The Watch - What Just Happened at HBO Max, Justin Charity and Micah Peters on ‘Sound Only,’ and Part 1 of ‘Lonesome Dove’

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Chris and Andy discuss the recent executive shake-up at HBO Max, HBO’s confusing transition of their streaming platform, the HBO Max original film ‘American Pickle,’ the end of a well-executed season of HBO’s ‘Perry Mason,’ and more (0:06). Next, Chris is joined by The Ringer’s Micah Peters and Justin Charity to discuss the relaunch of their podcast ‘Sound Only,’ the evolution of art criticism, their entertainment consumption during the pandemic, and more (43:48). Finally, Chris and Andy embark on Part 1 of their ‘Lonesome Dove’ discussion, in which they dive into the iconic novel as well as Episode 1 of the limited TV series (1:08:45). 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 rigger.com and joining me. As always, the Prince of the Friday News Dump, Danny Greenwald. That's what you got to do it. No one's paying attention.

You always get away with it. Guess what, guys? You don't have to do Friday news dumps anymore because nobody's doing anything. You didn't catch me while I was at a hot buffet at Morongo about to sit down for six hours of Holden Poker. You know what I mean? Like, I'm in the same place. I always am. I'm on my couch. I'm looking at my phone. No more Friday news dumps.

Okay. How about that? Do you think that they felt like whether, and what we're talking about here, obviously, it could be anything. It could be firing all the executives at HBO Max or shutting down the U.S. Post Office. Yeah, it's going to say the end of mail. Whatever you guys want to talk about. Whatever you do, you can't do it at dinner time on Friday, then spend the next six hours waxing your mustache and drinking whiskey out of a heavy beveled glass. Like, we're watching.

We're aware. It's cool. Nobody's doing anything. Andy, it's so good to talk to you on this Monday morning. We wanted to hit up a little bit of stuff about this WarnerMedia, HBO Max, shakeup that involved Bob Greenblatt and Kevin Riley exiting through the gift shop. And Casey Blois and Ann Sarnoff sort of being elevated under Jason Kalara, who's, you know, former Hulu, I guess, CEO, right? Executive, at least.

and he is now sort of big dog, big dog pit bull over at Warner Media. And there's your sort of streamlining things, I think, is the best way to put it. But I have a few things I want to talk to you about in regards to that. And we're going to actually talk about some recent pieces of HBO Max content that we wanted to chat about. American Pickle, which I watched very late last night and may have fallen asleep during. And Perry Mason's season finale, which I will opine about. But Andy, how are you first before we get going? I'm great.

I just feel like, you know, I feel like my job on this. podcast is to really, you know, just pull back the curtain, let people know what's really going on in Hollywood and in this podcast. And what's going on today is, I see you, but you can't see me. And I feel like that's an interesting, it's a kind of an interesting Friday news dump of our own here, because I'm reading all the cues. I'm watching your body language. I'm watching you take a sip of water right now as I speak, but you can't see me. You don't know what I'm doing. And so I wonder what that will do to our audio dynamic. I've done podcasts with you in every single possible way. I've done them with you while you're like wading out a dust storm and Albuquerque.

I've done them with you in various locales across the states on payphones. You know, like this is an open exchange of ideas and it doesn't really, it's not, it's the message, not the medium. I also should note that today a little bit of more house cleaning on the second half of the show, I'm going to be joined by Michael Peters and Justin Charity who have their, I guess, reborn, like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. Yes. podcast sound only, which is coming this week and is really, really dope. I'm listening to the sort of, not pilots, but the sort of rehearsal runs that they've been doing.

And I'm really excited for that pod. I wanted people who are listening to Watch to get to know Mike and Justin a little bit better and hear a little bit about that podcast and also just we're going to talk some shit to each other. And then at the end of this show for about, I guess, probably almost another extra 40 minutes because you know you want it. It's that summer of dove. It's the first lonesome pod. It's the first episode of the CBS miniseries and the first 280 pages, at least according to my edition, of Larry McMurtries-Reedle and some dove.

This is a long-pronged project that Andy and I have been working on where we just wanted to share our passion for this story, this saga that is pretty much taken over our lives. I hadn't been checking in with Kaya before she went on vacation. And thank you, Nephew, Kyle, for Man in the Bords today for us. I assume she spent the latter half of last week just sourcing horse clip-clop noises and whinnying and nays just to really like punch up the sound of two dudes in their 40s,

waxing poetic about a 30-year-old cowboy novel. I had Bill just buy the Ennio Morricone sound library so that we could just go, dun dun dun dun dun. Could you just have them buy some horses? I feel like that's more economically feasible than getting into Morricone. If you'd been keeping up with Ozark,

you would know that buying horses is a pretty... Pretty dangerous thing to do. Okay. Well, we are, we joke. We are really excited and proud of this. We're going to be talking through the book and the miniseries over the next four episodes. And then never fear if you are not caught up. I think the plan is we will combine these episodes into a single freestanding remuda, if you

will, a word I learned from Lonesome Dove. We will hobble our own horses together so you can listen to them all at once. But if you are listening along, if you are reading along, if you're watching a long, if you're watching along and you have questions about Larry, about the book, about the miniseries, about the project, about our deep, deep love of it, about how long Chris and I could survive crossing rivers with nothing but a bit of bacon in our saddlebags. Hit us up with some questions on Twitter, Facebook group, whatever, because we want to bring you along for the ride. Yeah, absolutely. So before we get into this, into this Max stuff, did you have anything you need to get off your

chest? Any weekend observations? No. I loved where you started with the, with the, lack of Friday night news dump because come on. Yeah. I'm ready to get into it unless you have you have something frisky. So here's no, here's basically the thing. So Bob Greenblatt and Kevin Riley are out. While the heads of HBO and Warner movies, it's Casey Blois and Anzarnoff respectively, they've been elevated. And I guess you could say that this can be read as a course correction of sorts from the original management structure that took over after AT&T bought Time Warner and Form Warner Media. And it ends any semblance.

I think of siloing. Is really, if you're reading between the lines, like the stuff that Jason Clark was saying, is that he wants to streamline everything. And he doesn't want people reporting to multiple different generals. He wants it all to kind of go up to him and for there to be sort of an elegance to the way that they're doing things.

The way I figured we could do this, if you will allow me, Andy, is I'm going to give you some takeaways and you tell me if they're true or false. Okay. So this kind of makes you Bob Hollywood. I don't know if you want to say you're rock, Robert Hollywood here?

It depends. I think we're all being a little more informal these days. Most of Hollywood's happening over Zoom. So you call me what you will. First takeaway. Running a streaming service is an entirely different skill set

than running a network or a channel. True. True. And I think the impetus for asking that question comes from the fact that Greenblatt and Riley are made their bones if you will, on traditional programming, basically. And for those who

haven't been keeping up with the C-suite machinations, Bob Greenblatt was a, is a well-respected programmer who came to NBC, took it over basically 10 years ago now, which is sort of shocking, after the pretty disastrous reign

of Ben Silverman, and got a lot of guff from people like me who wanted NBC to be more like the NBC I remembered from my youth, or at least from my early 20s, but is credited largely for saving the network and turning it around through things like the Chicago franchise, through things like America's Got Talent, going very broad, which actually

was probably the right play in a time when the streamers and more niche programming was expanding elsewhere. He came on as part of this AT&T takeover, right? Kevin Riley was the original head of FX, then became the president of Fox, where he did a lot of interesting things. and then for the last few years has been in charge of the Turner networks. And then he was elevated to basically overseeing a lot of the original programming

for HBO Max from his role at Turner. So these were kind of the old school heads who were building up the content libraries for HBO Max ahead of its launch and also spearheading, at least from a development side,

the rush to get it up. And Chris and I talked about this a couple weeks ago that this whole project happened in basically in a year, which is incredible for how much time is usually poured into these enormous

brand building building paradigm shifting decisions within this industry. So that was all going on, and it all seemed to be going pretty well. They had a lot of budget. They had a lot of leeway. And now they don't have a lot of jobs. And it's, I have to say, Chris, we, we love covering the industry from our perspective just outside of it. Shouts to our inspiration, Jackie Harvey from the Onion. And it, this was a shocker. Yeah. You know, there's been a lot of lot of slow bubbling developments at NBC

Universal over the last few weeks. There have been a lot of fallout from the, you know, the latest volleys in the streaming wars as well as what COVID has done to the industry. But people did not see this coming. And it's pretty surprising. And yeah, I mean, there are a lot of takeaways,

but I don't want to jump on your next question. Well, I would just say that there's, it's not uncommon. So if you consider HBO Max a startup, it's not uncommon to see some executive departures after a certain phase of that startup is over. But HBO Max is not an electric scooter company or like an app.

Right. I mean, they are an app, but this is like, Bob Greenblatt and Kevin Riley were not short-term fixes that then did what they needed to do and left. I think that the- Kevin Riley signed a new contract in May of 2020 for four years. So this was not a cheap decision. Right. This is like more like Italian soccer management decisions.

We're like, you sign the guy and you're like, We hope to be with this man forever. And then fire in the next day. So that was my Italian soccer club owner voice. You can Venmo me for more. But yes, I just... But only in Lira. Chris only accepts Lira.

My takeaway here was that this is the Hulu 07 squad. You know, like the people who were sort of in charge of Hulu when it launched before we even really all knew what streaming was. and they have been, you can say, ahead of the game for quite some time and that they felt like HBO Max needed to be foregrounded in this whole conversation and that there needed to be a different brain, different group of brains attacking the problem. And why do they need to do that? Well, that's my next takeaway. My next takeaway is clarity counts. Because HBO launched, HBO Max launched with a, when it launched,

it required an instructional video explaining whether or not consumers already. had it, got it for free with their pre-existing subscription, or had to pay for a new one. And there were, at the outset, four different HBO's going at once at one point. Also, Chris, let me jump in and say, one of the things adding to the confusion is that there were a surprising number of false negatives when you got tested to see if you had HBO Max. I know. I know. I know. The guys at Dodger's Stadium, we're like, we don't know. We just can't see for sure. I was like, I've been a subscriber for a while. I still have cable. Do I have it? And they were like, look, just just, just, stay in your car, swab your face,

and we'll let you know. Yeah. So you had HBO Go, HBO Max, uh, HBO now. Now. And then regular old, I have cable.

I have HBO channels at that on, on my, on my cable service. Go has been sunset. And I, I imagine that everything is just going to sort of be, you either have HBO Max because you have a cable subscription or you can sign up for HBO Max if you just have internet access.

but this is something that I don't think, I think the only service that we've seen in the last year or so that we've been talking about this that has just launched and been all of a sudden like, yep, this is going to be here for a while. It feels like it's always been here. It feels like it has a perfect reason for being is the pluse. Well, part of that is I think Disney,

unlike all these other companies, has been a consumer-facing company for its entire existence. I mean, point of contact or all these like industry terms that a company like Warner Media that didn't exist as a unified company just a couple years ago, they don't have a theme park business. They don't have, they don't sell toys directly. You know what I mean? They don't have cruise ships. They're not used to greeting consumers and welcoming them into the experience. Disney has that advantage. And I think that played out even in terms of like UI, user interface, right? So the clarity thing is a doozy. We talked about it a lot. And I think

I'd like to say, I think we were kind of right. We're going to talk about an American pickle, the Seth Rogen movie in a bit. But when that movie started, it said it was a point gray production, which is Seth Rogen's production. And it also said it was a Warner Max production. I said, Warner Max, what's that?

Another version of this? We're just going to keep iterating different combinations of words and suffixes and prefixes. But isn't Warner Max what this thing should have been called? Their argument was HBO is something people know, and it's a popular brand, and it means television, and It means prestige television and it means quality, so we should use it.

That definitely means more than Warner does in the year 2020. But the flip side of that that we ran up against here is people don't know what they have. And then we ran into this other thing, which is, you got a little Big Bang Theory in my HBO, right? Where HBO means a certain level of quality and people expect a certain level of quality from it. And which isn't to say Big Bang Theory isn't quality. It's just not what anyone would ever expect to find on their HBO. So combining it into one big soup is a little bit confusing. Then, in terms of programming clarity, Kevin Riley and Bob Greenblatt were running their own shop.

They had a lot of money to play with. They were told to really ramp up production. But the shows that they were greenlighting and making aren't necessarily HBO shows. Because meanwhile, in his office, Casey Blois is ramping up production too and making a lot of HBO shows. And he's making really good shows. And he's on a hell of a winning streak right now. Yeah, he's on a heater. One that looks to continue.

this month with Lovecraft Country, which is getting rave reviews. So from a programming perspective, and yes, you could say HBO Max got dinged because a lot of the originals that they were hoping to have, including like a friend's reunion, never materialized because of the pandemic. Partly, this is a judgment on the clarity of the branding, but it's also a judgment on the future of development and content, a judgment we can't weigh in on because we haven't seen the shows, but clearly behind the scenes, there was some concern. When we talked to streaming wars, there's always a degree of Monday morning quarter,

back and going on that Andy and I don't have to make these decisions and we don't have nearly enough insight into the economics and the politics and all the various reasons why one thing happens and another thing does it. It's been really fascinating to watch these services launch. And I think the reason why Andy and I talk about this stuff so much is because we are very interested in why we are seeing the things that we wind up watching and how those things come to be created and how now, now more than ever, I think, a variety of different forces like technology, Silicon, Valley conglomerates, like global conglomerates in a way that I don't even think that we were experiencing when it was like Gulf Western owned Paramount. I mean, this is, we're on a different

level here almost. And I think it's very interesting to think about, well, okay, so then why Love Life? Why, why search party? Why are these the shows that you are launching with? And then by that same token, why did Apple TV launch with this full suite of originals that were very expensive, but seemed to lack a kind of real brand or identity or perspective in some ways? And so these are two sides of the coin. One is a service that launched with few originals, but a huge library and a library that they were very proud of. While another service might launch with, hey, we got all these movie stars in shows.

Can you believe it? Also, you already have a lot of this stuff because you are completely intertwined with the Apple product experience more than likely on your daily life. So it's really interesting to talk about these things. I think that one thing that hasn't been determined, although I'm sure there are people who are consultants who are paid an enormous amount to have a strong opinion about this. We are not among them. But I don't think people have quite figured out how to do this yet, how to launch successfully. Because I think you need libraries don't move subscriptions. I think that seems to be pretty clear,

at least if you want to extrapolate anything from the HBO Max launch. I'm looking at a headline from variety from just the other month from the end of July, saying HBO Max and HBO have 36.3 million subscribers. So that's combining HBO Max and HBO,

which already is a Dodge, saying that's up 5% from the end of 2019. So it's up 5%. However, HBO proper lost 2.1 million subscriptions. So that's just a lot of numbers that aren't quite clear. So the subscription wasn't the subs number, which is what's driving it, isn't what they want it to be.

So you need new content to do that. However, when you're launching a service, the one piece of information we can extrapolate from the last few years of launches is the shows you choose, or your executives or your development people choose to launch with aren't going to define you. Your audience in the consumers will define you through the shows that they choose to champion and fall in love with. So, you know, Jason Clark's taken over Warner Max and has come over there with a lot to be proud of with Hulu, which is now quite entrenched and has a very successful original's business. But Hulu was flailing just like all these companies were at the beginning until the Handmaid's Tale suddenly appeared and then they fluked it into an Emmy Award win and then they were suddenly

in business. And that was their show. And this is something that goes back to AMC being like, yeah, okay, I guess we'll make the show about an advertising executive and also a guy cooking meth, and then all of a sudden AMC was AMC. So you kind of have to launch with a bunch of stuff, and then you have to listen to your consumers, but you can't play for both outcomes, right? It's a little bit confusing, and it requires a long leash to get there, but we are especially due to a global economic catastrophe and not to mention a health catastrophe, people don't really have long leashes right now. One more takeaway, and then we can get into Pickle and Perry, which is just maybe what we should change the name of this podcast.

too. So clarity counts. We said that, right? Maybe Friends doesn't. Right. Max launched with legacy titles like Friends and Big Bang Theory in its library, but perhaps

those shows were more attractive to, I don't know, like the easy to use world of Netflix and Hulu or the I'm already here, you know, I'm hanging out. Oh, Friends is on. I'm going to let friends play for the next six hours. You know, maybe that's not

the exactly the attraction to signing up for a new service or switching over your watching habits to a new service that people thought it was. And if I may go one step further, maybe people have like

watched friends now. Like maybe people have watched friends 10, 12 times through and they're like, I'm all done. I had years and years of friends on a loop and now it's not on Netflix and I'm okay. Well, I think this dovetails

with what I was trying to say before, but I think you've said it even better here, which is that, like, library titles, legacy titles, that's your nice, that's your bass, but it's not your guitar solo. You know what I mean? Like, it's great to have it and it will boost, it'll support you and it'll keep people subscribed. But I don't know if it's moving the needle to get people to sign up. You need something bigger, brighter, more electric to do that. And if I could use a personal anecdote, because I don't think, always, I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm, I don't think I'm, I'm, this is a place for personal storytelling. It's just another episode of Perry and the Pickle. I don't think I am,

the target for any of this, although I cling to the fact that I am still barely in this 18 to 49-year-old demographic that still matters. Chris, you know, in a previous pre-child life, I was a pretty big sports fan, watched a lot of sports, really loved our Philadelphia sports teams, lived or died with them. Even during this difficult pandemic time, I was like, though it seems like a catastrophic decision, I would watch baseball because I really like having baseball games on. I have not watched any baseball games this year, despite baseball being something that I have long enjoyed in my life. Because I'll be honest with you, I have no idea how to find it.

I don't know how to turn it on. I don't know what channel it's on. Baseball? Yeah. And the thought of looking for it is so exhausting that I'm not going to do it. I'm just not going to do it. I'm also not paying for the MLB practice this year, so it's not like I have. This is how you find

out that you are actually not in the 18 to 49 demo. Yeah, no, I'm in the 75-year-old demo. Now, let me tell you something. Is there an actual channel called Baseball? that I can watch the baseball games on? I'm being honest. Are these on the CBS network? Where are these things?

If they were, I would watch them. But my point is not only... The reason you can't find baseball is that all the games keep getting suspended. That's true. All the players are sick. But I am dragging myself partially with intention, but also to say, baseball in this metaphor, if you'll allow it, is friends or is the office.

Which is to say, gosh, I love it. I'll always love it. I don't like it any less during the months or years that it's not in my life. But if it's not just there, I might not make the effort to find it. And me not being able to navigate DirecTV despite four years of deeply dissatisfied business relationship with them is one thing. But, you know, asking someone who is used to watching Netflix, maybe friends on Netflix while they cook dinner, being told, well, now you have to download this new app that you might or might already have and you have to pay $15 a month and it's over here and now it's purple, that might not, that might be a barrier, right? So I think there's a lot of different things

for them to address. I think that we should also turn this to one other word that you said, which is the sort of the low key story in here, or at least the more industry facing story, which is the, and you use the word silos. For a while, people were like, these media companies can be enormous and be as big as they need to be. And they can be fiefdoms, basically, right? like every little piece of them can be their own little piece. They can approach their content business the same way Warner approaches the DC universe. Like, you get a Joker and you get a Joker and you get a Joker. It's no big deal, man.

Yes. My Joker's not touching your Joker. That doesn't really work anymore because the part of this consolidation story that's leading all the headlines, including ours, is people whose names we know are out, Kevin Riley and Bob Greenblatt. In some ways, the more telling story and the story that leads to today's story, oh, p.s, there's going to be hundreds of layoffs at the company, is that instead of saying the Turner networks have their own studios to generate content in their own heads, and DC Universe has its own people, and HBO has its own people, and HBO Max has its own people. This reorganization

is saying, we're Warner Media. We have a studio, and our studios make shows that can go on a bunch of different places, but it's all one thing. And as much as that runs against the narrative of Casey Boy's, you know, bringing the HBO sensibility to the larger company, which to some degree he probably will because he has good taste and he has his own sensibility. But he's in charge of Turner now also. It's all one thing. And this is where media is going. And purely from a business perspective, perspective I rarely take, that makes sense. Even at the company where I do business, NBC Universal, right, there are two studios. There's Universal TV that makes like your Mike Scher shows, your Tina Faye shows, the Chicago fire shows.

And then there's UCP, which is where I have a deal that makes shows like Homecoming or Mr. Robot or the Umbrella Academy. Two distinct studios. But we're already starting to see that crumble in other companies. For example, again,

I'm just using NBC Universal example. They're making a TV show of Child's Play, the horror movie. It's already been announced that that show is going to be on USA and sci-fi. And maybe it'll be on Peacock, too. Wait, USA and sci-fi like two channels. At the same way.

Okay. Well, and AMC was doing that with Killing Eve with BBC America, yeah. That's where things are going. And I think that that thinking, which is not wrong, is what led them to say, you can get some HBO Max and my HBO, right? Because it's all the same thing. But they may have jumped the gun on that. And there were other issues at play. But the streamlining of studios and the streamlining of these media companies into saying it's all one tube now is the story of the present, if not the future. Right. I feel like we could use this moment and we can just, we can jump on to the two things from HBO Max that we watched over the weekend. I will just say this. Months ago, Lucas Shaw from Bloomberg came on the pod. I think it was late last year, if I had to remember correctly. And I was asking him, is there a world in which one of these services essentially can't make it around the track for the first time? I don't know what, what I was really thinking in terms of like how long it would last. But is there a world in which basically people can't keep stumping up for the five, six streaming services on top of whatever other bills they have? And he kind of was like, yeah, and that would, that world would

be a world in which we are in a pretty significant recession, if not worse. And that was pre-COVID and pre-every everything that's happening. And I do wonder whether or not we're going to, people are going to start making, if they haven't already, which obviously there's a lot of like economic strife right now and economic turmoil right now, if they're going to start making some pretty easy decisions to be like, I can just save $30, $45, $60 a month, getting rid of this stuff and maybe drop down to Netflix

or have nothing at all. But, you know, start to just kind of make these kind of like decisions because these, the streaming wars were a product of excess in a lot of ways. And we're not living in a... excessive times anymore. No, I think that's right. And I think that for even in a time when they had been able to launch these services with the bells and whistles, bells and whistles they intended to launch them with, bells and whistles are a lot less appealing when you also need food and shelter. You know what I mean? It's just a very, very different economic landscape that they're entering into.

And we could say, oh, I wish, you know, I'm sure to some degree, either the men themselves or those around them are saying, oh, if only we had launched HBO Max with the Gossip Girl reboot and the Friends reunion that we had intended to, things would have broken differently. But even if they had finished production to go into this economic environment, I don't know if that moves. I don't know what needles of those things move at this moment. Talk to me about American Pickle a little bit. Oh, so people may know. Seth Rogen made a movie based on a very, very, very, very funny, of my alley, Simon Rich short story called

Sellout. And this was one of the first big kind of deals at the beginning of the pandemic, which was this was supposed to be a theatrical release. And HBO Max snapped it up and dropped it this past weekend. And I got

a couple things to say about it. One is well worth your time. It's very funny. I think it's one of Seth Rogen's best performances ever. In fact, he's doing two performances. It's about a Jewish immigrant in 1919 who leaves leaves a very hilariously hard-scrabble life in Eastern Europe to work in a pickle factory in Brooklyn and then falls into a pickle jar is brined for 100 years

and wakes up to meet his sort of sad sack tech developer great grandson played also by Seth Rogan. It is a very light and enjoyable thing to watch. It is as Mark Merrin described it to Seth Rogen maybe the most Jewish movie made since the 1970s. And just to say that, that what's kind of amazing when you watch this is this was going to be a theatrical release, I'm sort of in awe of that. It, to me, isn't really worth it,

whatever that means anymore, right? Because it's an enjoyable, it's a light entertainment. It doesn't really hang together. Like I think it's the kind of movie that seems to be having so much more fun when it's in Eastern Europe with Sarah Snook than it is later when it's trying to find some morality

about developing web apps. Yeah. It doesn't quite work on that level, but it's trying, and it gives it a good effort. But it really suggested to me, and this is something I was going to, I know you love to be surprised on the podcast, but I feel like we should, I don't know, I was about to talk about it like it's a duel. We should demand justice. No, we should suggest to our buddy Sean Fantasy, maybe some sort of crossover, home and home with big picture, because I feel like what we're starting to see is the emergence of an entirely new genre, which I kind of want to call the medium movie. This is a medium movie, and it is absolutely best served on a streaming service. It's not a TV

show. It doesn't feel smaller or less. It's just like a thing that worked as an hour and a half entertainment and was nice to have on the weekend. And we've been talking about a couple things like that. I think Palm Springs, for example, could have worked in the movies, but it was an excellent medium movie. And what I kind of want to talk to Sean about, so I'm just going to throw this out here. but maybe we'll be able to flesh this out more fully, is I think we should come up with a list of filmmakers whose careers maybe would have been better if they had just been empowered to make medium movies,

filmmakers who have been stymied, who we'd like to make it rain with money so they could make medium movies. Because there's a place for this. And maybe Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, this would be a better thing for them. They're making a lot of TV projects already. They work on Black Monday.

They did Preacher. boys. The boys, like, they kind of just want to make stuff. And the way streaming is, it's elastic enough to fit all their different interests right now. But there are a whole other range of filmmakers. Like, I would make a case that Judd Apatow is kind of makes media movies and would do better if he could just chase his bliss. In some ways, he already did the summer. King of Satinau. Yeah. Exactly. But there are all other filmmakers, like, like someone whom I love, who's not going to, you know, move needles at Marquis anymore, but like Witt Stillman, who spent like the last 20 years trying to make a fifth movie. Well, I think he, and he also has been trying to, like,

get various Amazon series is off the ground. And I just think that he's just like, no, I have to, like, I mean, I have no idea why those things haven't worked. I enjoyed the one pilot that came out of that, though, the cosmopolins. But instead of taking someone who makes movies and trying to squeeze them into a TV box saying, okay, that movie you want to make, could you just make it a 10 episode half hour series. Let him make a medium movie and we'll move on. So, so it's nothing but positivity for me about this. I enjoyed it. I thought Seth Rogen was great. I thought Sarah Snook was having the time of her life, uh, eating a dried fish head. And it made me excited about the future, not of cinema, but of the medium movie. Um, I think you're absolutely right. Unintentionally,

I think if people wanted to do a great A, B comparison here, I would love to have seen the medium movie version of Longshot, which I don't know if you ever saw that, but that was the Seth Rogen, Shirley's Theron movie that came out last year, I believe, and was among, it was just like a movie that I had a ton of affection for because I saw what it was trying to do. And I thought it was so successful in doing them in some ways, but also felt the need to have huge action sequences. And a lot of extraneous, like, let's also have like a huge, you know, a lot of stuff going on in the White House and then there's like an attack on the on Shirley's life and all this stuff going on that if you would strip that out because you were like we're going to make a medium movie

you wind up having all the good stuff from that film minus the like we have to do this to fill up the screen now obviously American Pickle was not made for the time when no one could leave their house and it was going to be on HBO max so it's not a one-to-one comparison but it's really interesting to think of not only filmmakers whose careers could have been better off if there was such a thing as the medium movie but also movies that would have been better if they could have stripped out some of the

bullshit and just allowed themselves to be medium movies. Before I let you go last point you're totally right this is the blueprint for something it didn't even know it was going to be because American Pickle are there other people in this movie like have you ever seen a movie with such a small cast? I know

it's definitely it looks like it was made, it's almost was like a project where they they made it, you know, within each other's apartments a little bit because there's a couple of obviously like big scenes with like falling into a pickle batter some stuff out, you know,

exteriors in New York, but you could. Exteriors in quote unquote New York. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I mean, it's like seven people standing next to a pickle stand. I mean, it's not exactly you know, the Godfather Part 2 arriving in America's scene. So I

I just think that, yeah, I think medium movie is a thing. We should really pursue this. And I'll tell Sean all about it. And I'll give you credit for TM copyright pending Andy Greenwald. Before we go, just a quick note about Perry Mason, which concluded its first season last night. And I say first, I want to emphasize first season. Because watching the way that they sort of navigated the end of the case of the season that they were, that the, the show is pretty much focused on, which is the Emily Dodson, the Charlie Dodson murder, and who was

being accused of it, his mother, Emily, was being accused of it. And Perry was defending Emily Dodson. It's been such a long time, I feel like, since I watched something where they very clearly were like, yeah, there's going to be another season. Right. There was no limited to this. It was like, oh, yeah, they're setting up all of these characters, Juliet Rylance's Della. to be an associate next year. Shea Wigam is going to go to the district attorney's office. It's clear that there is going to be another case next year. And I almost was very charmed by the elegance of that

and the forward-thinking nature of that. So few shows know whether or not they're going to get another shot at it, whether it's because they have huge stars and those huge stars have other commitments, like big little lies or something like that, where it was like first season ended, you're like, that seems like it, you know? And then there was a popular demand, I think, for it to come back.

But to watch a show just kind of actually be like, you know what? The first season's really just the bones of it. And I know that when we first talked about this in depth, I was like, you know, it's kind of trying to be true detective meets a procedural, a little bit more of a procedural on that there's a lot of like terrible men doing terrible things and people staring in the mirrors and being like, am I a bad person? It essentially turned into a few good men. by the end of it. All the way to the point where there was actually a somewhat fake courtroom scene

where he tries to get somebody who admit they order the code red. And I was absolutely here for it. It's totally where this show wants to go. He does not want him to be a Messcal swilling World War I veteran who's haunted by what he saw overseas and thinks that the world is full of shit and terrible people. it's about a crusading defense lawyer who thinks everybody deserves a good defense. It's pretty wild the permutations and what, you know, third level yoga poses necessary for a show to just be that. Yeah. Like, it ended up in a place that was where all TV shows began for 40 years, including the television show Perry Mason. But in order to earn that, or in order to be Trojan horsed onto HBO, a pre-

at least in development terms of pre-HBO max HBO, it had to pretend to be law and order Carcosa for an entire season, right? In order to like earn a skeptical, overly educated audiences' respect to become an audience-pleasing show. It's kind of bizarre, but it also is just such an interesting case study

in what TV is right now. I saw Alan Seppenwall in his slightly, you know, not as glowing review as yours in Rolling Stone, was basically like, I don't, he just doesn't think that one should do a premise pilot as a season. You know what I mean? For people who don't know the term, a premise pilot is the thing where a character gets the job that he or she is going to have for the rest of the run or whatever, that introduces you fully to what's going on as opposed to starting in media res like someone's already a lawyer.

So it's really what it is to me is just a wild flex. And it kind of always has been from the beginning when I sampled the show in terms of the money behind it, the HBO muscle behind it, the talent behind it, and probably more than anything else, the star power all the way behind it, which is Robert Downey Jr. This was originally developed to be basically a vanity project for himself. So really only Tony Stark saying, I'm going to come do television for you, could earn you in this day and age, the right to say, we're going to do a season-long origin story to become the thing you already know already. And it makes me interested, though, in the second season. Sure. And I would say this, that, you know,

even though this season have really good performances from Juliet Rylance and Chris Chalk, who plays Mason's new investigator, and, you know, I do think that there were three performances that they're going to need to replace next season to keep the vibes going. Because for as good as Matthew Rees is and as good as Juliette Rylance and Chalk and Shay Wigamar, I think that they're going to need to find replacements for Tadiana Mislani, John Lithgow, and Gail Rankin.

Because in various cases, I don't necessarily think they're going to be big or at all parts of season two. But they were the gear-shifting talents that this show needed. They were the people who brought a completely different energy or grounded the show or gave it a kind of patina of like, we know what we're doing. And they're going to be tough to replace. And not to say that there's not like a huge bullpen of people out there who can do it,

but I thought that Maslani in a lot of ways saved this show. show in the first season. I'm going to give you a counter argument, which is to say, well, first of all, you're right, or 100% right about needing to have heavy hitters to come up and continue to elevate the show above anything else that it's being, anything else that's competing with. But I'm going to give you a counter argument, which is say it's not going to be hard to get them. Sure. Because the one thing that the last few years of TV have taught us and even my own experience making TV is actors want to act. and what actors really, really, really, really want to do is act in a well-run, smooth running operation

that only lasts one year and shoots close to home. And the first season earned them the right to say to almost anyone, come hang out. Come hang out. You know, we'll give you scenery, chomping, beautiful, exciting scenes. You can play against type. You're working with the best of the best

in terms of network and in terms of production design. we're not going to skimp on anything. And especially now, this is always the case, but especially now once we can even get production going in this country again, people don't want to go to Canada. They don't want to go to Budapest. You can film in L.A.?

Come on. So I think that this is a show that even actors who you think are not getable are going to be like, get me that. Absolutely. All right. Well, Andy, pleasure to talk to you. I'll let you get back to your life. I wish you could see what I'm doing right now. I mean, can you even imagine?

I just imagine, like, you're in, like, full, I don't know, like, maybe, like, full Mandalorian cosplay. It's not that, but what you guys should know as I duck out, but we'll return, obviously, for the Lonesome Dove conversation, is that I just noticed 40 minutes into our podcast, a stuffed dog peeking around a pile of sheets and looking at me, like fucking Bobadook. It is scary.

So I do it for you, stuff, dog. I do it for you. This is my life. All right. That's it for Andy. Micah and Justin coming up next. And then after that, Andy comes back and we talk Lonesome Dove,

the first episode of our summer of Dove Lonesome Pod explosion. All right, Greenwald. Thank you so much, man. Getting up Branskis. All right, guys, thanks for listening to today's watch. So here's the rest of the show. We're going to talk to Micah Peters and Justin Charity about their upcoming first episode or first new episode of Sound Only,

which is on the Ringer podcast network. you can go subscribe to that wherever you listen to podcasts. And they have a great show plan for you where it's essentially this broad strokes pop culture show that starts with something that's very relevant, very urgent, very current. And then it's going to keep going deeper and deeper and deeper in this sort of wide-ranging rabbit hole conversation about popular culture largely centered around. I suppose you could loosely say the millennial lifestyle, but also about the state and art of criticism and taking in everything from animated video games

to the things that you find on Twitter, YouTube, wherever else you're finding your content these days, plus general popular mainstream culture. So it's actually just a fascinating conversation about pop culture in the 21st century. It feels very much of this moment. Micah and Justin are two of the smartest people, I know, and it's really exciting to have them back on the Ringer podcast network.

So let's get into my conversation with Micah and Justin about sound only and about some of the stuff that they're listening to and watching right now. Okay, everybody expects us to have an anime podcast. Michael Peters, Justin Charity, at long last, are they podcasting once again about anime? No. I'm Justin Charity.

And I'm Micah Peters. Honestly, this podcast might turn out to be like the Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence movie Life, except neither of us is in prison, and in fact, we're not even taping in the same location. But we will be talking about, a lot about the millennial life, you know, music, video games, strange stuff from the dark corners of the internet that piques our interest.

People think this is going to be, oh, a little topic A, oh, what's topic B? Oh, a little, you know, chit chat. No, every time you tune into this podcast, we are going to lock you into a room for 45 minutes, and we are going to do criticism. We are going to get to the bottom of every Scooby-Doo mystery that the discourse produced. Ducees for us each week. Mark my words. Man, that was a lot. But anyway, we are excited about it.

We are excited. We're excited. We're super excited. I'm Justin Charity. And I'm Micah Peters. And this is Sound Only. We're back on August 11th. Catch us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. Let's go.

Guys, thank you so much for joining. Micah Peters, Justin Charity, you're here. I wanted to talk to them about, I described it as a Phoenix rising from the ashes. Is that an appropriate image? Sound only is back this week. I've got a chance to listen to a couple of the dress rehearsals. Let's just put it that way.

And I'm so excited for everybody else to hear this podcast because it's really, really good. If you listen to the trailer, there's a couple of things in there that I wanted to talk about. But the first thing I wanted to talk about was charity saying that sound only is going to engage in some criticism-ass criticism. You know?

Like some really getting after some criticism. And it's a complicated thing to do these days. I hope I'm not revealing too much by saying that in some of your dress rehearsal episodes, you touched on this subject. And how kind of strange it is to go from to really actually engage in the form of criticism these days. So that's kind of what I wanted to talk to you guys about today. And also just welcome you to the show and talk about whatever you're watching.

So how are you guys doing? First of all, Charity. What's up? I mean, I'm good. Thank you. Thank you for having us on, Chris. Micah, welcome. Why? Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm doing all right. Thank you.

For people who haven't gotten a chance to hear for the trailer, why don't you tell them what you guys are trying to do with Sound Only? Well, we originally were doing an anime podcast and we had a lot of fun doing an anime podcast about Neon Genesis Evangelion. So much fun that each of the recording sessions went to like four hours.

Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. With a lot of notes. Beyond binge mode. Yeah. A lot of notes. Four hours per six episodes of television. And instead of doing that to ourselves again, we kind of wanted to expand the mandate, right?

Like, instead of having an anime podcast, we wanted to have sort of a larger podcast where we can talk about anime, but we can also talk about other stuff so that we can sort of have a more, I think, eclectic critical mindset. Yeah, Micah, I mean, like, for you, it's interesting because you've obviously done, you know,

you talked about music on shuffle, and you talked about anime on sound only, but were you looking to have like a larger, sort of more broader general cultural conversation in the pod? Yeah, so I think that if you read, you know, both of our writing or have listened to the couple of podcasts that we've done for the site. Charity was Damage Control Me,

was on Shuffle, both of us with several recapable shows. It's more like we tend to take stuff and place it into a larger context and also like to be in conversation with other things that are going on.

But then some of those discussions are to like essentially 21st century to have like in written form. or to do anywhere else and then on a podcast. So basically we wanted a space to do that. But I do it with music.

I have done it with anime, but we also do it with movies and TV and possibly with Jake Paul. You know, if it comes to that. There's going to be a wide variety of topics covered, but one thing that I've noticed from the episodes that I've heard so far, which are obviously very much time,

sort of, you know, whether it was after a Chappelle, after the Chappelle special that dropped a few weeks back or whatever is the topic that you guys were talking about, you sort of use it as a jumping off point and then there's this kind of like rabbit hole structure that you guys go down where it's like, here's the thing

that everybody is talking about, but here's the thing that everybody should be thinking about. That's essentially the structure of the show, right? Yeah, and I think a big part of how we've tried to walk through you know, structuring the show, structuring the episodes, right, is what feels like the inherent difficult of doing criticism in the 21st century, right? With, like, the internet feels like a very,

a tumultuous space to do criticism. And there are a lot of contested things about media and in social media and web writing at the moment. And I do think sometimes, like, I feel great about writing. And there are other times when I have a critical concern where I actually think it might be more illuminating to talk something through in a space, in like a podcast. space with Micah. You know, and I think that's the real mission behind the podcast,

is sort of to work against the ephemeral, fast-paced nature of how a lot of criticism seems to happen in social media channels and even in web writing and sort of slow it down and put it in our little vacuum called Sound Only and work it out there. I was wondering whether you guys felt like, you know, in August of 20, 2020. And for how long you felt like that if this, if you do, that criticism is necessarily adversarial towards the things that it's talking about. Because I think one of the things that's been happening over the last eight years that Andy and I have been podcasting together is that we have kind of noticed

a shift in the landscape, a shift in the way that people relate to popular culture and art in general from, I think at least in the beginning, really healthy, but often somewhat, I guess snooty way of looking at things, but it was adversarial. Like I think that you would watch something, you would listen to something, you'd read something, and you would think about it in terms of what's wrong with it,

how is this kind of like not necessarily fulfilling its promise as a piece of culture. And then I think we've seen a shift happen, at least in the conversations that we have, more towards fandom, where somebody is essentially like coming to something as a fan and thinking about whether or not something is satisfying their desires as a fan.

Michael, you're somebody who I think of as a very passionate fan of a lot of things, but I also think of yourself, you as a really thoughtful critic of a lot of things.

Do you get what I'm saying about this sort of like this kind of change in the starting stance a lot of people take when they're talking about art? Yeah, I mean, like it's basically you have to hold

two ideas in your mind that aren't actually competing, like, and so it should be pretty easy to do without friction, is that I love this thing and I would like it to be better in these ways, which is what, I mean,

like the job tends to be. But yeah, I mean, like, I think that also, to your point, there had been a shift to, like, towards, like, the pure fandom of it. I mean, it makes sense, right? Like, fan-driven stuff

has kind of become the most popular, popular culture, whether it's Star Wars, whether it's Game of Thrones, whether it's Marvel, whether, and I think that that's kind of like invaded into all discourse now. It's like whether or not you are, like, whether, I don't want to go as far as to stand for something, but like whether or not you are like a passionate believer in this project or not. And that is the kind of filter through which your criticism is shot. Yeah. And I think the thing that's distressing about it in the air of the internet, right, is that it, that's such a universal shift that it doesn't even matter what medium or genre are talking about. You know, you could be talking about, you know, you could be talking about. movies, right, like blockbusters, or you could be talking about musical drama.

You could be talking about the Taylor Swift album. Sure. And look, I think that that means that the environment in which criticism is published, it feels very, it can feel hostile sometimes because it's filled with fans and stands. I do think that critics should kind of suck it up, right? And just accept that, like, part of being a critic is just sucking it up. But I do think there are other things to do. It's also, if you're a really fine-grained

hater, you live for that tension in a way. Yeah, it's just like you, you, you, like, there's a bit of a perverse enjoyment out of it. Yeah. Yeah, like, it's, fine grain ateer is a really good way of putting it. But, but I do think that in that environment. That is how I would describe you. That is how I would describe you, charity.

A fine grain hater. But I, do think that the environment being such that, yeah, fan culture really has sort of, it feels like it's annexed the wider internet in such a big way that I think that's why I'm excited to do a podcast like this, right? Because it feels more like, it feels like critics increasingly are going to have to find ways to carve out these spaces, whether it's like the watch or whether it's sound only, carve out spaces where they can do the work of criticism sort of regardless of the prevailing

winds of fandom, you know? Yeah. I mean, Mike, one of the complicated things that I think is happening now is that like when I first started writing about music,

so in like the mid, late 90s, you had like a lot of different options, but for the most part, a lot, I think for the most part, people were like, I'm going to write about the text.

You know, I'm going to write about the record at hand and whether or not I think the record does something. And the extracurricular stuff their record would do so. I was writing about bombs over Baghdad at the time of its release. I might write something that was about a personal experience

or I might write something about the state of the world at that time, but it was essentially reacting to the thing that was in between the grooves of the record that I was hearing and what these guys were saying. And that's changed so much now where I think we're almost expected to be writing about a perceived reaction

to a piece of art rather than the art itself. You've kind of grown up in that wave. Like I think, I think you've kind of matured as a person and as a critic in the time when charity might bridge it a little bit more. But I think that you definitely came up in a time where in like, writing about folklore is almost besides the point. You're really writing about the reaction to folklore. Has that been something that you have felt firsthand and how complicated has that been? Well, yeah. I mean, like, it is something that felt firsthand because you are like, despite the fact that you existed at these,

pre-digital spaces because you necessarily grew up in the 90s or whatever you're around when like you don't really remember what it was like before YouTube and also like you encounter all of this you encountered a lot

of different types of music for the first time in digital spaces like on social media so therefore like while you can appreciate like say a certain artists myth making and Like that is essential.

You also, you know, are immediately doing the work of deconstructing it. Like this at the minute that it comes out because you're doing it online with a bunch of other people. Like, and that's just the way that everybody interacts with it. And that interaction is as important in the discussion almost as the music has become as important in the discussion, almost as the music itself. So you have to include it when you're talking about, like, about. a body of work when it comes out. Yeah, and then also so many of the most, I guess, relevant or at least

talked about artists have this extra art life that we also have to take into account when we're talking about them, whether it's Kanye or whoever else. Charity, have you been feeling that too, that sometimes talking about a thing gets overwhelmed with talking around the thing? Yeah, and it's weird because I think there's like an extreme reduction of that argument that can make it sound. like we're saying that millennials invented

the idea of celebrity, which is not quite right, but I do think that someone like Drake marks the shift into oh, this person's, from this person's first album onward, their albums weren't like books of music so much as they were metanarrative objects. They're almost

sort of like seasons of a soap opera that you're expected to keep up with. Yeah. And I think, you know, over the past decade or so, yeah, increasingly that, you know, whether you're talking about the melodrama of rappers, or you're talking about the melodrama of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, right? Like, you're sort of talking about this

meta-narrative serialization that turns everything into sort of a sort of celebrity trivia. And again, I think a lot of that is driven by the tyranny of fandom. I would go so far as to characterize it. And it's not, you know, the tyranny of fandom and the thing's becoming like a repository for ideas that are already on the internet. Yeah, but like, I mean, it's basically, Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, yes, yes. That is the tyranny of, like, tends to homogenize things and thus, like, your critical concerns become extradectual.

Yes. Like, necessarily. But you have to work with that. Like, you know, we're so far gone into that. That being how celebrity and art and popular culture work now. that, you know, I don't, I don't want to make sound only out to be a place that we're carving out to escape these things altogether. Like, if anything, I wanted to be a space where we sort of take that fandom on its terms and talk about it and talk through its conclusions and work out what we really think about it. So as much as we think through questions of, you know, how adversarial is a critic's relationship with an artist or with a body of work, you know, I hope we are working through questions of how adversarial the critic's relationship with the fan is.

Because these are interesting questions, even if the shifts that have sort of provoked those questions are kind of frustrating. I mean, like, I will say that that is, we want to stress that this is, like, very much walking into the woods about certain subjects. Like, We'll take the structure of each episode is pretty simple and easy to remember. We're going to take a simple question about a person, place or thing on the internet, you know, probably pertaining to rap anime or what have you.

And then we're going to complicate it until we get an answer. That's more or less how each of these test runs is gone and how we plan to handle the rest of it. Well, I want to stop dancing about our. here and give people a sense of the kinds of things that you're going to be talking about. But the easiest way I can think of to ask you about that is just basically how you've been entertaining yourselves over the last couple of weeks and months. It's basically been the topic of the conversations that Andy and I have been having. But I was wondering, you know,

how drastically your habits have changed in terms of what you're watching and whether or not you're necessarily looking to be challenged, comforted, whether your curiosity levels have been higher or lower over the last couple of months and just generally what shit you're feeling and what we can expect to be hearing you guys talk about on the pot so michael we can start with you right so um candidly like as a point of disclosure uh initially in the beginning of quarantine i was just like yeah i'm going to get to this entire list i'm going to watch ganja and hess and i'm going to watch all the bruce leave movies again and i'm going to do all this other stuff, but then you kind of settle into, like, watching all of the comforting things

that you've seen a million times, like Mask of the Fantasim or the Count of Moni Cristo or whatever. I don't know what that might be for you. Those are just a couple for me. I was going to learn German. Yeah, you know, I had such grand designs, but I think, like, as it went on, like, you are honestly watching the, like, I just would be watching the things that everybody was watching just to participate in the larger conversation because you just need other people to talk to and things to fixate on. So, yeah, of course, like I watched Tiger King. Like most recently I've been watching Umbrella Academy.

But, like, kind of it hasn't been sticking for me. And I noticed, like, also talking to a lot of other people, like, I guess, a my immediate friend group, but also other people on the internet. that it's like a difficult thing to stick with, even though the energy of it is something that critics flawed in most of their reviews is just like it keeps it up from beginning to end, but it's difficult to watch past the four episodes for most of the people that I know.

And I was trying to figure out why. And the thing is, is that, like, umbrella academy is actually structured, like, an anime. Like, there's a very, like, complicated conceit that you have to immediately accept that these are the terms of the world, like from the onset. There's a bunch of colorful characters that have like amazing abilities

that don't really translate into like the physical world without looking goofy, you know? Yeah. The color palette, the way that the scenes are like structured. But anyway, yeah, like those kinds of things are discussions that might pop up on the podcast.

Whether or not Umbrella Academy is shadow anime. Would. Yeah. Charity, what about you? I actually have had a tremendously difficult time doing the things that normally do. Like, I don't have a much harder time reading post lockdown. Oh, that's impossible. I really can't focus on TV shows.

And so I've ended up baking a lot, learning some programming. And I mean, what else? I mean, mostly that. And I can't even really play video games like I was playing before. I can play games if I'm reviewing them for the website. or to talk about Michael with them on his recommendation. But, sure. Yeah, I've been baking and programming and jogging a lot.

And, like, even TV, I really don't... Like, I watch tons of Twitch streams now. And that's just my lifestyle at this point. I've watched maybe one TV show in lockdown and hundreds of hours with Twitch, probably, at this point in the background. I actually watched upload because my girlfriend was into upload, so I watched it with her. I mean, wherever you can find any kind of pleasure with it,

I was curious whether or not you guys had been legitimately thrilled by anything in the last couple of months. I honestly had an experience on Saturday, Friday night. I saw a movie on Shudder, which is a streaming horror service that I recommend if you like horror, you should definitely check it out. And they have a movie called The Host on. It's 56 minutes. And it's the first quarantine horror movie. They made it during core.

and it's entirely, it's a Zoom chat that they, a group of friends, decide to have a seance on a Zoom and shit goes really wrong. And it is phenomenal. Like, it has no business being as good as it is and it is so fucking scary and absolutely dead on in terms of like,

not only just like, oh, wait, wait, I didn't mean to talk over you there kind of like mechanics of Zoom talk. But like even like the way people have anxiety about what can be seen in the background of their screen and what they're seeing and other people's screens. And it's also really interesting because it's 56 minutes. So it's like barely a movie.

But it really like honestly gave me like a real charge for the first time in a while. So I don't know. You guys should have to check it out if you get a chance. Yeah. Yeah. You talked about that before. Like the your, your, your pre-election for watching horror movies to shock yourself away.

It's true. It's true. But there's also I've before, because I'm going to forget, because I don't know if you've watched it yet, Chris, but you're going to love it is the Anelka documentary. I fucking adore it. Come on, make you kidding me? It's incredible.

Like, especially, like, I just, I like the, I like the way it illustrates how he was just more ambitious about his piece of mind than he was about his career. So this is a very, like, an infamous, I would say, a footballer from Europe named Nicholas Anelka

who played it for a lot of the big clubs in your Arsenal, around Madrid, and he recently has been in the subject of a Netflix documentary, but go ahead, Micah. Right, so Anelka, young phenom comes on to the party bronze for PSG at 16,

which, I mean, like, think about, like, imagine if, like, LeBron debuted at 16 instead of at 18, whatever. Like, let's, for a parallel. Scores in his first game and then, like, you know, legend takes off from there.

But the thing is that, like, he's one of those characters that was, like, from even then very, very confident in his self-worth. So, like, he'd show up at Arsenal and be like, I should be starting at 17. Like, he'd show up at Real Madrid and be like, I should be the lead striker. The team should be built around me. Yeah.

The team should be built around me. And it's really like an interesting test study case in like sports psychology as far as like needing to, needing to think that you're the best while also appreciating the limits of your game. Yeah. But like the friction that that causes throughout, you know, one transcendent talents career. Yeah. It's an incredible portrait of tortured greatness. I guess it's best way to put it. Can you guys give me a little bit of a preview?

Give our listeners a little bit of preview of what you're going to be talking about on the first episode of sound only if you feel comfortable. No, no spoilers, but you know. No, just spoil it. We're talking about verses.

Yes. You're talking about verses. We're talking about DJ battles on Instagram live. Yeah, and but the thing that people should know about the pot is the cool thing is like, yes, they're talking about the versus battles

that have been happening throughout the summer, but also whether or not any of this COVID era we figured out this new way to do things if any of that shit is going to stick after this is done. And should it stick? And the ethics of it sticking. Right. Yeah.

The ethical moral quadri of it sticking. I think it's actually a perfect first episode for people to hear because it's like what if you took this thing that people are aware of and paying attention to and then pushed it to its farthest, farthest reaches of in terms of the conversation. So I I can't wait for people to hear Sound Only again.

And thank you guys so much for coming on today and make it some recommendations. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Yeah, it's been great. Thanks. Thanks for having us. I appreciate you having us. All right, thanks to Micah and Justin. You can subscribe to Sound Only wherever you get your podcasts. And now some of you have been waiting for this. I can't wait to get into it myself.

This is the first chapter of me and Andy's four-part conversation about Lonesome Dove, the Larry McMurtry novel and the CBS miniseries. starring Robert Duval and Tommy Lee Jones. It's become something of an object of an obsession. For me and Andy this summer, I think it's given us a lot of joy to lose ourselves in this world and to just kind of get swept up

in the majesty of this entire saga. So we wanted to talk about it. We thought it would be easiest to break the conversation up into four because there's four episodes of the CBS miniseries, which you can find... I think it's on Amazon. It's on iTunes. If you have stars, you can watch it for free.

It's out there. I hope people have been reading along. I hope people have been watching along. We don't really spoil things if we can help it in this conversation. So if you're just watching episode by episode, this is basically episode one. A lot of our conversation is about the novel, though, because the novel is something that's really had a pretty profound impact on both me and Andy's life. And it's been kind of awesome to know that that can still happen this late in life and, you know, in 2020. So it's been, it's been awesome texting with Andy about it. I can't wait to get our conversation on Mike. So let's

just get right into it. It's episode one of our Lonesome Dove Talk. All right, Andy, I guess this is where we find out if we was meant to be Cowboys. This is the first edition, first episode of our Lonesome Pod, our recap of Lonesome Dove the novel by Larry McMurtry and Lonesome Dove the miniseries, which aired, God, I guess, what, 28 years ago on CBS when did it air? 31 years ago. 31 years ago. We keep it moving.

Andy and I have been talking about this for a while. I think both of us, for the better part of a year, have been on this kind of journey where we've been moving in and out of the flowing fields of Larry McMurtry's fiction and essays. And we settled kind of into this shared zone where we were both reading these Lonesome Dove novels. We started off, obviously, with Lonesome Dove, and it's sequel, Streets of Laredo, and then there are some prequels, Day Man's Walk, and Comanche Moon. We're going to be talking mostly about Lonesome Dove, although there will be references to other works. And we're going to talk about it. The way we're going to break this up is we're going to do basically one episode

of the miniseries at a time, but using that mostly as like a mile marker for where in the story we're going to discuss. So this is for my edition of Lonesome Dove. We're going to be talking about the first like 280 pages. It's loosely a couple hundred pages. Andy, I thought I would just say something at the beginning here about Lonesome Dove's

sort of journey to us before we talk about our kind of discovery of Lonesome Dove because Lonesome Dove took a little bit of a pretty long and winding road to its great American novel capital letters status. It started out actually as like, as an idea for a movie between McMurtry and Peter McDonovic. And he had collaborated with Bogdanovich on the adaptation of Last Picture Show, which obviously launched the careers of people like Sybil Shepard and Jeff Bridges. And it's just still a stunning film and a stunning novel. And it was initially imagined as a script for John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart,

and Henry Fondo with Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne playing the Woodrow Call and Augustus McCray roles and Henry Fondo was going to play Jake Spoon. And it was going to be this kind of capstone Western for these guys' careers. And it would look back with some, you know, real honesty and sober eyes on the West and the mythology around it. And it kind of floundered mostly because Wayne and Stewart did not want to make the movie. And McMurtree went on. Because they didn't want to be old. I mean, because they didn't want to be old. Yeah. They didn't want to be a part of closing the book on a book that they and their careers had written. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, McMurtry went on to find tons of success with novels like Terms of Endearment, which were also adapted to famous movies.

And I think is one of the most sort of successful and well-known literary novelists probably of, I would say, almost the post-war period from the 60s till today. His books are regularly adapted. He's a, you know, a really charming public figure. when he is in public. His sort of commentary is always is always really acerbic and smart. And this book is a masterpiece. And it was initially submitted to Simon & Schuster as a 1,600-page first draft.

And what we get is this huge tone that was sort of modeled after Victorian novels, after Don Quixote, and the stories that McMurtry heard from his uncles growing up in Archer, Texas about ranching and cattle driving. And it's a phone book of a novel, and it'll break your heart and it'll sweep you away.

It won the 1986 Pulitzer for fiction, and it's probably one of the, I think, most beloved novels of the last 40 years. And funnily enough, it remains a bit of a sore spot for McMurtry, who had this to say, years later when he wrote the preface for a later edition of One Some Dove, he said, it's hard to go wrong

if one writes at length about the Old West, still the phantom leg of the American psyche. I thought I had written about a harsh time and some pretty harsh people, but to the public at large, I had produced something nearer to an idealization. Instead of a poor man's inferno, capital I like his and Dantes, filled with violence, faithlessness, and betrayal,

I'd actually delivered a kind of gone with the wind of the West, a turnabout I'll be mulling over for a long, long time. And we're obviously going to mull over a lonesome dove in tons of different ways. But why the hell are we doing this, Andy? Like, why in 2020 we decided to dedicate this time to Lonesome Dove? There's a couple of reasons. I think one is circumstance, context, age and perspective, which is to say that during this awful lockdown and period in American

history, both of us have been, like many people, have been looking for escape, joy, wherever we can find it. And picking up a, I mean, my copy is almost 900 pages, or over 900 pages, that seemed like a pretty good way to do it. And losing myself in this book over the course of, you know, almost two weeks was one of the most purely pleasurable reading experiences of my life. I absolutely adored it. I think one of the other reasons why it interests us is because something that we love to talk about on this podcast, whether we're talking about albums or TV shows or movies, is there are moments when there is intent behind a work of art, and that intent is often multifaceted and complicated and difficult to parse, and then there's the reception. And there's always that excruciating moment, like when the ball leaves the pitcher's hand and they can't control it anymore. And we are as much interested in the mythology of Lonesome Dove as we are in Lonesome Dove itself.

And you alluded to it, this idea that McMurtry, who is deeply unsentimental, wrote a book that is a sentimental favorite of American culture to the degree that there was a spike in children named Gus after 1985, that Larry McMurtry, who grew up the children of cattlemen in arid West Texas, rejected the cowboy way of life, was not for him, hid in the barn and read books, went to graduate school eventually in Houston and just was happiest in the library, dreamed of being accepted by a literary community that kind of only wanted cowboy stories from people from Texas and sort of expressly rejected him, even though he is as intellectual, as literary, it's just about anybody else. I mean, in addition to being an incredibly prolific writer, as you alluded to, Chris, he's also a bookstore Maven

and owns a store called Booked Up in Archer City, Texas, that has maybe more books than any other store in the world. And so for years, he rejected writing a Westerner a Cowboy. He was writing about in the 60s, what was then his own memories of a changing Texas, and then wrote a number of books that you and I adore that go from sort of a swinging Houston in the 70s to Hollywood and books that were well received and were adapted, you know, spectacularly to Hollywood, but kind of never found popular traction. And then he wrote the thing that he said he was never going to do, and it exploded his career, got him the Pulitzer Prize and all the acumen that he probably secretly did covet. And what we have in Lonesome Dove is, as I said,

it's just a brilliant, staggering book. There's an essay by Jeff Dyer that we'll link to or let people see where he correctly says it. This is that kind of book where the words, you lose the distance between yourself and the page, and it just comes alive in you. And you just, you just spend hours thinking about it when you're not spending hours reading it. But it is also one of those really fascinating events in popular culture where what was intended is so divorced from what it was and how it was received. And I think we're going to get into that as we go through it. Other examples of this phenomenon would be like born in the USA by Bruce Springsteen, which is a song that is harshly critical about what it means to be born in the USA. And yet was a, you know,

a hallmark of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign and is thought to be a very nostalgic patriotic song by a lot of people who love it. I think about David Chase with the Sopranos, who was just like, my whole life, I've been haunted by the specter of being Italian-American and the mob, and I think that these people are nihilistic monsters, and everybody wanted to go out for Gabagool with him afterwards, no matter how awful he made these people. So obviously, McMurtry wrestles with his own legacy in subsequent books, and we won't really talk about it until the end, but Streets of Laredo, the sequel, which is named, which is actually what the original Bugdanovitch screenplay was named, kind of wrestles with it in a much more explicit way,

his reckoning with the West. But look, this is a novel that was described by Texas Monthly Magazine on the 25th anniversary as like the ultimate Texas novel. And yet the book is barely in Texas. It's about people who ran out of things to do in Texas and have to go to Montana to feel alive. And it's not like when you're spending time in Texas in this novel, you're like, man, Texas sounds great. No, it's amazing. He thought he was being completely unsentimental. and yet everybody fell in love with it. And that push-pull, because the book is so lovable. The characters, even the worst of them are, well, not all of them.

We're not talking blue duck here. But like all the cowboys, even call, you know, are admirable or lovable in all sorts of complicated, wonderful ways. And yet, and yet. So this just felt like a rich text for us to get into. Yeah. I think both of us come to it as, you know, cowboy agnostic. I think I probably have a lot more fired up about westerns and the old West

and you are, like, growing up. Prior to two weeks ago or whatever it was, yes. Yeah. Now you just were chaps. No, I'll echo what Andy said and just say that, you know, the best description I have of my experience with Lonesome Dove over the last couple of weeks is Bastion and Neverending story, like, up in the attic, just crushing, crushing tape,

just like reading, just burrowing himself into the world of this novel. And I got to say, like, I always had a little bit of jealousy, when I heard my dad talk about experiences he had had with adventure books, like whether it was reading Robinson Crusoe or whether it was reading, you know, James Fenimore Cooper or these sort of like typical young boy adventure books that you read because I was like, I never felt transported by novels in that way. I often would find myself thrilled or completely immersed in them, but I never felt myself being carried away on like this river of story, you know,

and just forgetting everything around me. And that's been something that I think, in a lot of ways you wonder whether or not this could have happened at any other time for both of us, because we are kind of limited in what we are taking in or experiencing in the outside world now,

that we were really open to the idea of being completely transported to another place. And I think that McMurtry has talked before about how when he writes essays, and if anybody listening is looking for a good example of his essay work, I would recommend Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen, which is an incredible collection. it's half literary criticism, half memoir, but it's just stunning.

He talks about how when he writes nonfiction, he needs every sentence to make sense. He needs every sentence to connect to the next one and the next one because he's making an argument. He's trying to make a coherent point. But when he writes fiction, he's essentially doing it in a trance. I think that that can sometimes work against McMurtry. McMurtry has definitely got a body of work that has some clunkers in it. I would say that his clunkers are better than a lot of people's best work. but there is definitely books where you're like,

man, I'd love to know what was happening in his personal life when he was writing this. Right. But Lonesome Dove is probably the perfect balance between refinement and pure expression, where you just feel this story tumbling out of this guy and out of this country, but you also feel like he is completely in control.

I agree with that. I think that you referred to his public persona as charming. I think it's cantankerously charming. I mean, he's kind of a crank. and in a wonderful way. I mean, this is a guy who very intentionally wore blue jeans to the Oscars when he won for Brokeback Mountain a few years ago. But you also do get the sense that writing for him is pure. And it is what he does and it is what he loves to do. Not the case for many people, your boy included, who have made a career out of writing. It is hard work and it is not always fun. But he seems to love it. And it just takes in places. And so sometimes those places are the book he wrote just before Lonesome Dove, which is this, totally minor, just sort of very light DC comedy called Cadillac Jack that I'm struggling with, despite having been reading it for eight months. And then sometimes it's lonesome dove when he just taps a vein. And there's something else there. And it is contagious when someone clearly was

taking as much pleasure out of writing it as you are out of reading it. And there's a lot of, I think not enough scholarship about this book. But Chris and I will link to this Texas Monthly article we're referring to where people are like, correctly being like, Cormick McCarthy gets all the attention. But Cormick McCarthy is just dark, you know, and it's appealing to people who want things to be. I don't even mean to shit on Cormick McCarthy. Nobody needs me to do that. He's great, and you can have both.

But those books are very, very mannered and written in a way that is appealing to an intellectual mindset. This, Larry McMurtry writes popular fiction even when it's not popular. And in that, he's more like a dickens, right? He just somehow wrote great literature. that filled 800 pages of a mass market paperback that anybody, even people who've never heard of Corby, could read and find something to enjoy in. And that also mirrors, I think, our taste,

kind of in terms of television and other things we talk about. So it's all lined up for us. Maybe, should we... This is actually very lonesome dovy that, remember, that book is about a cattle drive, and it doesn't start until 250 pages in, which is the length of most novels. In some ways, I think, you know,

I'll be really curious to see... I've seen on our Facebook page that a lot of people are reading the book. I've seen on our Facebook page the people have just decided to watch the miniseries first and sort of see where they're at with that. They are completely different experiences in this one regard. The miniseries essentially does a very faithful but economic job of moving through the story so that at the end of, I think it's an hour and 17, hour 30 minute first episode, you are 280 pages into the book.

Whereas the book, and especially the pace of the book, feels very basically intrinsically related to the action on the page. So the time they spend dilly dallying around Lonesome Dove, this small town in Texas on the border, and kind of trying to decide what they're going to do, whether or not they're going to follow this guy, Jake Spoon's advice that they go take a cattle herd up to Montana because it's the last pure frontier.

And what last adventure these guys can have? Because I think everybody in this group seems to know either consciously or subconsciously that this is the last adventure. I mean, I think even would recall when someone says, well, what will we do when we get back? And he's like, we're not coming back. But that whole feeling of them milling around once in Dove and getting ready to go,

it's also a very meandering story in the book itself. I mean, he just kind of pokes his head into different people's lives and introduces us to a lot of different characters. Yeah, I think, and I don't know if we said this at the top, we should say it again. We're going to do our best to not spoil the segments of the book or the miniseries as we go

in the case people are parceling it out to go along with it. We're going to limit our future conversation. We're not going to say what happens to these characters in part three of the miniseries or part three of our podcast. But I think that's exactly right. And so I kind of wanted to start at the very beginning, which is, you know, you grab this brick of a book or you dust off your parents' VHS tape or whatever you're doing and you

feel the weight of it or you see all the quotes, the masterpiece. You hear about how this was the greatest thing ever on television, even though I didn't even realize this. The Emmys totally ignored it, which is hilarious. It's 18 nominations and one win, right? For director, yeah, which is really funny to think about. So you look at this and you feel the importance of it, even the painting on the old mass market and hardcover edition,

feels like this is an epic of Americana, as Simon Schuster intended to market it as. And it starts with a pig eating a snake. From the beginning, he's trying to tell you this isn't a monument. This isn't a statue. This isn't an ode to greatness or the American spirit. This is just some stuff that happened in a dusty, mean place. And if you find moments of beauty, you can enjoy them, but they will be fleeting.

And I remember opening this book, and again, it was only a month ago, being like, why am I going to care about this? This is a book about pigs eating snakes. It's incredible to think that this book starts with these characters, and, you know, people I think are familiar, but we'll say it again. these legendary Texas Rangers and the Texas Rangers were the people who, and they were even exempted from Civil War Service because of it,

they were cleaning up the frontier. They were cleaning out Texas. They had a, it was incredibly hard work. Yeah, I think it was incredibly brutal. The latter is probably more accurate, right? Yeah, I mean, they went to war and rode against the Comanches

so that homesteaders and settlers could expand their territory further west and they could hold the relatively arbitrary frontier of the Rio Grande. from Mexico. And when we pick up our story, that's kind of done. It's not the natural starting place for a story. We're down to pigs eating snakes. And Gus McCray and Woodrow Call, who are partners, and I guess friends, although that means something kind of different, brothers, basically, have given up rangering and have opened kind of like a, I don't even know how you describe it.

Like, they rent animals, but not pigs and they dig wells. Yeah, it seems like they basically have like a dirt farm. I mean, it's a town that is barely getting by. have some horses, right? Like, I think they have, they have like a functional, like, cattle farm, but they don't really seem to sell anything or do anything. It is a one-hor town, to coin a phrase. Exactly. It's a place between here and there on the edge of something. And immediately, you kind of reminded that the frontier myth, and this is something I, you know, that reading this book has gotten me thinking about a lot. When you think about cowboys and all this stuff, like, it really was only a couple years in the American experiment. So all those beloved movies and all

the things that our parents or grandparents grew up idolizing decades later was just a blip, essentially, when there was an active frontier and, you know, there was, you could put some heroism on it, at least in your imagination. Then it was over. And so these are two men who have devoted their life to conflict against something intangible, whether it was the unknown, whether it was the frontier which kept moving, whether it was the American experiment or whatever they were doing it for, they went to war against it and then they kind of won and then what? Now they're just digging holes to nowhere in a dust bowl and where does that spirit, where does that go and how does it play out? And that's why, though they've been sitting here drinking on the porch for 10 years,

when Jake Spoon, their old Companiero shows up and it's like, I heard Montana's nice. Yeah. Call suddenly is like unlike him because he is, you know, the by the book guy. And is not a cattleman. Not a cattleman. No connection to emotions, hope, anything is like, we're going to go there. We're going to do this thing

that we've never done and we're going to do something no one else has done because that is the only animating spirit in his body, even at whatever age he is when this book begins. And these guys are,

I think that's where he starts to put his finger on the idea of a settled frontier versus a wild frontier and what these guys are really looking for because their idea of what civilization looks like, even if it's something

as sort of podunk, and goat herding as lonesome dove is in the town itself, their idea of what the frontier should be is limitless. It's boundaryless and it's boundless. And they want the adventure and they want the danger and they want to cross all these rivers and drive these cattle. The cattle are kind of like almost a macuffin. What they really want to do is get to essentially the Canadian border from the Mexico border.

They want to get someplace new. And it's very much a different definition of the American dream. Like the 20th century definition of the American dream, I think, was you can buy a house and settle down and have kids there and, you know, milk and eggs will be cheap and plentiful and you can settle in. Like that's sort of the post-war American dream. The thing about Call and McRae, even though this might not even be, I guess might, I think certainly by the end of the book, and this is not a spoiler, Gus is more aware of this than Call is. Their dream was to build that world for other people, but they don't want to live in it. that has no appeal to them whatsoever. And you feel that torpor at the beginning.

And I think if you're just starting the book and haven't been doing the things that Chris and I did later, you might not get it yet, right? Because the book's called Lonesome Dove. And yet they're in Lonesome Dove for 200 pages and it kind of sucks for everybody. Even people who have started the book,

if you don't make it to where that first episode of the miniseries ends, you might be wondering why you even signed up for this ride because they did all of this. And for what? To sit and sweat all day and they don't even have a roof. Yeah.

When you think about some of the other sort of great cattle drive stories, and I guess Red River would be the number one that comes to mind. Bogdanovich had talked about how he wanted to make a Red River-esque film when he was working with McMurtry and he obviously idolized Howard Hawks.

Red River is essentially, it becomes mutiny on the bounty, but on horses. You know, it's about these younger cowboys who rebel against and then eventually, you know, work with John Wayne's character who's driving this cattle herd to Missouri from Texas. Lonesome dove is a little bit more wandering. I mean, I think that these guys are trying to touch something or articulate something that's just out of their sort of intellectual capabilities to understand, but they just know that they can't sit still anymore. And that is that

kind of rambunctiousness and that restlessness that you're talking about, where it's not necessarily about establishing anything as much as it is constant movement. And that's, and that feeling of constantly being able to move through and across anything that's in your way, whether it's a river or, you know, three days of no water or whatever it is that they come across. The thing that I think jumps out at me or to jump out at me, even in the early stages of the cattle drive, once they leave Lonesome Doven, there's like this whole other side story about a sheriff from Arkansas who's pursuing Jake Spoon for murdering his brother-in-law and that sheriff's wife, Elmira, who then leaves Arkansas promptly after John.

July's departure and she's going off to find the love of her life and they wind up, you know, being this sort of B plot of this novel for the most part. For people who've read these books need to understand, what McMurchy communicates to us is that the West is fucking huge and there are like 20 people there and you run into them constantly. Yes. And I'm cool with it. I'm cool with it. I mean, I was trying to figure that out because this is something that comes up throughout the

novel is that two people will be looking for one another, for sure. three months and you're just like, you guys are just not going to bump into each other. One's in Nebraska and the others. I mean, I guess there's only so many roads. It does sound like there's like four roads. Yeah, and that eventually, like, if you just like stopped and waited for someone in San Antonio,

they would probably come through one way or the other. Also, these people are hungry and thirsty, full stop. But they're also hungry and thirsty for goss. You know what I mean? Like, they want to know what's going on. And so that matters. And it also, you know, not to get, not to digress too much, but the idea of legends and legends spreading faster than reality,

I mean, when Gus and Call leave Lonesome Dove and reenter the world, I mean, there are moments when some people don't give them the respect that they do, but generally people know who they are and they're famous, despite the fact that they've been, again, sitting on porches or digging wells for a decade. Yeah. So news does travel in a relatively small community. But, sorry, I cut you off when you were. No, I was just going to say that just early on in the book,

and I think the thing that we could probably take from this first section is the two things that immediately get dispelled are, A, the idea of like Magnificent 7, that this is some sort of like superpowered, you know, suicide squad justice league of cowboys, it's not that. It's basically Colin McCrae, a scout named Dietz, a boy named Newt of unknown paternal origin, which comes up obviously a lot in the novel, a prostitute named Lorena. She's with James and a couple of other people, PI, like a couple other, like, basically rag tag group of stragglers.

This dish erasure will not stand. Dish, yeah, there's a bunch of different cowboys, Jasper Fant, the O'Brien brothers, all these guys, and they are moving across an absolutely heartless landscape. Yeah. Pretty. And there are parts of it that are beautiful

and there are parts of it that the people who are moving across that are very in touch with on an almost like subatomic poetic level of just being like there's nothing better than watching the sun come up over the landscape. But McMurtry's view of nature is brutal. And Dave Hickey, in that Texas Monthly article that you were referencing, he said,

he said, Larry has something that my grandfather had, which is a ruthless view of nature. I remember watching a sunset with my grandfather as a kid. I said, isn't that beautiful? And he said, oh, yeah, and while you're admiring nature, nature is looking back at you and saying, yum, yum, here comes dinner. There is, in Larry, an idea that nature

as this monstrous force in which we make our way very fragile, Lonesome Dove is very good about this. And that's true. Yeah, there is a relentless savagery to this book. It's just, it's a fact of, it is literally a fact of life. It is natural. It's matter of fact. And that is a, you know, that's like a difference between McCarthy and McMurtry

in that McCarthy looks at violence as this almost like biblical act of this original thing that we are born with. Whereas McMurtry, I think, looks at it as like a happen, an often, an often, an off. of nature and a product of being alive. And I think that we'll have a deeper conversation as we go along about things that McMurtry does in the way portrays characters in this book from the 80s, you know, with our contemporary state of mind, which is to say Dietz, the black character in the book. And Lorena, who's one of many fascinating women in the book, but is the primary one.

And speaking specifically about Lorena, I mean, there is, look, I was going to say certain things seem accurate. I don't know. I am not Texan. I have never led cattle. I am not a student of 19th century American history. But McMurtry has always excelled in all of his books from Horseman Pass By and Last Picture Show all the way through in allowing his female characters, the women in his books to be full-bodied, full-minded, full-hearted human beings with a full range of emotions. And to my eyes anyway, which of course are suspect to any, you know, to all sorts of degrees, she is a fully alive and realized character partly because he is absolutely unstinting and again unsentimental about the limits this society has placed on her and what her options are and what her

path has been and what it is likely to be. We don't lose sight of that. And that's something as we begin to talk about the differences between the book and the miniseries, that's something that I struggled with more in the miniseries because we suddenly, that door is slam shut, the window is slammed shut to her inner thoughts, what she really wants, how she feels about what's been done to her and what she has to do.

And Diane Lane does a really good job in the miniseries, but I think that's a great example of the limitations of, sometimes the limitations of telling a story on screen versus telling a story in a novel. And the psychological depth of characters in Lonesome Dove is actually quite subtle. You know, there's the old trope of action, his character. I think that that's actually really well suited for Lonesome Dove, but there's just not a lot of action.

In fact, what it is is just every day kind of moving through these people's very, very, very fucking hard lives. You know, because that's what life was like back then, is that you might do everything right and lose focus for a second and the worst possible thing could happen to you. You know, and that is the reality in which these people are living, but that doesn't mean that they don't, daydream or that they don't have reveries about different parts of their lives or wish that they had something else going on in their lives that they could live for. And sometimes what they're living for is they don't even know. They're just like, I just feel like I'm supposed to keep moving forward. Yeah. I mean, to use Dietz is another example, one of the most amazing characters in the book, there's a moment early on in these, it's in these first hundred pages where we're suddenly

with Dietz and it's talking about how he just kind of feels melancholy to the point of suicide depression at times. And what it means for him to feel that way and what he looks forward to to and there are certain moments in nature that make him that alleviate that pain and that feeling that tell us so much about him and who he is and what it means to be a black man in this world, a full partner essentially, but not fully. Full maybe in the Hat Creek outfit, but not in society. Not in society. And even with limitations within the Hat Creek outfit. And as a way to transition to talking about the mini series as well, in that Texas monthly oral history of it, there's a quote from Danny Glover

who plays the part beautifully. And he's just like, I wasn't sure about doing it because I wasn't sure how much there was there. And honestly, and so he came up with some more backstory for Dietz in order to bring to his performance. But look, the miniseries is great, but he's right. There isn't room for that internal life and there isn't room for the depth,

although he certainly brought depth to it. And one of the things that this makes me think of, and maybe this is a way to transition, It's so fascinating to me that this was designed as a star vehicle. This was Larry McMurtry and Peter Bogdanovich sitting on a balcony of a hotel in Miami watching Sybil Shepard swim laps saying, let's do a Western. Let's get the Duke back on horseback again. And we'll get Jimmy Stewart saying Augustus and his funny voice.

And that's what it'll be. It was a star vehicle. And then when no one wanted to make it, he bought the rights back and turned what had to have been a, what, a 120-page script into a 900-page novel. It is so rich in detail, you'd have to read it multiple times to get all of it. And then it becomes a miniseries, which was as expansive as something could be at the time. It was six hours on TV that's pretty good for the 80s. And looked as you could probably make a miniseries look.

And yet ultimately, it is a star vehicle in the end, you know, through the weight of Duval's performance and Tommy Lee Jones's performance, but also because the aperture for a story like this in 1989 was to center it in the two old cowboys. and not necessarily find a way in through the horror on the side of town or the black man who's a member of the group but not really a member of the group. It is what it is. To my mind, anyway, watching it, I admire it and I'm fond of it

the way I think the sentimental fan of Lent and Dove is, but I just feel what's missing so much. Yeah, well, it's interesting too because the order in which you come to those things I think has a big impact on the other. So I think that I have a really hard time seeing Gus and Woodrow as, anybody else, but Robert is all in time. Me too. And crucially, I think, especially for these

opening few hundred pages, the book doesn't really have an antagonist in the early stages other than Jake. You know, Jake is the thorn in everybody's paw, but is not quite a villain yet, or, you know, is not quite a villain. And I think the interesting thing about this book is, and the story is that even the most monstrous villains that emerge aren't really villains. You know, Or they are villains, but they aren't really, they aren't really the centerpiece of the story, the way I think I've trained myself to read stories in terms of who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist. In some ways, I don't even know how much we really know about Gus and Woodrow psychologically at the end of this book that we didn't know in the beginning.

I mean, some of them are, they've been changed by their journey for sure, but a lot of what's changed them is literally physically what they've gone through throughout the journey. I think that's right. And I think that when I was reading the book, expecting something more traditional than what it is, almost having the legend in my mind more than the reality of it. And even my mass market paperback has that thing that books used to do where on the inside and back cover, it's like, you will meet. And it says, like, oh, the horror with the heart of gold and the beloved gang and says, and the fearsome villain, blue duck and blah, blah, blah. And then I'm reading the book. And I'm like, man, Larry doesn't give a fuck about rules.

It's like he doesn't even introduce the antagonist into page whatever. And when he does, it's, and it was only later that I realized that, of course, he knows rules. He was intentionally subverting them. The villain isn't what we, isn't who we think it is. The villain, such as it is, is entropy and time and nature and all of that, right? It doesn't behave the way you expect it to. It fights it at every turn, even though we, even now, when we're talking about it, sometimes still try to put certain narrative clothing back on it.

I will say, though, that one thing I thought, that the miniseries does really well, and they talk about it in that Texas monthly oral history, is the casting of Robert Urick, which I know that we've texted back and forth and you've been like, man, I don't know. Like, it just feels like he was a little out of his league here.

But I thought it was so interesting reading them talk about, reading this various people involved with the project, talk about that was an actual tension on set. That Robert Urick actually was like, I'm a TV guy, and this is Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duval. that I'm acting with, and he had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about it. And Jake Spoon has a chip on his shoulder about things not going his way the way he always wants

them to go. And he is this immature brat of a character who's actually not good at anything but women in gambling, but has kind of written on the reputation of the Rangers and Gus and Woodrow throughout most of his life. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, you read these retrospectives and Duval knew. Duval was just like, and by the way, they went to Duval first to play Call. Yeah.

And I think James Garner was in the mix to potentially play Gus. And Duval is basically like, you know, he knows how to ride. He knows how to ride horses. He knows how to do basically everything. And he had just won an Oscar the year before for Tender Mercies. And he was like, we are doing the godfather of Westerns. Like we are through sheer force of will, we are going to make a masterpiece here. and somehow achieve that,

even though there were all these other concerns at place. You learned behind the scenes that when they wanted to cast Angelica Houston as Clara, its character doesn't show up until much later in the book, but casts a very, very long and impressive shadow, and it's an amazing section of the book that's, you know, well, it gets you. The people involved were like, you know, we need some TV people on this. This is a TV show. Let's get Bob Eurick and Ricky Schroeder.

Yeah. And that's why they're there. And are they suitable? Sure. But it's part of the limitations. were up against. I mean, whole characters are removed, some, you know, in ways that make sense. Some, like Will Barker, that are still going to still annoy me. But I guess I'm curious what other people feel about it because clearly there's many, many more people whose introduction to this

was the miniseries and just feel enormous fondness for it than have ever read the book. But for me, watching the show as a companion piece, it's amazing to watch Duval and Jones Cook and just bring these people fully flesh and blood to life. And then on the margins, it's like, well, it's fun to see. It's fun to see. But it lacks, for me, the depth and the depth and breath, because it's just, he just writes so much. He writes so much about everything. Well, yeah. And I think that one of the challenges for the show, at least in terms of looking back at it, is even though you can, even though a lot of the performances have not aged a second, especially that of the leads.

Some of like the more set piecey parts, especially the part that I think will end on here, you know, you probably would have wanted another run at that in 2020 maybe, which is the, for lack of a better term, the snake attack that ends the first episode of the miniseries and happens about 280 pages into an edition that I have.

This is also the moment where I think most people are like, oh shit. Yep. This is a very engaging, lovely, funny, interesting story for the first couple hundred pages. You're introduced to all these different people. I think I kept getting distracted by July a little bit

and just kind of be like, what is up with this guy? Like, why is he getting so much screen time here in the book? Yeah. And then we got to, they've been on the, you know, out there on the prairie for a little while. And there have been cool set pieces.

I think that the stealing the horses or stealing the horses back from Hacienda Flores in Mexico is an amazing sequence. But really they're just kind of like moving along and complaining about horse flies and dust for a lot of the book

until kind of in the middle of a paragraph he says that's when Newt turned around and heard a scream that was the worst sound he had ever heard. And this is absolutely, it's anecdotal, it happened to me. like this is the moment when you say, oh shit,

and you realize the book you're reading isn't necessarily the book you thought you were reading. And I know you plan to just finish this chapter and go to sleep, but you're not going to because you have to keep going to calm your heart rate and wonder if anything's ever going to be okay again. Yeah. And this is also a lot of insight into the way McMurtry works, which is there are few writers alive or who have ever lived, I think,

who love their characters as deeply and totally as he does. I mean, he just almost like a, with a painterly casual stroke introduces someone, and you know everything about them and you love them. And you feel like they're flesh and blood and part of your life. And, you know, they ride down to Mexico and suddenly they meet these singing Irish brothers. And you're like, okay, sure. And you learn, by the way, from the Texas Monthly that that's because Bogdanovich wanted to cast some Irish singers in the movie they were going to make.

And so these characters are artifacts of that just random desire that he had. And then you're with nude and he's becoming friends with Sean O'Brien and he's brave and he's learned out to ride a horse. And you're like, everything is going to work out. And all of us, and we talk about this and we talk about TV too, just have a natural desire for things to work out. That's how we are as people. And sometimes we bring that to filmed entertainment or books, and then that's where that dissonance is where the good juicy stuff happens.

All of a sudden, Sean O'Brien, upon whom much story time has been allotted and bestowed and he's come alive to us, is bitten to death by two dozen poisonous snakes and dies gasping for air next to a river. Yeah. And you're like, what the? And that's when you realize the book you were reading. isn't the book you thought you were. And there were moments before,

even as you were talking about, the horse raid on Pedro Flores' compound, in retrospect, I now understand how important that is because Call is like, he's our enemy, he's our mirror on the other side of the border. We've given and gotten as good as it gets. And Call loves that.

He respects being well matched. You're like, oh, is he going to chase them? Like, what's going to happen? And then they get away, and I'm like, oh, this is a fantasy. Like, everything is going to work out for these guys. And then it's casually, oh, old Pedro died. Like, oh, the old guys are dying.

That's what the book is about, by the way. But instead, we have the same. we have the snake attack. And it is so disturbing and haunting. And that is the moment when, dare I say it, Larry's literary fangs latch into you and don't let go. You watch it on TV. These people who made the miniseries version, Bill Whitliff and Austin writer and artist who did the screenplay and Simon Winster, the Australian who directed it. I mean, they're no dummies.

They knew the book. They knew that this was the moment to end the first episode. Yeah. But woof. I wish we could just gift through time some special effects. Release the Snyder cut. Like, let's just get like some special effects going and get like, like, do you don't actually see a snake attack?

It's just like a shot of a snake, the guy's dangling leg as he enters the river and a scream. So, I mean, obviously. No, no, no, it freezes, Chris. It freeze frames on a snake's split head near my man's Sean Astin looking face. Yeah, that's right. And then it freeze frames. Like it's like it's an episode of Trapper John MD or something.

Look, it was late 80s, man. That's the thing. It is, it's dated. It's dated. But that is the moment when you realize, and by the way, they're still in Texas. Like, they haven't gone very far. Yeah. And all of these people along the, he takes a lot of time making it clear that everyone is shook by this.

And that sort of brings me to the, to one of the last points I wanted to make for this. first section, which is the Hat Creek outfit, but then also the whole team that is assembled, is split, right, between old hands like Gus and Call and Dietz and P.I. And new recruits, whether Newt, who is a kid, but people who are essentially his peers, whether they're the Irish guys, or Dish and Soupy and Jasper, all who fancy themselves, top hands or whatever. And it's split between, almost to a dangerous degree between people who don't know anything and people who really should know better. And it romanticizes neither. Like, Newt's innocence is sweet and compelling and like almost any like buildings Roman story. You're like, oh, he's going to learn about

the world and maybe catch a few bruises and nicks along the way. And only later are you like, why are the people who should be just giving him good advice leading him into this? Yeah, because that was the way of, that was the way life worked back then. And that's the thing is, there's also this amazing moment where I think there's a lot of trepidation about crossing rivers and a bunch of these younger guys are just like, shit, I do not want to do this. And it's like, yeah, because this is like the fifth river you've ever seen and you've never gone across any of them. Also, horses can swim. Like, this is just me learning stuff. You know what I mean? Like, I didn't know. I certainly didn't know pigs could swim. But look, I mean, it doesn't seem real easy.

Like, is there anything? What's weird is, and we should end here, but there's so much escapism in our pleasure that we take from this book and this property. And I would give anything, I mean, I love talking to you, buddy, but I would give anything to be reading this book again right now. But that's different than saying, I want to be these people. There's never, I would never really want to play Lonesome Dove. And in that sense, I think it's like actually a book that I only really felt like I could read now. But, you know, you never, you know, you wouldn't imagine yourself in this world. because you wouldn't last a day. You wouldn't last a day. You know, like, it's essentially, like, it's a miracle they make it five miles outside of town.

Yeah. I mean, I think Bolivar's cooking sounds interesting. I like the whiskey. Yeah. Whiskey sounds good. That's about it, really, right? Yeah. And for what? To get these cattle from one part of the country to the other. And it's a testament to the book that you're just like, I'm following along, you know, breathlessly. So we'll wrap it up there. you guys are as well. Yeah, we'll wrap it up there. I think we're going to get more into specific characters than the next couple. We just wanted to set this up

as much as possible. If you guys have questions for us or if there's conversation topics that you'd want us to hit, I think the Facebook group or hitting us up on Twitter would be the best place to do it. We're interested to see

what other people are interested in here. And yeah, thanks for going on this dog days of summer journey with us. I got my bed roll and also a lot of luggage.