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Stand up and walk now! Hello and welcome to the watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am editor at theringer.com and joining me in the studio, my friend Andy Greenwald.
It's low key today. Yeah, I took a little off that pitch. That's okay. That's okay.
You know, I feel like you guys, it was hard. We're both kind of in a shaken up place. I would imagine that a lot of our listeners might be a little bit of a shaken up place. This is not the political podcast.
We have one of those. It's a good one. I don't know if I can bring myself to listen to it for a while, but I love those guys. I just feel like, Chris, you can tell me if you disagree, but we're friends.
That's why we do a podcast. We haven't sat down in a room with each other since Monday. You're talking about Kevin Clark and Robert Mase's NFL show, right? That's a political podcast, yeah.
We haven't sat down in a room since Monday. The world was different. My feeling is just not doing a podcast if you don't feel up to it. It's not a good idea.
We really appreciate having you guys, your listeners, our friends, our listeners, our family. Yeah, for sure. If you're in a different headspace, we understand it, but we're kind of in a funny headspace. We're just going to rap about it.
Yeah, I would mean funny. Ha ha ha funny. I think it's funny. I think we wanted to do this and we wanted to talk about how we're feeling and how we're kind of grappling with this in reality that we're faced with.
It shouldn't come as any surprise to anybody who's listening to the podcast that we're just pointed at season eight. There's a lot of questions right now about, I think, Alice and I wrote a piece this morning on TheRinger.com about the good place, but it was also about things that might make you feel just nominally better. I think that there's a really natural thing to say back to that statement. It's like, I don't want to feel better.
The palliative sort of opiate effects that sometimes popular culture can have on people, sometimes it's good to feel raw and sometimes it's good to just hurt and not want a comedy or not want anything. I can be halfway on that. I'm on internet timeout. I don't even know where I feel like that.
We're going to talk about it. I'll use I statements as I was taught in my liberal arts college. I'm on internet timeout. I'm off Twitter for two days.
I'm off Facebook. You look great. Thanks. I feel a little bit healthier because of it.
The reason for that is a couple things. I don't begrudge anyone's personal reaction to anything in their lives, personal, political, whatever. In general, posting stuff on Twitter on a good day is to shout into the voice basically to be heard. It's to not feel alone, just to share something, just be part of the community.
It's ideal way that it gets to feel connected to people. It's to be connected. Or it's to promote your podcast, which I also use it for, although I'm taking a break. At this moment, I don't begrudge anyone's right to be angry to vent.
Certainly, I feel as things to have the counter-pot take to make jokes. I just can't feel that right now. I can't hear it. I've stepped back.
It's very important. It's just getting you angry. I feel like self-care is kind of important. One thing that we've learned this week that I think is going to affect us as critics, as thinkers, as consumers of it, of popular, whatever we're doing.
Nobody knows anything. Nobody's ever known anything. The reason why we do all this stuff, whether it's obsessively refresh, talking points memo, if that's your poison or whatever, or less another people's podcast or watch TV, is to hope that someone knows something. It's to gain some knowledge, some way of putting off the uncertainty.
Here's the big secret for our self-help podcast. The uncertainty is always there, man. That's what we're always afraid of. That's kind of my headspace right now.
To bring back to what you were saying, while I am definitely pulling back, I don't want to be diverted. I don't want someone to make sense of something from me. I'm not even looking at the news. But on Tuesday night, I didn't know Donald Trump got elected president.
I still don't actually. On some deep human level, I don't know what to do with that. But I did fire up because I was not sleeping. I did fire up the Xanax prescription.
No, I did fire up the—oh, yes. But I did fire up the most recent episode of The Good Place. It's interesting that I wrote that. We were going to talk about that show anyway, I think, because we both watched it.
We were in a post Atlanta limbo anyway before we were going to record this. Yeah. I want to talk about the show, Macro and Micro, which would you prefer? I have a bigger idea that I'd like to bring up with you about it in the context we're talking about before we even get into what we like or dislike about the show.
I guess, you know, yeah, go Macro. I think—so if you guys aren't watching it, let's do it quick back. We talked about it once when it started a couple months ago. The good place is the new NBC sitcom from Mike Sher who created Co-Cread Parks and Recreation.
It's pretty high concept. It's basically about the afterlife. It's about Chris and Bell's character who enters—it's not called Heaven. It's called The Good Place, but she enters there because they made a mistake.
Can she become a better person when she's surrounded by sensibly better people? It's about ethics. It's about how to behave as a human. It's about how to improve.
It's heavily serialized. Mike Sher has talked about how he's met with Damon Lindeloff before making the show, basically to say, how can I take some of these big pictures ideas that you were doing on Lost and make a comedy out of them if I can? It's very ambitious. It's nice to say also, it's been a reward.
The ratings have been pretty good for a network sitcom because America loves Ted Danson and Frozen Yogurt, I think, which is a current theme in the show. I really like the show. It's really grown on me in a lot of ways, and it was palliative care on Tuesday night, I would say. But one thing that's interesting about it is I was thinking about its relationship to Parks and Recreation, which I love.
Did you stick with that show? I watched a lot of it. I don't think I finished it. I loved it always and forever.
What's interesting about it is it already seems very dated. It already seems— It's a place for Parks and Recreation. It's automatically almost seems—all of a sudden it seems like an Obama-era show. I think it's actually specifically a first term Obama-era show.
It is a show that is relentlessly positive and very uplifting. It was not so much a comedy. It was a fantasy, but in a very, very affirming way about the possibility of doing good local work, literally organizing your community to make the world a better place and the limitless possibilities that come from that. What I wanted to say about it in relationship to the good place is it strikes me that a show like that, like Parks and Recreation, that idea of enacting change despite tough odds, all of a sudden I want that show desperately.
I want to main line that show, whereas the good place almost seems like all of a sudden a third-term Obama show, because it has become so abstract. In a concept of good and evil, it has removed itself from Earth entirely. I wonder—I'm going to see the floor here. Because I believe in the government.
I do. I believe you have a right to be heard too. I hope I get a chance to talk to Mike about this at some point. He's suddenly very vocal.
The one thing that I have seen post-election is his loss, which I agree with, and I think he said he was taking a Twitter timeout too. Does he almost want to do over and try something different for the new world that we're suddenly waking up in? It's interesting to hear you thinking about it in those terms. I think that I completely agree with you that it is pop-cultural ibuprofen.
It's just like I can feel the headache getting just slightly better. That's absolutely certain, like a statement of privilege for me to be even in a place where an NBC sitcom could make me feel better for 22 minutes. The thing I keep thinking about before the election and after the election, obviously, in much different ways, we were talking about—I was seeing a lot of stuff about what can shampoo teach us about our time today? How should we be moving right by Robert Townowar?
Beatty that came out and it was set on the election eve of 1968. That's a great movie. Yeah, it's a great movie. What can the candidate tell us?
Sean wrote a great thing on Monday about the Ring about Network and how networks tell us a lot about Trump's celebrity. I think a lot of those pieces and a lot of those things were from a place of safety, from a place of feeling like we had a grip on what was coming. It turns out we have no grip on what was coming Tuesday, but what might be happening to us for the next four to eight to the rest of our lives, for eight years to the rest of our lives. Since the election, I've seen a lot of stuff about time of late 60s.
Music is going to step up. Music is going to be good now. Yeah, and I think that we'll see. What I'm interested in and what an election like this says to me is that I wonder how many new things are going to rise out.
I don't mean new art forms, but the concept of the cyclical, now we'll go back to the late 60s. Now we'll go back to the machine. Now we'll go back to Bush era. Azure prop, the refused will come back somehow and make us feel like we need to...
I don't really know. I think that this is really complicated and I'm not sure, especially with the televisions, the cycles of the way people make television and make movies and frankly, sometimes make music. Everything is moving so fast right now and things changed so drastically, so quickly, between in 25 minutes from a tweet about the peso is falling to She Lost Florida. The world changed.
When you're talking about, oh, this show seems post Obama, but in a post Obama best case scenario, I agree with you. I'm just talking this out. That's all we're all going to do. What's your question?
I don't know. I think that to engage with art at any time is a privilege. I think that we, in addition to enormous amounts of privilege in general, we get to talk to each other and talk about art and television as part of our job. I think that in limited conversations with people in this town where we live now, people who work in entertainment, I think people have had their head spun around the number of ways.
I think there really is a thought of we were making what I was writing, what we were producing, was made for a different world. In a sense, I think everything is always that way because in order to embark on any creative enterprise. You have to feel the fact that we live in a world in a country in which transparent can be a critically adored and beloved show and Donald Trump can be president. I feel, those are like, that speaks a lot to the plurality of this country.
Yeah, and that is also why I do feel underneath all of the layers of upset and fear. I just feel afraid about a lot of things. I do still have optimism. I do still believe in the moral arc of the universe, not to get too heavy.
I do. I think that we all, someone slipped under my windshield this morning and said, we're going to get through this together. I think that small acts of empathy are surprises and kindness matter. We'll get us through whatever is ailing us.
I also though wonder, well, one thing I'd like, this may be opportunistic to even say it because I would have argued for this on Monday too. Maybe I would have been felt as strongly about or have been able to articulate it specifically. But the small acts of empathy that have gotten me through the last two days is what I like in art also. And so to the degree that watching a comedy show can make you feel better, because it's distracting, that has real value in the time when we all deserve to be entertained and we all should be able to feel that way for 22 minutes.
But I think to see acts of kindness has value beyond entertainment. And I'm only mentioning Westworld, not even in a critical way. I can't wait. I'm not going to wait to watch this week's episode and talk to you about it because, again, that's a privilege.
Yeah, right. But I'm going to put this out there using Westworld as an example because we've been talking about it. It does feel a little bit chinschratchy and privileged to make a show wondering about the potential empathy of robots. This is you.
I'm wondering if it's a pivot factor role. No, no, but I'm asking you this. Yeah, of course it does. It all seems stupid.
Wait, I'm trying to find the sweet spot between it all stupid and it does. Can I help you there? What I want to say is what about a show that was radical about exposing empathy? Sure.
I'm going to help you get there. Not just that. So you watch the good place. We both watch the good place at various points over the last two days just to kind of have something on other than the void.
And I made an interesting personal choice and watched Don't Breathe last night. What? I just thought maybe a horror movie would be cool. I don't know what was going on in my head.
I never felt less sure if we were. The day-like saving shift and the fact that I've kind of been awake for two days, he kind of screwed up. So I get a pizza and I fire up Don't Breathe. And that was a bad choice.
That was a really bad choice. Do you know what this movie is about? Yeah, I do. It's about turkey basters, right?
Yeah, I didn't know that. I like to kind of keep my information. How much I know about a horror movie and a pretty limited- You don't listen to podcasts. Yeah, I have a rotten tomato Mendoza line that I need to go over and it's a pretty low Mendoza line.
And then once it's over that, it gets a shot pretty much. And so I didn't know what this was about. Oh, man. And it's basically like a very much in the style of it follows.
It's a pretty good movie. I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more six weeks ago, which says way too much about me than it needs to. But Jane Levy, who was on the show? It's a purgatory.
It's a purgatory. Stars is a group of three house burglars. It's suburban houses in a variety of houses in Detroit. And it kind of looks a lot like it follows in terms of like the photography and stuff.
And they basically like get hired to get hit at a house in like a nowhere neighborhood that's basically been a completely abandoned. And apparently it's like an Iraq war veteran who has $3 million or half a million dollars in his house and they have to go steal the money and they get in there and they find out that he's blind. But it also like everything goes wrong and it turns into basically this like gut wrenching somewhat torture porn person trapped in a steam laying. Right.
Anyway, bad choice by me. Yes. Bad choice by me. I was like, I don't have anything for this movie.
I don't have the capacity to watch people like artfully be tortured. You know what I mean? And that was the first moment last night. And obviously a lot of other factors go into it.
That was the first moment last night where I was like, I wonder how people's responses to certain kinds of pop culture are going to change. One thing that is not often discussed by anyone is that we enter into every entertainment experience or reviewing experience with our own little emeter set differently. Right. We sometimes need one thing or sometimes we need another thing.
And a good example of that is when I made you but then also like the necessities of our podcast and career made you watch a naughty episode of Mr. Robot after I had been responsible for getting you in the on-site traffic for an hour. You were not in a space to appreciate a naughty head fuck. Yes.
We've all been in those places. Some things work sometimes, some things work other times but the personal relationship, the personal relationship with art with television which is what brings us back to it and what sustains us changes and it's not universal. People's reactions are going to be different. I think I maybe even said this on the show before but I will never see that movie.
You know that. Yeah. Regardless, you know, President Dalai Lama could have been elected and I would not be seeing this movie. But yeah, not joys of that.
It was what your reaction to President Dalai Lama was. Yeah, it would have been weird. But I attended this event a couple months ago here that was like it was like a panel talk basically of creative people. It's panel talk season.
It's talking about things. You know how I feel about panels. And the guy who wrote and directed that movie, his name is I'm forgetting. The Alvaroza?
Yes. Was one of the people speaking on it. And I found him to be very inspiring. I found him to be very engaging, very smart in the way he talked about making movies, creating things.
It's crazy filming. I ordinarily would have been like, oh, this is such cocky and scenes of complete visual storytelling and the way he ratchets tension out of these different camera moves and I just did not have that in my locker. No. And so it was interesting to me to see that disparity.
Like I'm never going to see this movie. But I pointed out the way he spoke about making it. Yeah. Which is kind of an interesting thing to think about.
And you know, we're saying all this. And as much as I don't want a lot of things that I'm getting at the moment in the world, I don't want a fully reactionary, not in a political sense, but literally instantly reacting culture. Like I don't want a new Green Day all up next week. You know what I mean?
I don't want that. I want things to breathe for a second. I want people's natural experiences. I want people's natural responses.
I can understand why for some people, if they've gone out into the world over the last few days, seeing groups of friends together laughing or seeing something relatively benign, like I got a press release today about something. My highlight of Tuesday night. The highlight of Tuesday night. Let me finish this.
Just to say that like to see people laughing is actually made me feel better. It's supposed to make me feel trite. The world is trite. Can I share with you the one thing that I really enjoyed about Tuesday?
Wait, is this person who sent you this press release going to know that? I think it's okay, honestly. I'm going to pull this up in my email. But in the middle of feeling like the world was crumbling, this was 718 PM out in the west on November 8th.
I got an email and the subject of email is Rick Ross releases official statement, quote, I am fully aware of my current dealings with the IRS. Oh, but first of all, genius strategy. If you have something like if this email had said I am fully aware of my current dealings with murdering transients in parks across America, it would have gotten the same response. Right.
That was amazing to me. But a good reminder, and I'm going to do a big acrobatic flip right now. I'm watching you, man. A good reminder that when we have no control over the big, we only have control over the small.
Rick Ross is in trouble with they are a rest, man. That sucks for the boss. That was true. Monday, that's true today.
Similarly. Similarly. We got the last talk in front of these microphones. You're in the night kitchen right now.
You're mixing up the dough. This is the night kitchen. I learned about the milks in the batter. Yeah, good.
The book is weird and dark. When we last talked in front of these microphones, we were talking about that episode of Coordane Parts Unknown. Yeah, it's not lost. One of the things I was thinking though is those kids went to school again.
They went to high school. Like the kids we saw meeting with their principal in Coordane. They went to school yesterday. They went to school today.
They probably are afraid to or confused. I hope that they seem like they have a community that will help them with those feelings. But that still exists. On a granular level, the things that matter to us still exist.
How to balance engagement with those things with engagement with the big and unknowable is really tricky. But one thing that I do think might help, I don't know how long I'm going to be able to hold out. But for me so much of Twitter right now is just people trying to patch sucking chest wounds with band-aids. That doesn't even mean the election necessarily.
But people are trying to make sense of things that are not sensible. Yeah. And it's a cheap high for me. I understand why people are doing it.
I think also there's just a general, like, whatever you have a situation like this where you feel like you put a lot of faith in institutions that ultimately didn't lead you astray. I mean, it's not people's jobs to tell you the certainties of the world. But I think that for people who work, do what we do. And for people, a lot of people out there.
There's just a lot of distraction. And there's a lot of feeling of, like, I am informed, I am engaged. And I don't even mean like in the political process. I mean, you're talking about helping people on a granular level showing and giving these acts of empathy.
And I know where my time goes. And it's not that. And it needs to be. It really does.
I know that about myself. And I know my time goes to curating Spotify playlists and to watching sitcoms and watching horror movies. And I don't know. I mean, everybody's got to do what's right for themselves.
And this is not a prescriptive podcast at all. I think we're trying to grapple with the idea of what does come. How does stuff, I'm interested in this idea of, like, what does stuff that's coming out that was made in a different time? And what is the stuff that is on the horizon that is being produced now that is being produced in a kind of a different way.
Obviously a different environment. Does that reflect it at all? Is there a way to reflect it to accurately reflect it? Because I think a lot of people are, if there's not a universal, like everybody's afraid.
There are a lot of people who are afraid. And there are a lot of people who are feeling pretty triumphant. Here's an easy statement. People don't do well with lack of resolution in life or in art.
You know, things that end in the sort of middle place are very tough to pull off and very tough to sell. You know, I think about the ending of the graduate all the time. Like that's one. And Michael Clayton basically did the graduate ending also.
There's a book that's really like only one of which involves auto-explosions in front of livestock. But you can't. That was incredible. That was close.
Catherine Ross is saying. Sorry. So there's a unified theory of culture after all. But, you know, I think that grappling with that can create better conversation.
It can create better art. But it's tough. It's a tougher place to just rest in. And nobody wants to rest there.
I think about how I spent. I don't like to do that. But I think about how I spent the last six months basically just constantly drugging myself with blog posts and tweets. And podcasts.
All of which were. So what were the alternatives? Well, what I'm saying is all that I could have written off at the time saying I'm engaged. I'm a civically engaged person.
I'm anxious. I want to know. But really what they were was I wanted someone to tell me I'm okay. I wanted to be reassured.
I wanted to have a grip on the world. None of those people were able to do that. And that honestly, even if things had broken the way we wanted to, that still kind of would have been true. But you kind of maybe wouldn't have had your nose rubbed in it as much.
People don't really know. We're all just trying. But prescriptive. I mean, I don't know what we do with that.
I guess what I'm saying is. I do want to try to jump from us venting to finding a way to integrate this into our conversation. I think about the conversation we had on Monday about the desire some people have. And this is a legit desire.
I don't mean to belittle it. But to watch television to solve puzzles. That in and of itself suggests that there's something to be solved. Which I think we're learning is.
I think it's also just that when you're making mass-produced entertainment. And if we had had a different, if this we could go on differently, I would have liked to have spent some of this time talking a little bit about a movie that's opening tomorrow. It's a rival. Oh, yeah.
You saw that. It's a really beautiful, beautiful movie. It's a really like affirmative. It's a really like great film about communication and contact.
And it's also a great example of why they should make movies. Just keep doing it. Keep doing what you're doing. Just give people a contact.
It's the first film since Sicario. This is the director of prisoners in Sicario. This is the story of the movie we like a lot. And it starts Amy Adams as a linguist who is asked by the US military to help with the communication aspects of dealing with several egg-shaped pods that have arrived on Earth.
I guess. Yeah. So it's Marin? Yeah.
No, like basic spaceships around on Earth and they can get into them and they can, I don't want to give it too much away, but basically Amy Adams is tasked with making first contact. Jeremy Renner is also in it. And ordinarily we would just be going insane about Renner right now. Would you hypothetical quick as a side?
If you were in charge of this mission, if you were in the government, would those be your top two people? Renner and Adams? Which would be Adams and Renner on the front lines of interstellar communication? I would probably task, I would task Adam Scott character from Eastbound and Down.
Or the PG version of it from the good place. Yeah. Just to see what would happen. No, it's a great movie, but it feels like way more of, okay, it's about aliens.
Keep going. But it feels like even more of a fantasy now than it did last a couple weeks ago. Not the fantasy part about the aliens. That's already happened.
Yeah. So the underlying themes are a little bit harder to talk. You're too cast with Tom the longest, the best decision I've ever made. Some of the underlying themes of the film are a little bit harder to identify with now.
Now maybe some people will see it and say like, now more than ever these ideas are important. But yeah, it's tough. I don't know what the role of culture is going to be in this. It's a question of it's one that we don't like to pay attention to when we don't have to because it's really fun to joke about Jeremy Renner or see comedies or do the stuff that we normally talk about.
But what do we look to this stuff for? And by stuff, in this case, honestly, I mean, this is facile to sort of equate them. But if we've got a gap, whether it's like some, whether it's neediness or boredom or whatever, when we look to fill it, whether we look to fill it with binge watching something on Netflix or binge watching political news or whatever we fill the whole way, what are we looking to do? What are we looking to get out of those things?
And is it more than just passing the time? I think it feels different for me now than it probably would feel for me in 25. Yeah. I think that's true.
But ex-plicate why that would be. I think that I think when you're older, when you get a little older, I think that you probably do look for some sort of bone. And when you're younger, you do look for some sort of, I also think it's like I'm a white man. Like it sucks.
I mean, I just don't think that I can fully appreciate what this means for a lot of people. And I'm trying and that's going to be my project. That's definitely a top priority and concern is to understand that this is in a lot of ways not happening to me in the way it's happening to everybody else or a lot of other people. But when it comes to how I relate to the television and films and music I listen to, I think that I'm almost looking for something that's right in the middle.
Not too sunny and not too stormy. I was listening a lot to The Kill yesterday and I was like, this is just enough edge to match my mood, but not too confrontational demanding that I am thinking about what were digitally on all day long. One thing I think a lot. By the way, I think you just triggered me as a New Yorker.
One thing that's different I think between experiencing this now and experiencing a similar dejection, although honestly very different 12 years ago, is I hope that being a little bit older allows us to take the longer view and that things are cyclical and that to feel secure that you are being represented or your values are in some way being represented on a higher level, that is a gift and a privilege and not always guaranteed. You can hopefully see to the next time when that might be the case. But I also think that, and I know the irony, it's a rich irony to be making this point on a responsive podcast basically, but I do wonder about our ability to take the long view of things in the culture at the present. Not to be the guy who used to walk uphill in this notice school, uphill both ways.
But at 2 a.m. in the East Coast, the last wave of hot lava takes I saw flowing towards me before I asked a twittering bird off of my phone was what this means. What this means now? What this is going to mean?
Heads up. We don't know. We can assume some things, but we don't know. And I hope that we can carry that being okay with that because we're going to have to, but being okay with that uncertainty maybe until we cover stuff.
We're baked into a different cake at the moment where I'll turn it back to Westworld in a positive way. I'm only using it not to rub people up, but because that's the hour long show we've been talking about. We have been discussing the chapters, not the book. And analogy, I usually have trouble by pushing back against the two.
But it is the nature of what we do to react quickly to a piece of something without being able to see the whole. I hope that we can, I mean, I always sort of wanted to hope this, but I hope that we can try to be culturally a little bit more patient. Yeah. Obviously we're going to have to be.
And again, I realize, like, I think you made the point well. Like we have the privilege of just talking this out with each other in front of microphones. This is a much bigger. Yeah, this is, I mean, we're aware that this is an incredibly self-adulgent act.
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It's one that keeps on giving Blurb. Make a book. Leave your mark. I'm interested in the terrible culture choice you made less.
I'm wondering how you think. Trying to... Because it's like horror movies produce a visceral reaction and they're very transporters. So if you are able to kind of give yourself over to the fun part of them, they're like rollercoaster.
There are a lot of things where you are basically... It's like playtest. You're just electrifying your nerve endings almost by engaging with a part of them. And frankly, the more and more I get older and the more and more I get time, I spend on a computer or looking at my phone.
The less I feel scared. Or thrilled. Or I'm being dropped off a building. My heart's wasting.
It's hard to get the highs. Completely. And it's telling that I would look at a culture for that and that's just where I'm at in my life. Not much of a thrill seeker anymore.
But I think that it wasn't the actual... I don't like being scared right now. That was throwing me off. It was the voyeurism and safe experience of violence, of terror.
These are real things. You could just fire it up. That stuff was happening two weeks ago. That's my bullshit to work out that I thought that it's safe three weeks ago and it's bad now.
It's a complete fallacy. And that's something that I think we'll all start to see. We've gone through 10-15 years of the anti-hero being the primary delivery system of televised narratives in a lot of ways. And I don't know how much longer people are going to be like, yeah, this guy's an asshole.
This is great. Maybe people don't want to have people who are a little bit more real. I think that we have confused anti-hero with a real man or a real protagonist. And I wonder whether or not that is something that's going forward.
We have plenty of real-life examples of people who are anti-heroes. Show me somebody who... Are you saying show me a hero? It's true.
I am saying that. Well, I like that in these series too. But I agree with you. Do you think that Simon's like, God damn it.
David Simon? Yeah, because he's making a movie about the 70s and it's... Or do you think I show about the 70s and that's a guy who I think would obviously... He's talking about wanting to fast respond to something.
The last time I was online he was Tweet-baiting anti-Semites and KKK members. So I hope you took a Twitter vacation too because I just can't imagine welcoming that into your life, let alone existing. But no, I think you're making a great point because I want... Not David Simon the polemicist but David Simon the artist.
I kind of want him on the front lines of stuff. But this is what I'm talking about. That kind of like... All the traditional modes of communication, the traditional institutions of mass media, even all the voices that we already have were all screaming the same thing.
And it didn't work. All the gatekeepers were irrelevant. All the emperors had no clothes. I think that's a good point.
But I was only going to finish by saying I wonder if there is frustration in going back to work on deeply reported, deeply realized examination of Times Square in the 70s with James Franco as twins. Like I'm into it. Maybe we're going back to the 70s Times Square. I don't know.
That's an interesting point. It would be an interesting play test if you will. If you have the luxury of seeking, whatever you're seeking this week in the arts, what clicks and what doesn't. On the way here, there's new songs by artists that I like randomly this week.
The new Los Camposino song. Remember that band? Oh man. Los Camposino's great, great, great Welsh band.
And they rhyme something with Ferranti. The novelist and the song. I enjoyed it. But I thought I was going to...
I thought I wanted to hear some shouty emotional rip-pop, essentially. It's kind of discord. I've been listening to this... There's a...
This is just... I should really put myself in a locker after this. But there's a Noel Gallagher curated playlist on Apple Music that is mostly... The Noel Gallagher Indian Summer playlist.
Yeah. When you go to an off-license and lie down at a park and hit shuffle, it's like his description of it. But it has... One last time you think he did that.
I don't know. That's a really one. Yeah. It's got a lot of African-cyke rock and weird beat-driven psych rock from England and Africa that I just was like, yeah, melt it all away.
Let's do it. I put on the new song by the XX this morning. Yeah. And I was really...
They have an incredible Spotify playlist that's what they've been listening to in the studio. I was really moved by this new song because, you know, I don't know if you guys listen to the XX, beautiful minimalist kind of post trip hop. I don't even know what you call it. It's not really dubstep.
It's just very, very intimate, like bedroom tunes, as they might say. But in the space between their second album, which I didn't love, and this new album, the producer, Jamie XX, made that beautiful album that we talked about in the podcast last year. And there's this moment in the song where it starts like an XX song and then there's something in the background that's bubbling and bubbling and bubbling and it's this beautiful... Sam Gallagher opening a can of fosters.
His third can of fosters. And that's the same effect. It's a chopped up sample. Have you had a floster?
In that big can? Yeah, it's a tough hang. Because it gets kind of warm, right? Unless you really go for it.
It's a kind of thing where you get halfway through it and then you Joe Bluthit and you made a terrible mistake. We used to, when we first started out in high school, it was 40s and then one of my friends in high school went temporary blind from drinking say-hights. At least he claimed to. And then we moved to fosters for a while and I was never a big fan.
Well, you have bad memories associated with it. I was just going to say that when this sample comes up in the XX song, it was surprising and it was beautiful. And I was like, okay, all right. It's a small thing.
We're going to build this back piece by piece. And there was a moment today when I heard something that surprised me. It was beautiful. And there's a point to that, man.
There's a point to that. I don't know if that's pedantic. I don't know if other people need to hear that or be reminded of it today. Maybe you're seeking solace a different way.
Maybe not seeking solace at all, which is fair enough. You don't have to. But if you feel that you are and fosters isn't doing it for you, I thought that song was pretty good. I'm curious what people like is generally, and we can start to wind things down, but you wrote me the other night and I hope you don't mind me putting this out there because I was going to say the same thing.
We probably all have these routines. We all have the movies that we go back to in different times of our life. We all have the songs, we have the TV shows that comfort us or whatever. I remember being told before I had a kid that the one benefit of being up all hours in the first few weeks is, man, you can really binge a lot of TV shows.
I was like, great, I love watching TV shows. It's definitely what I want to do in my free time. But I was telling myself that it was a part of me that was like, this could be a productive time. I could get through some of these series that are on my to-do list.
Let me tell you something. In that headspace, 1000% know. What I did was I re-watched Parks and Recreation and I re-watched 30 Rock because you just want Mac and Cheese, man. You just want sometimes.
That's all you want. But I was going to say that it would be interesting to hear back. I would almost say to you do this, but I'm not looking at Twitter, but maybe you will. What's your go-to?
Because maybe some people want to, the emotion that they're chasing, not in the sense musically anyway, or maybe in terms of TV, too. Maybe it is surprising. Maybe it's not the Smiths. Maybe there's something between the Smiths and the Turkey-based movie you watched.
I don't know what that is. But I would be curious. I just think that in good times and bad times, I do appreciate, not just that we can do this, but that there are these touch-downs, whether TV shows, movies or songs, that do make us excited to come together and talk about stuff. That doesn't change politically, whatever.
We would have said this on Monday. We did kind of say it on Monday because we were very moved by a crawfish boil involving Sriracha and beer. But I think we particularly are grateful for it. Yeah, I'm grateful to be here with you, man.
So I think we should end it there. How psyched are you to see what Maeve does with her extended intelligence over weekend? Let's just be really, really real. I just mean they've got a lot of amnesiac inhaled in the thief to work through on that piano, so I'm really looking forward to see the gloaming take.
What if I think it goes to Avron Piano? What if we just came, because like mix of mitosis, and it's finally stripped down the way that we should have been? What if we just hit reset and we just came in? I wish that writer would turn around and be like, is that fucking radio?
Hey, the game? Pass me Fostas! But what if he was like, no Gallagher? He's like, right up proper, tune you anchors?
University Tops. Yeah. What if we just hit a hard reset and we just came in? What if it's two timelines?
By the way, full disclosure into the idea of divergent timelines, all of a sudden, super into it. What if this is the brighter one? Well, thanks a lot. That's lurking underneath every episode of Community.
What if we just hit a full hard reset and we came in just like 1000% in on Hugh Laurie's Hulu show chance? Yes. Hugh Laurie, guy, why are we talking about this? Hugh Laurie did not seem totally psyched to be back on television, and to be fair, he's not.
Hugh Laurie has just one thing. To get Hugh Laurie attached to your project, does it help with the characters American? Sure. Does it help that he's professional and misunderstood?
Yes. But the key is, his name has to be the name of the show. Oh, yeah. So he's not the name manager, though.
Doctor House. Good point, but that was only a limited series. He's committed to more seasons of this. I believe his show Chance, his name is Hugo Chance.
But this isn't the dude who wrote this? Like your boy? Ken Nunn? There are many talented people involved in this, but I just want to call like time out on- On naming shows after you?
Yeah. It doesn't have to be unless the one carve out I'm going to make for that is next week when it's all about the show that Doctor Arnold Westworld named the park after himself. That's what it's about. It didn't have to be a cowboy world.
It just happened to be his name. All right. We're going to wrap it up there. Andy and I will be back on Monday talking about Westworld.
We're going to just watch some TV, man. Keep doing podcasts, but I really seriously- Keep doing podcasts. I said, what are you doing? I really think- Thank you to our listeners.
We don't say that often, but it's awesome to have guys talk to you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and stay sane out there. Just rely on each other and- We got you, Rinsies.
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