The Watch - The State of Comedy on Television, Plus a ‘True Detective’ Recap | The Watch (Ep. 323)

Episode Date: January 22, 2019

With the third episode of ‘True Detective’ there seems to be some pull between the writers and the director (6:30). The popular legal drama ‘Perry Mason’ will return as an HBO series (26:50). Showtime’s ‘Black Monday’ is playing at a higher frequency (35:36), and we share other TV comedies we’re watching (47:59). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Read Alison Herman’s review of ‘Black Monday’ here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I need sports to have to clear the run. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me in the studio draped up in the finest Scoot McNary for men. It's Andy Greenwald. You know, I almost didn't come in today because it's a holiday

and I've been working remotely recently. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Same to you. Of all years, we should take a moment and honestly just appreciate the greatness of them. man and the beauty of the day. But I actually, you know, when I came in to record to you today, I thought, it'll be worth it if we can discuss Scoot's Scoopneck sweater fashion. Sober Scoot. Sober Scoot really comes through with the Stag Provisions, 1990, like listening to Archers of Loaf's

demo. I didn't know that Farity brand started in the Ozarks. So we're talking the fashion angle on TD3, EP3. Yeah. But we have other things to talk about, too, today. We're going to talk about Black Monday on Showtime. Yeah. We're going to talk about comedy on TV. Yeah, we are.

How is your weekend? We're going to talk about health. Sure. We're always talking about health. Look, this is a self-care podcast. It was nice that, first of all, how are you doing? Because, you know, I infected everyone here. Man, I'm okay.

I'm okay. This is a rough season. Yeah, it's taken down a lot of a soldiers. It's upper resps season. and honestly everyone here has been so supportive you, Kaya, there's no one else here because it's a holiday, but whatever

virus that lives within me now has the tenacity of QB12 in the fourth quarter. That's a great look for you. You were really dialing up some football yesterday. You were dialing up some hot rounds. I did. The in-laws are in town for the long weekend

and the one, well, look, the best thing about in-laws is childcare. The second best thing about in-laws is you can't tell your father-in-law that you can't put on the game. Conversely, it's hard to tell your wife you're going to put on the game. But she was like, go hang out with my dad, right? Well, it's not like we have multiple rooms. You know what I mean?

It's not a palatial situation. Everyone is around each other. But when the father-in-law starts drifting towards the stack of remotes that the modern household has and is like, which one makes TV go on? And you're like, I guess I can show you. Which one brings me gym neds? Yeah. I mean, you can get there and, uh,

So you just sat, did you do six hours? How much football? No, no. We watched the second half of game one. Okay. The NFC championship between the Saints and the Ramp. And then we watched the first half of game. I saw that.

We watched the first half. I mean, by the way, I mostly checked out from football for a couple years before the Philadelphia Eagles won the Super Bowl. But you can just punch dudes now, huh? You don't even need to wait for the ball to show up. That was the thing that's funny about the NFC championship. And I guess this is on television, so it counts as something that the watch to do. But it's weird that we're just like, Everybody is like that was a travesty of justice.

But congratulations to the Rams who were going to the Super Bowl. America is used to travesties of justice. Yeah, I guess that is true. And then we watched the first half of the second game. Family went out to dinner. Where'd you go? Our buddy Matt provided text-based play-by-play for the fourth cue of the next game.

Like literally play-by-play while we were at dinner. So we made it home just in time for, the wild finish. We saw the last drive of the fourth quarter, and we saw the overtime, and we saw evil maintain its throttle hold on our dimension. Yeah. And to bring it back to my lungs,

no, I don't need to do that. But yeah, that was a day. That was a day of sports. But it's a long weekend. It's all right. I spent my weekend. Saturday, your boy prayed to the sun god out in the Moorpark Highlands up in... Did you get out there?

I got in the links. Put little golf. My game's a little rusty. I had some nice shots. We haven't had a lot of golf talk recently. I thought maybe your interest was diminishing. It was not really the season. I mean, it's even here, it's difficult to get it in

because it's, you know, the sun goes out at 4 o'clock. And then Saturday night, I went to a concert. I went on Joyce Manor. Good for you. At the palladium with 3,000 of my all-ages friends. You haven't been getting into concerts much. No. That's the only.

entertainment choice you can make where you're like, okay, what time does it start? And they're like, seven, but really 10.30. It's rough. It's like, there's no other thing where you're like, hey man, what time does true detective come on? And they're like, I don't know. Could be any time, really. You should stand while it's almost on, though. And I definitely watched a dude vomit for 45 seconds.

And there was, you know, a lot of crowd surfing. But Joyce Manor's really, really good bands. I was like, I was like into them, but now I'm like, that's a fucking great band. Are you into them because they impressed you with the depths of their pop punk catalog? Are you into them because you feel like it's a gesture of reparation since you left 35 minutes into their set to beat traffic? I left 50 minutes into their set. And it was going to be a crush for Ubers. And so I just felt like I'd seen like, and they also have, like all their songs are like a minute and a half long or two minutes long. So I got like a solid 20 songs down.

We, the wife and I went up to Ohio for the little couples retreat. And that's Mickey Pizz country, by the way. I think that's where Pizzolato place. And I think what you're talking about there, it sounds a lot like the lost episode of camping. I just wanted to say, though, the golf thing, it's a lovely, lovely, lovely country up there. But where we were staying, a butt's a golf course. Yeah, it's in the resort. And so our welcome to it when we went by the little snack bar to get a chicken salad sando

because your boy forgot to eat anything during the drive up there. You know, the quaintness of it was disrupted by the bro in the MAGA hat just doing donuts in a golf cart. Did he actually have a MAGA hat? Yeah. And he was actually doing donuts? That's not really golf course behavior. He was driving a golf cart.

Is that a more fair representation of things? We haven't really spliced together all the cell phone footage of our interaction. But I got to say, like you got to go get your golfers, man. Yeah. I was worried about your health out on the links. It's a big tent church. So there's a lot of different parishioners, a lot of different sects. But we welcome all kinds.

Greenwald, since you've mentioned Ohio and Nikki Piz, let's talk a little bit about True Detective Season 3, episode 3. So this was interesting to me. Now, this was the first episode. So Jeremy Salnier, film director, who directed the first two episodes and was slated to direct at least this one, right? There were going to be three more.

I've had this opinion through a long time as a TV critic. You know, I understood the opinion. and I still sort of get at even having gone through the pilot process myself. Like Daniel Sackheim, who directed this episode and came on as an EP and directed, I think, the last three. Three, six, and seven, I believe. Right. It's a very talented TV director and a very talented director. And you can tell, though, I think the difference in ambition.

There is a painterly aspect to the first two episodes in terms of the shots and the lighting and the pacing that I really fell into and I really loved. And this episode, in ways that are good and bad, fell into a more traditional episode of TV drama. Sure, yeah. Now, considering the wild highs and lows of True Detective over the previous seasons, there is something to be said for steadiness. Yeah. But my concern about this episode, I'm concerned. Give me a break. Let me back up my golf cart. I am not concerned about this.

Take a moment. Get on that take. I am not concerned at all. but it did make the rougher edges appear rougher, I would say. The main one being, I still don't quite get this case as the one that is worthy of three timelines worth of Agita. Sure. That said, the things that I liked about the first two episodes and maybe even shocked our listeners in liking, we're still here. Yeah. And that alone keeps me watching.

And you got Dorf throwing 99. Dorf is, you know when sluggers, I know you're a big baseball guy? Yeah, sure. When they're in the on deck circle and they got the weights on the bat. They got the donut on the bat. And then they pop it off and they're in the cage and they're like, this just feels lighter than air. That's Dorf without the hair. Yes.

Once you get that recession, he's back, baby. He regresses to his current hairline. And yet he also regresses to his blade two level of energy. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, but super fun. And I was glad to see the boys back together, honestly. I like their dynamic. I like their energy.

And even back to the first season, when I was alone on the hate train, when the boys were just working cases together, that's the part of the show I like best. The tension you're getting at is so fascinating, not only for true detective, but for television in general right now, because as TV becomes more and more this push and plumbulling, between a writer's room and the otorist directors, even if that's just the way that we read the tea leaves

when we're actually watching it. I mean, you can speak, you can attest as much as anyone about the just almost breathtaking, collaborative effort it takes to make a piece of television and all the people who are working on different things and how we'll say like, Carrie Fukunaga is a genius,

and it's maybe it's the director of photography or it's this person or that person or the set designer or any number of people who could have had a huge amount to do with what we're seeing and hearing. But True Detective itself is such like an interesting case study of

that push and pull. Of that, a writer trying to be like, these are all the things I care about and that I'm interested in and this is what I want. And then a director saying, well, I'm going to take this material and I'm going to use it as a platform to try all this different stuff. Now, by all accounts, there was a basically,

I mean, it was a mutual parting of ways between Solnier and Fitzolato. in the past That's what we've heard With director attention on this show I think Pizzolado has like a very clear vision For how he wants this stuff to go

And starting next week he's directing For the first time, is that right? He directs 4 and 8 Okay And Sackheim directs I think The middle ones The other one

Oh four He might direct four Five and eight And I think Sackheim does three six and seven Yeah I think he directed one episode of two Didn't he? I don't know

But the bigger issue is It is a Like my old boss Noah Hawley I mean that is the ultimate but not reclamation, claiming of the full vision of the project. Right. And I think that, you know, the thing about what Sonnier did is not only was it like, oh, cool shot, it was, wow, this guy really understands small communities, some of them on, like, a lot of them on economic hard times, dealing with crime, dealing with, you know, the sort of bonds of society fraying a little bit, the things that ties together. and so he was the absolute right director for this material.

So it sucks that he didn't get to see the project out, although he wasn't ever going to direct all eight. And increasingly, I think we're just seeing, like, that's a huge ask for someone. It's enormous. And when they do do it, like even with Fuganaga on Maniac, there's still a lot of, like, that same tension where it's like, oh, okay, it's like this guy's vision

versus like the storytelling that we're sort of used to from TV. Yeah, and I think there's also tension. that we're not discussing on the studio side too, which makes it more like a film. Because there's so many moving pieces, the studio or the network or in tandem feel that there's always a chance to salvage the piece of the project that they like best or the thing that they thought it was going to be

or want it to be. And if you hand over a blank check to one director, you're getting that director's vision throughout. And if that doesn't line up with what you want, then there's even more friction down the line. Yeah. Yeah, and I agree with that. I think maybe the things that I thought frayed a little bit

in this episode were the marginal stuff, It also could have been the story. We never really can know, totally. But Trashman, dude in his, what is he? He's like a motorized little... He's like a little dune buggy kind of that he drives a go-cart that he drives around town to pick up scrap. The way that that character was on the margins of the first two and maybe the people in the background being interviewed and the faces, I couldn't even tell you exactly how the difference between they are portrayed, the way they were captured in one and two and then in three.

But it felt flatter. The confrontation with him, the sort of anger of the... neighbors. It didn't feel as textured as the world we saw around him and the other ones. You know, and then there's just the other stuff that I'm always going to bump on, like, that the women just die and get out of the way, or lovingly invite you to take them to a motel to have sex all night and drink, which, cool. Right. But, you know, this isn't that story. Yeah. This isn't the story that is interested in what they're doing. But you're pointing out that you think that the crime itself or that the case itself seems a little bit

creak under the weight of three timelines and also just like, okay, so like, and then when you pull this layer back, it's going to be this. Look, I'm on the record as not loving the supernatural aspects of season one that got everyone all fired up, but at least that felt like it was mysterious enough to maybe be worthy of all the attention.

This feels like a confusing and upsetting case, but the lingering aspect of it is unclear. Now, that's going to unfold over time, I guess, and of course we get moments like, like Wayne losing his daughter briefly in Walmart, and we see the personal, you know, all of that business. And obviously in 2015, something's transpired between 1990 and 2015 where he's not literally, like she's not gone, but they're estranged.

Something's up. But let's go, let's talk about the two things that I think were most interesting about this episode. Sure. You touched on Dorf, so maybe we can end with Dorff. Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Always happy to see a 12-sided die on the story.

screen. Uh-huh. Are you questioning whether or not a long-range recon guy could spot 12-sided die on the woods from 30 yards? Listen, you're the guy in this room that knows about lurping. You are an old, old, old style. I think that if somebody's just doing a casual listen to this pod, you make it sound like I like to larp and that I like to...

No, quite the contrary. No, look, honestly, I couldn't care less about that. I love tracking. Let's just roll the tape all the way back. tracking to me is a completely mystical or mysterious bullshit skill that is probably quite real. I don't care. It's such a plot device. But it's one of those beautiful ones that I don't care about.

Give him the skill and let's go. That's wonderful to me. And it's fun. And it gives us, because one of the things that we like in this kind of fiction is competence. Like, I like that he's really good at this thing. So I'm happy. I mean, he could find a 20-sided die. It wouldn't phase me at all.

What is your feeling? about Dungeons and Dragons as a plot signifier. I know you've probably been talking about this with Jason on the Flat Circle after show. You know, and I also know that one of the threads that interests you the most, and I think would be interesting to me too, is the sort of patina of 80s subculture in the way that it, Dungeons and Dragons, Black Sabbath stuff. I mean, this is stuff that feels very tame to us now through the prism of history,

but at the time felt a little bit strange, a little bit countercultural, little bit, you know, more than countercultural, right, a little bit trending occult towards the occult, which obviously would have been disturbing in a quieter time of American life, but particularly in a quieter corner of America, like where the show is set. Yeah, I mean, so are you asking whether or not I think it's as, like, is as big of a deal? No, I'm just curious. What's the appeal to you and how do you see it playing in this show? I look at pre-internet culture, especially when you're a kid, like when you're younger, when we were growing up in the 80s, as like a hallway with a series of rooms on each side, right?

And so you're walking down this hallway and you would walk into a room, you would get directions to that room, maybe from an older kid or like somebody would tell you to tell you to check that room out. And you go into a lot of rooms as a kid and some you may leave and some you may stay in, right? So I remember, I think we've joked about this before, but I remember like my first night at Temple University, like the guy, who was my roommate was like, do you want to go see fish with me? And I was like, no, but if I had gone, like, who knows what would have happened to my life? I've got some thoughts. I could have been like a Cape Cod mushroom dealer right now. Business would be booming, by the way.

And I didn't, and like my life went in a different direction. But throughout your life before the internet, before the internet was like, here are all the rooms and you can have them all open at the same time in a tab bar on your browser. By yourself. Also, you don't need to commit. Yeah, exactly. And you can have this platform that lets you listen to all the music, and this platform lets you watch all the movies, and you never have to really interact with anybody or be made fun of

or be encouraged by any of it. You can just be whoever. Back then, it was a little bit more mysterious, and some of those rooms had these connotations of like, don't go in that room. Like, that room's the weird room. That room's the heavy metal room. That room's the Dungeons and Dragons room. And now, of course, Dungeons and Dragons.

dragons just seems like any other teen toy culture from that time period. But in reality, I think that as people, you have like this rise of the evangelical right in the 80s, you also have the decline of like the sort of American dream under Reagan. And at that time, you're starting to get these crimes that are just like unspeakable tragedies that are affecting teenagers. And people are grasping at straws for explanations for what's wrong. And whether it's heavy metal or rap music or Dungeons and Dragons or all these things. I think that my favorite part about True Detective, aside from this sort of general of the show itself, just like tough talking detectives, is that it makes me think about

all this other stuff. And that's been a cool thing. I don't think it's actually going to be the make or break part of this season is like these teenagers who listen to Sabbath or the fact that this kid was playing specifically Dungeons and Dragons. I think it's going to be more who was he playing Dungeons and Dragons with. Right. But, you know, I think it's a cool little thing without making it to like stranger things, kids running around in Ghostbusters outfits. Yeah, I think that the appealing thing about this sort of story is that the kids are not all right. The kids are not where they're supposed to be.

The supposedly straight and narrow, the society is represented by the cops. In this case, it's even tripling down on it because the cops are, obviously they're older, but they are also. veterans. I mean, they are the system, you know, and there's that scene in last night's episode where he's at the, I don't know if it's a VFW hall or a bar, but basically. Yeah, it's a VFW bar, yeah. You know, even Lieutenant Dorff's stature or irrelevance is question. I mean, these guys are, they are the spine of society, supposedly. And then what bothers them most, like the trash man, when they return to a world that they no longer fit into, that they are out of step with. And we know with that, of course, echoes Wayne's own inability to stay focused or to stay locked into one time.

It's a rich text, and it's interesting. And I'm curious to see how far this season of this show allows our main character to tumble, basically, as opposed to being this sort of slightly, this weather vein through the timelines that is only slightly crumpled and bent. Yeah, well, depending on how much it adheres to the first season structure,

which so far has a lot of similarities, at one point one of these timelines is going to have to become the main timeline. You know what I mean? Like, in the first season, it was interrogations telling the story of something that had happened 15 years before or whatever it was.

And then it went into that present tense of when the interrogations were taking place and they went on to pursue the case itself. So I'm curious to see, is it 90 or 2015? I mean, 2015 is going to have like, you know, Mahershal Ali in 2015 is not moving

with the same agility as... He's really good at playing an old guy. I can't believe. He's like more convincing as an old guy than he is as the 1980 guy. You know, there's something, he has such a stillness in his physicality always, that it's just, you know, maybe it lends itself to that performance. But it's amazing. Yeah, it's legitimately amazing.

And the relationship between him and Ray Fisher, just physically the way they approach each other and gravitate around each other, I am totally removed from the reality in which he is not an old man. Yeah, I know. And he is not that guy's father. It's really striking. The last thing I would say So what's weird is

Why is it that they can get The old man version so right And the 1980 Hemenendorf definitely just like can't get Like is a hair that hard? I think hair's hard I think that Well I think that

They're doing a great job on Mahershala Like I think he's I can tell physically Which era we're in Just if he's alone on the screen And it's not just the hair I just think that there's something The way they're treating him

The way they're making him up Slight clothing differences. Slight clothing differences. But again, I think it's a physical thing, the way he's holding himself. I think Dorf, his face is too weathered and lined to plausibly be the younger version. And then he just seems like totally ready

to be the middle version. I don't know if we're going to get an older version. I was just going to say, for people who are on the fence about the larger supernatural mystery part, which I am on some level, I just really would urge people younger than 30 to go online and Google

the Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook and Monster Manual covers from like the second edition like the early 80s. Because these are like totemic images. Like I never actually successfully played Dungeons and Dragons because it sounded amazing. Did you try?

Yeah, because it seemed amazing. Like it seemed totally creative. Like you would just create a story and you could create characters and even wanting to be a writer at a young age. I was like, oh, that would be the greatest thing to do. But then ultimately it was just rolling dice. It was rolling dice and being dependent on someone

who is the dungeon master making the story, and I never really found the right DM, if you know what I mean. Never really slid into the right DMs. Honestly. But what it represents still is what's interesting. And Pizzolado for all our obvious differences and stated differences were more or less the same age, right? He's maybe a couple years older.

I think a little, yeah, hair. But these books, like you just would see them in these weird covers, and they felt like portals, as you said, Chris, into other realities. And almost that's enough, that mystery of like the sliding doors, like you could chase down that thing, and it makes you feel a certain way because it felt so strange and foreign and other. It was only in the back row of the Walden Books or the friend's older brother bookshelf. And that, the mystery of opportunity of childhood is so fascinating. Yeah. And Solnier did a really good job with that because initially he just presents Will as this, like, kid who rides his bike and has a Boy Scouts backpack and is taking care of his sister and just seems like nothing to see here.

It's a great point. And they've done really nice, like, layer after layer of, well, these parents are pretty disengaged with the process, you know, somewhat disengaged with the process of raising their kids. They have their own problems. And it's slight, it's just slowly starting to be like, okay, so like, what did they really know about Will and what was Will really doing? And that, I think, is going to start to explain. And what really happened out in the woods, which is essentially the question both of, like, all fairy tales and all fairy tales. and also this show. But ultimately, I think the thing that remains the most successful to me

about this season versus other seasons and versus other shows that might... Netflix might also suggest to you if they were all in the same algorithm. I was thinking about the killing recently. And what the show is not doing that I appreciate is that it is not just throwing red herrings at us like we're at Pike Place Market.

It is not interested in cycling through suspects. It is really focused on this one man's journey through space and time. Yeah. Which I think ultimately, even though, you know, I find it weirdly humorless and often claustrophobic,

that is a successful way to convey this story. Sure. For people who are on the fence or are looking forward to next week, next week is the episode that Miltch got a credit on? Is that right?

David Miltch, the mastermind of Deadwood and a lot of television greats, who was rumored to be much more involved in the season. And then that was then downplay. They were going to co-write it was like one of the rumors.

Right. And then Pizzolato said, that they basically traded like notes. Like Milch came, did some work for a week or two on this season and the Pizzolato did some work on the Deadwood movie, I guess. Oh, weird. That's what he says, yeah. Let's take a break to hear from our sponsors.

And when we come back, we're going to talk about Black Monday, you're the worst, and a couple other TV comedies. Today's episode of The Watch is sponsored by ADT. Real Protection when it comes to something as important as your family's safety. You deserve real protection from 80s. Real protection means the nation's number one smart home security provider is standing by and there for you when you need them. Real protection means having a safe and smart home with everything from video doorbells, surveillance cameras, smart locks, lights, carbon monoxide, and smoke detectors, and a system that's custom designed to fit your lifestyle and setting up custom automations to do things like lock the doors and set the thermostat when you leave.

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and Connie Britton, don't miss the return of Smilf, new episodes every Sunday, only on Showtime. Greenwald, we're going to talk about Black Monday. I just had one quick thing. Since we were talking about Nick Pizzolato may being involved, maybe being involved in Deadwood, and these are sort of extant HBO projects, a weird one that's sort of gone under the radar had some news last week. There's this long gestating Perry Mason reboot, which this seems like post-peak TV at its peak in that this was a project that landed at HBO with a big splashy announcement and probably a big cash penalty with Robert Downey Jr., his wife, their production company, having the rights to the beloved television

lawyer Perry Mason. They were going to reimagine it. Downey was going to star in the show, which of course was very big and splashy. This probably broke around the time the first true detective was happening, or at least, you know, I feel in my mind it's a connected idea because... I believe it might have been around when I talked to Downey, which would have been for either Civil War or Iron Man 3. Yeah. So it's been around for a while. Clearly, he's been too busy to do this.

But there was a moment when Pitsilotto was going to be writing this show. Yes. And now it's fallen to Roland Jones, who was a writer from the Jason Cadem's verse, who wrote one of the very best episodes ever Friday Night Lights, The Sun, which is a moment. in itself exciting. And then they announced last week that Matthew Reese, fresh off the Americans, one of the best actors working on TV is going to take the lead, which obviously

I'm very excited about and interested in. But they also announced that it's kind of a gritty reboot. Yeah. Right? Like it's set in 1932 Los Angeles. It's film noir. It's like Raymond Chandler era. Yeah. Which, you know, I'm just putting it out there because we're going to be tracking the story with, you know, one eighth of the ribidity

that we bring to our coverage of the Mandalorian. But this is one of those, like wild-eyed shrug-moji projects to me that I'm just, it could be great. You know, it takes a lot of boxes that we like, but it does seem to be, from the outside perspective, the kind of thing that gets greenlit and gets made off of very exciting star-studded press releases that continues to exist because of the momentum of those initial press releases. But furthermore, continues to exist because of the 18T HBO stuff where they need to be making more volume, producing more content, more volume.

Yeah. It doesn't feel like an 80s. HBO project, really, as we used to conceive of them, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But I just wanted to flag that as news develops about it. It's kind of interesting. Two things about this. All right. One, and we could just leave this as it is, but would you say that Robert Danny Jr.

has spent his show business capital well or not well? I think he's a very unique case because he found mega super. stardom in his 40s after a very, very, very checkered path of being as a very young actor tabbed as the best actor of his generation, as a firecracker of talent and ambition and also substance abuse. And what the case you could make is for where he is in his life, sober, by all accounts, quite happy, happily married, with outlandish success, not just financial and global box office, but his involvement in the Marvel stuff,

I mean, he just has to go in front of a green screen if he wants to, and he can do whatever he wants, and the money he makes off these movies, it weirdly feels like a smart choice for him, because the wild stuff, you know, whether it was like two girls and a guy, or chaplain or these bigger swings that he took. He took the big swings, right, when he was younger.

You and I would love to see him at least just do a Zodiac again, which is one of his greatest ever performances. Right. But in terms of the life that seems to work for him as a person and a performer, just having these like soft, scheduled franchise landing spots, I know, it's weird to talk about his career purely in like psychological personal terms for someone that I have never met. You bonded with him, I believe, over what band?

Steeley Dan played his 50th first day or something. Yeah, at an airplane hanger. By the way, that's, I believe, your goal for your 50th as well. Which is, you know, not soon, but there's time. Anyway. It says I'm going to have Joyce Manor play, yeah. Not after they heard when you left. Does that make sense?

Yes. The reason I was asking is because of that chat that I had with them a few years ago. Which you can read on Grandland, right? Yeah, and I remember the Perry Mason thing was in the air then, as was he had been developing a script that Steve McQueen, speaking of True Detective Season 3,

the actor Steve McQueen had been working on when he died called Yucatan, which was about a treasure hunter in Mexico who found like, you know, like basically a psychedelic other portal of dimension, other portal of reality, like a real

like kind of Raiders of Lost Ark meets the, you know, Terry Southern kind of acid 60s. And that, I don't know what's up with that. The Pirates, the Caribbean writer Terry Roscio was going to write it or whatever. But there's no news about it in five years, now four years. And to me, the crucial turning point, and, you know, there's debate about how close he was or wasn't to do this, but is the fact that he doesn't do inherent vice in 2014, which he was that's right. Originally supposed to play Doc Sportello,

instead Joaquin Phoenix did. He does the judge, which seems like a movie from a completely other decade where it's like back when, you know, you were making a few good men and a civil action

and these kinds of movies and, you know, these kinds of like good lawyer comes to, like a... Well, the soloist was another one like that. The soloist, but that was a little bit earlier. And then since the judge, he's just done Avengers Age of Ultron,

Captain America's Civil War, Spider-Man Homecoming, Avengers Infinity War, and Avengers Endgame. Sherlock Holmes 3 is coming out. What about Dr. Doolittle? And he's got The Voyage of Dr. Doolittle next year. A movie that is, I don't know if he is actually starring in this movie,

but it's directed by Jamie Fox, and it's called All-Star Weekend, and it's about two guys who form a rivalry over their favorite NBA player. And then a Richard Linklater movie that he is supposed to do called Untitled John Brinkley Biopic. I don't know. He's a really, really, really interesting actor, but this whole Perry Mason thing to me is an, It's like another one of those,

huh, I wonder what would have happened if he actually had done this, you know, if he had gone after this. I don't want to, again, I don't want to presume psychology and I don't want to equate risky behavior in your personal life with risky behavior professionally.

But a career is a crapshoot for an actor, you know, and you can only, you can go with your gut, but you have this team of people who are giving you advice on what to do and there's financial considerations and there's your schedule. And every decision, especially at that level, has a hundred other attendant, you know, consequences to it.

And we do see this a lot. And I just think it's easy for us from behind our mics to be like, take the risky choice, work with the great filmmaker. I think that you can see in the longer-lasting, more interesting careers of people like our beloved Colin Farrell, for example, it's never a mistake to work with the talented risk-taking filmmaker. It really isn't, because the downside is, you know, the movie isn't a hit, but it's not on you.

You worked with, you pushed yourself. Yeah, I mean, I'm that's like, oh, you should have been the fucking bellboy in Grand Budapest hotel or something, Robert Jenny Jr. No, but, you know, we were, we weren't having this debate because we were just graduated from college, but 20 years ago, um, when Steven Soderberg was making traffic, uh, Harrison Ford was supposed to play the. Yeah, the Michael Douglas part. And then there was, I remember even then in the nascent internet movie blogosphere, there was

all this like, oh, Harrison Ford just wants paychecks. Right. He wants to be a movie star still. He can't see himself as this troubled part of Michael Douglas was like, give me. Yeah, yeah. And Douglas's career, and I listened to him on Mark Marin recently, weirdly, for a guy who was a big movie star, has been that, taking the parts that the other people wouldn't take. Basic instinct, yeah.

Over and over again. Yeah. Which is pretty cool to be that kind of like... And even doing behind the candelabra. Years later. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. This is the sort of stuff, I mean, this is the stuff that's fun, you know,

the sidelines to watch. We won't ever really know. But in the case of Downey, it does rankle a little bit because he's so good. Yeah. He is so good. So I wanted,

the other thing that I thought of when I was reading about Perry Mason and this leads into Black Monday. I love that you're doing this. Is... No one is better in the Segway game. I mean, I've had a lot of reps. I've been standing out there

on the Undex circle for a lot. Not since Joe Bluth. Have Segway's been... Do you think, as somebody who's probably way more aware of what things are in development, what things are getting pitched right now. How high up in the pitch is the period setting? It's interesting to see it come back around because, you know, when I first started taking

creative meetings at the end of Grantland, period pieces were way, way, way, way out. The expense was so great, and the risk on the return was, also great, that people were definitely, definitely cautioning against them. I don't know if things have changed. They seem to have. Certainly within, I mean, between this and Glow, between Black Monday and Glow, the fact that we now have like two drug-packing domestic robot gags that are just fully going. And there was a male robot on the Americans. It's interesting. The period setting as romantic seemed to fade out, maybe generationally. Magic City, maybe was

the last one sort of a boomer generation. Yeah, like the madman level, like let's go to the 50s and play, like what was the playboy club? Yeah, all that stuff. Pan Am and the Playboy Club, but I think that was nostalgia for the generation just before ours in terms of

what they didn't quite experience. Now, 80s and 90s nostalgia rules, because I think it's just, there's always a nimbus around the current generation that is most desirable of like 18 to 29-year-olds or whatever, of what they maybe have whispers of in their mind, but didn't have. And so you just get, you get that ease of distance, but also the ease of reference humor. Is that sort of possibly it?

But I feel like you're chasing something else, too, in terms of thematical, in terms of the themes of some of these shows. Well, it's, I find it fascinating that CBS could just make, well, CBS would never, like CBS and Showtime share a lot of, obviously, corporate structure. But now our former friend of the pod, David Nevins, former head of Showtime, has now been promoted to be head of both. There is a world in which nothing as like, nothing as profane and sort of boundary pushing as Black Monday could be on CBS. No.

But a show about an upstart, like corporate raiding chop shop on Wall Street. There's a world in which there could be like a procedural about this rag-tag group of got people who are coming together. The main character would be named Jason Black. And we can pitch this later in our own time. But you see what I'm saying? So like the 80s part of Black Monday, especially since it is obviously not historically accurate. No.

It almost feels secondary to me, but it felt like in the pitch to get it made was crucial? Yes. And I'm interested in how that shakes out. So if people haven't yet, I recommend reading Alison Herman's take on the show in The Ringer, because I thought she really very cleanly, dialed into the thing about the show that might be

confusing, quite honestly, to some people. And I noticed after reading her piece, it brought it into clarity for me as well that that was what I was bumping on. This is fully a comedy. And we are kind of out of practice with prestige comedies, particularly on these networks. We have everything is hyper-serialized now. Everything is sort of, hmm, comedy, to a degree. Whether it's Smilf that returned last night, and I'm sure we'll talk about that again,

or even glow to the degree that it is, it's often a drama as well as a comedy in a different way. So backing it all the way up, this is a show created by Jordan Cahan and David Caspi who created one of our favorite late lamented comedies, Happy Endings. And I would say that happy endings is the skeleton key to understanding Black Monday. Well, let's circle back to that.

So this is a show set one year before the stock market crash in 1987, it begins one year before in 1987, produced and directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, starring Don Cheadle, Andrew Rannels, Regina King, and Casey Wilson, and Paul Shear. Friend of the Pod. I don't know why I'm really leaning into that today.

I just feel loving towards our fellow, our community, our wider audience. It's fucking broad in a way that honestly I wasn't expecting because I am so used to a different kind of storytelling. And I found it jarring it first because I found it really funny. You know, it was really funny. It's funny. But I didn't even know what I was watching for a minute. And, you know, maybe this is also the curse of pilots. You know, like you got to buy in fully to the rhythm and they got to set up some stuff and get them in the same office and yada, yada, yada. But, well, let's talk about two things.

Let's talk about it as a comedy. And I'm curious about your half. endings take, and then I just want to clear the lane a little bit, Stugged about Cheatel. So I just think that it's much easier to see, to review this, you're inevitably going to think, okay, so billion, succession, margin call, big short, like, how is this going to either lampoon or explain the world of high finance? But it's just way easier to look at it in terms of the high density, high velocity

joke making that made happy endings, not only like an incredible watch, but an incredible rewatch because you can go back to happy endings episodes and just find four jokes on the margins of scenes that you didn't notice before. God, it was so fast.

It was so fast. And the actors, crucially on happy endings, that's like a once in a, I don't know, like, I don't want to be crazy and be like once in a show but that's like a one in 200 sitcoms ensemble

that clicks the way that that group clicked. And I think that Black Monday kind of has that in some ways. But Ranald's, and Cheetah and Regina are like really, really, really playing at like a high frequency, man. And as soon as you're just like, oh, this has nothing to do with Wall Street, like in terms of like,

it's not going to explain anything to me about Wall Street or make me feel differently about capitalism. And as soon as you're just like, this is just about like people doing Coke and smoking while they do Jane Fonda exercises and like people like sneezing into Andrew Randall's mouth. That was the hardest I like. after the show. It's really, really, really funny in a way that was like, it kind of took me

back to 80s comedies. It was just like joke, joke, joke, and it kind of has a story and it kind of has a mystery and it sort of has like heartfelt moments, but for the most part, it's like a lot of fucking really funny bits. Well, Rogan and Goldberg as filmmakers are kind of

in the splatter art aesthetic. You could tell the same guy's directed preacher as directed this. And I really respect that they have a style. that interest them, you know. I think they make stuff that they want to see. Yeah, the camera has the energy of a teenager and follows every joke and follows every bit,

almost to the point of abstraction sometimes. What I was curious about, though, was like, I felt weirdly unprepared to appreciate the show. I'm excited to keep going. Now, because, again, for all the reasons you said, but we are maybe over-serialized, and I wonder why that is. I have been really enjoying catching up on comedies recently.

And this is just a slight detour to say that like the last two episodes of Good Place, and honestly the last three or four going back to last year, we touched on it at the end of the year. I thought I've been excellent. I think the show is all the way back. And the thrilling thing about that show is that it is finding out in real time the limits of being a serialized, metaphysical, thought-provoking show and being a workplace comedy.

And I think you and I both were chafing a little bit as it got that ratio a little bit off in the beginning of the season, but now it's all the way back. And it is one of the most risk-taking, thought-provoking shows on television. But it's a comedy. Similarly, you're the worst show that we both loved in the past is back on FXX for its last season. I was revisiting the end of season four, something we never talked about. And there's a standalone episode about Gretchen I, Akash's character called Not a Great Bet or something, that is one of the best standalone episodes of the last few years.

and thinking, you know, these are comedies and you can pop a couple like chips, but it's so serialized and it's emotional that it gives you the same feeling that we have been enjoying and have made this podcast about, but in bite-sized, more occasionally light-hearted form. So to just suddenly almost, you know,

pull the emergency break and Tokyo drift into something that is just gonzo, I haven't been watching TV like that in a while. And I wonder if other people who listen to this podcast have been with their active brains. And what I mean is,

it seems like people are consuming new TV in serialized chunks. And then in the margins, they're just watching the office. Yeah. And that seems to be the difference. So can Black Monday succeed in an atmosphere where people are expecting

a certain kind of serialization? And look, they seem aware of it. The show begins with a flash forward and we're wondering who died, but do we care? I don't know, but it's trying to straddle both worlds a little bit, but mostly it seems like it just wants to just party. Well, that's the thing, is that people often talk about, like, Trojan horsing stuff.

Like, you know, you're going to use this genre convention to Trojan horse in, like, all the things you want to say about America now, right? They seem to be using the 1980s Wall Street thing as a Trojan horse just to fucking make jokes for 35 minutes at relentless pace at a relentless pace and that is almost kind of like how they used to make

comedies in the 80s where it would be like stripes and it's like it's about the army but it's really fucking Bill Murray and Harold Ramas and John Candy

for two hours just being all stars and that's kind of like how I feel about this like when I was watching in like the the message is playing in the beginning of the first episode

I'm like wasn't that like the song like six years old by the time this started Oh, the timeline is, it's like the Goldbergs and it's fealty to actual history. So for a second, I was just kind of like, well, that's not 1986, sir.

And that's because I've been watching True Detective and I've been like, is it in 1980s? That would be this. And then, like, Reagan would have just been elected. It doesn't fucking matter. Like, you know, it's just like Kadeem Hardison. And Regina Hall and Don Chitle just like karate chopping one another.

It's just really like high-level comedy acting. And it's actually like a performance from Chedel that I did not expect to be so. Live wire? Let's come back to that. By the way, I want to apologize. I said Regina King. I knew I was going to do that.

There are two goddesses at work on the small screen and the big screen named Regina, and they have one syllable less names, and I apologize. Regina Hall is the star of the show, and God, she's really good. But I love seeing Party Cheetle back. Cheetle? Boogie Knights Cheatle. Boogie Knights Cheatel. Devil in a blue dress Cheatel.

Young Cheatel. Dare I say. The joke that he's 39. in the beginning plays great. It's hard to remember, we talked about Downey a little bit, there is a whole type of actor, and actress as well, I believe,

and if I had the brain power, maybe we could come up with a couple who start out as character actors and live wires, the ones who elevate on the margins and spice things up, and then they sort of age into or are cast into leading roles

where they have to sort of straighten up. and this is much more fun than seeing him put on the armor in the Avengers movies or put on the armor in House of Lies, which was kind of a tweener. And maybe Showtime's investment in this, this just doesn't feel like a Showtime show, which is cool,

because maybe the brand that we've been discussing with Showtime for a while has been, we're not really sure what a Showtime show is anymore. Source, but I mean, Allison sort of points this out in her piece, but is Smilf kidding and this more of like a new version of Showtime? It seems... And the same way Escape at Dan Amora might be a new version of drama for them. They might just be like we're in business,

and Showtime shows are maybe high level A or once A-list talent and given a lot of free reign to do what they want to do. Weirdly, Showtime, I never would have said this even a year ago when we had a similar conversation when Twin Peaks The Return was on about what Showtime was doing and what... what gaps it was taking advantage of in the marketplace you're trying to position itself as. Its aesthetic seems to be 2013 Netflix.

Netflix now is not 2013 Netflix. Netflix cancels shows. Netflix does mostly, you know, it's really promoting its reality division, it's film division, it's multi-cam comedy stuff. It's trying to grab all the corners and please everyone.

It's old model of like, let's just throw money at interesting autours like Jenji Cohen. or reboots, like in this case it would have been Twin Peaks. Or, I mean, this feels more, in some ways, this reminds me of, like, not just because of Ken Marino, but like wet hot American summer, you know. But similarly, like, giving Frankie Shaw a show or Michelle Gondry, Jim Carrey, those don't, those feel like Netflixie moves to me. And I'm sure they were in the mix on a lot of these things. It's an interesting gambit, particularly for a network that has survived by being the CBS of cable in that, you know, you, you, you, you, you, you, you.

You watch the season one, and you're like, great, nine more seasons. Let's go. Yeah. Ray Donovan can run forever. Homeland is ending, but ran for a really long time. I was thinking about the Netflix thing just this week because my wife and I have been watching friends from college. That's back, right?

Yes. Under-promoted second season. They obviously have a very good publicity department in Netflix, but, like, I just think that they just don't care. Like, they feel like the people who want to watch this show will find the show through, like, whether it's an alert that a show that they have liked has returned. Does Netflix do push notifications? I actually don't know that.

I think you can get them. I think that you also can just sign, like, hit when you're watching Friends from College. Like, you can just be like, it'll just show up on your home screen when you go to... Because it knows you watched it. I mean, that's what literally happened to me and my wife. We were like, oh, Friends from College is back. Like, let's watch a couple episodes. And I was thinking about this in relationship to HBO's, you know, year or whatever.

We don't know when things are coming. I mean, Thrones is obviously coming in April 4. 14th, and then there will be big little lies, and one would presume Succession's going to come back at certain point this year, given the fact that they were working on it when we talked to Jesse Armstrong. And then beyond that, there's like Barry and a couple things, but those are like, you know, half a dozen to 10 shows, probably more like half a dozen shows. Like, in the next three weeks on Netflix, not that these are, I'm not making an aesthetic

or qualitative comparison, but there's friends from college, then there's Black Earth Rising, which is the new Hugo Blick show, which comes out this coming Friday. That's the guy did honorable woman. We love his work. And Russian doll, the Leslie Headland show with Natasha Leone.

Exciting. That Amy Poller worked on as a producer. So it's like, those are three shows in two weeks. That are more pitched to our aesthetic and more like what we thought of than Netflix would be giving us.

Yes. Yes. And so I think that their volume play is fascinating, but it kind of has broken the ability to talk about it in any kind of reasonable way. Things are much less stable

than I think. think the consumer would believe right now. Things are nuts. And the baseline story on the consumer level is, wow, there are a lot of choices. Wow, Netflix keeps pumping stuff at us. The story on the podcast or blogger level is, boy, Disney Plus is coming, you know, and a lot of moves are being made because of that. The next level of, like, industry story, and this is one that, you know, I can, you know,

can only speak of, I can speak of, but with a caveat, because I'm in business with them for Prior Patch, is that, this wasn't a secret, but like Comcast Universal just announced, well, they're going to be launching a streaming service as well. That underscores why the Fox sale was such a huge thing, and why NBC Universal made a last-minute play when it looked like the government wasn't going to let Disney buy Fox. It's an attempt to just own as much content as humanly possible, but it also means that all three of those major entities are going to start yanking all their shit from everywhere else. Yeah.

So Netflix's volume is really a bulwark against what's coming. And then how that shakes out, I don't know. But it is weirdly, for a business that we just talk about because there's just so much to talk about, there's so much content being made. There's an instability at the root of it that's going to play out over the next two to three years as things massively realign and shake out. both in terms of where the content goes, and also what the consumers decide

is worth their monthly money. Absolutely. I mean, this is what we're always interested in. And at the tail or the head, depending where we are on the nose-to-tail cookery version of this media story, is Don Cheadle with an afrode,

hoovering lines of cocaine. Kung Fu kicking open twin Ken Marino doors and calling the brother fuckers. Yeah. And what that means, it would take a industry seer much wiser than us. The one thing I will say is that you can

maybe you could tell by listening or maybe not, but I can tell that we are still as people just better suited to talking about stuff if it comes out week to week.

It's just like already this year we've talked about True Detective and I don't know if they'd put up eight episodes or 10 episodes of Black Monday on Friday and it had been like people were like

Black Monday had an unsatisfactory conclusion or tails off in the second half of the season and like that was kind of a closed book And I was like, well, I watched three and you're like, well, I watched one. And either of us finished. It would have been like, well, where do we start and where do we finish.

And we've tried this before where we talk about Netflix shows and, like, sections of one through three and three through, you know, four through. And we still might do that with Black Earth Rising. I'm interested in sex education. I mean, in Russian doll, I've seen it. It is fantastic. Great. Yeah. But I do feel like for the purposes of, like, a lot of people, it still really works to watch things once a week.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, particularly for the people who care about the second story. and maybe we can wrap up on that. But I think that when we started seven years ago this month, the second story, the industry mergers and the content wars... And how we were talking about this stuff, yeah. Felt a little bit, honestly, a little bit self-indulgent

because we felt we were talking to TV watchers, which was week-to-week watchers. Increasingly, I think people who really watch TV and pay attention and read the blogs and read whatever and listen to us are interested in the whole story. Yeah. Whereas the people who are like, I'm going to sprinkle some friends with college S2 in with my office rewatch.

And all the stories about Universal Streaming Service and Black Monday premiering doesn't matter at all. And, you know, not to diminish the size and reach of our Boransky Hive, but I think that casual audience is the much larger audience. I mean, that show you, which I've not checked out, but was a lifetime show that got a tiny bit of buzz for being interesting, and then it goes to Netflix almost immediately. And Netflix, starting to get super chatty with their ratings, by the way. Say that it has like a 400% increase.

And, you know, I was talking to someone the other day. In concert also with them raising their prices too. Yes. Yeah. For shareholder stuff. Because they're also, well, let's come back to that. But like, I was talking to a TV writer who knows the business, who referred to it as a Netflix show.

Yeah. Because that's what it's become. There are people who think of Riverdale as a Netflix show because it's gotten such a huge following of people who wait for it to just go on Netflix. The Good Place should probably be called a Netflix show despite... There are people who think of Saul as a Netflix show.

But they probably should. Like, the Good Place should be called a Netflix show despite it being, you know, the last remaining... Well, maybe Superstore people like a lot too. But it's carrying the flag for this... This aging, if not almost on a deathbed tradition of NBC gather everyone together comedies. But it only exists because of this day-and-date international deal

it has with Netflix. The last thing I'll say is that, to your point about the chatty press releases, this is what got HBO into trouble. HBO for years never had to talk about ratings, and then the Sopranos ratings were so good, it started talking, and now it had to play the game. Netflix has been totally opaque forever,

which was a huge power move, but now they're talking, and they're talking about bird box ratings, and they're talking about you, you know, 400% ratings increase, or whatever. And that is, I think, partly to flex and also to signal to shareholders that they're not just funny money

as these big storm clouds are looming. Yeah, let's see if they have their own Black Monday. Well, Penn Badgley is winning, right? That's the only real takeaway. That's the takeaway from this entire podcast. If you just skip to the end, which I, you know, I assume most members of my family do. Penn Badgley has the belt.

We'll be back in some capacity on Thursday. You never know. Some health capacity. Yeah. Until then, thanks for listening, Branski. Great job, Branson. Today's episode of the watch was brought to you by ADT. Real Protection.

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