The Watch - Was TV Ever Truly Monoculture and More Questions from the Mailbag | The Watch

Episode Date: March 8, 2019

We break open the mailbag to answer questions about the new ‘Game of Thrones’ trailer (4:16), the year in television so far (16:00), and how big of a competitor Disney+ will be (28:56). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And subscribe to I'm obsessed with this on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. 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. I am an editor at the wringer.com

and joining me on the other line. Winter is here. It's Andy Greenwald. Hey man. So I'm not, how do I sound? I'm on the phone. I love it. See, I grew up in the era of Bill Simmons calling Jacko in his office, man.

This is what podcasts are supposed to sound like to me. Complex litigation, buddy. This is what this is over here. What's up, brother? Well, we're recording this on a Wednesday. This is for our Thursday show. Just at the top, I'm just going to say I will be in Texas at South by Southwest. So if you see me say, hey, I'm going to be seeing a bunch of movies.

We're also doing a live Talk to Thrones and a live rewatchables on Saturday and Sunday. you can find details. On my Twitter feed, Ringer Twitter feed, everybody's Twitter feed, Greenwald will not be there because he loves the Los Angeles weather so much he can't bear to leave.

My Twitter feed will be strangely silent on these topics. I can't get the signal boost from you? No, I'm not supporting your trip to Texas. I know we're doing a mailbag, buddy, but should we talk about the Los Angeles weather? Well, you know, it's funny you should say it.

This is a mailbag, and the first question I have here from Frank Christian Birch, and it says, how's it going, fellas? Listen, Frank, at 11.30 last night, Frank, Pacific Standard Time. There was a lightning bolt so loud, I levitated from my bed and ran to check on my children for no reason. And the closest emotional reaction I can connect it to is Harvey Firestein's death in the original film Independent. That was my big move. The aliens destroying New York City.

I was watching the Warriors game, and I did think it was an alien invasion for a second, because I didn't look at the weather report, so I didn't know that that was a possibility. And my entire living room got a step or two brighter for a second. I was like, oh, it's happening. And that is, you know, as you know, Andy is a longtime friend of mine. It's like that's the kind of situation I'm really looking for

because I feel like that's the moment where I become kind of the leader we all need. Yeah, exactly. Some sort of either post-apocalypse or alien invasion, I feel like I'd be really useful. I think that I serve my purpose. Like there was a loud noise, and my first response was to go wake up my children. You woke them up? I didn't, but the noise didn't. And I was like, maybe they should know about the noise that just to have to...

What's the opposite of a swivel? Because that's what I keep my head on. No, you keep your head in the sand, right? But you got to pull it out because I need you to talk a little bit about... This is not actually a mailbag question, but we do want to talk a little bit about the Game of Thrones season 8 trailer. So consider that a question from Christopher P. Ryan.

What were your impressions of this first trailer? The full trailer with actual footage from season eight. What does the P stand for? Does it stand for Padrick? Yeah. See, that's a character from Game of Thrones that I remember. I, look, it's going to be a lot of fun, right? this is going to be exciting. It certainly managed to capture the tone. It certainly managed to

cram in FaceTime for every character that I can remember that is going to play a role in this season. Even some you can't remember. I was mostly frustrated because it made the trailer is, the lighting the trailer is so dark. I could just see the smudges on my laptop screen. Yeah, I didn't know that HBO does that. HBO apparently makes the trailers darker so that they are more difficult to decode. Apparently? Oh, that's interesting, because I found that very challenging. Yeah, so Mallory and Jason obviously did decode it. They did an amazing video that's on YouTube now on the Ringer channel of essentially like an hour-long video breaking down this trailer with painstaking detail. So if you want like real scholarship about it, that's where I would go.

I thought it was pretty cool because obviously it's teasing the Battle of Winterfell, which has been rumored to be coming for a while. And it also seems that we're going to get a chance to see this ensemble really be. together, whereas last few seasons, I think we had a lot of pairs. We had a lot of people broken off into different parts of the map. It's going to be really cool just to see interaction that extends beyond that. What will be interesting, actually, is to see if we like them together. You know, there's so many pairings, and this has never been done before until, you know, until for John DeNeronra's until last season. And there's an open question as to whether they have chemistry or whether we want to see them, you know, actually sharing the screen together.

It'll be fun to see. I'm very interested in the ratio of lower-key human moments to the giant CGI what-the-fuckery that we know we're in that we have in store. Who are you happiest to see in this trailer? Because it's been a long time. Oddly, you know, I've always been really partial to Jamie Lannister, as has been well documented over the last few years. But I was really excited to see Aria and just seems like she's going to,

I mean, they're all going to play major roles in the action. But her trajectory is so fascinating to me. It's the one that I've really started to warm up to as I've kind of rewatched bits and pieces here over the last couple of weeks as we get ready for Talk to Thrones. I just think that her sort of evolution from tomboy to assassin has just been amazing. I am so excited about your preparation to get back into it for Talk to Thrones. I will tweet about that. I really want to know.

Like, I want to see footage of you riding a stallion through the streets of Philadelphia with Mallory and Jason on ATVs behind you, a la Creed 1. Yeah, it's, look, here's the thing, guys. What is it? Five weeks away now? April 17th, yeah.

Hard to imagine, but what else is there say? Let's go. Let's go. Josh Lewis asks us, and this is a great question, Josh. I really, it stopped me in my tracks. and I think even it'll stop Greenwald here. Josh Lewis says... Something I've been interested in for a while

is whether or not the Golden Age shows like Mad Men the Sopranos or Breaking Bad were truly monocultural in the way that a lot of us refer to them as. Ratings-wise, these shows rarely, if ever, touched a typical walking dead rating. And the universality they have now comes as much from people watching them

on streaming services. They had a way of dominating conversations on forums and sites like Vulture, ABC, and Grantland, but outside of that sphere, it was hard to find people in the real world who were watching on a week-to-week basis. Basically, his question is, was Golden Age TV as truly monocultural?

Was it ever truly monocultural? Or was it more that these extraordinary shows felt truly special to those paying attention at the time and slowly bled out into wider audiences through stream services? Josh, great question. I would say. Yeah.

And I mean that as a compliment, I think the way to think about it, I don't think he's wrong, but I also think about it in terms of calling at 99, 2000, Sopran. Prior to that, there was essentially culture. When you and I were growing up, in the 90s we watched ER and friends,

and millions and millions of people who we had, would maybe otherwise share nothing in common with also watched it. Starting with these prestige shows, suddenly there were two TVs. There was a TV that still raked in all the money and that people watched on a nightly basis, and that's a long line that stretches from sitcoms

that we watched the 80s all the way to Big Ben. theory and things like that. And then there was the second TV, this sort of new TV, then immediately elevated and signal boosted by the nascent internet and chat rooms and eventually Twitter, right? And this was the TV that was talked about by people like us in person and then on podcasts and then also talked about by people who

and the era, so I think it's really more that it was a monoculture, it was a tracts that was about it. And if you were watching, if you were invested in the second telehealth, then you were probably watching those shows. Now we just have a thousand televisions, and, you know, I mean, try even the us of three or four years ago trying to decode that there is a mad about you reboot

coming to Spectrum, which I think used to be Time Warner Cable. I'm a Spectrum subscriber. I don't get any of it, but I will, but just in terms of, partly because I believe this and partly to defend my own takes of the time, the last thick of me in the sense that it was watching, because clearly, but then because of those seasons of catching up on Netflix when those last six

came at the end of the summer week to week, it was as thrilling. Yeah, and I think that I would just add, Josh, that I've kind of been trying to interrogate my use of monoculture recently and the accuracy of that word. I think that it means different things to different people ironically, since it's supposed to be this kind of a way of describing something that everybody believed in sort of in the same way. But I think that sometimes when I say it, and when we talk about it, what we're really talking about is a television experience that's sort of passed away rather than specific kinds of television shows or specific TV shows. So really what I'm talking about is this run that happened, even, I'll even go outside of the

shows that you've mentioned that Andy was just talking about, but shows like 24 and lost, that I felt like had a certain whole. over people and also fostered a conversation around them that would kind of be what was being talked about at bars and like at work when you would come in the next day. And that's what Andy's talking about, that little bridge moment between the sort of mass entertainment of something like LA law, you know, or ER. And a certain specialized storytelling that was maybe happening on some of those HBO shows. And also like for Breaking Bad for Lost, to some extent the end of the Sopranos, since the question was how's it going to end.

There was an element, not necessarily of mystery, like, who done it, but more like how will they end it or how will they, how will they do it? And that was also something that was driving a lot of, you have to watch this on Sunday night or you're going to be behind. You have to watch this on Sunday night or, you know, you won't be part of the conversation the next day. And, you know, I think that that well and truly is coming to an end with Thrones now. Yeah, I think that's the piece of it that the question doesn't necessarily take.

into account the having to watch it at the same time and what that meant. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, let's move on to another question here. And this is one I really, really enjoy, but I wanted to hear your feelings on this as well. I can do my answer while you're thinking of yours. So New York City, spelled in a funny way, asks, assume you can travel back in time strictly for the purpose of the watch podcast. What year in TV and movie history would you want to?

to set up shot and discuss the most. And I have an answer for this. I would love for us to be doing the watch in the fall and winter of 1984. Oh, wow. Not only because we would be seven, and that would be hilarious, just for Andy and I to be

just seven-year-old, like, it's Andy Greenwald! And then, like, we talk about Transformers for two hours. Happily, I would love that. No, but the fall of 84, when I was looking kind of at different years, we would have the premiere of Miami Vice in September, which I thought would be pretty cool again for seven-year-olds to be talking about, or for us. Miami Vice premiered in September, and that kind of changed television a little bit, but you also

had a lot of like sitcom stuff on. But more than that, what a year for music that year? Because we would have Purple Rain, born in the USA. I think like a virgin came out that year. Unforgettable Fire and the Replacements Let It Be, I think came out on the same day in October. And then you also had R.E.M. Reckoning, Husker Do's and Arcade, the Smith's first album, I believe. The music was incredible. And then that fall for movies, there was Jonathan Demi's talking heads movie Stop Making Sense, Paris, Texas, Terminator, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Beverly Hills Cop. Plus, there was a presidential election. Jeez. So that would be fun, right? Better than mine. All I was going to say is, I'd like to fast forward 20 years to... the fall or late summer of because not only were we things.

I think a little bit slightly more erratic scheduling. Definitely erratic scheduling. Definitely. Yeah. I'm at the Borgata. Can I record this podcast? What was that? What was the little radio station next to like Frank,

the pizza place on Avenue? East Village radio, man. EVR. I feel like we would have just begged for mic space on that. But that's also the, that's the year born supremacy came out. Oh, yeah. And The Wire Season 3 came out.

Yeah. And I just feel like we are often enthusiastic on this podcast and we love things that we love. But like to be there when the lava was passion mountain like for those things. That would also be, oh, December of 2004 would have been Purple Hays by Cameron. Well, that's the trilogy right there. We're done. Right. Okay.

So I'm going to go with 1984. Andy's going to go with 2004. Let's say Brandon McShane wants to know, has the 2019 TV year started off stronger than 2018 and who holds the belt? Yes, stronger than 2018, definitely. 2018 was strangely 2017, which, yeah, what holds the belt? I'm not sure. You know, Russian doll is the one that comes to mind just because we talked about it the most. And again, in our no longer monoculture way of talking about TV,

That's the box that has been checked the most in conversations I've had with casual TV fans and industry people. What else am I, I mean, we've talked about a couple of the show, and I continue to stand for, what else is out there? What do you think? Well, I feel like this year, I don't know, I feel like this year is a little bit, feels a little bit more vibrant to me. I don't know whether that has more to do with the eyes with which I'm watching television. maybe in early 2018, I didn't feel like the Joie de Viva I do this year, but I feel like it's a kind of a cool time

where while there is always a new show every week, it seems like there are a couple of shows that are maturing and kind of in their second, third, fourth seasons, which is hard to come by, I think because we, you know, when we started the watch, it was sort of an end of a lot of things.

It felt like, you know, Kind of. I feel like, you know, at the end of Hollywood Perspectus and the end of the beginning of the watch, we were seeing a bunch of our favorite shows sort of wrap up. And now I feel like it's kind of cool to see like Good Fight and Expanse in their third and fourth seasons or whatever. And even things like Killing Even Atlanta moving into its second, third season, better call Saul in Middle Age. I appreciate the fact that we've got a bunch of shows that are kind of like really good at what they do. And then you also have event television.

which is really nice, which is so thrones, and I think Stranger Things counts as that, and Big Little Eyes counts as that. So you have like these kinds of, there's some fireworks going off, there's some shows that are aging like a nice wine, there's always new stuff to watch. So I feel like it's a better year so far for me

than it was at this point last year. I don't know what has the belt, though, because I've been in True Detective Land for three weeks, for the last, I mean, for six years. Yeah, I think the fact that we're not sure, maybe undercuts our argument a little bit, but it has a tenuous hold on it. I think you're right. Russian doll, I think, with a tenuous hole. This is a good one.

What else? What's a good one for you? Matt Linton wants to know, are there any 2019 albums that have caught your ear? I have only really been listening to these two massive playlists that one is made by David Holmes, where it's really a collection of what David Holmes plays on radio shows, and another is by James Lavelle, who we know as the guy behind Uncle. And they just made these like 700 song playlists that I just like let them rock on shuffle. That's really what I've been listening to. I haven't been, concentrating too much on new stuff. I know that you're freaking out about Vampire Weekend. I can't believe the album cover for their new record, Father of the Bride. It is like every video, which sold CDs for no good reason. Cover it needs to only that they're giving off.

And a fucking monumental masterpiece, there's been a lot of good records. His record, you know, I like the Gunna Drip or Drown 2 record. James Blake, Sharon Van Etton, all really good. And, you know, I have a podcast that at least a beautiful, beautiful solo album called Inferno that's getting almost as much burned in my... That's right. That's good. By the way, better oblivion community center, too. Oh, yeah, yeah. Is that album out yet?

Yeah, that album's out. It's good. I gotta cop that. I gotta get to listen. That's the movie bridgeers wall. Up from the wall. Phoebe Bridges, yeah, Connor Oberst one. Okay. Yeah, that's really good. Greenwald, thank you for calling in. I thought you had all these Briar Patch questions. That was all locked in.

Oh, wait. Yeah, let me ask you a couple of them. I mean, there's just, there's some. Let me ask you a Briar Pratch question. Hold on. Let's talk about it. I got to get back in the, back in the, you know. Okay. Andy. Okay. Andy.

Yeah. Andy. How did you go about requiring the rights of Briar Patch? Oh, great question. I didn't. Which was kind of a giant mistake. I just wrote a pretty different adaptation of the book for fun, for spec, on spec. And it was like, it was like, you.

an exercise, right? You're not supposed to do this, but basically, like, I just had always had this thought it could be, and my agents were like, I'd just do it. It's just a sample. It's fine. So I did it, and then our friend Sam SMA wanted to buy it and for Universal, and that's when we found out that Paramount had bought the rights to the book outright in 1984. So that was two and a half years ago. That seems like something we would have covered on 1984 watch. Yeah, it was basically, that's why in some level, I mean, this has all been fast and fortunate, but some of the delays were related to that, and that's why I'm happy to say that Paramount is a co-producer on the project. I have two studios, but don't do what I

did. You should get the rights to anything you adapt, and I'm very grateful to happen. So you think that they're, you know, this is, I guess, a bit of personal news, but I've been working on just kind of like my own kind of rollicking take on To Kill a Mockingbird. Do you think that I could run into any hurdles if I try to put that through? Do you think Sam would just buy that site unseen? How rollicking. It's kind of like it's to kill a mockingbird

meets John Wick. Wow. Let's see if we can get Sam on the line. No? I'm being told no. I'm being told lose this number. I know. Probably because Scott Roden will sue him just for taking the phone call, I bet.

Just for saying the word mockingbird. The other question is, what's it been like? This is from Leah. Leah wants to know a little bit more about the pitching and writing and production process but just to throw this to make this a little bit more specific what's been the most surprising thing

that's happened in the writer's room recently like I know that you're working with some really cool talented writers you're working on scripts for the season on like a day-to-day basis what is like actually talked about when you walk into a conference room and like there's a bunch of people sitting around a table

and you guys are like I'm kind of curious about what it's like to write collectively? I'm anti-table. We sit on couches. Oh, really? Yeah, you don't want people like stiff. You want them comfortable.

How dead poets of you? Yeah, exactly. Well, I stand on the table sometimes to lecture. Sometimes we talk about if anyone brought donuts. Yesterday, I made everyone watch the scene from the live action archie to impress girls. Eva, one of our writers, made everyone watch the end of Mulholland Drive so they could how grandparents could be scary. It's basically what you'd imagine. It's a fascinating and totally thrilling experience and process that is sort of hard to explain. We're now like eight or

nine weeks in. And what's amazing is how everyone contributes to play and people sort of gravitate towards that naturally in terms of maybe one person is generally more skeptical. One person is being more mindful of the procedural mystery elements of the show. One person is, that he hates mysteries and yet is employed by me on this show. That's good, though. But that's a nice, it's a nice mix. And on the beginning, you know, when I sold the show, I sort of pitched a version of what the season would be. And there are big, big story beats across the tent.

And what we've been doing is as we break each episode saying, okay, well, we know we want it to feel like this. Because, you know, to some degree, and have their own particular feel. If we know we're going to have these sorts of things in the episode, and then you sort of of piece by piece build it. And then it's funny because you ask me that question for it, but I don't actually make it. I'm not in there doing it. They're in there doing it right now. Here you're doing it. On the fifth episode, and I'm

here talking to you. I'll let you go, man. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you next week. Probably no show on Monday, or we'll record something from Texas for the feed. But, I mean, I'm going to miss you. Have fun. Have fun in Texas. Thanks, man. And feel free to give me a little bit of a social boost

on Twitter if you want. Okay. I'm going to think about a way to do that that's both passive and aggressive. And then it'll come across your transit. I'll have a lone star for you. Goodbye. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Twix. The perfect partner for coffee.

I'm not kidding, man. Next time when you get your coffee, when the coffee break hits, do me a favor. Do Andy a favor. He's not even here, but he agrees with me. He's signed off on this. you got to pick up a Twix and you got to try it with your coffee. That sounds crazy. No, it doesn't.

You can dip, dunk, or stir to make your afternoon show a little more exciting and tasty. Now, there's a lot of, like, elaborate coffee flavor choices being made by the public right now. You know, like, everybody's doing all these different things with flavors and powders and foams and macha and whatever you guys are doing. But, like, let me tell you something that I like. I like a solid cup of coffee with almond milk. You don't have to blow my mind. And when I have it, though, it's what I add to the coffee.

It's what I have with the coffee. That's what takes it to the next level. Twix is the perfect partner for coffee because no matter which side you prefer, whether it's the left twix, which flows caramel on a crunchy cookie that's bathed in chocolate or the right twix, which cascades caramel on a crispy cookie

that's cloaked in chocolate. You can't go wrong. I personally, I go left. I like to flow. I like to crunch, and then I like to bathe. That's my vibe, but you can go right,

you can go left. I also just want to say, Twix is a weirdly effective coffee stirer. Kaya, did you know that? I did not. So almond milk tends to bunch up a little bit, especially if you get like the wild natural almond milk.

I like, I basically like the most processed and fake version of almond milk. But if you get like that really good almond milk that basically breaks apart when it's in the coffee, stir it up, man, and stir it up with a twix. That's all, and that's my, that's my advice for life. If I was giving a valedictorian speech, that's what I would say to the graduates. Stir it up with a twix. Drive to your nearest convenience store to pick up a twix and coffee today. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by the good fight. Christine Branski is back as Diane Lockhart in the new season of The Good Fight.

You know her, you love her. She is the patron saint of this podcast. I love The Good Fight. It's premiering March 14th. Bransky stars alongside Cush Jumbo, Rose Leslie from Game of Thrones, Sarah Steele, Audra MacDonald, Delroy Lindo, and Michael Sheen, who joins the cast this year. I love this show so much. Join the fight at CBS.com slash The Watch to redeem your free trial of Cee.

CBS All Access and catch up on the first two seasons ahead of the season premiere March 14th exclusively on CBS All Access. I feel like I've been banging the drum for the show for years now. This is your opportunity to see what I'm talking about. It's a chance to catch up. You guys can just go to CBS.com slash The Watch and you can catch up on the seasons with your free trial of CBS All Access. All right. We are back. Andy had to jump off, but Kaya is going to join me now.

Kaya, say hello. Hello. Hi. So, Kaya is obviously our producer, if you didn't know. She's often referred to as the youngest member of the watch team out of the three of us and a harsh critic of my culinary habits. But Kaya is going to be giving me some questions here from the mailbag. So, Kyle, let's get started. All right, let's do it. First, we're going to start with one from Alan Jones. How big of a competitor do you think Disney pluse will be? Will it take more than classic Disney movies to outmustle the likes of Netflix and Amazon? Can I ask you a personal question? Sure. Do you refer to it as Disney pluse in your everyday life?

I don't refer to Disney pluse often at all. Okay, so like at Albertsons and you're checking out, you're not like, are you guys going to subscribe to Disney Plus? No, I'm not. But if I was doing that, then I would call it Disney pluse because I'm classy. My answer to Allen's question is I think Disney's going to be a major player due to the significance of its library alone. You know, so the crown jewels of Disney, I think, are going to shine about as bright as any of these platforms have. They have the Disney Library of Children's Classics, which are going to obviously attract like a huge base of families that I think want to have those shows or those movies, rather, at their fingertips as they have over the decades since they've been out. And we're talking everything from Mary Poppins to, you know, Dumbo and Beauty and The Bees.

and Little Mermaid and all the stuff that I don't watch. So their crown jewels will be brighter, but for me, Netflix's appeal is not, um, it's not about how loud it can get. It's about the constant hum. I know I'm mixing my metaphors here a little bit, but Netflix,

the Netflix experience and, and Kai, I mean, you jump in here, if you agree to me, it's really about like watching three episodes of friends back to back, and then you wind up randomly watching some like foreign crime show you've never heard of more than it is appointment viewing.

Would you agree with that? Um, yeah, I mean, to an extent, I'm definitely one to pop on the office if I just want to like turn my brain off for a little bit or like I've been really liking Schitt's Creek lately. Um, but also I mean, if there is a particular like Netflix show or a movie like Triple Frontier that's going to come out next week, that's going to be more appointment viewing for me. That goes in the G-Cal. Yes, exactly. Exactly. Like I haven't noted in my head that Triple Frontier will be out next Wednesday and I will be watching it. Is Triple Frontier important to someone in your life?

No, it's important to me. Okay, so like, I completely agree with you. That's a good point, that Netflix does have its signature things that people. I mean, I already am kind of like mentally preparing for stranger things in July, like, as a normal person does. You know, one of the things that I did think about with Alan's question, though, is when I first moved to New York to work with Andy, you know, we had known each other before that, but I moved down to New York, was working at Spin Magazine's website in 2000. And I moved down there. I was working at the website with him. And there was this, I wouldn't say tension, but like it was the early days of the editorial internet as like magazines had websites, you know, and you would go to, you know, the New York

Times.com or SpinMag. Spin.com to read not only stuff from the magazine, but original content that people who were working at those websites were creating. And there was a little bit of, is definitely a discussion all the time about what do we put on this website that won't detract from what we're really trying to sell here, which is magazine subscriptions because that was the business model back then.

So they wanted to basically make sure that the magazines still special enough is still authoritative enough and that the website was really only like additive and not really its own editorial voice. And that obviously has changed over the decade plus since then. But I was kind of thinking about that relationship

with regards to some of the big Disney properties like MCU and Star Wars. I think that will be the biggest test of their seriousness about this platform is like, does anything canon altering happen in a Marvel show that's on Disney Plus? Does anything canon altering or truly important happen in the Mandalorian that changes like our understanding of Star Wars? Or is the Mandalorian like in the conversation for like some of the best Star Wars content, you know? And if they treat it seriously, I think it'll be paradigm shifting. And if they look at it as an extension of, uh, the movies, then I think it will be, it'll be okay. And that's kind of what the Netflix Marvel shows were. They were okay. They had some

highs, but they were generally like pretty good. But I'm really curious to see like, if you want to know how seriously they're taking their streaming platform, it's will they ever put something in there that will change everybody's perception of that piece of intellectual property. So I guess that's the answer to that question. This is when we got from Mark Weaver that I found interesting as the resident young person on the watch. Mark Weaver says, I'm a middle school teacher and the majority of my students consume the vast majority of their media through streaming. YouTube, Twitch, and Netflix, mostly Riverdale and older comedies like The Office and Friends. What do you see for the future of cultural criticism as younger generations,

seem to be moving towards more ephemeral content. Do you think Gen Z will graduate into more traditional forms of storytelling or has streaming, particularly YouTube and Twitch, fundamentally altered the landscape? That's a great question, Mark. I've been thinking about it since I saw it yesterday. I think it was on our Facebook page, and I think it also popped up on my Twitter feed.

I think about this all the time, because we have these conversations here at the Ringer about our video content. you know, and about what kind of, I think that you bring your biases as someone who's grown up watching things your whole life. And it can be really hard to understand like, well, what is it that people want to watch on YouTube? And how is that different than what people would want to watch if it was on a cable network, right? And that's even happened over the years, to be honest, with some of the after shows we've done. You know, what Jason and I were kind of doing with the flat circle in collaboration with folks like Sharma, on you and Jason Gallagher and Steph Snowden here was trying to make something that was very

much in line with the way people watch things on YouTube. It's usually, you feel like a degree of engagement with the people who you're watching on YouTube that's sometimes disarming and sometimes feels a little bit like overly casual to me, but that's because I'm 40, or I'm older than 40, but as I'm in my 40s. And, you know, how do you kind of create something that follows along a structure and has expertise and is able to deliver certain things while also creating that sense of intimacy with people. And I think that that is weirdly what Twitch and YouTube do is it does create a sense of intimacy. And it also seems to be a sense of constants.

I guess that is that the word I'm looking for? Constance? Basically, it's like when I look at a vlogger who's like, I'm just going to live, when somebody's is like, I'm just streaming for six hours. like that just seems to me it's almost like not dissimilar to what Kyle was saying when she wants to turn her brain off

and watch the office it's like there are people who are just like I'm just gonna turn my brain off and have this guy playing video games in the background and I'll engage and maybe I'll go in the chat or maybe I'll watch it for like intently and watch this guy play Fortnite for a while but for the most part maybe it's just

it's like wallpaper or it's like having the office on and that might not be that much different than the way Andy and I grew up and we would come home from school and turn on syndicated sitcom for a couple of hours. I do wonder whether or not there will be a gradual, long-term impact on storytelling. I mean, I think that is legitimate.

It's funny that Mark mentions Riverdale as, you know, one of the shows that his students are watching Riverdale is about as, you know, old-fashioned as it gets. It's soap opera. And they're watching shows like Friends in the Office, which are in themselves dated comedies in terms of like their cultural references and whatever. But I think that part of the reason why people are so into friends in the office is that there's so many damn episodes. I mean, Kai, do you like that, knowing that you're not, like, ever going to run out of these? Yeah, I mean, I think it's that, and that's just, like,

the feeling that I can just kind of jump in wherever and, like, just sort of go. I saw on another question that someone wished that Netflix had, like, a shuffle option for shows like these, and that's kind of what I would want to because sometimes, like, I don't, when I watch the office, I'm not watching front to back. You're not watching chronologically or, like, yeah, you're not going to season through season. No, I'm just kind of, like, like picking a random season and a random episode and going from there. Huh. So that would be interesting.

It's like I, I mean, I think that this almost ties back into the Disney pluse conversation because this is, I think, ultimately the thing that Netflix likes is the feeling that you can come to Netflix and not never leave, like Hotel California, but that you can spend all of your viewing time within Netflix

and that there is no kind of show and no kind of movie that you could want to watch that they don't have. Now, do they make as good movies and shows as HBO or A24? Not right now. But they might someday. And in some ways, ease of use, having everything kind of in front of you like that, and having this weird algorithmic, like, oh, this thing came up, or this next episode started playing,

or I finally decided to give Big Mouth a chance or whatever. That is just so much different than, This show is on at 8.30 on Thursday, and it's going to stop every five minutes for commercials, and you can tape it, or you could get it on iTunes and pay for that single episode or a season pass. There's like so many different barriers of entry there. And even though I think that there will be a long time before those networks go away fully, I think that that's ultimately what Mark is kind of getting at. How that changes how we talk about this stuff is really interesting. You know, I think you can do some pretty high-level cultural criticism on various, like, forms of storytelling and personality-driven television or video on YouTube and on Twitch. But it's not the same thing as analyzing, like, someone's use of or subversion of three-act structure or mysteries or whatever. I mean, I think that it is a different language all to itself. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by On Running.

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Yeah, so prestige is tough because what's prestige anymore, right? Like there's Killing Eve in Atlanta and these things that are like sort of up for a lot of awards. But like we were talking about before with the monocultural thing, I think that our idea of there being like five or six really good shows every year, I think that there is some there's a degree of samuiness in people's top 10 list from 2018 but even with the podcast that Andy and I did with Sam there was some real variance

I mean you do have people who are like that show you like that you think is the best show sucks and you know that there is a little bit more of a diversity of opinion I think which is a good thing I think that that means that there's enough TV that's stimulating enough different parts of our brains and our collective

kind of the collective creative muscles that we all have when we're watching television, that that's a good thing. But as far as stuff that's been cut short, I would nominate two. One is Channel Zero, which was a show on sci-fi, which I didn't really ever feel like properly caught its wave. But to me, was about as good as horror can get on television. And this is a show that was created by Nick Antasca, who I believe,

has a Hulu show coming up soon, and I think he's going to come on the watch to talk about it, a show called The Act. But Channel Zero was based on a series of like, basically, internet urban legends, but creepypastas, which are these like online stories that are essentially like really creepy campfire stories that somehow involve like whether, no, they don't necessarily involve internet culture, but, you know, like kind of slender man type, did this really happen, like, mythology. And I thought Channel Zero was incredible, though the seasons that I saw. It was an anthology series, so each season did a different one of those stories. My favorite, I think, was no end house, but a lot of people are really into Hidden Door or, or rather Dream Door. So there's

a lot of great stuff on Channel Zero that I would recommend people check out if they get a chance. And then the other one is Detroiters, which was a show on Comedy Central with Sam Richardson and Tim Robinson that I thought was just really, really, really funny and never quite caught on to that workaholics level of fandom. But I thought it was just a great sitcom. All right. Next question from Chuck Salick. Borrowing a question that someone posted on this page a week or two ago, what novel would you most like to see turned into a series? any you think would work especially well as a miniseries.

Chuck, good question. I think I've said I've pitched this before, but I feel fine like throwing this out there multiple times just because it's not ever going to happen. At least I don't think it will. But World War Z would make an incredible miniseries. And especially if they did it slightly more faithfully to Max Brooks's book,

not only in terms of the stuff that happened, so for people don't know, World War Z is a 2006 book written by Max Brooks that is basically an oral history of a zombie war.

Now, I know that sounds pretty silly or genre E and it is, but I think that the cool thing that what he does is basically treated as seriously as possible.

So what would be the global medical community's response to a zombie apocalypse? What would be the military response? What would be the political response? What would be the social response? And he thinks about it globally. So there's stuff that's set in China. There's stuff that's set in Israel. There's stuff that's set in Colorado. There are these huge political decisions that are made. And while I actually enjoyed World War Z quite a bit, and I'm sad that David

Fincher is actually not making World War Z too, which just think it would have been like an absolute scream to see him do that. there is a version of World War Z that you could do on TV, although there are some huge set pieces, that you could do on TV that would actually model itself after almost like a Ken Burns documentary where it's basically a lot of talking head interviews about this action that I think would be really, really cool.

And I obviously would not be surprised if that actually happens. I assume Paramount owns the rights to World War Z and it wouldn't even shock me if it winds up on Paramount Network in the next five years. So that would be the one that I would pick. Kai, I think we have time for one more. Okay, well, we have another one from Cal O'Boyle. So you get a choice of director for an up-and-coming movie and gives you six options.

So you get to choose a director for a Marvel movie, a DC movie, a Netflix show, a Blumhouse flick, and an A-24 flick. So five. Okay, so I'm going to slightly do a little bit of a variation on Cal's question here. Because I think up-and-coming director is where up-and-coming directors sort of run into a little bit of trouble. because we keep picking these young directors to take on these huge franchises. And we've had a couple of experiences with like Josh Trank and some other people where it seems to like really kind of like

gum up their careers a little bit. Maybe there's other reasons behind that, obviously. But I think that it would be cool if you got some veterans involved here too. So for my Marvel movie, which you kind of define as maybe like witty, bright, usually a big ensemble, has a lot of moving parts, but has an element of subversion and originality to it, I would love to see Danny Boyle try it. You know, I know that Danny Boyle was supposed to do the Bond movie and left the project because

of creative differences. You could easily see that happening with a Marvel movie, but he's such a relentlessly inventive filmmaker that I would love to see him on a Marvel movie. and I also think that his handling of a lot of verbal witticism is like really, it's, he'd be perfect for this kind of such scenario. For the DC movie, again, another veteran, you think it's a little more gloomy, a little bit more noir, atmospheric. I was thinking, Carl Franklin.

Carl Franklin is a really accomplished film and television director. He directed one of my favorite movies called One False Move, like a couple decades ago now, but since then he did Devil in a Blue D.L. He's done tons of television like The Wire. And I would love to see what he did with one of the DC characters. For my Netflix show, I know that this seems reductive and probably a bit of a layup, but why don't we just let Catherine Bigelow direct Narcos?

How come we haven't done that yet? For Blumhouse Flick, one of my favorite horror directors and producers is Roxanne Benjamin. She worked on Southbound and XX and VHS as in various roles. roles as a producer and a director, and she's got a new movie coming out called Body at Brighton Rock, and I think it would be cool to see her do a Blumhouse movie. And for 824, it seems pretty obvious after mid-90s with Jonah Hill, let's let Michael Sarah take a shot and let Michael Sarah make a movie. And if you've ever seen Michael Sarah's Criterion collection, like the closet videos they do, where they're at the Criterion offices and people are just like picking DVDs out of the merch

closet, his is really funny. So I recommend that. Guys, thank you so much for your questions. It's been really fun answering them. Like I said, we'll have a Texas show going up, I think, on Monday. And then next Thursday, I would expect it to be incredibly triple frontier heavy. So look forward to that next Thursday. Thanks for listening, Branski's. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by The Good Fight.

Christine Branski is back as Diane Lockhart and the new season of The Good Fight, premiering March 14th, along with Cush Jumbo, Rose Leslie, Sarah Steele, Audra McDonald, Delroy Lindo, join the fight at CBS.com slash the dash watch to redeem your free trial of CBS all access and catch up on the first two seasons ahead of the season premiere on March 14th exclusively on CBS all access. That's CBS.com slash the dash watch to redeem your free trial of CBS all access. Today's episode of The Watch was brought to you by On running. On is taking the running scene by storm as the fastest growing running brand in the world based around the wrap. radical idea of zero gravity running. On's clean and minimalistic design, as well as its sole

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