The Watch - Where Is 'The Falcon and the Winter Soldier' Trying to Go? Plus, Some Listener Questions.

Episode Date: April 12, 2021

Is 'The Falcon and the Winter Soldier' getting lost in the weeds by trying to be more than a buddy comedy (6:02)? Chris and Andy talk about that and then answer some listener questions about fan participation that shapes television shows (31:57) and exclusive live content potentially coming to streaming platforms (51:53). Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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See terms at fanduel.com slash predict slash bonus dash offer dash terms. I ain't sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello, welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me on the other line. He was just having lunch at this cafe in Riga.

and holy crap, it's Andy Greenwald! Chris, Prague has never looked better. Not since it was spoken about reverently in the 90s classic kicking and screaming. Has Prague had such a great look on the national stage. Huge moment for Prague. Andy, we're talking about Falcon and Winter Soldier today. We're also going to take some listener mail,

some questions that we got through various social media platforms. It's a lovely Monday. It's great to see you. How you doing? I'm good. I want to do a chat. I know Mondays, people love this. want to do a weekend check-in. Thanks for asking. I have not

continued my interest in dressage. I think that is a settled issue. But I'm still going to keep mentioning it because every time we even the idea of something happening on horseback is brought up on this podcast. Chris's face, all the color leaves it. So I'm not scandalized by it. I just think that you've, to say that you've beaten this dead horse is an understatement. Chris, those horses were not dead. That was the one thing I know for sure about those horses. I wanted to check in with you about the weekend if you had another nice sporting time, you watched some things because one thing that I think our listeners should know,

listen, sometimes it's fair to take the slings and arrows that people say, you know, guys, you've changed. Okay, guy, you've changed. He used to be a TV critic, you watched it all, and now you, maybe you don't. Maybe you don't watch as much. And I would push back and say that, I'm watching some things, things that I care about and love. But, Chris, I am in a zone right now with Le Bureau. People know we're going to be talking. We're going to record our first podcast about the first two seasons this week. I hope everyone catches up, checks it out, et cetera, et cetera.

I would say that you're not just in a zone, but you're in a state of like, you're like Lou Reed and I'm waiting for the man right now. Yeah. Well, our entire household. I love the show. I am almost on the third season. I think it's, there's a case to be made that it is in the conversation for best shows of the last decade. I'll say, it might be the best spy show ever.

I will be your co-counsel in that case. I can't wait to get into it with everybody. But it has been a really long time since the adult members of my household have been hooked like this. And it takes you over. There really isn't room for anything else because it's the only thing we want to watch. Yeah, I agree. I mean, like, it's been, we've really, so you may not, I think you know this, but my wife, Phoebe loves to hoard television shows. Like, when she finds, when she loves, she's like, she doesn't want to run out of it.

Yeah, she doesn't want to run out of it. And I've been like, well, we have like these 25 more episodes left because we're midway through season three. And I'm like, I just like, feel like this is a show. The right time to take breaks on the bureau is definitely between seasons because they do a really nice job. They tie up the season. The season then extends into the next season, but they start new storyline. very well. But if you stop mid-season on your flow, man, it just gums up the works. On your do-flow, my own-read-do-flow.

But it feels very... The only reason I brought it up is just in terms of like a watching experience, it feels very, very old-fashioned in a good way to be just completely consumed with one thing. And I realize that, you know, we have our tent poles for Mondays and Fridays. Now we're doing

Falcon and Winter Soldier, which we'll get into. We're doing top chef on Fridays, which is good, I think, for the balance and sanity, because there's no room for anything else right now. Next Monday, we'll have Mayor of East Town. So I think we're probably, Falcon and Winter Soldier, we've been talking about extensively. It's just been fascinating over these last couple of months to talk about the Marvel TV experiment, especially seeing as how it's become the only show in town in a lot of ways. In terms of, like, generating this kind of interest, there's a lot of stuff that's on right now that people are really into from Snowfall and Made for Love, to the Netflix stuff, to everything that's

been going on. But, you know, in terms of like what's kind of, like, what's kind of of like generating a lot of interest and conversation in these parts. It does seem to be the Marvel stuff. I think once Marraveestown starts next Monday, we'll probably start talking about that equally, if not more so than Falcon, just because Andy and I have gotten a chance to see the first episode, and we were completely blown away by it.

We're really excited for the show. It is really good. Let's get into the Falcon, though. Yeah. I think at one hand, kind of a typical, especially for shows like this, and we haven't had that many of them, but pretty typical in that there's got to be one that sets up the last two or one that sets up the last one.

These shows have a penultimate, penultimate problem maybe where it's like, hey, we've established all this tension and mystery. And now we need to do one more beat before we go to the grand, you know, this crescendo of the season. It's the hinge episode, basically. Yeah. You know, I try to resist the urge to make TV into movies, to say that the same. says, oh, it's a six-hour movie, blah, blah, blah. Obviously, it wasn't designed that way. The people who made it did not intend it to be received as such.

But it does follow some of the similar beats of a big budget Marvel action movie, but spread out. And in that case, there's always the moment when Tony's like, nope, we got to go to Secovia. Yeah, exactly. And this is the, even though they were very much in Eastern Europe during this episode, as we were joking at the beginning, this was the now we're slowly turning this large beast this way, pointing towards conclusion. What is the beast?

I think is this is the Of the show? Yeah. So my question is more like if I asked you, could you tell me what was happening in this show?

Like what is the show about? I think Wanda Vision, this is really strange for me. I understood Wanda Vision. It got a little like kind of heady when it was like

who could the, who might the engineer be that Monica's going to meet or, you know, who is Agatha never letting that go. No, I'm just saying like,

Richard so badly. No, but that was where like that show took on some serious Super Soldier serum when that conversation got introduced to the discourse. For Falcon and Winter Soldier,

I enjoy this show 10 times more than I enjoyed Wanda. Yet with Wanda, I understood that Wanda Maximoff created a alternate reality within the confines of this town and that they were trying to figure out

why that was happening and maybe if somebody was making her do it and all this and it was very clear what was sort of going on. in some ways the story itself was figuring that out. Falcon Winter Soldier, they're throwing a lot of looks at me. And I'm like a, I'm a Texas quarterback. I don't understand it.

Beyond my first read, I don't really know what's going on. But I am actually, I would say just totally enjoying the vibe and the feel of the show. And I'm actually tip my cap to them for kind of going there more than any other Marvel thing has in terms of the themes of the, the themes of the show and also the violence of the show and the language the show is using. And putting some pretty unimpeachable characters, whether it's Sam or whoever, or at least the iconography of Captain America, it's a pretty fucking uncomfortable positions and kind of making us think about these things in terms of heroes and villains and everything else. How much do you, can you put aside like, okay, power broker

is what now? Yeah. Versus these guys make jokes and kick ass. It's pretty fun. I want to jump in before I answer that and say that when you're talking about things that the show is clearly about and doing well, I feel like you neglected to mention it's about men wearing jackets. In fact, it might be the premier men wearing jackets show since season one of Kevin Clark's Slow Newsday on the Ringer.

That's right. Truly incredible stuff. Yeah. Sam packed heavy for his trip to Madrepoor and Riga. You know what I mean? I really like that sort of like. Well, maybe like Sharon just dapped him up with a bunch of members-only stuff that we didn't.

That scene got left on the cutting room floor, though. Okay, that's fair. Yeah. So what you described just then as enjoying, I frankly wish there was still more of. The idea of these guys crack and whys and cracking jaws. Making cherry blossom tea, busting each other's chops. That's fine.

And I like that version of the show. And every so often now, you know, this many episodes into it, we get a few nods and feints in that direction when they're like you and your partner and he's like not my partner. But I'm like, really? Why are we fighting so hard for them not to get along? They're spending a lot of air miles together. You know what I mean? They got, by the way, the most COVID-friendly Airbnb in Prague. The ceilings alone are well, well, well beyond like 12, 15, 16 feet high. So I thought that was pretty smart of them. The buddy comedy action movie thing, I think, works for this. And,

I think that's the version of the show I like best. I don't think that's what we're getting, at least in these middle episodes, primarily because in addition to the buddy comedy, and again, I don't even mean this in a pejorative way. I think Malcolm Spellman and his writing team and the producers who were involved in the creative decision-making, to whatever degree they were, wanted it to be so much more than that. And I commend that. I mean, you want shows to be about as many things as they can be about and still be seaworthy. I think the danger here becomes when you start to think about the shows,

conception as it's a difficult shape. Okay, let me take a step back. This might be a little heady, but I kind of like to think about the concept, the creation of a season as a shape. Some shows are arrows shot from episode one going towards a destination. What would be a good example of a show like that? Going in terms of like momentum to get from A to B. I guess you could look at, the metaphor I always used for Breaking Bad actually wasn't an arrow,

was an elevator, right? It started one place and just went down, down, down, down, down. A Arrow show, I mean, this is incredibly self-promoting, but like that, I came to mind because that's kind of how I tried to describe Prior Patch because there's an event in the beginning. She lands in Texas and she's going about her, yeah, right? And she's cutting through it to get to the point of her, to solve the thing that happened in the beginning.

And I get that. The shape of this show is kind of a circle in the sense that it exists because there's a void in the middle of it. Like, this is the show about a world without Captain America, without Steve Rogers. And it's about what happens to his shield, to his mantle, to his legacy, and most specifically to his best buds.

And the blonde woman he met 10 years ago, who is now a crime lord in Madraport. And who was, okay, was the daughter of Peggy Carter, blah, blah. I always have to prove I actually know a little bit about what's happening when I go on tangents like this. So that's a tough shape. right? Because you're basically admitting that the North Star for all of these people and all of this plot isn't there. So then what happens? It's fascinating, but it's difficult. And I think that one of the ways that this show has attempted to deal with the absence of Steve Rogers and the absence of that charisma or that sort of clean narrative, he's a hero, is by throwing almost everything else on top of it. There are so many characters. There's so many subplots. There's so many really, really, kind of radical ideas for the MCU almost being tossed in casually.

I mean, we talked about the Isaiah Bradley stuff that I think in a different conception of how they're making these TV shows and what they're doing with the universe, that could have been a season of television unto itself. And maybe it still will be. I mean, that's the beauty of this thing. But you get to this point where we're spending all this quality time with Sam and Carly Morgenthau, and she's just like, they're having a very heavy conversation with a dead body in the room about the nature of supremacy.

and all of its guises, insidious guises in this world. I'm like, that's a lot. Meanwhile, Wyatt Russell is roiding out, dude. Like, it's literally like, I feel like we're, in recapping the show, I feel like we are talking, we are the anchor men talking about the anchor men battle when Brick killed a guy.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, that really escalated quickly. So, again, like, we are in the middle place where where we're going isn't entirely clear. But my feeling about the show is, appreciation, entertainment, which might be enough, but kind of at a remove, because there is so much stuff flying at me all the time. Sometimes it's a vibranium shield that I am struggling to latch

onto, not a character necessarily, but latch on to the theme or the plot point that is enough to get me through. See, I haven't had a problem with that so much. Like, I think that the show is about what makes a superhero, right? What makes a hero in general, but what maybe makes a superhero? Is it somebody's willing to sacrifice a certain amount? Is it someone who unites their sort of energies with the beliefs of a nation state or whether it's an idea, whatever that may be? Like, I get it. I think that's what's driving, among other things, Walker crazy. That's what is making Sam reticent to, was made Sam reticent to take up the shield.

That's what's driving the flag smashers to do what they're doing. there are two things that I think the show is missing and neither of them are Captain America tell me what you think of this so one thing is that this show more than even Wanda and it's interesting because this was supposed to come before Wanda is about this blip and post blip world and you know the blockbuster movies

obviously dramatized what happened with the snap and everything and Wanda Vision showed what happened when people just sort of arrived back but in Falcon, we're sort of just kind of like talking about this thing where when, was it, five billion people disappeared and then they like, you know, the world changed maybe even in some ways for the better on a sort of global level. Like people were welcoming. Everybody was trying to help one another. You could go to a country and just kind of become part of that country. It wasn't like a big deal. And then as soon as the five billion people come back,

all of a sudden we go back to the way things were where everybody is. much more conscientious about their borders and what you're doing here and what... And fighting over resources. And resources, right. I don't know what they could have done better or differently to sort of show that,

but I think that the absence of... The fact that they're making it all entirely Carly talking about it in these very hushed tones and these sort of far-flung parts of Eastern Europe is making it a little bit hard for me to connect emotionally with that as like the main sort of driving force of the show. realize that it can get, it might, it may already be tiresome for some. It may continue to get tiresome as we, as this goes on and on with endless numbers of shows on the horizon. But I do find it interesting to, um, sort of take a moment and consider what the real challenges and limitations of this TV project of the MCU are. And, and I think that at least going by what we've seen in the two programs in Wanda Vision and Falcon and the World Soldier, I think they're twofold. I think one is, the MCU to their credit,

And to the creators who will come on board with really interesting takes to their credit as well, they want to go there. They want to take the questions that are asked almost in passing in between punching Josh Burland's CGI chin and be like, no, let's really play that out. What does that mean? Yeah. So what is this MCU version of the leftovers on a grand scale? And what does that mean? Not just in terms of personal grief like Spider-Man turned to dust and came back, but like four to five billion people now. And what do they do on earth?

And what does that mean for countries and borders and identity and all that? Like that's very, very cool. And I commend them. And I would prefer them going down those roads than ignoring the roads. But there are limits. You know, this is a stridently PG-Veering on PG-13 universe that also has to tick many other boxes, including advancing the future cinematic goals, but also punching and kicking. Like that's part of it. Right.

So much like with Wanda Vision, which sort of sidled up to some heavy ideas about grief and then kind of rushed away at the very end. Right. It became like, which is fighting. Yeah. In order to set up Dr. Strange too. This show keeps, it keeps me interested, I should say also, by fainting towards some pretty big, interesting, dramatic ideas.

And then people get hit in the head with vibranium shields really hard, by the way, and seem none the worse for the wear. Well, except for the homie at the end of the episode. Well, that was, they did differentiate. That was multiple strikes to the chin, head, neck, and chest area. But the other, because I did the thing I was talking about last week that Joe Biden does well where he says three things, then he nails them. I did a moment ago say two things.

Okay. So I don't want to get away from that. The second one, the second thing is, and this is as much like Kevin Feigey's project as it is TV shows that are meant to entertain us, is not many supporting characters, even beloved supporting characters are Frazier's. Most are Joey's. And that's just the way it is. There aren't that many characters that can support secondary characters that can support spin-offs or their own. own properties with the same level of affection, charisma, or what have you as the initially scripted lead.

Sometimes you can. And sometimes you can be surprised by it. And I think that what was done in Wanda Vision, you know, we talked about the many other things that were good about the show, the thing that was the most valuable probably to Disney and Marvel and probably the most successful thing that happened that Jack Schaefer did was Vision and Wanda are legit characters now. But in my, in my, I mean, it doesn't need to be in my eyes, but I feel that way. I think clearly millions of people around the world do.

Right. It's a little more challenging here because I noticed Alan Seppenwald, great TV critic, said this in a tweet, and then more at length in his Rolling Stone recap for the episode. But he did point out, Sam Wilson has been a prominent character in the Marvel universe for almost 50 years. He has never held his own series. He's vital in Captain America, in various iterations of the Avengers,

but kind of has never been a leading man character. Would you call this his series, though? Well, Winter Soldier keeps getting series, too. And there was one kind of cool one written by a guy named Alice Cott that I highly recommend. It was super weird. Oh, you're talking about the comics. Comics. Yeah, oh, okay.

Because I wouldn't call this show, the Falcon show. No, but after however, is this episode four or episode five? This is episode four. We have two more left, five and six. Right. That is this episode four. So after episode four, are you hungering or hankering for more Falcon series? Oh, like another TV show?

I don't mean more of this. But I do think that so far, and it could be because of the relative limitations of the characters themselves, or the fact that, as I was saying before, it's an extremely crowded kitchen right now. So far, I'm not coming out of the series being like, I think there can be a Winter Soldier series.

Signed Sebastian stand up for the seven-picture deal. He should be the star of the next thing. Keep Mackey on speed dial. I want more Falcon. leading things. You're just talking about the old way of doing things. This is not the miners, but this isn't the miners anymore. They're not testing out Sebastian Stan

to see if he can carry a movie. They're thinking maybe Bucky and Sam break up at the end of this or like, you know, have an amicable sort of like, I need to go back and repair my relationship with the Dora Malagia or something like that and like goes off and that's his journey

and they do a show about him in Wakanda or they do a Waconda show that maybe he appears in. But that's not. Like he stays winning. Yes. Because he wins either way. But for as much as, you know, we do analytics now, it's small ball or whatever, Wanda hit a home run for Elizabeth Olson and that character.

And whether the goal was we can upstream these guys back into their own movies or not, it's potentially on the table because it was a breakout and they were put in a position to succeed. I agree with you. The whole point of that is it's exactly what you said. They could do Falcon and the Winter Soldier season two, three. that could do seasons two and three in five years, or more likely, well, where does Sam go next on his journey?

Right. Who does he team up with? What world does he fit into next as we build up into the movies? They're always moving those balls and it's working. I agree with you. So we're going to,

this is poor structure, but like you had two things that you thought were up with this. I had the second thing that I thought was missing from the show aside from... So technically is that the third thing overall? Kaya, you want to run the numbers for us on this?

So wait, when it was my first one was just saying that I can't even remember what my first thing was. I got you. I anti-Bidened you. Yeah. See, it's tricky. Don't do that. Tricky to make numbers. Tricky to make lists. Hold on a second, Kaya. What was my first thing? What was the first thing that I said? That you like it, that it's a buddy comedy? No, that was like the first thing I said in the whole podcast. Can I just say what my second thing that I think is missing from the show? Yeah, because non-Captain America. I didn't even realize

that in our particular team up, I just totally crashed and put my two things in between your two things. It's okay. I think people have gotten used to our specific way of doing things. The second thing is that this isn't like a problem,

but this is now the second time in these shows where it's obviously A, they know it works and B, it's driving a lot of conversation. But I think some of the plotting

would be smoothed out if they were like, this is who the power broker is. Like the first time around. Right. The idea of holding out to be like, we don't know.

You might, it could be Vincent Dinoffrio. We never know. You know what you mean? Like the idea of like, This sort of everybody speculate, everybody guess, like, it clearly, like, keeps people on the edge of their seats to wonder, like, is the power broker X character who we've already met? Or a character who, if you read the comics, you know, is coming, or a character who has corrupted Sharon Carter or is, in fact, like, you know, Nick Fury or whatever it is, like, if it is that, like, I actually think it would just be making, it would make a lot more sense of that trip to Madrepoor a couple of episodes ago where it's like, yeah, we got to go see the power broker because he's the one who is sort of, overseeing this entire international smuggling of Super Soldier Serum. And instead now it's like,

we're still getting like these kinds of breadcrumbs about it. But it actually like in the, I would like to see one of these stories just tell the story straight rather than be like, you never know who could be the surprise character who can pop up in episode five, which they are now teasing that there is like a big MCU character coming for the next episode.

That's interesting. I mean, and I agree with you. I think that they can get a little cute with laying on mystery after mystery, but also, you know, they know what fuels the most rabid part of the fan base. And so that that's going to continue and that works for them. I think the other thing that I'm realizing, and look, we're talking very, we're talking on a very macro level where I'm probably as usual being a little overly critical. But I think it's interesting. Again, I keep coming at this stuff from the process point of view. Maybe that's the Sixer fan in me.

But this is their second TV show, and they're figuring it out. And there was a moment when Marvel movies were Kevin Feigy and Marvel TV was Jeff Loeb, and they were completely separate entities, even though they pretended that they weren't. And to take a moment just to talk about the Netflix shows, the sort of the Defender's Shared Universe shows, which had some real highs. The first season of Jessica Jones was really good. There were a lot of good things in the first two seasons of Daredevil and some lows, like no one will ever speak of Iron Fist again.

But I thought that it was a smart structural decision to say that while the Avengers are in Asgard and kicking aliens ass in outer space, they're fighting some gangsters in Hell's Kitchen. And they don't have anything to do with each other, and that's fine. And it presented the stakes were understandable, and we got why Thor wasn't showing up in Jessica Jones.

Even if you aren't a fan of the comics, I mean, to be a fan of comics perpetually demands a suspension of disbelief that if, I mean, on 100,000 levels. Yeah, I was going to say. But also, like, if Spider-Man is in a bit of a pickle in New York City, we get why all of the X-Men don't swarm down and solve the problem for him in 30 seconds.

Yeah, right. Because it's a Spider-Man story. Like, we get it. Okay, I understand that. The thing about this that's been kind of interesting is that this is, in some ways, Falcon, I mean, Wanda was just in New Jersey. and that was probably helpful to it.

Falcon and Winter Soldier is trying to kind of split the difference and say, like, these are global-sized characters. Like Winter Soldier and Falcon and the Dora Melange were all part of the end battle of end-game. And people are like taking their picture on the street and recognizing them or not recognizing them in banks and stuff, yeah. But their version of superheroism is also we wear leather jackets and we just walk around and have coffees in Prague, like with no backup. and it sometimes does my head it.

Like, I get, everyone's like, Sam Wilson, we know you. Come walk into this warehouse and our orphanage. I think that the TV part of it. I think you can make the argument that the Sam and Bucky side of things are like, we're rogue, we're rogue nation and we're kind of like run it off. But when the new Captain America and Battlestar shows up and it's like, you guys didn't bring anybody, like it's just four dudes try to catch the flag smashers. Their energy is very similar to the energy that me and my friend David had and we were

staying in hostels on like a Eurorail pass in 1997. Like, I guess we'll stand here. You're far beyond negotiating. We'll stand here until something else happens, I guess. We'll walk into a place that either is a lab or an orphanage or both. You know what I mean? Like, it's all on the table. And by all, I mean, an American Express Travelers check.

It's interesting to see. And again, I don't want to pretend that I'm arguing against what I just argued, which was there's a lot of stuff going on in the show. I don't also want a sidebar on the U.S. government's level of involvement in tracking its most valuable asset as it wanders through the byways of post-pandemi Prague. That's fine. I don't need to know that. I would like a scientist to weigh in, a physicist perhaps, to let me know why you can get a vibranium shield to the face and be fine or a super soldier punched to the head that knocks you unconscious and be fine. But if you get thrown wrong into a wall, you're dead. Yeah, there's some complicated.

I think actually, you know, you make a good point because this show has sort of introduced a lot of relatively adult content. We got a question about this from Vince Nunnley, who asked, you know, Falcon and Winter Soldiers seems way more violent than other MCU offerings. Are we transitioning into more adult content? I think that there's something to be said for the fact that people who were 15 when they first saw Iron Man are now in their mid-20s, you know? Like, I mean, people who are 12 are in their 20s, you know? so they're growing up with this stuff and I think that... People who are 30, do you want to do that? Yeah, I know.

But I think that Marvel can safely assume that there is a huge chunk of their audience who can stomach that. And I give them a lot of credit for, even if it's a roided up, not Steve Rogers, Captain America. Like, gambling with that iconography by having him cave in a dude's cavity with his shield

is like not something I thought I would see on this. show. So I guess salute to them for that. Well, I put that, I mean, the level of violence is one thing. I do put the iconography and what it means to be American standing and how you treat Europe. I think those are some of the interesting ideas that Malcolm Spellman is not shying away from, which I appreciate. What you're saying about the aging up of the fans is noteworthy because that's been perpetually a problem with the comic books, which is a long time ago, the people who made Marvel and DC primarily realize that their fan base

was just aging with them and that they were not attracting new fans. They've done a lot of good work in the last 10, 20 years to change that, although a lot of that credit could probably go to the movies and TV shows. But for a while, it was just getting darker and darker and darker

because that's what people's lives were getting, I suppose, as they got older. The violence thing, though, just to make one other point, it's also a TV thing, which is to say, in a movie, you can have your three to four fight scenes and you can get away with people who have lasers

or throw gigantic vibranium spears conveniently missing people or only being thrown at people who can withstand them or who are made of metal or whatever. This show's mandate seems to be at least two, if not three, major fights per episode. Yes. Right? And then you kind of can't keep hiding.

I think one of the reasons, if I may speak for you, that you're probably tripping up a little bit on this specific episode is that this was the one where I felt like the, the fighting parts of the episode and the talking parts of the episode were like completely separate. And we're, there's either scenes where there's three guys sitting in this hostel talking about the ideas of the show or they're busting each other's asses. But there's, there's not like,

hey, we got to walk down the street and talk about this as we go find something else. And maybe I'm going to stop in here and we're going to go meet that. The momentum of the first three episodes, I thought, really solved for any kind of like, hey, who, who? why are we in Madrepoor? Who's Nagel? Why are we talking to Shelby? Why is John Walker mad like this? Like, big mad? So yeah, it goes on like that. I think when you come to a resting point, shows have a tendency to trip up a little bit. I agree. I'll also say that it's interesting that I think by far the the person who makes the most sense in the show and as the clearest and most logical plan is Zemo. I don't know what he's doing, but time and time again, he's making all the right decisions, such as the

best way to make children like you is to give them candy. Historically, never been a problem with Randos and fur-lined collars giving candy to children. He seems very on the money about making fewer super soldiers on Earth and destroying them. Like, I think that that's a platform I would vote for and I can get behind. And in general, like, I think that relaxing with a cold towel, which, by the way, was Dr. House, aka Chris Ryan's number one medical advice for the years 2000 to 2014 and a stiff drink makes sense. And then also when the elite fighting squad

of the most innovative and powerful nation on earth arrives at your Airbnb to fight, you go to the bathroom. Like that's when you just quietly remove yourself. That makes sense. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break and when we come back, we'll do some listener mail.

Quick question. Did anyone on Twitter make the AO technology joke when she took his bucky's arm off. I assume someone did. I didn't see it. I just wanted to jump on it. But imagine it as a GIF. You're welcome. This is good. This is like podcasts but tweets. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

I think I'm going to describe a meme next. If we're going to love it. Were I to post a segment with Andy Greenwald? Someone do it for me. We'll be right back. This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever have a plan come together out of nowhere and realize you're missing something. Like a last minute beach day,

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complicated? At blinds.com, we've spent 30 years proving it doesn't have to be. And today is your last chance to save big on spring Black Friday deals. Whether you want to DIY it or have a pro to handle everything for measure to install, we've got you. Free samples, real design experts, and zero pressure. Just help when you need it. Shop up to 45% off with minimum purchase, plus get a free professional measure during the Blinds.com's spring black Friday last chance sale. Rules and restrictions apply. All right. We're back. Andy. Hi. Yeah. We're going to take some listener mail, and this might be the longest, but also maybe among the most thoughtful questions we've ever gotten. So I thought it would be good to do this one. This comes from Josh Lewis. Here's a long but awesome question. Quote, I've been thinking a lot lately about this concept of fan-written pop culture, particularly with regards to big IP properties, which more recently came up with the Snyder cut, but has been a recurrent issue with something like Rise of Skywalker, which was in many respects a fan rewrite of TLJ. the circulation of petitions with hundreds of thousands to rewrite season eight of Game of Thrones.

I'm a hater of season eight, but I still think such petitions are massively stupid. That was Josh. He goes on, I am a socialist politically, and while I might be in favor of wild reforms like nationalization of the film and television industry, I don't extend that same way of thinking to the production of art. You guys have made me into a big believer that great art at all levels of popularity should surprise us, challenge us, make us think in different ways. Star Wars, a Star Wars crowd written by Reddit, I am almost positive, would not be any of those things. It would just be a reiteration of tired fan opinions. I'm curious what you guys think of all this. Have your feelings evolved or changed on this as fan service has escalated? I remember coming into Solo, actively hoping

that they would address the whole Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs thing, and coming out just so dissatisfied despite the fact that they did the exact thing I wanted them to do. And what do you make of the blurry lines between fan collaboration and fam control? I know the people like Damon Lindeloff had talked about how genuinely helpful fan feedback has been for him, but there's the line at which we get to something wrote and turgid like Rise of Skywalker. Sorry for the high level of self-indulgence, but hope that makes sense.

Thanks so much of your question, Josh, because it's very, very thought-provoking. First of all, this is the right room for a high level of self-indulgence. I can't believe he apologized for that. I've been thinking about this a lot, too, because I think that we are seeing such an incredible and chaotic,

I don't know if I want to say democratization, but resetting of the sort of boundaries between what someone makes and then how we are interpreting it. And that goes for everything from the media to television to movies, to music, to everything else. Like the main commodity right now does seem to be connection. It's this connection between the audience and the producer of whatever it is, whether it's the artist, whether it's the news anchor, whether it's the person tweeting at you, whether it's somebody on Instagram, or whether it's Taylor Swift, I think that the idea of there being this sort of huge moat between those two things, which I think is the way that you and I grew up, where we were like, the concept of following somebody who we really liked

when we were growing up and having them give us updates and even maybe like take our opinions seriously. And that just is totally foreign to me. You know what I mean? Even on the like the small more DIY bespoke kind of like stuff that we grew up on like indie rock or punk rock where you felt like you could basically like turn to the person who was making the music and be like, I love your band. You would also not probably be like, I think you should have turned the drums down on that last record. And they would have been like, oh my God. Or you owe me an explanation as to why you didn't. Yes. Also we, we'd, why did you forget to turn the drums down? It was all just mystery tablets delivered from on high.

Yeah, exactly. Or from slightly less than high. So I think that there's been a huge demystification of some of that stuff. And I think that there's also been something lost in the kind of constant yelping of everything that we consume for better or for worse. But I was curious what you thought specifically about this idea of fan written, because I think it's going to, I think it's going to continue. I think we're going to continue to see stuff like this.

And I think even, I mean, I even saw over the weekend. I mean, it probably was just something that. got a couple of retweets, but there was something like, you know, Ben Affleck's Batman script is actually incredible. It's the best Batman script ever written, make the Bafleck movie, you know, and I was like, we're going to start this again? Because I don't think Ben Affleck wants to. You know what I mean? Like, but, but is this, is this like going to, after the Snyder cut, are we just going to keep having more and more like, let the people who really understand this character control the character? Well, I think it's, I'm of two minds

about it, neither elevated to the level of like, actually, I'm not freak me out about this, but I think in some ways, I think it makes sense. And in other ways, I think it's terrifying. In terms of the way that it makes sense, I mean, we could go to Snyder Cut and Justice League, which as people know, I haven't watched. But I'll say that my understanding of what it was and what it was coming from was slightly misinformed. Your understanding of it? Yeah, because what I didn't really get, because as not a fan of those movies or Zach Snyder in particular,

I didn't really understand what had happened. And again, this is an element of now we do know. 20 years ago, we wouldn't have known. 40 years ago, we would have been like, excuse me, who's Zach Snyder? There's a movie out. But the fact that he, like it or not, had a plan and a vision,

and due to a combination of corporate fear and miscommunication, and then also major tragedy in his own life, was walked away slash was removed from the project that he had made, and someone else came on and grabbed the wheel and steered it completely in a different direction, which resulted in something no one was happy with. So then, not just the fan outcry and whatever, but I think it ultimately was very smart of WarnerMedia,

to realize they could do two things at once. One, make something that even if it's not necessarily better or worse to take that language out of it, that is consistent. That was what it was supposed to be, like it or not. And thus, you know, win kudos from not me, but I'll give them in the sense that, yeah, I would like to see, like, creative people's visions completed or at least, you know, showcase to the best of anyone's ability. So they could do that, but they could also just score a corporate win with the rest of

fanboy community, which is, you know, which as you said is currency these days, that makes sense to me. They could undo, in a way, it was sort of fixing something, not just, oh, the Twitter guys are mad at us. That's a little more complicated, I think, than that. And people seem to be pretty satisfied with it, right? The flip side of it is, I think fans have always felt ownership and over what, you know, their experiences and things that they love. And I think that's great. And you can't look past that. I mean, that is what has gotten many creators that we like and admire to the places they have been in their career and it has produced good things. But it is scary to me that the idea of things just being poll tested or basically just, you know, decided on by Twitter. Because first

of all, those loud voices aren't necessarily even, I mean, Twitter is not a good model for anything in society. It's not a good barometer for what people actually. Yeah, right. Or who actually wants things or who are we even talking about when we say we have to please these people who are these people we don't actually know right um the other thing is i think ultimately for art to be good and i've said this a million times is you have to have specificity you have to make decisions you have to have a point of view and whether i like it or not like zach Snyder clearly has a point of view and so i guess i am defending him in this case when you don't have a point of view it's like well we've got these characters and some people seem to like them and some people don't but also people like the

marvel movies where they joke so let's do something where everyone does all of it and then this character says a catchphrase that some of the children who we hope to also see, so we have a four quadrant hit across the world will want to, they'll recognize it. That just, that just creates, that's a nothing, you know. And so this thing like, you didn't like, you mentioned Damon. I'll mention Damon too. Hi, Damon, he's probably listening. He knows, I've said it to his face, I've said on this podcast that when the loss finale

aired, I didn't connect with it, I didn't love it. But I will always use this podcast, Mike, and any other opportunity. may have to defend how great it was that he got to do it. He and Carlton got to say, this is, we've been telling a story. Now that it's ending, you might not always agree with us, but we were telling you a story, and this is how it ends. You should have done like an alternate January 6th protest where you're just like, I will defend the loss finale to my death, but you were just doing it in like Culver City. On January 6th? That would have gotten headlines, I think. But do you know what I mean? I think that there's also,

like with everything in culture right now, we are in a very kind of, it is a transitional moment. And there's a democratization of almost everything in ways that I think can be good. And I think that resistance to how things are changing as a knee-jerk response isn't how anybody wants to be. But there's a line, like, we didn't really cover much

because we don't really know that much about it in the full story. But like the Ray Fisher thing, we were talking about a lot of the things I was referring to, like Ray Fisher being asked when Joss Whedon came aboard to say cyborg's catchphrase from the cartoon in order to make kids like the movie.

And he was just like, I don't want to do that. That's ridiculous. And he was bringing, I think, correctly, a cultural point of view about how black characters are often reduced to catchphrases and what that means, et cetera, et cetera. And I, personally, I would support that. I think that's probably right. The next

thing that people, some people reading that story might say, is, are we in a world where actors we hire aren't going to do the story? You know, aren't going to say the lines or the fans are going to say, you're wrong, person hired to make this movie. That character would never say that. Right.

I'm not saying it's good or bad. It's clearly trending in that direction, but it's messy, and we are nowhere near understanding what the new normal ought to be. The reason why this stuff is so popular is because we have industrialized fandom. It's because they've realized

that there are certain kinds of stories, there are certain kinds of pieces of intellectual property that people are willing to dedicate tons of their life to. And when you ask people to do that, or you allow that space for people to do that, or you create worlds in which people can be like, I think about this stuff,

not just like the hour before and the hour after I go to the movie, but constantly, they're not going to be passive about that. People are going to have a passive relationship to Star Wars. If you want them to think about Star Wars, 340 days a year. So when they start doing that, there might be a huge group of people

who are like, Luke would never do that. And they will fucking lose their minds if those characters deviate from what they had imagined this sort of trajectory for this character would be. And in a lot of ways, for as much as I obviously loved the second season of Mandalorian,

I was kind of like, that finale kind of like corrects people's image of Luke Skywalker, for the last time. Do you know what I mean? It's like a badass who saved a baby Yoda. You know, and that you see that stuff happen all the time of like Superman

Wooder wouldn't do something. Batman Wooder wouldn't do something. These are fake, these are not real people. You know what I mean? Like we don't know what Batman would or wouldn't do. It's just your reading of a character. But I think that the more you actually like ask people to devote huge chunks of their life

to their passion for this stuff, the more we're going to run into stuff like release the Snyder cut redo game of thrones tlj who desecrated my memory of luke skywalker also it's i think it's worth noting that we we tend to the longer people have with characters in their cultural memory and mind the more sacrosanic they become they stiffen you know you can't they're not bendable action figures anymore they are only one thing because they have to be that one thing to continue to resonate with the fandom to that degree And so that's when you end up with these, I mean, we said at the time, I wish the Mandalorian had left Luke on the shelf, but it was doing a lot of work, not just in terms of legitimizing the characters that we've come to like in this new show, but also, as you said, it was undoing something. It was correcting something that either John Favro or Disney in general felt needed to be corrected.

Similarly, the moment that people loved, I mean, you and I really liked Rogue One, but I do remember that the loudest positive response at the time seemed to be the Darth Vader stuff. Yeah. Right? And that was Darth Vader the way people wanted to see them as a red lightsaber wielding murderous badass, not as Hayden Christensen. You know what I mean? Yes. So it becomes more restrictive. Game of Thrones was similar.

You know, it went on for so long and it existed for so much time in people's minds in the books. that when Beniof and Weiss said, sorry, everybody, these aren't the characters that you're reading in the books. These aren't the people that have been living in your hearts. These are the characters that we created for a TV show played by these actors, and this is how we're going to end their story.

It's a wrenching betrayal. So I always want to be careful not to jump over the actual emotional anguish that I think this can cause people. But I also think it's a very strong argument for, creating new things. I really think that's important because you just can tell bigger and broader stories

and the stories can be less about not only can they be better or surprising, but the stories can be less about commenting on the previously If you do that, then you don't have to worry about the legacy of the characters

or honoring what made you fall in love with this thing in the first place. You can just be like, well, it's my story. I made it up. So, you know, like get with it or get out of the way. Yeah, so I think that it'll be worth watching.

And I think Falcon Winter Soldier has a little bit that swagger, which is why I think I'm willing to forgive the fact that I'm like, I don't understand which city are they in or why they're running from this person or not. I think that previously with mass entertainment, which really just means Star Wars, maybe a couple other things. But there were kind of two phases. There was phase one, which is the creation and the veneration in the beginnings of the cult. And then there's phase two, which is the, it's never as good as I remember it.

This isn't you're doing it wrong. And I think that what, and now I think Star Wars is in phase three, which is we're starting over. Sure. Marvel had phase one that ended in endgame. And I know they had their own phases, but this is for the sake of this take. I think they're trying very hard and smartly to forge a phase 1.5. You know, by upstreaming relatively minor characters, by trying different things in the margins, by putting people on TV with a focus slightly different.

told over this period of time rather than compressed, yeah. And not saying anything about the future of their biggest franchise, of the Avengers. Instead, we're going to get some things that, you know, Spider-Man and Black Widow that feel like things we've seen before, probably. But we are going to get the Eternals. And we have no idea what that's going to be. And we don't know who any of those people are. And we're going to get Shang-Chi coming soon. And we're going to get Natalie Portman as Thor.

You know what I mean? Or her version of Thor. Like there's going to be, it's a period of change, and I think it's smart because they're keeping away from the totems. Because they know that they're already in that zone. Can I ask you a couple more listener questions before we get out of here? Yes. All right. Yeah?

Yeah. Jeremiah Ramirez wants to know. Twin Peaks, the return is looping on Showtime. I tuned in just for a few episodes, and I am now craving pie. What cravings have you had resulting from TV? This is so easy for me. Hit it. What do you got?

Mad Men makes me want to smoke. Most things make you want to smoke. Yeah, that's true. Mad Men for Detective, I mean, lots of shows make me want to smoke. Yeah, I think anytime a hard-bitten character has a well-deserved or perhaps unnecessary drink, it makes me want to drink. There are shows that I think are dangerous to watch after 9-10-m. then. I think that's

100%. That's my only answer. Clint Denisco asked, could there be a future of streaming television that involves implementing exclusive live content? For example, watching a live musical production only through Peacock to entice people to subscribe to their service. Obviously Disney did this with Hamilton, although I think it's worth mentioning the windowing thing here. To be clear, I think he's saying live. So, like, Hamilton

was a film made of a live. show that was then streaming. I think, but ultimately what I think he's, yeah, right. But like, I want to mention windowing because Hamilton came. That was a sort of time capsule recording that they did. And I think that they, I think they released it when they released it as like a gift to people because we were having a hard one last summer. It was supposed to come out in theaters this Memorial Day. Right. And, and that had been like they had always, they'd, I think it had been known that they had filmed that version of the cast, kind of like capturing that moment in time

of when Hamilton was kind of at its peak. The thing that's important to realize, though, is that while it would be incredibly convenient for all of us to see a Taylor Swift concert, which people do, you know, you'll be like, okay, one night only, it's like this. But the margins are not great for the artist in that case. Or at least they weren't, they haven't been traditionally.

The place where these people make money, both in the theaters and on stages when they do concerts, is taking that show out on the road or having people pay a ton of money to go see it on Broadway, not for me to have a $599 or a $1099 slice of my subscription dedicated to that at the end of the month

or whenever Peacock cuts the check to Lynn Manwell, Miranda, or Taylor, Switzer, whoever. So while that might be like an enticement, on one hand, it might alienate people if and when we ever get back to going to do stuff. I think people would get pretty annoyed if they paid hundreds of dollars to go see a up theater production or a concert

and found out that it was actually available to everybody for the small price of subscribing to the streaming service that they were subscribing to. So I think if we are ever going to see stuff like that, it would come at the end of runs like we would see the final show, after the final show of a tour, a band's concert might get streamed.

Or after this version of the cast is finished its run on Broadway, we might get a version of slave play or Hamilton or something broadcast in that regard. Do you have any thoughts on this? I agree with that in terms of windowing in terms of the goal is to get people to see the thing. And so it's almost always going to be for a live event like that, like a stage event, it's always going to be structured to happen at the end. But in terms of making sort of creating live events that you could only watch in one place,

whether it's every few years someone decides whether it's a TV. executive or Aaron Sorkin or Ben Affleck or someone is just, or Clooney, like, we're going to do a live stage play on TV, you know, or a live episode of something. I can see a world, particularly, I actually thought I would see, we would see more of it during the pandemic of like, we're just going to put this on. And the only play, and we're going to, it's going to be live.

And the only place you can see it is on Paramount Plus or Netflix or whatever. I thought there might be more created specifically to be live event type things. Yeah. I mean, it, through streamers. And they messed around with like the one night

only stuff that they were doing like the live recreations of classic sitcoms for a while there, right? Well, ABC does that. Yeah, right.

But I mean, theoretically you could do stuff like that on the streamers. Yeah, but I think we're, it'll be interesting to see because streaming is becoming the dominant way

that people watch television. And I think that, you know, Netflix has tried to have talk shows. They had Chelsea Handler for a while. they had Hassan Minaj. It hasn't quite jumped. You know what I mean?

Like, I think that there's a certain type of show that people still expect to see on, quote, quote, quote, their reality shows are just have taken over that whole side of that business. Oh, yeah, it didn't make sense for that. Like, the non-scripted stuff is now all, like, either like mild competition shows

or dating shows or whatever. I guess I wonder if there's a world. I think when it was announced, they said that Peacock would show the late night shows early. And then the, but then the, the affiliates were like, excuse us?

Like, why would you do that? It's one of the few things we have. That's the thing you got to understand is it's just like there's still like all these people who primarily watch their television through their cable provider. And those cable providers are like, you're not fucking getting this thing like six hours early. Or not even the cable provider. Like, you know, W whatever, WNBC in New York. They're like, but people watch Seth Myers here.

You know what I mean? Like that doesn't make sense. I think we're still in that world. That said, I'd be interested to see who gets the most creative with it and how quickly they do it, because as I think people know, like Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel and the late night's Colbert, they film those shows in the late afternoon, like 4 p.m., 5 p.m. And then they do some quick edits, and they basically film them live to tape unless something crazy happens. There's a world where they could do a live feed of some of those shows.

I think it would be a lot of hoops to jump through. Maybe they don't do the whole show. Maybe they do a live pre-show or green room or something. But there's opportunity there, also in terms of the corporate synergy to make something like that happen. One more question. Then we'll go. Noah Lieberman asks, what do you think we'll have more of the monoculture this year? I guess kind of like

the most sort of attention. The highest grossing movie, the most streamed movie or the most watched show, and what do you think each of these would be? I don't know how to calculate

really most streamed movie because sometimes that's like a 2011 Mark Wahlberg movie on Netflix. I guess like in some ways I think that like I was always expecting tenant to have like

a huge, sort of streaming life, and I don't know that it necessarily has. I have a feeling the highest grossing movie, especially since it's moved again, is going to be Top Gun 2. I think the Marvel movies that are coming at the end of the year, perhaps like Eternals could outgross Top Gun 2 in the theaters, but assuming like America goes back to the movies by the end of the summer, moving Top Gun, obviously they did that because they were like, I think we'll make a billion dollars if we do this. And we'd stand to lose a lot of money if we don't. That being said, I think that I can't tell if we're in a bubble or not, but I think the MCU TV stuff has become the closest thing we have to these monocultural events.

I agree. I think the thing to keep an eye on, you mentioned movies. I think movies and theaters still mean something. But what I don't, and I wonder if Sean and Amanda have circled things on their calendar over at the big picture. I'm not sure what this movie will be. Maybe it would be Top Gun 2. Maybe Eternals Breaks Through. Maybe it's something I'm not checking for that I'm not even aware of.

But whatever movie can kind of make people just feel fucking great about going to a movie theater and seeing it with people is going to be something that has an enormous halo effect. Because I think people, obviously, for a billion reasons, want to, quote unquote, feel normal. But they also want to participate with other people indoors in something entertaining. Yeah. So I do think that if there's, and I'm sure that's what Top Gun, but the people are trying to game it out now. Like, okay, can we be the first to ride that wave? but also not be too early that we're making people ill,

you know, or making people make terrible decisions. Like we're leaving half of our gross on the table because there's just like six weeks or eight weeks more of like a comfort level that needs to come. That said, and we should have him on,

we will, I'm sure at some point this year to talk about it. But our buddy Sam SML has been, our buddy Sam SML has been really on top of this and basically saying like, the success, like Godzilla versus Kong seems to be a success, full stop.

Like people are streaming it, but it also has made money in the theaters where theaters are open. and he's been banging the drum that he's had this drum for a while, but basically like the window is stupid. People will see movies in the theater if they want to see it, but they also want to just see it. And so let people see it.

So I'm interested in that as we move towards a moment that I think a lot of studios are angling for, which is to lay the marker and be like, no, this business isn't dead, we're back. But I don't know. Maybe it's too really to say, but maybe it's just off of that one movie, but the HBO Max thing might be working.

Might be a success. I think it might be. Andy, we will be back. on Friday morning or late Thursday night, depending on when we post the episode of Top Chef. And also, we have a very special guest joining us to talk about a show that we really love they'll be coming up soon. So we're very excited to share that. You might be able to puzzle it out. Yeah, maybe. Until then, man, it's good talking to you. Great job, brains.