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My name is Chris Ryan. I'm an editor at TheRayer.com and I am currently in Portugal. And I'm not even a metaphor. It's not a metaphor.
I'm on vacation, but before I went away, me and Andy Greewald recorded a mailbag from all of our great listeners sending in all these great questions. Greewald, what's up, man? How is it going without me? Things got weird.
I'm going to tell you something I guess I had on. We're really aggressive. Yeah, I thought it was strange that you had Sean Spicer and... I think everybody deserves a second chance.
And Roland Emric on the same show. I thought they vibed. We have a bunch of questions from our listeners. I'm going to start this.
Andy, I'm going to start this. What you're saying, though, is you're explaining that you're on a nice vacation. I didn't even finish my thought. You didn't want to interview someone.
I'm sorry. I'm trying out for sporting Lisbon. What I want to say is there may be a lack of topicality in some of these, right? Yes, right.
If there's something pressing going on in the world and it's not covered in this mailbag, because we got these questions circa September 10th. But that's what Roland and Spicier for as my new coach. Roland in the Spice in the mornings! That would be the weirdest thing in the series.
Let's just get right into it. Let's get confrontational and emotional about it. At Crocken wants to know, besides Andy's chance tape, what is the worst take each of y'all have ever had on the show in Heinz. Great question.
Let me first begin with my 19th year culprit here. Chris, we've been doing the show now for five and a half years. It's a lot of takes. You could build a city with a take bricks.
We have shaped from River Clay and stacked on top of one. In that time, nothing was worse than my chance take. What was that based on? It was a couple of years ago.
I was very dismissive of alt-rap. Just in general, I wasn't trying to... I was out on something called acid-rap. He had a chance of the rapper in his name.
I thought this is too... I had on a hat. I didn't engage with it. I was out.
Then the take actually happened when what was the side project that he put out? The Donnie Trumpet Jam. I believe I say I'm not checking for Joey Trombona here. Did you actually say that I heard you say that I was a bar and everybody was scandalized.
I think I was rehearsing what I was saying for the mic. You know me. It's kind of like you're going to the comedy seller working on your hour together. I was, but it was not ready for primetime.
It was a hideous take. It was an ignorant one. But happy ending. It listens to Joey.
It's a chance. I love his music. I have to ask you this. What's my worst take?
Oh, there's so many. You're paying up the FX ROM of the Americans. Oh, yeah. That's right.
I was going to say any great quarterback, you've got to forget your mistakes. You've literally forgotten them? You feel like you've done nothing wrong all this time? I suppose for you it's valid to say that the Americans are my worst take.
I think also we... That's a bad take. But in general, I think that we have strong opinions, but we don't just throw them about willy-nilly. I think a lot of the opinions we have stood the test of time.
The biggest shift we ever had, I think, was on the leftovers, where our dare I say it, Antipathy for that show was strong enough to inspire Damon Lindelof to create an cold open for a season. Designed to upset us. Designed to upset us. No, it did.
I thought that that cold open was not that. I made me crazy. And then I kept watching. I was like, okay, this show is actually secretly great and only got better.
But we have said to a space that I've not changed my opinion. I would say that if Green World is guilty of takes without backing, I am guilty of no takes whatsoever. I think sometimes I'm a little too wishy-washy and I should just say what I feel. I'm going forward.
Maybe that's a New Year's resolution. Aren't there a couple things that you've come in like blazing 500 degrees hot for it and then forgotten about it two weeks? Yeah, also there are some times where I'll be like, I'm going to go on the show and be like Carly Rejeps and Sucks. And then I think I just like don't sell it hard enough.
I don't think we ever did it. I said it. I think I said it because some of you, I did say that. We're going to carry away.
I do. You guys know that takes the don't make on show. Chris decided he was going to just come on and like do the contraflame thrower from the NES on Pop Chantou's Carly Rejeps and you I am quite fond of. But your whole point was predicated on comparing her to.
Sky Ferrera. The bad takes generally don't make on the air, but I will apologize to chance because of chance of the rest of my days. This is a great question. It comes from Greg of the Dead, Greg Sylvester.
Can we get a check on the status of Jonathan Pangboard in the MCU and will he ever play Street Hoops again? I think that's doubtful. I think it's doubtful that he doesn't need something really bad happens to him. The end of Dr.
Strange and like the credit sequence, right? Well, Mordo played by a see-a-tell age award. Is that wild that we watch these movies? I know.
Wasn't it wild that I knew that character before? It was socially okay to do that. It shows up to take back the magic from his lower trunk, his body piece. I have a high hopes for his continued presence in these movies, not as high, obviously as Benjamin Brett's team as agents.
My concern stems from this. Every year at Comic Con, Marvel rents out the big hall and then they often show concept art for the upcoming projects. So it's like an illustration. You see Starlord and the Incredible Hulk and Wasp, but all these characters who have yet to appear on screen together, drawn together.
So I'm like, okay, I can imagine this world. Now, in none of those drawings was their room for a surprisingly spry 50-year-old. Running a high-low screen. Yeah.
Just street ball legend of the Rucker. He's not in them. The thing is, is that of many amazing things about that Dr. Strange basketball sequence.
Yo, Pangborn! Yeah. Is that they're playing basketball underneath the BQE, aren't they? Yeah, you don't do that there.
I know. It's like scrap metal yards there. You're in old McDonald's. Andy, this is a question from Corey2613.
So, if Corey thinks we're running in, who do you think is more to blame for the oversaturation of sequels and reboots? Hollywood, or audiences? Wow. Wow.
But enemy within? You never blame the victims. Well, I think that we're really getting into an interesting territory with this because as Sean Fennissi has detailed in many of his industry essays that he's been writing over the course of this year, there's a little bit of IPFT, a little bit of franchise. When you get deep into the Pirates and the Transformers series, when you get to movie number five, while the producers of said movies would say, actually did quite well globally, we're happy with the money that we make globally.
They are definitely losing the mind share of, I think, the domestic audience. And this has been a year that I think a very charitable reading of this year would be that movies like Get Out and Baby Driver were very successful and that there is still a place to make original genre filmmaking and then to have those be box-off successes. I think that there's blame to go around. I think you have to vote with your wallet but people are going to the movies so it's tough.
I mean, it's been a pretty barren stretch in the theater recently. You can read it two ways. Studios are just high-volume entities or cogs, I should say, in larger shareholder traded companies. And what business people do to run smart businesses to keep shareholder interest is to try to produce a consistent product or a consistent return.
And art is hard to manage consistently. And so they have the increasing trend towards trying to plan for things and that is why we get studios giving us release dates for tent poles that haven't been named yet. That's why the DC Comics slate stretches into 2022. I marveled at Disney.
I mean, these are benchmarks not for us as fans, although they are sold to us that way, but benchmarks for shareholders and investors, which is a perfectly valid part of the business, of those businesses, but less interesting to us, I think, as fans. You could also look at that and say that the attempt to control the return comes from the increasing data-fication of everything we talked about a couple weeks ago with Spotify and the music business changing that way. We've talked, you know, I don't, but at the Ring or another sports sites, you know, people talk about the way data is used in sports now. If we try to do that, we do this in the third act.
We're going to have people tell their friends it was good. I mean, they really do think about it that way. So that is also added to a diluting of the product. But I think the future probably lies in understanding the middle ground, which is to say that one of the best reviewed movies of the year and also one of the best in terms of return was Logan.
And Logan, you could say if you swing it's a sequel. But what it actually is is filmmakers and a star being like, we want to do something different. I wouldn't even say original because it's a Western basically. No, it's like capturing the, not only capturing a certain essence of that character that has been written and filmed and in the public consciousness for what, four years now, but sticking with it, sticking with the vision, sticking with its guns throughout the entire movie where it's not, oh, yeah, it's a kind of a cool 45 minutes, but then it gets back to like, oh, we always go back to the idea of Captain America winner soldier being compared to like parallax view in three days of the Condor when it's like, there's like two or three scenes that are kind of cool like that.
And then the rest of it is based on Captain America. Let's also try, I think it's also important to maintain some perspective when discussing the glut of IP or pre-existing franchises or pre-existing material because something like it in its success and the lessons you can take from that are very different than what you could take from the announcement that Hollywood had assigned a screenwriter to the live action movie of Robotech. That to me seems like the definition of something cynical and soulless and pointless. I don't even- I think it's the same guy, right?
Who did he? Who did he? Who's attached to that? Yeah, he's going to make it to first.
He's going to make Robotech? See, that thing that's interesting. Making that up or did you not always make that? I didn't know it was the same guy.
I was going to say that, you know, Holly, one thing Hollywood has always done is take books and turn them into movies. I'm going to have a problem with like the IP stuff. But I'm saying there are examples of it that are- you can tell they're cynical up and down and we talked about it the first time I brought up Dark Tower and I feel like they just needed to make a Dark Tower movie and it seems there were too many cooks or not over side. It didn't matter if they didn't make it in time.
And so they made something that pleased no one. Whereas if you do it well or you do it specifically, it can turn out well. So maybe Robotech's going to be great. Right.
And I actually have less of a problem with, you know, it's not less of a problem, but I find you know you can't blame audiences when Hollywood will be like, oh, you know what, like neighbors and bridesmaids did well, let's make 19 movies that are exactly like that. And I think it's neighbors too. And I wouldn't be surprised if there was another prize made eventually. I think that like the lack of imagination is not limited to movies that have a two or three at the end of their title.
It could be just like there's like a lot of copycats and there always has been there always will be. And I also think to just go all the way back to the original question, I would never blame audiences because people have people, you know, you can only choose what's on the menu. And I think anytime people go to the movies is still a good thing. Yes.
They're in the other options. You have people want to have a shared experience. They want to go see something fun or exciting or they've never seen before. And people are voting with their wallets relatively well, I think, at the moment.
You know, even if it's not something I like, like I cheer the success of it. And I'm only saying that because it's the most relevant recent example when we're recording this because apparently it's a hard movie done pretty well and people like to go see that. That's good for everybody. It is that's not the end.
That's not the death of things just because it's a pre-existing material. We're talking about choice. Here's another question from Bryce Sawin. Are we going to end up with 500 separate streaming services and bundle them with our internet just like cable TV now?
Bryce, I increasingly feel like your that is going to be the case that there's going to be a certain point where there's just going to be too many over the top services that people feel like I'm paying eight dollars a month for this and twelve dollars a month for that and a hundred dollars for my Amazon Prime and this for my HBO now and this for this. And eventually you're going to get up around the two hundred dollars that a lot of people wind up paying at least in the cities that I've lived in for premium cable packages. I would say that in terms of bundling them together, if you're talking, I don't know if there's going to be a corporate bundling of those things. But I think that you're actually seeing that with things like Apple TV.
Apple TV, when you look at all the apps that you have, is essentially a TV guide that you have to build a guide button on your cable. And you're not getting, I think that they're trying to do things with Apple TV where you can just like type in Grey's Anatomy and it'll show you how you could watch that. But whether or not all this stuff lives under one corporate umbrella, if anything, I think that if you read Ben Smith's piece in Buzzfeed this week about the kind of changing perception in Washington towards big technology companies Silicon Valley and it kind of starts to talk about these companies being viewed almost like the oil industry in terms of their dominance and the control they have over people's lives and all the issues that come wrapped up in it like privacy and security. I wonder whether or not, you know, if we're doing the watch in ten years, we'll be talking about the breakup of those companies and what that meant to the entertainment industry.
It's also because this is the time to start to chip at them because they're becoming more insidious and intertwined and you know, I think people know that AT&T is buying Time Warner, which means what they're really buying as HBO. And I believe there was some confirmation this week we're recording a couple weeks ago for you guys, but that the plan is to make HBO now available to AT&T subscribers so that I don't have to have cable. I will get it through my cell phone packets or whatever. And that's right.
I actually am an AT&T user, so there I get it. That's cool. But I am very curious what this is going to go because people want choice and Alucart is great for a lot of people, but for people like us and people who I would imagine are engaged enough in pop culture to listen to this podcast, we want more than three or four or five or six things. We want to be able to sample.
We want to be able to have the most crucial services and the full Alucart thing, I don't think it's going to fly. I don't know who's going to bundle it. I think who's skinny bundle is very interesting. I think there are other companies starting to do interesting things with that as well.
But the jockeying of the last few years to make every distinct entity a competitor with Netflix and Amazon, people are seeing now if they didn't see already financially. That's just not possible. They cannot hang. You know, Brad, you didn't ask this, but I think the other thing that will be a huge, huge change to the cable television business is if you start to see sports leagues go to streaming.
If you start to see if the NFL or the NBA or even international soccer leagues still directly to Facebook or Amazon or YouTube and people truly can't because I think that that is anecdotally like one of the last remaining reasons to have a cable subscription is to watch live sports at the, you know, in time rather than that slight delay that's on streaming. So what's what happens with that? Let's go to another one. It's so quiet, once I know which Blade Runner cut, I should watch ahead of the sequel.
You know, there's a lot of debate about this. I think that I would just like watch Blade Runner. I did want to mention this. It is September 14th.
I'm officially worried about Blade Runner 2049. So only because of this, I think it's always strange as we get this close. So when is this coming out? Like I think the 27th of October?
No, it's coming out in October, some point in October. By now, there should be some Blade Runner 2049 is incredible. With every other Denis Villanuevio movie, like there has been some advanced buzz about like what a amazing movie like by this time people wouldn't talking about arrival of being brilliant. There's something also a little funky about how much they're playing up like the wacky relationship between Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford on set.
Yeah, it just feels very remember that Tom Cruise like movie Night and Day where it was like Tom Cruise is Tom and you're always making jokes. And it was like, but nobody was talking about the movie itself. I feel like there's something a little bit off with all of this. I think that's very likely.
I have no information. I just think that there should be buzz about this movie. My only counter is you'd think there would be buzz about Star Wars Episode 8. Sure.
And there isn't. And in this case, my read on that is probably because it's good. Because the only buzz coming from Lucasfilm this summer has been about firing directors and productions in trouble. And you know, who was managing this ship and how's it doing?
And not a peep about Ryan Johnson's episode eight, which to me suggests is just sailing through it. Right. And we had thought that so strong was the lack of word by episode eight that Ryan Johnson would be a candidate to direct episode nine. Sure, sure it was.
Yeah. But Jay Jay Abrams is going to do that instead. Yeah, which that news broke right when we were between shows. It's interesting to me.
We'll see the movie. I mean, this is one where I'm like, we'll see. I think as I've said before, I think Jay Jay Abrams is a fantastic steward. You want to be in business with him.
You want him in the room giving notes. You want him pulling together the impossible because he's done that. Literally, I mean, not just as a mission possible, but he successfully rebooted and reimagined Star Trek and Star Wars. We got into it a little bit talking about Colin Tremero.
I did think about that after we talked about this when he after he left the episode nine, you know, Richard Markin and Erwin Kirschner definitely very, very competent directors. But we don't really talk a lot about what their role was in Star Wars. I don't really know if in 20 years anybody's going to be like, well, it's really important that Jay Jay came back to finish the tale that he started. I think that we're these movies will be regarded for what they are, which is these sort of mass entertainments and also the acts of a lot of people, not just the director.
There's the two questions I'm pretty interested in the answer to, but I'm unable to answer right now. One is obviously how episode eight will be received and what it will be because there is a chance that this is the first auteur film of the big budget franchise era. Ryan Johnson wrote and directed it. There is no talk about people doing rewrites on scripts.
There's no talk about other people coming in to save it. Take it away from him and editing. He seems to have just done this movie in the middle of this biggest, most billion dollar machinery possible. That's incredible.
So that will be interesting to watch, especially if it's just full stop. Good. The second thing I really have to ask and this is there's no way to answer this now because the story isn't over. JJ Abrams has never made a great film.
Does he? No, I think he's made some beloved movies. I don't know if he made a great film. Has he made beloved films or has he been involved in making a film?
I think that the mission of possibility did has a lot of fans. I think the first half of Super 8 is great. Great, especially great Spielberg homage. But what I'm saying is, and this is could be an example of a successful person knowing his lane.
He's incredibly good sense of story. He wrote scripts for very big movies that did well in very different styles regarding Henry. He wrote, me getting rewrote, many other things that we know and love. People want to be in business with him.
He makes exciting projects happen. He didn't make lost, but lost would have been impossible without him being there as part of it and directing the pilot, which Loki might be his best filmmaking honestly. Clearly, he wants to be filmmaker too and is a filmmaker. It's not like he doesn't even prove at this point.
But I do wonder if that bugs him or is he just like, I do everything. I'm an old style Hollywood guy. I'm a producer. I'm an empire builder.
I'm a writer. I give notes. I'm power people. I direct when the timing is right.
But I'm interested in empowering people in story and stewardship. Or is there that little part of him that's just like, I don't get credit for being a great standalone film that is a masterpiece or considered as such? We'll see if he does that with episode nine. Sorry, all that's connected to say is there's a chance for him to do that.
We'll see. Default face wants to know, do you guys listen to any podcasts with the same level of interest that you watch TV? I actually would say strangely enough, this could be a product working here where we have a lot of really great shows on our network. So I listen to a lot of those.
You need to bring your podcast network. But I actually have turned podcasts. My podcast listening habits are much closer to my radio listening habits when I had any. So I listen to a lot of sports podcasts that are very timely.
I don't listen to a lot of narrative sports podcasts, but I listen to pods about the NFL and the NBA and soccer. Right, Ricky Sanchez. A lot of soccer, a lot of NBA, right, Ricky Sanchez, football, ramble on the continent. They've re-run NFL.
So all of these podcasts that are about very specifically what just happened in sports that day, it's about as close to sports, stock radio as I can handle. I have had obviously my dalliances with the deeper end of the podcast feel. But do you have anything that you were like, man, I'm as into homecoming or welcome to Night Vale as I am? No.
And it's interesting. I have to say, I didn't, despite having done a podcast for five and a half years, I didn't get podcasts fully until I had my first commute in Los Angeles. I was working at home, my apartment in Brooklyn, and I didn't commute. I didn't get it.
And now I get it. And now I also get, especially after a long commute, the need to stop thinking about the music that I'm playing, just have someone talk to me. My listening habit for podcasts is generally interviews. I really listen to Marin.
I listen to Fresh Air. Sometimes I listen to You Made Weird. I like hearing people talk about stuff a lot. I did S-town and found it really interesting.
But I haven't, and I think because it's a break from all the other narrative stuff I'm doing, I just haven't engaged with it on that level. Yeah, and this has always been the way I did things. Like, I remember being in the mid-2000s before. I think the apparatus for podcasts really popularized.
I used to download Bill from ESPN RadioZone.com or whatever, and then put it on whatever my MP3 player was and have it for the Subway ride, or I download Scott Van Pelton, Ryan Risillo's podcast and take it. I think, I do want to say since we were talking about podcasts, I was going to do this anyway. I checked out Bill's friend, Jim Miller's podcast Origins. And the first season or first episode is about the origin of curbing enthusiasm.
And this was pure pleasure for me. And I think for a lot of TV fans, because it's just interviews with Larry David and Jeff Garland and Suzy Essman and JB Smoove and the people behind the scenes like Larry Charles and Bob Whitey and Chris Albrecht and Cheryl Hines, who is not behind the scenes. But it's just funny people telling pleasant stories about creating something that's beloved. Yeah.
And that is a very cool hang. It is essentially reading a great oral history but having it dictated to you when you're in the car or running around at a park lake. Speaking of her beard, he hasn't been on the street. And Chris Brummitt wants to know, are you guys worried about the new curbsies and after seeing that new trailer?
Chris, the opposite. Yeah. I am not worried. I don't even understand the concept of being worried about Larry David just doing stuff.
This is, it is not, you shouldn't think about, obviously, 17 years in and then how long a break between years, seven years. You don't think of it like a normal TV show. And even putting aside that he probably wouldn't come back unless he had something to do or something to say, this is just, it's almost like what I was saying about that podcast. You just want to hang with your pals and get up to some stuff with some Palestinian chicken.
You know what I mean? Like, it's not, not going to be funny. There's just, I'm sorry, it might not reach the heights of past episodes. But this is, think about these people and they're, remember they're improv.
It is a, it's wonderful. There's more. Yeah, I think it looks hilarious. We're going to take a quick break to hear from our sponsors, we'll be right back to finish our mail back podcast.
Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 9. Guys, girls, watch listeners, pets who happen to be in the room, children, the Emmy and Golden Globe winning comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm is returning for a 10 episode ninth season, this Sunday, October 1st at 10 PM Eastern on HBO. I'm so excited. You know this, Curb Your Enthusiasm star Seinfeld co-creator Larry David has an over-the-top version of himself in an unsparing but tongue-in-cheek and pretty good depiction of his life.
The new season brings back cast favorite Cheryl Hines as Cheryl. Jeff Garland as Jeff, by the way Jeff Garland, got an interview coming up on The Watch. Susie Essmann as Susie, JB Smove as you see where I'm going here, Leon, as well as series veterans like Richard Lewis, Bob Einstein, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, catch the return of Curb Your Enthusiasm on Sunday, October 1st at 10 PM Eastern on HBO. Today's episode of The Watch is brought to you by Adblock Plus.
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You've got mail. We're back on our mailbag podcast, me and Andy. Greenwall, which fictional television restaurant would you want to eat at? That comes courtesy of our homey, Vance Williams.
This is a great question. I wish I could take a week to think about this. I could say that any of the restaurants on my low-key favorite show, Samurai Gourmet, that I could have a beer in the afternoon, maybe it's a macbook rice. You can't choose a food restaurant.
I know, so I'm saying I could do that. Yeah. You know, one of the first things that came into my mind was, I think it was called Fills from Murphy Brown. I remember the political hangout.
What a deep get. Where they were all together and all the politicals were there and they probably either closed their eyes. That also maybe because it reminds me of Max Place from the series of books by the people of Rust Thomas, just like a place in DC. Sure.
Like a steak sandwich. Really stiff martini. Yeah, two of me. Which I can use right now.
I was thinking about that. I was also thinking about upstairs from Cheers because we never saw it. I remember that there was a restaurant there. Yes.
And sometimes people would go up there or come from there but we never saw it. I know. I mean, what a mystery meal. What could it possibly be?
Probably a mediocre steak. We think we served at Cheers. Yeah, probably Barn Girl food, right? And we had a little downstairs bar for that.
Yeah. Do you remember that there was a show about a restaurant made by the people who made St. Elsewhere called Tattingers? No.
It was like six episodes. People were like, checking for that new St. Elsewhere joint. Like for real ladies, they were like, these guys would make the best shows.
They're going to make a show about a restaurant. And I was like, good idea. First of all, imagine making a show about a restaurant in the 80s where you have to do 22 episodes. Where is the drama exactly?
What is the story driver? Like, did they get an order of bad fish? How long can you stretch that plot? No, my real answer is a double or diner for Twin Peaks.
Nice. Of course. You got to know how the pie is. It would be pretty easy to say that I would eat at Kim Dickens' restaurant on Treme, just because I'm sure it was probably pretty good.
Kim Dickens' restaurant on Fear the Walking Dead. No, I imagine she has to eat while running from zombies. Other than that, wherever the place in Mad Men was where Roger got completely shit hammered in the middle of the day and then went back and vomited during his speech, it was all oysters. It was a grand such oyster bar?
It may have been. It was definitely a real place. They always referenced the forum of the 12 Caesars. They always referenced restaurants from the era that existed.
Yeah. Yeah. Who would be the person who made you run up the stairs because they challenged your manhood? I mean, the staff would be the one.
Oh, fantasy. Yeah, definitely would. Yeah. Should a TV viewer know when a series will end?
This comes from Andrew M. Sponger. Does it ruin the show knowing how many episodes are left? That's Andrew has a fascinating question.
I guess that is a new phenomenon where you're like, well, they've got to wrap it up by now. I mean, I think that it definitely impacted our watching of phones this season. For sure. Because we were literally saying to one another, like, they've got X-member hours and they're spending on doing this or doing that.
Or, quite frankly, I wish I missed the kind of stuff that they would do when they weren't racing for the finish line. A lot. So many of the limited series now changes the way you kind of watch something like Little Eyes. What do you think?
Do you miss the days of, we'll see if we renew it? I have to say, there's got to be a middle ground. I think the creators should have a sense of their own story and whether they've made it public or not. And I think it's a general of the case.
They always say, like, oh, I knew exactly how it was going to end. But what I'm saying is I don't want that to be true. The thing that makes TV and worthwhile is the chance, the possibility, the randomness. You bring in someone to be a guest star and it clicks.
And the next thing you know, Urkel is the star of your show, Magic, Magic. Bad example. But the beauty of being able to pivot in the middle of a story and chase story and celebrate a random chemistry between two characters that maybe never would have crossed paths. If you had your original plan in place.
That's one of the things that makes TV so wonderful. The example most often used for that is that Jesse Penguin was supposed to die in season one. Or as we learned, I was reminded from our friend Jonathan Abrams' upcoming book, All the Pieces Matter, Omar was written not necessarily open-ended, but they could have written him out for a season. Michael Williams was assuming that he wasn't going to survive the first season, but boy was that magic and you had to chase it.
So I don't like shows that don't allow for that. Hermetically sealed things. They're just dumping a story in a certain, in a pre-decided amount of time. I love the fact that you can find things in the moment.
But that said, it's very helpful as we learn from Lost in From Other Shows so that the creators know how long their story is going to be roughly. If this hits, I could do this in five seasons. Or they could be like I could do in three seasons. But when things start to stretch, that's the problem.
I think that's an interesting question for shows. Obviously, for Walking Dead, the source material is still ongoing as well. So I think that they have a much longer runway and obviously just have no interest in stopping. Something like this is us, which is really high concept.
But an enormous sensation is the kind of thing that I could see having a few too many seasons. It's already guaranteed. There's no way that's going to happen. And I think that to answer the question more specifically, should the viewers know?
That does change things because when you're in a car ride and you don't know where you're going and you've never been there before, it feels like it's much longer than it does. On the way back, you're like, I know it now. It's two minutes or two hours or whatever. Part of the joy of TV is when you start something and you don't even know who the driver is.
And then all of a sudden you're like, I trust this person. Oh, here we go. This is so open-ended. And the flip side of that is when you're told, like with thrones, well, there's only eight more left and everything feels different.
Because possibilities start to shut down and you're on a track heading towards the finale. And that's a very different engagement for the show. Let's do two more. King of Naps wants to know if you got polio.
It's tough. What show that you've missed over the years would you most likely been first? I'll go first. House, because if I had polio, I would want to know what's the question was if you have Lupus, because then they answered you watching House, you don't really have Lupus.
I got to say, shout out to Selena Gomez, who had a kidney transplant from her friend over the summer to recover from Lupus. But as soon as I saw the Instagram about that, I was like, damn, Selena Gomez had a kidney transplant. I have, man. Selena Badlyer Gomez.
She's like, this is why I haven't been promoting my music because I had to get to get to the case. Poor woman. She's like, oh, that's a good song. Yeah.
Andy, do you have a show that you would go back and binge watch your recovery? I want to make Shaster on I'm Happy and say Sons of Anarchy, but I don't think I could survive the experience. I imagine if I'm recovering from something major, like maybe I'm on some opiates, like maybe I'm, you know, I'm drug a little bit. Yeah.
So I kind of feel like the vibe would be to watch shows that aren't in the canon anymore, but like informed the canon. I really go back and just mess with the complete Rockford files, not just a couple. So not something that's like from the last few years, you'd want to go all the way back. Say now, swear.
Like I watch NYPD Blue, but not like, I don't know. I just feel like maybe they're digging in the crates a little bit. There's some, some gems to be uncovered from the last few years. I go nuts.
You've already seen it. I've already seen it. I had polio and I missed out on some stuff. Would I start binging?
I think the question is what would you. Oh, personally, I haven't watched it. I haven't watched it. I haven't watched it.
I just think Americans. Wow, that would be a dark time for you. That would not lift your spheres. Seems like the Americans would be a show that has some of you has polio on it.
Yeah, I'm saying, like you would feel very much at home. You would not be transported to a magical world of mystery. You know what I'll be, if I'm being honest, like the shows that I wish that I had time for that I've heard good things about, there are a lot of shows that are on stars. Like, Outlander, people are like, that's really good.
And I'm like, we're 3D, but I don't know if I can do it. Survivors, remorse, people say, is really good. And I have not done that. I'm sorry, America.
I've not done it. Okay, last question, Andy. We'll try to get to these again in another mailbag one, but let's just wrap it up here with this last one. Kevin L wants to know, how often do you wish that Mad Men was still in the air?
Constantly. I can't believe that's really a question. I'm just thinking about that. I'm adding a wrinkle to Kevin's question.
Yeah. How often do you wish that the cultural conversation around television was closer to the one it was around and we started this podcast like, look, no regrets, man. Like a great quarterback. I only look at the place ahead of me, not the ones behind me, but it's a different time.
We're different people, I guess. But do you miss the Sunday night and then the next day, like the next three, four days, all we're talking about is what we saw on Sunday. I, one of the things that made me wanted to do this and to write about TV during that era was the engagement with the Monoculture, the idea that we could all do this together. You know, I've said this before on the show, I'll say it for the rest of my career.
Like writing about the last six episodes of Breaking Bad is about as good as it could get professionally. Because time stopped at the dead of summer and it felt like everyone in America was watching these shows and I didn't get screeners and I was just watching them with everyone and then vibing off and then talking about it. It was a rush. It was really fun professionally and artistically to engage with this stuff.
Yeah. I do miss that. And it's been interesting to watch even our show, our podcast evolve because we used to have seasons where there would be one show in that season that we would. You were just talking about every episode.
Every episode. Every Monday we would be talking about it. Yeah. Now because there's so many shows because we don't watch the same shows because we don't think our audience watches all the same shows.
We just, they're very few shows. We've got a lot of time on rap caviar. I'm just constantly just checking for the latest bangers. Yeah, Game of Thrones is the last show that we really give that attention to.
So I miss that. But on a specific to this question answer, I really miss Mad Men more than I thought. The show was, for two reasons, one, the level of production and the writing, the writing especially, was not like anything else before because it was beautiful and layered and poetic and haunting and really affecting on an emotional level constantly. Do you remember the way the show unfolded where much like, in a weird way, I'm going to say this, like Game of Thrones, we didn't know what the season was going to be quote unquote about.
You would tune in one week and you would get an experimental French film from the 60s and then the next week it would be an office comedy. Yeah. It was profoundly different episode to episode because of the show respected the episodes. But that sense of sitting down, what is this going to be?
What's going to happen to these people was really bracing and enriching just purely from a creative level. The other aspect of it that I miss was the old fashioned nature of that show. Not there was in the 50s, but that I sort of alluded to it. At its bones, it's kind of a workplace comedy.
It was a TV show. It was a TV show. What are our friends up to this year? It was a TV show in the sense that there was a lot of like Don walks into interior says something to Roger Exit's interior.
Roger looks out the window. Like it was, it felt much more close. It's in retrospect, it almost feels closer to something like LA Law. Yes.
That it does. I don't know. Black Mirror. I love that.
It's not just Don walks in and talks to Roger. It's that Don and Roger have been talking for six years. And we know all their conversations. We know the history of it.
We know the spot on the carpet in the office where he shook up the oysters. And it was Roger fucking sterling. I missed that character. I missed that performance.
I missed the lull. There was a ham interview in the Times that's online now. It will have him online for a while. Once you hear this and it was like he's talking about how he's still friends with the people from the show and he's like, you know, Lizzie and Slatty.
Lizzie and Slatty. Yeah. I definitely missed that show a lot. And though we will continue to get great television shows and we're going to get more Matt Weiner on TV soon.
The Roman offs. The description of that show, which is a little bit mysterious, but it does sound more like an anthology like Black Mirror where he's writing short stories. Interconnected. Interconnected.
Short stories. I want a TV show, man. I think that's not why I think we were really, really responding to the deuce. We talked about this when we were introducing Palacano's interview where it's just like this kind of feels like the pros.
They got it. They got this. They're telling us a cool story with like 15 characters. Well drawn characters that we're interested in and taking back to that world.
And it will be interesting to see at a time when drama is generally in flux and people are paying attention to the ongoing drama, people are paying attention to limited series and anthology series and the creative flexibility of the half hour is the move for the drama to go take a step back. Give people something. I mean, this is us. It's probably example one A of that, although that's not that's that's a network doing what broadcast networks should do.
Yes. The question is, is there space in this crowd landscape for AMC to be like, I got this great script and it's just about some people. And there's a hook. It's a period or whatever.
Right. Who is this guy? But it's not a comic book adaptation about a chain smoking preacher hunting for God. By the way, all respect.
That's awesome. But can you find the script and then can you make people watch the other thing? Yeah. Because you know what?
The end of the day, Chris? I'm gonna put a button on it. I love to watch our stories. Guys, thanks so much for writing in.
We will do we try to do another episode of this where we can get some of the other questions that we didn't get to today and we'll solicit some other ones. Andy, I'll be back for show on Thursday with some people who aren't Chris because it's a long vacation, but then Chris will be back. Oh, we got a great Q's, Bransies. Today's episode of the watch was brought to you by Kirby Enthusiasm season nine.
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