The Watch - The Neptunes Are Back Because No One Ever Really Dies, Plus ‘Stranger Things’ Season 2 (Ep. 200)

Episode Date: November 2, 2017

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald welcome the return of N.E.R.D by revisiting what makes the Neptunes and Pharrell persistently relevant (1:00). Later, they discuss episodes 4 through 6 of ‘Stranger Things' Season 2 (17:00) and then answer a few listener questions (36:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan and I'm editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio, the Chad to my Farrell. It's Andy Greenwald. Is that me I'm going to disappear for 10 years? No, Chad has a great life, man. Chad just makes the, just makes the textures.

Since we're talking Neptunes, which we shouldn't be. I'm just saying that could, there are one or two ways that could go. Either Chad has retreated to a lovely life. in Virginia Beach. Yeah. Maybe wife, a couple little Neptunes, little satellite moons. Or things got dark. I don't know which it is.

I think he's fine, man. I think the Neptunes are fine. The Neptunes are back. We're going to talk a little bit about their new song with Rihanna. It's called Lemon. We can just talk about whatever you want to talk about today. We got Stranger Things episodes 4, 5, and 6 to discuss, correct? So are we putting that at the tail end?

Not the tail in the second half? So, like, let's talk a little bit about. I wanted to talk a little bit about the Neptunes just because this song they put out with Rihanna, which is from their new album. You said you confirmed this via Quest Love's Twitter. That's where I confirm all my major news. I actually not kidding. Like there was, as you guys know, there was a horrific attack in New York, which is unspeakable.

It's monstrous. New York is both of our, was our cities. We love it. Shout to everyone who lives there. I found out about that from Quest Love's Twitter. Are you serious? Yes. And he confirmed like this is a, this is an ERD.

I'm obviously not in any way comparable events. Yeah. But this is the world we live in, man. So this song came out a couple of days ago. and it's stunning how much it just sounds like vintage Netflix. Yeah. I get it how I live it how I get it. Come to motherfucking digits.

I pull it with a lemon. Not because she ain't living. It's just your eyes get acidic. And this ain't a skirmish. Yeah. Just just one in the ball. You can talk about the beat all you want. You can say like you're happy.

Farrell's no longer dancing with minions. Because like we're getting some of that skateboard pee lifestyle back in our earbuds. Fine. I want to talk about something that I feel personally invested in, which is MC Rihanna. Oh, is this the thing? This is my take on this, because, look, you may not remember months ago on this podcast. You may not remember this podcast that we're recording right now tomorrow. But a couple months ago, I said that one of the low-key swaggiest moves on Kendrick Lamar's record was that he got a Rihanna feature and she basically just wraps on it.

Yeah. And she sounded dope as shit. She sounds great. I felt like this was coming for her. And what was, so I think it sounds great. I think it's the most interesting part of the song. But I also thought you might have something to say that clearly the Obi-Wan to her Luke is puffy. Her flow is like pure puffy. Do you think the people who ghost wrote for Puff?

That's what I was going to get to. Ghost wrote for Rihanna? That's what I'm asking. Look, did Puff have some famous, like, I can never tell you it's like Black Rob Ghosts right of Puff stuff? All the dudes who were also emcees on that label, Ghost Road for him, Biggie also, most famously. Biggie's like third ranked in that list. Absolutely.

Listen, I just ask questions here. You know, I'm not a truth teller. I'm not a source of authority. I am not Questlove's Twitter feed. I don't break news. I'm just asking the question. Do you think that, so like of all the things that you remember from the early aughts in terms of hip-hop production, where did the Neptunes rank above? I remember so much.

Where do the Neptunes rank in terms of like your, you're kind of like your hierarchy? One of the most exciting things about being a music fan or pop music fan from the first 10 years of the decade was this sort of arms race or beats race that was occurring between Timbal and the Neptunes, right? Where they were both, they both transitioned from being sort of not weird because, but very creative outliers to not just throttling hip-hop world, but mainstream R&B and pop as well. and they clearly considered each other to be a friendly rivalry. And that sound just dominated. There was a specific type of track. And, you know, of course, you know, drop it like it's hot or beautiful, like all those songs that I named two Snoop songs for some reason. Maybe it's because I live in California now.

But that dominated and then they hit pause. And was it because Chad went to race satellite moons? We don't know. Who knows? Obviously, this is right in our wheelhouse because we care about these guys. We care about this music. I have sort of two lines of conversation that we can continue on before we move on to other topics. Sure.

One is, I didn't know NERD was like influential. Like, people seem to really point to those records and talk about them. I always thought they were sort of the lark that they did in between producing the biggest JZ records. Those are any RD records. I think that they're pretty hotly critically debated. Like even yesterday I saw on Twitter, like some people being like, are we really pretending like in search of was good? Right. Then there were some people who were like, do you guys know that fly or die is better?

Like, it was like a whole thing for like six hours underneath. Yeah. Everything else people were talking about online yesterday. But, you know, what I keep coming back to is this idea that when the Neptunes were at their most relevant, they sounded so futuristic. Yeah. And they sound, it still sounds pretty fresh. It's not like, I mean, personally, like my platonic ideal of hip-hop production would still be DJ Premier. And if you put out someone singing or someone doing a track over DJ Premier, now, I'd still like it as much as I did back then.

You know what I listened to the other day? Sing Like Bilal. by Joel Ortiz. Did you really? I just dialed that up on the old Spotify box. Did you actually search it out or did it come out on a playlist? S-I-N-G-L-I-K-E. I got to add that to my 40th birthday party.

This is so on brand for us. Yeah. But, you know, I remember not only were they incredibly futuristic at that time, but I remember being on like email chains among other rap critics and just the amount of scholarship that went into finding every single Neptune's production. ever and making mixes of them CDR mixes of them there were all these like bootleg

Neptune's tapes yeah and you know I mean like they had this kind of hold over not only obviously the pop charts and they had everybody wanting to work with them but they also had like this kind of like critic critical sort of adaptation that you don't really see that much anymore I'm not just saying that was in their name I mean the first time I interviewed

them we went to like the this old vintage video game store Manhattan and and and All for all wanted to do was talk about Galaga. Gallagga. Gallagher. I never knew it had a, does that have a Castilian pronunciation? Are you in Basque Country?

Let me tell you something. Holt McElaney. Look, I walked proudly into not knowing how I say that. Yeah. That's their thing. But I also think it's impossible to overstate, and maybe since we've now steered the first part of this podcast towards the 40-year-old demographic,

the demographic year soon to join later this month. But this is actually... No, but what I want to say was how truly revolutionary and thrilling it was to hear Super Thug, the Norie track. And here, like, oh, wait, what are they doing? You can do that. There's certain tracks that for us and our generation were like inflection points for you're allowed to do that. And for me, it's Alia's argue that somebody. It's outcast bombs over Baghdad. And it's probably super thug. Where I just had no idea that you were, quote unquote, allowed to be that experimental on tracks that were, at least I had perceived to be made for mainstream appeal. And then they took the mainstream and they bent it to them. And that's thrilling. And for nothing else, even if this is just a lark at this point, because, you know, Farrell had downtime between minions, millions, millions. that he just wanted to make another record with his pals in Virginia, cool. The thing that I liked about this track, which is fine. It's fine.

And the Rihanna stuff's good is that it's kind of fun and it's bright. And you know me, you know I just take that rap caviar and I spoon it on the Blinis. That's what I do. That's where you find your Joello T. Ortiz. Literally not that though. No, because, and I listen to that and it is a downer, man. Like, I'm not going to sit here. Grab caviar?

Yeah, we've talked about this before. Right, but I'm not going to like, listen, nobody wants to hear a 40-year-old. and a 39-year-old litigate the state of the rap charts, such as they are. But I don't think even the most die-hard little Uzi-Vert Stan is going to be like, that's some uplifting shit. Or fun, necessarily. And so it's nice to have a little bit of that comeback,

even if it's just nostalgia for us at this point. Let me ask you a question. I love it. Let's go back to, I guess, 05-06. Let's go back to second clips album. I'd love to. And what was happening around Feral at the time? And just the amount of water he was drawing.

Yeah. And the amount that people were like, this dude is really the like the center of all pop music right now. He's a triple threat. So now fast forward 10 years later. He can sing, he can produce, and he can design sneakers. Yes. Well, here's my thing. Fast forward 10 years later.

Are you overwhelmed, underwhelmed, or properly overwhelmed with what Feral is done in the intervening 10 years? Honestly, I would say overwhelmed. because... So he's over, he's exceeded your expectations for what he went up. Because there was a brief moment when he appeared poised to be legitimately, to legitimately become a pop star in his own right. Right. When one of the reasons why we sort of,

um, not disparaged NERD, but definitely didn't like, um, up parage it or parage it, um, was because it essentially felt like a vanity project for a guy who's better served in the background of other people's records.

Yeah. You know, you and I are both veterans of the clips mixed tape. Fast forwarding his version. on the clips mixtapes or tolerating them. Yeah. Because, you know, that was the, that was the price of admission, basically, to listen to them. So I would say the fact that he had a number one record around the world and...

With happy, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. With happy and a solo record that did, I think, probably okay. He had such a good GQ conversation with our friend, Zach Barron, that there was like a whole alt interview that appeared online. Yeah. And also to realize that, just to bring it back full circle to our ages, how much time has

past. So to continue to be the guy people are checking for I am overwhelmed. I am overwhelmed. If only because he abandoned his skateboard P persona. Because the DJ drama tape he made before in my mind came out. I remember that. He's one

of my like low key favorite rap mixtapes ever. Yep. You always said that. Just him rapping over like Wu Tang beats and tribe beats with drama screaming in the background and a couple of appearances from Pusha. But I'm not a complicated guy. You know what I mean? I like my big potato with my steak.

Uh-huh. And I like it when dudes rap over Wu-Tang. They could just, if all of music was just people rapping over Wu-Tang, it's a desert island sound to me, man. And I think it contains multitudes. And I remember that tape came out and I was like, this guy sucks at rapping. But this is fucking awesome. Do you think people check for the new Metro Boomin production with the same, like, scholarly

enthusiasm that we are talking about now? I was thinking about that, too. So like do you, I think that the life cycle for those guys is a little faster. And that's, again, coming from someone who is not fluent in rap caviar, which is just like, come on, somebody take me out behind the barn and put me out of my misery. But as someone who is not exactly like completely on top of it, I don't know that with the exception of Mike Will maybe, a couple other guys, have we seen someone who has like filled the Farrell mold that has gone from producer, hook person

like provider of hooks guest artist soul artist in their own right and also like business maven music business maven who's like directing traffic because a lot of that was really good on Farrell's part in 06 where he was like I'm going to start

my own American Idol and it was just like wow and then it didn't happen but he definitely knew how to like stimulate the pleasure centers of a lot of different groups of people and I don't know that anyone one rap producer has transcended being like, I'm really good, maybe now I'm making some pop stuff to become like a central cultural figure the way for all it was.

That's an interesting conversation to have. And I think that what that speaks to more is the times than the people involved. Yeah. Because I think that one of the hallmarks of the era of music we're talking about did feel incredibly exciting with the potential for crossovers and people feeding off of each other in different genres and sort of collapsing genre boundaries altogether. Right now, everything does feel. and politics aside, things feel polarized culturally.

And what I mean is, you know, when we talked about Craig Marx's great story in Vulture about rap caviar like a month ago, the implication of that article was 21 Savage doesn't need to do anything, but make a 21 Savage track and upload it for it to go to number one on the billboard charts basically at this point. Sure. So then it's both, I don't know if it's the interest has waned or the expectation or pressure has waned. But if you look at Mike Will made it, who is a good example, I think. producing Miley Cyrus. And there's a moment we're like, okay, he's crossed over. They're coming to him in the same way that Gwen Stefani went to Farrell. For a haliback, yeah.

And then look what happens. Miley then, because she has this immense privilege, can basically just go full stop, hard reboot and be like, nah, just playing. I really like country music and hanging out with my boyfriend. You make it sound like Mike Will is like Lloyd Dobler. And he's holding like a boombox over his head playing a GZ tape. I mean, that's, first of all, if only I could. be woken up that way instead of a large skunk making its way to Dodger Stadium.

But you know what I mean? Like she retreated basically into an older persona or a safer persona. And that appears to be the way of the pop charts right now. Yeah. But I'm sure like there's a trap rapper who is just like, damn like Will you've left us behind just the same way like he's probably like. Yeah, but that trap rapper's like damn chain smokers, why don't you return my text. That's true.

Okay. We're going to get into Stranger Things episodes. Four through... Four, five, and six. Four, five, and six. So, spoilers through six. Yes. And we will be talking about the final three episodes on Monday.

We'll also be talking about Thor. Yeah, a lot on my watch list. There's a lot on your watch list. We'll be back after a few words from our sponsors. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Sonos. You've heard Andy and I talk a lot about Sonos over the last couple of months. You know, but I was sitting around in my apartment one day, and I was like, you know what, you know what this Sonos could really use voice.

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We're back. The watch, the re-up, it's Thursday. Things are loose. Things are casual. Yeah. Listen, we just did a whole jag about the Neptunes producers. Let's make a playlist and throw it up on Spotify. sometime in the next few days.

We'll tweet it. Yeah, we'll do that. We're going to talk about Stranger Things episodes 4, 5, and 6 right now. And at the end of the episode, we'll take a couple of listener questions, as is now. Do you watch Reup tradition. It's just what we do. It's who we are. Yeah.

Andy, so the middle act, acts two of Stranger Things season two. By the way, just announced John Coblin over the Times just tweeted out. Somehow, I'm not sure about the math here. Nielsen says, 15.8 million people watch the first episode. of Stranger Things season two. Why do they know that? I don't know. I mean, okay.

Yeah, they're scraping our data. Is that good? Because it's not just pretty good. I mean, I know that's a lot of people watching something, and that would be, you know, but what are we comparing it to? Because HBO at this point tracks the life cycle of a Game of Thrones episode, which I think all told, everything over time can get $20 million. Does Netflix have higher expectations, lower expectations?

They're playing a different game because they want everyone who subscribes to the service to watch it. Or they want people to subscribe to it. And then it doesn't matter because they're getting their money. So all that is to say, we know it to hit. I think that this maybe suggests that this is not just like dorks like this. Mm-hmm. I think that this is like maybe catching on the phenomenon.

What does it say about me that I don't like it? Well, that's a good question, man. Maybe you're Steve. Yeah. And I'm Jonathan. Well, then the show is doing me a massive disservice. So I take it that the fourth, fifth and six episodes did not buoy your hopes about this show. No.

But I want you. You put me on my heels last. time. I want you to make the case. Because, you know, here's, this is, this is a sort of a bracing slap in the face for me on the old Sosh, because I haven't been a critic in a minute. And I kind of forgot how much people want critics to like things and to approve of things and to agree with them until our man, Sean, the commission, you posted a 10-minute clip of me bagging on stranger things as 16 million people were falling in love with it. So that's cool. That's what we do. I'm out, I'm on the front lines of this. I don't, I don't,

away from that opinion but I do want to hear the positive case for it because I think on some level and maybe we'll get to it in this conversation I don't think we disagree about that much you just seem to be enjoying it more yes I really really really enjoy the world and the characters and the story is sort of secondary to me and if anything my gripes come down to I want different pairings here and there or I want X character to get more screen time or Y character to get more screen time I was thinking about this a lot in relationship to some of the I was being announced as a remake this week.

Four weddings and a funeral? And I was just like, can Mindy Kaling not get a frigging romantic comedy off the ground that she has to bury it underneath this? Yes. Right. That's the answer. So for people who don't know,

she has announced plans along with the Mindy Project writer Matt Warburton to basically revive or reinvent the beloved film for weddings and a funeral. Just explore the four dubs and an F universe. By the way, that is a dark universe where out of four friends,

three of them get married and one dies? That's like the saw films, I think. But anyway, for Hulu, so make an anthology series based on that lovely idea. Sure. And you could just,

that Mindy Kaling with whatever, you know, pull she has in the industry, cannot just like walk into an office and be like, hey, I'd really like to make a show about a group of friends who get older over the course of eight years or something like that

and have several major important life events happen to them. Obviously, calling it for weddings and a funeral, that's a baseline of interest in it. I don't know how passionate that, that, like, interest is anymore. Right. As we learned with Blade Runner. Yeah.

I mean, that's a... Blade Runner is something that's incredibly complicated. It was three hours long. You could only seat that many people during the course of a day in a movie theater. It obviously didn't play at all in other overseas markets. But I was just thinking about this with stranger things that part of, like, there is actually, like, I'm the reverse of, you know, you have a baseline of interest in some of this preexisting intellectual property.

I'm kind of like, this is just so nice that it's new. And it's not new. Except that it's not. Yeah, but like there's, even if there are archetypes, they're not like, I have to do this because you guys have expectations about what happens. I agree. I think my frustration with it is that the Duffer Brothers' interest in these archetypes seems to be little more than I love this stuff.

And I don't even mean to, that's in and of itself isn't a criticism. It's okay for shows to want to be pleasurable and enjoyable. In fact, that's something I often advocate for. But what I mean when I say that is it just doesn't go deeper. They just kind of sit there, particularly in the second season when we're really just sort of celebrating the people and the archetypes that we were introduced to in the first season rather than pushing deeper in any real or meaningful way. Before we get back to the show, I did want to play devil's advocate for the original material versus IP thing. Sure. Now that I've had some experience on the other side of the business, let me tell you, it is a weird and crazy experience to sit in a piece.

pitch room or you're pitching somebody on an idea, especially an original idea, and they have nothing. If they don't have a script, if they don't have a book, if they don't have a pre-existing they have your word. They just are listening to you. Sure. And you know what that feels like when you're doing it? Even if you're doing it successfully and the person likes you and they like the idea, it feels like you're telling somebody about your dream. Yeah. And you know that staring at like a point in your forehead and nodding. And nodding. And there is no there there. And when you need an anchor point, not just to make this successful interaction on a conversational level, but if you're going to potentially put one to $2, $2,200 million behind it.

Yeah. You need something just to make yourself feel better. A lot of it is semantics because I know that throughout the 90s, there was like, people would walk into studios and say, die hard in a or die hard on a, and they would be like sold. But if you said, I have a hostage movie that's like this and it's like, it's about how you package your ideas and how you sell them. I get that part.

But there was something about the fact that even in Blade Runner, I felt like, okay, Certain things have to go certain ways and there are certain nods that it has to make to the original. It's a lot of... Stranger Things doesn't really have to do. You know what I mean? But it doesn't? Does it? So like what's the thing that you think it's doing that is like overly indebted?

Not even overly indebted, but like shackled to a pre-existing thing. What's with the guy with the mullet? What's with Max's brother? Let's talk about Billy. Why is Billy here? Who cares? other than the fact that Billy looks like someone who should exist in Stranger Things

and in movies from this era. Billy is the big misstep for this season. I really, really obviously have a lot of thoughts on the basketball scene and we'll be sharing them in a upcoming video for the rare, but... Good. That's all you need to say. His inclusion seems like they wrote him into the show and filmed some stuff and then changed their mind.

Yeah. And which is not fair to... I'm not saying that they didn't plan it out in advance, but even the duffers, or actually Sean Levy said about the duffers recently. Sean Levy, the executive producer. One of the reasons that season two ends the way it does in terms of its lack of epilogue. Oh, hey, well, most of us aren't there yet. But it's just to say there's not an epilogue the way there was for the first season where it was like he coughed something up and Hopper gets in a car and this happens is because they didn't want to box themselves in.

And I don't know, I feel like they brought Billy on because they were like, wouldn't this be interesting? And then they were like crap, we have like too many characters. There is a, Stranger Things proudly exists a little bit apart from the TV business as it used to be in any number of ways. Obviously, it's, it's manner of distribution, the way that its success is gauged, the way the Duffer Brothers approach it, you know, this whole season as a sequel. Sure. It's interesting the type of story it wants to tell. But there's a very, very big old TV tell to me in this season, which is it just does not appear that they had. enough time to give it enough thought.

Okay. This obviously, look, this is an open secret. Netflix keeps shows in development because they need to keep the production cycles. They need to lock down the thing. So before Stranger Things premiered last summer, before it became the success that it became, they had a writer's room going. Sure. They have to be ready in case it is.

And in some cases, then they quietly shut down the writer's rooms now that they've started canceling shows. But generally, you know, that's why whenever I'm interviewing people, like if it's the Glow Show Runners and when we had Jonathan Groff on, Look, they're getting... Yeah, John McGrath was like, I had to make sure that a... Fincher told Groff, are you sure you want to give a couple of years of your life away to this? Right. And he also knows when he's going to have to be in Pittsburgh, and then if something crazy happens and they have to cancel a show, okay, but he knows.

Yeah. So this was already pretty far down the track. And then they had to rush and they had a phenomenon. They had to respond to it. And there's just some decision-making in this season that I'm like, is that the best... Is that really the choice you want to make in these nine hours? Yes. Do we really want to take the characters that we like

and the momentum that we like so much about the first season, uncovering the mystery of 11 and Mike being together, all four kids fighting, everyone basically fighting for something and spread them all out. Mix and match them a little bit, turn them against each other in ways it feel, also kind of very old TV TV. And then just sort of have them sit there.

They're also veterans of the war already. So like the first season, part of the sort of charm is that these are a bunch of children who are trying to process like the emergence and reality of this incredible evil and what's happening to a friend of theirs and the appearance of this new mysterious character in their lives

and this time around they're all like, yeah. Weird shit happens. We did it, man. We're back from the shit. Also, they're all just like, hey, there is a phantom negative zone of pure slithering evil. Which is like legit still there.

Yeah, it's just there. And everyone's like, okay, I know what this means when there's little snowflake detritus floating through the air now. Exactly. So I think that that was part of it. These middle three episodes

that we're sort of talking about. I mean, we could talk about any one of them specifically if you want do. I think... Well, they're intentionally blur. Yeah, and I think that the spy is the one that had the most potential. And it would have been the hardest to actually... The spy is six. And it's the one where it becomes apparent that Will is possessed. Yeah.

That had the most potential to really go somewhere interesting. Yes. Is to turn Will into a villain. Oh, good. We have the same opinion. Go. Yeah. And I don't have like... Look, sometimes I think we have unrealistic expectations about what some piece of mass entertainment can really do. I mean, if you know if you go back to some of the things that, even if you watch Empire,

Empire's dark. It's not that dark. But it's not that dark. I mean, most, I'm sure Harrison Ford and his ranch wanted him to not come out of carbonite freezing, but like he was going to come out of carbonate. There was a reason he didn't kill him and they only froze him. Yeah, but there was also this feeling of leaving us all on the brink of despair, knowing that we wouldn't stay there, but leaving us there for two or three years was a bold choice.

And actually, what I would say is almost the Stranger Things does, I think actually Empire is pretty, has a lot of dull parts. Like, there's a lot of training on Daegobah going. Even as we're saying this, what I'm realizing is the carried memory of this is this dark masterpiece exists mainly for people who couldn't watch the next one for three years. Yes. Yeah. And it's like you're sitting around legitimately being like, like his hands gone? That's his dad. That's his dad.

Hans Solo's Frozen. I mean, this is wild. Sure. So, Surger Things doesn't have that problem. I think Stranger Things is like, they. actually, the stuff that would be their Daigobah training, they're like hanging out and going to the arcade.

I like those scenes. I like those scenes. It's the part of the problem is when they get to the very edge of, damn, should we freeze this kid? Is that they don't do it. No, they don't. Exactly. And so maybe they're too in love with something that was a problem in 80s movies, which was the invention of PG-13, which is when movies

were like, well, okay, we can tiptoe to the edge, but then we've got to pull back because PG-13, which I believe was created for Temple of Doom. Didn't exist before that. The big flaw for me so far in this season, and it's weird because this show has me turned around. I sound like I'm advocating for things I generally don't advocate for. In this case, it's more violence and bodies. But one of the crazy things about the first one was this idyllic suburban town, and there was a body count.

This season, everyone feels strangely safe because they're, quote, unquote, beloved. You can't really saw a show called Strangely Safe, though. Well, no, but let's go specifically to the Will storyline in episodes. That's what I was thinking of. That, to me, that he set them up and they're all going to die, was completely toothless because who are those guys? It's just red shirts, yeah. It doesn't matter.

Now, you put one character we've met in that room, whether it's a cast member, whether it's hopper, it's not going to be hopper, but it's, or you introduce a redshirt early on, who's maybe nice to him, gives him some gum, whatever. Yeah. It's not tricky to do that. We care. Right now it's like, but I thought these lab guys were the bad guys anyway. We were against them.

season. Right. So they've sort of, I appreciate the fact that they didn't just want to redo the Modin character with Paul Riser and just have another evil scientist. Paul Riser's been great. I think it, I actually, I think you and I are probably, like, 85% approval rating for this show and you're probably at like 35 or 45 or whatever. Correct. And then we meet in the middle where we're probably both like, if you had some consequences in this show, while it would change the obviously, like, it would change the overall tenor. Like, I don't really want to watch a stranger thing where, like, Dustin bites it, you know?

No. Well, no, I don't. No, but that's not the show. But the idea of what keeps these kids, you know, can their friendship, can their team work, keep them a little bit safe to, quote-unquote, keep the world at bay. You know, if you want, I mean, one of the things,

I feel comfortable saying this because those movies that they're basing these things on were that, too, which is they're metaphors, right? For, we talked about this last week, for teen sexuality or the Cold War or the dangers of the modern world. And can these safe places still exist, these Americana towns, can they exist, or are there tendrils of evil worm sludge existing beneath them? Your point about the introduction of Billy, which is like, he's just hilarious anyway,

but the issue with it and the issue, so you bring in Billy, you bring him Bob, you bring in Max, you bring in Dr. Owen or whatever Hall-Riser's character's name is, is that you get some suggestions. and Brett Gelman. Is that one of these episodes, right? Yep. Yeah. So you get some suggestions.

When he asked Jonathan about how the pullout method worked? Exactly. That one maybe needed a fine tooth comb edit. Got the pass. Gone. Is that you get some suggestions of things like the Nancy Steve relationship is actually pretty interesting. It's like, you know, this was born out of a time before the, like, the end of the first season.

They were kind of like getting together and it had like a kind of innocence to it in a weird way. and like she was making him better. Well, also he was playing this role where he was like he had chosen her. Yeah, right. And then there's that. And then there's also, Mike is the interesting one to me

because Mike is the guy who, yeah, you know, like we saved this kid. Yeah. But like I'm pretty bummed out. I lost my girlfriend. Yeah. And also don't really think that my friend is the same as when he left.

And think about, you know, it's hard not to think about freaks and geeks doing a lot of these storylines better, obviously in a very different genre universe. But, and I do think we're going to get to it and they're trying to do it with Max and Lucas a little bit. But the idea of we are a gang, we are a team, and then we start to get interested in other things, and we can't all go to that place. Yeah, and like governing your friend groups or your life with like these

kind of, you know, these rules that govern a Dungeons and Dragons game. You can't do that. What did you say about Mike this season? I want me to say it? Go ahead. Chris sent me a text that Mike got cucked this season. I don't mean to make this Bright Bar the watch feature on Bright Part News. Do you have any other notes of four, five, and six? You want to break up? No, I mean, the Nancy thing. First of all, the show, this happens sometimes when a show gives us a relationship that we don't want, thinking that it's what we want.

And I think you can actually use this as a test case to prove our hypothesis that the Duffer Brothers are too in love with archetypes. Right. Because they created the triangle where Steve is kind of the douchebag jock and Jonathan is the sensitive guy with the punk rock tapes and Nancy's caught between them. And obviously, we all want her to go with the rebel. But not me. Heads up, no. One million percent. I'm Steve.

One thousand percent. Now, it's also because in terms of breakout stars, this kid Joe Kiri, like, he's really good. Yeah. And it's not just his hair. And they recognized it between seasons. He gave him more to do. And let him be winning and appealing. But he is one of the people who transcends the archetypal trappings of the character and the show because he's having fun with it.

Yeah. I think David Harbour is another one who's able to do that. He's like, they basically were like, you're Andrew McCarthy, but then they realized actually you're Matthew Brody. You're like really charming. Exactly. So they're giving us this Jonathan Nancy thing as if it's inevitable and Brett Gilman laughs. You know, ha ha. Why don't you guys bone?

Okay, cool. But nobody wants that. And then furthermore, the show doesn't really have the time or interest in explaining, in wondering, you know, explaining any of that to us or at least dealing with it on a real level. I am for, I, this is very me and probably puts me in a minority. Yeah. But what about Nance, though? Like, for real.

What do you mean? Like, what about her argument? she doing? Or what does she want? What is she doing? Like, other than Jonathan on a Pauauau episode where she's just like, here's my, here's my vision for myself. Let me tell you something. Claire McDier wrote a really funny piece for the rigor about how like Nancy just needs to get out of Hawkins. For real, for real. Yeah. But by the way, she could just go now because her parents do not give an F. Yeah, there's a, we'll get to one o'clock. There's an absentee parenting going on here. So we'll wrap up stranger things there. Do you have any

other notes? No, it's just, it was surprising to me to have made it through six and not at least feel caught up in a larger story. There was so much throat clearing and chess piece settling. And I think it's telling that we didn't even talk about 11. Millie Bobby Brown, by far the best performance on the show, the best,

probably the best character, although the nosebleed thing is getting a little tiring. This, you know, vision quest for her mom, I guess that's important for the character. The only reason that bothers me is, like, I just don't understand the rules of, like, what she's capable of doing?

Sure. And I don't, that feels to me like people who didn't think they were getting a second season. So they, you know, they were like, let's just deal with this now. I don't think anyone would be mad if we'd put that off for another season or two or three. How about Simets, though? Yeah. Amy Simits showed up as, and I had to text Chris and say, first of all, I didn't realize who's her mom's friend.

I didn't realize that was Amy Simits. But then I was like, is her mom married to a woman? Like, I don't know who that person was. And then she's like, come in, baby girl, who I was sure was dead. until you showed up at the door. Yes. It just, look, there are many great pieces of entertainment, particularly in genre or nostalgic stuff,

that fall apart under close scrutiny. But as we've said many times on the show, the goal is giving us so much pleasure and giving us so much pleasure in the process that we don't put it under the microscope. Sure, yeah. And Stranger Things is creaking under it. Okay, we'll talk about the last three episodes

of Stranger Things on Monday. Before we go, we're going to just do a couple of listener questions. You've got mail. Andy, Daniel Sharpless asks, Axe? Axe body spray. What types of stories are missing

and or underrepresented in this age of television and streaming services? Nancy's story. Doctor stories. What's up with doctors? What I specifically, how about doctors

who are good at their jobs? I want some good doctors on television. I would love a bad doctor show. A bad doctor show would be amazing. That would just basically be like a courtroom drama about malpractice. Not like scrubs,

but like just people who are checked out and just maybe dip it into the opium closet. What do you think about this question though? Is there anything that jumps out? at you were like we really need X we need to see X on screen um there's the obvious answer is just like shows that represent the diversity of of the viewing the viewing audience 1,000% yeah but but not just that shows that represent the diversity of the viewing audience that are that represent the diversity

of creators that have the full financial and and marketing backing of some of these other shows yeah that aren't just considered niche or whatever um by diversity I definitely mean either CIA agents, FBI agents or cops that play by their own rules. Or doctors who play by their own rules but are good. You know, I like, it's interesting. The Mindy Kaling thing, you know, we're dinging it for having to be based on four weddings in a funeral. But that type of storytelling, like someone who, Mindy Kaling is passionate about romantic

comedies, she's never, you know, she's done it in miniature over a number of seasons on the Mindy Project. But I'm excited to see what she could do. I mean, there's room for that kind of show on television. I'm excited for the third wedding. I'm excited for, which is the one where a now 80-year-old Simon Callow shows up in a kilt, just moon the audience. It'd be like, give me my residuals.

I've waited five years to drop a Simon Callow reference. I almost said Simon Cowell. Well, we started five years ago. Oh, yeah, that's true. Things like that are interesting to me. You know the thing that I always want. I think it actually came off the board recently. But where's sneakers the TV show?

Where are our heist shows? So why do you think it came off the? I think someone said they were developing it. I think someone picked it up. But like, you know, the types of shows that, going back to Terrier is a show that I love so much, but shows about in a sort of 70s or even 80 style, you know, the sting, like get some charming people doing some sort of crime and like, and give it to me. You know, with it the parts of, and I'm not saying that's going to win all the awards

would be the most prestigious of prestige shows, but the parts of the deuce that we talk about, hanging out of the bar, the very Pelicanosy stuff from his books. Let's siphon some of that off and give me some. I mean, Corey was the closest to... Corey was the closest to a pure pulp crime fiction on television that I've seen and that got just brutally mishandled. So what I'm saying is there's a lane for it. Logan Marshall Greenback, though.

Yeah, damnation. Chase Branch wonders, can a highly praised animated comedy like BoJack or Rick and Morty possibly garner a deserved best comedy Emmy nomination? We don't even talk about them on the show, so I don't know how they're going to get. In this world, I mean, possibly, but I think, no, my sense is that the Emmy voters, particularly because they're protective of their own fields, whether they are, you know, they generally write for non-drawn, non-animated things, they don't want to muddy the waters in the same way that I always gave myself an out by saying that my top 10 list was just going to be not animated, just so I could have more room to put shows that no else liked on them. Along that same lines, Noah Liberman asks, why hasn't a streaming comedy like American Vandal or BoJack capture the zeitgeist like drive?

Drama's aka, or not AKI.e. Hammaids, Stranger Things, etc. I think people love to, I wouldn't necessarily put Hammaids and Stranger in this group. I would say more like Westworld and Game of Thrones, where I think that the collective effort to solve and investigate a show is what drives a lot, not a lot, but a fair amount of the interest in show and drama. The serialized journey. Yeah. I also think that people don't. don't really like talking about comedy. I mean, that's anecdotal, but I think people are like, that was funny. It becomes the Chris Farley interview in a hurry. Yeah, it was like, what's the mechanics

of talking about how funny American vandal is? I mean, I can just be like Tromboli is a legend. Yeah. But I don't really know what to say to you beyond, I really laughed at it. I mean, and they take it to a really great extent. Ten years on, we can talk about aspects of 30 Rock as they relate to a wisdom about the culture or the country or feminism or whatever other spot we want sort of wedge it into. But at the time, and I wrote about it weekly for a while, you know, it was really just, boy, that was funny because no one writes funnier, faster jokes. Sure. That's part of it. And then there's just, there is a still inherent bias that a half hour is somehow less serious, whether it is partly comedy or not. Like, the hour still is the

mechanism for which we judge the gravity of a television. Yeah, I mean, I was kind of, I was expecting, I think over the last couple weeks for you to be like, when are we going to talk about curb? Yeah. I sort of thought so, too. And then I keep watching it. And I don't know. Do you laugh? I laugh, but I laugh honestly because I am enjoying the rhythms of Larry David's mind and the way he talks and seeing our old pals again. I don't think anyone would say that this is close to one of the best seasons.

But do you think it's because you're viewing it through the lens of the kind of scrutiny we put on other shows? And like if this was just part of like a six season, you know, I'm watching curb again kind of thing, you would have like some revelations. No, I kind of feel like it's when we talk about the new Jimmy World album or Afghan Wigs. album where we're like they got the band back together where I'm like hey there and not only that they're still doing it and this is still really good but both for the band although I don't know I don't know actually they feel this way Jeff Garland didn't seem to feel this way but certainly for the crowd we've all sort of made piece of the fact that this is not part of the larger cultural conversation anymore but they're still hitting their marks for us and curb was part of a larger

cultural conversation at its peak whether it was a cultural conversation I don't know I mean And although we all talk, certainly we all talk about pants tense now or whatever the case may be, it entered words into our vocabulary and it, you know, radically transformed comedy. I mean, there's definitely been a time. There are 30 Rock's a good example. You know, I'm Simpsons and Seinfeld, obviously. Like there have been comedies where you would have that day after a conversation. Yeah, the rest of development, parks and rack. Sure. And I think the good place is sort of because it is so deeply serialized is able to slide in and out of that conversation. Yes. But I just feel like specifically for Curb, I'm happy to exist because I want Larry David to just have fun and do these things. And it's an enjoyable hang. But this is not the best season by any stretch. And it feels like it's lost its fastball in a lot of ways.

Because what it does seem to be doing is it knows what it is. And it's sort of karaokeing itself a lot of ways. Like that episode where it gets kicked out of the hotel and the tongs and the cookies and then the hooker that he meets in the beginning and Funkhauser's nephew. I mean, there's so much plot now. And the trick seems to be, the challenge for Larry seems to be, I'm going to go all the. these outlandish directions and then tie them into the funniest possible bow. Right. Which is amazing. But it does feel culture adjase. One last question for Matt. I actually haven't really thought about this one a lot. When is it okay to watch on your phone?

That's a great question. I think in an emergency, not a real emergency, but like a literally like I am at the DMV or everyone else in this house is asleep and I'm jet lagged or like something where there's no other option. But I think the show tells you, man. I think the show tells you. whether to watch it on the phone, like it's okay to watch it in bed on your iPhone or not. Like, if it's a sitcom, go for it.

Yeah, like, if I, if I just, if you just need a dopamine hit at the end of a day and you're like, like, go ahead. Or cheer, old cheers reruns or something. That's fine. I would watch like parts unknown on a phone. Well, it wouldn't look good. Yeah, I would. But I, but I'll use a specific example.

I was, when I was, you know, getting through the season of Stranger Things and there was a moment when I did not have access to any devices but my phone. I was like, well, I can use this moment to do 10 more minutes of it so I can. You know what Mr. Netflix is saying, that's fine, brother. But I tried it, and I was like, I mean, you've heard me in this hour, or podcast, talk about

how not into the show I am. I was all the way out watching on a phone. Yeah. But look, you do you. You live in this world. You navigate it. This is a rap caviar universe. You get the mother-a-purle spoon. That's what I'm telling you. We're out. Thank you to Zach. Greenwald. New Double-down book club for people who

didn't make it through the deuce interview last week. Queen Pin by Megan Abbott. Queen Pin by Megan Abbott. Megan is going to join us to talk about it. sometime in December, we are really excited. Go check it out and finish Stranger Things for next week, right? Yep. Have a great weekend, Varnski. Woo! Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by Sonos.

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