The Watch - What Is Paramount+ Trying to Offer? Plus: ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘Nomadland’

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

Paramount+ announced a bunch of series that will be available on its platform this week, including several Taylor Sheridan properties (1:00) and a ‘Flashdance’ revival (23:21). Plus, ‘It’s a Sin’ may be the best show of 2021 so far (36:25), and the very American beauty of ‘Nomadland’ (48:52). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald 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 on the other line. The only Taylorverse he's interested in is a Tammy Taylorverse. It's Andy Greenwald. Wow.

And you're not even talking about Swift. It was right there. I'm talking about Taylor Sheridan, baby. Andrew Greenwald and I have gathered here today on Thursday to discuss Paramount pluce and they just rolled out a lot programming that we're going to break down. We're also going to talk about a new show on HBO Max that we're very excited about. I would go as far as a say since it's the first great show of 2021. It's a Sin.

So we're going to discuss the first two episodes of that series today. And we're also going to chat a little bit about Nomad Land, which is available on Hulu and is the favorite for Best Picture at the Oscars. So let's get into the watch. Did you know about one in three people with plaques psoriasis may also develop psoriotic arthritis, which causes joint pain, stiffness, and swelling? Does this sound like you? Listen to what it sounds like to be a million miles away. Tremfaya, Gucalcumab, taken by injection, is a prescription medicine for adults with moderate to severe plaques psoriasis, who may benefit

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Tap this ad to learn more about Trimphia, including important safety information. This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever have a plan come together out of nowhere and realize you're missing something? Like a last-minute beach day, a spontaneous hike or an outdoor movie night you didn't plan for. That's when Prime's same-day delivery as you're back.

Getting you exactly what you need fast and reliably so you can actually join the moment instead of watching from the sidelines. Same day delivery, it's on Prime. Visit Amazon.com slash Prime to find millions of items delivered fast, available in select areas. Terms apply. Andrew, Joel, Embed Greenwald. No, I haven't done that before.

I've never called you that before. Now you have to call me that forever. Every single time. Andy, what's up? It's Thursday, a fun show today. Some serious topics, some lighthard topics. I wanted to start out, as we always do, is just asking you how you're doing. You look great.

Wow, thanks. Thanks, buddy. I appreciate that. You know, doing okay. Keeping on. Keeping on. I got nothing new to report. I mean, the big news from my household is probably while we're recording,

the seventh book of the Harry Potter series is being finished by my, elder child, which is a seismic event. Does anything important happen at the end of that book? Is that the last one? It's the last one. Okay, so it's mad important stuff happens at the end of that book. Super, a lot of magical S happens, yeah. Yeah.

And it's interesting, too, because she's experiencing. Did you not swear because you're worried your daughter might be listening? She's excited that she would be a name check here. It's interesting watching, you know, there are certain conventions of widescreen franchise entertainment that we just are used to. They're just built into the culture. They're built into certain stories. You and I famously, infamously have not read the Harry Potter books ourselves, but I think that certain story beats wouldn't be surprising or could be surmised. But my daughter this morning while we're brushing our teeth is like, I'm almost done. That's amazing. I'm really impressed.

And she said, a lot of people are dying, though. And I was like, yeah, that's how it is in these fineries. She went, but not enough bad people are dying. And I was like, now you're sound, now you sound like a neocon. Now it sounds like she's reading Paul Wolfowitz's memoirs. She got to get her Twitter account. If Uncle Chris was in the mix, which I can't be really right now, I think if she was like, I'm almost done. Yeah. I would just pull out Lonesome Dove and be like, actually, you're just getting started. Oh my God. Exactly, right? You know, I want to talk about people dying. I did show her Lonesome Dove as an attempt to gain to make her be impressed because I also read a long book and she said, but there's only one of those. That's true. So,

well, there's three. There's three of those. Well, there's four in the series. Yeah. But I think collectively it's not the same amount of pages. So that's the news from my, what's going on with you? Man, nothing much. I'm kind of in a rut cooking wise. Like I made a bunch of lentils earlier in the week and usually it's something that me and my wife eat. She kind of like abandoned it this week. So I've just been like grinding these lentils out. She tapped out on the lentils. Well, I suggested pouring a tremendous amount of adobe chili sauce like in it like to kind of give it a little bit of a kick. And I just get like insane heartburn from it. But like I feel like it's my duty to finish the lentils. So you just sitting there like cry eating like Andy Daley in the Pancakes episode of

esophagus just like emulsified. Can you run this back for me? Like, can you just actually quote yourself accurately in how you suggested pouring in a lot of adobe pepper? So she does a lot of the work here. I am more of a chef de cuisine. I'm sort of like,

are you Tony Romo? Are you like, looks like she's going to pour in some spices. She was like, actually. So you just boil the lentils, throw them in the cast iron, you throw some garlic in,

you throw a bunch of seasoning in. And then there is a, a pepper like in adobe sauce. You chop the pepper up roughly and throw it in, but then it's optional to like, just add a little sauce. Add a little of the sauce that comes in. Yeah. Or the canned liquid.

And she goes, you know, you want me to put some in? And I go, you can't put too much in. You dared her? No, I'm just saying because like I was like, I just, it's one of those things that looks a lot better than it tastes. So I was just like, this looks great. Like just fucking lacquer this whole thing up. And then, since then, it's very conspicuous by the fact that she has not had one since.

She has not, because we make tacos with them. What's incredible is the ways in which, and I think people listening to the podcast will appreciate this because they know, I even name check this probably about a week ago, the legend of C. Ryan on like the baseball diamond, right? Sure. You know, or the community pool. Like, to quote that great tweet that our ringer colleague sent about Ethan Hawks. I mean, shoot or shoot, you know what I mean? Like you have a fire in your belly for competition that is even bigger than the fire in your belly post-adobo chilies.

Plainview-esque. But what's interesting is that since you are not out, you know, on the field of play or combat, this manifests in the kitchen now where you were like, I basically challenge you to destroy my gastrointestinal lining. Regardless of the spices, and I'm going to throw this out here, this might be a little controversial, But do you remember that incredibly, in retrospect, incredibly dumb days of early quarre when

when everyone was just like, nature is healing. The Venice canals are full of plankton. And also I baked six loaves of bread. There's two dozen coyotes walking down my street. Like, finally. Like, that's not a good thing. Have you read a Cormick McCarthy novel? Like, they know more than we do.

Yeah. The thing for me is that that was a big, like, everyone was like, well, there's not going to be food in the stores, you know, so you got to get a lot of dry beans. You planted like a bunch of corn in your backyard? That would be a good idea. And then I actually, I raised a lot of it and I made a very, very, very small baseball diamond. That's right. But only, was the guy's name Eddie Gitt?

What was the name of like the little person who played professional baseball? It was brought in as a decoy. Only he showed up in my tiny backyard field of dreams, field of mini dreams, mini field of dreams. Many field of dreams. Anyway, look up that story if you don't know about it. It's true. I like Chris, and I know all the people dying to hear about our opinions about all the Taylor-Shared and shows are hang on every word here. I like a nice, a nice bean.

You know, you make a nice pot of beans. You can use them for a lot of things. But here's the thing that they don't say about making a nice pot of beans. Even if you get the very, you know, the special like Rancho Gordo. You sound like Allison Lerner right now, by the way. Well, but, you know, you can still hear my voice. I have not been canceled yet. I haven't finished my anecdote.

My point is, beans are a collaborative sport. Between who? Between the members of a household. Oh, not you and the people. You cannot make a, wasn't that a spoon song on the 20-year-old album, The World's Can Tell, me and the beans. Not about this. You can't make a large pot of beans and then have everyone else in your family ghost on you,

which is what happened to me repeatedly in early quarrel, where I was like, these are beautiful. like this is a varietal of bean. Rachel Gordo, yeah, right. Like, it is a varietal from the north of Mexico that they brought back to life. It is a beautiful speckled color. I'm going to put, you know, celery and half an onion.

I'm going to really make something special here. And everyone was so encouraging. Oh, it smells good in here. Oh, look at the beautiful color. And then your boy just ate beans for two weeks because no one else wanted any. They were so supportive. But when I needed the most, they left me.

And this is not even with adobe. So I think that I appreciate your taking one for your team, but I think you should remove the peppers from the equation and ask, do you have a bean partner? No, I don't. Not anymore. Okay. No, I'm rolling solo. Thank you. I'm sorry. Hard truths. Let's talk about the rise of a new streaming network. How about that? Okay. Fine. So this week, Paramount Plus did a big show and tell about their offering. So starting, I think on March 5th, CBS All Access will turn into Paramount Plus. They'll be offering this new service. I believe it is 10 bucks a month for the ad-free.

tier. There's a $5 a month option, which is directly competitive with Peacock, if I remember correctly, about the pricing options in terms of the ad-supported versions. And Bob Backish and everybody from over at Paramount did this big presentation about what they had to offer. And I have to admit that there was a little bit of skepticism. I don't know necessarily that I've come out of it being like, this is an essential thing to have in your back pocket and your streaming library. But I was impressed by what they kind of rolled out because a couple of the streaming services that we've seen Max, Peacock, I think had slightly starter gun run five yards and then be like, and you just wait until we finish the race. And Paramount Plus, while a lot of it was like eventually this will be

there, this will be there. I was kind of impressed with just the breadth of offerings. So they have, and I should have mentioned like, you know, occasionally Paramount Plus, well, you'll hear advertisements on the watch for that. Like this is a separate conversation. So I'm just saying they have two things that they are emphasizing that I haven't seen another streaming service emphasized, which is news and sports. So obviously there are sports streaming services. You can get ESPN Plus. You can do all that stuff.

And the way in which they were foregrounding that, I thought, was distinctive among other streaming services. And also, I didn't really consider this, but they are offering a library of 2,500 movies, or upwards of 2,500 movies by the end of the year, they said. So already you kind of like, your eyes are getting a little bit bigger. pupils are getting dilated. There's a lot of stuff to dig into there. And then they hit us with a bunch of announcements of shows that they're going to be developing, including, yes, from all the jokes we made in the beginning of the show, a bunch of Taylor Sheridan shows, which are a particular

interest to Young Wynn River over here. But Greenwald, I wanted to see just generally speaking what you thought about the big rollout. My first comment is related to what you said about hoping to have 2,500 movies by the end of the year. I just pictured Doug from Paramount. just locked in a vault somewhere. It's just like road trip comes out and he's just like... He just has to upload all of it. He's filming it with his phone. I mean, they better hurry.

Yeah. You know? So I think you're really correct to point. Well, two things. Peacock also has launched with news and sports as part of the focus and appeal. Like they have some Premier League stuff, right? They have some original news content. Medi Hassan has a news show every night on there and you can stream

MSNBC, blah, blah, blah, blah. But you're right. I think the fact that you called it out speaks to the larger point, which is that Paramount Plus is a little bit late in the launch game, but they have the runway for a more proper launch that was denied Peacock and to a lesser degree HBO Max last year because of the pandemic. Best laid plans with Peacock, you know, it was going to launch with the Olympics, which was going to make it a must-see destination and really showcase the total vertical integration that they hope to achieve with all of their services and channels. TMJECDine.

Yes. And a shine-Arwig company, yes. And obviously, the original content for both services has been markedly slow, although HBO Max has been making a lot of interesting international deals that have helped bolster its library. Which we will talk about them. We will discuss later, yeah.

And we're even going to get to it again today. The other, I think the thing that I took away was, and I do want to get into some of the specific shows, not even in the Sheridanverse, they really went for a, let's blow them out of the water presentation. Yeah. Like, let's really knock people out with the amount of stuff we have. And I have to say that I was surprised by it. I was impressed by it.

And it made me realize that one of the things that it's not been underreported in, like, the business press, obviously, but I think we haven't focused on it. And we've talked about Paramount Plus is one of the reasons why there was a late start was because as a company, there was an internal civil war for many, many years between CBS and the larger corporate parent of Viacom. There was a less moonvis on the CBS side and Sumner Redstone and which side of the company was going to prevail. And that led to kind of short.

Some Redstone family drama? Yes. And it led to some short-term thinking, like launching CBS All Access as an independent streaming service when now, as of next week. it is just folded into this larger paramount thing. So in a way, what we're seeing is the first time that this larger corporate monolith has been able to fully flex as itself. And the results are, you know, I think it's not exactly shock and awe, but it's impressive because they have a lot of corporate synergy to play with now. And obviously a deep, deep bench of IP and titles and things that trigger

nostalgia or fondness in people's minds. And so they went for it and it's noteworthy. I want to ask you a question, and I want you to be really honest with me. In the Bob Wars, is Backish coming for number two? Is Chepec got to watch his back? Because Iger is number one. It's Iger Mountain. It's the Iger counter. We know all about it.

You know, like we can't touch Bob. But the other bobs are, I think there's a little bit of a Bob dog fight happening. I appreciate what you're trying to do. I know you're trying to stir up clickbait. You know, I mean, that's that's what you do on this podcast. always dancing with the hot button issues. But listen to me, let me say this. If you are not the most powerful Bob at your own corporation,

you're not in the Bob race. You're not even in the Bob race. So Cheapac, you don't even think is in the conference. He's not in the medal ceremony. If LeBron James can't have the Lakers on a winning streak without Anthony Davis, he's not the MVP. Joe L.M.B. is the MVP. You know what I'm saying?

And so for the same reason, Iger tried to gracefully leave the stage and they pulled him back. That's what happened. That's absolutely what happened. That is how I choose to remember it. Backish was, he was brought back onto the court like Willis Reed with Goofy and Mickey holding him up. You know, sometimes people talk about bear markets or bull markets and we're like, oh yeah, I'm very bullish on this. I'm very backish on Bob Backish.

I was digging into him a little bit and I saw this quote from a while back where he called the sort of Paramount Studios, CBS Viacom. He called them arms dealers, which means his nickname now is War Dog. But second of all, by the way, incredible synergy. I was going to ask our loyal legion of photoshopping listeners

to take the poster for the film War Dogs and put Backish in both. Both Miles Teller and Jonah Hill's face. He gives good quotes, but he was very, very confident in his company's ability to make hits. And I think part of that is rooted in CBS's still, you know, they still have like this stranglehold on network television and ratings.

But, you know, I hadn't really thought about the fact that Paramount makes a lot of really big shows for other places. And that CBS, Paramount CBS still makes a lot of really big shows for other places. So there was an air of showmanship, I guess, to yesterday's presentation or whatever day it came out. Yeah, I think it was yesterday. Let's talk about some of the shows. they're going to do. So like I mentioned, there's 2,500 movies coming in the library. They have the CBS News. They have the Champions League. They have the Masters. They have March Madness. They have a bunch of stuff going on. All that's very relatively attractive to people. But then there is

always going to be, they're going to win the day with their show announcements, which seems to be what you and I spend so much time on the show doing now is just sort of evaluating these these rollouts. And by the way, before we even get into the specific shows, when you're talking about the different arms that they already have in this arms race, I have to represent for Attington Island and say, Nickelodeon is a Viacom slash Paramount company. And that immediately makes them a player in the Kid Wars. You know, there are benches here in Los Angeles that just say Paramount Plus coming March 5th.

And there is the copaganda dog from Paw Patrol and Dora the Explorer. And two out of two children have noticed these benches in my personal small sample size automobile. So that is one of the reasons why, you know, Disney Plus was a hit out of the gate, was because it's just stuff that kids needed to see and parents were going to have to pay for. So now let's get into the stuff that they're going to try to lure the parents with. Right. So the parents are coming for fatal attraction, the TV show. Am I right? We read this list, read this list where they were just like naming movies that Doug had already uploaded and saying that they were in development as TV series.

I honestly, though, is this a bad plan? Here's some of the movies that will be getting series adaptation series reboots. The parallax view in Love Story. I don't know about you. A lot of unanswered questions at the end of Love Story. Love Story extended universe. Fatal Attraction, also a pretty definitive ending to that movie. The Making of the Godfather series, the Italian Job, and Flash Dance.

Here's what I have to say about this. And this is, I think, I don't know, we should come up with a term potentially in German to describe the split in which we have to engage with culture now when we talk about on the podcast. There is the business hat and then there's the creative hat. Blanket statement, any of these could be good. Some of them probably will be. Some might even be great. From a corporate strip mining perspective, this is what you do. This is what you do. This is putting on front street the stuff that you just have and you own and you keep it moving and you keep everything siloed within one company. You know, you harvest material from the mines that you already own. You hand it off to workers who

are under overall deals for your corporation and you turn it in. to future content that can be spun off on the streaming service that you also own and you keep it all in house and keep it moving. That's what makes sense. And, you know, as someone who is under an overall deal at a different company, like very, very popular and very, very forgotten movies are put on my desk all the time. Like saying, like, got to take on this? Any ideas for this? That is the business of Hollywood right now. And so you can't front on it. You can't deny it. That said, when I read this in a tweet, my first response was, and I say this is, again, I'll put this through my personal lens. I am someone who loved making a TV show, and I am working on multiple projects right now,

hopefully one of which will come to fruition as another TV show for people to watch. Maybe we should pump the brakes. Maybe this is enough TV shows. That was my honest to God reaction. At this point, we have now clips the point where I think it's hard for TV critics or TV podcasters to keep up with stuff. You and I have tried this one out, this whole chestnut out where it's like, it's just so hard to keep up with TV these days. TV's great. There's something to watch every night. I do not think that there is any world in which anyone can watch all of this stuff. And obviously, the business model is showing them that if just a few people or enough people like something enough to stay subscribed to a service, it is worth the investment of making the show. I presume that is what

they are thinking. It does not feel like any of these things that they're talking about here, with the exception maybe of some of the Sheridan shows, are necessarily them going hit hunting. You know, like a few years ago, we were all wondering what the next Game of Thrones was going to be, what was going to be this huge investment into a fantasy world that you could build out, that you could have a multiple season blockbuster show and then maybe spin off into different directions, prequel, sequels, side stories, what have you. Obviously, you know, we'll see what HBO Max does with the Game of Thrones shows that they have in development or in production. But none of these shows that they're talking about here necessarily sound like hits.

And I was going to ask you this because you mentioned, you know, as somebody who works on this stuff, you'll get asked, do you have a take on this? Do you have a take on that? But let me ask you this. If you went to any studio and you're like, hey, I have an idea for a heist show set in Europe that's just got a lot of great car chases, a lot of beautiful people. and a lot of really elaborate robberies. And it's got jewel thieving and romance and betrayal and double crossing. And it's country hopping. And it's going to just, it's going to be like a really fun born.

Would you get laughed out of the room? Or would they say, hey, that sounds like the Italian job. Would you take on the Italian job and funnel all of your ideas into this? Like, what happens? That's it. I mean, it comes from two different directions. People who work in development at studios spend an increasingly large percentage. of their time offering things from the garden. Hey, so we're thinking about this. Do you have a take on it?

Do you have a take on it? And it's a way to keep, especially if they're talking to people with overall deals, keep them working, keep them moving. Do you have a take on this? And maybe more than one person does. And then there's a bake-off, and then they decide we're going to develop this one. And then it falls apart for whatever reason. And they give it to someone else. And they keep these balls in the air, which is why it's worth saying, before I get to the second half of your question, this is, you have to look at this through the lens, not of shows we're going to be watching, but as an announcement to the industry and to Wall Street that they are correctly leveraging what they have. What they have. The odds of all of the projects, I mean, the Godfather thing is happening, presumably even without

Army Hammer, who was involved and was. And there are two Godfather things, because there's a series and then there's a Barry Levinson film with Jake Gyllenall. The other things, I mean, most of those won't happen, or they won't happen on any timetable you recognize. Basically, they are just announcing things. I mean, all the studios are doing this, but they're not announcing them until they've maybe attached talent or they've sold it or set it up at a streamer. They're saying, we're doing all this just to let people know that they are both feet in the game. To circle back to your question, yes, and I know anecdotally, not anecdotally, I just know firsthand, a friend of mine was developing a series for a studio, and it was a completely original idea that

was inspired by the vibe of things that you and I and this person had grown up enjoying. and a lot of otherwise productive work hours were spent and potentially wasted debating and pursuing the option of grabbing IP that kind of inspired it and bending it back into being that thing to the point of absurdity because the original IP in this case, and I'm sorry I'm being vague, I just don't want to blow up this experience, is not known. You and I would remember this movie. That's what I was going to say. The culture has not remembered it. Kaya, are you there? I hope you are because you're the first of this podcast. I'm here. What's up? Kaya, yes. Fatal attraction TV show. Do those words mean anything to you? I have seen fatal attraction, the movie.

It's not, I'm not trying to like be like, dunk on the millennial. I'm asking like, does like, does this intellectual property have any resonance to you? I mean, I think I'm along the same vein as you is that I think they, you know, wrapped it up pretty nicely in the movie. I don't really see why there needs to be a TV show. actually tells the story of the bunny's children. Oh, my God. Watership Down. Yes. Yeah.

We can get the Watership Down world and the fatal attraction world. And you can have like a crossover event. I guess I'm just, because like, Kai, have you seen Flash Dance? No. Right. So if I told you, hey, I'm going to make a show about a woman living in a dilapidated old factory town in Pennsylvania. And she dreams of becoming a great dancer. But what she really has to do is.

essentially like exotic dance for to make ends meet and it's just the kind of like sexy drama set in this world. Would you be like cool sounds good but then I mean like does flash dance even pop as an idea beyond even the name recognition of flash dance? Yeah, I just think there's probably a divide between people who haven't seen flash dance to me but like the premise of the plot and so would probably be interested in watching a TV show about that versus people who have seen flash dance and like maybe love it dearly and yeah i guess love it so much they would like more flash dance i i think i agree with that completely i also think it's worth putting in context a couple things one is it's nothing new i mean people things have always are always being

remade and reimagined i recently watched the classic carry grant katherine hepburn movie holiday and then i'm reading more about it and it's like that was a remake of a silent movie from 10 years before and that movie is from 1937. So this is what happens. What's interesting, I guess, and maybe a little worrisome, is that Flash Dance, young woman dreams of becoming a dancer, right? This is not a new story.

That was just a particularly 1983 version of that story. I mean, it's not that different from like the Red Shoes or some classic movie from 50 or 60 years earlier, although there was less steelworking in the Red Shoes, if I remember it correctly. Whatever story about a person wanting to become a dancer, whether it came out in 93, 2003, someone's going to be like, well, it's like flash dance, blah, blah, blah, blah.

I mean, that's how we describe things we do it all the time when we review stuff. The difference is, the way our culture works now and the way companies are incentivized to just mine their own bones for new scraps of meat is that it becomes forever fixed as one thing. There will just be, instead of a new story, slightly new story about someone who wants to be a dancer or at least under a new name, it's just always going to be a new version of flash dance. in the same way that all space stories are either going to be Star Wars or Star Trek because that's all we're doing now, right?

Right, right. It kind of chokes creativity or least originality in the small potential for it, even on the margins. It's where we're at. I mean, any of these things could be turned into something good. Like we were saying about Mr. and Mrs. Smith on Amazon, it's not particularly specific IP. I mean, it's just a log line.

You know, a married couple or also spies and try to kill each other. Flash dance, young woman, or in this case, young man. young trans person. We don't know what it's going to be. Dreams of becoming a dancer. That's fine. Yeah. We'll see. So the wrinkle here would be the announcement that they made that they are doing no less than for Taylor Sheridan shows. So Taylor Sheridan for everybody who doesn't know is obviously the writer of Sicario, writer-director of Wind River. He's got a movie coming out on HBO Max this year called

for those who wish be dead with Angelina Jolie. And he is the creator, director, writer of Yellowstone, which shoots out on his like, Ranch in Montana, stars Kevin Costner, and is probably the biggest drama on television right now, I would imagine. I think you could make some arguments about different numbers, but right now on cable television, it is the biggest drama. It's not even close. Yeah, and it's coming into its fourth season in June, I would imagine, but they have already announced that there would be a prequel called Wine 1883, which would be about the founding of the Dutton Ranch, which for people haven't seen. Sounds like Lonesome Dove the series. Well, so does the other show that they announced.

a new Taylor Sheridan show called 6666, which is set on a cattle ranch in Texas. Now, that I think is a more modern version, a modern telling of a story. So he's got those two shows along with Yellowstone, Y-1883 and 66666, both of which are ranch-based, I guess, ranch-based dramas. Then there are two other announcements. One was called Mayor of Kingstown, which is going to be starring Jeremy Renner and as Antoine Fukua, I bet as the director of the pilot, and then as an executive producer going forward. And that, is about Jeremy Renner playing a mayor in a small Michigan town that is essentially living off of the prison that is in that town and how incarceration is the kind of the big

business in this small town and is supposed to be a look at the prison industrial complex and all the socioeconomic and racial issues that are tied up in that. Then he is also doing a show called Landman, which is the best name of a fucking television show I've ever heard. and that is apparently, to quote, deadline, an upstairs downstairs style look at the Texas oil industry from roughnext all the way up to the billionaires. So on one hand, they have seen that they have something successful in Yellowstone

and they are mining it for as much as they can possibly get out of it, starting a sequel and a spinoff. Then they've also got these two other dramas coming from Sheridan, both within the same Mayu, but like essentially different stories. the mayor of Kingston sounds the most different and seems to maybe be the biggest name just because renner is in it. And that's, I mean, he still is a movie star. So I think it's pretty interesting that rather than going back until the 80s, they're just like, let's go back two years and take the successful thing that we have and make the most of it. Yeah, this is incredibly smart business,

first of all. I mean, I think as part of this, they announced, I mean, they're just in the Sheridan business, right? They're a nine figure overall now. And he's just developing essentially, they're almost their entire slate of originals. I mean, these things are much further along, clearly, than love story or fatal attraction in the series. A couple things. One is, I mean, this guy, Taylor Sheridan, I mean, he's the Davity Kelly of the Heartland, right? I mean, there aren't that many people who can write at this pace and at this level of quantity, and very distinctively, yeah. And clearly knows what interests him, what interests, what interests viewers and he's got his lane. And the thing is, it's a giant lane that stretches through the

majority of the landmass of the United States of America. He's not writing shows set in California or New York or Atlanta, and that's fine. Most shows, other shows are. It's really, really smart. I also have to say, I'm trying to think of an analogy. Chris, you're a full-time sports blogger in addition to being an exceptional podcaster. There has to be an example of a team neglecting to sign its most valuable player and then just throwing insane amounts of money to try and recreate the production of the player that they let walk foolishly. Yes, right. The reason I say this is because it is probably, this will never happen again.

And all credit due to the woman in charge of acquisitions at Peacock, but Yellowstone is the crown jewel. the flagship show of the paramount corporation. Arguably the reason they are able to do what they are doing is because of Yellowstone. And they do not have it. Right. They sold the secondary run rights.

That's just how Ward Dog does it though. To Peacock. And now, is that a perpetual thing? No, because they didn't sell the underlying ownership of the show. They sold air rights. So is that for one more year, two more years? I don't actually know. I'd love to find out.

But because of, probably because of the lack of attention, during that Viacom CBS CBS dust up before it was all resolved, this just slipped right out the back door. And so now they're building up this edifice around it, but there's something kind of missing at the middle, which is kind of crazy. It's just, it's noteworthy that that shows on another service. And I'm telling you, that is never going to happen again. So you should probably, it's probably worth noting. Let's take a quick break. And when we come back, Andy and I, oh, did you want to say anything else about Paramount?

Because, oh, that's right. You wanted to go full James Hardin on something. there was one more thing, which is maybe lost in this avalanche of fresh news, was the news that the long gestating, perhaps questionably gestating television show based on the video game Halo. Oh, that's right. Wait. Is moving yet again. One of Chris Ryan's 2021 most anticipated shows.

Once again moving, this time from Showtime to Paramount Plus. And this was announced with a Hall of Fame quote from Showtime and CBS Network's boss, David Nevins, friend of our show, friend of the pod. It delivers the visceral excitement of playing the game, along with a much deeper emotional experience around the Spartans, human beings who got their humanity chemically and genetically altered. The story is about reclaiming what makes them human, and therefore, it's a very powerful story. Say that first line again. therefore.

It delivers the visceral excitement of playing the game along with a much deeper emotional experience. Andy can speak to this, but the visceral excitement that I felt playing Halo is having one hand stuck in a sour cream and onion Pringles can,

a camel light dangling out of my lips and holding the controller with the other hand while I was on like hour nine and a half of trying to beat that game. Is it going to bring that back? I can, You know, it would be a more gripping drama.

It would be the scenes of both of us trying to reclaim our own humanity after a weekend spent only playing Halo 2. I'm not sure that that project is completed yet. It's still TBD. But anyway, so we joke about it. But every time we talk about the show, we should say it starts Pablo Schreiber and Bokkeem Woodbine, which is awesome. It was developed by Kyle Killen, the very first guest I ever interviewed on this podcast, who created Lone Star and Awake, really interesting writer and TV thinker. It's cool. I also got to say, this to me is a total win, and it's really, really smart. It never made sense

at Showtime, no matter how high quality the show is. I think that charitably, because originally, remember, this was supposed to be on the Microsoft Network that you would be able to get through your Xbox. Through sheer tenacity, perhaps genetically altered tenacity like the rest of our Spartan friends, Microsoft got this show greenlit and made and Showtime, and we credited them at the time are always kind of laying in the cut and making smart moves on the margins to stay relevant in all directions at once. You know, their bread and butter is like season 27 of shameless and soon to be season 27 of billions because that's the type of show that is.

It's not even a shot. It's just that kind of a successful, consistent show. But they also are like, okay, Deezis and Mero, we've got that. Good Lord Bird. We've got the prestige angle. We need a giant franchise genre thing. So we'll take this kind of weird one on the side. That said, it doesn't make much sense for them.

This is when corporate synergy makes sense. They can shuffle it to a more broadly targeted service, which does two things at once. It puts weirdly almost contradictory things. It gives it the shine and burnishment of being like a launch title or soon, you know, early title of this important service that's crucial to the survival of the streaming service. but it also lowers the temperature on it because it doesn't have to meet the same metrics of success that it would if it was anchoring Sunday night to 10 on an established network. So it's kind of impressive, and I know it was lost in the shuffle, but that's savvy. That was Bob-like by David Nevin.

So keep an eye on David in the Bob sweepstakes. David, it doesn't take much to change your name to Bob. That's all I'm saying. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about It's a Sin and Nomad Land. The playoffs are here, and you can predict the action all the way to the finals with Fandul predicts. Follow all the playoff dishes, swishes, wishes, wishes, and misses. Predict the spread, the total points, and even the game winner.

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

When you want points that can take you anywhere, any time, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. Book your spring break now. All right, man, we're back. Andy, I saw a tweet from our colleague, Alison Herman, the other day. And I'm paraphrasing it. But she was sort of running through the credits of a showrunner named Russell Davies, who is the creator of It's a Sin. And she was like, here's a bunch of the shows that he's done, including years and years, banana and cucumber. He also obviously had a lot to do with the Doctor Who revival. It did Torchwood. He did Queers Folk. And she was basically, like our conversations about the great showrunners of our time need to include this guy on the list. And watching It's a Sin, I don't have an argument for her. I think that that is a very astute observation. And Allison has like a great piece about the show that you should check out on The Ringer. Man, what a television show. And one of the things that leaps out when you, within the first five minutes of the show,

as you're being introduced to this group of characters who are all living in London in the early 80s, as the specter of AIDS starts to rise out of San Francisco and New York and America and starts, you know, you start hearing first as whispers, then as small stories, and then as we get into the second and third episodes, I think larger and larger headlines, Davies's facility with characterization,

with tempo, with world building and setting, and with tone, man, it's something to reckon with. I almost feel bad that we have neglected to talk about him in this way yet. I love that you said that. I love that Allison tweeted that and wrote that piece because as far as I'm concerned,

the show has the belt. I am totally floored by it. I've watched three episodes, so half of it. It's completely floored me. I love it. And I'll talk about the emotional reasons why and why I think it's so successful on a number of different levels. To start with Russell Davies, I think you're absolutely right. He has the kind of career that people don't have in America. And that might be because of the way the TV business works over there or because of his own particular genius or talent. But if you look at his CV, it's almost painterly where he has created or reimagined massive franchises. Career's Focus had multiple versions all around the world. Doctor Who is still going, largely based on the template that he helped create. And then he just dips in and out in an almost painterly way, telling story.

is that interest him in the shape that is appropriate, whether it's a longer running series or it's a three or four, five, six episode kind of thing. Then the sheer ability to make this show what it is, I am just totally undone by it. Because it accomplishes in such short order, like a checklist of everything that we expect from contemporary TV. And that's not easy in that it is politically minded and cognizant of the world and telling an untold story or portraying often untold or underserved stories. And yet it is never didactic. It is never hectoring or lecturing or never feels like homework or history. It is telling a large-scale story because, as Chris says, it's essentially about a group of young gay men who are friends in London from the advent of the decade

through the AIDS crisis, I think, to about 10 years. It tells about a 10-year span. And it does so with the most just dazzling economy where, I mean, the first episode alone, let's just talk about that. And again, we're not going to spoil it because I think we will revisit the show. Yeah, I've watched two and Andy's Watch three. When we finished it. But here, let me talk about the first episode by bringing up a, let's bring up a Marvel Comics anecdotes. I know we're always in good standing. We haven't done that yet.

We haven't done that yet. Yeah. About, I can't believe I'm saying this, 20 years ago. Marvel took a chance on a writer named Brian Bendis and on the future of its line and gave him the opportunity to recreate Spider-Man as a title called Ultimate Spider-Man that was set off in a – everyone knows what these are now, different universe, different dimension, basically. And what got a lot of attention and a lot of credit at the time was that Bendis and Mark Bagley, his artistic collaborator, took what Spider-Man's origin, which if you go back to Amazing Fantasy 15, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko did – in a page. It's literally a page of a boy lives with his aunt and uncle, and then the uncle gets shot,

and then he gets bitten by spider, uncle gets shot, great power, great responsibility. Boom, boom, bang, we're done. Right? They took that and they made six issues out of it. Everyone was like, Bravo. Look at this. Look what we can do with this kind of,

there was a term that I keep, I just texted Jason Concepcion being like, what were we calling this kind of storytelling? 20 years ago, we're like, this is incredible. Look what, it was basically making it a TV show, episodic. Now I'm like, were we dummies? Because what Russell Davies does in one 47-minute, I think, episode

is not just introduce a city and a time period and a world and a culture and a vibe. And nearly a dozen characters. Four to 12 brilliantly drawn characters who I would take bullets for after 47 minutes. And he does it with just like a few scratches of a pencil. You know what I mean? Like three glimpses. And then our lead character, Richie Tozer, has played. by the actor and singer Ali Alexander.

He goes from being a shy kid living, I think on the Isle of White with his family, to being the most fabulous young man in London in the span of 12 minutes, and the performance is incredible. But the moments that Russell Davies chooses to show us are like Stanley and Steve Ditko and that they are foundational.

You know what I mean? And now we get it. And it's that rare show that hits the electricity of loving, it emotionally and a character level and just being so thrilled and jacked up on the technical prowess and shouts to Peter Hoare, the director, who does a beautiful job. He worked on the Umbrella Academy. The soundtrack is bananas as it should be. It's thrilling. And then it has a

darkness and a deep sadness that is affecting me so deeply. I'm going to take a pause from monologuing my enthusiasm so you can jump in. Well, I was just going to shout out a particular performance in this show that I didn't expect to be as important, which is, it's Lydia West who plays a character named Jill, and she's sort of the den mother. And there's a book by Rebecca McCoye of called The Great Believers, which is similar in that there's like a woman at the center of the story of a bunch of guys. And it's becoming increasingly obvious over the course of the book that she is going to be taking care of these guys as they, as time goes on and if they get sick. And, you know, the Lydia character, or Lydia's character, the Jill character in the show starts out. And it seems like she's just like kind of a facilitator. Like she's, when she is first introduced, you're like, it's cool that they're friends, but it seems like her job is to introduce Richie to this world and then maybe step aside. And then like great television does in the second episode, you're like, oh, wait, this is also her story. She's an essential and she is acting essentially as the Sherlock Holmes of.

this mystery of what is happening. Why are these guys getting sick? What is with these stories that we're hearing about 41 people dying on the same day in New York City? Or did you hear about this one article in the Sunday Times? And Neil Patrick Harris plays a character in the first episode. And he's fantastic, but he's great. And he introduces this character, Colin, into the world of London gay culture. And then, you know, not to spoil anything, but at the end of the first episode, he and his partner both get sick and they don't know what they have and the doctors don't seem to be able to tell them and there's all this mystery and all this paranoia around you know can he go can you go can you go into a room where this person is you have to wear a mask you have to wear gloves can you how do their

how does their food get delivered to them and that kind of ability to keep the viewer just slightly on tilt and just not know exactly what you're going to get out of each character not know what behaviors you're supposed to sympathize with lion eyes criticize, identify with, you know, you wind up really identifying with, empathizing with these people as people, not as like characters. And they're so complicated and they're funny and they're, they're so full of life. And yet this cloud is hanging over them. And it really is this mixture of tone and style that I just find be breathtaking. I can't, yeah, I can't quite find even the words to express it, that there is a sadness at the heart of the show that is almost overpowering

at times. And I think part of that has to do with, I read an interview with Russell Davies where he's talking about he's not trying to make the AIDS story of the 80s. He's making a story or the story of these characters. And it's a crucial distinction, you know, because when you think about other, and there have been many, as there should be, but I think about, you know, and the band played on, which was, you know, over 20 years old now, but the, HBO adaptation. Angels, yeah. Angels in America. Or angels in America.

Or even the way the AIDS crisis emerged on the Deuce, the David Simon show. There's so many other things going on, whether there's a larger educational agenda at work or in the case of the Deuce, they're telling many stories at once. And so the AIDS story is just part of it. You kind of lose the immediacy and the personal empathetic connection to people. And what this show does so incredibly is it has us fall in love with youth and young people at a time that many of us can relate to when we were just discovering who we were

or loving music or going out or just a city. And then presenting something that feels, even in this era of pandemic, feels totally impossible, which is what if the things that you loved also could kill you and no one was going to help you? And there was no way to get information. And there was, you know,

and of course, bitterly thinking while watching it, like 40 years ago, literally people didn't know. There was no information. Now we actually have information about illnesses and what to do and people don't follow it. But separate and apart from that, there are multiple ways to understand injustice and tragedy, you know, and to get an audience engaged in it.

And getting people riled up and angry is one of them. Bringing you into the lives and homes of people and then crushing you with sadness is another. And it's just a unique position to be in with a show because, as I keep saying, I just love this. I don't want it to end. I love being with these guys and with Jill especially. It's a beautiful performance and a crucial performance and an incredible character.

And she's, she's, she was in years and years as well. That was Russell Davies's last show. That was his last show, yeah. And I just want to, I just want to be with him. And yet I can't remember a show that has made me this deeply, like, existentially sad before and knowing that there's more sadness coming.

And the thing about Davies is he's such a consummate TV pro that he roper dopes you in ways that I, won't spoil. But you can watch this and you can put on your take your heart out and put your brain in and be like, well, okay, I can kind of guess where this is headed. You can't do that. You can't do that with the way that he makes this show. Like, because it's such a universal feeling, especially the way he captures, it's in the first few minutes of the first episode, how these guys each came to London to finally be themselves or in the case of the Rosco character left home in London to be himself. And then they finally sort of find their tribe. They find their group. They move into this old

dilapidated house in London together where it's like 20 quid a person to rent, the pink palace. And they're having time of their lives. So like the idea that you would go to a city and find finally like your friends, your real friends and how your friends can become your real family is so perfectly captured within about 45 minutes that it makes the hammer drop that much more hard to deal with. And the third episode is a hammer. I'm not going to say anymore. So people check it out. I think it's six episodes on NEONX. Maybe we'll jump back on this in about a week or so and we'll talk about the end of this series. Let's talk briefly about Nomad Land because I know that we both got a chance to check it out over the last couple of days.

I watched it over the weekend, talked about it a little bit with Sean and Amanda on the big picture on the 1984 movie draft, but I know you also got a chance to check it out. And it seems like this movie will be in the conversation for a couple of months because it's going to likely be a best picture nominee, if not a favorite. What did you think of it? I think it's an amazing film. And it's amazing not just for its content, but pretty remarkable that this is a movie that seems to be.

And again, in a year without box office, you know, maybe it's more pure this way because were not, it's not tainted by that. Right. It's in a lot of conversations, and it's available to everyone at the moment that it's, I mean, not to everyone, but to anyone who has a Hulu account. So it's not one of those typical Oscar things

where people in New York and L.A. are excited about it in October, and then maybe people in America can see it in February or after the Oscars. It's out there now, and hopefully that helps it. But it's a very unlikely hit movie in that it's directed by Chloe Jow who made a film that I haven't seen, but people love called The Writer. It's awesome movie.

And kind of in her now trademark style where she and her collaborator and I just found a life partner and cinematographer, turn the camera on in beautiful places in America and involve a lot of non-professional actors and a lot of blur the line slightly between truth and fiction. And in this case, loosely based on a book of the same name, stars Francis McDormand as a woman who has lost her husband and literally lost the entire town that she lived in. Yeah, she was living in a place. called Empire Nevada, which was like a factory town. When the factory closed down, they basically ceased all operations as a town. So she's living out of a van and working seasonally in and around Nevada and then meet someone, a woman named Linda May who convinces her that she should start driving around the West, essentially like working seasonally and working at these different

places in the badlands, in Arizona, in Nebraska, and then, you know, She meets people along the way and she has this sort of odyssey. And it's unquestionably beautiful. It's anchored by a performance that is, you have to see it from Francis McDormann. She has always been, but is especially in this, one of the most unique performers of our time in that she has the sort of lived in truth of like a method theater actor. She has the physical quirks and eyes of a character actor. but holds the screen like the biggest movie star in the world

and anchors this movie in a way that is almost otherworldly. It also is about America, shouts to Taylor Sheridan, but, you know, it seems like it shouldn't be that hard to show, to make a movie about the economy and about the unseen victims of capitalism and about, I mean, Wall Drug. Like, I've been to Wall Drug. Most people who drive across the country have been to Wall Drug.

I've never seen it on a screen before. Yeah. And here we are. And who works there and why and when, you know. And so all of it, it does feel, I hate saying this, it does feel kind of important. That said, I'm struggling with the fact that I didn't, I didn't emotionally connect with it and love it to the degree that you may have, and almost everyone that I trust has. And this is one of those ones where I think it might be on me. And I'm kind of trying to poke around and interrogate why.

Because I'd love to hear why you felt you were really drawn in right from you go. I had two very visceral reactions. One was to the just sheer beauty of the photography and the way in which Chloe Zhao kind of films her stuff, which is reminiscent, very much of like late period Malik starting with the Blue Line and New World and Tree of Life. And, you know, these sort of tracking shots that she does that sort of capture the enormity of the landscape that these characters are occupying. and I have to admit, you know, I don't really have a better explanation than watching Francis

McDormand made me miss my mom. You know, I mean, I haven't seen her in a year and just seeing an older woman navigating the world on her own was pretty touching in a lot of ways. It's not something we see very, very regularly on big screen or small screen, where it's just a very process-oriented, occasionally uncomfortable process-oriented movie for the first half of the film is she's sort of making her way through she's just surviving, whether that means working in an Amazon factory or using the bathroom in her van in a bucket or trying to find places to park and find places that are warm enough. And then she kind of goes through this spiritual awakening when she visits Arizona

and meets a community of people who have decided to basically go off the grid and get out from under the yoke of capitalism essentially. think that there's a lot of stuff in this movie that's very on the nose, you know, like, there are no, there are no fun conversations. They're almost entirely confessional, probing, deeply emotional, very revealing, very vulnerable speeches given to one another. And when she goes and visits her family, her sister and her sister's husband, of course, the people that she visits are real estate agents who profited off of the financial collapse of 2008. and that's the conversation that they have.

They're not talking about whether or not the giants or winning the pennant that year or anything like that. Like, it's not normal. It's everything is there to kind of make the point about this is an entire generation

and an entire group of people that have been kind of left behind by the world. But I couldn't help but be very emotionally affected by it. I don't know necessarily that it's something that I'm going to dial up

anytime soon to watch again. I think that that's okay. You know, I don't think that a movie's sheer job is just to like really entertain us. But it hit me on the gut and it hit me in the head. I can't think, I mean, I think that's just fantastic explanation of it. And I can agree with all of it. I think even on the hitting you in the gut part, I do think that from when I talk to people, it is very tender and emotional people's reasons for loving this movie. And a lot of them come from recognizing people in it or recognizing maybe being afraid of recognizing themselves in the future in it or feeling close to that or maybe, you know, the safety net doesn't exist at all. And I wonder when I hear things like that, if,

my remove, keeping myself at a remove is actually like self-defense. Yeah, right. You know, and not letting myself go there. The coping mechanism. Which speaks, you know, better of the movie and less of, and less of me. Your other point, I think, is probably the other thing that kept me a little bit itchy at times. There's something, I think this movie was made in good faith. You know, I think it is heartfelt and genuine and respectful and beautiful. I think there's something in me that when I see a camera turned on in that like epic widescreen mode on like, you know, sunhardened real people telling their truths. The cynicism in me turns on and I'm like, who's profiting off this? What are we really trying to say? Where's the art?

Well, the line between polemical art and political art is pretty, pretty thin, you know? And I think that that ties into, it ties into it's a sin too, which I think is a lot more, I mean, there are different kinds of stories, right? But I think that it's a sin is doing a a coming of age drama with a global health crisis and a story of social injustice on top of that that's looming and then increasingly steps into the foreground. You know, those guys going to London and finding love and finding out who they are. That's sort of in the foreground in the beginning, but increasingly the volume gets turned up on AIDS, the AIDS epidemic. In Nomad Land, it's almost weird, it's like the space that she's photographing, these characters

standing in these wide open spaces. And I feel like the space is filled up with, we all know why the fuck this happened. We all know what happened in 2008, what happened to people's life savings, what happened to the collapse of American work that kind of led to people feeling like this was their only option. And, you know, it's a specific story

because I don't want to make it sound like, I think one of the things that's cool about the movie is that towards the end of the film, you start to feel like the Fern character, Francis McDonoughan's character, there is a degree of agency here. Like she is choosing to live this kind of life. I think her sister offers her

a much more comfortable life. She has the option of staying with David Stratharine's character in this fucking amazing house that seems north of Big Sur. So she's not without options and she chooses to live the specific kind of life. But yeah, I think your point's well taken. I think everybody's taste will vary

when it comes to like whether or not their antenna goes off. It's also requires, and it's not too dissimilar from what I was trying to articulate about promising young woman, which is, you know, a humility and deprogramming before you sit down to it. I think maybe seeing this in the theater might have changed my experience, not just because the imagery and the pictures and the sound design were so beautiful. And I wish that I had had a better bitch I'd experienced the way they were intended to be experienced. But just that I'm always just my personal taste. I'm always going to be more interested in like, you know, she's making ramen in her van, like the little character details that make a life and less in the broad strokes. You're wrong about, you know, the social safety net vis-a-vis the housing bubble, which is necessary to make in the movie that is, you know, it's declamatory. It's movies, widescreen and big in all of its aims and intentions and what it tries to wrap its arms around.

And so it's, I don't think it's necessarily legitimate to say I wish I had more of one thing when the movie was very true. to what it was. And the segue I wanted to make about that was, weirdly, I can see why Marvel thinks it hit a home run in hiring Chloe Zhao to do its next gigantic movie. Not just from an artistic point of view, because we said this even before I'd seen any of her movies, what was really noteworthy about what we'd learned about Eternals was that the first thing she said was, I'm not going to fucking Atlanta. I'm going to film this in the world. And now I'm like, yes, she should be out in the world. My God, she can really pick location. and take things in.

That's already shaking up their formula. But just in general, there couldn't be two movies more different than standard Marvel movie A and Nomadland. But both modes of storytelling are widescreen, are, you know, image-driven in ways and affect you, you know, the script is honestly secondary, you know. That's okay. And it's pretty exciting, actually, to think. that it makes me think that whatever we get in Eternals might actually be a Chloe Jow movie

in the same way that Black Panther is a Ryan Cougar movie, which rarely, rarely happens within the MCU. Right. I mean, seeing Nomad Land is in and of itself enough of an experience, and it's definitely something I've been talking about all week with friends of mine who have seen it. It is cool that you get to see what she's going to do with a blockbuster. And it certainly feels like she'll bring her own sensibility to it. We can wrap it up there.

We'll be back on Monday where we'll be discussing the penultimate episode of Wanda Vision. And I'm sure some other stuff that popped up over the weekend. But if you have a chance, please get started on it's a sin if you haven't started already. And we'll try and wrap that up maybe next week at next Thursday show. Have a great weekend. Bye, guys.