‘Dune’ Was a Box Office Hit, so Why Doesn’t ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Work? Plus, ‘Say Nothing’ With Sean Fennessey.

Andy is joined by Sean Fennessey to talk about the first few episodes of ‘Say Nothing’ and how the show works because it lives in a moral gray area (1:00). Then they briefly discuss the finale of ‘Disclaimer’ and why the series might have worked better as a film (31:56) before talking about the first episode of ‘Dune: Prophecy’ and why this prequel series is not working so far (42:43). Host: Andy Greenwald Guest: Sean Fennessey Producer: Kaya McMullen Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What's happening? It's Todd McShay and I'm back with a new home and a new show at The Ringer and Spotify. The McShay Show. It's a video and audio podcast coming to you year round with all my NFL draft information, big boards, mock drafts and player movement. Plus, I'll be chatting with some of my best friends in football, including some of your favorite football analysts. During the week, we'll have episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays that'll include discussions about my player rankings, who's rising, who's falling, and who your NFL team should be keeping an eye on. Plus, we'll be reacting each week to the college football playoff polls and giving you previews and picks for each Saturday slate. In addition, I'll have episodes on Saturday nights with my immediate reaction to the full

• 0:44Speaker 00

  day in college football every week. So if you love the college game, the NFL, the draft, or all of it like me, make sure to like, follow, subscribe, and get ready for The McShay Show on The Ringer, Spotify, and wherever you watch or listen to podcasts.

• 1:03Speaker 01

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• 2:07Andy Greenwald?

  And walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Andy Greenwald. I have no official title at The Ringer, but I'm joined today by someone who definitely does. He's the head of content. He's the host of the Big Picture Podcast. He's an avid Redditor, particularly on the Wizarding World boards. Sean Fennessey, welcome back. Are you on Reddit?

• 2:27Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:27Andy Greenwald?

  No?

• 2:28Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:28Andy Greenwald?

  No, I'm on record as, I like to go to the CR Heads website, I mean website.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Website, yeah.

• 2:34Andy Greenwald?

  URL, because I'm also a CR Head, as are you.

• 2:39Speaker 04

  Of course, long time.

• 2:40Andy Greenwald?

  And it's fun to see our friend lionized, lionest, celebrated. And honestly, it's also fun to see which of us gets shit on more in how we don't match up to him.

• 2:52Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, well, I signed up for that. I feel comfortable with that.

• 2:56Andy Greenwald?

  I know.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  And I'm in the chair today, literally, not living up to Chris's greatness, which I'm very comfortable with, honestly. But I don't, I don't look at that site. Those people historically are not fans of mine.

• 3:06Andy Greenwald?

  Really?

• 3:07Speaker 04

  I think, because I think I've put myself in these competitive circumstances with Chris over the years, where we were drafting against each other.

• 3:12Andy Greenwald?

  Oh.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  You know, so there's like-

• 3:14Andy Greenwald?

  But you were kind of like the Washington Generals in those drafts, right? Like you were set up in a certain way?

• 3:18Speaker 04

  Absolutely not.

• 3:19Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, no, no.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  No, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. But I appreciate you not knowing. I, thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here with you.

• 3:28Andy Greenwald?

  It's great to have you.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  World traveler, Andy Greenwald. I'm happy to sit with you in Los Angeles, our city.

• 3:32Andy Greenwald?

  I, I'm not sure where my brain pan is currently, but I am physically back in Los Angeles. I wish I could say the same for Chris, but he decided to linger a few more days.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  He told me he's not coming back. He said because of the election results in England, he's staying.

• 3:48Andy Greenwald?

  That's right. Because he's pro the results in England?

• 3:51Speaker 04

  Exactly, yes, that's what he told me.

• 3:52Andy Greenwald?

  He's just a labor man, thrown through.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  Exactly. He's very pleased.

• 3:56Andy Greenwald?

  They're not very pleased over there. I have to say, that is one thing I noticed. Yeah, it was fun. It's another great fortnight over there, but it was nice to have Chris there. You know, we recorded in Spotify UK last week.

• 4:06Speaker 04

  How'd that go for you?

• 4:07Andy Greenwald?

  Well, first of all, it was Wednesday, early on Wednesday, November 6th, so vibes were awesome.

• 4:13Speaker 04

  I did listen to that episode. You guys sounded fucking weird.

• 4:15Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 04

  Sounded like someone had ju- like just shot your dog. Like moments before recording began, your dog had been assassinated.

• 4:23Andy Greenwald?

  What was amazing was I had also just found out I had a dog. You know what I mean? That was the weird kind of emotional.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  Quite a head trip. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you guys had some time together over there. That's great.

• 4:33Andy Greenwald?

  We built, and I did wonder if he lingered intentionally to avoid talking about Dune Prophecy. But luckily you've picked up the slack.

• 4:42Speaker 04

  Happy to fill in as always.

• 4:44Andy Greenwald?

  So we're gonna talk about a bunch of stuff, as always, when we sit here, we're gonna talk about TV and movies and maybe the way they overlap. We're gonna hit Dune Prophecy, which premiered last night on the Mac streaming service and Home Box Office, I believe.

• 4:57Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:58Andy Greenwald?

  We are going to, I'm gonna, I'm gonna address disclaimer a little bit. I know you haven't watched and I, it will not be spoilery. But I do think there's a way to, to, to bring it into our conversation that will be relevant. So if people, I'm sure there's like eight dead enders who are like, Greenwald said he was gonna talk about the disclaimer finale.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  I feel like you hear the

• 5:18Andy Greenwald?

  Keep the receipts.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  I feel like you hear the footsteps out there, you know? How can I encourage you to not hear?

• 5:22Andy Greenwald?

  The disclaimer?

• 5:23Speaker 04

  The internet footsteps, you know?

• 5:25Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, no. Well, first of all, this is a great time to say I am almost two weeks clean.

• 5:31Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 5:31Andy Greenwald?

  Of the internet.

• 5:32Speaker 04

  No blue sky for you?

• 5:33Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, hell no.

• 5:34Speaker 04

  You won't do that?

• 5:34Andy Greenwald?

  Fuck no.

• 5:35Speaker 04

  It seems, it's been friendly thus far. I made a shift.

• 5:37Andy Greenwald?

  I don't need to do this anymore, I think. I, I am now two weeks without anything.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  Cause you're too rich? Like, why?

• 5:42Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. Also, I'm gonna get a big tax cut, so what do I need to hear what the plebes have to say?

• 5:48Speaker 04

  That's great.

• 5:48Andy Greenwald?

  No, I, I just feel like it's time to unplug social media other, other than I am still on Instagram because I mostly follow ramen shops in Tokyo.

• 6:00Speaker 04

  Understandable.

• 6:01Andy Greenwald?

  Like, oh, there's gallops in that?

• 6:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's me but for Aaron Rodgers's descent into hell during this NFL season.

• 6:09Andy Greenwald?

  I did say to Chris, when he asked what you and I were gonna talk about, I said, Justin Herbert being clutch now.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Well, someone had to be in the showdown between the Bengals and the Chargers, which is also a game that took place in hell. A very fun game in hell.

• 6:21Andy Greenwald?

  It was a good game. Yeah, you, you declared, you saw exactly how this Jets season was gonna go.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  This is a disaster. It was so obvious to anybody who was paying attention.

• 6:30Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  And there's so many people on pods before the season started that were like, this looks like an 11-win team.

• 6:35Andy Greenwald?

  Isn't it, we're gonna get into our conversation, I promise, but I do find that as someone who fanatically and dangerously pays attention only to my football team, and then, once a week, I listen to Bill and Sal, and I'm like, there is, is there a bigger disconnect in experience in the 21st century than between the experience of a fan of a team and people who are generalists, who just have like the four box on and they're like, "Oh, the Eagles seem pretty good." I'm like, "You don't know what good is."

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:04Andy Greenwald?

  Even though they are good.

• 7:05Speaker 04

  You mean if you're like-

• 7:06Andy Greenwald?

  I just mean-

• 7:06Speaker 04

  From New Mexico and you root for the NFL in general?

• 7:09Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, like, remember like, our buddy Chuck Klosterman, just likes sports.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:13Andy Greenwald?

  He's literally Rob Lowe, wearing the hat that says NFL.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Well, he's from a Dakota, and so he doesn't have an NFL franchise to root for.

• 7:20Andy Greenwald?

  It's just that like, if you live and die, and I just mostly die with every potential mistake, I never feel good, really, even though my team is 8-2, and I know I have nothing to complain about.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, since we're doing the Bill and Sal review conversation, I've obviously been listening to that show for, I think it's coming up on decades, not just decade. And I remember as a kid, as a kid, I remember in my twenties, listening to Bill and hoping he would spend more than three minutes on the Jets-

• 7:49Andy Greenwald?

  Oh.

• 7:49Speaker 04

  On an episode.

• 7:50Andy Greenwald?

  I was just thinking this on the way in.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, and now I will have the opposite. I'm like, "Please do not speak about this franchise. Don't even text me about it anymore. I know, it's terrible. I'm aware."

• 7:59Andy Greenwald?

  This is how cooked I am. I, you know, I missed a bunch of pods last week, you know, just focused on the work.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 8:05Andy Greenwald?

  Mate, and that's how I talk now. And I was gonna fire up Bill and Sal, but then I saw that on Thursday, Bill and House talked about the Eagles-Commanders game. So I was excited about that, and then I forgot that it was Bill and House. So they just talked about the Commanders for 17 minutes, then Bill said, "Yeah, I don't think the Eagles are good." That's the first time he's said the word Eagles this year.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, it's an unsatisfying experience. I am both a generalist and a fan of my team. It's easier to be a generalist when by week nine of every season, your season no longer matters. And we are now in the 14th season in which the Jets will not make the playoffs, and their ninth consecutive losing NFL season. So, feel my pain.

• 8:47Andy Greenwald?

  But look what you've done with your life now, with that, you know, on the back burner.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I get to be here with you, speaking about the troubles.

• 8:54Andy Greenwald?

  Talking about how you've accepted your unpopularity on Reddit. Okay, so we are gonna get into some movie stuff at the end. We're gonna talk about Dune Prophecy, a little bit about disclaimer, but I thought we should start, even though Chris ended Thursday's pod talking about this, with something that TV does really, really well, and that is exemplified by Say Nothing, which is all episodes, kind of annoyingly, actually, all episodes dropped on FX, Hulu, Disney, Star, if you're in the UK. Just thought I, you know.

• 9:22Speaker 04

  Interesting. Is that where you fired it up?

• 9:24Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I downloaded it on my Disney Plus and it said Star Original, and I felt so glamorous. It's like I was eating a packet of crisps.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 9:32Andy Greenwald?

  You know what I mean?

• 9:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a, that's a reference to potato chips in London?

• 9:37Andy Greenwald?

  Cigarettes.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Cigarettes, I see. I got this off Kazaa. I downloaded it. Yeah, I pirated it.

• 9:43Andy Greenwald?

  Good for you.

• 9:44Speaker 04

  So I'm excited, yeah.

• 9:44Andy Greenwald?

  So all episodes were up. This is, again, if you listened to Thursday, you heard Chris's interview with Patrick Raddenkeefe, the New Yorker writer who wrote the book Say Nothing, upon which this is based. He's an executive producer. So Chris was Raddenkeefe-pilled. He was ready for this. He's read the book. I have not. I was blown away by how good the show is. And not in a, I am ready to invest thought and podcast capital in adult project, like in something that is thoughtful and cerebral and historical and rich. I just thought this fucking rips. Like, it is so, so entertaining. And I feel like you and I had the same experience, where we were both hoping to check out a little bit of

• 10:25Andy Greenwald?

  it in advance of talking today, and I think we both binged through over half.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, this has been the least amount of television I think I've watched in my adult life this year.

• 10:36Andy Greenwald?

  Yes. Recently, I mean, busy, busyness aside, there just hasn't been that thing.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's been, obviously, we had a great season of Industry, which you guys covered. We had Shogun, which was great. There were a handful of comedies this year that I've enjoyed. But I have been fully movie-pilled this year in a big way. Plus, as you know, raising a toddler, like, it just, like, slices right into the time that you spend watching TV shows. So. I, that being said, I audiobooked this book.

• 11:06Andy Greenwald?

  Did you?

• 11:07Speaker 04

  My, my dad is now Patrick Raddenkeith Pild, and he sent me The Snakehead for my birthday, which was his first book, which I've been reading, which is really, really good.

• 11:15Andy Greenwald?

  About crime in Chinatown, I believe.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Correct, about an epic crime lordess, like an older woman who runs a, a crime ring. And so I'm, I'm a huge fan of his work as well, been reading him in the New York for many years. And of course, this story is, is familiar to me, familiar to my family.

• 11:31Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Um, I would not consider myself an expert on this period at all, but I've seen movies about it in the past, you know, Steve McQueen has a movie this fall and he famously made Hunger, which is about kind of ancillary some of the figures here. So I was very interested. But I agree completely with what you just said, which is that in addition to this being certainly a very important historical story, like it's a, it's an actually sort of fun show, even though it's quite grim and quite intense in terms of what it's portraying, very propulsive and entertaining.

• 11:59Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. And I think the balancing act of doing that is particularly noteworthy because at least so far, and I think you and I both are almost five episodes deep in this out of nine, this show does not seem to be fearful of existing in a moral gray area. Now, all caveats here are necessary that like to be an American 50 years on is very, very different than even being a English person or an Irish person, Northern Irish person, whatever you might say today, you know, like I was reading reviews of the show in the UK and they come at it from a different place, as well they should. So I don't mean to be glib when we talk about it, although I might end up being slightly, just to say that purely as a work

• 12:41Andy Greenwald?

  of art, I'm really, really, really inspired by the fact that it is deeply alive and fun at times, does not take itself too seriously when appropriate, and then is capable of hitting the kind of moral ambiguity and deep, deep emotional anguish necessary.

• 12:59Speaker 04

  What, what is the, um, what are the UK reviews like?

• 13:03Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, well, it's just like, so there was a review in The Guardian, I don't want to get it wrong, I'm just saying this off the top of my head, but was basically like, this is extremely well made and it, and it goes down the list and that the actors and the adaptation and even I think giving a shout out to the, the book, but basically saying that. It's a tough one.

• 13:20Speaker 04

  Because it's wildly sympathetic to terrorists?

• 13:22Andy Greenwald?

  Well, basically, yes. Basically, it is humanizing people, and particularly in Dolores Price, who's the main character, played just absolutely brilliantly by Lola Pettit-Crew and Maxine Peake, who plays the older version of the character. But I believe the writer in The Guardian was like, I grew up in Manchester, and there was a bombing that killed people. And so I existed, my experience of this is on the other end of it. In no way is the reviewer saying, I deny the humanity of the people on the other side of it, but that this is still a very raw thing. And it was interesting, she was basically like, I'm giving this three stars, even though it might be better than that in some ways. Like aesthetically, but morally or historically, I struggle with it.

• 13:58Speaker 04

  That's really a useful way of thinking about art, about complicated subjects, though. I mean, and in its way thoughtful. You know, I think that I would much rather people be candid about that sort of thing, rather than restrain themselves in print, but then grind an axe in a review.

• 14:12Andy Greenwald?

  And I feel that way about artists, too. Because you can't... The sense I get, and again, maybe this is because of the supreme artistry of those involved, like Josh the Tumor, who adapted it, or Michael Lennox, who directed a bunch of it. Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson from Color Force are executive producers, and they've done great work before steering complicated historical ships. But clearly, they didn't come into this with a moral mandate. They did not come into this saying, we are going to show you people who think they are good, but they are bad. Or people who are bad, but maybe secretly... It's just not that binary. So it allows for the story to be the story. We can see why Dolores makes certain choices. We can see her parents behave in certain ways.

• 14:57Andy Greenwald?

  And most importantly, I think it puts you in the shoes of people who are suffering and then are given opportunities to, at least in their mind, to address that suffering.

• 15:07Speaker 04

  Right.

• 15:09Andy Greenwald?

  It's also clear from the beginning, and by the really brilliant... I'm usually not a fan of stories being told in two timelines.

• 15:17Andy Greenwald?

  I was gonna say two time zones, but this is a podcast only being done in two time zones.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  You only feel like you're in two time zones right now.

• 15:23Andy Greenwald?

  But because, you know, because, A, it's often an awkward jumble of like, which story are you telling? Are you kind of spoiling the story that you hope to express by showing us how it ends ahead of time? But what it's doing here, it's so artfully done and interwoven that you just get this sense of creeping doubts. You know, and creeping doubts are really all many of us have in this world these days. Certainly you heard that in my voice and with Chris last week at Spotify. So Spotify UK. But yeah, I intentionally want to go back to saying that the show rips because it it almost shouldn't. There's so many obstacles for it feeling light on its feet and it seems to just be dancing through those obstacles.

• 16:00Speaker 04

  Well, I think you can be honest about some of the ways in which a critic for the Guardian might bump on it because it I don't. I'm not sure if glamorize is the right word, but there are choices that are made. Think about the way that the lead actors look, you know, they're they're beautiful. Dollars in real life, Dollars Price was was quite attractive and striking, had this red hair. But, you know, Lola Pettigrew is incredibly striking and Anthony Boyle as Brendan Hughes is incredibly striking. These are good looking actors, set to really cool Brit rock of the late 60s and early 70s throughout. There are these gracefully and exciting violent set pieces in many of these movies because of the bombings and the shootings that were going on during this period.

• 16:45Speaker 04

  And you've got this kind of classical war between the system and the rebels, you know, it is it's Star Wars. Like, that's really what this is. That's what they're showing us is this kind of conflict. This kind of like low intensity, uneven conflict between David and Goliath. And so that's like naturally inherently exciting. Are these acts of terrorism or they acts of freedom bound rebellion like I, you know, it's it's been debated forever and will always be debated. I'm an Irishman. I have a complicated relationship with the UK personally, you know, I've talked about it on podcasts before. I'm, you know, I'm second generation, a lot of members of my family have a really nasty relationship with the UK. I'm not Northern Irish. They have an even more complicated relationship. So, you know, I I try to approach this not from the same emotional perspective.

• 17:29Speaker 04

  I I tend to love storytelling like this, like crime stories set in history is my bag. So I'm very comfortable, you know, being excited by a show like this. But I think it's reasonable for anybody to feel a little bit of emotional discomfort by what you're getting excited by.

• 17:48Andy Greenwald?

  Anthony Boyle, we have to shout out again, he's the real deal.

• 17:51Speaker 04

  Like, he is incredible in this series.

• 17:52Andy Greenwald?

  He is so, so good in this series. And I love the way the show steers into, and he's playing a character known as Dark, and then perhaps ironically, or not, is sort of revealed to be almost not dark enough to see where this is going.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:08Andy Greenwald?

  There's an incredible scene midway through, I won't necessarily spoil the specifics of it, but when he has a collision, basically, with Jerry Adams, and it's a conversation over the, an argument over the cause of the people. And Anthony Boyle's character says that the cause is the people. And it's just an incredibly stark illustration of something that is still very relevant today, which is just, why do we, why do we fight the fights that we fight? What motivates us to do it?

• 18:39Speaker 04

  It's a useful time to be asking that question.

• 18:41Andy Greenwald?

  It really, really is. And I'm just blown away by the, by the performance. I did want to ask you, since you mentioned the Steve McQueen film, and also, I think that my own experience is extremely limited, and not in any way culturally suffused with the troubles, but comes from a couple of movies over a 30-year period that I've seen. So, in many ways, a lot of the show is an education for me, which I appreciate, and I hope it's, I hope it's a fairly accurate one. But I feel like we're about to have a deeper conversation about the ways TV continually makes mistakes that seem, in telling stories that could be movies. Or maybe would be better served by being movies.

• 19:21Andy Greenwald?

  Why do you think, at least through halfway, why is Say Nothing succeeding? In the sense that the goals of A Hunger, or A Crying Game, or, what's the other one that I'm thinking of? With the Liam Neeson movie? No, that's a different era.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  That's different, yeah, that's Michael Collins. 71 is an example of this.

• 19:41Andy Greenwald?

  That's the one, 71 is the one I was thinking of.

• 19:42Speaker 04

  Jack O'Connell movie, I mean Belfast recently is an example of this, you know, Kenneth Branagh. And I think, actually, when you look at, like, the production design of Belfast, which isn't black and white, but it looks very similar to the way that Belfast is portrayed in this TV series. It's very, very close to those sort of, like, connected brick. In apartments.

• 19:58Andy Greenwald?

  So why do you think the movies that we just listed, the ones that you feel are successful? Like what, what, how do they accomplish their goals versus what Say Nothing is doing? Because Say Nothing is, you know, it's, it's longer, obviously. It is more in-depth. It's telling a story over time in two timelines. And I think that it seems to understand the need to build, like just the way all TV, good TV does. It's telling a propulsive story. There's a lot of plot. There's a lot of characters that are given room to develop emotionally over time. The effect is not the effect of a successful film, which is often to leave you with a strong haymaker punch of a, of a specific emotion.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Well, I think most of the best films, I mean, there's other, there's lots of other films. There's Bloody Sunday, there's In the Name of the Father. You know, Jim Sheridan has made movies about this.

• 20:42Andy Greenwald?

  That's the one I was thinking of.

• 20:43Speaker 04

  There's so many, so many good movies. The Outsiders, a famous one.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  Most of those films are about one or two characters and they're about one or two events. And they take place.

• 20:53Andy Greenwald?

  And extrapolate from those events.

• 20:55Speaker 04

  Yes, and maybe they take place over the course of 20 or 30 years, but they're mostly focusing tightly on Bobby Sands as one figure where you want to spend all your energy. You could have spent more time, I think, on the hunger strike, you know, this portrayed in McQueen's film. This show has more leads, you know? It's, you could make the case there are five leads in this show. In addition to that, it's trying to traverse 30 years and a number, and a sequence of events. We haven't even seen the back half of the show, but I mean, there's a lot of history that transpires between wherever we are. We're like at 72 right now in the fifth episode. You know, the Good Friday Agreement's not till 1998, you know? Like this is, there's a long way to go here in terms of this conflict. It's not as heated as it is in the seventies there.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  But I'm not quite sure how they're going to close the loop and how much of, you know, Rad and Keith's story they want to tell. This doesn't feel like, oh, this should have been a movie to me. But maybe if it was only dollars a story.

• 21:50Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  It could have been.

• 21:52Andy Greenwald?

  It, yeah, I mean, I think that's exactly right. There's a, if you want to make a story about one woman, she is an incredible protagonist with a lot of rich inner and outer life to explore. But you would need a very specific point of view aesthetically, but also a reason to tell that story. And, you know, a clear sense of what you wanted to communicate. This is telling us a history and it is sprawling. But I'm really struck by just these very simple choices that were made. But they appear simple. I actually think they are not simple because we see them get screwed up again and again and again. And I feel like, again, I don't think this is a spoiler. If you're about to check the show out, you will see this happen. But I was struck by the first episode, which sort of introduces us to Dullers and her sister,

• 22:35Andy Greenwald?

  Marion, and they're quite young and they're quite, not naive, but they are a lot more innocent in their view of the world and how they see it. And Dullers is planning to go to art school and they're going to be into nonviolent protests. And their parents, who have been members of the IRA for quite some time, are a little skeptical, let's say, of their naivete. What struck me about that first episode is I was in on that show. I was in on that version of the show right away. If this was a, you know, kitchen sink, urban drama about a period about parents and kids who don't understand each other in an era of tumultuous change, which I think Belfast was some of that.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  Sort of that. It's through the eyes of a very young boy. But yeah, Saturday night and Sunday morning, but for the troubles.

• 23:22Andy Greenwald?

  Exactly. And if it was that, I was like, they're doing this really well. And I already feel a place, a sensibility, an aesthetic, a point of view, and I'm centered in Dullers and where she is. I feel like a lot of historical shows begin at the end and work backwards in the sense of like, where do we, where are we, what's the thing we're excited about showing? And it might be a bombing in this case, or it might be a kidnapping. This show seemed equally interested in the early stuff as it is, and I presume in the later stuff. And that's, that's TV logic. That's not history logic. That's not magazine profile logic necessarily. That's TV logic, and it was exciting to see that on display.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  The one thing that happens, though, before we see that

• 24:03Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Is we do get this. Sudden and almost like disambiguated little moment where we see a kidnapping transpire. We see a family living in an apartment complex. And the mother is a mother of 10 children. She sends off her 16 year old daughter out to go get some groceries and come back. The chippy, that's right, the chippy. You know all the lingo now.

• 24:25Andy Greenwald?

  So that's, that's a shop that sells fish and chips. And by chips, to be clear, I mean like french fries.

• 24:30Speaker 04

  What?

• 24:31Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, yeah. They're really good.

• 24:32Speaker 04

  Is that what they call it?

• 24:33Andy Greenwald?

  It's bizarre.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  They are crazy.

• 24:35Andy Greenwald?

  They really are crazy.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  Um, the kidnapping is incredibly scary and violent. And we come to learn that these incredibly violent and scary kidnappers are the heroes of our show.

• 24:45Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  And, and that is what's kind of meant to like upset us, flummox our expectations of what it is that we're watching. And it's a really good choice. I usually hate when new TV shows are like, I'm gonna show you a little five minute snatch of something that happens in history, but it's not actually our main story, but we'll come back to it. That's such a tired thing.

• 25:01Andy Greenwald?

  It's so cliched and it's done to death. And, but it's not just that it's done to death. It's rarely done with the specific purpose that this one is done. Which isn't to say it's just like, well, we want to, we want to communicate in the first five minutes that this is going to be a propulsive, exciting, even violent story. And that's hard to do when we're at the dinner table with the two 16 year old sisters, or 16 and 17, whatever the case may be.

• 25:30Andy Greenwald?

  It's what you just mentioned. We're introduced to one of the story's most propulsive inflection points, but it is just suffused in, um, not just ambiguity, it's deeply disturbing.

• 25:42Speaker 04

  It's upsetting, scary.

• 25:43Andy Greenwald?

  This is not anyone's finest moment. And as the story unfolds, it is, you know, I think it's parceled out really well in terms of when we catch up to it and then how we move forward from it. But it's, it's telling you something else. And I think that that is, it's rarely, you rarely see the double act. Often the like, here's the exciting thing, six years earlier. Because you're afraid of how boring your story might be, or you're afraid of your audience having to have their hands held. It's not that, this is purpose of intent. Well, you know, the, sorry, statement of intent that like, this is not going to be clear cut. This is not going to be easy.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Maybe you can underline this for me, but the way that I always read this choice, and this happens on network shows, on streamers, on any, any kind of TV show. This is such a common strategy for mini series, for ongoing shows. Is one, it obviously sets up what you're describing. Two, it sets up this idea of sort of like a mystery that needs to be solved. When will we go back to that moment that we saw so that it keeps you on the line? But three, and I think this is more critical, is there's so much fear about people turning shows off in the first five minutes.

• 26:44Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, my God.

• 26:44Speaker 04

  So much fear. And it's the same, we have it with podcasts here at Spotify. We have it with all culture consumption. This like, how do I hold your attention? How can I hold you for more than 30 seconds? The way to do it is to make something in a drama series like this about history set in the 1970s in a country you've probably never been to. Make it intense and scary.

• 27:02Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  Get people excited. And usually it sucks.

• 27:06Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 27:06Speaker 04

  And for whatever reason, in this case, it does not.

• 27:08Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think it, it all, it does come down to that. I mean, the, as you know this as well as I do, the, the dominant emotion inside the executive rooms and development, development offices in this town is fear. And a lot of the fear comes from, how do we, how do we even begin to have an audience? Everything is just slipping through everyone's fingers. There's too much of it. Nothing is sticky. Nothing breaks through. And, you know, I get to FX's credit, like, they really, really are just in the pocket being like, we're just gonna make good stuff and it's gonna, it's gonna, it's gonna get figured out. And yes, are they partly able to do that due to the largesse of the Walt Disney Company at this point? Probably. But this is an extreme example of it.

• 27:53Andy Greenwald?

  There is no one famous in this show to American eyes unless you're just like a dedicated Rory Kinnear head.

• 27:59Speaker 04

  Which I am.

• 28:00Andy Greenwald?

  Which we both are.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  The, the single person who is a fan of the film Men, written and directed by Alex Garland, yes.

• 28:06Andy Greenwald?

  That's, that's.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  I'm the lone man who is a fan of Men.

• 28:09Andy Greenwald?

  It's ironic, really, considering the title. I'm a fan of his sweater game in the show.

• 28:12Speaker 04

  Incredible. I described him, I was trying to remember his name while I was watching the show with my wife, and I was like, he played the prime minister in the first episode of Black Mirror.

• 28:21Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, the pig fucking episode.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that was the best way I knew how to describe him to my wife.

• 28:25Andy Greenwald?

  I think to his, I guess, I, good natured spirit, like, that will be his obituary, you know? He's a healthy man. He's gonna do great work.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  I mean, in England, he's famous. And he's, he's Tanner in all the Daniel Craig Bond films. Like, he's, he's, he's a well-known character actor.

• 28:42Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, but it, you know, it's the Ned Beatty effect.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:45Andy Greenwald?

  You know, in the sense that like, you have a, you have a, you have a surprising sexual encounter. Where the word pig is mentioned.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  See, for me, as a Chayefsky loyalist, there'll always be networks, Ned Beatty, not deliverances, Ned Beatty.

• 28:59Andy Greenwald?

  Who are you talking to? Me too, I'm just speaking for the common man now.

• 29:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:03Andy Greenwald?

  I'm reading the cultural winds here, Sean.

• 29:04Speaker 04

  Right, that's just, the pig fucking is everywhere.

• 29:06Andy Greenwald?

  We're in a deliverance era, not a network era.

• 29:08Speaker 04

  Okay. So, are we? Are we sure?

• 29:11Andy Greenwald?

  Well, let's keep an eye on that. Last thing, will you tell me, was this just the being on an 11 and a half hour flight when I was watching this show? Or did you have this experience too? Where I actually had to check if the characters were being played by older actors or not? Because I thought that the performances and the look were uncanny, that I thought it was possible.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  I think they were well cast. I think, I think particularly Tom Von Lawler and Anthony Boyle, who both play Brendan Hughes, are very close. That looks like Brendan Hughes 20 years later.

• 29:47Andy Greenwald?

  It's right, it's not just that it looks like Brendan Hughes, it looks like the emotional successor of the character we're seeing.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 29:53Andy Greenwald?

  Because he does not have the sparkle anymore.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 29:55Andy Greenwald?

  He looks beaten down, he looks softer, he looks like he's, he looks like he's changed his mind in a profound way. I don't mean that politically, because I don't even fully know what's going on with him, but that.

• 30:05Speaker 04

  Von Lawler's also giving a great performance, just essentially into camera while he's being interviewed about his time in the IRA.

• 30:12Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think, does this mean that now in your personal rolodex, Tom Von Lawler will be remembered for this and not for his role as Ebony Maw in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame?

• 30:23Speaker 04

  This is not a joke at all. I am a huge fan of his performance as Ebony Maw. I shouted it out many times in 20.

• 30:29Andy Greenwald?

  You did not.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  I swear to God, you can ask Bobby Wagner, my producer, I would constantly reference how amusing I found Ebony Maw in the Infinity War Endgame.

• 30:38Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think he overshadowed Carey Kuhn as Proxima Midnight?

• 30:40Speaker 04

  I mean, no one could, but he had more to do.

• 30:43Andy Greenwald?

  He's got, he's got this great opening sequence in Endgame.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Oh, that's him.

• 30:46Andy Greenwald?

  Opposite Iron Man and Doctor Strange, yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 04

  That's Ebony Maw.

• 30:50Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, Ebony Maw.

• 30:51Speaker 04

  He's like the, the sort of the wizard, the first in command amongst Thanos's children.

• 30:56Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. Doesn't, doesn't work out great for him.

• 30:58Speaker 04

  No, he takes a few L's. He actually takes multiple L's over time. One with Spider-Man on the ship and then the reanimated new version of him in Endgame. Remember, remember, remember when the Marvel movies were kind of interesting?

• 31:09Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, and I'm actually having to relive some of them because my kids are now really into the Tom Holland Spider-Man. And I was like, wait, wait, this is so, you'll love this. I was like, okay, but wait for me to watch the third one. Because if you haven't watched the Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield movies, you might be a little bit lost. And also Doctor Strange, and they were like, okay dad. And then it's not just that they watched it while I was away in London this last time. They watched it the night I left when I was on the plane.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Well, it tells you a lot, doesn't it?

• 31:36Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  And so they didn't, but they didn't watch any of that other stuff?

• 31:39Andy Greenwald?

  No, no, they were like, it's sad. There was like, it's really sad. But then, then my older daughter was like, it's really sad, but the fourth one's coming out June 25th, 2026. And I was like, so the release dates are for you, not just for shareholders?

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Or for discussion on this podcast.

• 31:54Andy Greenwald?

  I thank God. Wait till she finds out I have a podcast. She will not care.

• 31:59Speaker 04

  I, my take on those three Spider-Man movies is they're not good, but I like them.

• 32:03Andy Greenwald?

  Well, this was a painful realization for me. Maybe you heard me say this, that like, I thought they were good. And I think maybe I was wrong.

• 32:09Speaker 04

  They look really bad at home.

• 32:11Andy Greenwald?

  They look bad at home, but also I had completely forgotten how afraid of its own tail Homecoming was. That it was just like, let's front load this as an Avengers movie as much as possible. Until we even get to the movie that presumably they wanted to make or that like, they had marketed internally as like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. There is so much time, including the introduction of Tyne Daly as the director of Damage Control.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  Forgot about that. It's tough. They do have Marisa Tomei.

• 32:40Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, which, and she's the real, here, I actually think this is a kind of classy thing. My daughter's tuned in for Zendaya, but came out being like, we love Aunt May.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Oh, wow. Interesting. Got to show my cousin Vinny.

• 32:52Andy Greenwald?

  I think they could handle that.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah, sure.

• 32:54Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 05

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• 33:56Andy Greenwald?

  So anyway, boy, that was a great, that was a great pivot.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  I mean Ebony Maw brings us together.

• 34:00Andy Greenwald?

  Ebony Maw, I mean, he tried to bring the Stones together.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  I mean, in some ways, he did. He, he won in the first film.

• 34:07Andy Greenwald?

  He did, and then...

• 34:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, he got snapped.

• 34:10Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  It's tough.

• 34:11Andy Greenwald?

  That's tough.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  Sometimes I wish I could get snapped.

• 34:13Andy Greenwald?

  Really?

• 34:13Speaker 04

  I do, sometimes.

• 34:15Andy Greenwald?

  Was one of those times November 5th? It's usually... Let's give me five years.

• 34:19Speaker 04

  No.

• 34:19Andy Greenwald?

  Give me five years in the Dust Realm?

• 34:21Speaker 04

  It's always when I'm in the midst of an 18-minute screaming session for my toddler, where she's just like, "I will not stop." And I'm like, "If I could just snap the next 18 minutes, I would do it. I would do it."

• 34:31Andy Greenwald?

  I will, and I'm sorry to do this, but I will say, like, as a vision of your fut- as, as the Tom Von Lawler to your Brett Anthony Boyle, I will say that the "I refuse to do it" screaming sessions are actually quaint and much missed compared to...

• 34:48Speaker 04

  Don't say this.

• 34:49Andy Greenwald?

  Compared to...

• 34:50Speaker 04

  Don't say this.

• 34:51Andy Greenwald?

  Yesterday? Wait. Yesterday, I was with my daughters, and I, you know, just got back on late, late, late Saturday, and I was like, "Let's cross the street." And they were like, "Let's go to the traffic light." They're not New Yorkers anymore. And I was like, "Let's just cross here, it's fine." And so I started to, like, edge out into the street, and they were really mad at me about doing that.

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 35:11Andy Greenwald?

  And my older daughter said... Don't, Dad, don't do that. I was like, come on, it's open. And she said, don't do that. I said, come on. And she said, don't do that, Dad. Go back to London. No one missed you.

• 35:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know I've got a lot of that coming my way.

• 35:27Andy Greenwald?

  That was worse.

• 35:29Speaker 04

  That's, that's bad.

• 35:29Andy Greenwald?

  Guess what I did? Put my ass back on the sidewalk. I was like, thank you for teaching me proper street crossing etiquette.

• 35:36Speaker 04

  As someone who has been ticketed for jaywalking in Burbank.

• 35:39Andy Greenwald?

  You have.

• 35:40Speaker 04

  I, I understand where she's coming from.

• 35:42Andy Greenwald?

  Well, you're a scofflaw. I think we all know that. This was your own.

• 35:47Speaker 04

  It's well known.

• 35:48Andy Greenwald?

  Lowercase t troubles.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  RCR heads.

• 35:49Andy Greenwald?

  You and Burbank. Alright, so anyway, we love Say Nothing. I'm sure Chris and I will cover it more. I think it's a guarantee gonna be on my top 10 at this point. It's, I'm really, I, I repeat myself. I'm so thrilled about how well made it is, but I'm also so thrilled about how entertaining it is.

• 36:06Speaker 04

  Agreed.

• 36:07Andy Greenwald?

  Okay, so pivot point here. I wanted to talk about a bunch of other things, but particularly, I do think it's relevant, that question I was asking you about what to Say Nothing do versus what movies about the troubles do. I wanted to briefly talk about disclaimer, which is an insane thing. Like, its existence is totally crazy. Alfonso Cuarón, a great filmmaker, a much, much lionized and celebrated filmmaker, has not made a film since Roma. Is that correct?

• 36:35Speaker 04

  I believe so, yes.

• 36:37Andy Greenwald?

  And that was 2018?

• 36:38Speaker 04

  2018.

• 36:38Andy Greenwald?

  Instead, he made his seven-episode version of Big Little Lies.

• 36:42Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:43Andy Greenwald?

  And he made it with Chivo Lubowski. It looks beautiful.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  And Bruno Del Benel.

• 36:48Andy Greenwald?

  Yes. Oh, two, he has two of the best cinematographers working, some of the best actors alive, especially Cate Blanchett. And it's really awful, like in some pretty surprising ways. It looks beautiful. There's no question. And I'm not coming in here being like, guess what? I'm just gonna pull Cate Blanchett's card. Like, everybody's really great. But it is a testament to like, actors can elevate, and then actors can also just truly, truly believe in something that might not be worth their time. I've now seen the whole series. I won't spoil it. I will say that after watching the finale, I now understand why Cate Blanchett did the project. She delivers a monologue in this that I'm like, oh yeah, she is, she's the goat. But without spoiling it, I think everybody who's engaged with the show understands that

• 37:33Andy Greenwald?

  there was some sort of twist coming. There was some sort of unreliable business. And that is absolutely the case.

• 37:38Speaker 04

  I don't mind you spoiling it. I don't know if you're afraid, concerned to spoil it for the audience.

• 37:42Andy Greenwald?

  I don't want to spoil it for the audience. I don't know if they care. And maybe Chris and I will spoil it, spoil the shit out of it on Thursday.

• 37:49Andy Greenwald?

  Just to say that for me, this twist was not worth it and was a little bit, well, I won't get too far into it. I'll just say that having watched it all and then read some interviews and Quarone is like, the twist is why I made this. It was all in the service of what happens in Seven because, he doesn't use these words, I'm paraphrasing, but the, basically, he's just like, what was important was that you were tricked because you believed something for a long time and then it was proved not to be true. And so it forces you to question your own assumptions. And what this reminded me of, because, okay, sure. What I wanted to say to you is that doesn't work on television. I don't think you can build a seven hour story on the revelation of a trick or of

• 38:34Andy Greenwald?

  a surprise. You can't Kaiser Soze on TV. If, even if you do it in a limited series, I think you need to make seven hours of caring about Verbal Kent. And movies, and I do not mean this to diminish the great art of cinema, of which I'm increasingly a bigger, bigger believer after all this TV I've been watching this year.

• 38:56Andy Greenwald?

  Movies, I think, because they are so focused, can do that in a way. You can make a two hour experience that is about pulling something out of you like a Jenga tile and feeling, that feeling of collapse as you walk out.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's novel versus short story.

• 39:10Andy Greenwald?

  It is novel.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Oh, Henry, you're, you feel satisfied at the end of 28 pages.

• 39:15Andy Greenwald?

  But, but, yes, but, but even more, I'm trying, I wish I had come prepared with more examples of movies that have. Tumbled me.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  I got you, I got you.

• 39:23Andy Greenwald?

  And I feel like you've got this.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  I got you. This is so clear to me in this exact moment because I've been thinking about four films that are in the culture right now.

• 39:29Andy Greenwald?

  Four films?

• 39:30Speaker 04

  Four theatrically released movies.

• 39:32Andy Greenwald?

  My god, all I needed was one.

• 39:33Speaker 04

  All four films have something that could be called a kind of revelation in the third act.

• 39:37Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 39:38Speaker 04

  I'm not sure if the twist is quote unquote as big as in disclaimer because I have not seen disclaimer. The fact that I can't, like, I could not get through the second episode. I was so stunned by how bad I thought it was.

• 39:47Andy Greenwald?

  You started, I didn't really know.

• 39:48Speaker 04

  I tried it and I couldn't get into it and I love Quarrel. I'm a huge fan of Quarrel. And, but that these four films that I would describe as what most prestige television is or is trying to be are high middlebrow.

• 40:02Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  They're mainstream entertainments that aspire to some bigger ideas. The four movies are Conclave.

• 40:09Andy Greenwald?

  Right, can't wait to see it.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  Juror Number Two, Clint Eastwood's new film. We Live in Time, are you familiar with this movie?

• 40:15Andy Greenwald?

  This is the Andrew Garfield movie?

• 40:16Speaker 04

  Andrew Garfield with Florence Pugh.

• 40:17Andy Greenwald?

  And the horse.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  And the golden horse, yes, the golden horse. The horse does not figure into the twist in any way, I promise. And Heretic, the new Hugh Grant horror thriller.

• 40:27Andy Greenwald?

  All of these are playing now, right? Is the Andrew Garfield movie out?

• 40:29Speaker 04

  They're all open now.

• 40:30Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 04

  They're all doing surprisingly okay business.

• 40:34Andy Greenwald?

  Mm-hmm.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  Moderate to good business for mainstream movies with like stars but not mega-stars. You know, like Refines is, everybody loves Refines, but nobody's rushing out to the theater just for him. Likewise for Nicholas Holt, likewise for Andrew Garfield, likewise for Hugh Grant.

• 40:51Andy Greenwald?

  You know what all these people have in common?

• 40:54Speaker 04

  British men.

• 40:55Andy Greenwald?

  They also spend a lot of time in London.

• 40:56Speaker 04

  They do.

• 40:56Andy Greenwald?

  Like me.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. Although these are all American productions as far as I know.

• 41:00Andy Greenwald?

  Well, so am I.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 41:01Andy Greenwald?

  As far as I know.

• 41:02Speaker 04

  That's a good point. All four of these movies have this thing that you're describing. All four of them are, to my mind, deeply entertaining.

• 41:12Speaker 04

  None of them are the best movie of the year. In fact, none of them I would just, I would even describe as great or excellent. But they're good.

• 41:19Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  They're all good.

• 41:20Andy Greenwald?

  And that's not, that's not nothing.

• 41:21Speaker 04

  It's not nothing. And for what I do, Mona from Heaven. It's incredible to get movies like this. Like, I haven't had time to talk about We Live in Time because Amanda's been on leave. And I really want to talk to her about that movie. You know, she knows that I have a, I have an Andrew Garfield fetish and a Florence Pugh fetish. And, you know, I'm a bit of a sap when it comes to stories like this. So like, I really want to talk to her about that movie, but I'm gonna wait until she comes back. Nevertheless, these, this is perfect for the movie container, the one hour and 49 minute container.

• 41:48Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 04

  And you can feel satisfied and not duped. Like Heretic, for example, is a movie I really liked, which is about religion and about what, like, kind of what, what is and isn't the same amongst religions around the world and how we confront some of those ideas. I thought the third act kind of stumbled a bit. It didn't really have that ending, that conclusion that I was excited about. But I didn't feel bad about having spent two hours at an AMC watching the movie.

• 42:11Andy Greenwald?

  It's worth a shot.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  It was worth it. If I had invested nine hours in, in the Heretic TV show, I would have been pissed. So I think that's what you're getting at is like, you guys, you and Chris have all this tonnage to work through. And it's so often unsatisfying.

• 42:25Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I think there's two points there. One is, that is a thousand percent the case. It is an investment versus return on investment conversation. And especially now that we live in a world where there's just fewer and fewer. And the industry claims it's gonna reverse this. We have some examples of it, but fewer and fewer ongoing shows. Where just the, the labor is spread out over time, amortized, if you will. And then also, the stories are built a certain way to deliver whatever their delivery system's for in consistent amount at consistent times. That is one thing. I think the deeper question on this point that I think might not be relevant, because we're gonna move on from disclaimer as a society, but also, um, but Apple doesn't care.

• 43:08Andy Greenwald?

  It's just like, they just wrote him a check and they made the show and it exists. He insists it needed to be a television show. And I- Strongly disagree with that. But specifically, the fact that he was still using the movie logic, which is to say, where this is going is worth whatever it takes to get there because of what I want to leave you with. Very, very few TV shows, and certainly very few successful ones, begin with a sense of what they want to leave the audience with, because the goal, that might be years away. And in the case of the very best shows, they might not even have introduced the key character or the key romance yet. It might be years away from even hiring that person, or having that idea, or writing that scene you didn't expect.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  This is why I respond to the troubles, by the way, because I know it's going to end.

• 43:54Andy Greenwald?

  That's really true. In 1998, from what you said.

• 43:57Speaker 04

  Well, maybe.

• 43:58Andy Greenwald?

  Thanks for the spoiler.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  Not necessarily.

• 44:01Andy Greenwald?

  It's just that Disclaimer was not only not interested in doing any of the work of giving us a reason to care about these miserable people, these humorless, humorless fucking people, for six of the seven hours. It's like he didn't even understand the question. You know what I mean? And there's a reason why the next movie he makes will likely not be seven hours.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  I hope not.

• 44:22Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, I certainly hope not. But do you know what I mean? It's like, it doesn't merit that. You need to invest in the storytelling mechanism of the box that you're putting your work into. All this is to say, people seem more and more confused about what this box, what these two boxes are. I want to make a joke about the pain box, since we're about to talk about.

• 44:43Speaker 04

  I was going to say, this seems inextricable from the Dune prophecy conversation.

• 44:45Andy Greenwald?

  That's basically where we're headed.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  Look at you, you've really wended quite a beautiful road for us.

• 44:50Andy Greenwald?

  I'm exhausted, honestly. Been up since four. But, uh, yeah, this is an example of, once again, I think Hollywood, or the executive class, or the whomever, just kind of misunderstanding what it is they have and what to do with it. Do you want to start from that, like, broader place? Or should we get into the specifics of the show first and build up from there?

• 45:14Speaker 04

  Disclaimer is very similar to me that, um, to a movie that I'm talking about on The Big Picture this week, which is Red One. That might sound crazy that I would think that they're similar, but they are similar, which is that they are big swings from a lot of high-powered people, from major streaming service slash tech companies, that are original. Yes, they're original. And Disclaimer was a novel, but it's an original TV and film property. It's not based on anything beyond the book that they're adapting. Red One is certainly based on the mythology of Santa Claus, but it's an original story. And it's something that I call for all the time on the show that I'm basically a brat about. And then stuff comes along and I'm like, this stinks. I would much rather watch the new Marvel movie than Red One. I honestly would.

• 45:58Speaker 04

  And just like I, I probably would enjoy whatever is happening on the Walking Dead spinoff right now than I would disclaim her.

• 46:04Andy Greenwald?

  Don't drag Kai into this conversation.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  I'm very excited for her and her journey through that world. So the truth is, is like, there's no one size fits all. And Dune prophecy maybe is an example of that. That's an example of a, a brand extension from pre-existing property that could be good, could not be good. It's a little hard to tell. We just saw the premiere last night. I didn't love it. I really wish I liked it a lot more because I love the Dune films.

• 46:27Andy Greenwald?

  Well, let's say one thing at the top. I'm in a very fair-minded, good faith way. I think it's very, very possible to, for all of us to have things where we like both the wheat and the chaff, the milk and the cream. Like for a long time, until relatively recently, I was like, I actually like getting in the weeds with this Marvel stuff. Because I loved Marvel comics when I was a kid. So I, I am the target audience for their expansion into TV or more obscure characters because I love that shit. And I love sitting here being like, actually, Chris, Mephisto is the embodiment of a devil, not the canonical Judeo-Christian devil, or whatever. The last three years has kind of tested that.

• 47:12Andy Greenwald?

  And now I think I'm kind of less interested. Now with something like the DC Universe or especially Dune, it's been totally fine for me because let's just talk about Dune. I have not read the book, although I think I probably should at some point. I think it's kind of interesting. I didn't mean to be dismissive. I am kind of interested in the thought of reading the book.

• 47:31Speaker 04

  I wonder if your kids are gonna get into it too.

• 47:32Andy Greenwald?

  That has been discussed because they, it also Zendaya is in the movies. And that does seem to be the secret sauce for interest. I have not told them about Euphoria or the weird movie with John David Washington.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  Malcolm, Malcolm and Marie, another movie of which I am the lone fan.

• 47:46Andy Greenwald?

  Are you really?

• 47:46Speaker 04

  I am, yeah. I'm a defender, yeah.

• 47:48Andy Greenwald?

  God, what a, I, I love the island you've carved out of the ocean for yourself.

• 47:52Speaker 04

  I'm looking to the bright side of cinema.

• 47:54Andy Greenwald?

  It's beautiful.

• 47:57Andy Greenwald?

  Dune is, I love those movies too. And I love them because they are a very, very over the top celebration of pulse pounding, eardrum knocking, grandiose insanity.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  They're what movies are made for.

• 48:15Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, and the thing about Villeneuve that is pretty impressive, especially for this era, is he does seem to be able to, despite being a dyed in the wool mega geek about this stuff, he seems to understand the wheat chaff divide and be like, I'm just gonna cull the very, very, very best and noisiest bits of this and deliver it to you in the most over the top way possible, and I defy you to deny it, especially if you're in a, you know, a nice theater and it's just being shouted at you.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  No, it's Cecil B. Demille, it's Steven Spielberg. These are the, those are the templates. It is pure spectacle and awe and the highest level craft.

• 48:56Andy Greenwald?

  And there is no point, in my experience of these two recent Dune movies, where I was like, yeah, what was happening 10,000 years before this?

• 49:07Andy Greenwald?

  Like, that's cool, they genetically engineered a messiah, but who thought of that? You know what I mean?

• 49:12Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 49:14Andy Greenwald?

  There was no moment where I had the slightest drip of curiosity about what happened to the thinking machines.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  Turns out it was Emily Watson.

• 49:21Andy Greenwald?

  It was, no, it was Jessica Barden.

• 49:23Speaker 04

  It was Jessica Barden, that's true.

• 49:24Andy Greenwald?

  Who I will always have a spot.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  I do, I love her too.

• 49:26Andy Greenwald?

  It's the end of the fucking world, she's, she's great.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  She's always incredibly entertaining, but even watching that show, I was like, why is there not more Jessica Barden in this show?

• 49:33Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 49:33Speaker 04

  Why am I in this other future? It's the same thing as Say Nothing, where I'm like, so we're going to the past to go to the future, but that we're still in the past?

• 49:40Andy Greenwald?

  But also, yeah, we're still so far away from when the story got interesting, where even to the point, like, the show is hamstrung before it begins, because all the characters are like, this plan is gonna be sick in 10 millennia.

• 49:57Speaker 04

  Well, the other thing too is just that we know.

• 49:59Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  Like, we just saw.

• 50:00Andy Greenwald?

  Guess what? They did it.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  They did it. Like, it works out.

• 50:03Andy Greenwald?

  Well, does it? TBD.

• 50:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:04Andy Greenwald?

  But part three's coming soon.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  I mean, look, this is obviously something that Game of Thrones is dealing with now as well.

• 50:10Andy Greenwald?

  Well, this is what all these franchises are doing.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  They're all sort of like, we have to go back as opposed to forward. And, you know, Star Wars seems a bit trapped by what era of story it should be telling. I don't have the answers. I don't. This is literally not my line of work.

• 50:22Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  Um, I'm just a person who watches them and thinks about them. But I don't really care for 10,000 years in the past. That's not something I'm ever going to get invested in. I don't care about the origins of the Jedi, for example. That's, I just don't care.

• 50:36Andy Greenwald?

  No, and what's interesting about this is I've been, you know, in the, if you put, if one puts one screenwriter hat on, and in any, like, good writing room experience, or working with development executives, or working with, um, showrunners, like, the best advice you always get is write the scene that's the most important scene. If you've written three scenes that get you to the good scene, cut those scenes.

• 50:59Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:00Andy Greenwald?

  Those were practice. You don't need to see the player, you know, getting his ankle taped and walking down the tunnel. Show the highlights of the game.

• 51:10Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 51:11Andy Greenwald?

  For any number of reasons.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 51:12Andy Greenwald?

  The rules of storytelling, or audience engagement, or grabbing people early.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  In which ways did Aaron Rodgers fail to move the ball downfield? Show us those ways he failed.

• 51:21Andy Greenwald?

  Well, that would be a seven-hour Apple TV series. That's not a film.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  It actually is coming to Netflix. There is an Aaron Rodgers documentary series coming to Netflix.

• 51:28Andy Greenwald?

  Are you gonna be a talking head on it?

• 51:29Speaker 04

  I am not. They did not ask me to participate.

• 51:31Andy Greenwald?

  Could you, are you gonna do, are you gonna mummy it? Are there gonna be a lot of, like, Netflix momies for you in that?

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's, they're all gonna be like, my face when I'm the worst person in the world. And just images from that show.

• 51:41Andy Greenwald?

  I can't wait. But this is the advice that all good screenwriters learn from peers, mentors, whatever. And is, it's just great practice. And it's, you know, probably for writing anything. And yet, all of these same high-level screenwriters are now being employed in an industry where the market trends are encouraging them to do very much the opposite. Slow down. Tell us how they got to the interesting place.

• 52:06Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 52:07Andy Greenwald?

  Try to find something interesting along the way, even though if it had been really interesting, Frank fucking Herbert probably would have written about it. Like, he started in a certain place, too, probably for a reason.

• 52:17Speaker 04

  I mean, that's the other thing, too, is that this is based on novels that were written by his son after Frank Herbert passed away.

• 52:25Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 52:25Speaker 04

  So this is a real mega-brand extension.

• 52:28Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 52:29Speaker 04

  This isn't, you know, Dune Prophecy, which I believe was written by Frank Herbert, is not Dune Prophecy, excuse me, Dune Messiah.

• 52:34Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, that was a Frank Herbert.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  That's a Frank Herbert book. That's meant to be the next Villeneuve adaptation. So he's getting the prime rib, you know?

• 52:42Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, these are the offcuts.

• 52:44Speaker 04

  This is the skirt steak, you know? Like, it's cool. It's pretty cool. There's, the production design for a TV show is mind-blowing.

• 52:49Andy Greenwald?

  Except Sean, it's not the skirt steak, because what's great about skirt steak is when you have, like, a humble bistro chef who's like, "I can make this unloved cut delicious" by having fun with it and having some humility.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  You gotta dress it, all kinds of new spices.

• 53:02Andy Greenwald?

  You do not prepare it.

• 53:03Speaker 04

  Hey.

• 53:04Andy Greenwald?

  You do not prepare it the same way you would, uh, prime rib or filet or whatever, and then try to serve it to me in the same restaurant and charge me the same amount and tell me it's...

• 53:13Speaker 04

  It's true.

• 53:14Andy Greenwald?

  So, it's a tough one. I brought up this wheat chaff thing, basically, to be as generous as I could and to say that there are clearly spice heads out there.

• 53:24Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:25Andy Greenwald?

  Who are like, "Give me all of the Dune content." I have long wondered about the foundation of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood and their millennia-long quest to influence the royal line.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Well, there was, when I first started reading about this, and this show has had kind of a tortured production history.

• 53:41Andy Greenwald?

  Which I do want to talk about.

• 53:42Speaker 04

  Multiple showrunners over time, and they've had to change people out. But there was, when I first heard about it, I was like, "Oh, they're gonna, like, Yassify the Bene Gesserit." Like, this is gonna be the girl power Dune show.

• 53:53Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  And it is, but it's still incredibly staid and, um, there's a religiosity that is being captured here that is, like, kinda boring.

• 54:03Andy Greenwald?

  It is unfunny, it is unfun, it is unsexy. And Dune, by the way, at least the way we've seen in the movies, is not particularly any of those things, but it is ripe fodder for people who are kinda nuts. Like, both David Lynch and Denis Villeneuve have...

• 54:21Andy Greenwald?

  Gone full tilt on this property.

• 54:23Speaker 04

  Well, there's one other thing that is worth mentioning too, which is, you know, Denis Villeneuve like kicked up a little bit of a storm earlier this year when he was like, I don't care about dialogue.

• 54:29Andy Greenwald?

  A sandstorm?

• 54:30Speaker 04

  Oh, A O. Uh, when he's like, I'm not interested in dialogue.

• 54:33Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 54:34Speaker 04

  No, yours was good.

• 54:34Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, that's all right.

• 54:37Speaker 04

  The thing is, is that dialogue's important on TV. It's way more important on TV than his interviews.

• 54:42Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you for making this point. Yeah, he, I mean, to listen to him talk, I think it was on Fresh Air where he was just like, talking about the worm unit and like sending, which, no, no A O for that.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  But it's all worm unit, isn't it?

• 54:58Andy Greenwald?

  But then he was just like, also that, you know, in order to film all of the desert dialogue scenes in natural light, they just kept having to like reset up so that the sun was like, that's fucking crazy. That's crazy. That is, there's a religiosity to that, but it is spectacle. And that is what movies, I'm not gonna say should be, but they can be.

• 55:18Speaker 04

  Well, it's meant to be seen in IMAX too, as opposed to at home.

• 55:21Andy Greenwald?

  And, and yes, and TV is the opposite of that. And, you know, the genest version of this is to say is they're trying to pass off the skirt steak as the prime rib.

• 55:31Andy Greenwald?

  It's also hard to engage with this, you know, as you said, it's a very, very, it's not just that it's a tortured backstory, because show me any project in television these days that isn't slightly tortured. But the mandate to create this show, to have a companion show, to take advantage of the procurement of the Dune IP stretches back over eight years, I believe. The idea of this being a show that was going to air then on the Max Network and then now on HBO was announced in 2019. It was going to be called Dune: The Sisterhood. It was announced it would be about the Bene Gesserit and it would be based on this book.

• 56:13Andy Greenwald?

  Originally Villeneuve was going to direct the show and John Spates was going to write it and it was going to be much more clearly and closely entwined with their work on the movies. That's how these things always start. But then you know what they got busy doing? Making the movies. So then it just started to get a little bit, the slow drip, drip of dilution. Diane Demujon, who's a very talented writer and producer, was brought on and she's a big Dune true believer. Her version of the show is going to be made with Johann Rank, who made Chernobyl. And she was removed from the project. He fell off of the project, was delayed by the strike. They kept, they were chasing tax breaks around the world, filming in different places.

• 56:55Andy Greenwald?

  Cast changed, story changed, and we end up with this show that is six episodes. I mean, let's just talk about that, like the state of contemporary high budget TV, which is eight years of development for a six-episode first season that probably cost quite a bit. And the best I think you could say about it is that it's fine. It's fine.

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I've seen one episode, so I will withhold like my, this, I'm not, I hate this, I'm not watching. I didn't feel that way. I just think it felt familiar, but lesser. And that's not, really not where you want to be, coming on the heels of one of the great box office successes of the year. Essentially, you're trying to capitalize on this new franchise. And whether it's the characters that they've chosen, or the strands of storytelling that they're looking for, like, there is a character in this series, the sort of, the Arrakis, the man who returns from Arrakis.

• 57:49Andy Greenwald?

  Desmond Hart, played by Travis Fimmel, who was on The Raised by Wolves, and he's on Vikings, I think.

• 57:54Speaker 04

  Yes, and he has a very terrifying demonic energy that is well deployed in this movie, or in the show.

• 58:01Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 58:02Speaker 04

  And he has a moment near the end of the series where you're like, I guess we've been waiting the whole episode for this to happen, to see that this is what this show can be.

• 58:09Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 58:10Speaker 04

  Which I get, and that's something that happens in a lot of modern television, which is sort of like, that's the Taylor Sheridan brand, is sort of like 39 minutes of nothing, and then five minutes of, whoa, this is crazy, tune in next week. So they got me in that respect. I'm curious where it's going, but I was hoping for something a little tighter, because I think those first, those two films that Bill Nieuwman made are really, really, really good.

• 58:31Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, and propulsive, and they draw you in regardless of what you know or what you care about. This is the opposite. This is, this is. For if half of modern television begins with a crazy scene and then three months earlier, five months, five years earlier, this is the, this is the other thing that TV does now, which is begins with a 10 to 12 minute expositional monologue about the foundations of the universe and all of the interesting things that have already happened and how what you're about to see relates to interesting things that might happen in the future. But don't worry, we're just gonna park here for a while.

• 59:04Speaker 04

  That was a lot of VO to open the show.

• 59:06Andy Greenwald?

  It was so much VO and especially after disclaimer, I'm a little VOed out. Do you think Travis Fimmel as Desmond Hart, who has returned from Arrakis, do you think they showed him Cosmo Jarvis in Shogun or they kept that performance away from him?

• 59:18Speaker 04

  He's not quite as chaotic as Cosmo Jarvis.

• 59:20Andy Greenwald?

  I need more of that chaos.

• 59:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:22Andy Greenwald?

  I think the other thing that's challenging to me, and maybe this is just me, and is that, so you're saying that this is 10,000 years before the events of Dune? Not like Game, House of Dragon is 100 and some years, 170 years, I guess, before Game of Thrones? Even with that, I, I think I've said on this podcast, I'm like, so you're telling me in 170 years, nothing happened technologically or culturally to differentiate these eras? It was just still the same miserable people in rooms being like, we gotta get the throne? But now you're asking me to believe that for 10,000 years, dancing across the galaxy, everybody just waited? All the technology is the same? All the family names are the same?

• 1:00:05Speaker 04

  It's a, it's a contradiction for them though, because if they change the look and feel of the world too much, then it's no longer Dune.

• 1:00:11Andy Greenwald?

  Right. So, so you're trapped by these things. You're just trapped by the mandate, you know? And so, oh, that character's last name is Atreides? That's cool.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you've gotta just take into consideration too.

• 1:00:20Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think, would you be interested in talking to a version of me from 10,000 years ago who's like, last name is Greenwald and just sitting on a mountain in Slovakia? Is that where your people are from? Some of them.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 1:00:31Andy Greenwald?

  I don't like to give too much away about myself on this podcast.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  So not from England, you're saying?

• 1:00:34Andy Greenwald?

  Actually.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  Here we go.

• 1:00:36Andy Greenwald?

  My great grandfather grew up in Manchester.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  I thought you were gonna say he went to England once.

• 1:00:41Andy Greenwald?

  He went to, no, grew up in Manchester.

• 1:00:42Speaker 04

  He left Slovakia.

• 1:00:43Andy Greenwald?

  Not.

• 1:00:44Speaker 04

  On a donkey?

• 1:00:45Andy Greenwald?

  Just unrelated, you know, three generations back is too many to apply for dual citizenship. Just something that you might Google when you're struggling with jet lag.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  You know what the pain of my life is, is that, you know, my grandfather was born in Switzerland and so.

• 1:00:57Andy Greenwald?

  A peaceful man.

• 1:00:58Speaker 04

  A Swiss passport is incredibly powerful and it extends one generation. And my mother never applied and now I'm no longer able to acquire a Swiss passport.

• 1:01:06Andy Greenwald?

  Why did, why did she never?

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  I honestly don't know.

• 1:01:09Andy Greenwald?

  Huh.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  I have no idea, but that would have been a very nice piece of hardware to have at this particular time in history.

• 1:01:14Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, but you would have applied for it and they would be like, ah, but we see here you were arrested for jaywalking. That does not fly in Geneva, buddy.

• 1:01:21Speaker 04

  Are they German in Switzerland?

• 1:01:23Andy Greenwald?

  Part of Switzerland, they're German.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I guess so.

• 1:01:25Andy Greenwald?

  Part of it, they're French, part of it, they're Italian.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  They're everything. They certainly are everything.

• 1:01:28Andy Greenwald?

  The best of all three worlds.

• 1:01:30Speaker 04

  Um, the thing about this show versus the movie that is important to remember is that the movies feature Timothy Chalamet and Zendaya.

• 1:01:39Andy Greenwald?

  Keep going.

• 1:01:39Speaker 04

  And Rebecca Ferguson and Josh Brolin and Jason Momoa and on and on and on. It is the.

• 1:01:45Andy Greenwald?

  The starry.

• 1:01:46Speaker 04

  Javier Bardem, like it is the best collection of exciting actors in a big IP franchise.

• 1:01:52Andy Greenwald?

  What's his name?

• 1:01:53Speaker 04

  Arguably ever.

• 1:01:54Andy Greenwald?

  The bike rider.

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  Uh, Austin Butler, Estelle Skarsgård, Dave Bautista.

• 1:01:59Andy Greenwald?

  Florence Pugh.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  Florence Pugh.

• 1:02:01Andy Greenwald?

  A moment ago, you said you were obsessed with.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  Yes, Lea Seydoux, like all the way to Charlotte Rampling, like it is a ludicrous collection of both highly gifted, Academy Award winning actors and also the hottest stars in Hollywood. I'm not, I'm not sure if it's ever been done before.

• 1:02:17Andy Greenwald?

  No.

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  And so here's what we're gonna do with this TV show. None of those people are here. And in fact, none of them are even close to being as good as the actors from the films. It's tough. It's, you're behind the eight ball. It's a very challenging thing. No disrespect to Emily Watson, who I've always liked.

• 1:02:30Andy Greenwald?

  It, it, it's tough to talk about because a lot of people worked really hard on this. I mean, that's true of all TV shows, but everyone is trying to do the best version of something. But this is an incredibly, incredibly narrow, uh, very small needle to thread to, to get this right. I wonder if there's also just, and I don't, I didn't mean to put you on the spot, you don't need to have an opinion about this, but like. I guess it's generally considered now that The Penguin, which just ended and gave this slot to Dune Prophecy, is the best-case scenario for cinematic brand extension.

• 1:03:05Speaker 04

  I'm working my way through that show almost because I feel like I have been bullied by people who quite like it and are like, you should, you should do it. You should watch it.

• 1:03:12Andy Greenwald?

  I'm not one of those people.

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:03:14Andy Greenwald?

  I've not.

• 1:03:14Speaker 04

  I know you guys checked out.

• 1:03:16Andy Greenwald?

  I think I checked out for the same reason that I just ultimately can't check into this. Cause I, I guess I'm just trying to be fair-minded and say that. The ceiling is low for me on, on some of the like the sideways brand extensions. Like this is happening at the same time as the more interesting movie. Or we're going to flesh out something, we're going to pick up this scrap that was left on the table, or we're going to fill in a 10,000-year gap, or whatever the case may be. The ceiling of those just feels so low from the start that it's tough, to circle back to your other point about an investment, that's a tough investment of time for me. These episodes are long. There are a lot of characters. It is, it is not fleet of foot. And then it also does things that like, I just can't believe we're still doing in sci-fi in 2024,

• 1:04:01Andy Greenwald?

  which is a disco nightclub scene where people drink mysterious concoctions and do space drugs. Like, we're still doing this 25 years after Matrix Revolutions or whatever the fuck it was?

• 1:04:10Speaker 04

  I mean, 50 years after The Cantina.

• 1:04:12Andy Greenwald?

  Yes. Yeah, but The Cantina had fun Muppets.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:04:16Andy Greenwald?

  That's different.

• 1:04:16Speaker 04

  But I'm, it's just that it's iterative.

• 1:04:18Andy Greenwald?

  Well, yeah, but also like, stop wearing tunics and going to raves. Like, it always looks dumb.

• 1:04:23Speaker 04

  Did you see The Matrix Resurrections, the fourth film in the series?

• 1:04:27Andy Greenwald?

  I think, I think if you were to log into Max, it would say, continue watching? Question mark? I think I made it halfway through.

• 1:04:34Speaker 04

  I like it.

• 1:04:35Andy Greenwald?

  What do you like about it? Well, it was a little self-knowing, I thought that I appreciated.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  Absolutely is.

• 1:04:41Andy Greenwald?

  I like that.

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  Perhaps too self-aware, but it is also like a pure manifestation of Lana Wachowski's id from the, all the time that had passed.

• 1:04:50Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Speaker 04

  From the, the third film to the fourth film. Like, everything in that movie with Neo as the stand-in is sort of like, here's what identity really is in this world.

• 1:04:59Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  Which I really liked. I thought that was like, kind of insightful. And you don't usually see that level of thinking in IP adaptation 20 years later.

• 1:05:08Andy Greenwald?

  Also because you don't let the often don't let the creators keep going and say like this was meaningful to me then I am only one person and I am continued to have thoughts and process them as opposed to most IP storytelling which in which the baton has been picked up by fanboys who are like let me chase a feeling I had when I was eight.

• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, this isn't quite that, but Gladiator two comes out on Friday.

• 1:05:32Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:33Speaker 04

  And, you know, is not written by the people who wrote the first film and so.

• 1:05:37Andy Greenwald?

  Nor is it written by Nick Cave, who wrote the original sequel draft.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  Certainly not. That would have been an incredibly audacious adaptation. I've never expected something like that to come out of Gladiator two, but Gladiator two feels like chasing a feeling as opposed to creating something new and or part of some sort of lineage of one one creator's point of view.

• 1:05:53Andy Greenwald?

  But so, not to split too many hairs here, but like, I do think that Top Gun Maverick raised chasing a feeling to something close to art. Like, how do you differentiate that? Like, is it just that it's incredibly hard to do? Or did Top Gun Maverick have a specific special sauce or balancing act between reverence and recreation?

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good question. I'm glad you're bringing it up because we're going to talk about legacy sequels on The Big Picture later this week about Gladiators two, so I can kind of prime my mind for that. And I don't know how much it is related to TV or not, but Top Gun two has two things. One, it is obviously leveraging our enormous emotional connection to Tom Cruise. Even if you hate him, you probably have some history with him, but most people don't hate him. Most people like love his movies. And so it's applying that very effectively. The way that Maverick is portrayed in that movie really gets you on board right away. Secondarily, the craft and engineering of that story is amazing. It is a Swiss watch to go back to Switzerland.

• 1:06:55Andy Greenwald?

  It really is. Considering how many people worked on it, that's incredible.

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  And I think it's because you have kind of Macquarie overseeing a lot of the execution and he has figured out how to move Tom Cruise inside of those big machines.

• 1:07:06Andy Greenwald?

  He sure has.

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  So it's just the highest level version of something that usually sucks and it just happens to be extraordinary.

• 1:07:13Andy Greenwald?

  It's interesting. I think I think you're absolutely right. I also wonder if. Maybe it's the wrong framing, because instead of thinking of it as like recreating the feeling, I think it's interesting that you brought up, you started with Tom Cruise, as every Tom Cruise project does, but in the sense that it's less about being a note-perfect legacy sequel to Top Gun, and more about being the contemporary version of what we used to call like the winking swan song, like Paul Newman in Nobody's Fool, where it's just like, hey, everybody loves this guy playing a certain kind of part, let's give him a chance to do it again. Do you know what I mean?

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  I do, but a better version of that example is a different Paul Newman film, which is The Color of Money, which is the same thing. Like, it is leveraging the familiar fast Eddie Felsen thing, but also here's Tom Cruise.

• 1:07:59Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:07:59Speaker 04

  And he gets to be, you know, shepherded into the mix, the same way that that film's trying to bring us Miles Teller, but actually brought us Glenn Powell. You know, like, it is now Glenn Powell who got to surf the wave, Color of Money style, into mega fame.

• 1:08:11Andy Greenwald?

  It's so funny. That's also what, which one was it? Ghost Protocol was supposed to do to Jeremy Renner, but Tom Cruise, Tom Cruise doesn't fast Eddie anybody.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  No, he snatched that one right back.

• 1:08:20Andy Greenwald?

  Wasn't the story, I don't want to go too far off here, but like, with Maverick, wasn't Glenn Powell in contention for the Miles Teller role?

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  He was.

• 1:08:29Andy Greenwald?

  And then they created another part for him?

• 1:08:31Speaker 04

  They significantly expanded Hangman, as I understand it.

• 1:08:34Andy Greenwald?

  And, and they took that screen time from Manny Jacinto, is that how it worked?

• 1:08:37Speaker 04

  Prob- probably, and Jay Ellison, a number of other characters.

• 1:08:40Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, like another incredibly handsome young actor.

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  Like, this guy's the future, actually, just kidding, he's in one scene.

• 1:08:45Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, pivot. That's interesting. Okay, so, are you gonna watch more Dune Prophecy?

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  I think I'll stick with it because I have to keep, the same reason that I probably will watch The Penguin is, is that I am committed to the Matt Reeves Batman project. I know you guys are not.

• 1:09:01Andy Greenwald?

  Interesting.

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  But I'm, in part, is that they're movies. They're tent pole movies, and I, tent pole movies is something that I cover, and so I'm, I'm engaged.

• 1:09:08Andy Greenwald?

  Although they're tent pole movies propping up a tent that's been moved off the midway, right? Because they're no longer like DC canon?

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  It's true, but there is this clear détente between Reeves and James Gunn.

• 1:09:18Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, they're allowing each other to-

• 1:09:19Speaker 04

  Where they're sort of like, we'll let you guys keep going forward simultaneously, comfortably.

• 1:09:23Andy Greenwald?

  It's interesting. I know nothing of the internal politics, but I, I feel like the success, and again, success is an interesting metric with streaming, but I think in ev- it, there's no question that The Penguin is considered a success.

• 1:09:33Speaker 04

  It worked, yeah.

• 1:09:36Andy Greenwald?

  I feel like that was incredibly significant for that détente because the big Jim Gunn Industries is extremely involved in the DC stuff across all platforms. And the success of Penguin, I'm not saying he was itching to get in there, but I think it definitely bought the Matt Reeves verse a little more time.

• 1:09:54Speaker 04

  Well, one thing, I'm sure this has been pointed out by people who've been covering this over time, but Matt Reeves is really good at TV. He's made a lot of TV over the years. And so even though he's not the showrunner of The Penguin, he understands television storytelling. Whereas like somebody like Kevin Feige got kind of like, you know, helicoptered down and it was like, now make nine TV shows, buddy.

• 1:10:16Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, and Lauren LaFrank, who did The Penguin, is really talented and clearly was left, no, I don't want to say left a lot, like, it's really hard to do any of this shit. And the fact that that show worked, even though it wasn't for me, should be celebrated because there's something about the Dune prophecy thing that feels, and I mean no disrespect to the people who finished the journey with it, but it's very, I think it's significant when you like, look at the Wikipedia and you're like, this was a show that was going to be directed by Denis Villeneuve and then by Johan Rank, who's maybe, you know, who's high level TV director. The score wasn't going to be done by, what's his name, who did the movies, who did the?

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  Hans Zimmer.

• 1:10:52Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, Hans Zimmer, but see, Jonsey from Sigur Rós was originally going to write the score for this.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:10:58Andy Greenwald?

  He didn't at the end. Ultimately, the show.

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  Is it Jonsey or Joncy?

• 1:11:03Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I don't speak Icelandic. As we discussed, I'm from Manchester, mate.

• 1:11:07Speaker 04

  I was like, is that, it's like?

• 1:11:09Andy Greenwald?

  Jonsey.

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  Isn't Jonsey in Police Academy?

• 1:11:11Andy Greenwald?

  Jonsey's in Police Academy. I was thinking about starting to adapt of all the things I've learned in England, is there just absolute just disdain for French pronunciations of words? Like the fact that we are in America, we're 6,000 miles away, being like, I'll have the filet, please. And they're like, fillet steak. Because they're just basically like, fuck you. We've lived next to you, Ponces, for. Forever. But, but anyway, but the Dune prophecy show was directed by Anna Forster, who did a fine job. And I don't mean any disrespect, but like you Google her and you're like, ah, she's an acolyte of Roland Emmerich, which I don't mean to diminish people by their associations. Many people work for Roger Corman, but it is, it is an aesthetically different choice. And did she make the trains run on time?

• 1:11:54Andy Greenwald?

  Seems like she did, and that is no small thing. But, but the ambition with which these things were announced and then how they end up once they go through the sausage factory of TV is, is noteworthy. Okay, last thing before I let you get out of here. We've been, we've been going for a while. You probably have three other podcasts due today.

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  Just one.

• 1:12:12Andy Greenwald?

  But I have to check in with you because Chris, there's no way this is going to come up again once Chris is back.

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:12:17Andy Greenwald?

  But it is the number one topic in my household, which is have you seen Wicked yet?

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  I have seen Wicked.

• 1:12:21Andy Greenwald?

  Is there an embargo? Are you allowed to tell me anything?

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  I don't think that reviews have come out, but I think you can social media blast your feelings, which is not something I do anymore.

• 1:12:29Andy Greenwald?

  I'm off social. I don't know if I bragged about that recently.

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  You did, you did. You mentioned it.

• 1:12:33Andy Greenwald?

  I am the new, I, I don't actually own a TV.

• 1:12:35Speaker 04

  I mean, okay, I've said this on other shows. I had never seen this, the stage musical. I'd never read the novel. The Wizard of Oz is one of the signature films of my life. I'm giving it to my child right now and my family is having an amazing experience with it. We just saw it at the Academy Museum last weekend. We went to the color exhibit at the Academy Museum, which is incredible. And they're featuring the ruby slippers. My, to watch my daughter receive this story and this movie experience is very, very, very special to me. So I, I have heard to find gravity, like I'm, I'm familiar, I guess with the parts of it, but it's not something that makes any sense to me. So I went to go see the movie. I think it's like fine. I think it's like an okay, kind of crappy CGI.

• 1:13:18Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 04

  Overextended. You know, it's part one is two hours and 40 minutes.

• 1:13:24Andy Greenwald?

  Is it really?

• 1:13:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very long. I think the second film will be just as long, which comes out next Thanksgiving.

• 1:13:29Andy Greenwald?

  And they've definitely, it felt like maybe this marketing reasons. They're not being coy about that it's part one, right? They're just not calling it part one?

• 1:13:36Speaker 04

  Um, I think anybody who's, has any interest knows it's part one.

• 1:13:41Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think the sequel will just be called Wicked with two I's? So it looks like two?

• 1:13:45Speaker 04

  That would be a good idea.

• 1:13:46Andy Greenwald?

  That one's free, guys.

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  I think that. I'll be very curious to know if your kids like it. The screening that I went to, which was like a mix of industry and press, but a very friendly one, basically gave it a standing ovation at the end. There's a lot of passion amongst the super fans.

• 1:14:03Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:06Speaker 04

  I thought Ariana Grande was very funny.

• 1:14:08Andy Greenwald?

  Good.

• 1:14:09Speaker 04

  I don't have like a ton of nice things to say about it, but I do feel like weirdly it all of a sudden is competing for Best Picture.

• 1:14:17Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  So I gotta just spend another four months with this movie?

• 1:14:21Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, it is this, maybe we'll talk again, especially once I've seen a movie that's going to be in contention, but I was struck yesterday, right before I tried to illegally cross the street, which I'll never do again. But I did walk by a movie theater and I was looking at all the like now playing posters and it was literally the lineup that you talked about, plus the piano lessons. Conclave, it was Heretic, and it was Enora, which I cannot wait to see.

• 1:14:44Speaker 04

  Phenomenal movie.

• 1:14:44Andy Greenwald?

  And then, you know, The Brutalist is coming, but it's just like, it does feel oddly small stakes. And I don't mean to disparage those movies, but I do feel like in past years, and you tell me if I'm wrong, at this point, I'm like, well, here are the three big swings, you know, that we're gunning for it and have the marketing budgets or the star budgets to go along with it. It just feels like this season has been very small, small potatoes. And small can be good.

• 1:15:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think September, October, November's been an interesting experience for me, in part because Amanda went on leave. And so like trying to figure out like, what are people seeing at the movies right now? Who am I talking to about these things because of that smallness that you're talking about? I mean, in truth, Wicked and Gladiator 2 and Moana 2 is really as stacked a Thanksgiving weekend as you could ever get for movie going in terms of awareness of the IP and anticipation and the kind of like cross pollination of audiences and what they like. So it's not that those movies aren't big, they're all going to be very big. It's that they don't seem as important.

• 1:15:46Andy Greenwald?

  That's what I mean, like they're not Oscar-y, which is.

• 1:15:49Speaker 04

  They could be and they may be, but, and we shouldn't be confused. Like they're not like it was in 2019, where in 2019 it felt like, from July, when Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came out, through August, when Parasite came along, all through the fall, when we had this cavalcade of marriage story and Ford versus Ferrari and, you know, the uncut gems, like this kind of like river flowing of great stuff. Since the pandemic hit, there really hasn't been a November, like October, November, December, that's been loaded with truly great films. Like, it feels like there was when we were kids. But I think it's ultimately just that I didn't love these movies as much as I wanted to. I would have loved to have loved Wicked. I would have loved to have loved Gladiator 2. And I don't. And I think people are kind of picking up on

• 1:16:31Speaker 04

  that, maybe, that, like, they're good. They're not great. And so there's some disappointment there. But I don't know. It's a post-strike year.

• 1:16:40Andy Greenwald?

  Have you seen Moana 2?

• 1:16:42Speaker 04

  I have not. I have a ticket for next Monday.

• 1:16:44Andy Greenwald?

  Next Monday?

• 1:16:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Andy Greenwald?

  If you need someone to talk to about that, I have a lot of thoughts coming in.

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  I mean, I will be talking about it. I will need people to talk to about it. I mean, I don't know if it's gonna be good.

• 1:16:54Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know if it's gonna be good.

• 1:16:55Speaker 04

  It is gonna, it was, speaking of TV.

• 1:16:57Andy Greenwald?

  It was supposed to be a TV series.

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  It was.

• 1:16:59Andy Greenwald?

  And that's a tough retrofit, retcon.

• 1:17:03Speaker 04

  The only other time I can think it almost happened and worked is a little movie called Mulholland Drive.

• 1:17:08Andy Greenwald?

  I was about to mention, maybe the only time.

• 1:17:11Speaker 04

  So maybe it's as good as Mulholland Drive.

• 1:17:12Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think it has similar vibes?

• 1:17:14Speaker 04

  For my daughter's sake, I hope not.

• 1:17:16Andy Greenwald?

  Or?

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  It's a little early.

• 1:17:18Andy Greenwald?

  Or, okay, yeah, fair. All right. Well, I can't wait for Moana Drive 2. Sean, thank you for filling in so ably today. It's always fun to talk to you.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  Thanks, Andy.

• 1:17:29Andy Greenwald?

  You guys should listen to Sean on the Big Picture Podcast. What else should they do for you, Sean?

• 1:17:33Speaker 04

  Hmm, follow me on Blue Sky.

• 1:17:35Andy Greenwald?

  Look at you. Look at you.

• 1:17:37Speaker 04

  I'm on social media. I don't care.

• 1:17:39Andy Greenwald?

  Well, you're younger than me. Maybe there's still a few more, there's still a few more, like, branches to hit on the way down as you're falling.

• 1:17:46Speaker 04

  That's, that's how it feels at the end of every episode of the show.

• 1:17:48Andy Greenwald?

  Absolutely.

• 1:17:49Speaker 04

  Falling down the tree.

• 1:17:49Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you for producing us, Kyle McMullin. Chris will be flying back to America. He's so psyched about it, let me just tell you. And he and I will be back on Thursday, and we'll talk about a bunch of stuff. Maybe Landman, I believe it's pronounced.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  Like Grantland.

• 1:18:04Andy Greenwald?

  Like Grantland. Probably they both have similarly long runs. Talk to you Thursday, Brian.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

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