think he thinks of himself as like, these are like the films that I'm making and they're being cataloged or categorized

as like a series on HBO that's kind of a comedy. And it's like there are funny parts about them, but there's also like, Like, you just never, never, never know where they're going to go and the connections that he's going to make in his head. Do you think this is useless because, you know, he's a younger than us guy. He's got, I'm sure he has other plans of things that he wants to do. I think he's directing the second season of Lioness. If you're wondering where he goes next.

Oh, I would fucking love that. Was he inspired by our comparison of Lioness to the films of Hell Hartley in the 90s? If he heard that part. I think he heard that part. I just mean clearly what his talent is and with his team of collaborators too, I mean, what the last episode was about was that this isn't just some like, you know, magical good fortune that he stumbles upon everything. But he just pulls threads and you could see one of these threads turning into a larger thing.

But I wonder if we will look back and be like, boy, we had it. We were so lucky to have this abundance of a show where we essentially got 18 movies by this guy who now makes one movie every five years. Yeah, you know, I was watching this on Max and also on Max, are a lot of the episodes of various shows of Anthony Bordaim. So because of the CNN deal, he's over there. And it made me think a lot about

people who become basically, I mean, you rarely see John Wilson in how to John Wilson. In some sense, you see his reflection, but it's inimitably him because he's narrating almost every single frame of this series, and his particular way of speaking

and his particular way of thinking is imprinted on the, entire project. And obviously, like, Anthony Bourdain, the public figure who was in those shows and did certain things in those shows where it's like, I come here and I like, I like drink a weird moonshine and have 40 pounds of barbecue and go to a weird museum and meet the most important person I've ever met. And then, you know, we go on to the next week.

It became who he was in some ways or it started to take over a little bit, like the public persona, started to take over the personal man. and I wonder whether or not that's like in some way similar for Wilson where it's like the version of me refracted through this show is so totally me that the me that I am

is not there anymore or something I'm not trying to like armchair psycho and analyze him I'm fascinated by his decision to stop doing this well but I think that it goes back to what we were saying before you're so he's observing a guy who wants to be immortal but spends his living time cataloging

the Bachelor gestures on The Bachelor. And my guess is, and we've never spoken to John Wilson, though I'd love to, is that he feels more in common with that guy. Yeah. It's followed up by its unremarked upon shot of a hotel pool where one man is playing with his child in an inflatable raft and is completely locked in and focused on this person, this child. And another guy is holding like a 16 ounce can of beer and wandering around the pool. And Wilson says, like, maybe you just get to a point in your life where you want your life to not be about you anymore. But I think that the unique thing about his life as lived in the public lens for the last three years since the show premiered was that up until the HBO show premiered, and we saw some of this evidence in episodes in the first season, he was doing this anyway.

Yeah. He was just filming stuff and cataloging it. And that was the weird thing he did, like people watch The Bachelor or I was about to reach. into my grab bag of dozens of other unique weirdos we've met on the show, and there's so many that I can't grab a single one. But that was him. But then it became public that that's what he did. And it became his identity.

It became successful. Likes to gooncap while he keeps getting interrupted by work. That's your hero. What kind of a dog does that guy have in him? I don't know. What a masterpiece this show was. What an absolute treat. And if there is a small segment of people who listen to us talking

about things they don't watch. Consider this honestly. We tried to thread the needle here. No, but this is a gift too because this show, it's not serialized really. It's not answering any questions. It's not tied to any cultural moment. But if you find yourself with a spare 30 minutes

every other night for a couple weeks, watch the show. I was going to say it's not going anywhere, but you never know in this streaming economy. Sometimes my wife would walk into the room while I would watch the show, and she would be like, is there a cat on this show? You didn't tell me that.

And I was like, eh, it's not really like that. It was in the window. He has a cat. Yeah. So she didn't watch this? No. No. Did she know what goon capping is?

No. She doesn't. Should we call her live on air and explain? I think she'd be thrilled to be a part of it. Thanks to Kai McMahon for producing a content-heavy episode of The Watch. That makes it an outlier. We interrogated a lot of stuff. I think we get to the bottom of the economic model of television,

the worldview of Taylor Sheridan. Our dedication to accuracy, in sports history. I think the biggest question coming out of this is does Kaii think Chris Paul is going to work on the Warriors?

Do you feel like they're going to be able to move past the attempt to bridge the generations? Do they trade comminga for veteran help? Or do you still believe in comminga and Moody

in their ability to be the bridge to the next? Bridge the future. Yeah. Yeah, and what happens if the team USA loses the World Cup

does that diminish Steve Kerr's standing not only in the NBA but in the global world order? The global marketplace of ideas? Yeah. Well, Steve Kerr is an internationalist himself. I don't know if you know this, Chris. I do a lot about basketball, so I know that he grew up a little bit in the Middle East.

His father, do you know that his father was a diplomat. I do. I do. You never talk about that. You know that. You're such a modest man. Thanks for listening to the watch. Steve Kerr is lioness in the NBA combined in one man. What do you think, Res dogs for Thursday? Okay. What's on your plate this week? What do you want to watch?

Chris, like, school's starting back up. my plate is just I can fill it I can go up to the buffet now and I can just load it up I'm excited I'll find something for us to check out maybe we watch like 20 episodes

of Top Boy before Thursday when's this new season you're excited Thursday I'm excited because Barry Keegan is in it do you know what's rough though is that like we can be like ha ha imagine watching that many episodes of television to prepare for something

then Mallory is like hold my gogirt and she would do that yeah so let's have Mallory watch all a Top Boy for Thursday I'm sure she's got plenty of free time. Thanks for listening to The Watch. We'll see you guys on Thursday.

It's a good one for it.