The Watch - Why Isn’t Steven Soderbergh's ‘Mosaic’ A Bigger Deal? Plus ‘The End of The F** World’ | The Watch (Ep. 223)

Episode Date: February 1, 2018

The Ringer’s Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald review HBO and Steven Soderbergh's six part murder mystery ‘Mosaic’ (3:00) and the experimentation happening in the television industry right now. Later, they finish their series review of Netflix’s ‘End of The F** World’ (25:00). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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My name is Chris Ryan. I am editor atterrigger.com. And joining me in the studio, he's renting a spot in my barn while he works on illustrations. It's Andy Greenwald! I'm so excited to be here today. I'm so excited to count, perhaps on one of my two hands, the number of listeners who got that intro. You don't think there's a lot of mosaic heads in the building? Look, we stay talking about Steven Soderberg.

It's true. So if there are mosaic heads, I hope that they have found their way to this podcast by now, because we will, in fact, discuss... Well, this is one of the major talking points about this show is that why isn't this a bigger deal? We're going to talk about Mosaic today. We're also going to end... I know why. We're going to end our end of the effing world Thursdays.

We've got to get you guys the next show we're going to be doing on Thursdays. We're not quite sure yet, but we will tweet that out as soon as we know it. I feel like we got to get off Netflix, man, because obviously Netflix has so much content for these kind of chapter watches. What's Crackle got? Talk to me, Crackle. Crackle has a show where I think Dennis Quaid is an auctioneer or something. They had some money laundering show that I was kind of down with. Yeah.

I think it was like before Ozark. It was like a prequel. But it's also like right before Bitcoin. or like Bitcoin, but like not quite when Bitcoin blew up. So they're just like, there's this coin and it's like a bit. Look, I got to be honest with you guys. Look, every facet of my quasi-career is fueled by this television industry, right? Like we talk about it here, everything.

And yet sometimes I wonder, like, if you were to go by the set in Vancouver of Crackle's Money Laundering Show, which is almost too on the nose. And you just grab some Canadian gaffer. you know what I mean and be like what's really good like how are you managing your money like how long do you think this is going to last it's called startup don't you think Adam brodie's in it too exactly don't you think the answer you'd get would be similar to the answer you'd get if you just drop by cosmo.com's headquarters like circuit July 2000 and I'm like hold up hold up you you guys have to know that Greenwald has had the Cosmo joke locked and loaded I have the receipt Greenwald's been messing around with this Cosmo joke for four days. I just feel like children, it wasn't for this, because I used it somewhere else already. I'm double dipping on the dot-com era humor. The children in the room, like our producer, Zach Mack, might not realize that there was an ostensibly legitimate business concern at the beginning of the millennium. And the business was, I could go to their website, I guess, and say, I'm in Murray Hill right now.

Bring me a pint of Ben and Jerry's ice cream and ghost face kill a Supreme Clientel CD. Yes. And they would. And nine hours later, a guy who'd show up and be like, I went to Virgin Megastore. And then I went to the 7-Eleven down the block and got you. That'll be $80. And it melted. Yeah.

Yeah. It was like, let's disrupt the bodega business that was on the corner of where Spinn's offices were. I'm just saying, like, they had to know. It was a little bit. Do you feel like the Cosmo guys are just like, damn Amazon came through and just crushed the building? Yes. Look. We had that.

I'm just saying it feels real good to be in a bubble, but do you know if you're in a bubble or not? So what does this have to do with a mosaic? I was just saying, maybe there's too much. Well, this is a great question. This is what I want to talk about. So explain to the listeners who are still listening what Mosaic is. Guys, and I had a really cool talk with Allison Herman about this earlier today, and she said to me... Oh, is that of this podcast?

Are we done? Was that your podcast? I was chatting with Allison because I was trying to get a feel of like, Cam Collins wrote about Mosaic for our site. Allison said she had watched the first episode and that she was hoping to catch up. But we were having this conversation, and she said,

how come Sharon Stone starring in a murder mystery directed by Steven Soderberg on HBO is not Big Little Lies Big? Why is this not a bigger deal? Part of that is because this show has been, the rollout for it, has been a little bit unorthodox, to say the least. It started out as an app

that you could download onto your phone and play, or you can basically see this story, which is ostensibly, and it's explained in the first 30 seconds of the show, so I'm not giving anything away. The murder of this woman, Olivia Lake, a children's book, illustrator and author, played by Sharon Stone,

who's living in a Park City-type city in Utah called Summit. And she is murdered by someone. We're going to find out who. The app allows you to view this story through a variety of different characters' perspectives, switch to see how, one person viewed a conversation versus how another person viewed a conversation. It also provides a lot of documentation.

Like you can look at police reports. You can look at autopsy. You can look at photos from the crime scenes of whatever. So there's a lot of like extra dimensional investigation that you as a viewer can do. And I think it captures a lot of, or it was attended to capture a lot of the passion around some of the true crime podcasts, some of the documentaries that have been blowing up over the last two years. And also, as someone who is married to someone who really enjoys playing these video games where you're basically solving a crime, her story was one. I can't remember some of the other ones. But Concepcion would know, maybe we can tweet them out later.

It's an addictive thing to basically play amateur detective and have a lot of the raw materials. And because of the technology available at your fingertips, you can do it. All that being said, we're here to talk about the show that's the show that I think you could make the case that, in some ways HBO dumped. Oh, they did. I mean, that's... Which is crazy. Sharon Stone, Garrett Headland, in a murder mystery, set in a posh part of the country.

Why are you bearing the lead? Pee Wee Herman. Ambo Bridges. Biff from Back to the Future. Right. Directed by Steven Soderberg. Ziggy from the Wire doing donuts in the snow. I love Zieg.

James Redsode is great. Who's the Michael Shervis? Michael Cerveris. Star Broadway. Yeah. Great to see him in a non-singing role. So he... they put the show out as a five-night event, quote unquote.

They dumped it. They dumped it. That's what that means. So, Andy and I both watched this this weekend, or last night, I think, we both watched one episode. So obviously, I've read reviews that are like, it gets really good at three. I've read reviews that are like it, yada yada. Andy is chomping at the bit to tell you... It's not good, man.

Okay. It's not good. Look, one of the benefits of this television bubble. which I should say, I was being, I was joking before, when a company like Apple, the biggest, richest company in the world shows up to the party, just as the parties might be ending and it's like we're going to drop $4 billion more to keep this party stocked with peronies and murder mysteries. Yeah.

The party's not over. So the bubble is not popping. One of the benefits of this kind of boom time economy is that experiments can get made. So when I say this isn't good, I don't say it with the same cynicism where I say, please don't watch Chicago Fire or Chicago Law or whatever on NBC, it's pretty cool that a noted

polymath, like Stephen Soderberg, who is bored so easily, who can't stop filming, who loves to try new things, he can enter into this interactive storytelling experience. That's what he wanted to do.

I mean, you could make an argument that by putting the app out first, they were essentially cutting off the cutting off the show at the knees, but this was an app. This is the point of it, and that's what attracted Soderberg to it, was the idea of being able to film all this content

and organize it in a unique way. And it's worth mentioning that since his quasi-retirement, Soderberg has since come back, he's made two seasons of the Nick, he's made Logan Lucky, he's got a new film coming out this year, Unsane, which is a horror film that he shot on an iPhone with Claire Foy.

Everything that he has done since he's come back from retirement, so to speak, and he has said in interviews that movies are for his silly, and TV is going to be where he's serious. Everything that he's done, movie or TV, has come along with a challenge, a self-imposed challenge.

For Logan Lucky, it was that he was going to reimagine the distribution model from theatrical movies. For the Nick, he directed and shot the entire series at what sounds like a Herculean pace. Edited. And edited. Right. Often editing it on a laptop

while being ferried to and from set. Right. It's outrageous. Right. And then Unsaity shot on an iPhone, Mosaic was an app that he then put out as a mini-series. And written by a legitimate screenwriter at Solomon. But let's just say this. Like the goal for the for the artist at play here, which is really what Soderberg, I mean, he's a painter also. He sees himself as the artist here. His goals might not jive with ours as an audience. Okay.

That is the fairest way I can say. So he may look at this as a success because every, new experience trying something different to his mind, a type of mindset I admire is a success. But all we can do is look at it as it was delivered to us. Now, feel free to at me and be like, you don't know the full mosaic experience or about that app life. Me at you? You usually don't use Twitter to communicate with me, but you could. But what I want to say to people who would make that argument is you got to miss me with it. Because ever since, like, Hidden Mansion on Sega CD, I am not trying to solve crimes through

that kind of interactive lens. That's not interesting to me. And if it works better as that, then maybe it should have just been that. Because my main takeaway from this is that it is a mess. It is fascinating cast. It looks terrific. Oh my God, is he an exciting director? He can elevate almost any sequence. He challenges himself to do so. Everything, like almost every scene, it starts out with a police officer interviewing a suspect. And you're like, oh, yeah, this is, we're getting into the night of immediately. and then what you get is an hour of relatively pedestrian interactions between a pretty wide cast of characters. I just want to say up front, I have a lot more time for this show than I think, Andy, I thought about it a lot since I watched it,

which I think is always a good sign as if I keep going back to certain things. But I cannot, I'm not mad at Andy for having this opinion. Oh, that's nice. And I also don't really know, especially after one hour, and it's, It's a pretty ballsy move to make a pilot or a first episode of an HBO show and end it and just kind of be like, no, there is no, there is no suggestion of why you should keep watching. Not at all. I mean, which is one other thing that probably fueled HBO's decision to dump it all across five nights. One thing to remember with HBO, one of the reasons they've maintained their pedigree for excellence is that HBO only programs on one night.

HBO means Sunday nights. that means their development pipeline is infamously packed and many things fall away. It means getting real estate to be actually on HBO's air is incredibly hard, harder or other, certainly than like a Netflix, which has something new every week. So they're not going to give away five Sundays for something that they deem to be an experiment, or maybe not worthy of that real estate. So to say HBO dumped it isn't the same as saying a different broadcaster dumped it. So there is a sliding scale there.

but one can't, you know, I can't help think that they looked at this and they were like, no, this is going to appeal to some people and we're not upset that we've funded it, but. But aren't they notoriously ready to take a look at, you know, these, these, they have like some incredibly infamous pilots that they've shot and they've trashed, right? Yeah, pilots for sure.

Like Catherine Bigelow directing this or, you know. Or the corrections. The corrections. There was a David Milt's show that I think was very much like Succession, the new show that's coming up? That was the space that HBO was interested in, and they shot the pilot for David Milch's money and passed on it, and then Adam McKay directed Succession is coming on, sort of in a similar rich people space.

A family with a patriarchy who's deciding how to divide up his empire. A business dynasty, yeah. Yes. Pulling the curtain back further, I mean, HBO would love to have a good relationship with Steven Soderberg, because you never know which you're going to get with. with him at this point, you know, if you're going to get a masterpiece or an experiment, or sometimes both. They also want to have a good relationship with anonymous content, and the production company

and management house that works with Soderberg and is responsible for true detective, among other things. So there are a lot of reasons why they didn't dump this. You know, two or three years ago, maybe this would have ended up on Cinemax before Cinemax rebranded itself back to its old brand and stopped pushing the envelope in the way that it was. There are moments here. I'm curious a little more specifically, like, why you're, why you're. were so turned off by it. There's a moment here that I really appreciated, and it's early on,

and because it's Soderberg, and because he's a good filmmaker, there are some expository, I don't want to call them tricks, because it's actually the absence of tricks. There's some exposition and development here that is just dumped in a way that doesn't call attention to itself, the forward motion of time. It's not really helping you understand how much time has passed early on between these characters and how their relationships have changed, not much handholding, which I appreciate. we see Garrett Headland's character, who's a bartender, when he meets our man Jeremy Bob, who was so good on the nick, and then they go to a bar, and they start talking about Mobius and Hodorowski and, like, legendary 70s comic book figures. And it is such a, first of all,

such a deeply nerdy conversation. But it's also such an expository info dump when characters throw references at each other to establish to the audience who they are and why they get along. and you can feel, like you can often feel in Soderberg's best work, how he defeats the mundanity of the script by the way he encouraged the actors to perform it. There's this extra beat where Jeremy Bob says something and then laughs at himself. When Garrett Hedlin is clearly cracking up and the cameras keep rolling, and it sort of turns what could have been an incredibly artificial moment into something that feels alive. Yeah.

And there's a bunch of that, but not enough because I would say the majority of the show feels surprisingly inert. yes, nothing happens, and that is a hallmark of contemporary TV's pilots these days. We're not pilots, but, you know, it gets better later as a thing that we've started saying a lot. I actually found this completely atypical as a first episode or a pilot. I think that, yes, you're right. What I mean is the idea that things will get better if you invest time in them exists. Because usually the pilot hooks you. Even something that was like particularly slow moving like the deuce, across its first season,

you could even make the argument, had that extreme moment of like shocking violence at the end of the episode that sort of shattered the familiar. vibe that even these kind of like low down dirty players had amongst each other and you were like brought back to the harsh reality of what it must have been like to live in Times Square at that time. With Mosaic even though there is stuff about con men

Ponzi schemes, silver scams, people trying to screw one another over in a variety of different ways, ambition greed, you know, lust loneliness, all this stuff that's like actually quite textual. It's not even subtextual. It is

always interesting to watch these late period Soderberg things because you're like, do you resent this, the characters? Do you resent the screenplay? I'm actually so enamored by his talent and so enamored by his brain and so in love with his taste that I can't, I'm deaf, I'm blind to this. Like I will keep watching Mosaic. He does things like there's a scene

midway through Fred Weller, who I actually think is quite good in the show, plays this guy Eric Neal who's sort of trying to seduce Sharon Stone's character named Olivia Lake. Interesting performance and character. Go out to dinner. We don't see the dinner

until the very end. But we do see Sharon Stone standing outside of a bathroom at the restaurant recounting the dinner to Paul Rubens on the phone and Soderberg shoots it in one way where he just shoots her straight on.

And then there's another shot where she is, you can see her face through like, you know, an elaborate shelving unit, like the kind you'd see. at any kind of fancy restaurant where it's like, ooh, little candles and plates and stuff like that.

You can see her eyes. And she's looking through these shelves as if she's looking in a mirror, but she's really just looking at the camera. But she's sort of trying to check herself out. And then you realize she's probably trying to check to make sure this guy hasn't come looking for her because she's just sort of trying to play hard to get or whatever. And it's just this fascinating execution

of the most mundane boring scene. Yeah. And I don't know what to say about that because I guess part of it is I would only keep watching this because it's Soderberg. And yet I'm almost lightly disappointed that Steven Soderberg keeps just making experiments. It's one thing to do a deviation from, hey, I'm going to make something that's just like a real statement, and it's purposely entertaining or whatever. And it's another thing if you're just like, everything I do has to be challenging to me

and by proxy challenging to the audience. I think that's very, very well said. I mean, it can be truly exhilarating. to see him transform material, to elevate material. There are moments in the Nick that we talked about when we were discussing on the podcast where he seemed to be actively disinterested in the scene as written in a script and allowed his camera to wander and to create something very counterintuitive and surprising and ultimately artistically rewarding.

There's some stuff like that in this episode too, yeah. The thing that is lacking is if you tell a mystery story, particularly one that puts its cards on the table first, This person is dead. Now we're going to go back and we're going to meet this person and we're going to have to become invested in this death that we know is coming. You need to, there needs to be a little more carrot and a little less stick in the story. There needs to be more on-ramp for us to have any interest in these people that are in this world. And I did find the world incredibly chilly and emotionally unengaging on a pretty deep level.

The Nick, one of the things that we often said about the Nick was that if you stripped away, the performances and you stripped away the direction, a lot of the script, or at least the way it was initially designed, is pedestrian. It is a hospital drama. Then you get Clive Owen, then you get Andre Holland, then you get Soderberg's camera, and you get HBO slash Cinemex's production budget.

And then what was exciting to me about the second season was the guys who created and wrote the show now knew what show they were making. It wasn't the show that they dreamed up together without any sense of what it would look like, and they both elevated each other in a way. this does seem to me and if five hours later it changes

let me know these are long episodes it seems to be you know a very traditional and good well-intentioned murder mystery that doesn't seem worthy

yet of all the attention lavished on episode well I'm happy to keep watching a few more episodes and I'll let you know if there's absolutely something you need to come back for but I think it's actually a question that I'm curious about what some of our listeners

and you know we were really fast by you guys when you all responded to our questions about what streaming services you use and how you package together the various options that are out there for people now. Be curious to know, how much do you owe a show that doesn't grab you in an era where there's so much to watch? And what is the thing? If you can point to an example of something where maybe you were about to bail, but there was one, some thread that you wanted to keep pulling. You hear me and Andy talking, Andy is basically like, I'm out. And honestly, if this wasn't Soderberg, you'd probably be a little bit harsher on this show. Yes, I mean, but maybe because, even if you took Soderberg away, as you said a moment ago, go down the list of things that interest me.

And it seems to contain them. I mean, I do like a murder mystery. I would love to hear from people about that as well. Before we move on, what do you think of Sharon Stone's performance? She is the central character. She is both the star and her character is the victim of the crime. And as you think about it, let me just set it up further to say one of the things that is also continually sad. satisfying and interesting about Soderberg is his approach to casting.

Think about the faces and the older actors that he put in. Yeah, Buzz McAllister plays the cop in this show. I mean, going back to the informant, he's such a master of seeing things in other people that maybe we hadn't seen or had forgotten. The cast that he assembles are always exciting. Part of what appealed to him, I'm sure, was taking someone who is a movie star, but has not been given those roles in quite some time. and building a show around a movie star

with a very strong camera personality. Sure. I don't know. I mean, one of the challenges, again, is that she is a terrific performer and has been exceptional in a lot of things. One of the things that has always made her noteworthy is that she is tough on screen,

which is a good thing. She is not often a performer that, just by her sheer presence, like some do engenders an enormous amount of empathy from the audience, you know, she's tough. I like that about her as a performer, and it's curious to put someone like that in the role of essentially a victim.

She is the victim of the crime in this story. I don't know how I feel about it yet. What's the Sharon's, like, the best Sharon Stone performance ever? Legend of Alan Quartermain. No. I mean... Obviously, basically, it's the most famous. It's casino, I think.

Okay. I guess I'm having a hard time imagining anyone else in this role She does put her stamp on it But it is a deaf she makes choice Like she is definitely playing this part I think she's pitched up a little bit where Headlin and Weller are kind of like Yeah this is like it's very lived there are much more naturalistic and lived in

And she is very big She's a movie star and she's bit she is a movie star And he shoots her like a movie star And even in her more like frazzled state like you're just like damn like This is just, she's a magnetic presence. I don't know if it's right for the story. I think I can't really judge it until I see a couple more episodes. Yeah, I don't think it holds up to police academy for citizens on patrol.

What does, though? Which I saw in the theater. I was big, big point. Yeah, police academy head. Yeah, 10 years old. You were a police academy head. Who was your guy? Tackleberry?

No, what's his name? Winslow. The noises. That dude made noises with his mouth. That was hilarious. Do you think people, like, still check for police academy movies? Those were a big deal. Bill just pumped his fist if he was listening.

Rewatchables, man. I would do the whole series in a heartbeat. Just to say about Sharon Stone, there are a couple moments. Like there's the scene where she sort of co-ops James Ransone's speech, awkward speech, when we first see his character early on in the episode, and she stands up and she slithers in. And she's playing. She's down to play along. You know, she lets the camera hold a beat.

She responds to it in a way that I think Sotomberg likes. It's not like she is misused. used in this or wasn't down to play. It's an interesting thing to ask us to buy in off of the type of performance she gives. Well, look, look at this. Look how much time we just gave to a show that I'm out on. It's worthy of discussion.

I just don't know if I want to keep watching it. All right, well, if I'm going to keep watching it. If something pops up, I'll let you know. Okay. All right, we're here to support each other. Who is your guy in Police Academy? I was always pretty into Tackleberry. Honestly, I was not Gutenberg,

but what was the guy who replaced Gutenberg? Matt, McCoy. Matt McCoy. Yeah, he shows up midway through. That guy had a nice career later on. When they go to Miami? He's in, I love that one because there were jet skis at the end. And I thought jet skis when I saw that movie were like Back to the Future to hoverboards,

like they weren't real. And someone told me those are real. And I was like, oh, word? I mean, I'm still too afraid to get on one. This is gold. Let's take a word for a sponsor. Hey guys, this is Sean Fennacy, the editor-in-chief of The Ringer. And I want to tell you about a podcast I host called The Big Picture.

Each week I welcome a different filmmaker to talk about their latest movie and how it was made. I've talked to the directors of some of my favorite movies, including Jordan Peel, Greta Gerwig, Ryan Johnson, Barry Jenkins, and dozens more. You can find new episodes on the Channel 33 feed every Friday by going to the ringer.com backslash podcasts or by subscribing to Channel 33 wherever you get your podcasts. I hope you'll check it out. All right, Greenwald, we're back. We're here to wrap up Police Academy. Bingemo Police Academy. I'm glad you guys have been with us this whole time.

I'm so in on this. I'm so in on it. You're like so loathes of watching UTV and you just have Police Academy at your fingertips. Look, things that you experience at younger age are more available to you. God, Marian Ramsey... GTFO Steven Soderberg.

I'm trying to talk about police. Mary and Ramsey played hooks from Philadelphia. She's 70 years old right now. Jesus, that'll make you feel old. Wow. Turning 70, yeah, that'll make you feel older. We have 16 minutes. Would you like to talk about end of the fucking world?

I'm stalling. I'm stalling on purpose. So it turns into a different show in the second half. It sure does. The first half is, I don't know if I would call it a reverent, but it's like a black comedy. It is almost in love with its own sense of irony, and it poses, it strikes,

and there's a lot of voiceover and about these two characters pretending to be people. And then they kill someone. And then it turns into this different kind of dark, lovely romance story in the back nine. And I was smitten with it, especially the last few episodes. I really, really enjoyed it. I strongly disliked the second half of this season.

And I saved this one. This is an anti-Ozark. I didn't tell you that I was out. That's okay. This is not the same thing as the bird family for me. Strongly, strongly dislike them. I thought that... I always feel like if there's a negative reaction,

I need to clear out the paint free to. go for it. Well, I'm still trying to work through it because I just, I mean, as we discussed, it's easy to just binge right through them. So I watch these four with an increasing sense of dislike and unhappiness, not like just the end, literally five, six, seven, eight. So from when they kill the guy. I did not like the show anymore.

And I think because for as much as I advocated for these short runtime and how fun it was to be able to just zip through it, how probably appealing that was to a younger generation, although I don't necessarily want to just assume that people can't hang for a 58-minute episode of Sharon Stone on a ski lift. The downside of the breeziness of those episodes and the episode length and the season length as a whole is that it required those first four episodes in the midst of all the fun they were having to essentially be writing some emotional checks that would have to be cashed in the second half of the season. And I don't think they could cash those checks. So the idea that is basically that these two main characters, these two kids who are eventually falling in love,

are, I mean, like, that they claim that they don't need anybody, that they're psychopaths, that they're murderers, that they do things just to drive people nuts, and that they are basically these misanthropic, you know, teens, and then they find out the true value of love. Look, I admire the show for not, never hiding the ball on that. Right from the beginning, it's poking holes in its own premise and doesn't seem to take it, doesn't seem to take it seriously, or even, it's not trying to signal to us other than the very first few minutes when he puts his hand in the deep fryer. It never tries to con us and suggest that these people aren't just emotionally needy and broken. Are you just saying that nobody would put their hand in Deep Friar? Look, you do you. Chippies are much more popular on the other side of the pond. Didn't you do that when Gutenberg quit pleasing to me? I definitely.

No! I checked the trades. I mean, Gutenberg was a star. You checked the trades. You don't recover from that as a franchise? Nah, nah. This is not the same thing. but it felt awfully trite to me by the end.

You know, I was not in love with these people enough for them to realize that they were in love to matter to me. And one thing I want to put out there, I don't love this take of mine, but it has been emerging in my brain. Like, I've been trying to steer away from it. Okay. But last week I said that maybe the teenage stuff. Yeah, you didn't hear the teenage frequency. I just couldn't hear that frequency anymore. Even though while I appreciate the necessity of the extremity of it, for them to do extreme things,

and for a lot of the adults to be essentially cartoons, because that is, I'll use an eye statement, like that is what for all of us, that is what life can feel like often when you are the ages of these characters. But it's weird, man, as the show went on, I was like, maybe I'm watching this more as a parent now. I do not have a teenage child. I do not even have a teenage child who is 17, looks 15, and is. is actually 25. Right. Good for you.

Promise. Yeah. I would tell you if I did. I would introduce you. I would bring him or her to the studio and it could hang out. Sure. I don't. I have younger children.

But there was something about the cartoonishness of all the adults, her father. You don't think that changes once they switches to the third perspective of Gemma Khan's detective? I thought the detective thing was nonsense. Okay. I mean, I just thought it was such a, you mentioned true romance. That felt to me like a total affectation. Like, well, they're going to be cops, but they're going to be in, with each other and that'll be the fun little thing happening on the side.

Nah, I just didn't buy it. And then, you know, all building up to the big ending, I was just out on it. It's weird to say that because this speaks to the glut of quality television we have too. Boy, was it well directed. Boy, did the performances modulate. Music was great. Music was great. Yeah.

Great Buzzcox sync in one of the episodes. I guess it just reminded me a lot of, like, things like a life less ordinary, where it's like, what if there were two profane, angry angels? and you know what you mean? Like it had a kind of early, early, early odds, kind of like playfulness. I hear you. I just think that maybe it's because we have so many good choices,

my standards are perhaps on. Do we have so many choices? We have, okay, let me rephrase that. Because we have so many choices, my standards might be unfairly high. Just to be reminded of good things that we used to like wasn't enough for me. Now, in such bite-sized bits,

does it pain me to have watched this? No. Yeah. But it's fine. Right. I think it's interesting to have something that comes in the same box as Superstore or one day at a time, time-wise, you know, the amount of commitment, but is so wildly different. And I think that anything that is about sort of identity

and is about violence, frankly, like this just requires like you just have like a different sort of litmus test than you would again say, oh, I did or didn't like this episode of this sitcom that I watched, you know, which is the same 22-minute runtime. I know, it's interesting. It's the, that's the threat of this pod today, which is sort of, uh, in the land of plenty, what do you decide is, is the thing that's actually nourishing. Yeah, and there's just this, it's just a question of how you consider emotional engagement with your show as a creator, how you modulate your tone, how you bring people in or push them away. And, you know, the show takes a big gambit in the beginning with, I'll use the word again, with the extremity, with the friar, you know, with the way that Alyssa talks to people. So then as it sort of pulls back a little bit and yet uses the same extremity to articulate. James's trauma, the scene with a mother, the flashback.

When it's sort of shot and presented in the same over-the-top way as everything else, you know? That's sort of, yeah. I mean, this is a criticism that's often levied at West Anderson movies, where it's like it's adorable when it's hotels or, you know, and then you get to suicide or Nazis or whatever it is that is the serious part, and people are like, you can't put that in the same kitchy. What's funny is that I thought you're, about to say

Tarantino films. I really did. Sure. You could say that too. You could say that too. It's funny when it's like

cursing cowboys, but when they're really, really racist, it gets a little rough. For some people. It's hard to make art that hugs you and hits you and wants to do both

with the same voice. The greats filmmakers and TV creators and shows are able to do that. But it's interesting to me because I think that we watch something that was a little bit out of our normal watch zone

And this seems to be, correct me if I'm wrong, but fiercely beloved. I mean, I know Netflix desperately wants another 13 reasons why, but it was definitely pushing it down that path. And I could certainly see if it has been received rapturously as well by a teenage audience. What is the ceiling for it with you? Because you seem to like it and you were charmed by it. But it does not sound like you were in love with it. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I found it incredibly watchable, pretty funny at times. I thought the performance is really winning. It didn't offend me on any level, and I didn't feel betrayed by it. I think that you're probably a little bit more in a zone of, if this isn't working, it's almost pissing me off. Because I have a 25-year-old child. Yeah, because, like, your 25-year-old child is also out there skateboarding. My large adult son is out there just eyeing. And I'm a little bit more in a zone with, like, that was pretty good.

That was pretty good. You know, and I think that there's a world in which, like, when you have volume, like, the way we do now in TV, it's like, that was pretty good is what it is. Are they going to make more? I don't know. I haven't really checked. I mean, I think it ends on a perfect note. It ends on the right note. It ends on the right note.

Yeah. I don't think that they should come back, and it's like, that is an act of selflessness that I think that they're talking about the narcissism of his sort of obsession with himself and their obsessions with each other. and then they become, you know, they do things for one another. They learn the lesson, the sentence is complete, they're adorable, let's just move on. But I'm sure that either the cop missed or... Yeah, let's never answer that, please. Let's live with the ambiguity. Let's go in the cinematic direction where you can ask the question and then slowly back out of the room.

Because an answer will not satisfy anybody. Yeah. At least of all, me and my large adult son. Officer Hooks. All right, Greenwald. We will be back on Monday. Guys, we will be talking a little bit about the Super Bowl. Just culturally, emotionally.

One way or another. This is a big one for us. What do you want to watch? What do you like, I want to watch? You want to watch more Mosaic? You want to watch more Waco? You want to watch more Versace. I thought you meant, do you want to watch Fletcher Cox go full tackleberry?

On the Patriots front. We don't have to have this discussion right now. You don't want to do it on Mike? No. Let's just wrap it up, actually. When are we doing the Police Academy Pod? And last thing, just to the listeners know, because I think they care about this. We will be watching the Super Bowl in each other's company.

Unless you want to tell me something now on. No, I'm ready, then. Are you going to dress up in any way? No. You're going to wear any, like, green? No. Okay. So it's your fault if they don't win.

That's right. I just wanted you on record. I have two Eagles garments. Okay. Neither of which I think bring luck. My favorite of which is a nom DMC, like a DRC, my nom DRC. Yeah, that worked out. T-shirt with Namdi-Assumwa and Domi Groucher's Chromarty.

Just a great era. A great era. So that's what we're working with. I have a lot of dream team paraphernalia. I have a rich coatite signed white handkerchief to signal complete surrender. And I have in a small, like, plastic baggie, I have some strayed neck hairs from the beards of one of, or both of the Detmer brothers. They became intertwined in my collection. That's how the time portal opens in dark.

It is. So I feel like I will bring those things to your house. Yeah. And it'll be a big weekend for us. All right. We'll be back on Monday. We'll let you guys know what we're watching next week. Take care.

Fly, Eagles Fly.