And he supports that food room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to the watch. My name is Chris Ryan.
I'm editor at theringer.com and joining me in the studio, he just got back from the annual meeting of the Losers Club. It's in and gray walls. It's actually a quarterly now. Oh, is it?
Do you guys have dues there? Is that? We pay a due to the offense. By being a loser, we pay our dues daily.
That is a dope reference to it. The blockbuster horror film. We got some shocked by this. Are you shocked?
Well, we can get into that Andy. It's Monday. We just want to say actually at the top of the show, obviously we talk a lot about fun stuff. We're talking about PTV, the peaks and valleys of TV and pop culture here.
But our thoughts are definitely with those affected by Hurricane Irma this weekend. It was terrible. Watched a lot of coverage this weekend. And hoping everybody stays safe down there.
And the recovery is swift. Keep Houston in your thoughts and prayers. Keep Florida in your thoughts and prayers. Absolutely.
Moving into the pop culture stuff. The biggest story coming out of this weekend was definitely the fact that this horror movie about clown who made almost $80 million. Is it ready for some takes and what guy didn't see the movie? Biggest?
I know. I'm in for me. I love having a discussion with you when you're like, I haven't seen it. But we can do it anyway.
Because I want to get your takes on this couple of things here. I've got thoughts. It made $80 million almost this weekend domestically. And it is like a hard R-hard movie.
Like it is a kid gets his arm bitten off in the first 10 minutes. It's for real. And I think that this is such a fascinating development process that we can break this down in a lot of different ways. It's always interesting to me typically what happens when a movie like it had such a tumultuous kind of development process.
When you get it to the theater, it tends to generally perform according to how rough or smooth it took to get it there. And often does. This has been obviously a huge success despite the fact that Carrie Fukunago had been attached to the project for many years. Rotoscript has a screenplay credit.
Andy Machete came in and replaced him after Fukunago walked away from the project. It had been like not unlike Dark Tower also been debated about like are we going to do this? That's like a movie and then a series or a series and then a movie. Is there going to be, well how many components to this is there going to be?
At the end of the day, they decided to make, they broke it up whereas at the book, I think, is covers obviously quite a long period of time. That was a page book. Yeah, that's a classic Stephen King 80s. Ellis from Die Hard type writing experience.
For real. This one is just the kids. They updated the story so that it set in 1988. So when they jump ahead 27 years later in the sequel, which is all within the book, it will be more contemporary.
Oh, it's just the first part? It's just the first part. Wow. Just the kids.
It's the it expanded universe. Yeah, but you know what? The it IP if you will. Yeah, but I would say for as much as it's just about the kids, this is a movie for adults.
Oh. Because it's pretty violent. And I think, you know, when I was going into it, there had been some people who had been saying like, oh, this harkens back to like early 80s, pop horror, Spielberg, Topooper, like Poltergeist, a little bit of Jaws in there, like that kind of. Frightening, or is that too funny?
Frightening, it's a little bit too comical. There's some funny bits in this movie. Frightening to that as deep as I went. Yeah, I will say this.
Here's my review. I'm ready. It was too scary. And I don't mean that because I was scared.
I just mean that the success of horror movies for me are a lot of it has to do with what's happening in between the jump thrills, you know, and between the scares. And that's what people say about pornography. Just like classic things. There's a story of the articles.
Is that pizza going to get delivered? I want to know. It's getting cold. So this movie starts out and doesn't stop with just like scene after scene after scene.
Oh, don't go down there. Oh, my God, don't go down there. Oh, my God, that clowns in the sewer, which is another kind of pornography. I don't know.
I can send you a link later. Dark web. So dark. I think that horror is successful because of what happens in between the scares.
And it actually suffocates itself with too many scares. There's actually not that much suffocation in it, for what it's worth. But there's just a lot of scene after scene after scene of some terrible thing happening. And not even always with the clown.
Like there's these town bullies. They're harassing these kids and stuff like that. But at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, just like this movie is really good. I always remember, I personally don't think it's as great as it's box office number would suggest it might be.
It's a very well made movie that does manage to sustain interest over the course of two hours and 15 minutes. I think so I'm kind of coming out mixed on it. I personally as a horror fan was a little bit mixed on it. I think as a movie fan, I understand its success.
Yeah, I think the best takeaway from successes like this are often the second takeaway you mentioned. It's not. This is a triumph of cinema and we should ape every artistic choice made in it. But rather, this was well done.
And let's try and make things that are well done in the future. And that's the lesson that never gets learned. Yeah, I think it's notable that they did not try to PG-13 this and it just have like the kids curse all the time. The blood is like very, it's a very graphic film.
And you know, it was just kind of like, I just remember when you were a kid, because the funny thing about these kids all being like 11 or 12 or whatever in 88 is like that's what we were. Yeah. Did you ride bikes a lot? Did you like ride bikes with kids around the neighborhood a lot?
I rode bikes a lot. Maybe with like one or two kids. I didn't really have a gang. But I definitely did ride bikes around the neighborhood.
That was a thing to do. Were there parts of town that you weren't allowed to go to on your bike? I was sort of kid who wouldn't have pushed and tried to find out. Oh really?
No, but like there were a secret plate. I think it was that is a very potent idea, at least still for our generation. The idea, I remember there were like places you could only get to bike. It was like an alleyway behind the drugstore in the pizza place that you could go in the back door and get a slicer of an elk oke or whatever.
That was the top luxury. Yeah, they have an elk oke. They had a soda fountain in the pharmacy. I grew up in the pharmacy, by the way.
Fun story, I'm a mortal. There was a pharmacy and they still had a soda fountain and they would make a soda fountain. Did you ever like 20 minutes for me? Yeah, dude, this was a pharmacy.
It was on, how for avenue? And they had a soda fountain there. Wow, small. Damn, the point tasted real good.
Anyway, these are the sort of things you could, you know, freedom was not unlimited, but the sort of things you could do. And so, you know, I remember when you got wheels, such as you did, it was a very powerful thing. And that's, you know, that is part of the appeal of Stranger Things, of it, of, I would imagine, having not seen it. Well, they do a good job of showing haunted spaces.
Yeah. Like, I remember when I was a kid, we used to play stick ball, like off Lombard Street somewhere. You grew up in 52. No, we would play like, it wasn't stick ball, like with a stick.
It was basically like, we used the yellow wiffle ball, but we would stuff it with newspaper to make it, like, have here and have more impact. That's like prison rules. And then we played with either, you know, those pink rubber balls or a tennis ball. And, you know, everyone saw why we hit the ball into this underground parking lot that was there.
And the rumor was that there was guarded by a lot of rock, I don't think I've ever saw it, but there was just like a lot of, like, you know, you'd run down into this dark place. And like, if you didn't go, you were ridiculed, honestly. But I think that that's speaking to something Stephen King always understood, which is the richest parts of your imagination are formed in childhood. And that is a, you know, tell me if I'm wrong.
A lot of this is coming from my opinion about horror films, I do not engage with. Yeah. But if you look at movies like Friday 13th and Scream, there are all these essays written about or people making the connections that, you know, the fear of teenage sexuality and it's about becoming a grown up in a scary world, that's, those are very interesting themes and clearly have produced a lot of movies that people have liked. Right.
But I don't know if that is as innate to all of us as Don't Ride Your Bike Down There. I think that there are, Cameron about this, when he wrote his review on the Ringer last week and he was talking more about the book, but about, you know, how it reflected the time in which it was written, even though this book was set in the 50s, it had a lot of stuff in there about 80s era, Reagan era, like AIDS fear and a lot of stuff. And I think that horror movies have a tendency, I don't always buy like, that Nightmare on Elm Street is about teenage, the sort of terror of teenage sexuality as much as, or Friday 13th is. As much as it has, you take it out of the vacuum and it's like, that was a movie that was made in a particular time in history and why was that movie exciting for people, you know.
And I always, and I think the farther away you get from some of these horror movies, the more interesting it is to watch something like Friday 13th because you think about like, this was a pre-information age time of like, where fear could grow out of lack of information. Urban legends. Yeah, exactly. You could tell the people like, there was an, I remember there was this whole thing about like, um, Nivetany Park.
Sure. There was like the teeny gang. Yeah. Did you ever hear about that?
Yeah, my mom worked on your there. Right. Don't go on T-Park. Don't go on T-Park.
T-Park was nice. It was a really nice bar. It was been cool actually. But that's stuff just like invented it to give you away.
And I actually never got jumped there really were like three blocks from my house. Really? Yeah, we jumped? Yeah, you jumped like give me your baseball cleats.
Maybe they didn't like all your stuff. You're bad. Um, let me say a couple things here. I wanted to say a few words in favor of the miniseries I've, the only Pennywise we recognized.
Did you see that? This is Tim Curry. I did. I watched that on ABC television in 1990.
I do. I would put some more checks on what you couldn't watch in the early 80s and early 90s I had unfettered access to the American Broadcasting Company in 1990s Did you watch my advice? Twin Peaks, Miami Vice I saw a couple times when I was like, I was asleep over and like you kept the TV on late? Yeah, that was passed my bedtime when I was on the late 80s.
That was like a 10 p.m. show. But it, I mean, think about the cast, when we talk about prestige TV, PTV, it miniseries had Harry Anderson still trailing flames like an NBA Jam player from Night Court. Okay.
It had young s- That's actually just his magic tricks that he would do. And he was left green. Yeah, it had John Ritter. We're doing that's really weeps at one point.
Yeah. And he's like, I'm not actually repping for that. I'm not actually repping for that. I think what's fascinating to me about this before we move on twofold.
You mentioned it in terms of a not tortured but a long development process. The reason why that's a red flag to me or could be or should be a red flag is the reason why the dark tower was made. The reason why it was made is because we are still in the dregs of the great IP scramble of the 20 teens, meaning the movies became one thing when Marvel exploded, which was we need to be blockbuster. We need to be franchise.
We need to have these linked universes. We need to take advantage of pre-existing intellectual property. And so the king verse has despite sitting there forever was ripe for the picking. So all of those projects immediately were plunged back into development.
You got the sense of the dark tower, which completely flamed out this year, much like Harry Anderson in the after-night court, that they were going to make that movie regardless. It really didn't matter what the movie was. They were so dead set on making a movie with a name The Dark Tower that this weird thing that was released still born in the theaters is almost irrelevant. What's interesting to me about it was that whoever stayed on top of this, whether it was the producers or whether it was Fukunaga's chemtrails that he left behind the project, whatever, the new guy Andy Muscetti, they stayed true to it.
They had a vision for this movie good or bad, and apparently it was good. Okay, so that said, the second thing that's amazing to me is how wildly successful it was and how suddenly it seemed to be inevitable that it would be successful, going from being trouble to. Now, there are a couple things that we know. When horror movies have good word of mouth, they tend to do well.
There are two reasons to go to the, like, at the end of the day, there are two real reasons to go to the movie theater. Spectacles like Dunkirk or Scary movies like this. You can see anything there. It's great to see the big sick and a big screaming to people.
But there's something about being in a theater full of people as that tension mounts in a horror thing that is pretty addictive. You can feel it. This level of success, I think it's the highest grossing R-rated film opening weekend since Deadpool. And it would have been, I think it's now the number two or something.
Yeah. That's really surprising to me. And I wonder, and maybe we can talk to Sean Fennissi about this because he's tracking this. He's the major do-mo of box office mojo these days.
But like, there was some talk this year that Rotten Tomatoes suddenly had an undue effect on the box office. And so is the reverse true now? Is that the buzz was so positive and people are so just really want things that are good, just baseline good that that carries is over the finish line? It's like the Rotten Tomatoes thing I think is convenient because it's, they've given it a statistic.
They've given it a number that you can just be like, this is, I have an idea in my head about where I want this to be and if it's below or above it, I'll see it or not see it. But my guy used to be a movie critic and like his reviews on Fridays were like, he would get phone calls from just regular readers. You know, like I disagreed or I went to this movie because he told me to and it was bad or I didn't see this movie because you said it was, I did see this movie but you said it was bad but you were wrong. Like this is just a new way of telling people whether or not they should do something and they're going to get upset or not about it.
Now studios are upset because they think, well, there are a lot of people here who may not have read through a 500 word review or just taking our word for it that they should go see Hudson Hawk or something 30 years ago. I don't know. My dad was pretty bad about like genre movies though. Four stars will remain the day though.
I remember that well. All day after a few. Great film. Virgin Ivory.
How my house got built. Before you pay that, I wanted to put a bow on the IT IP. Stephen King, so hot right now. Yeah.
Castle Rock coming on Hulu. It's like this Stephen King verse show. Anthology show starring. I would say friend of the party came on once.
Nice guy. Terrific, one of the best actors working, Andre Holland. Very excited about that. Yeah.
I just was curious. Is there any piece of ephemera in the King IP universe that you are still hungering to see adapted? Yeah, you know, that's a really great question. I know we were talking about that the other day and I was like, oh, I can't believe they have ever made like Tommy knockers.
And there's a lot of good short stories that he's done. And Sean actually was telling me like, you know, when you think about it, like a lot of short stories of the basses for the best, the best movies that have been made. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Do you have one? Did you read the one? No, by the way, we didn't, we've never, I haven't watched Mr.
Mercedes. Have you? I've not watched Mr. Mercedes.
I don't have direct TV. I do, but I still haven't watched it. I like Brendan Gleason. It's just, to me, that's just a weird thing that there is a Stephen King show starring Brendan Gleason that just exists.
I'm excited for Castle Rock to be honest. Castle Rock, I'm excited about. I guess the thing that's interesting to me about it is one of the reasons the short stories have succeeded is because they are very compact and limited and then give a lot of opportunity for adaptation and for the creative voice that Filmmaker to come in and steer it through. For a long time, I think what hampered Stephen King's stuff from being adapted was that it had the perfect medium already.
He is a very specific storyteller. He's a very verbose storyteller. His books are very, very long. Yeah.
And he has a very specific voice. And when we were in a world where TV shows were networked TV shows and movies were two hours long, they didn't really fit into those boxes very well. So the thing that you were talking about is how the dark tower can be broken up into different games. It's going to be a movie franchise as daunting as that can be.
That does suggest ways to adapt things more creatively. I still love the sand. I love the book. I love the experience of reading the book.
The only thing I will say though why I am pessimistic about its chances to be adapted is the stand in many ways is the DNA of every major dystopian storytelling that we, I mean there's threads of it in The Walking Dead. Certainly a huge influence on the passage, the Justin Cronin book series that we were big fans of that's being adapted to a mini series on Fox. Is it going to be a mini series or just straight series? Mini series.
But I think multi-year-min series. Talking about something that's gone through multi-year-min series. And not just that, it was greenlit. They filmed it and they were re-doing it.
It's been problematic. It's been problematic. It's almost as if the moment is, the moment when it is most suited for some of his most beloved work, it's been just sublimated into the culture to agree that we might not need it. Let's take a quick break to hear from our sponsors and we'll be right back to talk a little bit about Top of the Lake the Duce and also some shifts going on.
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Andy, Sunday ITV is back. You know, you wanted to address and secure. We'll get to that down the line. That wrapped up in second season this week.
And then two new shows came out. One is the Duce, which we talked about kind of extensively. We had George Pelicontos on a couple of weeks ago. He's one of the co-creators of the show with David Simon.
And that was this pilot episode that aired on Sunday and had been available in HBO for a while. And then top the lake, China Girl is on Sunday. Another show. I like hashtag tootl.
How's that? Tootl too. Yeah. But I want to talk about this under the umbrella of an article that came out, I think on Friday in Variety, which is about a philosophical shift at Amazon.
And Amazon is... We won't talk as much about Amazon shows as we do about Netflix shows. I don't think... And maybe Jeff Bezos has noticed that.
I don't think that we were the barometer for this. He was a big fan of the watch. But I would say that Amazon had transparent and has catastrophe. And both are very lovely shows.
And I castle in Bosch. I think those are the two big ones. Goliath couple of them. They do their odd...
Like, here's all the pilots. You guys let us know what you want us to make. But in reality, probably they're like, we know what we're making. Friday, on the 8th, a piece went up on Variety about a new mandate coming from Seattle from Jeff Bezos.
That's basically like, finding Game of Thrones. That they want to have a conversation starting high-end drama that makes a global impact. And sort of along those lines, they have gotten rid of some shows. They got rid of Z the beginning of everything, which was the Christina Regis, Zelda Fitzgerald show that they finished its first season.
And that had been after the head of Amazon TV, Roy Price had said, yeah, we're going forward second season. And then it was like, wait, no. This happened with Good Girls Revolt too, a few months ago. It did.
And I think they did this with the last Tycoon in Amazon show. Yeah. So Fitzgerald, the Fitzgerald versus dead. Yeah.
And then it was dead. If you want to know why this happened, let's just run the tape back and realize that they had just aired two F Scott Fitzgerald dramas. What were they doing? I don't know.
What were they thinking? Now, there are a couple ways into the story. This is 100%. This is true.
Yeah. This is not just Friday reported. This is something I find out from meetings over there that this was a subtle shift. And then it suddenly became a very forceful shift.
So would you describe that shift? I think there's like a way to look at the story and just be like, this is a nothing burger because like the idea of it, big shows that can make the biggest difference around the world is like, sure. Yes. But everybody would like those.
But here's the difference. Amazon has unlimited money. Yes. And if you think about it, it's actually incredibly strange that one of the biggest companies in the world entered into a space as competitive as original television and did it with the highbrow reserve of merchandise to call them back.
They entered into television like an art house programmer. Now, there's obviously very good things that can come from that. They made some very, very smart international co-branding deals, catastrophe, fleabag among them. They greenlit transparent, which had been in contention at HBO, which immediately put them on a sort of cultural map, if not a national consciousness.
It won them awards. It got nominated. It got people interested in working with them. It was in terms of...
It could be under a plate. That's why you get to the point now where Matt Weiner is coming to them. Matt, they got Matt Weiner. They have this David O'Russell show with Robert De Niro and Julian Morgan.
They got Woody Allen to make a TV show regardless of what you think of it. I mean, they were... Their film division, which is not exactly what we're talking about, hired Ted Hope, who's run Good Machine and they put out Manchester by the Sea. There's an imprimatur of quality on the stuff that they're doing that is worthwhile and valuable to the world.
And I think that's a great thing about it. It's overall incredibly strange that not just were they investing in smaller ceiling into pieces, which is a generous way of saying things that are never going to be nationally... internationally... Blockbuster.
It's that they continue to do it in a way that seemed like a strategy, which leads them to greenlighting not one but two F-scuffets, Gerald B. Chishik's. The ceilings of either are relatively low. So it makes sense that they want to play with...
Yeah, and I think it's worth saying in the context of what's happening in the larger industry that I don't have any inside of information about this, but I would imagine that if I were today Amazon and my job is to make decisions about stuff like this, I would hear the footsteps of Facebook and Apple coming. Because for a while Amazon and Netflix seem to have a checkbook, an unrivaled checkbook, and when Facebook announces that they're going to spend a billion dollars on original content, and Apple has been making more and more noises about how they're getting into the content game. And think about the way Apple is getting into it. It's by hiring the heads of Sony TV.
The heads of one of the largest independent studios who know how to make hit shows, who made everything from Breaking Bad to Community, they are now in charge of TV for Apple. That is not just hanging a shingle-sang open for business, that's throwing open the doors in a very major way. Right. And we're actually, and I'm sure that the folks over now, a lot of what's interesting about this variety thing is a lot of it is about the data that they've been pulling.
The Amazon has been, and they've run this multi-year experiment of putting out these shows. And they kind of let, I think the creative executives do their thing for a few years, and now they're like, look, we're a data-driven company. We have access to incredible amount of droves of numbers about what people are watching, when they're watching, what they want to be watching more of. And we're going to make a change creatively on what we're doing.
Now, what I think is interesting about this is how digital companies like Amazon and Netflix maybe have a leg up on some places that are like, let's just do this. So they're a little bit more intuitive. I'm sure that there's a lot of data that goes into the decision that somebody like ATC makes. Yeah.
But it is fascinating to me that when you work for a company that may not be like a studio exec at the head, it's a guy who's like, I sell vacuum cleaners and books and groceries and television. But let's think about two things. There's a, things, things, you can often describe behavior in companies to physical location. Amazon is in Seattle.
Their TV business is in San Monica. That's a divide, and it's a cultural divide as well. And you know there has to be some friction between each city, the data-driven city being like we know how to run this business, and the people they hired from the larger TV film world being we know this business. Yeah.
A couple of years of figuring that out has led to where we are now. And I think it's worth noting, to your point, the one advantage that Amazon, not one, they have many advantages. But one particular advantage that might be overlooked in this is actually ties into our Stephen King conversation, which is we live in a IP obsessed universe. Everybody wants the next adaptation.
Game of Thrones itself is adapted from books. Amazon can have a vertical chain basically. They can sell you the book and then they can sell you the TV show. Here's another thing they can do.
They probably don't admit this in a public way, but everybody knows it's possible that they can put their thumb on the scale and make a book a bestseller. Sure. They can just put it in front of you more eyeballs. Yeah.
They can sink it and it doesn't even have to be nefarious. They can have the data to say, well, if you bought Charmin, you might also like the work of George RR Martin and we're going to put it in the corner of your eye and maybe you'll buy it. They can link things on a casual way and an advertising way, honestly, a native advertising way that a lot of these other services can't. So to not harness that is kind of foolish.
Look, I feel like we can use our own experience in this. We do this podcast twice a week. And I think that for a large part of maybe the last 10 to 12 months, we've definitely felt that there isn't a coalescing around a show, any other shows besides Thrones. People really like other shows, but there hasn't been that feeling.
Like, see what you will creatively about Game of Thrones this season. And I think it was not as successful as Passies and Screatively, but still had a lot to love. It definitely felt like I so clear out, get out of the paint for this show for seven weeks. And you could see across the internet, this sort of just this surge of content about the show.
And I think that if you're someone who pays a lot of money for original content, you're like, I want the return. That's the return I want on my investment. I don't always. I don't always want the golden globes and the Emmys are great.
But what I want is for kids to be walking around in the streets wearing winter as coming t-shirts over the shirt. And I want to sell them that shirt. And that is ultimately the kind of game. And this is how Hollywood arrives at.
We're going to keep making Transformers movies because these are the things that matter on a global level, even if nobody likes them. They let that one get away from them. But this is how you start making like, what is the most popular thing and can we make a lot of stuff about it? Amazon and Netflix are publicly traded companies.
And one thing to remember about publicly traded companies is that growth is what matters most to investors. In many ways, they have a similar business model, which is let's not, they don't worry. And this is how Amazon has been the darling of Wall Street for decades. It's unclear whether it's ever even turn to profit.
It's because it's constantly growing. It's constantly growing. It's business in 100 new fields at any given moment. And that is attractive to people.
Netflix operates under similar mandate. And the biggest growth often, this is the case in Hollywood in general, but certainly for these companies, it's global. So the shows they are making need to be global. Amazon is making two seasons.
They've committed to making two seasons of the Marvelous and Mrs. Maisel from Amy Sherman, Paladino. That's one of my favorite pilots of the last few years. I loved it.
I raved about it on this podcast. I can't wait to watch the show. I don't know the traction that that that's going to get in Asia. I am OK and enthused by the idea of embedding on the monocultures you're saying, making each other everybody loves.
There were a lot of jokes when this news broke on Friday from TV critic Twitter being like, make the next game of thrones. Oh, is that all? Sure. Everyone has that mandate.
But Amazon has the wherewithal and certainly the money to try. And I think they have the smarts to not just make that actually what they're doing. They're not just going to throw money at people with swords. They hired a very smart executive from Bad Robot to lead up a division in charge of this.
And I won't name names, but I will say that in meetings I've had with studios and networks, but the following quote was only given to me in one place. Money's not really an issue over here. I'll let you figure out which company that was. The stuff that has been bandied about as some of the new Amazon shows and ones that sort of follow this new mandate.
The one I would mention is Tongwars, which is a show coming from Paul Adnasio who wrote one of our favorite shows of all time, Homicide. He was one of the original writers on that show. And it's not a lot of fair to mailing television since then, but also wrote The Good German, which was not particularly well received. He is doing Tongwars with Wong Kar-Wai.
So holy shit. There's some Seth Rogan stuff in here. It's like they're going to look around. They're going to look around.
They're going to try and find something that's big. The reason why I use all of this as a way to talk about these two shows, both of which were quite fond of, and I think we can talk a little bit more about Top of the Lake, is that I do kind of wonder whether they are the last of their kind. Not to be defeatist about it. People will make a time and a place shows.
I'm sure for years come, and they will never get tired of dead girl shows. But there is something really invigorating to watch Jane Campion and David Simon and George Pelicanos present their specific visions of these stories and be allowed to take their time. And Jane Campion wants to make a really eccentric show that talks about surrogacy and feminism. It's a show about motherhood.
Yeah, and all this stuff in Australia. And David Simon, there is no porn in the first episode of the show is about. That's the long one. Yeah, right.
And there is no crime, so to speak, of the, we have to solve this crime in the deuce. And these are kind of shows that are going at their own pace and their own direction with their own, whether or not thinking about like, are you going to get a deuce t-shirt? Are you going to get a chinogrel t-shirt? And that's fine.
They're not every show has to do that. But when you see these companies that were like, we're all about like getting these creatives to trust us and work with us. And then you hear something like, well, maybe we want to get some dragons up and all to this thing. You wonder whether or not shows like this will have as much of a leash going forward.
People are making more TV than ever before and that hasn't changed. But it is worth tracking who's making it and what they're making. Is the latter getting pulled up to a certain degree? People like Matt Winery mentioned is making an anthology show called The Roman Offs where the what I've heard the only thread between the various short stories, if you will, that are going to be told or that one character believes that they are heirs to the lost empire of Russia.
That's not born. You know what I mean? I mean, I'm not going to be selling line on a poster. David Simon and Pelicanos have a synchure HBO where they can do their thing.
And it's a beautiful thing. And we've talked about it and we will continue to talk about it through the season. In many ways, it uses their most commercial project to date. It is the most quote unquote fun, even though there's a lot of difficult matter in.
That's a good point. That said, though, they have earned the right to make the show. Vince Gilligan can make any show he wants to make. Jane Campion being an award winning filmmaker can pull together the international financing to make this in the same way that a young pope can exist due to these arcana.
And Jane Campion, the thrust of these shows is essentially what happened to this person. It's a Jane Campion crime show. The question is the next generation of filmmakers. I mean, you mentioned people who just missed it.
Paul Etzanozio, who has a remarkable CV, is making a genre piece for Amazon that's in their blockbuster department. That was with Wong Kar-Wy. This is not a hardship in any way. But are we starting to see in TV a similar case where unless you are...
David Chazelle, who just got a Netflix musical series. Unless you are a certain level of filmmaker who already proved your bones or had this incredible fluke success or whatever, do you have to marry your talent to someone else's IP or to someone else's other network's vision in order to monetize your creativity? Has that era passed where anything can get greenlit from anyone and take wild chances? I think those are two separate questions.
Now they have said them out loud. No, I didn't. Almost anything can get greenlit anywhere. Yeah.
Clearly. Yeah. But in terms of people being able to tell a story at their own pace in their own inimitable style, I mean, that was the thing that we said to Pelcanas and I hope people go back and listen to our interview with him from the other week, that the thrill for us, I think, watching the pilot of the deuce that most people got the chance to see last night or you can watch on demand was that it didn't begin with a series defining question. Who killed her?
How is this guy going to get out of this predicament? Right. Or a flash forward and a flashback. It was just...
We all know that. Paul knows that. He's a very strange time of night. But the thing about the deuce that was so exhilarating was here is a completely realized world.
Here's some people who live in it. Okay, let's shake it up and see what happens when they all start bumping into each other. And for me, that is still a really exciting way into TV. And what's shocking to be saying this about a David Simon and George Pelcanas show is that that feels old fashioned.
It feels like, in a way, a setup that we would have been saying 20 years ago about NYPD Blue. If you're some characters who work in this police department, what's going to happen to them? Yeah. Well, and if there had been...
If the deuce was made in the 90s, if they ever would have been able to make something like this, they would have done it. And I think that the stars of the show would probably be cops. There would be two cops who work vice and Times Square, and there's maybe a murder that they have to solve while all this stuff is happening on the margins. One of the best things about the show is that they've chosen so smartly the star of the show is location is Times Square.
Jason wrote a really good piece about that last night. Yeah, about Times Square and New York. Here are the people who were drawn here who otherwise would never come across each other. People of all walks of life, all classes, all races, all backgrounds who are united in the pursuit of something, something bigger themselves, whether it's money or fame or survival.
And there they are in this powder keg. And in a typical Simon fashion, no good guys, no bad guys. In typical Pelcanas fashion, there's a little tiny bit of flesh. There's a little bit of genre.
There's a little bit of genre. And swag to it. And swag to it. And which is a good time to remind people, we're telling you to read this book.
Read the sweet forever. I read the sweet forever. Side note about this. I'm reading our old Grandlin, Peljohnathan, Abrams, oral history, the wire, all the pieces matter coming out the beginning of the next year.
I read it. It's terrific. So many good stories. We will.
So many good stories about the making of the wire. One side note, the reason Pelcanas went to work on the wire, I believe in season two, is because David Simon's wife, the crime novelist Laura Lippman forced him to read Pelcanas book, and they crossed it a funeral and got along. But they, the one that he read, the one that my parents met at a funeral. No.
For real. For sure. It's not weird. Really.
My parents met at a blind date. That's better. Better story. My parents met when my mom ordered pizza, actually.
The book that David Simon read that sold him on Pelcanas writing for the wire was the sweet forever. The book that you guys should be reading for the double-dumb. So we're basically responsible for the wire. That's kind of what I was getting to.
My big thing for both of these shows. I know you want to talk about the China Girl in the first two episodes came out last night, the next two are tonight, Monday, and then the final two are on Tuesday. I completely, when I spoke to Lizzie Moss last week about it, I completely was wrong about how it was being released. Released.
I got to stay wrong. I don't understand they were doing it like a miniseries like this. Yeah. Get on board with the show.
Yeah. You know, I love Top of the Lake. One and two. They are completely perplexing, challenging, confounding shows that don't operate under the rules that you're expecting if you think this is going to be a crime show or an international crime show.
Yeah. For both this and the deuce, but for China Girl, I mean for both of these top of the Lake's series is I watch the first two over the weekend. It's just like it's such a good detective show. Right.
It's such a good detective show. And these are just my favorite kinds of shows. I'm unabashedly excited for true detective season three in the Ozarks, even though there's already a show in the Ozarks. There's something about the genre that allows for so many different tellings and so many different shades to go into.
And let's remember, if there's been criticism I've seen of Top of the Lake China Girl, I've not finished it. And I've heard that it gets even more confounding as it goes on. The main criticisms I've read are the, you know, how unlikely that there would be this overlap between the professional and personal life of Robin Griffin, Elizabeth Moss's character, how it's not a proper investigation because they didn't, you know, take these boxes or whatever. It's like you're doing crime fiction wrong.
Yeah. If you're watching it for that, watch a documentary or go do it right along with your your book. The killing is because it actually was like both were wrong. Yeah.
Of course the investigation I can't even remember. But they didn't do enough work to make the actual investigation, the actual story around the investigation interesting. You want to spend time in the world with these remarkable characters and there's a small thing in Top of the Lake China Girl where this other Robin Griffin, Elizabeth Moss's character is partner with Lizzie Moss. Sorry, Lizzie Moss.
I just wanted anyone confused you so I don't know if you can call her that. With Gwendolyn Christie from Game of Thrones, by the way, Lizzie calls her Gwen. I don't. Lizzie ever had that formal introduction.
Yeah. Or informal introduction. It's hilarious. And it's so surprising the way it keeps happening and it doesn't feel particularly like weighted or evil.
Yeah, Gwen can hang. That you can follow the story. And that's the best kind of TV, man. That's why that's why we're in this game.
That's why. Don't forget about us. We're friends. Look just got to be us.
We've been leaving you. We'll be back on Thursday. Just for our listeners. You guys know, you may or may not know, we're doing a mailbag episode shortly.
And overdue mailbag episode. So send any questions to the WatchPod on Twitter. Just send us up. Let us know what you're talking about.
Yeah. So until then, this was great. Have an amazing week brother. Great job, brands.
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