Two Hundred A Day - Episode 41: Our Third Discussion Special

Episode Date: November 22, 2018

Your hosts Nathan and Eppy have a short conversation about what's changed over the course of the podcast so far, what has surprised us about the show, and what we're thinking about for the future. It happens to be Thanksgiving, so we also take a moment to say thank you for listening. Thanks so much! Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files! Support the podcast by subscribing at patreon.com/twohundredaday. Big thanks to our Gumshoe patrons! Check them out: Richard Hatem Victor DiSanto Jim Crocker - keep an eye out for Jim selling our games east of the Mississippi! Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app Lowell Francis's Age of Ravens gaming blog Kevin Lovecraft and the Wednesday Evening Podcast Allstars Mike Gillis and the Radio vs. The Martians Podcast And thank you to Dael Norwood, Dylan Winslow, Bill Anderson, Adam Alexander, Chris, and Dave P! Thanks to: zencastr.com for helping us record fireside.fm for hosting us thatericalper.com for the answering machine audio clips spoileralerts.org for the adding machine audio clip Freesound.org for the other audio clips Two Hundred a Day is a podcast by Nathan D. Paoletta and Epidiah Ravachol. We are exploring the intensely weird and interesting world of the 70s TV detective show The Rockford Files. Half celebration and half analysis, we break down episodes of the show and then analyze how and why they work as great pieces of narrative and character-building. In each episode of Two Hundred a Day, we watch an episode, recap and review it as fans of the show, and then tease out specific elements from that episode that hold lessons for writers, gamers and anyone else interested in making better narratives.

Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Palletta. And I'm Epidio Ravishaw. We're taking a little break from our regularly scheduled episode recap thing, the thing we do, just because it's been a while since we've kind of just chatted about the state of the podcast and kind of why we do it and what we still find what we find interesting about the show. And we have, you know, 40 episodes of this in the bag at the time of this recording. So well, with Thanksgiving coming up and all here

in the US, I thought it was a good time, maybe for people who have started listening recently or haven't caught one of our earlier kind of meditations on this. Just to kind of check in and chat a little bit about the things that we like and are perhaps thankful for. Yeah. Oh, I like that. That's good. That's timely. We are all about timely references here on this show. Which is why it's a podcast about the Rockford Files, because nothing is more timely than a 70s detective show.

This is good. 40 episodes. I mean, that's not a thing I was expecting to be here and going, Hey, yeah, we just, I think we've done this once or twice before where we didn't talk about a Rockford file. We've had a couple, they're called a discussion specials. So if you look into our archive and, and our previous ones have been structured around listener questions, which, you know, is great. We love getting questions and comments, but generally the comments that we we

tend to get on the episodes uh these days are uh ephemera about them like pointing out little details that we didn't go over or you know some production notes and stuff uh from from folks over on our patreon which we like to get they're fun to see but they're also that we're not hanging this episode on those um yeah it's more of a i think as i said state of the update check-in kind of thing and and at least one of our previous episodes wasn't the rockford files i'll let i'll let our viewers find that one but but we've done three dozen rockford files at least and um if um, if we, yeah, if we subtract the two discussion specials,

the two movies that we've done and the, and the one, uh, secret alternate episode. Yeah. That's still, that's 35. Yeah.

Episodes of the show and two movies. That is, uh, I don't want to say that that's more than I thought we'd get out of the Rockford files, but it certainly is more than I had anticipated in the beginning. I think when we first started doing this, we were like, well, we'll do this for a laugh for a little while and see what sticks. See what we get out of it.

Right, right. But yeah, I've enjoyed it thus far. So that's great. I actually am at this point now when I look to the future and I think with sadness upon the day that will come when we run out of Rockford Files episodes. Well, we still have quite a quite a ways to go before that point. What has changed for you since we started about how you've engaged with these episodes? Because I feel like there's something that's changed for me, but I wanted to start off with asking you so that you can answer first. Well, that's good. I appreciate that. No, I'm actually, I'm really enjoying doing a deep dive. So recently I've been watching the Netflix

Haunting of Hill House series, catching it late at night when I have a moment or two alone because I like to watch scary movies when I'm home in a brand new, well, not brand new, 100-year-old house that I just moved into. I've been doing that, and I've been re-familiarizing myself with the original uh story and listening to some people do some uh analysis of that um it is called the big read cast and and they have a uh episode from october of this year where they talk about the book, The Haunting of Hill House. This podcast is about books. So they're actually just into the books. It just,

in fact, from what I understand, it's just a coincidence that they happen to be doing this book at the same time that Netflix did a TV adaptation. But the thing is, is that TV adaptation is so incredibly different from the book. Like it would have to be a series that long and whatnot. And while I was doing it, I was listening to an old time radio broadcast. So I was getting it from all these different angles and I was really enjoying diving into like how each one approaches the different subjects and what they're doing to, to get and what they're doing to to get

across what they're trying to get across where maybe somebody may have missed something in their interpretation or deliberately chose not to do it right and uh like those are muscles that i had you know the only way i had flexed them in the in the past 20 years wait wait, 20 years, maybe 20 years, a little less than 20 years, was through game design, right? And in that case, I'm not looking at a particular episode. I'm not like when we do game design,

I don't know, maybe it's different for you. But when I do game design, I'm often looking at a much larger thing. I'm looking at a whole genre. you're not looking at like a text you're kind of looking at to use some fancy words you're looking at a a corpus of of work right like yeah so um this getting this chance to to drill down or focus a little bit more on on uh just a specific text we're not ignoring the larger picture because that's, you know, we know that, you know, sitting in a larger conversation, but this thing that we're doing

here is really helping, I don't know, scratch that itch. That's an itch I've had for a while that I'm, you know, had a chance to do it, except in this context. I've had for a while that I'm, you know, had a chance to do it except in this context. Yeah. Kind of, uh, strengthen, strengthen those muscles and kind of keep, keep, keep your limber for other kinds of analysis. I think at least that's kind of how I feel like having a regular excuse to, to, to look at this, uh,

to look at these episodes very closely in a fine grained way makes it easier for me to look at other stuff in a analytical manner, which helps with game design because we're all in a genre when we're doing something and there's other things that we're responding to. But also just kind of like critically looking at media, I think, which I think is worth doing. Yeah. We've gone down kind of rabbit holes about other examples of things that we see in this show that we don't like as much because it doesn't really stand up to critical scrutiny

and or the message doesn't seem to be very strong or what it's doing doesn't follow through with the premise that it set up. And stuff like that where it's kind of like, there's a lot of stuff out in the world. There's a lot of media, a lot of things to read and watch and whatnot. And I feel like if I can identify earlier that something isn't going to be for me, then I think that's a good skill. Like, it's not that everything is bad. It's more that being able to pick up on the things about something something that is not that I'm not going to respond to very well. The earlier the better means that I'm I'm finding more stuff that I like.

Yeah, I I have a thing where, you know, I take a deep breath. I just repeat to myself, I'm not the target demographic. Right, right, yeah. It doesn't mean this is bad. I'm just making a decision about what I enjoy. And there's something I miss, though, that I was doing early on that I haven't had a chance to do in a while. And this is just because the rest of my life got a little hairy and out of control, but I used to be doing a lot of games, running a lot of games, and able to implement the ideas that we were coming up with

within a matter of days or weeks of when we recorded the episode, which was a lot of fun. It got to some really neat areas of narrative design like i just i remember um oh i'm trying to remember which episode we'd seen of the rockford file but i had this idea from it where i just started a game that i was running where i had everyone describe where they were 48 hours from now oh right and then we go back and then we play up to that point uh that was oh it was so much fun and it was something that came out of our discussions right like uh that we were just like hey let's look at how uh how the crew here did it right and uh how can we implement that and i know that like i i mean i don't know the

percentage of tabletop role players in our audience uh i presume it's higher than it would be if any other two rockford two randos decided to do this show yeah i think that's kind of the our original premise right was not just celebrating the celebrating the show and diving in on like critical level, but also pulling out the narrative lessons of the show. And I think something that was a little unexpected for me was that over the course of those 40 episodes, it's not that we stopped finding things. It's more like we established a number of themes that make the Rockford Files what it is. And there are only so many ways we can really go back and hit those themes over and over in a way that's kind of like fun to talk about and not a stretch because we feel like we've already talked about it. So I think you can hear over our last handful of episodes we've been kind of transitioning into a different model where we're

it's a little more free discussion and a little less like let's make sure to hit this specific structure um which has been a little less pressure i I think, at least for me, um, trying to be like, what's a new thing to say about how we establish side characters or how we, you know, reveal the different layers of the mystery or how we show the information when we need to know the information. And it's not a fight to get information. Cause that's not the interesting thing. Like all these things that just are the core of how this show works.

This is a bit of a tangent, but since we started doing this Rockford side characters have ruined me. There's just something I was watching something recently where they did it sort of Rockford style. And I kept thinking, is this just a bit? Are they just doing a bit? Or are these characters important to the plot? Which is not a question I normally have watching

Rockford Files because I'm like, no, we're just getting a little bit of the life of the bus driver or, oh, I wish I could remember what it was because it really was, it just really stuck out. It was like kooky characters. That's all just, it just really stuck out. It was like, uh, kooky characters. That's all. So that's the other thing. We have ruined ourselves for certain kinds of TV. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I don't know. I, I still have trouble finding shows that I really get invested in and watch whole seasons of, um,

yeah, I don't know if it's cause I've been ruined, uh, cause I was having that problem before we started watching before we started doing this show before you hooked me into the rockford files but um i certainly have that feeling because now i kind of don't watch the show until we're doing a recording right yeah um and so when i sit down to watch one i'm kind of like oh right i like this show like so you had an answer to the uh

the question you asked me right um i think i was thinking mostly of how of the thing about kind of the the narrative lessons and how we ended up kind of exhausting uh a lot of you know the main ones in a way that i kind of didn't it's not that i didn't expect that but it's kind of like i just hadn't thought about it i was like this is the premise of our show so let's you know yeah um that's kind of changed i think i also um because i'm watching it and taking notes and kind of you know doing the play-by-play for our episodes i get more hung up on plot details than yeah than i did when i was just casually watching the show not because they make it worse but because i'm paying such close attention

that there's something that's just kind of like unresolved or like i don't see the connection between why someone did a thing and like what their motivation was or or how something happened and where all the characters were at the time like that kind of stuff where when you're casually watching it's like whatever who cares you know that's not the point but i've started to care so like so the episodes where that stuff's all really like well resolved are the ones that i'm like yeah this rules and the ones where it's a little more hijinxy or a little more light-hearted uh or there's more going on it just kind of drops certain little details. And I'm like, well, this could have been better because, you know,

this, this, and this. And I don't know if that's unfair necessarily, but it does give me a metric where I can differentiate the episodes that I think are great from the episodes that I think are like, you know, good, good to normal. And most of it is that attention to detail and whether everything really connects to each other over the course of the episode. Right.

So the Rockford files for us starts as just entertainment to consume, right? Like passively consumed, but not super actively consumed. We just, I started watching it because i just remembered it and i was like oh i haven't seen that in a while uh and then i was like this is excitingly good like i could look at this and and start studying it more which i wouldn't do for a number of shows that i otherwise enjoy i just i enjoy them and i'm like i don't need to

go into how they're doing the thing that they're doing because I'm not super impressed with that. I'm just enjoying it. Right. Like, uh, I was watching again, not a Rockford files, but something else, uh, a show that had, like, I'd never spent a whole lot of time on, I'll say directorial decisions, you know You know, every so often I'll note something and be like, yeah, that's great or whatever. But it's not, wasn't my forte before. You know, I really enjoyed like the writing of something more than sort of how it's visually done.

But since we've done it, I've started to pay more attention to it. And I saw an episode of the show, again, not of The Rocker Files, but of another show that again not of the rocker files but of another show that had gone through the trouble of making i would say almost the first quarter of the show one long continuous shot oh wow and it felt so in my face by the end of it that i lost track of what was going on i was like i get what you're doing. Just cut away. Where I think

before we had done this podcast, I may have just never even noticed. Because if you make a decision like that, you're making that decision for a purpose. Like the purpose might be to be like, haha, look what I can do. But I suspect the purpose is to instill an emotion in the audience. Maybe something that makes the audience a little bit more tense because you're not breaking or turning away or a little bit more hectic or whatever. But in this particular case, it made it feel like a stage play. play when you're seeing people uh having a discussion if you watch it on television the camera will point either to the person who's talking or the person they're talking to right and you're aware that there are other people in the room but you aren't really looking at them or aware of them but when you do this long continuous shot thing you're constantly panning

around other people in the room and you see that they're just sitting there like characters do on stage when it's not their turn to talk through the magic of the camera for years television has been able to say don't pay attention to these people yet and in this particular case they pulled it away and you couldn't control the audience that way which i thought was interesting and something I never would have paid attention to. I shouldn't say never, but I probably wouldn't have paid attention to if we hadn't been doing this

podcast and poisoning my brain against enjoying things. Well, I think one of the, one of the benefits of this show is that there are so many different directors and so many of them are very good right and yeah a lot of them are very just prolific tv directors of that era um and some of them were you know also directed films and tv movies and everything i don't consider myself like an expert on how a director influences a television show i I don't really know.

Like we've talked about a little bit like, oh, sometimes these cuts or these shots, could that, was that a director thing? Was that in the editing room? Because in TV, it's the producers who have the final, as they say, final cut, right? They're the ones reviewing the footage and putting it all together.

But sometimes when stuff jumps out at us, we can kind of see, oh, this director also directed, you know, noir movies. And here's this shot that is very noir and very cinematic and make those connections. And I look out for that now because I kind of like seeing the hand. How these things are, because it's an episodic show with the same stars how are they different across episodes not just the scripts but like how does the hand of the creative team affect the show um that just is an interesting question that i that i think focusing on for for our purposes has has made me even more interested

in the the characters are interesting too because we're watching. I mean, obviously, we've watched them roughly in order on our own, but we're recording these episodes. The order is not random, but it is not. It's not linear. And it's not it's not been planned out. At the beginning, we did more planning because we wanted to make sure we hit like episodes that's highlighted each character and we wanted to kind of get a rhythm before we did a two-parter and stuff like that but at this point we kind of go like all right what are we watching next time and one of us just pick something and uh it's interesting to jump around in these characters lives a little bit we're not

watching the characters evolve well we i mean we are but we're not watching them like the characters don't evolve in the way that they do in long form television now where characters have an arc over a series or an arc over a season um it's more that the characters just evolve based on the needs of the script, right, sometimes. And also just on how comfortable the actors are and how well the writers know them, I think. I think that's what's it too, because I think the earlier ones, the characters are a little bit more vulnerable to the needs of the script. Whereas the later ones, I think people are writing scripts knowing about the characters yeah i think so and that's that's also i think borne out by kind of what happened with the second season which was where you know again we've we've kind of touched on this here and there i'm sure but i think it's relevant to this uh at the beginning of the second season the first season

was extremely successful um the first half of the second season lost tons of viewers because those episodes where jim was the butt of the joke including some that we really like like chicken little is a little chicken is in there yeah pulled out of context that's a great episode but in context people who who were into the show in the first season came back and saw jim being um not being the smart guy being the dumb guy in these situations and didn't like it. And then it didn't pick up again until the end of that season and into the third and fourth where it never recovered its original audience, but it started getting better critical reviews and better writing once they

kind of like studied the ship and were able to put Jim into fewer situations where he's the the fall guy essentially and I think that's really very much an example of that character was a victim of the script in a lot of those episodes and then in third fourth season when they started winning Emmys and stuff like that I think everyone people were writing to support the Jim Rockford smartest guy in the in the room, but he never knows everything. Right. So it's the back and forth of him discovering things, outsmarting people, but still getting taken every once in a while by circumstances beyond his control or by someone who has his number. Right. Yeah. I think part of what we talk about is like when when something happens and we're like that doesn't really feel like a jim thing like that really stands out because we have this very holistic sense of like what that character is and like what he's all about yeah so it really stands out to us

when there's an episode that he uh doesn't quote act like jim rockford that's not because the character changes really it's more that he he almost he coheres he just like gets yeah more to him as the show goes on which is great i had a moment um no i had three separate moments okay so okay so we're right now to let people in on a little bit behind the scenes magic here uh right now uh nathan and i are recording this uh but we have already watched an episode taking our notes and if we're not too tuckered out or too whatever at the end of this we'll we'll record uh another episode of the rockford uh 200 today i'm sorry another episode of 200 today um i had suggested this particular episode uh and as is now our way, it was based on a whim. I just recently bought a house.

And I knew that real estate was involved in the plot of this next episode. And I am definitely the kind of person that likes to pick at that scab. Like, I watch haunted house things when i first move into a house when we were making our first offering on the house or or trying to decide if we're gonna buy it we watched money pit i'm very much about working out my fears in in uh right away in the fiction that i'm absorbing so uh i chose this episode uh but i had not yet heard back from you agreeing to do this episode. And I had some time to just watch it and take notes. And I thought, OK, I'll watch it.

I'll take notes. If we do it, it's good. For whatever bizarro reason, Nathan says, no, not that one. That's fine, too. The worst that can happen is that I watch Rockford Files. Right. So I sat down. Again, when we started this whole thing.

These these episodes were streaming, but now they're we have to have them on DVD. I'm sure whoever's listening to us is has bought the DVDs or maybe they still have VHS recordings. And thank you again, patrons, for getting us to where we could invest in the DVDs to keep the show going. getting us to where we could invest in the DVDs to keep the show going? Yes. I throw the DVD in, I start playing. Unlike other ways in which I could watch something, my control over the DVD is connected to the device via a wire. I'm using an old Xbox and so I have to get up and walk to where the controller is because I'm sitting too far away. Anyways, what I'm saying is three separate times I got up and paused the show and then went and looked through our back catalog to make sure

we had not already recorded an episode on that show. Because I just kept having these. And as far as I know, we have not. But it just was so familiar to me. And everything I was thinking of saying, I was like, oh, my God, I've said this, haven't I? I've said this on the show. So, yeah, that's where we're getting to now. Now I need to, oh, it would have been so easy to just check the 200 a day Rockford Files files.

I should have just done that. I should have just done that. Smarter than going through and rereading the title of every one of our previous episodes three times. Yeah. Yeah. I know what you mean. This one also has a lot of like previously ons for us. Yeah.

Between some of the character actors and the creative team and stuff like that. So I was doing that too. Whereas like I recognize that person and looking back on our thing so do you feel like that means that we need to is there a very special lesson we can learn from this is that what you well no more kind of like does that mean that the way that we approach these episodes is getting a little too samey or is it more that this episode itself kind of encapsulates a lot of things that are in other episodes? I think that might've been the second bit might've been it. Every time I got triggered by it, it was okay. I mean, let's spoiler alert. The episode is from the end of season two. Uh, it's called, uh, a bad day, a bad deal in the Valley. And every time Jim had to deal with Karen,

and I think I kept thinking of Two in Every Port might have been it. These stories where a woman from Rockford's past comes up and I'm like, oh, I know we had to have done this. Well, and also that actress, this is the second time we've seen her because she was in the very first or no she was in the second episode we did she was the countess in the countess oh that's okay yes because they reuse actors yeah yes in a slightly not the same not like a similar role because the characters are different but kind of a similar dynamic of jim trying to figure out what's really going on with this with this woman who gives him one story and then gives him another story and etc yeah yeah i wonder kind of one thought i have

is like at one point we talked about like are we going to watch episodes that we think are bad and right so far i still think there's really only one episode we've watched where I'm like, yeah, that one was not good. If anyone's going through the back catalog, there's an episode called Just By Accident that we did and is a skippable Rockford Files episode. But at this point, I think it's more kind of like, are there going to be episodes where it's kind of like,

yeah, this is a Rockford Files episode. There's not much more to say. It's not that it's bad. It's more like this combines the elements in this way, but they're all the elements that we know and love. And I think we still are, you know, we still like to, we'll still dive in on minutiae and stuff. But I kind of feel like we can give ourselves permission to do maybe like a shorter episode if there's really not a whole lot to dive into and that kind of stuff um we kind of respond to the episodes as opposed to have the stricter format yeah not that we ever have a problem with not having enough to say but yeah but i think that's

something i'm thinking about about like making sure that what we're talking about is still kind of interesting and obviously interesting to us but kind of like relevant to adding more texture to watching the show and also pointing at specific things that we can learn from for our own work i think that that last bit is the difficult part right because i think we've done rockford 101 yeah uh we've probably done 101 and 102. Yeah. And we could go into, you know, knuckle down and do like 200 levels. Right. But we may have used up some of the episodes we would use for that. Now maybe it's more like independent study. Like figure out, you know, the stuff that's directly relevant and go into it.

Yeah. We'll see. We maintain a list i mean i actually need to update it but over on our on our patreon page at patreon.com slash 200 a day there's a there's a list there of kind of the recommended episodes the ones that i think at least came out really are both interesting episodes of the rockford files are superlative episodes of the rockford files and also that I feel like we did a good job with. Yeah.

So if folks are hearing this and haven't listened to our earlier stuff, maybe that'd be worth looking through. If you want to kind of hear the, the greatest hits of what we've talked about so far, but yeah, going forward, I think we want to be a little, maybe a little,

a little looser with it and kind of keep it fun. Cause I, it's really, it's, it's like, a little looser with it and kind of keep it fun. Cause I, it's really, it's, it's like, I really like what we're doing and I love sitting down and putting in the episode and be like, all right,

this show is great. And like taking the notes and getting set up with you and getting the thing going. And then I think it would behoove, behoove us, you know, as the people doing the show and also probably be better for listeners. If we kind of keep in mind that we don't need to necessarily stick with the same formats and the same things that we've done in all of our other episodes.

If the episode that we're talking about doesn't really demand it. Yeah. I was going to say that also, you know, I wouldn't, I would not be surprised if we did, if we chose a couple of episodes to do at the same time and contrast them, right? Yeah, yeah. These work as a neat little pair or what have you. Yeah, I think the point is we've done the first introductory part of our work here. We've done the first 60 hours of the coursework. With that under our belt, we'll see what else we can do that's fun and

interesting and maybe reveals some new things. Yeah. Picks out some new stuff to talk about. Yeah, for sure. Well, I just wanted to point out real quick that our first episode came out at the end of our first set of episodes, because we dropped the first couple at the same time episode came out at the end of our first set of episodes because we dropped the first couple at the same time came out at the end of december in 2016 and it is now almost thanksgiving in 2018 the things that have gone on both in the world uh and in our lives in those yeah almost two years it's been a couple of years. Yeah, it has. Oh, wow.

That's kind of nuts to think about that. I got married. You bought a house. Real life stuff. And the world burned. The tire fire that is the world around us continues to smolder. But it's been good to have this. I think we've been pretty good about getting the episodes out to either know to to either the two two a month or one a month depending on other things this summer was rough

there were a lot of health emergencies and travel and stuff like that so we had to slow down our release schedule but yeah we've been getting getting the episodes out and making the time to do the show and doing the recordings and that has been a balm for the more chaotic things so thank you epi for staying with me and and uh being a great a great discussion partner and co-host for this show thank you yeah that's uh it's been like you said it's a it's an anchor in a in a a a port in a storm that is a really bad pun. That's all right. I got you.

And the title is, there's one in every port. And then there's another episode that's two into 556 won't go. Oh, man. I'm a Rock for Files expert. That's why we have that information online so you can look it up. Yeah. And also thank you listeners for giving us the validation for doing the show. We appreciate it.

So thanks for keeping us in your, in your feed. And thank you, especially to our patrons for throwing us a couple bucks every episode to pay our hosting costs and upgrade our mics and stuff every so often and buy Epi new headphones when he needs them. All the costs associated with the show. And, you know, gives us a little bit for our time doing the show, which is, as self-employed people, helps us out a lot. So thank you very much. Thank you, yeah. Anything else you want to throw out here in our little discussion special

State of the Podcast check-in Thanksgiving extravaganza? No, I mean, I we we nailed most of it thank you all for listening and uh don't worry we'll be back next time not to talk about ourselves but to talk about another episode of the rockford files oh did i go too soon i wanted you to do it that time