The Watch - What's Changed Since Starting the Show, Favorite Movie Moments of the Year, and Other Mailbag Questions | The Watch (Ep. 300)

Episode Date: October 23, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald celebrate their 300th episode by opening up the mailbag and answering listener questions, including what has changed since they started their show (5:42), what the future of Netflix looks like (15:39), and what they want to watch that’s not out there right now (25:17). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Just Crack an Egg. Has your relationship with breakfast felt strained lately? It's just too much work for a weekday, right? Well, it's time to head over to the egg aisle and pick up Just Crack an Egg. It's a hot, fluffy scramble that's ready in less than two minutes. Just add a fresh egg over the chopped veggies, shredded cheese, hearty meat, and potatoes, then stir microwave and reignite your love of breakfast. I need sports to have to clear the room.

Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com and joining me on the other line. Tonight we dine in hell. It's Andy Greenwald. Happy birthday, buddy. This is a big show for us.

300 episodes. And to celebrate, I will be doing a dramatic reading of the 300 screenplay playing all parts. Oh, that's really good. That's really good. I thought we were going to do an on-mic viewing of every episode of the Romanoff. This is going to be a 16-hour-long podcast. Congratulations to you, by the way. Man, France seems great.

France seems awesome. How are you, man? Listen, I'm recording this podcast live from Sam S. Mail's office, and I have to tell you that Sam wishes us a happy birthday. Does he really? And he does because, well, here's the truth. There's been a schism in the church. Listen, I know.

He's been disagreeing with us about some stuff offline. and I want you to know that I plan to celebrate this 300th episode by having him surprise you and just have him do the podcast. Okay. That was the plan. It was agreed upon so that I could just get back to the editing room. And this morning, I received a message from him that he was, and are you ready for this? Yeah.

Too busy to come into work today. Oh. To which I reply, must be nice. Must be nice. The truth is, I think, Chris, he was unwilling to have his feet held to the critical fire. Yeah, I wasn't going to let him. off. I'm like Anderson Cooper interviewing Corey Lewandowski, man.

I got that dude dead to rights. So he does wish us a happy, happy birthday, and he will be back on shortly. Like, hopefully, you know. Yeah, we'll do our annual year end pie with Sam, where he will subtly troll us about all of our takes. We're doing this 300th episode.

Shout out to Kaya for assembling all these questions. Shout to you guys, the listeners, the Branskies for sending in all these questions on Twitter and on Facebook. But before we dive into that, I wanted to ask you a little bit about your outdoorsman weekend and whether it deepened your appreciation for the show camping. I haven't watched it because I'm living. I think that people need to understand that, like, I know that I have not been, what's the word?

Watching television, yeah. These last few weeks, or frankly, being on the podcast, and I do apologize for that. I just want people to know that when I go off the grid, I don't F around because not only was I. here in the editing bay until 11 o'clock every night last week. This weekend, I had to attend a camping trip in the woods for my daughter's school. Now, do you think there's anyone listening to this show that's just like, wow, Andy really struck me as an outdoorsman? But do you think that's possible? I got to tell you, no. Yeah, me either. Can I tell you that when I was in Albuquerque, my wonderful UPM, Michelle Lankwarden said, well, there's lots to do around here. There's a great

rock climbing wall downtown. And I looked at her for a beat. And I looked at her for a beat. And I I was like, either she's trolling me or this is the greatest compliment I've ever gotten, that she's known me for four days and thinks that I would go rock climbing. You do like to wear a very natural denim. You know, you have like a kind of, you know, it feels like the kind of gene that a man who climbs rocks would wear in his casual time. Chris, since the last time we saw each other, I don't know if you were aware of this, but I am now a card-carrying member of the REI co-op.

Now, they don't advertise on the show, but I'm willing to support them, Let me tell you, in preparation for this trip, I supported them considerably in a financial sense. And I definitely looked apart. You formed a super pack to donate to REI? Got that dark money going towards tents? Yeah, yeah. It was called New American Beginnings. And I experienced one every night on the camping trip at around 1.30 when the coyotes came out to play.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we could do a whole episode about your outdoor adventure. I just wanted to check and make sure everything was okay with you. All I can say is I actually enjoyed it. It was fun. It was in the mountains, beautiful mountains east of Los Angeles.

And because this was a school camping trip in Los Angeles, there were a number of not minor television celebrities there with their children. And to run into one, who I won't mention this person's name, but this person was an early guest on the podcast in Hollywood Perspectives, in the sort of shared campground bathroom. At 6.15 in the morning on day two, day three, was, you know, it was, you know, really celebrities, I guess is what I'm saying. Did this celebrity say, hey, if my math is right, the 300th episode is coming up?

What I would say is the celebrity said, please don't look at me. That's what their physical body language was explaining to me. And frankly, I felt the same way. I am not as much of a hat guy as you, but I did not remove a hat from my head. until the minute I was safely in my shower. I think I wear the hat into the shower at the end of day. You're like Todd from Bojack. Let's get into these questions, man. Let's answer some questions from our listeners.

And the first one comes from Keith G. And I thought this was a nice one to start with. What's changed since you started this iteration of the pot? So obviously, Andy and I have been doing this together for about six years now, if not more. We started at Grantland with the Hollywood Perspectus podcast. And then when we moved to the ringer, we started the watch. Obviously, there's been, like, life changes.

I want to push back just on the numbers here because, yeah, we started the podcast almost seven years ago. It started in January of 2012. I don't have no idea how many episodes of Hollywood Perspectus of the interview pod I did. How many of those added up over the years? Well, you always got to mention the Andy Greenwald show, you know? First of all, it was the Andy Greenwald podcast. I know. I just like disrespecting it.

Second. Second, we haven't really talked on this podcast about your bravora turn in Take Hunter 3. And the only thing I bumped on, and I apologize, this is just purely from a story perspective, because that's where my head's at, you know, is that you told Bill, your character, I should say, because there's a fixed scrim of fiction over this. Your character told the Bill Simmons character that you had given him six years of your life. Now, I wonder what you meant by that. Was the first year free?

Yeah, I wasn't really trying until I got to L.A. That's, you gave him nothing. For sure, it was just like soccer columns, you know? Nobody cared. So you had thought about it. So there was a writer's discussion with that. That was at the end of a long day of shooting, and I think I just got my math scrambled.

Obviously, there's been some life changes that have happened. And obviously, Andy has moved fully away from criticism into the world of television production. So there's that. But I think also it's worth mentioning just outside of the personal changes is that I think that the nature of how we talk about television, or at least the way you and I talk about television, is pretty drastically changed in the,

time that we've started the watch from when we used to do it before. And that mostly circles around. Like, if you've been listening to us for a really long time, there are long months. If you go back and look at the archive of Hollywood Perspectus podcasts, it just says Homeland for 10 episodes. And you and I would get on the phone or on like a camera together, and we would be like, did you watch Homeland last night?

Let's talk about it for 40 minutes. Yeah. Yeah, we were America's premier Homeland Recom. But we did that for lots of shows, obviously. I mean, we did that for Homeland. We did that for True Detective. We did that for, obviously, Thrones. You know, we even started another podcast to compensate for the demand for Thrones talk.

But I think that we found that the conversation can't happen about just a couple of shows anymore. Partially because you're not watching them. And partially because there's so many and there's so much. And the world of popular culture has become so. chaotic, that you can't help but take a step back and look at it from a wider angle. Yeah, and I think the other big change, of course, is the delivery system, right? Because when we started the watch in the end of 2015, so basically three years ago, certainly there were shows on Netflix, and I think Amazon had started original programming as well,

but the sort of shock and awe strategy that they are both employing now as they enter full, full battle against each other just didn't exist. Now there is a new show on, on each of the services every week, dumping all of their episodes. And it's just impossible, not just for us to keep up with, but also to account for how everyone else is watching it. And so, honestly, I would be interested in turning this around. This may scare off our advertisers, but luckily, the REI cooperative is ready to step in. I believe it's substantial.

You're redirecting your dark money into the podcast. I love it. It's coming all the way back to the outdoorsmen shoes that I purchased are really going to keep us up. That would be kind of a crazy flex if you were like. I'm going to donate like $10,000 to the R.E.I. Co-op. And then the R.I. Co-op is like, we're proud supporters of the Andy Greenwald podcast endeavor. My next move will be, I will be governor of Florida. Like, that is a real Rick Scott level voodoo economics. No, you'll be like the secretary of the interior.

Oh, that's fair. I do love the outdoors. And I do love giving my wife free trips. Ryan Zinkie, retire, bitch. I wanted to turn it around on the listeners, actually, because I think that as much as the way we do the podcast and what we talk about is changing. My guess is the way people that listen to the podcast has changed too. I have found anecdotally more people, and this is a really wonderful compliment, I feel like more people have said to me I've listened to the podcast. But the follow-up has been that they listen to it more selectively because they either skip around two segments that, you know, that align with their own watching habits, or they binge listen to the pod. They know we talked about Better Calls Salt Season 4. They haven't watched the season yet.

And they go back in their archives. So I feel like it's a two-way street in terms of malleability of kind of. covering things. But yeah, I mean, who were we to know seven years ago that this podcast wouldn't be breathlessly following every permutation of Downton Abbey, which is how it began. Yeah, I know. And so I think we've all come a long way. It was just you, me, Carrie Matheson in a dream. All right, let's go to the next question. We'll go with Christine Hanson, who asks, which format will have the most legs going forward? Anthology, limited single season, or multiple season series. This is a good question. I gave it some thought this weekend. And I

think I'm going to cheat and say limited series with a breaking case of emergency panel, which is essentially... Yeah, more little lies model. Yeah, more little lies. It's just the more and more you can entice movie star level actors, not necessarily in terms of their talent, but in terms of their name recognition, to work in television by saying, hey, it's essentially the same amount of investment as you would give a movie. We're not going to sign you up for 10 years.

You're not going to go through the good wife, Hurt Locker, of... of being stuck on a network show or stuck on a show forever. But, look, if it's really successful, we'll leave ourselves an out to do more, then I think that's going to be the one that has the most legs. I think more or less they're just going to keep making TV the way they make TV now. I have a feeling, personally, that anthology is a little bit iffy right now. What do you think? I don't disagree with you.

I think it's incredibly hard sell to get the audience back year after year if you don't have the strong fundamental understanding of what the show is beyond season to season. American Horror Story is an example of a show that does have a firm sense of it. There are plenty of other examples that we can cycle through that I'm sure don't. I mean, just basically starting over fresh every year is enormously taxing on the creative team, on the marketing team, on everyone involved, you know, because you're essentially launching a new product every year. I think the best way for me to consider the question is to think about,

the question is about legs. And I think that there's the short race and then there's the long race. And I think the most important thing to remember is that the most popular form of television in America still is the way television has always been. It's still television in America. Big Bang Theory is ending, but like the Connors came back minus Roseanne to enormous ratings. And the biggest, the most interesting story to me in media in the last few weeks was if Warner Media, which now is this large company that also includes, you know, it's the spin of

Basically, there's the AT&T HBO thing, now there's Warner Media. Their plans to create their own over-the-top service to compete with Hulu and Apple and everybody else means that they will likely pull Friends from Netflix. Yeah, right. Now, this is essentially like pulling Wolverine datamanteam skeleton out of his body because Friends is consistently since it joined Netflix. I mean, again, they don't release the numbers, but it's still one of if not the most popular shows on Netflix. I know this, as I've told this story many times, anecdotally from kids in my old high school saying that they watched all 200 episodes sequentially. There are a number of services that track not the ratings in the traditional way, but in terms

of metrics, who's talking about what. And if you do that, Friends remains the fourth most popular succumb in the world when compared to everything else that's on and everything that's come on since. Serialized, reliable, end-of-your-day television is always going to be valuable. And if more resources are poured into anthology series, that bread and butter stuff is going to become even more valuable, which I think Netflix knows as it's trying to get into more multi-cam and animated fair. When we're talking about anthology and like attracting movie stars and all this stuff, that's a battle being waged by people for a very small sector of

America. It's being waged for the creative class and people who want to push the format forward. And it's being waged for the shareholder class who want to see flashy, exciting value. Beyond that, I don't know if the great masses of TV watchers are super hype for the next movie star show yet. Obviously, we have a lot of test cases coming up.

But I still think the thing that has the most legs is the stuff that always has. I mean, Dick Wolf is caking up forever for a good reason. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, it's a testament to where we are when, you know, imminently Hulu will be doing Catch-22 with George Clooney. And

that doesn't, you know, this is a guy who famously jail broke out of ER because he believed in his movie career potential and he was right. And now he's coming back to television in this limited way, but I would imagine that a guy like George Clooney given the movies that he likes to make

will probably be back on TV for the rest of his career. Yeah, because they're essentially, you know, in terms of the shooting schedule, in terms of the commitment to your life, there's not that much difference. And as long as we continue to do, and I hope we do it, and I think we do it on the pot as well,

hold up the best of television as, you know, the best of culture. Yeah, yeah. There is no longer any downside. All right, so you were talking a little bit about that idea of this, in reality, there's this creative class that might care about Amy Adams being in sharp objects, but there's a larger TV watching base is kind of indifferent to stuff like that. And I thought that that spoke pretty well to this next question, which comes from Jack Truitt. He asks, realistically, do you see Netflix or any other applicable platform,

changing up the way they deliver their episodic content. At first it was novel in a way to make a splash, but now when there's so much to watch, releasing whole seasons at a time isn't even very gratifying as it once was, and more importantly, it seriously hinders the legs of a show. Legs. Legs of a show in the popular conversation.

I get what Jack is saying, this is something we've talked about a lot. And with all due respect to Netflix who produces a lot of shows that I really, really enjoy, I don't think Netflix cares about me at all. you know, or Andy, or anyone who writes blog posts or anybody who wants to... Chris. Except when it's time to find someone to host an Ozark panel during FYCC.

Exactly. No, that's not what I mean. What I mean is for as much as I'm sure that they're happy about the fact that there are podcasts out there that want to talk about their shows, they're not making shows for that. And they're not delivering those shows in that way. And Netflix is nothing, if not practical, about their numbers. They may spend money like nobody's ever spent money before in the television. industry, but they know what they're doing. They have a lot of algorithmic based logic to their

decision making. And I think that they know that whatever they lose by not having a two and a half month Stranger Things media cycle where everybody is obsessing over what just happened and what's going to happen next week, they gain by people being like, I just watched the first Stranger Things. It's the first time I've seen this show in 15 months. I want to watch as much as I possibly can right now. I'm not leaving my computer. Apple TV, Roku, whatever, for the entire weekend. They have made that decision based on numbers, not based on antagonism towards the creative media class,

people who want to talk about television in this parsed out way. I take Jack's point that it's really difficult when there's so much that shows can be dropped en masse in one lump sum and then forgotten. And that's too bad, you know. But I think that there's probably a huge swath of people out there who could not care less about whether or not. you have a blog post that you want to write about episode six of Hillhouse that you just can't tell when to publish because who's seen who knows who's seen episode six yet.

Yeah, you're exactly right. I mean, Netflix is a publicly traded technology company. That's what it is. And that's how it operates. And as much as I feel very passionately about how I like to consume media and talk about it, and you do too, and that's what we do on this podcast. And I'd like to think our listeners feel the same way where we'd like people to consider things episodically.

We'd like to consider things that are new and debate them and that. digest them and consider them, Netflix's model works. I think it works because it gets the best of both worlds. They still get that big first blast of like entering the solar, entering the atmosphere, right? They get the press coverage. They get the billboards. Here's the hot new thing. They get that wave of press. But then it settles into what it always should have been, which is another thing in their library like friends for you to take or not take and for you to consider when you make your decision to subscribe or not to subscribe, right? Every time you come to the precipice of thinking, maybe I don't need Netflix anymore, you might do a quick scroll through your menu and just see the

wide marionic trench of content that you hadn't gotten to yet. And you think, well, maybe I'll give it one more chance. That's their goal. And it's that value, that deep bench of value that shareholders look at. And they are building up content at an insane pace, which, by the way, they might not keep making shows at this pace. But the reason they're doing it now is because they know Warner's going to take friends back. They're going to lose these things that built them to this point. They're not going to have Last Jedi. Yeah, exactly.

They need, right, Disney's taking its movies back. So they're going to need to have stuff that gets them to that next place. And there was an interview about this that I read with Reed Hastings and Ted Sarandos and the people from Netflix, asked directly about what's going to happen when friends goes away. And it was interesting. He said something like, you know, the first season of Stranger Things has value like that for us. You know, and they're going to keep adding to it to make it as, big as that. But the shows that they've put on, it's interesting to note, the ones that we love

have certainly registered with us. But, you know, I don't know if four or five seasons of the ranch or two seasons of flaked, I don't think you add those together. I don't think that equals friends. And that's why they're going to keep dumping until, keep dumping content and creating content and buying things until they feel more confident in their stature going forward. That's a fascinating question. We've seen them try to conquer all these different elements of television, whether it's reality, whether it's prestige drama. They've dabbled in sitcoms. How do you engineer the fanaticism that exists for the office? How do you engineer that kind of dedication to something that spanned? Honestly, I think one of the reasons why people like it so much

is for the people who've already seen it, it spanned a period of time in their lives. They remember where they were or who they were when they first started watching the office and when they stopped. And then for the kids who are kind of just coming to it now in reruns, it functions the same way that maybe, I don't know, people who are a little bit younger than us came to Seinfeld, which is that they just knew it as something that was constantly on, not as something that was on on Thursday nights. Here's something to watch.

This just occurred to me, and I'm putting it out there. This is based on no thinking, no knowledge, despite knowing personally the person who's involved here. There's been a lot of talk about Netflix's money being poured into showrunner deals, and they locked up Shonda Rhymes and they locked up Ryan Murphy because they have a track record of producing a lot of content that people like to watch. To your point, try to protect themselves in terms of having shows that people love

and want to watch over and over again, that same sort of sketchy, unverifiable, what's actually the most popular sitcom in America based on metrics and people talking about it survey, the number one sitcom in America was Brooklyn 9-9. And I would keep an eye on Mike Scher, because the good place has a similar, the ratings aren't quite that,

but everyone who watches it loves it. Becomes an evangelist for it, yeah. And Vulture is covering it like it's the last season of Cheers. I would keep an eye on his, I don't know when his deal is up with Universal. He's incredibly valuable to them going forward for sure, but he's the kind of showrunner that would make sense for Netflix to wildly overpay

because he reliably makes shows that, yes, the cognoscenti likes, but that people over time watch over and over and over and love. I thought that was a really good way of putting it. I like this one from Adrian Charlie who asks, What's your favorite movie moment of the year so far? I'll give you a second to think about it, but I have a couple here that I thought I would list out.

I will say that the last five minutes of wildlife, which I saw yesterday, which is Paul Dano's directorial debut. It's an adaption of a Richard Ford novel that I love, and it stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Carrie Mulligan in a... It's pretty hard for me to understand how anybody could put together a better performance than her in this movie. and it's about a young couple living in Montana in 1960

and the less said about it the better it's just about a marriage falling apart as seen through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy and the last five minutes that movie were probably the most wondrous thing I've seen on screen this year. I would also send shout-outs to the reckoning scene between Sterling K. Brown and Michael B. Jordan

and Black Panther, the shootout and hold the dark and Allie's first time she gets to the show and sees Jackson perform live, and they do shallow in Starsborn. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to mention Starsborn because at this moment where I am in my head, that's the only movie I remember seeing in 2018. But that whole sweep of the, yeah,

when you just give in completely to the shows. From her getting into the plane, getting into the SUV, being greeted, being brought back stage, going up to the side of the stage, yeah. The dream, basically, all happening like that. I'm trying to think of, Chris, I want to ask you,

because you're my good friend. Have I seen any other movies this year? I mean, you loved Infinity War. I really did. Boy, I've seen super highbrow right now. I'm going to circle back to this because this is editing brain. Like, I don't remember anything but my show right now. Okay. Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors and we'll be back to answer more of your questions.

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for as long as you want to, wherever work takes you. We are back. Episode 300, we're doing your questions. It's a mailbag episode. Greenwald's on the phone from Sam S-Mail's office somewhere in Los Angeles. Hey, Chris. Yeah.

Can I just also say, just because I know Sam's going to be listening to this before he actually talks to me again. Kind of sloppy with the Mr. Robot Season 4 stuff on the desk. I'm just saying, like, you got to keep this stuff more buttoned up. Okay, go on.

Do you want to just read anything that's just like, that breaks it down? This document called Season 4 Pilot Pitchout? No, I'm not going to say a word. Okay, Leonard Chang asks, what do you want to watch

that's not out there right now? I thought this was a really provocative question because in a world where every single thing that you could possibly think of seems to have a television show dedicated to it? Is there anything that you're like, man, I would really love X right now? Yeah, I can do this. I mean, people know this about me from, you know, from years of talking about it on the podcast, over 300 plus episodes.

But one of my favorite movies is the movie Sneakers. And I think everybody knows that even if you haven't seen that movie or haven't seen it in a while, I can just call it by a genre, which is a, it's a caper film. It's a heist movie, in essence, like the Oceans movies. And I understand, because I've been thinking about this, the difficulties in doing that in a television format, but I would love to see a great swing at it. I would love to buckle up for eight or ten episodes of a show that is pure joy, pure pleasure, putting the team together to do the thing. Because, you know, when we were talking about sitcoms, you said, or we both said the idea of watching something after a long day, I'm having a lot of. long days right now, I would love to watch something that felt effortless, even though an

enormous amount of effort went into it, in that genre. Because we've certainly seen serialized television storytelling do great things with a lot of other established film genres. Correct me, if I'm wrong, I just don't feel, it's hard to remember TV shows that have given me that sense of weightlessness in a way that I think is really pleasurable. That's a really good idea. Mine is a little bit more general. The other day we were just hanging out. We were shooting an episode of Kevin Clark's weekly video series, worst picks that we do.

And a bunch of us who were standing around the camera and Kevin, we were talking about the newsroom episode where Don tells the commercial airline pilot that the United States government has killed bin Laden. Do you remember that? Do you remember that? Sure. But he's like, sir, I want to be the first to tell you

that tonight our armed forces killed Osama bin Laden. It's not funny, but it was definitely something that happened on television. And I was like, you know what? You know what I fucking want? An Aaron Sorkin show. I miss Aaron Sorkin shows. They're really good. And they are like so, they're so fun to talk about and just to obsess over. Even if they're not on, like even if they missed to the left or right. But I just really would love an Aaron Sorkin show. Not the newsroom. I think that Trump would have broken the newsroom, but something.

I don't disagree with you. I just would love to see him do a show that's not about the media because that, I mean, it didn't work when it was navel-gazing and now from his position of privilege and success outside of the world that he feels strident about critiquing. It just is completely tone-deaf to me now, and that was my problem with the newsroom. But if it was just an errands-sorke and take on a procedural

or any other style of TV show that we like to watch, like, yes, absolutely. Let's do it. Fired up. I would love to see him go back to the roots. Go back to the courtroom, baby. A few good men style. Let's get like a law show going. I think that that is, if we can, you know, looking at the landscape, the stars, the talent, the money, the services that are all coming together to these giant packages.

I mean, prestige TV is the new Hollywood in terms of packaging and every name having to be bright and shiny before the thing gets greenlit. I don't see why this hasn't happened. You know, just dazzle him with money, give him an idea. give him a star and just let him do it. It's six episodes, right? Why not? Absolutely. Ryan Greer asks, all things on demand all the time is amazing,

but what do you miss most about the extinction of channel surfing? Ryan, I think I missed the ritual of it. And in general, I think this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. Everything you do now, if you want it to be this way, everything you do is essentially controlled by you. I mean, you get home, you have all these options of what to choose. You're choosing what you listen to on a streaming service.

You're choosing what you watch on Netflix, on Apple, on any of the number of on-demand services. You're choosing all these different things. But there was a time not so long ago where there was a little bit more submission involved in pop culture, and I think that I have a nostalgia for that. I don't know why, but I miss the ritual of coming home. I literally sound like Jake Gyllenall in Wildlife,

of coming home, opening a beer, turning on the TV and just sort of seeing what was on. And, you know, I love watching film struck and catching up on episodes of, of the deuce as much as the next guy. But sometimes the amount of stuff that you have in your queue feels like homework, whereas channel surfing was a very passive kind of like, just take me away from all of this act. And that was also how you would just be like, yeah, for the last three weeks, I've just been watching the second act of Goodfellas because it's on HBO every night. And so I just every night watch Goodfellas or Jurassic Park 2 or some random thriller or maybe you go to Turner Classic and you're in the middle of the

Philadelphia story. There was so much like kind of like happenstance that would happen. And I think that that was like a different kind, it provided a different kind of cultural brain chemistry. Like you would just, your neurons would be firing in a different way when you weren't in total control of what you were seeing. Is the Philadelphia story about Nick Folk? I don't remember. Here's the lesson that none of us learned. It's about a boy who decided he couldn't shoot from three-point range. No, no.

It's the Markell story. We kind of didn't take this lesson here. We got to the on-demand world of music before we got to the completely on-demand world of television. And you know what's still great is radio. And Pandora knew that, and obviously Spotify and Apple knew that too because they have all those options to create a radio station around a song you want.

there is something that is exhilarating about letting loose of the reins and being surprised and, you know, hearing things in a new way. It's sort of in the same way that you can't tickle yourself. Sometimes you can't delight yourself with culture if you're the one programming everything. And one thing that I truly miss, and it's funny because the Ringer Podcast Network has a fantastic podcast devoted to this, I don't rewatch things anymore. I'm not really a rewatcher by interest or by trade. clearly listeners to this podcast know my watch list is huge already of stuff that I haven't gotten to once, let alone the luxury of doing it twice. But all the movies that I've seen upwards of a dozen plus times, whether it's Goodfellas or Godfather movies or diehard or even

fucking Muppets Take Manhattan, is solely because I would be channel surfing and it would be on and you would just sink into it by accident. Yeah. And you would be surprised by it. And that aspect of watching, it is deeply missed. And I think you're right about brain chemistry and neurons and the type of entertainment that it is when you are surprised by it. It's just, it's wholly different. You know, I didn't used to think about television as a something that had a specific start time or end time or even runtime. It used to be, well, I've got an hour. And this also might be having kids.

But it was like I have a couple hours and I turn it on and you sink into it. And next thing you look up and you've watched the whole movie. Now I love film struck. But, you know, once the kids are asleep and I sit down. my wife and we're like, should we finally tackle this French movie you've always wanted to watch? What's the runtime? Ooh, 205. We're not going to make it. You know, it's a different, it's probably a more considerate and curated way of approaching culture, this idea that we have to experience everything, like, we have to experience everything start to finish as the filmmaker intended,

but I'm missing the bagginess, man. Yeah, I mean, it's weird. It's like, it's, so I remember very distinctly like different periods of my life. There was one time in 2007, I remember specifically, like I started getting really into watching South American soccer. And so I would come home and watch Spanish language Fox Soccer to watch this tournament, the Copa Libertadores. And it's that kind of sense of weird randomness and discovery that I kind of long for.

And the same thing can happen for a TV show. Like you could do it. That happens like when you're like, oh, all of a sudden I've become obsessed with like flipping out or, you know, any other, like, home improvement show or real estate show or a cooking show where you wouldn't necessarily seek it out, but in your channel serving, you come across something you really enjoy. Well, and that's completely gone because, like, that's how I and many, many others,

started getting into house hunters or househundreds international was just stumbling into it, right? And I think Netflix is, you know, wisely for them, just cut the heart out of that business. But I used to watch a lot of food network, and I don't even know what's on its air anymore. and partly that's an indictment of the network for choosing to just make everything a cupcake battle instead of innovating. Partly, that's just the position in the marketplace when Bravo and now Netflix are just eating everything that you maybe would have wanted to try and do. But if you don't have any appointment viewing, I'm not going to see anything on your network anymore. And I won't even know what you're trying to sell me, which is a problem for that. Yeah, absolutely.

Adam Chitwood asked, what's the most intensely Chris and Andy have ever disagreed on a show? I was trying to think about this. Do you think it's True Detective Season 1? I think it's Sicario 2. Does that count? I think that that's probably right. And that actually, we actually just sort of ended up in a stalemate about that, right?

I mean, we kept covering it, but it didn't flow because I was just, I was out, baby, and you were all the way in. Yeah. Who do you think history proved right on that one? Me. You would say that one. Strong me.

Kip Mooney asks what in-development project that hasn't been made or hasn't had any updates recently Are you most hoping will still happen? I gave this some thought back in the Grandland days when I think Iron Man 3 came out I got a chance to interview Robert Downey Jr. And he told me about a movie that he wanted to make called Yucatan, which is based on a 1700 page treatment written by the actor, late actor Steve McQueen, not the director, about a salvage expert looking for a Mayan treasure in the Yucatan Peninsula

that had a lot of like psychedelic elements to it. And they found it in a trunk in Steve McQueen's house in these leather bound volumes that he wrote about like this idea. And Downey was going to make it. And I haven't heard anything about it since then. Obviously he's made several more Marvel movies. He was working on a Pinocchio, a lot of, action Pinocchio that I don't know what's up with that because Guillermo D'Otoe is now making

a stop motion Pinocchio and he's I think making another Sherlock Holmes movie. Well, he made Dr. Doolittle too. Yeah, that's right. But you Catan because here's the thing. I really like Robert Downey Jr. when he acts. And it's been, it's been a while. It's been a while since we got just like a straight up not wearing a suit, either like a Sherlock Holmes suit or an Iron Man suit, Robert Downey Jr. movie.

I think that's a great call. I wish there were more things like that in general. And on that same page, and I think this is actually encompassing another question, mine is an adaptation of Travis McGee. Yes. Which actually kind of is in line with Yucatan. You could sort of combine them if you really felt like it. Are you saying Yucatan, Travis McGee's shared universe? I'm saying it's not too far journey to imagine that they're in the same place.

For people who aren't aware that the Travis McGee novels, there's a bunch of them. I forget the exact number, 1820 books written by John D. McDonald from the 60s up until the late 80s when he's. He died, and the character is an iconic character in thriller, crime, detective fiction, whatever you want to call it. He's just kind of a salvage expert, you know, sort of basically like we were just saying Steve McQueen wanted to play. A guy who lives on a boat at Fort Lauderdale and takes jobs when they come to him by Nerdywells, by friends, by mysterious people, and he'll get back what's missing, whether it's a person or jewelry or whatever, and he just takes half of it to, so he can continue his lifestyle of not working. and reading them all is a treat, I recommend it. Yeah. Talk about after a color. After work entertainment.

They're just all good. Some are truly great. And what's fascinating is watching the world change around this character from the 60s to the 80s. You go from Deep Blue Goodbye, the first book in the 60s, to Lonely Silver Rain, which is the last one. And by the end of it, there's like drug cartels in Florida. And he's just like, I don't even, and the environmental stuff is really bothered into the point of him. It's weird. the character that started as being very laconic has become almost nihilistic by the end of it.

Anyway, it's long been an object of development in Hollywood, and it seemed close recently, right? There was, I think even Dennis Lahane may have been adapting the screenplay for James Mangold to direct Christian Bale in. And to the point where I actually kind of thought it happened. It didn't happen. And it's bizarre to me that it didn't happen. I would love to see those talents do this. But I also feel like because of the nature of the show, sorry, nature of the, of the story, I gave away my point.

This really could work on TV, too. It's just a question of whether a star wants to do it big or whether the right creative people want to do it, honestly want to do it right. So I hold out hope. A couple of rapid-fire questions. I want to throw at you, okay? Okay.

Cole asks, would you rather have a Logan Roy prequel series or a cousin Greg's spin-off from Succession? Neither, because I think, like all good TV shows, they chose their starting point correctly. Yeah. And I'm not that interested in expanded universes, especially for things that are one year, you know,

only a year long or year old. But the answer is, the answer is Logan Roy prequel. Oh, see, I was going to, I thought you might say like a Joe Swanberg take on Greg just kind of making his way in Brooklyn.

Oh, just like him trying to get a good lease. Yeah. Right, right, right, trying to get into the ramen burger pop up and time. Yeah. Okay. You know,

like, I heard about this place on a, on Yelp. You know, and everyone here has been saying to me, it's all about execution. You know what I mean? So you show me that story, Chris. You become so Hollywood. Thank you for giving me this sort of backhanded compliment.

Super Mike asks, I can't make up my mind. Does the world need Sicario of three? Which one of us is he asking? I think he was asking both of us. It's predictable who's going to say what here. One, two, three. Yes. I think it could be probably an exciting showdown.

They set up to so that there's like a, obvious, if they were to do three, it would be the graver Alejandro's showdown. So they've been sort of put on the opposite sides of the fence there, so to speak. The question is for Sicario is, obviously Villeneuve, I doubt, would do it. He's going to be making Dune for the next three or four years of his life. And Salima said that he wasn't going to make another one, that he would be excited to see someone else have their take on it. I guess this would probably be an opportunity for Taylor Sheridan,

who's been directing all the episodes of Yellowstone to do it. I would also say that it would be kind of cool if Catherine Bigelow did it. And I know that that might feel like slumming it for her, but I bet she would kill it. Like, I bet it would just be incredible if she made it. The only way this is of value, honestly, is if it's another, the showcase for another filmmaker. Because, you know, I think my main issue, well, there are a lot of issues. You better, you better think twice about what you just said. It's a value just to see Josh Brolin wear flip-flops and take naps.

I've had my fill. But, you know, I think one of the things that I bumped hardest on in Sicario 2 was just how radically different its worldview was, and it seemed to misunderstand, to my mind, the point of the first one. If you make a third one with a completely different point of view using the same chess pieces, now you've done something. You've made something interesting in the sense that it's three different people, three different worldviews, operating off of the same characters and presumably the same screenwriter. That is interesting to me. Okay. If only one series could exist, born or Mission Impossible, and this comes from Danny Heifitz's college roommate, Matt Diggin.

So shout out to Danny and Matt. Wow. Here's the thing is that Born is a much more interesting world to explore as evidenced by Born Legacy, which is one of the totemic texts of our podcast. But I think I'm at the point in my life where I know that I'm really only interested in Tony Gilroy's take on it. And I know that that's a kind of, that is not a popular opinion, especially with Matt Damon, who I think has been pretty, he's been a little bit ambivalent about like Gilroy's involvement. in the series.

Like, I think he was, he thought it was somewhat overrated. I do not, personally, but that's just, like, from watching the movies and watching the movie

that he wrote and directed after the fact. I feel like a lot of the great stuff that was in Bourne came from him as well. But you have to think of it like this. Half of the Born movies are pretty much what it would be like if half of the Mission Impossible movies

were about Alec Baldwin and Angela Bassett. It's a great point. You know what I mean? So it's like they emphasize a certain civilian, kind of like day-to-day bureaucracy of the intelligence world and the espionage world that, you know, Mission Impossible kind of pushes off to the side. And I think Mission Impossible is shown that there's a lot more viability in having Tom Cruise hang on to the bottom of a helicopter

than there is having Edward Norton be like, I need a crisis suite. I agree. I think we should also take this time to mention to address one of the questions we seem to get more than any other is where is that audio clip from in our theme music. And it is from our totemic text, the Bourne Legacy. a movie everyone should revisit because it's really good and really holds up. I think the way to look at this question is which movie series is still alive. I would rather have the four...

I don't count. The last born movie Jason Bourne was trash and it doesn't count as far as I'm concerned. The previous four movies, I would rather have them in my life than all Six Mission Impossible movies. That's a great tape. And it's what I agree with.

Bourne is done. You know, it's just done. Tony Gilroy and Matt Damon are not working together again. there's a TV show being developed for USA that will hopefully do a great job building up the expanded universe again. Is it called Treadstone? It's called Treadstone. Chris and I are obviously very excited about that.

But in terms of a big ticket summer movie franchise until it gets, you know, will be rebooted or reimagined, Mission Impossible is more alive than it's ever been, frankly, after these last two movies. And Born is not. Let's wrap up on this one, somewhat self-reflective. This is from Daniel Berkowitz. What's something you feel you've gotten better at as a podcast? slash media observer over the past 300 episodes. Oh, I can jump in.

I've gotten better at bullshitting you on things I haven't watched. Hey, Andy, I hate to break it to you. No, you haven't. Wow. Time for some hard truths, 300 episodes in. No, come on. I think our nuanced conversations about U2 albums has improved over time. No, you know what?

Honestly, I think people think you're playing, like, you're playing hard to get with that Octoing Baby theory, man. I just feel like legally I shouldn't talk about it That's all Okay, but that makes it sound so much darker than it actually is It's not dark It just imagines a timeline when Bono like fell to earth for a minute You know, and experienced life

And just newly free East Berlin You have a much, much more You might have a much higher opinion of Bono than most people Guys, I'm just saying listen to the record It's all there Excuse me, Mr. President, have you never been a man Having a Midlife crisis in Berlin before? He was younger than us.

I know. It's painful. What have we gotten better? Are like observing? I mean, I don't know how this translate to the podcast yet, of course, but and listeners can be the judge of it. But I just feel like obviously this year alone has been the biggest learning experience of my professional career in terms of getting a show into production and now post-production.

And there's no way this isn't affecting everything that I think can see about how other projects turn out because now I just feel much more connected and aware of how sausages get made. So I don't, it's TBD how that affects our coverage on the podcast, you know, because I now know things like my theory about Octung Baby, I now know things that other people don't, that I can't unknow. You can't unsee those things. No, I can't unsee what happened in the back to do that. Yeah, I would say just along those same lines, I think that this is going to sound ridiculous.

but even in making the little video shorts that we do here in having people more frequently come into the office to do interviews and talk about their work, getting to meet people around here. And the fact that the ringer itself is based on a Hollywood studio, so we get to see people make TV shows. Well, I don't really get to see them make TV shows, but I get to see them stand outside of the studios where they make the TV show.

That's great, Chris. That's great stuff. It's cold. I think that you get to become a little bit more compassionate and I'll have a little bit more understanding of just what a monumental undertaking it is to do anything like that. Like, it's really hard. And I think that you and I probably were, I think we were otorists. I think that's fair to say a little bit.

I mean, we understood that it was a collaboration, but we would, for the sake of conversation and for the sake of assigning a win or a loss, give one person creative authorship of a work. We'd be like, oh, Matthew Weiner, or, oh, David Milch did this. and even though it was hundreds of people and performances and cinematographers and line producers and everything else that made it. And then when we would see something, we'd be like, well, that didn't work.

I think we know why it didn't work now a little bit better than we did three years ago. Would you say that's fair? Yeah, I think so. I mean, look, one of the things that has changed without question, and people have said this to us in ways positive and negative is that we're much more, we are literally recording from Hollywood now, where when we started we were a complete continent away. And there's a version of that where, you know, that just makes us shills or a policy, but there's a version of it, and by the way, I probably have been both, but there's another

version of it where it has deepened our understanding and our empathy, which I think has suited both the changes in the culture in terms of how we can talk about things and cover things, but I also think it's suited the way the consumption has changed, too, because it's allowed us to talk about the making of things as opposed to just the things. We don't know when they watch them or even if they want to hear us talk about them. So I think we've always been interested in process and been deeply curious about process and enthusiastic about it. it. And I think that was there at the beginning. And I don't think it's changed. But I think our perspective on it has changed and our ability to talk about different aspects of it. So

that's just a long-winded of way of saying thank you to everyone for continuing to listen to us, figure it out. This is, I can't, I really can't believe we got, thank you to Kyya for noticing the number. I'm pretty shocked. We would have just blown right past it. It was just another. As we have every other anniversary over the last seven years. We would have just done another episode of thinking about watching the Romanops. haven't quite gotten it yet. America's favorite theoretical Romanovs podcast. Thanks you for your stewardship.

Andy, thank you so much for calling in, man. Will we be talking to you on Thursday? You know, TBD, we'll see how the tweaks go today. You know, I'll keep everyone in a loop. I love being on edge like this. It just makes everything so much more fun. Thank you to Andy. Thank you to Kai.

Thank you to all the listeners. Send us off, buddy. Great, great, great job. See you later, guys. Bye. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by an all-new season of the Showtime original series Ray Donovan starring Leav Schreiber, John Voight and Susan Sarandon. LA's favorite fixer has left Hollywood behind but is still putting his unique set of skills

to work for the powerful and corrupt in New York City. Political maneuvering, dirty cops, and family turmoil threatened to drag him down, but Ray always finds a way to get what he needs for himself and his clients. Don't miss the premiere of Ray Donovan Sunday, October. 28th at 9 only on Showtime.