You may find it hard to believe, but 60 songs that explain the 90s. America's favorite poorly named music podcast is back. With 30 more songs and 120 songs total, I'm your host Rob Harbilla. Here to bring you more true musical analysis, poignant nostalgic reveries, crude personal anecdotes, and rad special guests, all with even less restraint than usual.
Join us once more on 60 songs and explain the 90s every Wednesday on Spotify. And he supports that clear room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to the watch.
My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com and joining me in the studio First of all, thank God we speak fluent Spanish. It's any degree walls. It's true.
It's a good thing. I mean, look, you know what that's from, right? I know what you were talking about. And kicking and screaming.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I know. They're going to have the book club meeting with all the pretty horses.
And Eric sits down and the first thing he says is that God we speak fluent Spanish. And then he says, Oh, you did read the book, right? He says, no, you threw me because, OK, guys, let's let's let's pull back the curtain a little bit. There was a moment of calm.
Sometimes before we had record when Chris is gathering his thoughts, he's preparing his quan. He's applying three to four nicotine patches to his body. And also he's preparing the intro. And you said you were going to do a quarmic McCarthy one because the great, the great man fell.
Pass away at 89 due to natural causes. I didn't know you were going to reach back to kicking and screaming because you and I did rewatchable kicking and screaming with William J Simmons. We did. Yeah, we did.
Was that the highest rated episode of rewatchable? It's out there. I figured it's out there with proof of life. Yeah.
Is it the most real listen to the most? The Mirren Packford family. Yeah. Did we do we did one together just as we did transpotting.
We did 10 of moms transpotting and kicking and screaming together. I think Bill is on kicking and screaming. Oh, and then we did 10 of bombs and we did in the fugitive. Oh, yeah.
We did the fugitive. I feel like we need the fugitive should be redone. I don't think it was done with all the categories about me. Yeah.
You know, I mean, you're, you're day-rate expensive. You know, Andy, what's going on, man? It's Thursday, today on the pot. We're going to talk a little bit about Quarmic McCarthy.
You did pass away this week. We're also going to talk about our buddy, Shae Serrano's show, Premo, which is on freebie, the Amazon fast channel, which keeps putting out banger comedies of which Premo is one. And also, you know what I don't mind commercials. What do you do during them?
Just stare into the middle of this like a garment with a cartilage for tag. I usually sit there on freebie with a pen and a pad writing down all the side effects of the pharmaceuticals that they are advertising to me. That's good. Because that's what I want is just the side effects.
So maybe there's other ways to go. That would be a Black Mirror episode is if it was just a pill called side effects. It didn't actually do anything but make you nauseous. I think there are lots of things that we can do that.
You know, you have doctor's prescription. I would love to say that we watched all of Black Mirror this morning and are ready to give a disc position on the mostly hour plus episodes of the show. But I have not seen it yet. It did not was that made available in advance.
Whoa, shots fired by me. No, it's not a deal. Shots. It gives me something to do this weekend.
Just trying to be dramatic. And so I can't wait to watch it, but haven't watched it yet. We're going to talk about Primo. We're going to talk about Spy Master show on Max.
And then we're also going to answer some of your listener questions. I can see Kaya be like, this is going to be a long one. What is the seat where we sit in the studio? You can see Kai's face.
I just assumed she's smiling and chuckling all the time. Yes. When you've got the information, visual cues and where this was going to be along. When did she crack her knuckles?
Did she side? She I was almost like infantismally raised as I kept adding things to our documents. You know, okay, should we do Cora and McCarthy first? I mean, shouldn't we?
Should we like to knock this guy out? How about that? That's only the greatest living writer. Well, you know, should I redo that because you're not living?
He's only the greatest living American writer until Wednesday. Yes. Honestly, one of my two or three favorite novelists, the writer of my favorite novel, Blood Meridian. I am who I am.
I'm not a particularly original person. Blood Meridian is my favorite novel. It's fairly original. It's not like you said infinite chest or something.
No, but I think that it's not uncommon for guys in their 40s who did some college. So we like, have you read Blood Meridian? That's my favorite novel. Okay.
Do you think I did some college? You got my age correctly. Yeah. And Blood Meridian may be the only Cormac McCarthy novel that I read.
So I would not count on you as a partner in this, remember, necessarily, but you can go along for the ride with me. I can walk down the road. The saddle up, right? I would say that just my thoughts on Cormac McCarthy are pretty simple.
What an amazing life. What an incredibly unique character and figure and what a towering literary giant. Yeah, yeah. Everybody knows those things.
I felt like when I read Blood Meridian, that not only opened up a world of language and and prose style that I think I understood existed in people like Faulkner or existed in people like Hemingway, but it was pretty revelatory to think that these books were being written during my lifetime because for most of my life, up until that point, literature was something that was studied as almost an artifact. Yeah. Because I was like, you know, like say I was like 18, maybe 19, when I read Blood Meridian. No, sure.
Like the totems were like, here's the thing of Hawthorne. It's Gerald Hemingway and all of it was in the past. It was kind of like also being told, well, the Beatles and the Stones already happened. Yes.
Things and that is what rock and roll slash novels are. Yeah. And to have these works coming out with like, it made me feel like, like, great literature was still like a going concern and a meaningful, like a meaningful industry at the time. And it's so hard to kind of articulate what someone like him meant to me.
I mean, his move into the sort of popular imagination of American life was like, kind of amazing. You know, when you look back on it, that this guy had the Border Trilogy and there was like a botched movie adaptation of all the pretty horses, but that those works continue to like, I think live on a red, those by watching me the Billy Bob Thornton movie that was made or like the Broughton movie, I think was was in its conception and in a lot of its execution was quite wonderful. I think that there was a lot of Harbor line station and against that went on with cutting it and then Daniel and while when his score be used because of what they did to the edit and stuff like that. And then for him to have like this sort of like late period, flowering, not only creatively, but also as like this, this sort of Hollywood, this Hollywood producer, not literally producer, but somebody who produced works for Hollywood, where he writes the road, he becomes the sensation, this Oprah book club rocket ship.
Bizarre. He writes, no country for old men, which almost immediately gets optioned and produced and made by the Coens. And then that film goes on to win multiple Oscars. And then has the screenplay, the counselor that he writes that really Scott makes, which is kind of to me at least a cult classic.
And, you know, a couple of people have hit me up and like, Oh, what would you recommend I start with? And I think you could go with like, you know, any, a number of different periods of his career. There's, there's the earlier such a child of God days that are in times quite comic, incredibly dark, but you know, Southern gothics and then he moves West and he kind of does the border trilogy. And I don't think you can go wrong with all the pretty horses as a place to start.
But in a lot of ways, some of his later works, like the counselor screenplay and he published two novels last year, the passenger and Stella Mars. I think it was last year, maybe it was this year. And the passenger is absolutely astonishing. And it's largely concerned with his brother and sister in and around Louisiana.
I think in the 80s is when it sat, but they're one of, you know, they're one of their parents worked on the Manhattan Project. And a lot of it has to do with this sort of apocalyptic vision of mathematics and science. And it's a very, very mystical book and I adored it. So he'll be missed, but what a life 89 and what a legacy and what a gift to like world literature.
It's also funny because when you think about the length and breadth of someone's life, it's, it's different than the one or two books you hold in your head, right? So my understanding of him was from really just reading blood radian and being like, that was a passageway to a chilling corner of the American psyche. And I don't know if I can go back into it, but he lived a very long and varied life, right? And like, I remember being sort of surprised, you know, that the New Yorker writer and Texan Lawrence, right?
Plays and just before I was, I don't, I'm not a big audio book. I was listening to his book about Texas and a lot of it is about why he left the career that he thought he was going to have in New York City to move to Austin and just like really center himself in a place. And he's talking about like literary parties in Texas in the 70s and Cormac McCarthy's just sitting there with the beer. Just like these people were really people.
Yeah. It had very different experience. And he was a pretty eccentric guy. I mean, like he lived at McCarthy worked out of this place called Santa Fe Institute, right, which is I'm still not entirely clear on how it works, but it seems like a like summer camp for geniuses.
Yeah, it's about like adaptive systems. Yeah. And that the idea is the unconscious is the machine for operating an animal. And a lot of the stuff that came out of the, like wound up going into the passenger, I think came out of his experiences at the Santa Fe Institute.
Do you think they never have us there? At the Santa Fe Institute? Yeah. I think I was invited to the Albuquerque Institute, which is an offshoot.
It does not require an IQ quite as I get an RVs or something. It's well, no, I mean, look, the food is good. Yeah. But the adaptive thinking is not as good.
I want to get to pre-mail. Yeah. Can I ask you a quick question about the flash? RIP, you're going to have a car.
I think just one of the formative figures of my life. I agree. By the way, I'm making a joke about him drinking beers in the 70s. He quit drinking in the 70s, maybe after that Lawrence right party.
Yeah. So I don't want to lose his merch. He's literally his last beer. That was probably it.
Um, the flash comes out this weekend. Yeah. And does it feel like the flash has been out for a month? Yes, because it's a very non-traditional rollout.
And that's what I wanted to ask you about. And whether or not that has been a positive or not. So when the flash was first sort of, I mean, obviously, this has been a tortured and exhaustive development and production story for a number of reasons, not the least of which relating to Ezra Miller and their controversies off camera. Uh, and then the film is finally more or less done.
And he was she had you who did the itch, the it movies is directing. And the early buzz via James Gunn, via insiders, a lot of people who had like skin in the game, but was this is the best superhero movies in Stark. To come from Warner Brothers. I just, that was, that was the thing that that was being said.
And I think it's the worst possible thing that could happen to this movie was the sudden turn towards this is great. I think that it's just, I think the whisper campaign about this movie and the attempt to make it or not organically like an important right instead of that wound up not being as bad as I thought it was going to be is it was a mistake. Maybe I haven't seen it. I'm not in a rush.
I would say you rush to see it like a flashlight rush. Like no, because I don't care about the DCU, but I think it's interesting. I think we generally either misunderstand or potentially underrate the importance of marketing and marketing campaigns for as much as I would love to say that it's not important. Like quality wins out in this incredibly noisy moment that we are barely living through.
It probably matters more than ever. I mean, there was, there's a Ben Affleck movie that didn't have promotion because of some studio, whatever. And it just, it's like it didn't even happen. Remember that Adam, there was an Adam driver dinosaur movie.
I mean, like, I'm not saying that those would have set the table for a box office success, but they would have permeated the culture and maybe people would have at least been aware of it. So I think that these things do matter. And so if you're playing the zero sum game where the studio's most important job is setting the best possible table for whatever is coming out, and maybe that is their job because the setting table, the reservation of the table is made now five years in advance. So they do everything they can, almost irrespective of what the quality of the film is, if you look at it that way, kudos to Warner Brothers, I guess.
Yeah. Because people understand that this movie is coming out. People understand generally that it's not disastrous. I think, you know, whatever.
Actually, I mean, I think that is getting some pretty bad reviews now. Well, no, I mean, up until this point when the embargo was lifted, all of that is to say, I guess they should be feeling good about the job they did to salvage what, you know, is recently as a year ago, people were like, are they just going to scrap this? Are they going to back grow this movie? But at the end of all this, that's a lot of effort for it seems like the latest chapter in their ongoing series, Loud Nonsense.
It does seem like the latest example of a, this has to exist. So we're going to do the best possible version that we maybe can given these constraints and it's hinging on a lot of really weird things. Separate apart from your feelings about Ezra Miller on or off camera or the performance or the character, the movie does seem based around the idea that there is an enormous thirst to see Michael Keaton be Batman again. Yeah.
Um, maybe we see the movie and he's not actually the co-lead and maybe that is all marketing, you know, to steer it away from Ezra Miller who did not do until appearing at the red carpet, did not do any press for the movie. But I don't know. I don't have many DC stands in my direct life, but like, I can't imagine any of them are like, what I most want from a Flash movie is a 60 year old Batman and a super girl I've never heard of before. Well, I honestly wish that they had just made the movie about Flash and Supergirl.
You know, I think that we're on life support when it comes to how many times can we revive characters from our past and have them go through kind of gestural karaoke versions of the things that they did 20, 30 years ago. Um, sometimes it's very affecting, but I do think that it would have been cooler for me and just in a pitch just to do like there are new people with new characters and it's a fresh take and it's like we're going to make our own, we're going to make our own hair. Also, this is now we were joking about it last week and we talked or not last week, Monday, we were talking about Spider-Verse. Like, this is the same movie for the third time.
This is I can go back in time or go to a different universe and I can fix something and it has disastrous results. So that's not the flash is fault necessarily. That's third of these movies to come out fourth. I guess Dr.
Strange was doing it too. Um, well, it's well, Spider-Man, right? Uh, no way home, right? Spider-Verse two.
Uh huh. And Dr. Strange two because right? Multiverse of madness.
Great. So that's the biggest thing about this is the biggest winner of this movie, whatever it does remains James Gunn because he was like, this is great. This is incredible movie. And he's out there.
He's pressing the flesh, but no matter what, he looks better if it tanks, honestly, not that it tanks, but like every single thing that he has done in the last three or four months alone in terms of setting up what he's going to be doing. Now that he's in charge seems like the antithesis of what the flash is, which is to say he's doing a Superman movie where the character of Clark Kent slash Superman is the star of the movie. He's like, Quinn Snyder coming in after the All-Star break for the Hawks. Right.
And it's like Trey Young and John Collins and Clint Coppella. You have like these couple of months to impress me. Yeah. And if Trey Young goes on a heater and gets them out of the trash.
I was believed in Trey Young, but Trey Young's the best superheroes and Batman. He's not on the hook for Trey Young's future sequels, exactly. That all of this goes back to the original scene of the DC thing creation, which was the flash was a means to an end. It was never like, Hey, let's have a reason to do this character from jump.
So, you know, it's funny that I remain impressed by Big Jim Gunn because he read the room, he saw the tea leaves and I mean, I think Marvel is an absolute free fall, frankly. And why not make a nice Superman movie? If we're going to be making these things, that's just seem like a good remedy. So, so what is your, is there anything about the flash that interests you?
Because I just, I think I should see it for cultural commentary purposes, but I have to say there's nothing in it. Well, I mean, honestly, you know, I would see it just to see it. I would see it just to see what Michelle did because I did like the first day movie a lot and I think he's a talented director and I think Sasha Kai seems like a really interesting performer. I could not really give you less of a shit about old Batman's coming back, though.
And Batman. Batman. Yeah. And I, you know, nothing, no like surprise cameo that I've even heard about versus like even one I could imagine is that enticing to me.
And just the fact that the movie itself is being sold on that means like, I think the movie itself is in the trailer. I think like what he does, like it's like this guy is real upset about, you know, his parents and he's going to go back and time to fix it. Did you see his dad is Ron Livingston? Oh, yeah, I did.
Yeah. I did. Yeah. Band of brothers, a classic TV show that I spent a lot of time with in the appropriate era.
Um, before we move off of the flash, we're in the pantheon of Hey, man. I, my kids go to private school do Michael Shannon's quotes about being involved in this movie rank. I do feel like being like Zod was not much of a character. This is like a new club as leader.
I think where he should know it's not just that he was just like, I don't know. That's not really acting as far as I'm concerned. And yet he's there. Sure.
What do you think is the correct? I mean, everybody knows this about you when it comes to sports, fandom, you're a big unwritten rules guy. You know what I mean? Like you don't, you don't showboat when you're up, you know, in the fourth quarter.
You know, you don't, you don't try to bunt for a base hit when the guys know what it's last time you have heard someone who is new to this world, who was already established. So not somebody who's like, I've gotten my big break. So now by being in a DC or a Marvel movie, but someone who is like, I'm a veteran established actor who has then turned around and been like, what an amazing sandbox to play in that was such a great experience. Because it's been a minute.
Elizabeth Olson is literally trying to talk her way out of being in this. Harrison Ford is like being in Captain America, Brave New World is high key fucking tough. They were working the shit out of me. I'm an old man.
He's just been Indiana Jones again. Yeah. Michael Shannon is like, that's not acting. Here's my favorite thing is he says he's multiverse movies or somebody playing with action figures.
It's like, here's this person. Here's that person and they're fighting. That's correct. It's not quite the in-depth character study situation that I felt man of steel was.
That's the best though. But I went back and I was because I saw that quote. So I went back and watched the Man of Steel trailer. Yeah.
I was pretty hyped for Man of Steel. The trailer was good. Yeah. No, they're all in hell.
All of these people are in hell now being trapped in these movies. They are not whatever good vibes and LOL text chains were coming out of Atlanta. Like it's very, very, very cool. When Julie Louis Dreyfus is like, I can do how many days in Atlanta and make a Nicole Hoffsener movie, that sounds great.
Yeah. Like, but when it's like Harrison Ford is like, I have been on set for 89 straight days and no one ever knows what scene comes after another. That's tough, man. That guy's an American institution.
Yeah. It's a it's a weird one. It does make you think of you saw this right that like the advice that DiCaprio gave to Timothy Shell and no, no hard drugs and a superglue. Seems pretty good.
Seems like good advice. That's also how we should pivot the podcast to to doing. Oh, you want us to be all superhero movies and hard drugs? So the opposite.
You need to stop reading side effects. Yeah. Then chasing weird anti highs and we don't we don't have to see the flash. Should we move to Premo?
Yeah. OK. Our buddy, Shay Serrano created a TV show on freebie called Premo. It is executive produced by Mike Schur and it stars Ignacio Diaz, Silvero as Rafa, who's this kid who's being raised and molded by his mother and his five uncles and Andy listeners.
I'm happy to report that this show is delightful, man. It's really good, but more than anything, it is. Shae. And you can really, especially in the first episode of watch the first three, you can really feel Shay coming through in the like the characters and what the dialogue and the scenarios and stuff.
Like I edited Shay for a while, like Grantlyn and at various points over time in the ring around, I've known Shay for really long time, obviously. This is how he emails. Like, this is how Shay talks and this is how she texts and stuff. So it's just kind of like sometimes I have to pinch myself where I'm like, that's not Shay.
That's an actor. You know, our buddy Jason Concepcion also wrote on this show. We're a little late getting to it, but I'm going to be relishing the rest of the season. This is a wonderful show.
I'm so happy for Shae. I'm so happy for Jason. I'm happy for Mike Schur, who has made many successful shows and is doing very well, even though he's on strike and but he deserves a happiness. I do want to talk about like this show and the void that it fills and shows like it in the overall TV landscape, but specifically about the show.
Chris, I know that you did the same thing, but I really enjoyed listening to now former Sixers coach Doc Rivers on the Bill Simmons podcast on Sunday. They were great together. Who should Joellen be played with? Who would be the perfect person from to play with?
And I thought of that when I was watching Primo and I watched, I guess, three or four of the episodes that are up. I don't know if I think eight. And I feel like Mike and Shay are perfect teammates because it's so purely Shay and it's drawn from his own experiences in his own life. A lot of Tony Parker stuff.
Yeah. It's strewn throughout the San Antonio bedroom. But Mike's particular gift, which isn't, which he's not precious about, like he can do it on his own stuff and clearly can do it with others, is that he just understands what makes satisfying half hour comedic television. And it is so deeply character based.
The jokes are really good and it's a credit to the writing staff they put together. But the degree of difficulty, I noted from a, I don't know, 28 minute pilot that has to introduce a world, a main character, make the main character, likable, empathetic, et cetera, et cetera, but also his friends, his single mom. There's like, there's like 12 characters and his five distinctly differentiated uncles, each of them has a completely different comedic voice and point of view. Yeah.
I don't know how you do that in 28 pages of script. And more importantly, I can imagine as a first time TV writer and showrunner getting lost in the sauce of that. And so whatever alchemy that they worked up together was just so clear from the beginning. It's absolutely a pleasure.
The best situational comedies, the situation in them is this is a situation I want to be in more. Right. I want to spend more time here. Right.
And I get it and it doesn't go too broad. It doesn't go too cute. It doesn't go too sweet. It just kind of nails it.
And by the second episode, they're already playing each individual instrument like an orchestra, like you know who you can cut to for the joke that'll cut the sweetness here, et cetera, et cetera. Also really remarkable for finding actors that some of whom, you know, don't have giant credits who are carrying the show. All the brothers are good. Right.
Like, I think some of them are maybe more known than others or a little bit more famous than others have at least have longer IMDD pages and others, like Carlos Santos who plays the back of the whole. Him watching Wolf of Wall Street with just the cocaine parts, which turns out to be just Wolf of Wall Street is amazing. But like Efron V as Mondo is really funny, Jonathan Medina is Jay carries a lot of the show in the early go and he just has a great affect is making really good choices. They're all really good.
What a delight. And but I did want to say like watching a really high quality, kind, hearted sitcom on freebie felt good. That felt good, which is is that like a subliminal shot at? You know, not at all.
I'm like, certainly sounded like one. What I mean is, okay, I'll put it this way. Like I got a text this week from a friend who's a works in the TV industry and had had surgery. Hope she's feeling better soon and was like in my like post surgery, hey, I decided to watch The Boys for the first time.
Okay. Have you seen it? I was like, yes, we podcast about it frequently. Please listen to our podcast.
But second, I was like, we were talking about something that has come up when we have talked about the boys, which is, yeah, they explode a whale. But also it has the rhythms of a WB show from 2008. And I mean, that is a good thing. Yeah, it's a TV show and it feels good to have a TV show, you know, that it's just like all the characters are going to get serviced.
The plot's going to get advanced. We're going to resolve certain things and create other things. That's not so complicated. And, you know, I don't like covering this industry like in a totally stratified binary, we get the idol or we get primo.
We actually have a couple of questions about stuff like that. Yeah. I just thought that this was this was nailing. And it's a really good use of the free platform and to go all the way back to the thing we're saying at the beginning, legitimately, I didn't mind the ads.
The ads start. The show is rhythmically. Daddy, Bizzos comes through again. No, but it's built.
So like this beautiful, big, beautiful advertisements show like this is rhythmically. It's okay. Yeah, I know it's okay. It's a bad break.
It's a 70 seconds of ads. And I'm like, that doesn't seem like that much. So do you sit there and you're just like, Oh, something? Well, it was funny.
Well, I have a lot of stuff, but just in my home, but I, it had been so long that it took me to like, I guess the third episode of primo to remember that I could mute. I didn't actually have to just engage with them as if this was more more content. So I did that. Sorry.
I hope that doesn't cost you a second season, but that worked. It worked. It's the right vibe. It's the right rhythm.
It's a really, really strong show. And we should have more shows like this. Yes. Yeah.
There's only one check, which is 100% true and we love them. And I'm really excited for him. Another new show that I think I referenced a couple of days ago on the pod. Maybe last Thursday, maybe this Monday was Spymaster and you checked out the first episode as did I.
It's a Mac show, which is a classic kind of last five to seven years, you know, basically like multinational production that brings together usually like performers and sensibilities from Europe and the States. And this is the kind of show where it really works because it is a espionage thriller set during Chachescu's reign in Romania in the eighties during the Cold War. Would you make it? I dug it.
Yeah. My Romanian is rusty. So the joke that I made was that I think that Max defaulted me to dubbed English. It does.
And if you do fire up the show, you watch like 25 minutes being like, oh, they're going to they're going to speak English and Romania. That's interesting. Chachescu was just and I was like, I'm surprised I didn't do a polish on this dialogue. And then I was like, oh, this is dope.
It's interesting. Like, I mean, I want to say two things about the show one. This is in our wheelhouse and I really like it. And it has an incredible lead performance by Alex Sachereanu.
That's my best Romanian attempt. I apologize by butcher his name as Victor Gaudionu, who is the main character, who is a, like a spy master for the Romanian dictator and Chachescu, who, at least as we meet him in the beginning of the pilot is attempting to defect. But it may be more complicated than that because this is a multi episode spy series. It seems like he's in the pocket of the Soviets and now attempting to play a double game and escape Chachescu by going to the West.
He's phenomenal. He just has like an incredibly charismatic intensity and you want to follow him also as reading about the creators of the show. I mean, the great Romanian filmmaker Christian, when you was behind as an executive producer of it. It's pretty sick.
The direction is awesome. Yeah. And also the sense of place is pretty amazing is really exciting. And you read the interviews with the creator.
I mean, they say all the right things for us where they just talk about LaCare and they talk about what the Americans did. And in terms of being, you know, having the storytelling language that we're familiar with, it reminds me a little bit of a show we were also referencing the other day of Gochulant 83. It's set in the Carter administration. So the period details are cool.
And also just a constant reminder that spy stories were a little bit better before we just had tracking devices in our pockets that we carried around. Yeah. Like there basically was a moment that I think born as the last time where it's like, it's kind of cool watching Chris Cooper ask for them to enhance on a CCTV camera. But after that, it just becomes like, Hey, is this guy on the phone?
Let's go find him. Yeah. Oh, did he ever go anywhere at any time? OK, we have a month video.
Yeah. So I was watching with that movie reality, the Sydney Sweeney. Oh, yeah. It was pretty good.
Fantastic. But it is pretty amazing. It's essentially just dialogue. The dialogue is all from the interview between the FBI agents and reality winner.
And the FBI agents are like, we know everything. We're just kind of here to know why that's the only thing they don't know. But it's like their level of tracking of her movements and things that she did is so comprehensive that they don't need to capture their just like your caught. But this is your opportunity to maybe get into some of the motivation.
Yeah. So from a character perspective, that could be rewarding. Yeah. But like we've now we've arrived at this place where like it's hard to do espionage when they're like, we got you.
Yeah. So it's nice to go back in time for that purpose alone. I think that it's this is another example of something that I think shows the promise of this globalized streaming world, but also a little bit of limitations, which is to say how great that a show like this fully formed can just appear on our streaming service and we can have a window into a different part of the world and see the filmmaking talent and acting talent and just a different perspective on again, a type of story that we love. Saying something as a car, I asked can mean very different things to very different people depending what side of the anchor you grew up on.
I think the downside to it is because this is a I think it's a German Romanian co-production, but also features American characters. There is a there is a portion of the show that is in English, character speaking English. And sometimes we saw this in the game when it's just like the rich people who they're playing the game for were the five American people they found here in South Korea that day. Yeah.
So you know, maybe not like a Michael Shannon level of character study from those guys. No offense. Right. There's a little bit of that here because they had to make do with what they could get.
And so because they're not really hiring. I mean, I think it's pretty good as the American CIA guy who says who's go to his meeting in the early episode. I'm excited to see more of him. But like when they cut to Camp David, the guy's like, President Jimmy Carter can take no more of this today.
Okay. It might bumps up. So that's my only hesitation is being like, is this on its own merits? One of the 10 best shows of the year so far, not sure yet.
I haven't watched enough. Is this really recommended as a interesting thought provoking fun watch in the genre? We like, yes, that's a great way. I couldn't say better than myself, but it isn't it is the subtext of this story.
And maybe in a weird way to prima to these shows have nothing common otherwise is how much labor there is in working with what you have, you know, because again, like Amazon is richer than almost any other company in the world. They aren't budgeting their freebie shows, the way they're budgeting Lord of the Rest and shout out to Shay for shooting an Albuquerque great town. I know I kind of talked about it early, but shooting there is has challenges and as opportunities. And this is a largely unknown task that he's working with and their mining gold.
And one thing that I was looking at, because knowing that's like, you know, comedy shows like this, you need guest stars and you cutaways, you need people to be able to sell the business in the background and they do it. Yeah. Um, and I think one thing that undoes shows not things by master is undone. Sometimes it's like maybe the money runs out at a certain point.
Yeah, where your ambition is bigger than the reality, but you have to work with it. Yeah. That certainly happened to me in my experience of times. And I feel like that is an, it's, it's under cover or under articulated.
You know, you have to be able to execute the highest possible level within the sandbox that you've been invited to play in. Would you like to answer some questions from our listeners? I would. How's Kai doing?
Just like her body language, like her, she's listening a little. She's saying up straight. Her posture is never in question. That's true.
That's true. All right. Can you chat? I mean, ask I, I threw this out to your favorite platform, Meta.
Um, oh, did you do it in the multiverse? Did you put on the goggles and be like, hello, hello, I just asked if anybody had any questions. I thought it'd be fun to just take a grab bag that today is a Thursday. Yeah.
To glue me out. We haven't watched Black Mirror. Oh, it's a glue me out. I hadn't noticed.
Um, do you want to get some feelings about the weather off your chest? I know because I do think that as an adult of a certain age, I can't actually be the way that I am, but we live in cloud jail, but I don't know. Like when do you keep this from people? Like you're always, you, you definitely make your feelings about the weather known.
Yeah, I'm having a giant tantrum. Okay. But I feel like I'm still like, I'm stoic about this. Like, no, I shouldn't be encouraged.
Like, Kai, when was the last time you saw the sun? You live on the West side. It's even worse there. Uh, I think it came out for a couple hours on.
It comes out at the end of the day. Didn't yesterday or the day before? Like, it's been 12 days. No, uh, yeah.
12 days since the sun was out in Los Angeles. Now I'm not saying this being like, wow, we deserve our beautiful blue skies. It's more like, why would we be here if it wasn't? Oh, don't they call it June gloom for a reason, right?
It's not. And then May Gray and then it's been fucking Seattle since November. I just make you appreciate something. It's just Vancouver without the charm.
I'm not, I want people to be clear. I'm not saying this because I'm an entitled baby who lives here and demands and deserves good weather, although I am an entitled baby who lives here. Yeah. It's more that like I'm actually saying we didn't move here for the vibrant theater scene.
No, I know. That's true. So it's true. Other cities have like infrastructure to support.
Hell, right. It's like you can just go to bars all the time. Yeah. Or something.
Yeah. OK, sorry. Yeah, it sucks. Kenny Chappen.
Recency bias aside, where does across the spider verse rank in the superhero movie pantheon? When you close your eyes and you see four movie posters from the superhero movie era. OK. Oh, wait to today.
And you're like, somebody who says Andy, I need four superhero movies that you think are the best from this era. What are the ones you think of? What's the rush more? Wow.
Can I help you? This is a classic wish I could have prepared for it more. OK, but I can wing it. I think you and I can do it together.
Because I think that when it comes to superhero movies, more or less, we have like similar sensibilities. So I'm going to say dark night. Maybe I'm going to say winter soldier. OK.
I'm going to say Logan. Huh. All right. Oh, so we do not have some.
So far, none. But go on and. Black Panther. Yeah, I think I can't there would be on there.
I think you know, I have a lot of controversial unpopular takes. I I like that man begins more than the dark night. OK. That may be wrong.
Mm-hmm. But I would put I would put that man begins. Black Panther and game and Spider-Verse. And that would like the middle three episodes of She Heelke.
Oh, if I could expect. Yeah, I would put I would put the third episode of moon night. The werewolf by night special. Yeah, I actually like that.
That was really good. No, OK. So so mine would be. Yeah, I feel like I'm missing.
I'm sure I'm. I mean, you haven't said we haven't said any Avengers movies. We don't say you did end game. OK.
OK. We're despite a risk go in that list. Well, wait. So historically, is Rushmore ranked like best to worst?
No, but I mean, is Teddy Roosevelt your number one? I think the whole idea of the Rushmore is that there's four. You don't have to like. I'm just asking does the spider versus on the pantheon of those movies?
Yeah, in terms of like what I think. Well, so what do you mean by pantheon? Like what represents? Kenny's question.
I'm just what in your conception of it. Are you are you picking the four movies that you feel objectively are the best? Or are you picking the four that to your mind best represent the era of the. No, I think they're the best.
I don't think it's I'm not going to say. I mean, like in some ways, Venom is a really representative movie of the of the era because it was that was the point where it was like, you literally can make a side character from Spider-Man, have these confused studio systems. And like because it's sort of how it somehow related, it's going to make a billion dollars. Yeah, that's true.
And I think that if I mean, I think I'm having it both ways because there's no question, if you're doing it, like pantheon, like what matters, what's relevant, what will last, what will just talk to you about. And remember, there's no question that it's dark night. That man begins to sort of a trolly kind of, I mean, sorry, in the pause between talking about it, I was thinking about Katie Holmes as performance, no disrespect. But for me, I put that in begins because I really loved it.
But also because that felt like a, oh, we're going to do it this way. Yeah, which then continued in dark night. And I think there were things in that movie that were absolutely incredible and things that I just kind of can't, like the whole, you know, the surveillance boat thing and the two-face part. You didn't like two-face?
No. No. OK. But he fledged right like that.
That's not a controversial take. It was amazing. But that belongs on the list. I mean, that was critically lauded, not a non-stradominated, et cetera.
Are we forgetting the answer is probably yes. Are there any movies in this genre that aren't Marvel and DC movies that deserve to be on here or Sony affiliated Sony ones? I mean, like, like some people might put the incredibles on there. I would not.
But in terms of capturing the spirit of a superhero type movie, like Chronicle. Right. OK. Yeah, exactly.
Again, I wouldn't necessarily say that was like in the Pantheon, but are you talking about movies like that? Yeah, that are speak the language of superheroes. No, so anyway, so my list would be one of the Batman movies I'm hedging. Black Panther endgame and by verse.
Tyler Bolton Fuhrman asks, what does an eventual streaming consolidation look like from both a business and user perspective? Will there be one app similar to Max that has the libraries of previous apps? How will companies want to structure said consolidation as far as merging? What media companies are most likely to buy others?
The reason we talked about this a little bit when we talked about Apple vision Pro and we were kind of joking around about that. But the reason I selected this question was whether or not, like, do you think there will be essentially a technological merger where everybody decides this is the best way to do it to be on Apple TV or to be on whatever? Or do you think it will be a content production studio merger where it's like Max buys peacock or something like that? Why not both?
Right. I don't I don't have the answers and I also don't even pretend to have the like the the stock market savvy or at least the business fair savvy of our colleague on the Ring of Podcast Matt Bellany talks about this on the town. But it is a broadly shared belief that this current setup where every studio has its own siloed streaming service that that is not sustainable. And as we've said many times, these companies are very, very different in terms of what they can afford and what they can how long they can continue to go.
I don't mean continue to go without new content because the writers strike. I just mean like the arms race. Apple is safe. Netflix is safe.
Amazon is safe, obviously. Beyond that, I have a clear. I there's a lot of the longstanding rumor has been that David Zazlev, combining Warner Brothers and discovery to sell it again. And the most likely places that could go would be Comcast Universal.
But then there were rumors of Comcast Universal was sniffing around Paramount. So those smaller ones could consolidate. I think the main thing that people ought to be prepared for is that we are going back to a bundle of some sort. And I think that that bundle will exist on Apple or Amazon or both.
And I think you will choose one or the other as your like player. And the fact of the matter is, is that we're kind of getting there now because you can subscribe to a lot of those services through Apple Prime or you can subscribe to them through Apple TV, I think. Yeah. And that is one of the main drivers for Amazon's entry into.
And frankly, like the older I get through that the older I get the easier is to do stuff like that. Yeah. Rather than be like, I'm going to Shudders specific website to enter my specific. I think we're going to Shudders the pricey beach hotel in Santa Monica in order to watch.
That's why I say that on my way. That's a nice. Did you watch me streaming television? Maybe we've no need to get into that now.
So yes, the answer is yes, but I don't know what it's going to look like. And it's a little scary. I mean, we're being glib about it because we don't know, but it is a little freaky to be like, they're going to be fewer companies and we're going to only be paying two of them to consolidate everything. That doesn't feel good creatively or what's the other word, democratically.
Yeah. A little weird. Sort of a sort of this is not entirely like a companion question, but it is a question about like how how studios and how streamers decide to do things. Dan Klobrask, who is dropping the entirety of the bear into our laps on June 22nd.
Yeah. Agree or disagree? And he shows you can think of that would have worked better with a full season drop or vice versa. I'm going to say something to you now.
OK, I cannot remember the last time that I was like, I'm so glad this entire season is here at my fingertips. Yep. I honestly never I don't think I ever have. No, I definitely did like when I was getting into House of Cards.
Like I was like, this is pretty cool. Like I watch the whole thing in the weekend. I'm getting addicted to it. Yeah, I don't think I'd kids.
And I'm sure it's happened at various points over the years since I think it's like dark, for instance, is fun to watch in a binge because it's so complex and dense that it almost lends itself to back to back to back viewings of an episode. But you're welcome to do that after the show and aired. I was back and say I was so happy to watch dark with all of it or all of the season of my fingertips, but I wasn't like, he's at 11. Fifty nine PM yet or 12 a 1 AM so that I can binge it all today tomorrow.
But you were I'm sure you were glad that it wasn't like I watched episode two of dark had a week in between and now I have to remember how episodes dark ended. That's true. I do not think that this serves the bear well. I understand that the bear is a half hour show and there's a huge appetite for it and not to find a point on it.
But I just think, man, like they could have the summer if the bear was coming out three, three, whatever season because they didn't know what they had. Right. It is bizarre to me. I mean, they must know their metrics.
They must understand the way people watch it and they must feel like that's the win. That's the way to do it. But I totally agree with you or at least do the Amazon model of like put out the first three and then make people wait for it. Like this is I don't think this is one of our like niche egg heady.
Like this is the show we're most excited about. I think genuinely a lot of people who like television are excited about the bear season. I think what we'll probably do is break the bear into sections for our own purposes. I think the procedural TV probably do every episode.
I don't know when it's going to go up. I mean, like I'm so thrilled to watch it, but I'm not really bothered by having to finish it all in a weekend and then come back and report on one day. I think we can do it in a week. No, I think we'll do it our way where we take our time and enjoy it because I don't want it to go away that quickly.
Yeah. I'm also kind of just I feel like a companion story to this is that FX has also announced that reservation dogs, one of its very best shows and one of the best shows on television, is going to air on linear broadcast cable, which it never has. It's only ever been on the roof. Oh, cool.
And so they're getting the reverse window, which I think is something that may start happening more, which is what? Which is it's going to be on TV. Oh. It's never been on traditional linear television.
It's only ever been streaming. OK. But they're putting it actually on TV now to potentially expand its viewership. And it's like, I understand your dynamics within the Walt Disney Corporation are fraught and eyeballs and what they mean and ratings and what's on streaming.
That's more complicated and way above our pay grade. But I do feel like if you guys are making good TV shows, get them on TV sometimes. Yeah. Or too fun stuff like that with the indoor.
Remember when they put like an ABC? Did they or did they or like that? That was fun for us. Yeah.
My understanding of that behind the scenes is that was not fun for Disney because it didn't change anything. Right. It didn't. And again, I think if they had done that differently, like maybe not been like, hey, guys, guess what?
The most acclaimed show of the year is on television on the day after Thanksgiving once. I think that that would have been slightly different. But yeah, I know it's this is this is the thesis from this episode of television. Sorry.
This is the thesis from that was telling. This is the thesis from this episode of the watch podcast television. It's OK. Pretty good.