The Watch - 'Star Wars' Presses Pause, Plus Marvel’s ‘Cloak and Dagger’ Showrunner, Joe Pokaski, Stops By | The Watch (Ep. 268)

Episode Date: June 21, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald react to the news that Lucasfilm is suspending operations on its 'Star Wars' spinoff movies (5:30) and then welcome Joe Pokaski, showrunner of Marvel’s ���Cloak and Dagger,’ to discuss the process of making his exciting new show (17:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What up, what up, what up? Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Watch. Me and Andy talked a little bit about the changes in the Star Wars Extended Universe. Sounds like they're going to slow down production on these anthology movies after the box office. I guess you could call it failure. I mean, they made a lot of money, but the box office failure of Solo a Star Wars story. So Andy and I talked about what that means for the future movies and whether or not they should be looking for or looking backward anymore. Then I was joined by Marvel's Cloak and Dagger showrunner, Joe Pekaski, and it was a really cool interview.

We talked about his show, Marvel's Cloak and Dagger. It's on free form. I highly recommend it. It is a very, very fully realized show for one that's so early on in its run. It's only, I think only three episodes have gone up so far. Aubrey, Joseph, and Olivia Holt play these two teens who have these latent superpowers that are powerful together. and they've had this childhood trauma that brings them together later in their lives

in their teenage years and it's just a really excellent kind of like Friday Night's Meets X-Men. If you want to read more about Star Wars Lindberg, Ben Lindberg has a great piece on the ringer.com right now that's just about sort of the state of their movies, the movie franchise. So Jeff, definitely check that out. Check out all our NBA draft coverage.

We'll be on tonight on Twitter video of the entire, we're going to watch along with the entire first round of the draft. So hang out with us tonight. And let's get into this episode. of The Watch. Thanks. I need sports 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 on indefinite hiatus. It's Andy Greenwald. Listen, man, it's Thursday. I just gave you a burrito. You give me half of a burrito. What we share.

Is it ham? I have half of a podcast with you. How do you feel about sharing food? Are you a big sharing guy? Like in a small plates menu? No, within the like, those fries are on my plate. Let me explain how our menu works. Well, what are you saying here?

Like if I asked you if I could have a French fry? I find that within couples often, and I don't know, we're, in some ways we're a couple. How dare you qualify it? We are fully a couple. There's like a rules and regulations to how meals go and whether or not. So I often will order with my wife in mind. Oh, because you know she's going to take a rule. He basically wants to be adventurous but doesn't want it on her plate.

Oh, interesting. So what do you order then that is like you get like a little side of the bone marrow or like what do you get? No, it's not even that. It's just like I order things to keep her in mind because I, you know, just. It's very thoughtful of you. Thank you. Do you think on our- It's also self-preservation, but we can save that for a different podcast.

On our Facebook group, is there anyone who's shipping us yet? I'm just curious. Like, is there a tumbler about us? Andy, we have Joe Pasky on today. he is the showrunner of Cloak and Dagger. Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, God forbid we not give Marvel the credit here. Marvel's Cloak and Dagger, which is a show on Freeform.

I think the show's excellent. Just debuted a couple weeks ago, I think they put up the first two. It's on its third episode now. To record ratings on Freeform. And it is a really, really excellent show. I would say, you know, obviously if you're a comics fan, you may know about Cloak and Dagger from the comics world, but...

You look at me when you say that. I did not know about this. Really? And I went into it pretty blind. And it's basically like Friday Night X-Men. It's like Friday Night Lights meets X-Men. It's about these two teenagers played by Olivia Holt and Aubrey Joseph. Excellent lead performances.

And it's set in New Orleans, but a very eerie kind of abandoned New Orleans. And it's about these two teenagers in high school or high school age who discover latent powers that they were given when they were children after a childhood trauma. Complementary powers. Yeah, they're complementary powers. And I would say, I would agree with you. I mean, I think it's particularly a good show for younger people, as it's intended. And I do not mean that pejoratively. That's a very hard lane to fill.

But I also think that the show is exciting because it suggests that Marvel might do right by some of its fringier characters. Yes. The potential in them. There's a reason why cloak and dagger are not household names. They are, frankly, it's a bizarre set of superheroes. barely heroes. Yeah. Emerged in the 80s, one black, one white, one representing light, one representing dark in their powers.

Generally, like, the most emo comic book characters in history. For sure. Yeah. And every time they would show up on the fringes of other comics that I was reading in the 80s, it gave me, like, a feeling like I lingered on the wrong TV channel, like grown-up stuff. and other books, and certainly music, the My Chemical Romance back catalog would have something to say about this. So it's particularly interesting to see it play out on television. And the first episode is directed by Gina Prince Bithwood,

who did Beyond the Lights, which is a great director. And it has, the show itself has this very naturalistic feel not dissimilar from what Pete Berg did with Frontinette Lights. So we'll have our interview with Joe in a little bit. It's something that we think, I think that we should continue having a conversation about even after this interview,

Because as someone who has been spending a bunch of time considering directors and the directing of TV, hashtag mood is everything, particularly in pilots. And, you know, I said it as a joke because I don't know a way to articulate it. I mean, to articulate something and then actually have it on the screen is incredibly challenging. Yeah. And then to do it under whatever circumstances they had. So I would recommend it even if you're not a comic book fan for people who are interested in that in seeing how a pilot, how a director can affect that. Let's talk a little bit about the Star Wars News this week before we get to our interview with Joe. So there was a report Collider that has since been followed up in a couple of different outlets.

Basically, that they have, I'm not sure this is the accurate phrase, but suspended operations on the anthology stories. Press pause. They have a lot of stuff in development, so you can make the argument that they're just devoting more of themselves to the finishing out the original, the Trilogy, the Abrams-Johnson-Abrams trilogy. And then there is a possible future Johnson trilogy. There is also a suggestion that there's going to be, not suggestion, there is a deal for Benny Offenwise to make other Star Wars movies. And then there is a live action show that is supposed to go on the to come Disney over the top app. That's not been paused, right?

That's not been paused. And John Favreau is in charge of that. Can I ask you a quick question? Sure. I haven't spoken to our team in a minute or two here. But what is the status of our pit of Sarlac proposed spin-on? off. I don't, you know, it's weird.

I'm waiting for Kathy's notes on that, and I haven't gotten them back yet. Because the last time I talked to where I pitched it as kind of a Garfield without Garfield, but a movie about a hole in the ground that literally can do nothing unless a bounty hunter falls into it. See, that's kind of the problem, I think, because you sent that in, and I was like, it's like Dogville, but inside a Sarlake pit. Oh, yours is better. Neither one of them is good.

Fair. This is a reaction, obviously, to the less than expected box office, results of Solo, a Star Wars story, which came out in May and has really borne the brunt of whatever Star Wars backlash there was in the fan community for Last Jedi, which I still find completely ridiculous and nutty. Now we are seeing it in sort of more of a commercial way with Solo because... Yeah, the marketplace rejected it. People rejected this movie, yeah. And I think that there's a lot of arguments about why

that happened. Now, most Star Wars movies, including Rogue One, which is a darker and more complicated a movie than solo, get almost a full year of promo. They come out in December, and usually that full year, there's three trailers, and by the time you get up to the release state, there are these extended trailers.

And the beauty of Rogue One is you have trailers that have nothing to do with a movie they ended up making. I know, exactly. And the same could be said for Solo, I'm sure. But, you know, Bradford Young thought he was shooting a McCabe and Mrs. Miller tribute. And Ron Howard came in. Inside the pit of Sarlock.

Exactly. I don't, I guess what? what I want to ask you is, is this necessarily a bad thing? It's not. And I was thinking about this a lot. And obviously, I mean, we have a showrunner for a Marvel TV show coming on in a minute. Obviously, Chris and I are not only interested in Marvel as a business success story, we are generally fans of their output.

I think that Marvel has done a really unique job in considering both their movies as individual movies, but also the larger project in the way one would consider a movie. And the thing about movies is they move in one direction and they have momentum. him. And if you look at the way that Kevin Feige and his team, a team that is now, I'm sure, tripled or quadrupled or more since the early days, they were all building towards something. And we talked a lot about what that something was in the form of Infinity War. But those first movies felt like they were telling us pieces of one story moving in one direction. If you look at the Star Wars movies, the trilogy, the spine that they are now returning to, was continuing

an old story. And whether they succeeded or failed at that, you know, we can revisit that when the time is right. But these tangential stories, We're telling stories that were completely adrift in the greater galaxy in relation to the main spine, which isn't to say that everything has to be connected, but I think that for an audience that just doesn't make any sense, it feels haphazard. And if you can feel, if a movie franchise that they're spending, you know, however much money on, that they're expecting a return of a billion dollars in feels haphazard, if it feels pointless, that trickles down. And the audience can understand that. So I think Rogue One told a cool story, and as we said at the time, maybe the one actually interesting question mark left over from the original trilogy. Right. How did they ever get the original plans?

These other stories just feel like either fan service or filling holes with widgets that you're not interested in. I don't think there was a great clamor for a Han Solo movie unless it was the Han Solo everyone wanted. But again, it's filling in something backwards while they're trying to make the whole thing move forward. It doesn't make sense. I think that if they had maybe planned a secondary series of movies that would build towards, like Marvel did with the Avengers, towards something new. You know, introduce new characters through these side stories, leading into what would become the new trilogy. I mean, I'm just spitballing here. No, you nailed it.

But I do think that it's a sense of momentum and shared purpose that these things lack. We both at the time when Kathy Kennedy took over admired in theory the idea of them just mining this the way you would mine Greek myths for IP. but it doesn't work like that in today's marketplace. People do approach movies the way they approach TV shows. I watch season one, I can't wait for season two, and I love the way it's set up season three. And Star Wars so far has not shown an ability to adjust to that new universe.

Yeah, and they haven't shown the ability to properly pull off their Ant Man, which is... Exactly, you don't do Ant Man first. It's not even a chronology thing as much as if you want to make a smaller Star Wars movie that's about a heist and a couple of betrayals and it has like, it's something of a spaghetti western meets Ocean's 11 with Hans Solo in the middle. Take my money.

Take my money. But I think that each one of these movies, because the price tag, feels like it needs to launch its own universe. And it can't. And it can't do that. And I think that the participation where it's like, here's this standalone movie that has some connective tissue to a larger world. And at the end of the day, Ant Man will play a part in one of these Avengers movies.

Sure. That's a smart way to do it. So take an iconic character who is, spoiler alert, dead, and re-backfill his history that a lot of people were kind of like, I think the coolest part about this guy is that we have no idea where he came from. Yeah. He's fully formed in a new hope. Yeah. We don't need more. But I think you nailed it with the Ant Man thing.

I mean, I'm excited to see that movie because it looks fun, not because it's tied to anything else. But it's worth noting, Ant Man came 10 movies into this whole project. That's the thing is what we're losing essentially is this Boba Fett movie maybe that James Mangold was. signed up to write and this rumored Obi-Wan movie. And I got to admit, I'm not really that interested in what, I don't, Boba-Fet's cool because Boba-F, you have no idea who Boba-Fet is. Assuming you forget about the prequels. Yeah, right, exactly, I know.

I mean, yeah, Boba-Fet, and it's, again, this is harder than it looks. We don't pretend to know how to make this work, or even that it should work, but the thing that makes Boba-Fet cool, he is an iconic suit, and he seems menacing, and he's in the background. Those are the things that made it attractive to James Mangold, a filmmaker we have a lot of time for, and he clearly felt motivated to tell a story, but they're trying to have it both ways. And yes, Marvel had an advantage of time by getting started early, but that's the playing field.

They're not ready to make their Logan yet because they haven't figured out how to make their X-Men. Exactly. You know, and so they're in an ecosystem that I'm sure to Kathy Kennedy feels very unfair because it would be super fun to make a Han Solo movie that's like Thor Ragnarok. And I think that's what Lord and Miller we're going to do. Yeah, yeah. But sorry, I know the audience wants that, or they think they want that, but

they're not ready to make that yet. And so they're spiraling, which is so weird because we've been doing this podcast since this whole Star Wars rebirth thing started. We were talking about what if they did this? And we were like six years ago. Yeah, we were like, this is gold. Yeah, yeah. How could they screw this up? Well, actually, there are a million ways to screw it up and only one or two ways to get it right.

All right. Let's wrap it up there. We'll take a quick break to hear from our sponsors. And then I'll be back with an interview with Joe Pascar, the showrunner of Marvel's cloak and dagger. Andy will be back on Monday. We're going to have to address the finale of Westworld. Yes, but also, Chris, we haven't even talked about. talking about this, but next week is Sicario

week, right? I mean... We have a... It's the week of the Soldado. It is the week of the Soldado. So I'm going to suggest, on air, so I can't back out of it. I think we should revisit the first film a little bit on Monday's pod. Yes. And then, I think we should discuss the

actual Dia del Solado later in the week. Okay. Hopefully with some special guests who are also Soldados in our particular Sicario army. Yeah, well, we'll see if we could do that for this next Thursday or the following Monday. but we'll have a full slate of stuff for you guys. We have some special guests next week.

We'll let you know about. And now our interview with Joe Pekaski. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Hotel Tonight. If you love to score amazing deals at incredible hotels, you will love Hotel Tonight. Hotel Tonight partners with hotels to help them sell their unsold rooms, helping you find sweet deals at cool, top-rated hotels. Hotel Tonight shows you the best deals at hotels you actually want to stay at,

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Thanks for having me. This is fun. Love the show. Thank you very much. It's really, I think I was, I am an interesting test case to watch this show because I was very unfamiliar with a comic. So I was going into it kind of blind. and was gripped immediately by the tone of the show. And that's kind of what I wanted to ask you about immediately. It was this sort of feeling of naturalism that permeates the entire thing from the setting and the direction and the writing and the feeling of the performances.

Can you tell me about you're driving around, you're sitting around, whatever you're doing you know you're going to do this? What's the first thing you start thinking about where you're like, I want it to feel like X? I mean, I think the first thing is I wanted to feel like nothing else that you see on television. I don't know if you notice, there's a few superhero movies and some superhero television shows. We sometimes touch on those here, yeah. Yeah, and you kind of don't want to be just another one in that basket. So at some point when I started thinking about Tandy and Tyrone and we started talking about bringing him to New Orleans and started talking about the vibe, for some reason the idea of like those Sundance Coming of Age movies came to mind. Sure.

Like, you know, I don't know if you ever saw a movie like Like Crazy, which is this shaky camera, like kind of very real feeling relationship movie. And then Beyond the Lights was another one of those movies that were just about two damaged souls. So when they started asking about wish lists for directors, Gina Prince Bythwood was one of the first people on my list. And we got, you know, we hit it off. She has two boys. And she just did such a fantastic job at taking a stupid idea of like how do we be intimate? How do we tell the uncertainty of coming of age? and then actualizing it with, you know,

with this great DP, Tammy Riker, and really kind of hopefully setting up a superhero show unlike one you've seen, at least in look and feel. Yeah, and so when you start having these conversations with Gina, are you guys talking about movies in terms of like, I want it to feel like this or influences, or are you more like we're on location and we're starting to look around

and this is dictating what we're doing? No, we definitely started talking about movies and we talked a lot about, you know, what she did on Beyond the Lights. You know, there's certain sequences in there, like, when Gugu is on the balcony. Yeah. Unlike anything you've seen, you feel like you're right there and you're feeling it like crazy. We watched and we talked about and we broke apart.

And then, you know, once we had, you know, our particular scenes, our particular locations, those ideas got more specific. But they're on board. You know, I, I, growing up in television, or at least coming up in the last couple of years, I get sick of things like waiting for Dolly Track to be. laid and things like that. Yeah. So we just were like, let's get up on the shoulders and let's just had these kind of handheld moments and kind of from there, we just, we had a really good plan. And then every day when we look at a location, it would get better. And then what Aubrey and Olivia were bringing to the piece, everything got better still. So it was just, it was a really optimal situation. I wanted to ask specifically about those two, obviously, there's stars of the show,

but it's one of those things where obviously, you know, you're watching stuff and maybe you also of your phone out or maybe you're also in like, you know, having a conversation with somebody else who's walking through your living room or something when it's on. And I actually found myself, I think I shushed to somebody who was trying to talk to me during it because they jump, they leap off the screen. They do. How many people did you see for those roles?

I imagine we probably, we probably had a list of over a thousand names each for those roles. We probably watched hundreds of whether there are audition reels or auditions themselves. And we were screwed about a week before we needed to have these roles. Really? And we were really scrambling because we hadn't, it's tough to find people that age who have that kind of raw emotional intensity. And we didn't want to do the, you know, the Dylan McKay, you know, 35 year old playing an eight year old type thing. We were really looking for people of age. So I had heard about someone who pointed out Olivia and I was trying to track her down to get her into read.

and then Gina just, her friend of hers said this, she saw Aubrey in the night of on HBO. And we brought them in on the Friday before we had to leave for New Orleans on that Monday. And we just kind of like, we were all kind of freaked out because we were like at the point where at some point you have to make a decision and pick your second or third choice. And then we saw them read separately and we like exhaled a little. And then Gina went and took them aside and didn't tell me what she was doing. but she basically took a scene from my script and said, like, this is what happens,

why don't you guys just improv it? She brought them back up, and they sat across, you know, just on this tiny stage from each other, and they just kind of improv, basically the cemetery scene from the pilot, but, you know, the idea of, like, meeting this soulmate just came out in both of them,

and everybody got goosebumps. And, like, you know, it was, they walked out the door and we all kept our best poker faces on. And, like, you hear the click of the door slam. Yeah. Like, just like, let's hear both of them. Touched out. And we all like, you know, we breathe and I'm out of peed my pants a little.

It was not a classy situation, but it was very down to the wire. I always say like casting is like falling in love. You only have to do it right once. And it feels like there's always only one person perfect for the role in it sometimes take forever. And you can get fixated on that person idea. Yeah, yeah. You know, I was wondering if you mentioned the improv part, you know, writing for teens must the vernacular, not making it like, quote unquote,

too contemporary so that they're like, hey, can you take a picture of me on the Snapchat? Like, and stuff like that. So do you allow them to improv? How do you make sure that it has, it feels contemporary but timeless? Because that's kind of what it feels like to me. Yeah, I mean, I honestly,

I think if you kind of write down the middle, they add their own angles on stuff. And a lot of it's on the day when you're just, you're talking through with them, like, does everything feel natural? And what would you say in this situation? And both of them, you know, Olivia's a singer-songwriter,

pop star and Aubrey writes his own music. So they both just have an amazing skill set in which every once in a while they'll come up with an alt and I'll be like, oh, that's better than the original script and get kind of angry at them because they're also like beautiful and talented and they should leave their writing to people like me. Yeah. But no, they're just incredible collaborators and they know they're very honest about when something doesn't feel natural and then we'll just adjust it.

And they just also are just really good tennis partners with each other. So when they're in the scene, they adjust to each other. and it's really interesting that they both listen, which is what I think good actors do. Yeah. You know, you talked about your past experiences a little bit. I know you worked on heroes, and you've worked with IP before, you know, coming into this stuff before.

I've seen a couple people be like, oh, you know, the first four episodes of Cloak and Dagger feel like an origin story, but they didn't really feel that way to me. For some reason, it felt more like we were joining these people in media res, that they were. Their lives felt very lived in. And I guess that's partially the performances and the writing. And I was wondering about your approach to that idea of the fact that you have to introduce these characters to people and introduce these very special, you know, abilities that they have and this sort of almost supernatural element to them.

But at the same time, it's very character-driven. And they are living their lives already. Their house is already the way it looks. I mean, do you talk a little bit about setting it in that sort of way? Yeah, I mean, I think, listen, I think the comic book was fantastic. And what Bill Mantelow and Hannigan and everyone who kind of contributed to did an amazing job for the comic book medium. But I think it's hard to tell a story in television and the long format where all of a sudden they're doing drugs and their best friends. And by the end of the first comic, they're fighting gang members.

So it felt like a good opportunity along the lines of what you said. I don't think, I think the population of people even within the geek and nerd community who know cloak and dagger well are very small. So there's an opportunity just to kind of really just invest in who Tandy is and who Tyrone is. You know, my plan is to do 100 episodes. Sure. There's plenty of people who can say no along the way, but that's my plan. And so particularly for these first four, you just want to really invest in who they are. And then also like the discovery of powers and kind of the discovery of the call to action, when I'm watching a superhero movie, I'm always like, I wish this could be forever.

I wish Peter Parker could be trying out his web. on the roof for 20 more minutes. But in the movie format, you don't get to do that. And television is just really about taking these big moments like them having their first conversation, which we land on in episode four, and just allowing it to breathe and allowing it to be character-based. Do you feel like, you know, whether you mentioned Spider-Man, and obviously there's been past a big motif of comic book writing and superhero movies anyway is this idea of, like,

the emerging superhero as a stand-in for. puberty or whatever and the X-Men obviously did that really well and I was wondering with this though it seems more like especially in the early episodes I've seen that their their superpowers are almost like this emerging sense of empathy and this emerging sense of being able to identify or feel what other people are feeling in a lot of ways that's very difficult for teenagers I think yeah but and I think that's it I think it's part of growing up is you know we I think we hit Peter in some sort of accident when we figured out Tandy, who's this crazy cynic, who thinks the world screwed her over and she's going to screw it over, is now forced to witness people's hopes and witness the world in which people want it to be.

And then Tyrone, who feels like he's alone and feeling fear, having him see that other people have fears as bad, if not worse than he is. I think that's part of it. And I think empathy is something that a lot of us could use, maybe all of us could use. is an interesting thing, even in America right now, where a lot of us just refuse to, you know, to pull off the headlines right now, look at these little kids as if they're our own kids, and then there's people who say,

no, these are our babies, whether we like it or not. So I think the idea of those two feeling like they're alone and then understanding there's other people out there who feel the same way is hopefully a theme that we get to run all the way through this series. I know a lot of different shows and movies get made in places like Louisiana or Atlanta because of, you know, it's like the tax breaks makes it affordable.

But man, like you, you showed a Louisiana in this show that I was really into, like just the specificity of it. Yeah, and that's the fun. I mean, it's like, as a lazy writer, it's fantastic because the more you research Louisiana, the more present story to us. So, you know, we have a fantastic room of writers where we hopefully try to represent lots of points of view and a couple of them are familiar with Louisiana. and it's interesting when we talk about things like the Madrigra Indians, which I had never heard of. Or Vodon in its reality. When we say, like, what is Vodon? We know the voodoo-uggy-buggy that you see, but like understanding this is a religion that the enslaved had that they brought over from Africa on the West Indies and then used Catholicism to mask it so they could go to church and look up at a stained glass window and say, this says, you know, St. Teresa, but I'm thinking Mama Brigitte.

and I'm applying this. And it's just, it's such a fascinating place. And I think it's our most European city. Yes. So it has the most, like, mysticism to it. And you have, there's this really interesting feeling that they are, um, these two characters, like walking across a very stark landscape. It's like almost abandoned in this post-storm world that they live in.

And it's that heightened sense of, it's slightly surreal, you know? Yeah. Walking across boards to get into abandoned homes and, you know, especially. as like they find themselves waking up in different places, it just feels so almost like a weird wonderland, a dark wonderland. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. And credit to Gina and Cliff Charles,

who's our permanent DP, and he actually did Spike Lee's documentaries on New Orleans. So he really had a sense of like capturing exactly that feel. And it's hard, to be honest, like when you shoot, there's a shot in the pilot when Tandy's walking to the trailer and we didn't plan it, but there's one of those markings that the FEMA markings,

trailers that showed, you know, we checked for bodies and things like that. These things that are morbid and crazy and the city is filled with such amazing people. And life just keeps punching them in the nose and they keep getting up. And so it felt like such a good city to tell that story. And everywhere you turn, it's beautiful exactly like you explained. Talks me a little bit about the TV landscape now, I guess. I'm curious about what it's like to go from, you've done work from major networks and you've done work for smaller networks. and you've done more smaller networks

and now you're working on freeform and it feels like you guys are able to kind of make the show you want to make here. And I was interested in the episode length for the season for you, how you're feeling about the way you are allowed or slash being asked to make TV now compared to say five, six, seven years ago. It's interesting because it's partially better

and partially worse. I mean, there's so much TV right now where you have to make a splash. I mean, it's honestly, if I told this show and it didn't have the word Marvel behind it, there might be half as many people tuning in. Yeah. So it's – but then I think if you gain trust in the people at Marvel and the people of Free Form trust what we tried to do, you know, when we said we're going to start a slow burn through through four episodes and then start creeping up to what's a normal superhero story, they didn't – they didn't entirely understand, and then we talked it through and then they got excited about it. I think the good news is, I think smart executives, which I'm happy to work with from both Marvel and Free Form. understand that if you do something quality, we have an electronic landscape in which people

will find it. Yeah. And so I think there's, it's a good opportunity. You don't have to break the bank. It has not to be broadcast television where you need to fund 15 million people in the first three weeks or you're canceled. Yeah. You know, like we live in a world where there's shows like Lone Star, which might still be

running or things that just didn't quite meet standards for certain things. I still say Buffy would still be on the air if they were rounding the seventh season right now because there'd be weird pay things and Indiegogo's. And so it feels like a special time to tell the story you want to tell. And I feel like the only shows that really get left by the wayside are the ones where they're still compromising. How does it affect you as a TV viewer? Like, do you find yourself, are you a week-to-week, night-to-night guy still? Are you saving a season of billions to watch at the end of summer?

You know, like, how are you kind of watching stuff now, especially I have imagined being in production at various points? Yeah, it impacts that. It depends on the show. I mean, there's certain shows you do do week to week. But some of whom you kind of want to build up, too. But it's funny also because I'm a drama writer, I watch so many more comedies because it's like watching drama sometimes it's like going to work. You're like, oh, I'm like this.

So it's like, you know, you watch a show like Barry, which is just genius. And you're like, okay, someone knows what they want. Yeah. Bill Hader's just bringing it every single episode and they have got this great point of view. No, there's still a lot of TV to watch. And I still think television is like a slightly superior landscape, at least for my taste to movies. I feel like when you find the right TV show,

it just keeps challenging you. And there's certain movies that blow you away. But I feel like it's not as consistent. Yeah, I think you're probably right there. All right. Well, Joe, thank you so much for coming by, man. I just think the show is like a small miracle in the way it kind of like, the kind of world is presenting is really, really, really exciting to watch.

You just wrote the next like four ad campaigns. Great. A small miracle. That is the greatest thing ever said about anything I've ever done. Thanks for coming by, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by Ors and Alps. Did you know that 60% of what you put on your skin is absorbed?

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