The Watch - ‘The Last of Us,’ ‘Poker Face,’ and How to Hype a TV Show. Plus, Noah Baumbach’s ‘White Noise.’

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Chris and Andy talk about two upcoming TV series, ‘The Last of Us’ on HBO and ‘Poker Face’ on Peacock, and how streaming services get audiences hyped to see new shows (1:00). Then, they talk about the new Noah Baumbach movie, ‘White Noise,’ an adaptation of the Don DeLillo novel of the same name (34:09). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News, and I'm covering the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. With my new show, The Town, I'm going to take you inside Hollywood with exclusive insight on what people in show business are actually talking about. Multiple times a week, I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know, journalists, insiders, all of whom can break down the hottest topics in entertainment to tell you what's really going on. Listen now. Did you know about one in three people with plaques psoriasisis? may also develop psoriatic arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness, and swelling? Does this sound like you?

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My name is Chris Ryan and I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me on the other line. the Copenhagen Cowboy It's Andy Greenwood I'm so happy the culture is finally making a show about my experiences in the capital of Denmark three months ago We're going to talk about Copenhagen Cowboy next week

So for people who don't know That's Nicholas Wending Reffin's series on Netflix Which dropped today I think I would describe it as to little fanfare But in our close circle of friends We're pretty excited about this You because you are Danish by birth and by experience.

And then me and Sean Fennessee because we fucking love Nicholas Wending Refund. So on Monday, Fenrock's going to join the watch and we're going to talk about that show. Now, how many episodes are we going to get through? I think it's a sliding scale per host. I've said to Andy that his Danish heritage

means that he needs to be on the show no matter what. But I think you're going to check it out, right? I'm definitely going to check it out. And by the way, I'm going to digress briefly on this topic. So we should say we're also going to talk about a bunch of like news today. We're going to talk about the film White Noise.

We are. Netflix. I don't know if, did I tell you this, Chris, that like, I know our listeners know that in my previous life before, uh, I sought birthright citizenship in the royal kingdom of Denmark over the summer. Truly the best place in the world. Do you do birthright in Denmark? No, it's not the way it is here where like you're born there and you get it. I claimed a birthright just by just temperament and that I like, uh, see, Buckthorn. And they were like, welcome. Actually, I was, you know, there's this thing, Chris,

I don't know if you know about this, but like, apparently Sephardic Jews can be like, actually we're Portuguese and then just go live in Lisbon. Why's Portugal so popular right now? Well, it's beautiful. The cuisine is great. It's having its moment in the international sun. Yeah. I also think that it is, it has been cheap compared to some of the, for tourists. Like Celtic tiger kind of thing. Like the Irish had that. Yeah. But, but, but, but, So once again, the Sephardic win is my only point. But I went to Copenhagen and all the food is like smoked fish and dill. And I was like, come on, come on.

I can pass. This works. But what I wanted to say was people here know this isn't a flex that on my trip, I was able to dine at Noma, which is considered by some to be the best restaurant in the world. It was a beautiful experience. I was there thanks to our listener, Ben Lieben. It's not a flex? I don't remember what I just said, because I'm just thinking about all the rose-shaped, the dishes I ate and thanks to

listener Ben Liebman for helping hook me up with that. So I had a there was a brief moment when I had a table for two at Noma and no two. It was just me because I was going to this wedding. I did ask my boy. I did ask my boy young Chris from State Property to make

the trip. He declined. I was like Ryanair flies there and that's named after you. You could do it. And then so I was like casting about and a friend heard this and was like oh my friend lives in in Copenhagen maybe he'd like to join you for a meal and I was like that's incredible you have a friend how do you happen to have a friend Copenhagen like oh I worked with him once this friend's a publicist I was like who's your friend she was like Nick I was like go on you didn't tell me this story

she was like maybe my friend Nick Winding Refund would like to dine at Noma with you doesn't Nick Wending Reffin just dine at Noma like every Wednesday like if you're I assume he has a he's norm of Noma I assume when he walks in. It's not, so I want to be clear, like, we should all be so lucky is to break bread with one of the leading lights of Copenhagen Cowboys Cinema. I saw him at Fat Dragon eating solo once.

Fat Dragon is a Chinese place in Silver League. He missed me. No, my only thing was the one time I saw him, I went to a screening of drive, right when it came out at Bam, the Brooklyn Academy music. And I believe, and I also, I do not say this with any judgment.

I often experience the same feelings of anxiety, but I believe to alleviate his concern over public speaking, he had basically taped a pillow to his body to comfort him while he stood in front of everyone. And I was like, this might not be the right vibe. Where are you at on body pillows right now? You're looking at me. How many do you see in the frame?

I was just saying, like, that would have been a weird, because people, we're talking about this filmmaker. Like, he shoots some extreme stuff. And I was just, it was going to be just off like a 15-hour travel day. I didn't know if I could hang with that. Now, you, Chris, you would run towards the flame. Yeah, absolutely. If I saw him at Fat Dragon now, I would just give him a pound

and I'd be like, I finished too old to die young. When you look at the Amazon stat sheet, and it says one person completed this. It's this guy. And he would be like, let me finish this beef with broccoli, please. Right. Okay, so among the other things I want to talk to you about today, obviously we're going to spend the second half of the podcast

talking about white noise, which I think we're both really looking forward to. We're both huge fans of the book. we're both huge fans of Noah Bobbax. I'm really excited to talk to you about that. I have a couple of interesting news stories to run by you. Okay. Going a bunch of different directions. You know, poker face, the Ryan Johnson show with Natasha Leon is coming out at the end of the month.

And then the full trailer, I think, went up of maybe it went a few days ago. But it was, it was, it's. No, no. We went up today, I think. Oh, it went up today. So the full poker face trailer giving us the totality of the amazing, of the amazing cast of guest stars they're going to be appearing on the show,

Nick Nulte, Joseph Gordon Levitt, Benjamin Brat, Ron Perlman, a bunch of people. Will Rel. And for people who don't know, this is a very knowing Columbo homage from Ryan Johnson and Natasha Leone, where the point of the show is that

I think there will be some serialized storytelling, but it is a case of the week style procedural, featuring this Natasha Leon character who is just gifted at solving murders. Her gift is she can tell when people are lying. Well, that would come in incredibly helpfully if you're trying to figure out who solved a murder.

If you're in Glass Onion, yes, it would. Yeah, I guess there are some cases where murderers are like straight up, I did that. And you wouldn't have to have a poker face. I wanted to ask you, though, so the conceit, and it's baked into the trailer, they're kind of like each week, a new case pretty much. You know, we've been lightly and lovingly mocked by Sam S. Mail

for, you know, talking about TV that you do, like, that's on in the background or laundry TV. I think we've turned... Lightly? Lately mocked. Yeah. Go on. In a weird way for as much... I'm super looking forward to this show. I love Natasha Leon. I'm going to watch the show, and I'm really excited for it. But that little Sam S-mail voices in the back of my head, where I'm kind of like, isn't it funny that we have gotten so far away from what TV used to do? That part of the selling point of a quote-unquote prestige show would be TV like you used to watch it, which is to say, if you miss an episode, no big deal, or if you want to watch

the fourth one, go ahead. I was thinking about that, and I was thinking about Netflix's Glydiscope, which is intentionally, like, you can watch any episode in whatever order. It's kind of funny that these things that used to be part of the process, used to be part of the distribution, the model are now like the things that you used to sell a show. Well, I think it's interesting how decoupled we've come from just the whole mechanism and the medium. Side note, we're not going to talk about kaleidoscope today, but I have to confess in the framework of this conversation, I have almost no natural interest in checking it out

because of the nature of the show. That they're like, it doesn't matter. Watch it however you want. And I'm like, that's like restaurants that are like, why don't you just tell us what you want? Like, no, I, you're the chef. Like when Tom Colicchio... Why did you do movie phone voice?

Because I love Kramer as movie phone voice, and I'm always looking for an opportunity to use it. Why don't you just tell me what you'd like to eat? I mean, I think he moved away from it, but Tom Colicchio from Top Chef, his restaurant craft, like the big innovation when he opened it before Top Chef 20 years ago. It was like, here's a list of proteins and here's a list of sides and do what you want. And I was like, I don't want that power. No, no thank you.

Take back this poison chalice and tell me what tastes good together. You're a chef. Anyway, the poker face thing is really interesting to me for the reasons you mentioned, which are this, the trailer proudly announces itself as what it is. A, we're going to have some fun here. We're going to, the stakes are going to be a little bit lighter. We're going to be meeting new people in the trailer. We're given the information that she is living on the road.

You know, that is, to your point about serialized elements, I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say the pilot sets up why she is living on the road. And so there is some causal, you know, cause and effect there. But, yeah, it's basically, it is. not hiding what it is, and I respect it for that. That said, I am going to put on my slightly devil's advocate scream mask, which is an uncomfortable fit over all these pillows strapped to my body, but I hope you'll allow it, to say it was impossible for me to watch this trailer and appreciate its breezy tone without also taking in the context of it, which was a peacock original.

Now, what I mean by that is we don't have access to the numbers. We don't actually know what Peacock is or isn't doing for the larger universal Comcast, Shineheart wig corporation. The perception within the industry or within people who casually follow the industry or listen to podcasts that have no actual insider information like this one is that it's struggling. And so the thing that I wondered about this trailer was is saying, hey guys, there's a breezy TV show coming. No biggie.

Is that doing what Peacock needs at this moment? Now, I say that thinking that this show could and should be, it should be the thing. It should be the killer app. Oh, yeah. Okay. For the service. It should be.

But is this trailer, which is honest, like Natasha Leone's character, about what it is, is it doing that job? So are you worried that it's not an, that this show can't be the crown jewel of peacock, or that it's, it shouldn't be if,

if, if its whole point is to have this casual relationship with it. I guess what I'm saying is nobody knows anything anymore, uh, as evidenced by the, the bill Netflix paid for Noah Bombach's white noise that we're going to talk about soon. Like, nobody knows anything. And I'm,

I'm okay with that chaos. Um, but at least in our perception of how networks and now streaming services have separated from the pack, have stood out, has been discovering the killer app, the killer show that you absolutely have to watch because people are talking about it because there's this building snowballing sense of anticipation that something major is happening, something is going to be revealed in a finale that you're

just going to have to know about. And this is true going back almost 20 years now to AMC rolling the dice with Breaking Bad and Mad Men. And with shows, and I'm not saying there are more of those out there. I'm just saying that the logic behind those swings was if we get you, and that's a tough ask, considering that most people think of us as a place for Shawshank reruns and the series, remember when. If we get you, we've got you hooked and you're going to stay here and you're going to tell people about it.

And I don't know, it just feels like things are even less sticky than they used to be. So this to me feels like the kind of thing that a successful and flush service could add or dangle as part of its other package of sparkly bobbles and say like, and we also do this. Isn't this fun and isn't this great? So this actually leads right into The Last of Us, which I also wanted to talk about. They've been doing a little bit more of a full court press with the promotion. The show comes out next week, I believe, next Sunday. And I'm very excited for it.

I'm almost like, as for as much as I'm looking forward to the show, I've been blown away by how they've handled the buildup to it. because it's a great cast, a beloved piece of IP. It's the thing that HBO maybe never had, which is the dystopian post-apocalyptic thriller that they didn't get from Walking Dead. I guess you could make an argument that Westworld was that, but I think Westworld was a little bit more of a mystery box show

than Last of Us will prove to be. And the creative team, the same guys who did Chernobyl, a show that Andy and I have done extensive podcasting on, so I would just refer you to that. Like, I mean, it's sort of insulting to even retread that water, I think, for us. I'm just talked out about it, frankly. I'm tired. I'm tired of it.

And I actually think, Kaya, you should just delete all the episodes we did about Chernobyl, if you haven't already. Yeah. Should we just do that now? Yeah, let's take a... And we're back. They have come out and said that in almost all certainty, that this is only going to be a two-season show,

that the first season is going to cover the first last of us game and that the second season will do the second last of us game. And Craig Bazin has been pretty open saying, like, I am not into spinning plates to just keep kicking the can down the road. And essentially, it was like referring to Thrones and, you know, other shows that have done more like, well, if we peddle in place here, we can keep it going for another two-season, three seasons, whatever. They are almost building in not only a sense of anticipation,

but a sense of urgency to this show that I think is really admirable to say nothing of the fact that it's just coming out on HBO on Sundays at a time when there is nothing else really competing with it. Yellowstone's going on

a mid-season break. There isn't like a... I think the show is going to be huge, weirdly. And it almost seems... The reason why I'm bringing it up is because as you're saying, like with Pokerface on a streaming service,

that most people, I think, are like, that would be my third or fourth or fifth choice of a service to have. It's a show that you're like, come watch us if you got a sec, you know? Yeah, we're here. Last of us is like, this shit is going to be over in two years. And let me add, by the way, one last parenthetical about the Peacock conversation.

I've heard anecdotally from people, including our fantastic producer, Kaya, who said this the other week to us. People watch Peacock, and they watch it because all the Bravo shows are there. Yes. Or they watch it because there's some good reruns there, Law & Order, Saturday Night Live, or the office. I mean, people are using it as a TV

platform to watch things. And under that rubric, maybe Pokerface fits in wonderfully because Murder She Wruns are there, you know, and you can watch it that way. So are Colombo reruns? Yes. So maybe it's leaning into the way people use it. And this is actually not even Galaxy Brain. This is just good business. So I don't want to presume to know otherwise. That was just my impression. I also would not be surprised if we get to like March or April and I'm like, I like, I like to poker face more than Last of Us. It's more just about the execution of building up anticipation for a show. So I think there's two pieces to it. The first piece is HBO was born for this. Like, whatever, throw out all the Warner Media scuttlebutt and tax write-offs and all the cursed touch of Zaz

spreading throughout the company, this is what they do. There's still people at that company, especially at that network, who just know how to handle precious goods and sell you on them. It's like when you go to a newer restaurant and you're like, boy, this cooking is good and this room is nice, but the service is a little lacking, and you remember that. And when you go to a restaurant that's been there for 20 years, and they know how to take your drink order or steer you to the things on the menu and you feel taken care of, that's HBO. And so I also have been very impressed by this. Like, they're not hiding the ball that this is a genre show or that it's based on something

that people like, but they're saying, look what a great job we did with this, you know, and look at our commitment to quality. Do you want to watch the show? For those reasons. Yeah. Do you know what I mean? Like, I want to, and this is an interesting conversation to have, too. I want to watch it because of the pedigree and because of HBO.

I have, if this was on a different network or if it was put together by different people, and obviously name some people that I like, it may be my fitting would change. But I guess what I'm saying, but you tell me who you'd like to be in this show. Tony Gilroy, press one. I'm listening. I would not be drawn to it because I'm kind of,

I've never been a big, never been a big dystopia guy, and I have not played these video games, and I'm good, but the pedigree makes me want to watch it. The question that I have lingering over this, and I wonder, we've been, you know, we're trying.

Casey Blois, you know the invite is there. We'd love to have them on the podcast. And one of the questions that I would ask, and I'm curious to, level of honesty we could get from any network executive about this, is now that we've been doing this version of TV gestures vaguely at the Hollywood sign behind me, for a number of years now, there's some data, right, like in terms of what has value, what brings people back, what gets watched. So the question I have is one season or two season event shows,

what are they really worth to you? And are we moving away from it? I think there's something different to HBO than they are to like, I, I, I, I think that they wind up being... HBO's just built up enough of a library and enough of an offering and enough of a track record to have... If they want to come out and say, Big Loa Lies is going to be six episodes,

but it's like it's going to be 12, or if they want to say, we're pretty sure we're only going to do two seasons of Last of Us, or Succession might just keep going. You know, who knows? This is the best show we've ever done. Like, they can just keep...

They can move things around like that. I think this almost ties into what we were talking about on Tuesday, where the 1899 cancellation on Netflix, not only do you liquidate making that, you know, the audience that you had who had invested in that show, but you essentially negate its library value by telling people, this is going to be an unsatisfactory experience

because the people who made it... We didn't believe in it, so why should you? And the people who made it intended to tell it this story over multiple seasons, and they won't. So, you know, I think that we've been talking around the same thing for about two, three months now ever since we started seeing things like Westworld being offloaded to a ad-supported television service to be named later.

And it wouldn't shock me if that starts happening with Netflix. I do understand what you're saying, though, where it's just like is the limited nature or does it somehow damp in fandom? But if anything, I think it just builds up anticipation. Because you know that they're not going to fuck around. You know that they're going to go for the jugular over the course of this run. It's not going to be like, oh, now it'll be a plot. No, this makes me really excited.

And I think that, again, HBO, the people who work there and the people who program the network and develop are very, very attuned to the industry at large. Now, obviously, anyone working in the industry is attuned to it. But what I mean is you were right to bring up the Walking Dead. And so I think what they asked, and HBO, I believe, was in the mix to maybe develop that show or air that show or a version of it back in the day. The question, I think that they ask themselves always, and I think it's very valuable and has been borne out with the quality of work they produced is they say,

okay, so we're dipping a toe into that water. What does it mean for HBO to do that? And I think they fundamentally can state that we won't just do 10 seasons and then say there's a Rick spin-off movie or whatever else they're doing over there. Their needs are different. Their needs of engaging with fandom, their return on investment is different, and the perception is different. I do wonder, though, intellectually, as taking all the business,

questions out of it is if you just go up to generic television watcher who does enjoy a thoughtful, prestigious show everyone's in their diet, and you tell them Station 11, which I guess we should also mention as part of the dystopian genre, which came out about a year ago, preceding last of us, like does the limited season nature of it, oh, it's only 10 episodes, like it's it, that's it, Does that have any impact psychologically on your interest in starting something new? Or are you just like, cool, it's a project, I'll watch it. I would say anecdotally, like over the last two or three months, a couple of people have asked me for TV recommendations.

And I said, thank you for asking. I co-host a podcast twice a week. And you could, you know, and they said, well, I don't care for podcasts. Why don't you just tell me? and the shows that I've recommended more than any others are reservation dogs and Station 11. And I think there's a good reason for that and a bad reason for that. The bad reason is people who aren't super plugged in are like, oh, I'm not familiar, which is not great, considering those two shows are some of the best over the last few years.

But I think the good thing from it was when I pitch Station 11, part of the appeal of the pitch actually is it'll be a wonderful experience to watch this. And the commitment is you can watch this on your vacation, you know, or you can watch this when your work schedule is later. Cool vacation. Cool vacation. No, it is an uplifting show ultimately. Eventually, yeah. So I think that does have value. I think we could argue out of from both ends and, you know, ultimately that the answer is the reason that show is successful is because they chose the right shape box for it. And it was an, and, you know, and it fit the box appropriately. And I, would trust HBO and Craig Mazzen to do the same for for Last of Us.

But I just, I, I, it's just, it's actually, it's just broadly an HBO question. And I think that it's probably not, there's probably not one answer because their business keeps evolving in both setting the tone and standards for the industry, but also keeping pace to a degree, especially during this, both industry expansion, but also retraction. I understand why HBO's core business still would support a mix of ongoing TV shows, which really matter to them, euphoria, succession, now White Lotus. Like, this is huge for them and is their core business. And then sprinkling in a, hey, guess what, it's Nicole Kidman and Reese Witherspoon and

Merrill Streep doing six episodes. Like, that gets the awards. That gets the attention. It says they're open for business for a certain type of A-list talent. It's the kind of middle part. And I don't want to keep harping on this because it was one of our favorite shows of the year. And we love everybody involved in it.

But, like, I continue to wonder about the afterlife or how. Halo of a mayor of East Town, which mattered a lot, not just us. It was a big hit, and people liked it and talked about it when it was on, but I continue to wonder how they... What's the, like, whether or not that's like a library play, right? What's the long tail of it, you know, in terms of the money spent on it and the return? Now, it won Emmys, so I think that they would, they would do it again in a heartbeat. But that balance in terms of like what, all of this is to say, there was a time not too long ago when HBO was just like, yeah, to all of it. Like, if it's the best, best thing, we're going to do it. And I feel like those days are probably gone all over the place.

The craziest thing to me is just how much this is, like, you know the idea that like everything and I think this actually might be from my noise, but like life was basically the same from like the dark ages to the industrial age and then it just accelerates so fast and massively like after that. Like when you think about when we started this podcast and essentially the outer limits of technology was DVR and getting DVDs sent to you from Netflix. And then there was streaming. And now we have gone from, oh, that's cool. Like there's this thing called HBO Go or whatever that you can then watch Sopranos when you want to to, to the entire value of this whole system is based on the strength of your library and your ability to keep people constantly subscribed

and signing up new people to subscribe because they want to be able to be able to. rewatch White Lotus when White Lotus season three comes on. I just don't feel like we're talking, and maybe the industry wags and newsletter scribes are covering this more than we are, more than I'm aware of. But I just feel like library value hasn't really been talked about a lot recently. It's really been about like the arms race, you know, because Apple, for example, has no library other than the shows that they've made in the last few years and they don't care. But then when they do things like they, when they sign up five seasons of slow horses, I'm like,

oh, that's smart. Yes, for that reason, sure. But, like, they're not, you know, and Amazon bought MGM to have a deeper film library and more IP to mine and et cetera. But maybe this is also a factor of their still pretty terrible UI, the user interface, right? But, like, my experience with Amazon

is almost entirely the surface of the ocean. It's just like, what are the three things that are new or on the top of the page? And then I don't sink deeper. You know, I'm not. You're pulling at a really interesting thread here because you mentioned the things that you recommend to people. And we talked about Station 11. But I think it's easier to get people invested in something like Reservation Dogs if they know that they can then watch the next season live.

They know that they know that, oh, so they're participating in something. It's not a solitary. It's not like, hey, you should go back and do homework from 2021. You should get into this now because when the third season comes up, I think it's going to be a thing. Do you know what I mean? Yes, but I do think that's a, I think that's an incredibly valid point. But I also think some of the people that I was giving advice to are separated from the churn. Like they are not participating.

They are clearly not listening to this podcast and not participating in any kind of new nounist phomoculture when it comes to TV. And they're like, what's something good? Oh, cool. Yeah. The person who I recommended Res Dogs do thus far has not asked, is there going to be a third season? Sure. Have they asked anything? No.

Wait a second. Let me do a wellness check. Why don't we get into white noise? Oh, I had one more TV news thing. Yeah. This isn't really a conversation so much as it's just an update. Okay. An update from the archipelagio of the Sheridan Islands.

By the way, I think that you just made that word Italian. How do you pronounce it? I think it's archipelago, but you sort of like were thinking of the Voltagio brothers. I definitely have definitely said that word wrong for my entire life. Luckily, I've only said it six times. I just didn't want to call it Taboo Island. You know, I didn't want to call it Sheridan. I get Sheridan Island is like a good thing, but Sheridan's got so much landmass, you know, at this point.

Yeah. What was the name of the continent when it was just one continent before they broke up? Like, on Earth, that's him. That's his island. I just wanted to update you and let you know that Nicole Kidman has joined the cast of The Lioness, which is his forthcoming show. And I'll just tell you a little bit about it. This is from the variety piece about it. Lioness is based on a real-life CIA program. I'm sure this is going to do wonders for the CIA's reputation. Per the official series description, it follows Cruz Manuelos, played by Liza Di Olavera, a rough around the edges but passionate young Marine recruited to join the CIA's Lioness engagement team to help bring down a terrorist organization from within. Kidman will play

Caitlin Mead described as a CIA senior supervisor who has had a long career of playing politics. She must juggle the trappings of being a woman in the high-ranking intelligence community, a wife that longs for attention that she herself can't even give, and a mentor to someone veering suspiciously close to the same rocky road she's found herself on. And it also, this show also stars Zoe Saldana and Kidman are executive producing and this was like going to be run by somebody else. I think it was

had like a writer's room and Taylor was like I got this. I got a little time on my docket. By the way, thank goodness Zoe Saldane is free of the shackles of Gomorrah. We didn't cover the fact that like one by one all the guys in the galaxy are like fucking freedom.

Just stumbling, blinking into the light. rubbing green grease paint off of their bodies is like, get this shit off of me. He's like, bro, I live in Tampa.

I don't know what happened. Yeah. You know, here's one of the things this news makes me think about is like older listeners will know this, but younger listeners,

if we have any other than Kaya, might not. But like there was a time when the idea of celebrities, like major celebrities, using their fame for something as crass as capitalism was so verboten that they would only do it overseas.

So, like, if you happen to be in Japan and turn on the television, you would see, like, Brad Pitt, hawking, espresso capsules. I know you're not about to compare Nicole Kidman playing Caitlin Mead, a senior CIA supervisor, to fucking espresso commercials. No, because this is the lioness engagement program, right? And, like, that deserves a modicum of respect. What I mean is what Taylor Sheridan and Paramount. are doing over at Paramount Plus is basically just recreating television, right?

Yes. Old-style television through a modern lens. TV, but if it was written by one guy. Well, there's that, which it used to be 60 years ago. Larry Gelbart just wrote all television, right? And we all laughed. My point is something about that dude and that success and the scrim of streaming. So it's not CBS, even though it is all the same company.

now has just allowed Helen Mirren, Harrison Ford, Nicole Kidman, they're just doing TV shows. Now, I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but I'm saying it's been an interesting progression from movie stars don't do TV to movie stars will do prestige projects on HBO, to movie stars will do prestige projects, even if it's FX on Hulu, to now the shows that we are doing. And I'm not disrespecting Linus, which probably sounds like a lot more fun than a bunch of the other stuff we could name check on fancier networks. this, if you read that description to me, I'd be like, yes, Wednesday nights at 10 on CBS. There's nothing wrong with that.

Right. They need to, you know, it's just that that is now what A-list actors are doing when they're not doing super weird movie theater commercials that seem to only Aaron Glendale. Did people nationally know about the Nicole Kidman? We love movies commercial? I think if you have a Twitter account, you probably know about that. But like, she obviously she does the intro, like, thing, the intro video before your movie plays when you go to an AMC theater and she says,

Heartbreak feels good in a place like this? Heartbreak feels good in here because she's watching Creed. Yeah. And here's the thing, Nicole Kippman's a TV star. She's a TV star. That's what's weird about that ad. She's not in TAR. Like, she is in Nine Perfect Strangers.

She is on Big Little Lies. She is now on the Lioness. This is what Nicole Kippman does, which is cool. I like Nicole Kippen shows. It's smart. Yeah. Her and Reese Witherspoon, they looked at the landscape and they're like, this is going to work.

And then Reeswetherspun sold her company for a bill for a full yard. Do you think that the, how many, how many BPs on that? How much did that, how much of that move through Rishi's desk, do you think? I don't know. You got stuck with fucking hello sunshine at opening. And it was like, I'm taking a bath. Do you think that the person that you recommended reservation dogs to a few weeks ago was in the lioness engagement program?

That's why they've gone dark. I think it's unquestionably the case. Yes. Okay. I do. Do you have time in your life and heart to watch all these Taylor Sheridan shows? I, yeah.

Like, I mean, like, I stopped watching Tulsa King. I am a couple behind on, I guess it's like I'm one behind on 1923 and I, I like it. I have more or less quit Yellowstone.

Okay. And it, like quiet quitting. Like, like, well, in a pathetic way, I read the vulture recap of Yellowstone and then decide whether or not

it's honestly interesting enough for me to watch. And this season has seemed to be almost like, on a perverse level, just like about like the grazing habits and like migration habits of wolves. You know, I don't. My five-year-old would love that.

I don't think it's an appropriate show for your five-year-old. Next time you babysitter, you're going to throw that on. Yeah. And then I am looking forward to the mayor of Kingston, as Jeremy Renner is obviously laid up right now. But I'm looking forward to the second season of that. and I'm looking forward to landman with Billy Bob Thornton. Unbelievable.

That's a good name for a show. It just flows off the tongue. Just trippingly off the tongue. It reminds me. Imagine Ray Fines and Hail Caesar saying that. The playoffs are here and you can predict the action all the way to the finals with Fandul predicts. Follow all the playoff dishes, swishes, wishes, and misses.

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So you're saying with Hilton Honors, I can use points for a free night's day anywhere? Anywhere. What about fancy places like the canopy in Paris? Yeah, Hilton honors baby. Or relaxing sanctuaries, like the Conrad in Toulomb. Hilton honors baby. What about the five-star Waldorf Astoria in the Maldives? Are you going to do this for all 9,000 properties?

When you want points that can take you anywhere, any time, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Book your spring break now. Okay, let's talk about white noise. Uh-huh. Noah Bomback's ambitious adaptation of Don DeLyloilo. his 1985 novel. I am a big-time D.D.L. Head.

Where are you at with him? Dingle-D-L-L-L-Lu? I love him, and I love Don DeLola. Are you a big Del Lolo guy? So this is, yes, but here's the thing. I don't know if we've ever talked about this on the mic, but I think you and I have talked about this, which is to say that, like, when we met,

one of the things that we were both interested in... Was American fiction. Exactly. I mean, we were also interested in reclaiming the cultural reputation of the song swallowed by Bush. We were really like proponents of that and the whole Albini Razor Blade Suitcase Era for that band. But beyond that, yes, it was like

the great postmodern dudes of literature were big. And like in high school... Too many of our cohort out there using Norton Anthology of poetry books to smoke weed with and it's like, no. We've got to respect this tradition. Yes. And we and I definitely used the books of

like DeLillo and Paul Oster, Madison's Smart Bell, as like step-ladders to make myself like appear smarter and maybe be smarter, but my point is I read all of these books way too young to know anything about anything. I thought the writing was dazzling.

I thought the cultural insights were just like, you know, existentially soul-rattling. And I couldn't believe that books could do this and talk about things this way and be this weird and funny and surprising. hugely important, especially DeLillo. I think I read them all, or at least all the ones that he had written through like 1997.

And then I never picked them up again. That's not true. I read Grey Jones Street again a year during the pandemic. Did you? Until that point, yes. But until that point, I hadn't. And the reason I picked it up was, what if I was wrong? I have no opinion.

Like snakes shedding their skin. I have no brain memory of any of this stuff. Or how it shaped me. Similar to you, I read. I think I read Mautu and White Noise and Americana in college and was like, I didn't know books could do this. Then didn't touch it, even when Underworld was like really like one of the major cultural moments, I think. One of the biggest like novel moments, I think, in a long time.

And then during the pandemic did like an entire rereading books that I had read before, but also like red red underworld, re-read Libra, running dog, Great Jones Street, end zone. Like, I just went through the whole thing, and he's one of my favorite writers. He's incredible. Now, that being said, white noise is actually not one of my favorite Dondalillo books,

although it was very formative in like, I think my level of appreciation for him. Like, that was one of the first I read that I was like, this is that dude. That was the one. I mean, there were certain touchstones to be, I would like to be expansive and say to be 16 or 17 in the years that we were 16 and 17, but maybe it was just literally for us.

But there were certain things like, oh, white noise by Dundalillo, Queen is Dead by the Smith, just like these things that were just about like 10 years before. Yes, that you were kind of use as like totems of like, I get it now. And other people would have, would hold them up and say, oh, well. And you'd be like, well, I need to be able to talk to these people and understand. Like they were hugely important in this book particularly because, from the sagacious vantage point

of the mid-90s, the book's skewering of what was becoming American mainstream culture with consumerism and Reaganism and the shadow of war and everything, it was like,

yeah, he did that thing. Well, you could almost make the argument that, like, white noise was Infinite Jess 10 years before Infinite Jess came out. Even though Infinite Jess would have been more time to you and our,

our, like, youth, it was like, white noise was, like, think, a little bit more approachable, uh, in some ways, in some ways not, but,

but it had a, But it had a punk rock field to it too because people are like, oh, you should read this book. The main character is a professor of Hitler studies and be like, oh shit. You could do that. Whoa. Well, so this leads into my question the first thing I want to say. So I guess broadly speaking, did you like the movie? I'm not sure. Okay.

It's a weird answer. I'm not sure. I'm grappling with two things. And I can get, we'll get more specific, obviously, with our thoughts and things that worked and didn't work. I love that no bomb back a filmmaker that I, you know, kicking and screaming. We did the rewatchables on kicking and screaming. I mean, he's very, very important to me as a filmmaker.

I love that he took a gigantic fucking filmmaking swing, very much outside of the wheelhouse that we thought he had built for himself by making this movie. And he tried to match the book's literary conceits and shape with cinematic language and ambition. Didn't try to just like flatten it by putting it on a screen, tried to match the spirit,

or at least the anarchic spirit that he took from it. In some ways, it has elements, it has spirit that maybe the book doesn't have. I agree, because especially, and again, this is the scrim of like a 17-year-old reading this book, I didn't understand great things could be funny,

like, or even funny ha-ha or funny absurd. I was like, oh, it's clever. Right, right. No, I think it's funny. It needs to be funny at times. And I think the book does that and adds emotional valence to things. A movie adds emotional valence to characters and situations that I definitely remember not getting from the book. But it is a tough, I found it to be a tough film to love.

Yeah, I would agree with that. So you might be asking, why are Andy and I, like, kind of belaboring the book part about this? Lots of adaptations use books simply as source material, maybe even as just like a plot hook that they want. and then they go off in lots of different directions. This is a film that is made in genuflection to its source material. You know, I would say, I can't imagine that if you just asked Noah Baumack, if you wanted to make a satirical environmental disaster movie set in the 80s,

he would say, yes, that needs to be my next project. His next project, or it was his project, because obviously his deep connection to an appreciation, and love of the Delillo Delillo's work and Delillo's fiction, and specifically Delillo's writing, because Delillo probably should get a co-screenwriter credit in this movie.

I mean, the dialogue is taken from the page, the pacing, in lots of ways mirrors the pacing of the book, and while he obviously imbues it with a lot of cinematic flourishes, the structure of the film is essentially the structure of the book. It starts with a relatively comic

kind of arch view of academia at the time, and And the station wagons. I remember that. I mean, that's the beginning of the book. Oh yeah, that's the beginning of the book. It's like this incredible description of everybody arriving at college in September, and that's how the movie opens. So it starts out. The first act is essentially like this satire of higher learning.

The second act is essentially an environmental disaster movie that is centered around this thing called the airborne toxic event, which is this chemical plume cloud that's hanging over this Midwestern town. And then the third act is, in terms of its films, the bomb bag version of the third act, is essentially a De Palma movie, like a psychosexual noir, and is about this guy, Jack Gladney, who's played by Adam Driver in the film, trying to basically avenge his wife's infidelity, is I guess the best way of putting it.

You probably see... Your infidelity, sexual infidelity and medical infidelity. Exactly. Was there a part of the movie that grabbed you in a part that didn't? Because I definitely have an answer for that. I thought the movie, and this may be true generally of movies versus books,

I thought the movie worked best when it felt urgent and that there was a reason for these characters to be existing in this moment and to be in peril. And I think that was primarily the second act of the movie. Me too. The airborne toxic event part. I thought that really worked and lurched the movie out of a kind of arch satire

and into flesh and blood, this is what's actually happening. And I think, I want to give you a chance to answer this too, but like the relevance quote unquote of this movie to this moment, I think was both a gift and a curse and something that we should talk about

and more in depth. But the movie came to life there for me and then I felt sort of shuffled back into not abstraction, but intellectualism to a degree at the end that suits the source material. And it certainly has in the past suited the filmmaker. But I felt less engaged with the third act

because of the adrenaline of the second act. and the success that it succeeded. I would agree with that. I would agree with that. It wasn't necessarily even the come down from the second act to the third act. I think it was also the characters to me

and some of it might be in Greta Gerwig's performance, which is a little bit like, it's not stagey, a little stilted. So you go through the first two parts of this movie and then when you get to the third part and it turns into this, essentially this drama,

I felt like it was hard for me to basically invest in the character journey, you know, because we have been held at a distance by what is essentially very stagy, stilted, arty dialogue throughout the first two parts of it, which I love. But when you get to the third part, and it's like people are in tears and people are chasing one another and people are, you know, feeling jealous of one another. It's like a little bit of a gear shift. It's too far from anything. I think there are two things I want to say, though about that. One is Greta Gerwig's monologue about what happened, I thought was the best part of the movie. Just full stop. I thought she was amazing. And I thought that it added, like just, it just shifted,

it shifted the complexion of the movie and the, and the texture of the movie in a way that I was really, really struck by. And I was thinking of, in our last podcast, we talked about the end of Fleischman is in trouble. And I won't spoil that for people who are just white noise, who, you know, who've only, we're going to do two books. True white noise heads. Yeah. Right. But we were talking about the intensity of Claire Daines's performance, and I was thinking of that. And it's a very different, Greta Gerwig is a very different type of actor, but she did tap into something that was as vital and I was really struck by. Also, I did levitate when my guy Lars Edinger showed up. Now, for the true VEP heads, no, that Lars Idinger is the best, he's a German actor. He's a genius.

He's the best thing in the HBO, the new series of Irma Vep that Olivier Sias did last year. Speaking of library plays from HBO. For sure. I'm sure that's just burning the midnight oil. People just can't stop vepping it up. He was just in an acclaimed production of Hamlet. This dude is the third rail that you can bring into your subway system. And when he shows up, I was like, oh, my God. phenomenal. But as exciting and as electric as he was, there was another element at work here, a different kind of airborne event, which was, I think, ultimately, it's an interesting, but kind of an unsuccessful. collision between two different types of movie because there is the kind of big cinematic literary adaptive swing that bomb back seems to be engaging in and i'm excited and i anytime any filmmaker like challenges themselves i think we should applaud it i think it's really exciting and rare especially

that's why you're watching 10 hours of Copenhagen cowboy over the weekend i've just talked myself into it but especially when they've made 10 movies or however many is made you know within a certain ecosystem. But there was another kind of type of movie at play here that I couldn't shake. And this is going to be an even more obscure reference. But look, we're talking about a Delillo adaptation. Hopefully this is a safe space for it. But there's a movie. It's now 50 years old called Little Murders. And the actor Alan Arkin

directed it based on a novel by Jules Pfeiffer, stars Elliot Gould. And it's this sort of shambolic. We're in New York, but we're kind of self-aware. And then there's violence. And then all my friends are in the movie, not mine, but their friends and their artistic community, and Donald Sutherland shows up midway through. And I felt that kind of like, I'm making a movie within my creative community, shambolic vibe in this, when it's like, let's take a second and have Dean Wareham and Brita Phillips from Luna sing a song on top of a car. Let's have the great Carlos Chiquot, who I was thrilled to see Share a Table with Andre 3000 in the background. Let's call James Murphy

out of retirement to write a new song, which I love for a dance number, which I also love. But it felt weirdly almost as if he was getting close to a more overt, ambitious flame, and then felt comfortable touching home base with some of his pals and some curly cues and intellectualism. And look, who among us doesn't shrink back from the heavier stuff at times? but that that kind of it didn't limit my engagement with the movie

but I didn't notice it and it held me in check too I think I'm pretty much where you are where it was like I found it a difficult movie to love but an easy movie

to admire and yeah the colors the lighting great wonder what it means to people who have never read the book and I wonder if other people

who have read the book like us are experiencing the very white noise sense of deja vu where I never really shook the Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig are doing like a reading of white noise part of it. And that's not altogether a bad thing.

I mean, I definitely enjoyed myself. But there is an element of it where I'm like, oh, he just said all plots move deathward. You know, like it has that like, there was some greatest hits in there. But it's a greatest hits for a crowd of how many people. I don't know. Can I throw a hypothetical at you?

Sure. Can I do it in the movie phone voice? sure what if I were to tell you white noise I'm not going to do it white noise this script you know this artistic vision for it but it's Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh does that change your engagement with them

and if Florence Pugh is too young actually these guys were too young to be honest but a type of actor like that's who I came to mind no I mean I think I was pretty thrilled at Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig playing these parts What are you trying to get at? Particularly the driver thing.

I think he's a phenomenal actor, one of the best actors we have. And I also, in the spirit of saying Noah Bombach was challenging himself, like this was against type for driver in a lot of ways. And he went for it, and he went for it big. I didn't fully buy him in the part. What I saw him and what I admired in him was the challenge, if not the labor. I didn't fully buy in that he was this guy.

Now, I think critics of the movie or of Delillo could be like, well, this guy, Jack Gladney, Professor of Hitler Studies, isn't a guy. He's a composite of ideas and observations, you know. But again, for a movie, I just felt like I needed to be a little more emotionally grounded in him. And I struggled with that. That's interesting. I was the opposite. I think I was like pretty much on board with Driver once I got over the punch and the receding airline. and had a little bit of like a barrier to Gerwig.

Look at us disagreeing. I want to satisfy people's bloodlust for us to like more view. Like I want to be like, fuck you, Andy. Instead we're like, oh, how interesting. Let me consider that viewpoint and get back to you. I think if only the House Republican caucus could take a page from our playbook here. I think the other thing I wanted to talk about, was the, they're not problems, the issues that came to light of time and timing. And I mean that

in two senses. One, part of the genius of the book, I imagine when it came out and certainly still when we were reading it in the 90s, was that the 80s was happening all around Don DeLillo and all around the readers of the book. And his ability to slowly approach it, like some sort of intellectual samurai and just slice and slice and slice and slice and you're like, oh my God, you know, it is all like humor and terror and it's all products and it's all the time

was genius, right? Because he was doing it in his own time. I think it's very, very hard from this vantage point of now 40 years to be like, hey, guess what? There was a lot of product stuff and consumerism in the 80s. Well, I mean, it's the funny thing about it.

So I found that the airborne toxic event stuff felt incredibly appropriate and prescient. Well, so that's the other half of this. Where even down to the different roles assumed by the people in this sort of Brady Bunch family that Jack and Mbibat have of children from other marriages and one of their own. You know, the panicked, anxious kid, the kid who seemed strangely into it, the dad who is pretty, pretending to be an expert to calm everybody down and is just every new development with this toxic cloud

he's like, yes, well, of course it's going to roll that way and you know, like we don't want that. Yeah, like I thought I loved all of that. The consumerism stuff probably maybe mildly intentionally, but I'm sure unintentional to don't know. I was almost nostalgic for the consumerism of the 1980s

and like the word communal like we're all at the A&P, marveling at the various Cheerio, the cereal boxes versus like I'm just going to like soothe myself by buying a pair of jeans on Instagram. Proust had his Madeline. I saw the

box of frosted Rice Krispies. Yeah. I was like, oh my God. That was so good. Those were so good. That was the other half of it that I wanted to point out which is it's no fault of Noah Baumbach or anyone involved that an actual pandemic broke out in the middle of this. And then

cause that kind of, there are things that felt incredibly vital and true and also some things that through the lens of now 2023 were like, yeah, right. Like that is how society breaks down. I also thought it pointed out something that I felt was a little unattended to due to the fealty to the novel,

which is the secret power at this moment in my eyes of this book was of a guy whose life is completely compartmentalized into the performative and is not just compartmentalize into the performative, the way they duel over lectures over the power of crowds

and Elvis and Hitler. It's that those compartments keep us safe, right? And we choose to be in them because it feels good and we don't actually have to deal with the chaos and violence of the world. And then the chaos and the violence

of the world comes to him. And you have that scene that you're referring to where he's just like, well, it will be fine because it will be fine, which all of us said in some form or another in March 2020, that panic, that drip of like dopamine panic. It's not dopamine, it's adrenaline panic.

But like that to me was, that's why you make the movie today. Yeah. That's why you make a movie. Because the other reason to make it is, gosh, I've always loved this book. Yeah, I've always wanted to do this. It's a buckaless thing for me. I think I can visualize it. And but, but, but, you know, but that great performance,

Bill Camp showing up midway through for one scene, amazing. I want to shout out a friend of the podcast, Emily Mortimer's kids. Sam Navola playing two of the kids. They were great. Sam's Heinrich is really, really good. Are those nepo babies technically? Alessandra Navola and Emily Mortimer's children being in this movie? Yes. Right? Yeah. But they're very good. So they're deserving, I think. When she was on the pod last summer, she was podding from, or whenever it was the summer before, she was potting from Cleveland because she was being the stage mom with her kids on the set of this movie.

That's pretty funny. Can we just, before we wrap up, how great that this movie is, exists. How great that this movie exists for us to talk about and debate and process and consider I'm going to keep thinking about it. But how fucking insane is it that this movie exists with a hundred million dollar price tag for Netflix? I, we've been towing up to the stuff a lot recently, and I don't want to make this the concern trolling about, you know, the underwriting of corporations for art. But I guess I'm just fascinated by like, it's Noah Bombach. Even though he's doing something different. He's not making Top Gun Maverick. It's a Dondalillo

novel. Someone was signing the checks being like, yeah, $100 million is right for this. I'm glad they did. But what's the thinking here? Is Netflix just, at least the previous version of Netflix that Greenlit this, so desperate to get on that Oscar stage that they were like, we're going to keep flooding the zone,

and then Apple wins with Kota, and then they're like, I don't, and then the economy is what it is, and they've changed their mind since then. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I think I'm choosing not to care about that for as long as I don't have to. That's fair. If it winds up next year that Netflix has no awards movies or that Noah Bomback has to go back

to raising money from 15 different financiers to make his films and he's never going to get a $100 million budget, I'm glad he blew it on the Dondalala adaptation. Yeah, and I bet he's glad too. Yeah. You know, I agree with that. I agree with that. I am curious just in the sense of like rubbernecking this industry, like not, but not taking any glee in its relative, you know, box office under well-me, or whatever, the response,

I don't actually care about that. Like, I just find it, I find the decision making interesting, and I'd love to know how the decision-making has changed. I don't necessarily understand the price tag, although I don't claim to understand why Black Adam cost $400 million or $300 million. You know what I mean? And lost money, right. Yeah. Whereas Shazam is profitable. It doesn't seem like they can make, for as much as there might not be a market for mid-budget movies, it doesn't seem like a mid-budget movie is capable of being made anymore. So if it costs $100 million to have,

to shut down the New Jersey Turnpike or whatever they did to shoot the airborne toxic event and then to do a bunch of the set pieces that they have in this film, I guess that's what it costs now. But for, I'm trying to like be, like, I think with Babylon and like loving Babylon as much as I did

and despite the fact that it didn't make a lot of money being like, sometimes good movies don't make any money and that doesn't mean they're not good. And rarely does a film's poor box office performance impact its long-term legacy. So if people wind up going back and being like outside of the sort of grip of 2022 end-of-year stuff, I've turned out I loved white noise.

Like white noise will have legs. Now, it existing on this imaginary cloud that, you know, and not really being in theaters, that's a conversation to be had about how that impacted its relationship to its perspective audience. I agree. And it was also, this is for me something to be celebrated. There's a specific moment in this movie after Camp Daffodil when Jack decides to drive the station wagon. By the way, shades of national lampoons of the station wagon. I love that. Drive the station wagon after the militia guys being like, I feel like they'll know how to survive. And then he ends up in a river with his son telling him when to turn the car off. And it's like a weird action sequence. But there's no action and the car is floating down a river. And then they escape the river and they rejoin the line. and I was like, that's the first thing they asked him to cut for time.

Like, that scene for plot purposes doesn't matter. No. He just joins the line. But thank God it's there. And it's sometimes worth pointing out the things that might feel, we shouldn't be watching stuff in that with that mindset.

Yeah, I mean, there's tons of stuff in Steven Spielberg movies where it's like, Indy didn't need to jump on that horse. I mean, he was just going to go over there. But, like, it's fun and it gives you a little adrenaline shot, you know? I get the, it's actually, I wasn't even going to bring this up, but it's probably a better way to end this because I agree. Like I, we are in the, the week, twice a week trenches of talking about both art and the industry. And sometimes I worry if we're tipping too far towards industry just because it is, it is interesting to us to do that. Oh, sure. But, but there are people like, there is good stuff and good stuff matters. And to your point, last. And I was reading about how at the New York Film Circle, I guess it was awards, they were last night. New York film. circle, Tar correctly, won best picture, in my opinion. And the guy, everyone's favorite MCU nut, Marty Scorsese, announced that Tar won and presented the trophy. I guess he did it

via video to Todd Field. And he basically, and he said, this is a direct quote, the clouds lifted when I experienced Todd's film. Right. And he goes on saying, like, so many of us are seeing films that let us know where they're going and they take us by the hand. And he's just saying, like he's talking about in terms of technical filmmaking to a degree that he's fucking Martin Scorsese and we can't speak that language but it's game recognizing game but that specific thing where he's just like

you gave us something that we were not waiting for we were not checking the Reddit boards for we don't understand and we experienced it and like that matters yeah that matters we can poke fun at Marty for like you know just taking Apple's bag and making another four hour movie or we're disliking the

multiverse of madness but like that's that dude and that movie is that movie, I think. And I'm happy that stuff still gets made. I think that same thing applies to what we were talking about earlier in the podcast where it's like, I ultimately don't really care what these shows mean to the bottom line of the streamers. I care about the kinds of shows that are being made and the kinds of shows that are being seen. So that's why I think we spend so much time talking about it. But I ultimately think reservation dogs outlives anybody who's like, how many people actually watch that, though, you know? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

Yeah, it lives it, hopefully, on a actual viable streaming service that people can watch. Exactly, exactly. We can wrap it up there. We'll be back on Monday. Sean Fennessee is going to come by and talk about Copenhagen Cowboy. You know, how many episodes will knock out, we'll see. Thank you to Kaya for producing us. Thank you to Andy for his insight.

Into Copenhagen, Copenhagen culture. His comradeship, camaraderie, and everything else. We'll be back on Monday. I'll see you on the next archipelago. Alka Pileggio Hey Nick Pellegio Oh

You insulted the island a little bit A little bit