Pod Insights The Watch The 'Landman' Season Finale. Plus, Our Favorite Depictions of L.A. On-Screen. About this episode Chris and Andy celebrate Los Angeles by discussing some of their favorite film and TV depictions of the city, including 'Drive,' 'Mulholland Drive,' 'Insecure,' and 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' (1:00). Then they break down the season finale of 'Landman,' a show that ultimately made no sense but was very compelling (32:28), and speculate on whether or not it will get a second season (49:00).
Our hearts go out to everyone who has been impacted by the L. A. wildfires. If you are looking for a way to help, below is a list of organizations that you can support during this time.
LAFD Foundation
YMCA of Los Angeles
PCC Community Relief Fund
Pasadena Humane Society
Venice Family Clinic
Dream Center LA
Altadena Girls
Mutual Aid Los Angeles
Westside Food Bank
Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald
Producer: Kaya McMullen
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript 14,338 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 What's up everybody, Chris Vernon here and welcome to a new season of the NBA and The Mismatch. And huge welcome as well to my new co-host, Dave Jacoby.
0:10 Speaker 01 I can't wait to link with you twice a week, every Tuesday and Friday, right here on The Mismatch to break down everything that's happening in the league.
0:18 Speaker 00 Who's playing well, who we loved, who we loathed, trade rumors, team dysfunction, we've got you covered right here. So follow us, subscribe and hit us with those five-star ratings on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:31 Speaker 01 And also don't forget to follow us on social media, that's at Ringer NBA and check out the full mismatch episodes with the two handsomest podcasters in the history of podcasting right on the Ringer NBA YouTube channel.
0:46 Speaker 02 I'm pro football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carry sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit mddallies.com to watch my story.
1:11 Speaker 03 Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins has not prescribed Caplyta lumateperone.
1:23 Speaker 04 I needed more from my antidepressant, so my doctor added Caplyta lumateperone, proven to provide greater relief from depression symptoms than an antidepressant alone. Building on my progress without starting over. Caplyta is for adults with major depressive disorder when used with an antidepressant and is available by prescription only. Individual results may vary. In clinical trials, weight gain was not common.
1:44 Speaker 03 Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke. Caplyta is not approved for dementia-related psychosis. Call your doctor about new or sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away. Antidepressants may increase these risks. Report fever, confusion, stiff muscles, which may be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal. Monitoring is recommended. Common side effects are sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, feeling tired, and diarrhea. These aren't all the same.
2:10 Speaker 04 Ask your doctor about Caplyta. Learn more at caplyta.com or call 888-252-4824. FanDuel is now available everywhere in the U.S.
2:25 Speaker 04 So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are, including these places.
2:35 Andy Greenwald? Make this your most rewarding season ever with FanDuel. Age and location restrictions apply. Product availability varies by market. See FanDuel.com for eligibility. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.
2:48 Andy Greenwald? I need sports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now.
2:53 Chris Ryan? Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com. And joining me in the studio, it's Monty Miller's heart transplant donor. It's Andy Greenwald.
3:09 Andy Greenwald? We have a lot to talk about today. Some serious, some not, but don't let me, don't let me let the sun go down on this podcast without telling you what I thought was going to happen with Jon Hamm's heart transplant in the season finale of Landman.
3:22 Chris Ryan? Uh, Greenwald, we are here. It is Monday. We are in Los Angeles, California, where we record The Watch. We're here with Kaiya today. We obviously did not do a show last Thursday because of everything that was happening in L.A. with the fires. Um, it's been one of the, the craziest weeks of our lives, obviously. Yeah. Our hearts go out to everybody who was directly affected by, by the fires that hit the Palisades, the fires that hit Pasadena and all over Los Angeles. Myself, Andy and Kai are obviously all safe, but, uh, our thoughts and hearts are with the people of the city who were directly impacted. Uh, we are going to do an episode today where we are going to talk about Landman. I thought. Andy had a really good idea that we could talk a little bit about Los Angeles on
4:03 Chris Ryan? screen as a way of celebrating this city. At the top, though, Kai and I just wanted to shout out a couple of charities if people are looking to give, if people are looking to support Los Angeles. These are ones that Kai and I have like worked with, basically. The LAFD Foundation, the YMCA of Los Angeles's Community Impact Fund, the Pasadena City College Community Relief Fund, they're doing incredible work out there. And Pasadena, and the Pasadena Humane Society. Kaya, did you want to talk about some West Side stuff? Yeah, sure. So I just wanted to shout out the Venice Family Clinic. If you are local to LA, they are accepting donations all this week. I think a lot of places are
4:48 Chris Ryan? kind of overrun with clothes right now, so they are mostly focusing on like non-perishable items, medications, first aid kits, stuff of that nature. Dream Center LA, I think, is working to provide housing for people who have been displaced. Altadena Girls is a foundation that was founded by a teenage girl and is specifically focused on providing clothes. Yeah, this is an incredible organization. Yeah. They're at Altadena Girls on Instagram. Mutual Aid Los Angeles is, has a super comprehensive Google spreadsheet of like every single place you can donate to. And volunteer at, sorted by like neighborhood and stuff. And then the West Side Food Bank
5:33 Chris Ryan? as well. Yeah.
5:35 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, and I'm sure everybody who is paying attention is also just overwhelmed by the amount of GoFundMes.
5:39 Chris Ryan? Yes.
5:40 Andy Greenwald? That have been set up so kindly by so many people. Because, as you were saying at the beginning, Chris, this is, this is on a scale that is incomprehensible and has affected everyone.
5:49 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
5:50 Andy Greenwald? All of us know people who have lost so much. And I think that the spreadsheets that you guys are talking about, these charities specifically, can sort of help fight the feeling of paralysis that it can set in when there are disasters on this scale, particularly... Or even for people who are charitably minded and who want to help. I think any bit of help helps, quite frankly, at this moment.
6:14 Chris Ryan? I went out to Pasadena City College on Saturday to help out with just like carrying water from one truck to a piece of ground. And they were like, we've just got more volunteers than we know what to do with. And I was like, I assure you, I'm a podcaster. I'm more than able to help in any way possible.
6:33 Andy Greenwald? Your physical form is underused in your day job.
6:36 Chris Ryan? And I was like, I've been waiting to use these arms of mine.
6:41 Andy Greenwald? Are you like that meme of the dog with the tiny head, but with the giant arms? Or is that just, you just have Rusillo arms underneath?
6:51 Chris Ryan? But yeah, you can, you know, it's really, it's easy to feel powerless. You can, you can help. So just if you're, you're outside of Los Angeles and you're looking for ways to give the ones that Kai and I just mentioned are really great places to start.
7:04 Andy Greenwald? And I think the one thing that we're all feeling live here is that this is, look, this is a very, very strange place, Los Angeles. And it is physically enormous to the point where, you know, it almost feels quaint now, but that anytime there is any event in the larger Los Angeles metro area, which is bigger than some countries, you know, you get the calls from people on the East Coast being like, is that near you?
7:24 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
7:24 Andy Greenwald? And it's almost, the answer is almost always no. That was not the case this time. But more so, what's been remarkable is the sense that even in a city of which, and we're going to talk about some movies and films and culture, a city that has inspired so much art about how difficult it is to connect, or dare I say, crash into each other on freeways. There is a deeply, deeply entrenched sense of community here that can span regions, towns, zip codes. And the very best of the city has come out in response to these fires that, by the way, as you know, as listeners know, are still very much going on.
7:58 Chris Ryan? Yeah, so thank you so much for, we'll, we'll kind of move on from the charity stuff there, but you know, you mentioned, I have a, I have a complicated relationship with the city and in like, I think coming from the East Coast. But one thing that was always, I think this still remains true, is that like my concept of the city is largely shot through the prism of what I see of it on screen, like what I expected from it when I moved out here.
8:22 Andy Greenwald? If I remember correctly, you had said you weren't worried about traffic because you had seen collateral and you can get anywhere real fast when you need to.
8:29 Chris Ryan? So.
8:31 Andy Greenwald? I feel like you were just abused of that pretty quickly.
8:33 Chris Ryan? Yeah, and I think when you were asking me where I was opening my checking account, I was like, "Well, not downtown Los Angeles." You never know. That money is insecure. But yeah, Andy and I thought we would highlight some of our favorite moments, or favorite shows, or favorite movies of Los Angeles on screen, just as kind of a homage.
8:50 Andy Greenwald? What was your first visit out here? Did you have some concept of it?
8:53 Chris Ryan? I had never visited here until I came out here to visit Grantland.
8:56 Andy Greenwald? Is that true?
8:56 Chris Ryan? Yeah, it was like, I think in 2011, I came out here. Maybe early 2012. I came out here right before I moved here to like, look for an apartment and like, go to see the office at Grantland.
9:07 Andy Greenwald? Did you have a similar first visit to your most rea- not, it wasn't your first visit, but your like, adult visit to London, where you were like, "I'm gonna stay near Wembley and see everyone and see all the sights and take in some theater." Did you do that here as well?
9:20 Chris Ryan? No, I think I stayed downtown at the J-Dub, at the Marriott.
9:24 Andy Greenwald? Shout out downtown LA.
9:25 Chris Ryan? Who was the one that was across the street from the J-Dub Marriott that had all the Wayne Gretzky art in the hotel rooms?
9:29 Andy Greenwald? That's where I always was- that's where they put me for years at Grantland before I finally made the-
9:33 Chris Ryan? J-Dub glass, yeah.
9:34 Andy Greenwald? Before I upgraded myself to J-Dub. Yeah, I think the freelancers got put at the- what was it called?
9:39 Chris Ryan? I can't remember. I think it's gone through a couple of different corporate ownerships since then.
9:43 Andy Greenwald? I think Rembert and I were like, platinum members of that weird-ass hotel.
9:46 Chris Ryan? Yeah, so that was, I think my first experience was in downtown Los Angeles and then, I still live where, at the place I moved into in 2012.
9:55 Andy Greenwald? I helped you scout that place.
9:56 Chris Ryan? You did great.
9:58 Andy Greenwald? I know, I feel very, very responsible for that. That was years before I moved here.
10:00 Chris Ryan? Shout out to my landlord, Jen.
10:02 Andy Greenwald? But I guess, cause you-
10:04 Chris Ryan? She's a great lady.
10:05 Andy Greenwald? But you never had, so what was the LA of your imagination before that? Cause your dad was a film critic, obviously.
10:10 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a testament to how he felt about California in the sense that I never came here until I turned 35 or whatever, but it was-
10:23 Chris Ryan? It was, it was an imaginary place. And I think you can kind of tell that when you come here, the first thing you notice is the light, you know, especially at dusk and you just, the California light does just put the zap on your head in a way that's just really, really, really intoxicating. I still feel like to this day, you go through all of the day and all of the night to get 45 minutes where you're like, truly, we are in God's country, like when the sun is setting.
10:49 Andy Greenwald? Oh, like magic hour and then when the night blooming jasmine starts?
10:52 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
10:52 Andy Greenwald? You're like, there are no problems in the world.
10:54 Chris Ryan? Yes. But I remember the number one thing I have on my list here of my favorite LA screen moments is when I moved out here was right around when Drive came out.
11:05 Andy Greenwald? Oh, yeah. I wrote about that for Grant.
11:07 Chris Ryan? Even anecdotally, it felt like in 2012, like there was less traffic. I know that's not real.
11:14 Andy Greenwald? Anecdotally.
11:15 Chris Ryan? Anecdotally.
11:15 Andy Greenwald? It was weird when you got off the plane and got on the like, you know, the rental shuttle, wearing leather gloves.
11:23 Chris Ryan? Wearing the stunt man mask.
11:24 Andy Greenwald? The dragon jacket.
11:25 Chris Ryan? Yeah. Um, yeah, a lot of dudes had dragon jackets at the Thirsty Crow in 2012. But driving around Los Angeles at night, listening to music is truly one of the greatest pastimes. If you can find yourself some green lights or an open freeway or whatever, and nobody is trying to cut across five lanes of traffic, hit a Tesla that's on fire, like then, then you're, you're in good shape and you can just let, let the Drive soundtrack rock or listen to Chromatics or whatever it is that floats your boat. But driving around, listening to music and thinking about Ryan Gosling is one of my favorite things to do. So I would put Drive at the top of my LA screen list.
12:06 Andy Greenwald? You just, you literally described something that my older daughter does, I think. I think maybe.
12:12 Chris Ryan? Does she drive around Los Angeles?
12:13 Andy Greenwald? Which.
12:14 Chris Ryan? I think I've seen some of her work.
12:15 Andy Greenwald? All I do is drive around Los Angeles and the music in this case would be, you know, Tortured Poets Department and we'd be talking about Ryan Gosling's performance in Drive or his, not in Drive, in Jesus, in Barbie or his SNL monologue, but imagine if we showed her Drive. What, what's he doing?
12:32 Chris Ryan? Just make sure I'm there for that when you first do it.
12:34 Andy Greenwald? What's he doing to the voice from Finding Nemo? That's disturbing.
12:38 Chris Ryan? Is Oscar Isaac gonna get to open a restaurant?
12:42 Andy Greenwald? You think that would be her way in?
12:43 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
12:44 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, I, I, I mean, I came here for the first time in the eighties and visiting my mom's best friend, who lived in the valley. And I remember being told like, two things. One, that my, my mom's friend's daughter went to school with Meredith Salinger, who was recently on screen in The Journey of Natty Gan. So I was like, clearly, I will now be in movies also.
13:08 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I'll be sitting front row next to Nicholson at the Academy Awards.
13:10 Andy Greenwald? This is not that I knew who that was, but yes. And then I remember we went to like Arts Deli in the valley. And my mom freaked out because she was convinced that Paul Simon was there, which is a weird celebrity sighting in LA. But I remember her asking me to get up and go to the bathroom and look three times.
13:28 Chris Ryan? How old were you?
13:29 Andy Greenwald? Nine.
13:30 Chris Ryan? And would you know who Paul Simon was? I mean, Graceland was popping back then.
13:33 Andy Greenwald? This is my birthright. Now, in retrospect, I think there were a lot of sub five foot five.
13:38 Chris Ryan? Did you go up to a random guy at arts and just start doing Lady Smith Black Mombazo voices?
13:43 Andy Greenwald? Started beatboxing. No, I think that the danger was, as I now know, there are many, many sub five foot five Jewish men of a certain age getting the pastrami. So it's very likely that it was just like a senior partner at ICM.
13:59 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
14:00 Andy Greenwald? But then we went to Disneyland and like Universal Studios and did all the tourist stuff. But, but the idea of the imagination, we'll get into when we talk about some other movies, like, it is remarkable. This is not, this is not a unique observation at all. But the, the steady diet of films that tell us either this is dreamland or nightmareville are so intense that it is so heightened. And then all my other memories come from coming out here a lot during the Spin Magazine days, both for my brief time as the video game correspondent and going to the E3 Expo.
14:32 Chris Ryan? Out here?
14:32 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, out here. Yeah. And like, magazines only ever put people where the hotels were in West Hollywood, like on the Sunset Strip. And the beauty of that was It was like MapQuest, almost pre MapQuest era.
14:45 Chris Ryan? But you could print out directions.
14:46 Andy Greenwald? MapQuest directions. There was also that beautiful thing that lasts for about 12 days when you move here, which is, yeah, I'll go, I'll drive.
14:55 Chris Ryan? Sure.
14:55 Andy Greenwald? So my experience was shaped by staying on the Sunset Strip, having a friend or two in Silverlake and just taking Sunset the whole way.
15:03 Chris Ryan? I actually love doing that.
15:04 Andy Greenwald? I didn't know there were other ways.
15:06 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
15:08 Andy Greenwald? And even to get to downtown once to the expo, like, that was the only way that my, the person who I thought knew LA, who was an editor who had been here once.
15:16 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
15:17 Andy Greenwald? Drove us. But there was so much, it felt so profoundly different than our life growing up and then our life in New York, that I always felt it was exciting, like, full of possibility that any man I saw could be Paul Simon.
15:30 Chris Ryan? Paul Simon, sure.
15:31 Andy Greenwald? But, but it is, I, I sort of wish that that magic stayed after you live here, but instead what you find is a series of interconnected towns.
15:41 Chris Ryan? Sure.
15:41 Andy Greenwald? With a lot to love and explore below the surface. But that first glow of what, of like, oh, what, what's behind that door? Oh, is that, is that someone? That I can still sort of like chase that tactile feeling of what it was like.
15:55 Chris Ryan? Yeah. So what's your number one thing on screen?
15:59 Andy Greenwald? So my, okay, so I'm gonna give you a list. I feel like, first of all, I think your list is really good. I just want to tell you.
16:04 Chris Ryan? Thanks, man.
16:05 Andy Greenwald? Ahead of time. I thought you did a good job. I found myself like.
16:07 Chris Ryan? You should be doing this with Mallory, because Mallory and you, I think, have an equally, like, like loophole centric.
16:13 Andy Greenwald? No, okay, you're the one, you're the one that does ties on your top 10s at the end of the year.
16:17 Chris Ryan? Sometimes, yeah.
16:18 Andy Greenwald? Okay, you reserve the rights.
16:20 Chris Ryan? How could I choose between my tailors?
16:23 Andy Greenwald? And did your, is your top five, is it, did you do movies and TV on one list? Or did you just pick five movies?
16:28 Chris Ryan? I just, no, I have, I have a couple of things. It's right in front of you.
16:32 Andy Greenwald? Right.
16:32 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
16:33 Andy Greenwald? Thanks for that.
16:35 Andy Greenwald? So professional, even in, even in the face.
16:37 Chris Ryan? Was your idea.
16:38 Andy Greenwald? Even in the face of catastrophe. Yeah, but you know what I'm like. I'm like, I'm like an idea generator. Like, I gift the idea to the room.
16:45 Chris Ryan? You're a creative director.
16:46 Andy Greenwald? And then I, then I just take a, take a walk. You know, I let them germinate.
16:51 Chris Ryan? You go out and smell the night blooming jasmine.
16:53 Andy Greenwald? Mmm.
16:55 Chris Ryan? While us working men put together.
16:57 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, while Ash rains on it. Um, okay, well.
17:01 Chris Ryan? You just, just kick it, man. You don't have to worry about a top five.
17:04 Andy Greenwald? Well, no, I have five, but I have a couple of categories. They all kind of fall into this idea of like, is it? All right, one thing at a time. The first one I was gonna pick was the movie that I ended up watching, I think.
17:15 Andy Greenwald? We've joked about this before, but growing up in Philadelphia, there was, there were, if you had cable, you could pay for HBO or whatever, Showtime. But there was also Prism, which was the local paid.
17:23 Chris Ryan? Yeah, dude, Prism rules.
17:24 Andy Greenwald? Paid channel, and it showed movies all day and Phillies games at nights, and in many ways is our brand.
17:29 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
17:30 Andy Greenwald? Being homesick from school, there were certain movies that were always on TV, and one of them was Muppet's Take Manhattan, which is still one of my favorite movies. But the other one that was always on TV in the late eighties was The Big Picture, the movie that inspired the name of Sean's podcast.
17:44 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
17:44 Andy Greenwald? Which was a Christopher Guest-directed Hollywood satire.
17:47 Chris Ryan? Kevin Bacon movie?
17:47 Andy Greenwald? It was Kevin Bacon. And it holds up. It's really funny, but it was on all the time. And in retrospect, it's pretty sweet. He's a, you know, a film school student who just wants to make heartfelt movies about like families getting together at Christmas time. So he's probably a successful lifetime director now.
18:05 Chris Ryan? Exactly.
18:06 Andy Greenwald? But, um, but I just, I was thinking about this assignment.
18:09 Chris Ryan? Or a cult leader.
18:10 Andy Greenwald? Or, or both.
18:11 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
18:13 Andy Greenwald? That movie about like Hollywood is a dream factory that can grind you up, but is still also, you know, it's still full of possibility. I watched that so much, and I think it's still worth checking out.
18:23 Chris Ryan? Um, I'll shout out a couple of my favorite crime movies. These are not hidden gems.
18:27 Andy Greenwald? And are these on your list? Or are now you going off your list?
18:30 Chris Ryan? It's right, it's right here. It's my list. It's my number two.
18:32 Andy Greenwald? I have my list open.
18:33 Chris Ryan? Uh, Heat, To Live and Die in L.A., and Collateral.
18:36 Andy Greenwald? Okay, this is what I, okay, all right. First of all, let's just talk procedural here. I have your list now in front of me. Your number two is three movies.
18:42 Chris Ryan? I mean, Andy, in this time, can't we, can't we show each other a little grace?
18:46 Andy Greenwald? I think at this time, when people are desperate for structure. And but like, and like, you know, just something to hang on to?
18:52 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
18:53 Andy Greenwald? All right, go on. I like these movies.
18:55 Chris Ryan? L.A. crime movies is basically what I'm saying. And obviously, Heat is my favorite movie. To Live and Die in L.A. is one of my favorite movies. Collateral, one of my favorite movies. Definitely gave me some wrong ideas about what kind of trouble I could get into on Alvarado. Although maybe the right idea.
19:13 Andy Greenwald? I think the right idea.
19:14 Chris Ryan? BJ's on Alvarado at 2 a.m. and that's the name of the club in Heat.
19:20 Andy Greenwald? What were you? Name your top five things that you were most worried people thought BJ's on Alvarado means.
19:26 Chris Ryan? BJ's in Burbank, that's like a grill, like, you know, like a sizzler kind of place? And then everything else.
19:33 Andy Greenwald? It also sounds like something that was advertised on the back pages of L.A. Weekly back when L.A. Weekly was in print. So you're crushing it.
19:41 Chris Ryan? Is it code for something?
19:43 Andy Greenwald? Do you think? Yeah, I think so.
19:45 Chris Ryan? Yeah, Collateral gave me a really perverted idea of how long it takes to get it from LAX to downtown.
19:51 Andy Greenwald? Collateral, I rewatched recently. Collateral is so cool and it is so slick.
19:57 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
19:58 Andy Greenwald? And I definitely, I would love to watch it.
20:03 Chris Ryan? With your daughter?
20:06 Andy Greenwald? That man isn't sleeping on the L.A.
20:09 Chris Ryan? Metro. That homie has his briefcase.
20:13 Andy Greenwald? No, I just, what I mean is like, you know, whenever, there's certain things that we talk about when we cover them. When we're like, oh, you know, the journalism season of The Wire always rang a little false to us. You know, trailblazing journalists that we were. When we saw Collateral as just inveterate East Coasters, I was like, oh, man, what an urban fantasia. It's incredible the way, you know.
20:35 Chris Ryan? Just go see some jazz.
20:36 Andy Greenwald? Just you could see jazz and then kill a couple dudes. It's just, anything's possible. I imagine the way it was.
20:43 Chris Ryan? Jane Pinkett is like, I like the cut of your jib.
20:46 Andy Greenwald? People here seeing it must have just been, just, this is preposterous.
20:50 Chris Ryan? When Bill and I interviewed Michael Mann for the three Heat.
20:53 Andy Greenwald? Yep.
20:54 Chris Ryan? He insisted, like, we made a joke about that that he did not laugh at. We were like, hey, how about that 25 minutes to get from LAX to downtown? And he was like, yes. We're like, okay, never mind.
21:06 Andy Greenwald? I mean.
21:07 Chris Ryan? Michael Mann.
21:07 Andy Greenwald? To be fair, the last time Michael Mann flew commercial, you probably could do that.
21:12 Chris Ryan? I know.
21:12 Andy Greenwald? Do you know what I mean? Like, there are, like, friends of ours who grew up here do say, and I believe them, that the traffic was better.
21:19 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I mean, you read books set in the 70s here, and they're like, I cruised from Franklin, Franklin over to the beach in 21 minutes.
21:26 Andy Greenwald? It's like, the mythology of like, the Laurel Canyon scene and like, all the musicians.
21:30 Chris Ryan? We can't complain about the traffic right now.
21:31 Andy Greenwald? No, no, I'm not, I'm not. But I do think it's interesting to think about. We're talking about mythology, the mythology of LA. That like, you read about, you know, Joni Mitchell and David Crosby and like, the, all the, like, the beautiful art happening in the canyon. And then part of me is just like, well, they were making art because they were essentially sequestered in a place they could never leave because how could they get anywhere? Why would they get stuck in that gridlock? But then you read like, an Eve Babbitt's book, and she's like, I changed my mind at 5pm and drove to the Manhattan Beach.
22:00 Andy Greenwald? Oh. So that's how it was.
22:03 Chris Ryan? In that family.
22:04 Andy Greenwald? In that family. So wait, in that category, I would add.
22:08 Chris Ryan? Yeah. The category of LA crime movies?
22:11 Andy Greenwald? LA crime movies, of which there are many, and they are great. Well, or do you have a separate category for noir?
22:18 Chris Ryan? I don't have any categories. I just have names of movies and shows.
22:20 Andy Greenwald? But some of the times, there's more under each number. I get it. I get it. Just feels a little shaky in here right now.
22:30 Andy Greenwald? LA Confidential, or do you keep that separate?
22:32 Chris Ryan? Yeah, of course, man. Let's just, let's just rattle them off. LA Confidential, Chinatown?
22:36 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, that's, that's, that's a pretty good one. This would be a great Chris Farley podcast.
22:41 Chris Ryan? Just name LA stuff until we can't think of anything else, and then the pod ends.
22:44 Andy Greenwald? That's a good one.
22:47 Andy Greenwald? Speaking of, okay, speaking of LA crime stuff, I did feel like there's a whole category that we could do of just Altman movies that capture LA. I think my favorite is Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould. Just from the, from the architecture to the vibe.
23:00 Chris Ryan? That place was up for rent recently.
23:02 Andy Greenwald? Did you consider it?
23:04 Chris Ryan? I've been curious about the furniture situation, the elevator that he's got.
23:08 Andy Greenwald? But Chris, now that we're talking about it, we know that they allow cats there.
23:12 Chris Ryan? I bounced it off my wife, and she was like, are the cats there? And I was like, no. And she was like, I'm not interested.
23:16 Andy Greenwald? But she could bring her own cats there. I know that's been a.
23:18 Chris Ryan? It's a controversial topic in, in my apartment.
23:21 Andy Greenwald? I know. I'd be into that.
23:24 Andy Greenwald? It's just, it's just a phenomenal movie, but also just an incredible hang and like, a beautiful updating, although now 50 years old, but of like, one of the most essential. Slavers of L.A. is Chandler.
23:36 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
23:36 Andy Greenwald? And how you can reinvent it for every era. I would also say Shampoo is a super.
23:41 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
23:41 Andy Greenwald? It's just an amazing L.A. movie. And Shortcuts, too.
23:44 Chris Ryan? Yeah, and The Player.
23:45 Andy Greenwald? That's way. Oh, yeah, I had The Player under, I had a category when I was making this. This place is hell slash will fucking kill you, which doesn't feel appropriate for this moment necessarily, but is a vibe of movies.
23:57 Chris Ryan? Sure, yeah.
23:58 Andy Greenwald? And one that's sort of fun to engage with.
24:01 Chris Ryan? Of the stuff that we've talked about on this pod.
24:03 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
24:03 Chris Ryan? And over the last couple of years even, I would put my last couple of shout outs go out to a trio, I guess, I didn't even notice this until I looked, is of HBO shows. Barry, Insecure, and Curb Your Enthusiasm.
24:16 Andy Greenwald? Oh, yeah.
24:17 Chris Ryan? So.
24:17 Andy Greenwald? Wait, that just maps beautifully.
24:19 Chris Ryan? It does.
24:19 Andy Greenwald? Different regions of the city.
24:20 Chris Ryan? You know, just honestly, really evokes a very specific, like you were saying, that L.A. is actually all these little towns and in some ways cities, but all these little towns interconnected by artery roads that, you know, will take you from one side of the city to the, you can go to Dodger Stadium to the beach on Sunset, you know, but these, these are about like the enclaves. And I, I think that these shows actually helped me understand Los Angeles in some ways.
24:49 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
24:50 Chris Ryan? Even though, even if they're not like every time geographically accurate, they're like quintessentially of their place. And Barry, obviously, in the Valley, you know, Insecure in South Los Angeles, and then, and then Curb.
25:03 Andy Greenwald? Insecure and Curb especially, I mean, I think Barry's brilliant in the way it portrays Los Angeles, both in like geography and ethos.
25:09 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
25:10 Andy Greenwald? But like, the thing about those shows is that within the, the sub-communities and regions of this town, like you really can know everyone or bump into people and have that kind of life.
25:20 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
25:20 Andy Greenwald? And there's always more to discover and explore. On that note, on my list is the 1994 film Mi Vida Loca, which is set and filmed in Echo Park.
25:29 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
25:30 Andy Greenwald? A very different era of Echo Park, but it's Alison Andrews's movie, 1994, about young women growing up in that neighborhood. Really holds up, watched it pretty recently, and it's just a beautiful.
25:42 Chris Ryan? Did you watch it pretty recently?
25:42 Andy Greenwald? I did, well, a year ago, but.
25:44 Chris Ryan? You showed it to your daughter?
25:47 Andy Greenwald? I was like, yeah, that's the lake where they're getting jumped. Yeah, great. The swan boats aren't there. It's, do you do this with, like, I find myself, as I get older especially, like, I mean, when I watch anything from 10 years ago or older, like, within our lifetime, I'm watching the backgrounds as much as I'm watching the performances.
26:07 Chris Ryan? Oh, yeah.
26:08 Andy Greenwald? Like, I'm just riveted by, oh, here is a glimpse of that street corner in 1996, or maybe even of 2003, when I remember it and I wasn't paying attention to how much it has changed. It's a great movie for that reason, but it's also just a great, great movie about the parts of LA. Because going through this list, I'm sure you found it to be the case, too.
26:29 Andy Greenwald? LA movies, LA stories, including LA Story, are pretty navel-gazing and entertainment industry-focused by and large. Or they are genre celebrations by a town that is always reinventing itself.
26:40 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
26:41 Andy Greenwald? I always like to give a shout-out to this, but Los Angeles plays itself.
26:44 Chris Ryan? Sure. You can probably still find that streaming in a bunch of places.
26:48 Andy Greenwald? It's, I didn't realize that it was.
26:51 Chris Ryan? Tell people it is.
26:52 Andy Greenwald? So, Los Angeles Plays Itself is a, its creator, Tom Anderson, refers to it as a video essay. It was basically made in academic circles to, like, make a point about how Los Angeles invents itself through the way it is shown on screen and how certain aesthetics and ethoses are perpetuated and reputations are made, basically, for what the town is or could be. It's quite long. It's almost three hours long. I remember seeing it in the theater with our buddy Sean Howe when it came out, and it is riveting. It, a lot of the movies that existed when this was made in 2003, 2004 are featured in it. But it is so, so thoughtful and so fascinating, not just about the depth of the city,
27:33 Andy Greenwald? but also just about what filmic language can communicate about, about an actual place. It's kind of like, it's a companion piece for the thinkier members of our audience. What's the, the Mike Davis book, City of Courts?
27:44 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
27:45 Andy Greenwald? It's the same, it's like how this place was made on an academic level. Or you could just watch Drive with Chris. Put on your dragon jacket, boys and girls.
27:57 Andy Greenwald? Don't worry about if that's Paul Simon or not. Keep driving.
28:00 Chris Ryan? Did you know that "Drive" was basically like created by Nicholas Wen and Ruffin just driving around with Gosling at night?
28:07 Andy Greenwald? Yes.
28:07 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
28:08 Andy Greenwald? That did not surprise me.
28:09 Chris Ryan? But like, they had the script. It was like, it'd been around for a while. Hugh Jackman was gonna maybe make it. And then they just like, when Ruffin signed up, he rented a house in the hills, I think. And everybody who was like, kind of working on the movie sort of lived with him. And they would shoot in the day, and then at night, they would either edit or drive.
28:26 Andy Greenwald? Sounds pretty cool.
28:27 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
28:28 Andy Greenwald? Wait, are you suggesting that we do that? You're looking at me in a certain way.
28:30 Chris Ryan? I just, I love stories like that where it's like, you can tell that the essence of the film came out of some sort of experience that was had while making the movie.
28:40 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
28:40 Chris Ryan? You know, like the apocalypse now going up the river thing.
28:43 Andy Greenwald? Can I throw a couple of other things at you?
28:44 Chris Ryan? Of course you can.
28:45 Andy Greenwald? The last one on my list, the last two, have to have some classic noir in there. "In a Lonely Place", probably my favorite noir, but like, there is something about the way L.A. is shot in black and white that it always gets me. And then, in terms of like neo-noir, or kind of the movie that sums up all of the categories I had, including this place is, uh, can be a nightmare, is Mulholland Drive.
29:06 Chris Ryan? Oh, yeah.
29:07 Andy Greenwald? Lynch's L.A. is pretty, pretty important, I think, because he loves The Kitchen. Recently, had a lovely lunch at his favorite restaurant, the Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake.
29:16 Chris Ryan? Oh, yeah.
29:17 Andy Greenwald? There's a framed photo of him there.
29:18 Chris Ryan? Yeah. What did you have?
29:20 Andy Greenwald? I had a, I had a Big Boy burger. What do you, what do you think? You think I got the salad?
29:24 Chris Ryan? I don't know.
29:24 Andy Greenwald? Do you want me to come on this podcast and say I went to Bob's Big Boy and had a grain bowl?
29:29 Chris Ryan? Do they have grain bowls there?
29:30 Andy Greenwald? Of course they do. It was really funny. Yeah, of course they do. I love that there was, there's a framed photo of him. There's a photo of Laura Dern there. Like, they, they know.
29:40 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
29:40 Andy Greenwald? And for what it's worth, you know, I, it is not a bit, like, the, the, um,
29:46 Andy Greenwald? it's, I'm not even gonna get into the reasons why that I was socially adjacent to David Lynch briefly when we first moved here, but like, there's some mutual friends were like, it was, it was about kids being the same age and some mutual friends were like, "You wanna get, do, get dinner with us for the school event?" And, uh, he refused unless they went to the Bob's Big Boy in Toluca Lake. It's the only restaurant he likes.
30:07 Chris Ryan? So did you go to, that's where you guys went, or did they?
30:09 Andy Greenwald? I wasn't part of this group.
30:10 Chris Ryan? Oh, okay.
30:10 Andy Greenwald? This was later.
30:11 Chris Ryan? Okay.
30:12 Andy Greenwald? No, my-
30:14 Chris Ryan? I feel like I would have heard that story if you'd go to Bob's Big Boy.
30:16 Andy Greenwald? Everyone listening to this would have heard the story. No, the highlight for me was when David's daughter had the, well, David had the parent teacher conference before we did.
30:28 Chris Ryan? Okay.
30:28 Andy Greenwald? And came out and I said, David, how'd it go in there? And he just looked at me and he thumbs up and he went, solid gold. Which is also his answer when I interviewed him on stage for the F Y C for Twin Peaks.
30:42 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
30:43 Andy Greenwald? And that was the only thing he said about the experience of reuniting all the most beloved people of his life for this now potentially career capping achievement.
30:51 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
30:52 Andy Greenwald? So maybe it's more that he didn't want to talk to me, but either way, it was charming. There's a whole category of just like of industry stuff that we didn't get into, like The Player, Barton Fink, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
31:02 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I mean Seth Rogen's upcoming show, The Studio.
31:05 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, I really want to see that.
31:05 Chris Ryan? On Apple. Yeah, the more we talk about it, the more it really occurs to me how much of this,
31:13 Chris Ryan? how much of what we're talking about is like this meta textual kind of
31:15 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
31:16 Chris Ryan? state of our industry, state of of how we interpret what we see on screen.
31:21 Andy Greenwald? The one thing that I think is lacking, and maybe it's because of the nature of this being by and large, at least in the media, a company town, is that there just isn't a ton, and I hope some readers or readers, listeners will point out things we've forgotten, but like of just people living here. I mean, like Father of the Bride was filmed in Pasadena. They were just kind of normals.
31:40 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
31:40 Andy Greenwald? And and lived there, but.
31:42 Chris Ryan? I mean, there's lots of sitcoms that are set in Los Angeles. They're either shot on stages and or largely, for the most part, with the exception of Nobody Wants This, like largely shot elsewhere.
31:51 Andy Greenwald? I wrote down that I was like seeing Adam Brody and Kristen Bell kiss in front of the Los Feliz three. I was like, oh, there we go.
32:00 Andy Greenwald? Or, you know, you know what show was very, very good about this? And it's a show we don't talk about enough anyway. It just had its 10 year anniversary is You're the Worst.
32:07 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
32:07 Andy Greenwald? Was very, very much east side of L A.
32:09 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
32:10 Andy Greenwald? Coded. There was a whole episode, like the Sunday Fun Day centered around the Happy Foot Sad Foot sign.
32:16 Andy Greenwald? There was the Judd Apatow Netflix show with Paul Rust and Gillian Anderson called Love.
32:20 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I remember that.
32:21 Andy Greenwald? It was up and down, but it was also like.
32:23 Chris Ryan? Gillian Jacobs.
32:23 Andy Greenwald? I'm sorry, Gillian Jacobs, yes. Would have been a very different show. Gillian Anderson was on it. The only other two TV shows I wanted to shout out. Party Down.
32:33 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
32:34 Andy Greenwald? In very industry-based, but very, very funny in its perspective on the industry and being slightly outside of it. And then I think one of the most crucial LA texts ever is a show that was supposedly, although, no, was set in New York but filmed here, which is Mad Men. Because the show's relationship to LA, how it positioned LA.
32:53 Chris Ryan? Yeah, is this like dreamland?
32:55 Andy Greenwald? Don constantly coming here, Pete working here, Don getting lost in the desert.
33:00 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
33:01 Andy Greenwald? The way that it served as a counterpoint to the claustrophobia of New York, again, on a future Mad Men revisit, we could talk about that.
33:10 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I mean, like his finding of spiritual sort of stability out here.
33:14 Andy Greenwald? And ending here, you know, it's esalen, but that like, it's, I'm constantly struck by the fact that the show was so deeply period, so deeply New York, but it filmed here, so they couldn't do exterior locations.
33:26 Chris Ryan? Uh huh.
33:26 Andy Greenwald? Unless they were pretending to be here, basically, or unless there was very, very controlled. And I think that claustrophobia of being inside of buildings or being dark was essential to the understanding of what New York was, and then the counterpoint of how, of what LA meant to those people, you know, mirroring the journey of many TV writers. And dare I say podcasters.
33:46 Chris Ryan? Sure.
33:47 Andy Greenwald? Is an important one, but um, I don't know, I guess the exercise is fun for us because we love this place and we love these stories and we love these movies and shows, but I'm also hoping that it will cause, inspire listeners to maybe make a little film festival or a little, curate something for themselves in concert with making a donation to the charities we mentioned at the top that makes sense for them and wherever they are financially at the moment in terms of their own generous giving.
34:11 Chris Ryan? Yeah, anything helps.
34:12 Andy Greenwald? Try to pair them, try to celebrate this, try to remember that, even though we're joking about all the like industry stuff, that this is so much more than Hollywood.
34:20 Chris Ryan? Oh, yeah.
34:20 Andy Greenwald? Um, this is a real place with generations of real working-class people who are very much affected by these tragedies.
34:28 Speaker 04 Ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease symptoms, don't pause for the moments that matter. That's why understanding your treatment options matters. Discover what's possible with Trinphiya. Guselkamap. Trinphiya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections, or lower ability to fight them and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Talk to your doctor and explore what's possible, or call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more about Trinphiya and visit trinphiyradio.com.
35:13 Andy Greenwald? This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. The Home Depot has everything you need to launch your holiday season in style. Upgrade your yard with this year's hottest holiday decor, including the show-stopping towering Santa, oh, I like that one, and his impressive reindeer, both 8.5 feet and both designed with incredible detail that stands out day or night. When you want decor that delivers impact, The Home Depot has it. Make your home Santa's favorite stop with the holiday decor you want, all waiting for you at The Home Depot. This episode is brought to you by Boar's Head. You know what I love about football season? It's the football, but also the football-watching food. And nothing hits like a Boar's Head sandwich when I'm watching a game. Really, any game day sandwich better with Boar's Head. Philly cheesesteak, layer-up buttery slider rolls with Boar's Head, London broil roast
35:57 Andy Greenwald? beef, American white cheese, and picante provolone. Delicious. Then add roasted onions, peppers, and Boar's Head pub-style horseradish sauce. I love horseradish. And you've got the ultimate game day cheesesteak. They've also got a whole lineup of premium meats, cheeses, hummus, and dips, condiments, and more to serve up on game day. Head to your local Boar's Head deli counter to shop now for game day sandwich inspiration and more, visit boar'shead.com. Boar's Head, committed to craft since 1905.
36:25 Andy Greenwald? Is brought to you by WeatherTech. Breaking news out of the North Pole. Santa and his elves are swamped with requests for vehicle floor liners. And although elves are terrific toy makers, their little hammers and chisels don't come close to the laser measured fit of a WeatherTech floor liner, cargo liner, or truck bed impact liner. Even Santa uses them. Cookie crumbs, glitter, a reindeer hitching a ride home? He just hoses them off. Visit weatherTech.com for all your holiday shopping today. It's all Santa approved.
36:58 Chris Ryan? Did you actually wind up watching anything this weekend?
37:01 Andy Greenwald? I watched the Eagles game.
37:02 Chris Ryan? Yep.
37:03 Andy Greenwald? I, we should say to our listeners that like, we intended to watch The Pit, which I know people have really enjoyed. I'm going to be honest with you, it was a extremely stressful and extremely upsetting week. And I did not have the bandwidth to engage with traumatic realities.
37:18 Chris Ryan? Emergency room doctors.
37:20 Andy Greenwald? I could not do it. I look forward to watching the show and engaging with it. Maybe when we're out of the red flag warnings.
37:26 Chris Ryan? I did, in the thick of it, I did The Pit. I did The Pit a little while ago, but I watched the second episode again, just to kind of refresh my memory.
37:36 Andy Greenwald? Or did you have to reattach a leg or something? Is that what it's about?
37:38 Chris Ryan? And then I watched Peter Berg's American Pride.
37:41 Andy Greenwald? See, that's the other thing. I couldn't, the universe could not have set up worse shows for us to be watching right now.
37:49 Chris Ryan? It was really, it was tough. I needed to like, switch out and I just was like, I'm putting Interstellar on and I'm vibing out. I gotta like.
37:55 Andy Greenwald? You gotta go to space with dad.
37:57 Chris Ryan? Exactly.
37:58 Andy Greenwald? I get it.
37:59 Chris Ryan? I need to go to space with my dad.
38:00 Andy Greenwald? Like, there's literally no better way to escape than that. That makes a ton of sense.
38:06 Chris Ryan? We did watch Landman. And I can't tell you how excited I got on Saturday night. I can't remember what the last football game was on Saturday night, but like, me and Mallory were just texting each other like, three hours till Landman.
38:19 Andy Greenwald? Well, also Mallory just had the Ravens victory, so she was in a good mood.
38:22 Chris Ryan? So she was, she was vibing. And you open up old Paramount Plus. We load up the Landman finale on late Saturday night on the West Coast.
38:31 Andy Greenwald? We watch so much Paramount Plus now. It's pretty amazing.
38:36 Chris Ryan? I just, I just shine a light over there.
38:38 Andy Greenwald? Do you have points on the back?
38:39 Chris Ryan? Do you want to follow me? You can follow me.
38:40 Andy Greenwald? Are you auditioning to be one of the, like, the fourth CEO?
38:43 Chris Ryan? I just want Daddy David Ellison to come scoop me up.
38:47 Andy Greenwald? By the way, can I just add, longtime listeners of the podcast know that my daughters changed my avatar on Netflix to just Daddy. What they did on Paramount is even weirder.
38:56 Chris Ryan? Is it Ainsley from Landman?
38:59 Andy Greenwald? No, it's, it's something from SpongeBob, I think.
39:01 Chris Ryan? Okay.
39:02 Andy Greenwald? But what they did was, my older daughter, whose avatar is Cora, from The Legend of Cora, put a parental lock on it.
39:12 Andy Greenwald? On me?
39:13 Chris Ryan? As a bit?
39:14 Andy Greenwald? I think she thought she was being responsible and being like, this will keep me from watching the Taylor Sheridan shows that Uncle Chris talks about so much, and I can't be trusted to be left alone.
39:24 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
39:24 Andy Greenwald? But now, when I, whether I'm logging in to the newest episode of Landman, or our friends, uh, Jim Nance and Tony Romo calling a playoff game, I have to enter a PIN that she came up with.
39:36 Chris Ryan? Uh huh.
39:36 Andy Greenwald? So, the, the secure, I am the one that is being protected.
39:39 Chris Ryan? It turns out this prison wasn't keeping us in.
39:45 Andy Greenwald? Or maybe I set it up and forgot to keep myself from watching these Taylor Sheridan shows for you.
39:50 Chris Ryan? I was so excited when I saw that this was an hour and 20 minutes. Not for my own benefit, although I, I certainly enjoyed myself, but knowing that this was waiting for you.
39:59 Andy Greenwald? So mean.
40:02 Chris Ryan? And I want to start there.
40:04 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, okay.
40:06 Chris Ryan? This is a huge hit.
40:08 Andy Greenwald? To a degree, I didn't understand. You should, you should get into these numbers here.
40:11 Chris Ryan? I, I can't really speculate on like what the actual numbers are. I know that there was a release from Paramount several weeks ago that said through four weeks. It had racked up something like 15 million viewers per episode.
40:25 Andy Greenwald? Yes, and that's in aggregate with all the whatevers, but regardless, there's no context in which that's not astronomical and insane for this era, especially on a streaming service.
40:35 Chris Ryan? And then you get into the anecdotal part where if you read any of the interviews with Billy Bob Thornton that went up last night after the finale in the trades. He's just like, this is the biggest thing I've ever been a part of, pretty much. You know, I mean, with the exception of Armageddon.
40:48 Andy Greenwald? I was gonna say, he was in Armageddon.
40:49 Chris Ryan? Yeah, but like, I mean, I think that this is a very big show and I kind of wonder whether they had no idea that this was gonna happen because there are certain things about it that
41:03 Chris Ryan? this is a very, very, very soap operatic and dramatic show and we're gonna spoil for people who haven't watched the finale spoilers going forward.
41:10 Andy Greenwald? I would also like to note that, at least from my own anecdotal research, there is a large percentage of listeners who count on us
41:17 Chris Ryan? Yes.
41:17 Andy Greenwald? for their landman recaps.
41:19 Chris Ryan? Well, let me tell you what happens.
41:20 Andy Greenwald? Who do not watch the show, but listen to us. So, thank you for that.
41:24 Chris Ryan? For a show that is so dramatic, there is basically no dramatic tension in this
41:28 Andy Greenwald? Zero.
41:29 Chris Ryan? series.
41:29 Andy Greenwald? It actively steers away from it.
41:31 Chris Ryan? And that occurred to me last night. Here's where we ended, okay? Tommy has gotten promoted and is essentially gambling with Monty's money now. The cartel has made peace with him. He will not get in any trouble for the Texas National Guard's bombing of drug dealers.
41:47 Andy Greenwald? Nope.
41:48 Chris Ryan? He's with his ex-wife again.
41:50 Andy Greenwald? And loves her deeply and always has.
41:52 Chris Ryan? Loves her. Daughter is with yet another five-star recruit.
41:55 Andy Greenwald? But this one will hold her at night.
41:59 Andy Greenwald? In addition to doing other things that she can only whisper in his ear.
42:01 Chris Ryan? His son has fallen in love with a widow who, despite everything, loves him back. And when she's like, I don't know if we should do this, he does the exact right thing
42:11 Andy Greenwald? Incredible.
42:11 Chris Ryan? and is like, walk me through your memories.
42:13 Andy Greenwald? Of your deceased husband.
42:14 Chris Ryan? Of your deceased husband, who I was present for the death of.
42:17 Andy Greenwald? Whose role I have now taken.
42:18 Chris Ryan? Uh, his son also has an idea that has apparently never occurred To anyone in the history of oil business in Texas.
42:25 Andy Greenwald? And is able to just cold call dozens of salt of the earth cynical weathered farmers.
42:34 Chris Ryan? Yes.
42:34 Andy Greenwald? And within the span of a single walk among the tall grasses, get them to sign a document.
42:41 Chris Ryan? Giving him leasing rights to their oil.
42:43 Andy Greenwald? Without reading the document.
42:45 Chris Ryan? No, they just want to have a cup of coffee with him.
42:46 Andy Greenwald? They just want to have a cup of coffee, yes.
42:48 Chris Ryan? And he is successfully now building a monopoly on the Wolfcamp terrain of Texas where like I think you can sort of see the large tankers pointing towards each other of Tommy being in charge of MTEx, which is trying to do fracking and Cooper also trying to frack.
43:10 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
43:10 Chris Ryan? And this dad and this son.
43:13 Andy Greenwald? Both being like, we agree.
43:14 Chris Ryan? Let's frack.
43:16 Andy Greenwald? Let's both.
43:17 Chris Ryan? I love you dad.
43:18 Andy Greenwald? This is great. We hate electric vehicles.
43:24 Chris Ryan? They do introduce a new adversary to this series. Which Andy rightly asked me as he was watching it on text message, is that Andy Garcia? And I said, yes.
43:36 Andy Greenwald? They don't have a Shazam for faces yet, so I was just double checking.
43:41 Chris Ryan? Andy Garcia, it had been leaked that he was appearing on this series a while ago and as the weeks went on, I thought maybe he would be, you know, Monty Miller, Monty Miller's brother or something, you know, like.
43:53 Andy Greenwald? You thought Taylor Sheridan would look at Andy Garcia and think of anything other than El Jefe, Capo de Tuticapo of the Mexican drug cartels? You are, once again, you are giving him far too much credit, but.
44:06 Chris Ryan? So he shows up as, just in the nick of time as Tommy is being seriously tortured by a cartel guy.
44:14 Andy Greenwald? Also, I want to tread carefully here because I know that in some ways you are considered management of the ringer, but do you have any thoughts on how El Jefe deals with sort of, you know, disobedient employees?
44:24 Chris Ryan? Well, we don't really get much clarity on that because we're, it's all shot POV style from behind the scrim of Tommy's.
44:30 Andy Greenwald? The repeated gunshots and the sound of bodies clunking to the floor.
44:34 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
44:35 Andy Greenwald? Left you in a state of. Confusion?
44:38 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I, I mean, so Andy Garcia's character, I believe his name is Galeno, shows up at the very end of the episode and-
44:45 Andy Greenwald? Say it and push a T-voice, it sounds better.
44:47 Chris Ryan? Suggests that he and Tommy are gonna be partners going forward in some capacity.
44:53 Andy Greenwald? No, they're gonna be friends.
44:54 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
44:55 Andy Greenwald? Now-
44:56 Chris Ryan? I thought that the, the line that was interesting was that he was like, "I, I may be interested in getting into the oil business."
45:01 Andy Greenwald? That was when it got interesting. The show can't, I mean, it is the monkeys with the typewriters, like, every so often, a few lines of Hamlet emerge.
45:09 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
45:09 Andy Greenwald? There are moments.
45:10 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
45:11 Andy Greenwald? You know, I enjoy those moments.
45:12 Chris Ryan? But, um, I have to admit that I have started skipping the Ainsley scenes.
45:17 Andy Greenwald? Did you?
45:18 Chris Ryan? I am just trying to be accountable, like, when, when she is talking to Ryder, I just click 10 seconds ahead.
45:24 Andy Greenwald? What, interesting, whenever I see, um, Adriana begin to do a silent montage of looking at things while wearing a tank top, I slow it down.
45:35 Chris Ryan? That's, their relationship is the best part of the show to me.
45:38 Andy Greenwald? No, but like, that seems so long.
45:40 Chris Ryan? I know.
45:40 Andy Greenwald? I get it, you're looking at pictures?
45:42 Chris Ryan? Well, so that takes me back to the hour and 20 thing.
45:44 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
45:45 Chris Ryan? Is-
45:45 Andy Greenwald? It earned it.
45:46 Chris Ryan? Um-
45:47 Andy Greenwald? Everything's bigger in Texas, homie.
45:49 Chris Ryan? Best example of, I can't tell if this is like, Taylor on the Benihana grill, making the onion volcano, and just being like, "I have it all at the disposal." I don't think so.
46:02 Andy Greenwald? But go on.
46:02 Chris Ryan? Or is this just like, a crazy mishmash of found footage, scribbled bar napkin notes, plot pieces being stitched together, strike affected shooting schedules-
46:16 Andy Greenwald? No.
46:17 Chris Ryan? Where people are like, "Most of this series is take place on the phone while Tommy is driving back and forth across Texas," like-
46:23 Andy Greenwald? I, I disagree, I think that there is intention here, and there is scaffolding. And, you know, there's a sense of, I mean, he's a good, he's a, he's a perfectly good writer and constructor of things, right? Like, it's, you know, what's the line from, um, Waiting for Guffman, where Eugene Levy's like, "I wasn't the class clown, but I sat next to him and I studied him."
46:42 Chris Ryan? One of Taylor's favorites, yeah.
46:43 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, I'm sure. He's like-
46:45 Chris Ryan? Waiting for Guffman.
46:46 Andy Greenwald? Just him and Paul Simon at Arts. Talking about their favorite Eugene Levy bits.
46:49 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
46:51 Andy Greenwald? There is a shape and arc to it that you can suddenly, every so often, you just get a glimpse of, and it's pulled into focus, right? Like, the opening montage where there's the history of this business, the Cooper making the deals and realizing where that's going, the scene where the drug cartels are like, "We'd like to go into the oil business."
47:07 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
47:07 Andy Greenwald? I'm like, "God damn, like, there's something here." And you can feel it, and you can feel the momentum under their feet. But there is no editing process. There are no notes accepted here. And that is his right, he has earned it, but there is a flabbiness that comes with it that robs the project of some, not just momentum, but honestly, it feels like existential purpose. You just sort of lose it. Like, when you are intercutting between scenes of Ainsley stripteasing and basically promising to BJ's on Alvarado for her quarterback boyfriend while the roughneck dude is watching minor league baseball downstairs and her mom is clarifying butter and they don't even lock the door.
47:52 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
47:52 Andy Greenwald? With Tommy having nails hammered into his legs.
47:55 Chris Ryan? But Angela said she doesn't want them having sex in the car.
47:57 Andy Greenwald? No, no, I know that she's respectful of their bodily autonomy. I'm just saying, it is a weird mise en scène of what's going on up there interspersed.
48:06 Chris Ryan? You have to stop using Kanye to cinema terms when talking about Landman. You gotta let it happen, brother.
48:11 Andy Greenwald? Au contraire. I think it is time to elevate this and consider it on the plate. This is the art we have. We don't get to pick and choose the moments we live in, okay?
48:20 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
48:21 Andy Greenwald? This is what I got.
48:22 Chris Ryan? Sometimes there's a man, you know?
48:25 Andy Greenwald? So, but intercutting that romantic folie a deux, if you will, with Tommy being doused and gassed.
48:37 Chris Ryan? And having nails hammered into his thigh.
48:39 Andy Greenwald? Was a weird juxtaposition.
48:41 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
48:42 Andy Greenwald? You know, similarly, let's go back to where you started, which is how the show just seems actively uninterested in dramatic stakes. Like-
48:49 Chris Ryan? No, there's tons of stakes. There's no, like, they introduce life and death around every corner, but-
48:57 Chris Ryan? But they do not extend that life and death past any episode. And I wonder whether or not that's part of the recipe for its success.
49:05 Andy Greenwald? Well, that it resolves every episode and moves on in the same way that like-
49:09 Chris Ryan? That it essentially always starts from this place of like, well, what's gonna be the crisis today? And Angela is like, I have a new idea about how to revitalize our senior citizens.
49:18 Andy Greenwald? I think that's a really smart observation. I think that the perpetual tension of television is to make everyone feel very safe and stable. And you know what you're getting every week, but also incrementally moving things forward without upsetting anyone.
49:28 Chris Ryan? Yes.
49:28 Andy Greenwald? And he has found an incredible balance of vibes and procedural that works. What I'm suggesting, it's like, shout out, West Andrew, shout out.
49:39 Andy Greenwald? What this podcast presupposes is maybe it's not intentional, it's just working.
49:43 Chris Ryan? Yeah, that's what I'm trying to suss out. I guess it doesn't really matter what the intention is, is what we see on screen. But what I'm trying to figure out is there was moments during the last episode where it gave me real last episode of 1883 vibes. And for people who don't know, 1883 is a Yellowstone prequel starring Sam Elliott, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill. And is this incredibly violent wagon train story across the American West. And the sort of foundation of the pioneer, you know, era of this country.
50:16 Andy Greenwald? Wasn't Ainsley in it?
50:17 Chris Ryan? She may have been.
50:18 Andy Greenwald? She played an old frontiers woman. Go on.
50:21 Chris Ryan? Come on, man.
50:24 Chris Ryan? So you're watching the last episode of 1883. And they like, spoiler for 1883, let's just say they get to where they're going.
50:33 Andy Greenwald? Let's say there's no 1884.
50:34 Chris Ryan? And you're like, oh, okay. So like, is the next season going to be about starting the town? And it's like, no, major characters die and then the show ends.
50:42 Andy Greenwald? Hard no.
50:43 Chris Ryan? And I thought for a second watching Landman, I was like, I don't think Tommy's gonna die.
50:48 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
50:49 Chris Ryan? But like, is this the end of the show? Like, it kind of almost had that freight train momentum over the course of the season and seemed to be resolving all of the, all of the open ends, like the loose ends.
51:01 Andy Greenwald? I, I see that, but I fundamentally disagree only in the sense that there was some, you can see the evidence of some longer range planning, like Jon Hamm doing a season in the same way that Kyle Chandler did an episode.
51:14 Chris Ryan? Michael Peña did an episode.
51:15 Andy Greenwald? Exactly.
51:16 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
51:16 Andy Greenwald? And, you know, a few weeks ago, we were like, why is Demi Moore on the show? And I think you suggested maybe she would become the new Monty or the step into his shoes. Okay, that works. That's interesting. The issue that I take with it in terms of like dramatic stakes is something that a writer's room can do. I want to be clear, this show is more successful than most things at all, most things, period.
51:40 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
51:41 Andy Greenwald? And whatever he's doing is working. And I'm not suggesting that there is a way to improve the show. I'm just, let me just give you a, just give you an, an option here to consider. That the thing that the writer's room, a writer's room can do at its best is pitch alternates and keep the thinking fluid enough so that when you make a decision, like he's going to be on the show for one season, to help the decision-making to maximize every moment of the season that he is in, to wring out every potential dramatic and emotional and character-y fallout from his demise. What was so bizarre about the show is that he does a couple of phone calls, gets on a couple of planes, gives some speeches, has a first cardiac episode, is fine.
52:26 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
52:27 Andy Greenwald? Get, is the recipient of a six-minute monologue from Jerry Jones, has a second cardiac episode.
52:33 Chris Ryan? Tears his aortic wall.
52:35 Andy Greenwald? Leaves the penultimate episode in a way that we think he's dead. This episode begins with him not dead, being told that he prob, he could be okay.
52:43 Chris Ryan? This is what I'm talking about, is like, I feel like there was.
52:46 Andy Greenwald? A decision made, like they were potentially keeping it in play?
52:49 Chris Ryan? Well, okay, so Jon Hamm's fate is. Only broadcast by a long shot outside of a
52:56 Andy Greenwald? This is where I was building to.
52:57 Chris Ryan? Where his family is sobbing and you can see a red light above his bed. So I was like, oh, I guess he's dead. Or they're really upset because he's, you know, got a machine breathing for him and he is not a lot like. He's not conscious.
53:12 Andy Greenwald? They could go in in post and put a little life in that.
53:15 Chris Ryan? All of the interviews are like after the death of Monty.
53:17 Andy Greenwald? No, no, he's dead.
53:18 Chris Ryan? Like everybody from the show is like, and then Monty dies. And I was like. I that almost felt like, let's shoot a couple of different ways of doing this and see what we want to go with. Um, I, I, I completely understand like a writer's room and other creative voices in there might stress test certain things and be like, the tonal shift between Angela and Ainsley at a strip club. And Billy Bob Thornton being fucking tortured by the Mexican cartel is much, is just like too, too far apart. That being said.
53:51 Andy Greenwald? Okay.
53:53 Chris Ryan? I like. I, I almost feel like more shows could use the chaos of this show. Like more shows should be weirder and a little less like, well, that's against the rules.
54:05 Andy Greenwald? No.
54:05 Chris Ryan? You have to do this.
54:06 Andy Greenwald? We all.
54:06 Chris Ryan? You have to do.
54:07 Andy Greenwald? We always come back to this point and it's one that I am very sympathetic to, which is everything we see is so noted and so group thought. That seeing anything that proves that there's someone alive in there is interesting. But interesting isn't not, isn't always the friend of storytelling. And so in terms of the Monty thing, just choose an event that lands equally on all the characters and stick with it. You know what I mean? Like have him die and then talk about it. Have him be, you don't know what his fate is and then have that land and move on. Don't stutter step it three times, Jerry Jones it, and then put it in a montage. Like that just seems like a very weird use of story resources to do that.
54:52 Andy Greenwald? I will say the cardiac surgeon who delivered the news. Perhaps the best acting performance on the show all season. Sir, I do not know your name, but I commend you. I thought you delivered some truly gut wrenching news with precision.
55:07 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
55:08 Andy Greenwald? And verve, and I was very impressed.
55:10 Chris Ryan? It would have been awesome if it had been, uh, Joe's husband from Lioness was his cardiac surgeon.
55:16 Andy Greenwald? That guy's too handsome for that job.
55:17 Chris Ryan? Dave Adenwell?
55:18 Andy Greenwald? Um, yeah, that part did work.
55:20 Chris Ryan? I would like to say something.
55:22 Andy Greenwald? Please.
55:22 Chris Ryan? And I don't, again, I want to stress that I have nothing against this person playing the part.
55:28 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, let's have the conversation.
55:30 Chris Ryan? I would like to politely suggest that the character Rebecca, who plays the litigator and negotiator of MTech's oil, that this character get Lyme disease and move to Vermont.
55:48 Chris Ryan? Something that they can manage.
55:50 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
55:51 Chris Ryan? And go to someplace, I guess there's a lot of ticks in Vermont. I don't know that for sure.
55:55 Andy Greenwald? A chronic, a chronic condition that is not fatal.
55:56 Chris Ryan? Yes, where it just takes them out of the game because this was the one part of the show. Not the one, but it was the, the part of the show that I think bothered me the most was that she played three different people this season.
56:13 Andy Greenwald? Yes.
56:14 Chris Ryan? She played this outsider POV character that's supposed to explain to all the snowflakes from blue states about how oil and the world really works. Fine.
56:25 Andy Greenwald? Yep.
56:26 Chris Ryan? Then she softens and is almost kind of like an adjunct, not member of the family, but like seems to be like, oh, I'm getting used to.
56:35 Andy Greenwald? And it was also flirty a little bit?
56:36 Chris Ryan? These Texas ways. And you almost think for a second, is this going to be Tommy's girlfriend? Because the whole Angela thing in the beginning, it seems like almost more of an antagonist thing, you know?
56:48 Chris Ryan? And then on a dime Rebecca turns into Voldemort.
56:52 Andy Greenwald? Thank you for that reference.
56:53 Chris Ryan? Well, I wouldn't know, but I'm just saying, I hear that guy does some bad stuff.
56:57 Andy Greenwald? Some people think I wouldn't know, but I do.
56:59 Chris Ryan? Like, I'm gonna put Cooper in prison, and I'm like, ma'am, you are not a state or federal prosecutor. You're just like a-
57:06 Andy Greenwald? She's fundamentally bad at her job, and yet everyone is just like,
57:09 Chris Ryan? I need to-
57:10 Andy Greenwald? She's a killer.
57:11 Chris Ryan? Exactly.
57:11 Andy Greenwald? Who knows nothing, and just screams profanities. Sounds good.
57:17 Chris Ryan? And then in the finale, is just basically like crying about fracking as Tommy tells her like, "Too bad, you're now the VP of-"
57:26 Andy Greenwald? "Your great-grandfather's built this world, and it's up to you to clean it up, missy."
57:31 Chris Ryan? It's like, "If you don't like it, get rid of your phone and get off the grid."
57:37 Chris Ryan? This sucked, and I just don't want to... I need Taylor to have a by-himself meeting, or whatever, or talk to some women, and figure out like a person that this character is.
57:50 Andy Greenwald? You have a binder of women you could share with him. I want to talk briefly about the role of telecommunications on this show about oil.
57:57 Chris Ryan? Is that you don't have any Rebecca comments? Or you feel like you're on the record?
58:01 Andy Greenwald? I think I'm on the record. I think, I believe, I believe I ended my argument last week when I said, "One of the top five worst characters on television this century."
58:09 Chris Ryan? I guess that's true.
58:10 Andy Greenwald? It's hard to come back from that or to find wiggle room.
58:12 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
58:13 Andy Greenwald? You know, a lot has been made of how the cellphone has changed storytelling.
58:19 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
58:19 Andy Greenwald? In the sense that-
58:20 Chris Ryan? This is why like they say like, PTA doesn't want to make contemporary films, just because he doesn't want to shoot people looking at their phones all the time.
58:26 Andy Greenwald? Right, or like spy movies, like it's no longer like chalk-marking dead drops and like being, you know, archly British and talking to your counter-
58:33 Chris Ryan? Yeah, kind of peaked with Nokia core, you know? Nokia wave.
58:35 Andy Greenwald? For real, though. Can't do that anymore. When you watch Seinfeld reruns, like everyone just walking into each other's apartments, because how else could you communicate? So, on the one hand, I respect Taylor's like commitment to the world as it is, not how we would want it to be.
58:53 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
58:53 Andy Greenwald? Not the world our grandfathers had.
58:55 Chris Ryan? Well, in a sense, though, not really, because, I mean, you and I like a phone call.
58:59 Andy Greenwald? Sure.
59:00 Chris Ryan? That's about the only person I talked to on the phone other than my wife and my mother.
59:03 Andy Greenwald? This is what I'm saying, that like, it's tipped.
59:06 Chris Ryan? Juliet.
59:07 Andy Greenwald? It's tipped to, anyone else, anyone else you'd like to add to the list?
59:09 Chris Ryan? Uh, Jeff Child calls, Jeff Child likes a phone call.
59:12 Andy Greenwald? Okay, that's nice.
59:14 Chris Ryan? That's about it though, yeah. So there's five or six people.
59:17 Andy Greenwald? But honestly, us discovering relatively recently that we still like phone calls was like, was a, was a beautiful moment.
59:22 Chris Ryan? Well, it's the foundation of our relationship. I used to leave you those messages from
59:26 Andy Greenwald? Vermont?
59:26 Chris Ryan? Forty-five minutes away in Boston where I'd be like, "Hey, brother."
59:30 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, I've got some CD singles.
59:31 Chris Ryan? Going to see Joan of Arc tonight.
59:34 Chris Ryan? Karate's opening.
59:35 Andy Greenwald? I'd be like, "I think, I think I'll stay in for the heavenly reunion when they hit the grad center." Um, good times. No, so, so much of this show is conducted over telephone and FaceTime that it is absurd. But also, the way that he does phone calls is beyond absurd at this point. I, I just want to call attention to one thing that happened early in the episode that I, I cannot, I cannot get out of my mind. Which is, we have the whole run with that phenomenal guest performance by the cardiac surgeon. And, you know, Cammy's thinking about stuff and the girls who don't have lines, but they're crying. And Billy Bob gets the call from the really a little too shook army major.
1:00:18 Chris Ryan? Oh, yeah.
1:00:19 Andy Greenwald? And he's just like, "Well, I've got people, they're lawyering up."
1:00:22 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:00:22 Andy Greenwald? "What are we gonna do? It's all fucking gone."
1:00:24 Chris Ryan? These guys are accountants and plumbers.
1:00:25 Andy Greenwald? And Billy Bob's like, "God damn it, not today." And he's like, "You know what? I'll fucking call you back." So he then leaves.
1:00:32 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:00:33 Andy Greenwald? We see him leaving the hospital. I'm like, "Oh, he's really got one on. Is he gonna be spied upon again by the cartel?" Or he lights a cigarette and I'm like, "Oh, well, he had to go outside to light the cigarette because he's respectful."
1:00:42 Chris Ryan? Can't do that in the ICU.
1:00:43 Andy Greenwald? Can't do that. You could do it when you're literally swimming in gasoline, but you can't do it in a waiting room in a Texas hospital. And I'm like, "He's clearly going to call the cartel again, or he's going to move this story forward"
1:00:54 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:00:54 Andy Greenwald? "to, to, as he has done often, mollify someone." What he does instead is he calls the guy back, repeats all of his points about how this is not really a fucking problem.
1:01:05 Chris Ryan? Yes.
1:01:05 Andy Greenwald? And the guy's like, "Okay, you're right. This second phone call really put my mind at ease, sir."
1:01:10 Chris Ryan? He cheered me up.
1:01:12 Andy Greenwald? And he hangs up. Now, again, this is not me being like, like snobby or judgmental, but I do feel like it could be like, Taylor, you know what's better than an hour and 20 minutes? Hour 18.
1:01:25 Andy Greenwald? You know what I mean? Like, that wasn't necessary.
1:01:28 Chris Ryan? Do you wish I talked to you more like Billy Bob talks to people? Like where it's just like, here's how it is?
1:01:33 Andy Greenwald? I wish everyone talked to me like that. Are you kidding me? The greatest lack in my life is clarity and declarative conversations.
1:01:42 Chris Ryan? Okay. That's my, that's my New Year's resolution.
1:01:45 Andy Greenwald? It would be so great. Truly, one of my happiest resources on the planet is the text chain with you and Kaya, where you just say, 10 a.m. tomorrow, Studio 6. And I'm like, thumbs up. Thank you. Thank you, work mom and dad. Thank you.
1:02:00 Chris Ryan? I don't know if I have anything else other than trying to unpack why I react so warmly towards the, the love story between Cooper and Adria.
1:02:10 Andy Greenwald? Before we go there, can I ask you one other question? Did you think that the field trip to the strip club?
1:02:17 Chris Ryan? Do you have nothing on Cooper and Adria?
1:02:18 Andy Greenwald? No, I want to go, because we actually care about that. I want to do one more silly thing.
1:02:21 Chris Ryan? Okay. I, I have to completely admit to you that I, I more or less like zoned out during the strip club thing. Like, I thought it was a funny joke that then took two and a half episodes?
1:02:35 Andy Greenwald? Yes, and it's not just that. It's to your original point. I was like, well, it's gonna be slightly complicating for, for mom and daughter when one of these old people dies, because they get so excited.
1:02:51 Chris Ryan? Yeah, yeah.
1:02:52 Andy Greenwald? Reader, that did not happen.
1:02:53 Chris Ryan? Nope.
1:02:53 Andy Greenwald? They had an amazing time and they made it back in time for nap and they'd like to do it again. That was the story.
1:02:59 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:03:00 Andy Greenwald? That was the story. And the lesson learned is they're good people and they're gonna do it again. That was the story.
1:03:06 Chris Ryan? Do you think, let's, let's like sort of tease this out, though. Like, is he?
1:03:11 Andy Greenwald? Hmm, who's he?
1:03:12 Chris Ryan? Taylor. By breaking all these rules, like creating a new kind of storytelling, like, is this like playlist storytelling where it's like, or skip the next song storytelling where it's like, hey, yeah, like that, isn't, wouldn't it be funny if a bunch of old people went to a strip club? Why? Just cuz?
1:03:31 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, I mean, no one's like-
1:03:31 Chris Ryan? But you're just gonna do that like as like a five second thing, right? Like, no, it's gonna take two episodes to plan it and execute it.
1:03:37 Andy Greenwald? And it's really funny, right? Like, it's funny. Old people getting boners, that's funny, right? And they're like, yeah, yeah, boss. That's funny. Keep going.
1:03:49 Andy Greenwald? This is better than Nate Bargatze hour I watched last night. That's hilarious.
1:03:54 Chris Ryan? Okay, so you don't think he's, um, he's breaking the wheel?
1:03:58 Andy Greenwald? He's the one. He's, he's changing history.
1:04:03 Chris Ryan? First of his name.
1:04:05 Andy Greenwald? No, I think that you are on to something that there is, again, I don't, I mean this in a positive way. I think that he is, I don't think there's a lot of forethought in this, but I think he is remarkably good at fracking five decades of television storytelling and emerging with things that people like.
1:04:25 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:04:25 Andy Greenwald? You know, I, I don't think it's actually complicated and needs to be studied under a microscope. Like, what is the alchemy of this? We spend a lot of time on this podcast over the years being like, ah, but television is many things to many people. You know, you can watch, uh, Lioness and you can also watch, uh,
1:04:41 Chris Ryan? Lion Man, yeah.
1:04:43 Andy Greenwald? And that's it. From one to the other.
1:04:45 Chris Ryan? Well, if you listen to this podcast over the last couple of months.
1:04:48 Andy Greenwald? It's pretty much all you can listen to. No, but I mean, I think that, I think a lot of our listeners will watch, um, Abbott Elementary. Some of them will watch Bluey because of children in their household and others will, and, and they might watch, they might have watched the, like me, they may have been among the six people who watched Irma Vep on HBO and they watched this. Like, there's a lot of stuff.
1:05:07 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:05:08 Andy Greenwald? So it, it actually, the rule breaking, the wheel breaking may be that we do not need to keep these flavors separate anymore, that, that everybody is watching everything and it's all kind of smeary. So we do not need to protect the very cleanly delineated sensibilities of some model viewer.
1:05:26 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:05:27 Andy Greenwald? So maybe that. And I do think we see that reflected in the, the people in our lives or just anecdotally feedback who are watching the show, which does seem to be a healthy mix of, um, snobs and basics in terms of what they want out of stuff.
1:05:40 Chris Ryan? I've gotten so many great text messages. I have to shout him out from Jason Gallagher and his wife Kelly, who have been watching this show from Oklahoma. Um, Jason obviously has Texas roots.
1:05:49 Andy Greenwald? Was Jason like, there have been earthquakes here before there was fracking?
1:05:53 Chris Ryan? Can I actually just tell you a couple of things Jason shared with me?
1:05:55 Andy Greenwald? I love Jason, of course.
1:05:57 Chris Ryan? This is from last night. Uh, Jason hit me up and said, my favorite LOL moment was from earlier in the season during the college track meet scene. It opens with a guy from KU doing the high jump and the height was clearly displayed. He successfully jumped four feet, five inches, which is literally what our girls' middle school team could jump.
1:06:17 Chris Ryan? And Kelly has like all these observations about how close pickup trucks drive to one another on gravel roads.
1:06:24 Andy Greenwald? Oh, great.
1:06:24 Chris Ryan? She's like, you would never follow a car that closely because the gravel and the rocks that would kick up by the first car would hit your windshield. And so it's just like little things like that that people are noticing. It's bringing a community together.
1:06:39 Andy Greenwald? Of Snopes subscribers to debunk and nitpick. All of this said, here's where I'll bring it back to the point you wanted to make.
1:06:48 Andy Greenwald? The scene where Cooper is talking to this week's weathered farmer who's mistrustful of people wanting to, you know, put solar panels on his land was so beautifully shot. Stephen Kay is the guy who directed these last round of episodes. They both looked fantastic and it was like, I use this word too much today for other reasons, but it was mythological storytelling. Like these were the archetypal Texas images.
1:07:14 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:07:15 Andy Greenwald? That speak to the soul.
1:07:16 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:07:16 Andy Greenwald? And being honest and direct with each other and the promise of building something. And maybe that appealed to me not only because I like those, that character and I like that performance and I like that storyline, but it suggests a future and places for it to go that won't necessarily be resolved.
1:07:32 Chris Ryan? I don't mean to sound overbearing about this, but there's something kind of precious about his performance and it's telling that his performance takes place largely in a vacuum.
1:07:42 Andy Greenwald? Yes.
1:07:42 Chris Ryan? He has one true family scene in the dinner.
1:07:47 Andy Greenwald? But has no connection on a character or even performance level with the other people in his family.
1:07:51 Chris Ryan? Almost in a coma when Angela comes in and immediately needs to take a Xanax and disappears. And for the rest of the time is on this other side of the story that almost aesthetically takes place in a different world than the rest of Landman, right? Like, he doesn't use his phone. He doesn't, he's talking to people in person. Like, it's an old way of doing things that I think suits the show and obviously speaks to us, but isn't, I don't know if Landman was about Jacob Loughlin and his dad on opposite sides of the oil industry, but like was shot with that vibe. I don't know if it would have been as successful.
1:08:29 Andy Greenwald? No, it wouldn't. I mean, there is a version of this where Jason Cadem's is working with the same Texas Monthly article. No, he's working with the same outline that Taylor shared and delivered to Paramount, but then he got too busy and stepped away. And frankly, it is exciting to think about that. That sounds like a much richer, much smarter in a lot of ways shows. And I don't mean like intellectual. I mean, in terms of its decision making.
1:08:54 Chris Ryan? Sure, sure.
1:08:55 Andy Greenwald? I don't think it would be as popular. I just don't think it would because this, because Taylor in his storytelling is shameless. And again, I'm using language that sounds heated, but I mean, he goes for it. He does the biggest version of everything. The cartel guy takes Tommy out and Sheridan's like, we are going to blow up a well.
1:09:14 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:09:15 Andy Greenwald? That is what we were going to do again, because we are budgeted for it or because I want it. You know what I mean? Like, he goes all the way. And I think that big, big, big swings do resonate with people. But there are, there are these glimpses of the type of storytelling that I think he wants to be telling it. That Cooper storyline has elements of the Yellowstone flashback shows at their best, and I've engaged with them in limited ways, but that's sort of, that's sort of like.
1:09:43 Chris Ryan? Sturdy.
1:09:44 Andy Greenwald? Not just sturdy, but sweeping, right? Like the lonesome dovishness that we like. We're like, this is about the beginnings, not just of a, of a family or of a family fortune, but about a land.
1:09:55 Chris Ryan? Passage of time, passage of ways of doing things. Yeah.
1:09:57 Andy Greenwald? He loves that shit. And I am very susceptible to that. And it's just increasingly hard to find that in the midst of all of the noise. But I think the thing that you're suggesting, which is not wrong, is that the noise is crucial to the popularity or to the resonance.
1:10:14 Chris Ryan? I never expected to talk about every single episode of a Taylor Sheridan show with you. It's been really, really fun.
1:10:20 Andy Greenwald? What do I get for this? We didn't discuss this.
1:10:22 Chris Ryan? That being said.
1:10:23 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
1:10:23 Chris Ryan? I don't think it was homework for you. I can sense from you when you're like, I have to do this for the good of the pod or whatever. And, and I can tell sometimes when you're like.
1:10:33 Andy Greenwald? No, I keep things pretty buttoned up.
1:10:36 Chris Ryan? But I can tell when you're like, oh, all right. Another one of the, like, yes, another episode of this. You were not like that with this.
1:10:44 Andy Greenwald? Well, first of all, I enjoy my time with you.
1:10:46 Chris Ryan? I know.
1:10:47 Andy Greenwald? But I, I think the, I think my thing with this is a.
1:10:55 Andy Greenwald? These little, what are they? Crumbs of Hope, as the episode was called. Which is an insane phrase that I don't think is a phrase. But I suddenly found myself searching for a way to describe what the show gives me, and the show gave me even that.
1:11:08 Chris Ryan? See?
1:11:08 Andy Greenwald? So that's what I'm saying. There are these like little bits.
1:11:11 Chris Ryan? He speaks in your voice, American.
1:11:13 Andy Greenwald? These little teasing bits, where I'm like, that's the vague shadow of something I would like to watch.
1:11:20 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:11:21 Andy Greenwald? And then there is an element of it that is like, he's not really going to build up stripping for old people.
1:11:28 Chris Ryan? As a two-episode arc.
1:11:29 Andy Greenwald? For, that is not just, there is the crescendo of some characters. I can't believe he's going to do that. And again, this is like, you mixed up my peanut butter and my chocolate, like these things that go to, like, it speaks to something about the way people do engage with TV now, which is like,
1:11:48 Chris Ryan? That's what I'm trying to get at.
1:11:48 Andy Greenwald? To keep your attention, you have to be that kind, that, it's like, he's making a bet with the audience that's separate and apart from is Tommy gonna survive? It's like, am I actually going to do this? Like, are we really gonna put the show in this place? And he definitely does.
1:12:04 Chris Ryan? Yes. And there's something about that that I think I respond to. I think I responded to it with early, first couple of seasons of Ozark, of that accelerated plot.
1:12:13 Andy Greenwald? What's next?
1:12:14 Chris Ryan? Like, the, the speed limit break, breaking of the plot. Of, most shows would end here, this would be the end of the first season, it's the end of the first episode. Most shows would never do this and bring this character in out of nowhere to be this massive sea change of a character. It's like, but what if we did it every other week? We just brought somebody on who's just gonna fuck shit up, you know? And that's kind of what happened over this season of Landman. Like, I think that explains somewhat what Rebecca turned into. It explains the consistent presence of the cartel and then now bringing in Andy Garcia.
1:12:48 Chris Ryan? So I don't know. I mean, I really, I enjoyed myself watching it. I think I thought the first few episodes were like truly great. And then it just became like a crazy fun thing to experience.
1:12:59 Andy Greenwald? You know, I do think, I agree with you. I know that you feel this way, that I think that trying to ascribe political motivations or read tea leaves in the show is facile. I don't think that's really relevant.
1:13:09 Chris Ryan? No.
1:13:09 Andy Greenwald? But I do think that the one thing about Taylor Sheridan that people respond to and that is in tune with the times is he is very, he is unapologetic.
1:13:19 Chris Ryan? And he cares about mental health.
1:13:20 Andy Greenwald? He cares deeply, and he's suspicious of green technology. But also, no, in the sense that he never backtracks, right?
1:13:27 Chris Ryan? Yep.
1:13:28 Andy Greenwald? He puts everything in and then just is like, well, now there's a new character to worry about, or now she's going to be in charge of this, or she's behaved this way and she was introduced to do this, but fuck it, we're going this way instead. There is never any equivocating or any doubt.
1:13:41 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:13:42 Andy Greenwald? And I do think there is something appealing about that when you are asking someone to drive your story's bus for a few weeks or a few years.
1:13:50 Chris Ryan? Greenwald, it was great to see you. Hopefully, we will have a show on Thursday.
1:13:53 Andy Greenwald? Yes, I would like that as well.
1:13:55 Chris Ryan? And we'll talk about the pit. We'll talk about the agency. We'll get ready for Severance, which is coming on Friday.
1:14:00 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
1:14:01 Chris Ryan? Thank you to Kaya for producing us. Thank you to C.T. for filming us today. And I hope everybody in Los Angeles listening to us, stay safe.
1:14:08 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, just lots of love to the entire city, region, community, and to all of our listeners. Thanks for sticking with us.
Previous The Golden Globes Recap and 2025 TV Rundown. Plus, ‘Landman’ Episode 9 Next Remembering David Lynch, ‘Severance’ Season 2 Anticipation, ‘The Pitt,’ and ‘American Primeval’ Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated