Paramount Settles States’ Antitrust Lawsuit. Plus, ‘Lanterns’ Episode 6.

Chris and Andy talk about Paramount reaching a settlement with state attorneys general over an antitrust lawsuit, bringing the David Ellison-owned studio one step closer to the acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (1:59). Then they react to HBO winning a bidding war for a new drama series starring Javier Bardem (19:36). Later, they discuss ‘Lanterns’ Episode 6 (29:49). Finally, The Watch: After Dark (56:26). Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of The Watch and so much more! Follow us on IG and TikTok! Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Studio Production: Jason Arreola Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:50Speaker 02

  I need support staff to clear the room. Stand up and walk now.

• 0:56Chris Ryan?

  Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at the ringer.com. And joining me in the studio, first in line for one of Jon Stewart's panic rooms, it's Andy Greenwald.

• 1:10Andy Greenwald?

  I thought we were calling them not, what is it? Not necessarily panic room?

• 1:14Chris Ryan?

  Whatever it is, that's where you watch the Eagles.

• 1:16Andy Greenwald?

  I'll tell you something. Every room I walk into is a panic room.

• 1:20Chris Ryan?

  You seem stable. You seem great. You seem even keel.

• 1:23Andy Greenwald?

  Thanks.

• 1:24Chris Ryan?

  It was a beautiful weekend here in Los Angeles.

• 1:27Andy Greenwald?

  Weather was nice.

• 1:28Chris Ryan?

  The weather was nice. It's a Monday here. We're going to talk about lanterns. We're going to talk about the settlement between Paramount and the state's attorney generals, who had sued them.

• 1:39Andy Greenwald?

  Is it too late to get barrister wigs as a prop for when we do legal talk? Is that something we have in studio?

• 1:44Chris Ryan?

  It would probably be the most expertise we brought to the proceedings.

• 1:48Andy Greenwald?

  That's what I'm saying. We need to distinguish somehow that we are not qualified.

• 1:52Chris Ryan?

  We got some other news and notes at the top. The Watch at spotify.com, the WatchPod underscore at Instagram. You can watch us on YouTube at ringer-tv with the Ringer Prestige TV Podcast. They're covering slow horses these days. Yeah, you can listen to us on Spotify where you can watch us. You can listen to us on all sorts of podcast platforms. National Public Radio.

• 2:12Andy Greenwald?

  Can you listen to us there?

• 2:13Chris Ryan?

  No. But I always have a dream of just doing away with this whole persona that I've built up and just being like, I'm with Andy Greenwald. We're going to talk about episode six of Lanterns.

• 2:25Andy Greenwald?

  Have you ever listened to my solo podcasts?

• 2:26Chris Ryan?

  Uh, no, honestly.

• 2:28Andy Greenwald?

  No, but that's kind of my brand.

• 2:29Chris Ryan?

  No, I've listened to your work. I think it's wonderful.

• 2:32Andy Greenwald?

  You're familiar.

• 2:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33Andy Greenwald?

  Which part do you like best?

• 2:36Chris Ryan?

  How are you doing, bud? Donny Candles, the Eagles, victorious? Where do you want to start with? Real, real life or fake life?

• 2:42Andy Greenwald?

  No, no, I think we should do that after dark.

• 2:43Chris Ryan?

  Okay, after dark.

• 2:44Andy Greenwald?

  We should do it.

• 2:44Chris Ryan?

  Let's talk about the biggest news in Hollywood, which is I had a whole A-block dedicated to the various leaks that have been coming out over the last four days. David Ellison taking out the tape measure and sizing up some office space in Tennessee. The subsequent hysteria that came out after it was announced that Paramount was starting to look at moving to Nashville in earnest. Then there were discussions over the weekend, leaks over the weekend about how negotiations were ongoing between a group of state's attorney generals led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta with Paramount over the merger of Paramount and Warner Brothers.

• 3:25Chris Ryan?

  There is discussions about penalties that would be incurred if they didn't release 30 movies a year. All sorts of, all sorts of business was getting out into the streets. As we were driving in today,

• 3:37Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 3:37Chris Ryan?

  it was announced that a settlement is nigh, if not already official, or I think it will be made official today. So we'll operate as if it's going to happen and hopefully.

• 3:47Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I just want to say how heroic you are. This is not unlike Jeff Daniels in season one of The Newsroom, when he had an A-block planned and then we got Osama bin Laden and he just bravely crossed out everything.

• 3:59Chris Ryan?

  In this case, it would be if Jeff Daniels, who played Will McAvoy.

• 4:03Andy Greenwald?

  God damn, wow. What a poll.

• 4:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and I'm sure he and Don were kind of in a corner being like, how should we approach this A-block? And I bet that A-block would have been, when are we going to get Osama bin Laden? And then it was, we got him. So in that case, my A-block was just, what's up with this merger?

• 4:19Andy Greenwald?

  No, I think honestly then it's like, when are we going to get Osama bin Laden? And then the A-block becomes, US bin Laden reach, super cool truce.

• 4:28Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I want to ask you about this on a couple of different levels.

• 4:31Andy Greenwald?

  Sure.

• 4:32Chris Ryan?

  Let's start in a place of personal, professional interest in the matter.

• 4:38Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you so much. You know, you really can't think global until you act local.

• 4:41Chris Ryan?

  Well, I wanted to ask you more than like as a industry watcher or a podcaster about television, but as somebody who works within it and kind of has one foot in, one foot out, you know?

• 4:54Andy Greenwald?

  Which foot?

• 4:55Chris Ryan?

  What does this mean? And what does this mean to you as a creative person working in Hollywood that this has happened?

• 5:01Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, I think that it is important to note that all of the industry unions were very, very vociferously against this. Mike Schur, creator of Parks and Rec and The Good Place, penned a pretty strongly worded op-ed in Hollywood Reporter about why the creative community is against this. I mean, I think there are so many ways to consider this entire deal. And obviously, the most important one is the great unknown of what is to come. But I think generally, when you have contraction in an industry, it is not good for workers. It is not good for people whose job it is to try to have a robust, open market in which

• 5:46Andy Greenwald?

  to sell their goods. There are increasingly limited options for creatives, both whether it's someone trying to sell a show or someone who is just a working gaffer trying to make a living in this town to ply their trade. And not only are there now fewer options and fewer potential buyers, but there is, there's more likely to be a continuation of what has already been the case within the industry, which is a sort of low-key suppression, where the bigger players will say like, this is the money we're paying for this. And now, look, you could be on the other side of it and you could say that, and this is absolutely what the more technocratic or just fully tech bros who have taken over

• 6:31Andy Greenwald?

  the industry say, which is you kind of can't have a healthy business run on handshakes, backslaps, and we'll get you on the back end kind of deals. I mean, so much of the success and largesse of Hollywood has been based on that, on personal relationships, on, you know, this is the, this is the union scale for the job you're doing, but we're going to sign you to an overall deal that reflects everything that you're doing for the company and to reward you for success and blah, blah, blah. It is not unreasonable from a purely capitalist point of view to say that that is unsustainable and potentially inequitable. But the flip side of it, which is there are now going to be five buyers, whereas a few years ago there were eight or nine, is just, that's just bad news.

• 7:16Andy Greenwald?

  And that is before you even get into the very complicated specifics of what the Ellison's, what Paramount represent, what they have done in the past with their increased power and where they may go in the future with what is now just becoming an almost comically insane amount of debt.

• 7:33Chris Ryan?

  It is a comically insane amount of debt that's going to result in inevitable job losses.

• 7:37Andy Greenwald?

  Especially because of the redundancy.

• 7:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, the redundancy, but also as soon as you come into a situation, as David Zaslav proved when he bought Warner Brothers or merged Warner Brothers with Discovery in the first place, is that when you bring it, when you're buying something mostly on, with debt, and even though there is a lot of liquidity around this deal, it does seem like there is also a lot of financing going into this deal, from what I can understand, it's just going to be a lot of like, changes made to the landscape of television and for the people who work in it. And I think there will be less jobs and that sucks. You know, I've been trying to imagine what I would think about this situation if the players were different. And if, if maybe just some of the names were different, if Paramount was trying to buy

• 8:24Chris Ryan?

  Peacock, or if Peacock was trying to buy HBO, or if Netflix had won the bidding and bought Warner Brothers and now Batman and the DC Universe and Harry Potter and Game of Thrones and all these things were under the control of a Netflix regime that I think we've had some questions about, like, the quality control over the last couple of years, or at least I have in terms of like, you know, this kind of cheeseburger style television and, I don't know. I mean, I think ultimately...

• 8:57Chris Ryan?

  What stunned me about the announcement, not stunned me, but what I kind of came away from with the announcement is how hard it is to, to kind of shake these people down when it's all like, it's all lawsuits and there's no actual government oversight of these things.

• 9:14Andy Greenwald?

  About what, maybe nudging things towards what might be the better outcome or more equitable outcome, or this idea that, you know, that everyone wins when there is more competition.

• 9:21Chris Ryan?

  And if you have a Federal Trade Commission that's probably going to be doing whatever it is that the president wants you to be doing, and then the president is going to be looking out for the people who have been there for him financially and, and support wise over the years, then it's, it's easy to just kind of throw your arms up. I, I guess I'll reserve judgment and see how these things shake out in terms of what we get to watch and how they get made and what quality they are. I mean.

• 9:49Andy Greenwald?

  It's not, it's not as simple or reductive a binary as we might like it to be. Like, I, I, I don't, I don't know the man, but when David Ellison says that he venerates and adores Hollywood, that he wants to have 30 movies in theaters a year, that he believes that his, he alone can fix it, which by the way is not always a winning strategy historically, but that his, that his main goal here is to preserve the legacy of film studios making movies and releasing them in theaters and working in Los Angeles, except if he doesn't get what he wants and then he's going to move everyone to Nashville, which by the way is some real shitty gangster stuff. If we take him at his word, then maybe we do need the billionaires to save us, but you know, as a former Washington Post subscriber,

• 10:34Andy Greenwald?

  I once said the same thing out loud. Like, it's, it's.

• 10:38Chris Ryan?

  You're missing some incredible op-eds, man.

• 10:40Andy Greenwald?

  Really?

• 10:41Chris Ryan?

  It's totally opening my mind.

• 10:44Andy Greenwald?

  That's fantastic. One of my favorite op-eds recently was New York Times over the weekend said, "Trump has finally lost the plot." And I was like, "The plot? Jeffrey Eugenides' marriage plot? Like, what do we, how we, how, how thin are we slicing this garlic, Paul Servino?" Anyway, it's not necessarily that the shows that we watch in the short term are going to be ruined. Like, I, I apologize for this, that usually there's a bad pattern I have. When I'm reading a book that's quite long, I will bring it up on successive podcasts until I'm done. So I'm bringing up the fact that I am reading this HBO book for Tinderbox, and one of the things that it really reminded me of.

• 11:19Chris Ryan?

  It's an oral history written by Jim Miller.

• 11:21Andy Greenwald?

  Jim Miller, yes. But like, how the Time Warner merger in the 90s was catastrophic. And everyone was like, HBO is doomed. But HBO was so uniquely successful and culturally whole that it survived. Then there was the AOL merger, which was even more catastrophic, and HBO plugged on. HBO has continued to thrive and succeed in this Zaslav era. So.

• 11:46Chris Ryan?

  I think Casey has been pretty public, being like, plus a chance. Like, like, this has always been.

• 11:50Andy Greenwald?

  This is what we do. And so the worry that you're hearing is definitely downstream from this moment. It is not that HBO is now in existential peril, or that the, you know, that, that, that the wire is going to be remade with, with, you know, with the good guys and bad guys swapped or something. Like, that's not, that's not where we're, we're headed.

• 12:11Chris Ryan?

  Only this strong-willed politician, Clay Davis.

• 12:15Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:16Chris Ryan?

  Can turn the tide.

• 12:17Andy Greenwald?

  With the will of the people. So I, I just think it is a, it's, it's concerning and it's distressing. And your point about like, you know, who's in charge of it. Look, I mean, I, I try to be as transparent as I can about these things, but like, I am working for HBO, I work for Netflix, I'm working for Amazon, I've done work for Paramount. Like, I, the, the personal relationships and the.

• 12:42Chris Ryan?

  There's just fingerprints all over you, man.

• 12:44Andy Greenwald?

  I, I am, I am not the, I am an imperfect vessel for outsider rallying cries of change, but as someone who is, you know, in trying to navigate all this, I just think it's a larger bummer for the industry. And I think I would feel that way no matter what, no matter who was buying who and what was potentially being contracted.

• 13:01Chris Ryan?

  Trying to think of, well, if there's anything else about this that we could even begin to speak, speak to.

• 13:07Andy Greenwald?

  I think your point that you made earlier too, about it being ultimately, the states, I think, had, the, they had momentum in the sense that like, is anyone rooting for this merger other than the Ellison's and the White House? Like, is anyone like, "This is awesome. I can't wait for this merger"? No. They had the wind at their backs in that sense. And I think the delay of, of discovery into a trial and march was costing Paramount dearly, as you saw from some of their behavior.

• 13:38Chris Ryan?

  But there was a note in one of the articles that have gone up, I believe it was in Bloomberg, that the several states were basically like, "We don't have the money to fight this."

• 13:47Andy Greenwald?

  This, so.

• 13:48Chris Ryan?

  And this is where you get into like, if you don't have a mechanism in place that's dependable, that adjudicates these kinds of situations, then you wind up getting into a pissing contest with the richest man in the world, you know?

• 14:02Andy Greenwald?

  Well, and, well, the other one is also on that side. Right. So like, if we, if we really want to live in this world where it is a race to the bottom of just oligarchs controlling every single aspect of everything we do, which for the moment, we're just greasing it and that's what we're doing, well, I've got good news for you today. But, but again, we are now talking about things much larger than the usual remit of this podcast.

• 14:26Chris Ryan?

  Okay. Let's talk about what we usually talk about on this podcast, which is actual TV. Now, I'll just do a bit of housekeeping and say that we'll split Thursday's show. Andy and I will talk about Slow Horse's episode two a bit and some other stuff. And then I think Van and I are going to talk about the entirety of really one of the crowning achievements of David Ellison's young career, which is Lioness. And it's the conclusion of season three. You know, I don't want to spoil anything for our listeners who maybe haven't caught up at the end of Lioness. It was, it was a busy Sunday.

• 14:56Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, that would include me.

• 14:57Chris Ryan?

  Was, where would you say on your to-do list it ranked yesterday of, of watching maybe like 22 episodes of the show to catch up for the finale?

• 15:08Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. I mean, it was on my, I make a little cheat sheet for the day, you know?

• 15:13Chris Ryan?

  Do you?

• 15:14Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, to sort of like optimize my.

• 15:15Chris Ryan?

  Do you have a TTD kind of system for your, for your life, or do you?

• 15:17Andy Greenwald?

  Well, you know, I.

• 15:19Chris Ryan?

  That sounds for getting things done.

• 15:21Andy Greenwald?

  Not to, I had no idea, because I never do. I, not, not to peek, offer too much of a peek behind the curtain here, but I think a week or two ago, we talked about like how I make my show notes in the same Notes app doc that is interspersed with like a grocery list.

• 15:33Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 15:34Andy Greenwald?

  So currently, just so you have some insight into this, I have this week's notes on lanterns. Then I have like six things I have to do before my plane tomorrow. And then I have last week's lanterns somehow, because I kind of jumped backwards. So.

• 15:50Chris Ryan?

  Oh, okay.

• 15:51Andy Greenwald?

  To your point is, even if I wrote down, "Watch 23 hours of extractions on Paramount", I don't think I would have noted, noticed my note in time to do it.

• 15:59Chris Ryan?

  I'll tell you one thing that happened is.

• 16:01Andy Greenwald?

  Sure.

• 16:02Chris Ryan?

  A surprise extraction happened.

• 16:03Andy Greenwald?

  You could tell me anything and I'd believe you.

• 16:04Chris Ryan?

  At the end of this Lioness season, which is, Jo is extracted from her family.

• 16:07Andy Greenwald?

  What?

• 16:08Chris Ryan?

  Well, it just turned out.

• 16:09Andy Greenwald?

  That's a beautiful family.

• 16:10Chris Ryan?

  Dave Anabel, wait no longer. He was just like, it's just one too many trucks to Gitmo. And I'm, I'm no longer going to be home brewing up a hot pot of coffee or uncorking and letting breathe a beautiful Merlot and watching the news, which is really all I do as a surgeon.

• 16:29Andy Greenwald?

  It's devastating.

• 16:30Chris Ryan?

  And getting like seriously red-pilled over the course of a year. So.

• 16:34Andy Greenwald?

  When you said that he was.

• 16:35Chris Ryan?

  I know the family unit was the most important part of Lioness for you.

• 16:38Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think it's going to be spun off in the same?

• 16:40Chris Ryan?

  Oh, just the Lioness family?

• 16:41Andy Greenwald?

  The Hogan family style, where it's like the star is now busy?

• 16:45Chris Ryan?

  They could do like a Dave Anabel surgeon show.

• 16:48Andy Greenwald?

  Yes. And then have, he's a, he's a, he's a put-upon, single dad.

• 16:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 16:52Andy Greenwald?

  You know, I, I hadn't remembered this.

• 16:53Chris Ryan?

  And then he keeps meeting women who might be like his, his girlfriend, and then they mysteriously disappear and they get redacted.

• 16:59Andy Greenwald?

  Black-bagged.

• 17:00Chris Ryan?

  Kyle is just like, "You have no rights."

• 17:03Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, I think that's, right. And so he's just like, "Why am I, why am I striking out on every dating app?"

• 17:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 17:09Andy Greenwald?

  I recently found out, or was reminded from, from our friends in the world of social media, that Dave Anabel and Matthew Reese are like blood brothers. Like, they're like best friends from their time on that show, Brothers and Sisters. So could we have Reese come in to that show and sort of support it?

• 17:24Chris Ryan?

  I don't see why not.

• 17:25Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, since we're making the rules and, you know.

• 17:27Chris Ryan?

  Wouldn't Matthew Reese's Americans character be like the greatest white whale on Lioness? Like, go back and get the original sin?

• 17:33Andy Greenwald?

  Oh my god. Yeah, they're, they were definitely operating at different velocities in terms of like what the stakes were. I feel like the stakes on the Americans were.

• 17:39Chris Ryan?

  Moscow rules are a little different now.

• 17:41Andy Greenwald?

  Exactly that. I, I had a Lioness, okay, I want to know about the extraction. I did get, I got a reader message about Lioness, because I think casuals, and I don't mean that disparagingly.

• 17:51Chris Ryan?

  And where can people reach you if they have questions for you?

• 17:53Andy Greenwald?

  I'd rather not comment at this time.

• 17:55Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 17:56Andy Greenwald?

  But I think in the, in the comments for the New York Times television list is the best place to just put me on blast. A friend of mine, Brian McDuckston, who, who.

• 18:04Chris Ryan?

  We should say that there is a New York Times Best of the Century so far TV, TV Shows list. Both of us voted in it. Andy was, was beautifully featured in it.

• 18:14Andy Greenwald?

  I think you're featured too. I, I, I voted after the Thrones 10 times.

• 18:18Chris Ryan?

  I, I, but we both voted in the, on these shows and we'll discuss the list when the entirety of it is revealed.

• 18:24Andy Greenwald?

  So here's a Lioness question that was sent to me by Brian McDuckston, great guy, lives in Tokyo, does ramen reviews, ramen adventures. Check it out. Does tours too, if you happen to be there. So this is a message. He said, "You're the only one I can come to with this question. Sadly, I don't think that's true, but thank you, Brian. Why is coffee in every scene of Lioness? Every time there's a meeting, they go out of their way to bring up the coffee they're drinking. Looking back, beverages as a whole should be given credit in the series, but the coffee bit that stands out. Is that true? Is it Taylor Sheridan branded beans?"

• 18:59Chris Ryan?

  One of my favorite aspects of the second half of the third season is that the QRF, Jo's, Jo's Strike Force. Do amphetamines. They stay.

• 19:13Andy Greenwald?

  What if you aren't watching on YouTube, watch Chris's face. Just watch him try to like, hold back the joy.

• 19:20Chris Ryan?

  Well, it's just some, they basically take what sounds like an experimental amphetamine. Like it's, it's called Provasic or something. I know that's the fugitive.

• 19:28Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 19:29Chris Ryan?

  Blood thinner drug, but this is, they're just like, should we all take two? And then they stay up for like four days and get in multiple gunfights in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

• 19:40Andy Greenwald?

  You have never wanted anything more than a prescription for Provasic 2.0. So you could do.

• 19:46Chris Ryan?

  Maybe I'll take it and then do Thursday's pod, having been up for three days with Vance.

• 19:51Andy Greenwald?

  How many pods could you do if you had access to Provasic?

• 19:54Chris Ryan?

  For sure. That was recording. Yeah, you're all good.

• 19:57Andy Greenwald?

  Just quietly back out of the room?

• 19:59Chris Ryan?

  Um, it was, it was, it was a great time was had by all and.

• 20:03Andy Greenwald?

  So anything else you'd like to add? I mean, she's now a solo lioness without her pride.

• 20:07Chris Ryan?

  Well, she has her QRF. She's got her, she got her homies. They got her out.

• 20:10Andy Greenwald?

  Are you saying that's her found family?

• 20:12Chris Ryan?

  It's the friends we make along the way and her adversary for what would seem to be an inevitable season four. It's a familiar face. I'll just put it that way. Um, I wanted to talk to you about a little bit of TV news before we get into lanterns.

• 20:24Andy Greenwald?

  All right, all right.

• 20:25Chris Ryan?

  And the number one story here was one that will go far down the list of the sort of biggest HBO things that happened this weekend. Since we now have to kind of consider the future of the network and how it fits into the Paramount portfolio in earnest. Uh, HBO went and bought themselves a Javier Bardem show.

• 20:42Andy Greenwald?

  They did. I saw this.

• 20:43Chris Ryan?

  And they won a bidding war and these are always interesting, somewhat I'm sure. Uh, shaped by agencies involved with the show where it's just like, oh, you guys have no idea the bidding war that just happened. You know, like, I feel like it's pretty common to read that like Amazon, Netflix and Apple were all bidding on this. And yeah, somebody came through with a straight to series, you know, no notes, offer.

• 21:06Andy Greenwald?

  Well, also I think HBO just, the marketplace has changed and all of these identities have changed. But historically HBO has been like, well, if anyone else wants it, we don't.

• 21:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And I mean, would you say that HBO has a process that develops shows internally in some ways? I mean, even if they buy the idea, it's like a long process of like, kind of like.

• 21:24Andy Greenwald?

  Infamously long and tortured.

• 21:26Chris Ryan?

  Well, this was bought basically like straight to series and it's called the spread. Stars Bardem and according to Deadline, quote, "Set in Miami, which is turning into a paradise of power." Wall Street South, some would say, "A subtropical collision of industry titans, elite hedge funds, staggering wealth, ruthless competition, sex, nightlife, and fun on an industrial scale. And into this sun soaked arena comes a visionary billionaire, played by Bardem, who collects the brilliant, the hungry and the dangerous, then turns their ambitions loose on the markets that power America. He chases something bigger, the power shift of economic gravity to Miami."

• 22:08Andy Greenwald?

  Sorry, I just.

• 22:09Chris Ryan?

  You just look like Mitch McConnell.

• 22:10Andy Greenwald?

  I just felt like Mitch McConnell. I mitched, but more in the sense that like, maybe.

• 22:14Chris Ryan?

  Hey, no disrespect, by the way.

• 22:16Andy Greenwald?

  No, I'm just saying that maybe.

• 22:17Chris Ryan?

  Powerful statesman.

• 22:18Andy Greenwald?

  A great lion, but perhaps it's past his time. You know what I mean? That's how I feel when you tell me about stuff like that.

• 22:22Chris Ryan?

  Um, so this is HBO deepening its relationship with the Ozark coaching tree. Cause currently Chris Monday is show running, uh, lanterns and this, this series comes to us from Bill Dubuque, who kind of had the original germ of the idea and worked on, and worked on Ozark.

• 22:37Andy Greenwald?

  Officially co-creator of Ozark.

• 22:39Chris Ryan?

  Uh huh. And there was a bidding war between Netflix, Amazon and HBO. Uh, the latter one with a rare for them, straight to series offer.

• 22:47Andy Greenwald?

  Apparently Netflix, Amazon, Paramount, Apple, right? Like all of them.

• 22:53Chris Ryan?

  All of them.

• 22:54Andy Greenwald?

  All the riches.

• 22:55Chris Ryan?

  I, uh, my, my subhead here is billionaire boys club.

• 23:01Andy Greenwald?

  Mm hmm.

• 23:01Chris Ryan?

  Now I'm gonna get a laugh for that.

• 23:03Andy Greenwald?

  It's good.

• 23:04Chris Ryan?

  HBO has made something of.

• 23:05Andy Greenwald?

  I'm sorry. Hold on. Say it again.

• 23:07Chris Ryan?

  Billionaire boys club.

• 23:08Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, I actually didn't hear you say it.

• 23:11Chris Ryan?

  I.

• 23:11Andy Greenwald?

  I thought you said boys the first time.

• 23:12Chris Ryan?

  Noted that HBO has made something of a late period business documenting the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Not to say that, you know, like over the course of the network's lifespan, they've, they've dabbled, but White Lotus, Succession, Big Little Lies, the upcoming Max show, How to Survive Without Me, seems like it's about relatively well off people. I ask you, Andy, wither Oz, wither the working women of Sex and the City and girls, you know, like.

• 23:36Andy Greenwald?

  This show, the spread.

• 23:38Chris Ryan?

  Trying to make it.

• 23:39Andy Greenwald?

  This show, this might be a good show. Uh, Javier Bardem is involved. Like, uh, I, you and I both enjoy content set in South Florida.

• 23:47Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 23:47Andy Greenwald?

  Um, literary, televisual, movies, whatever. So good bones, promising, absolutely not passing any judgment on a show that we have no idea about.

• 23:58Chris Ryan?

  It sounds like industry in Florida.

• 23:59Andy Greenwald?

  It, it is a, and it, it's very clear also why it was a hot package. And so we're not, we're not commenting on that. But if you take a step back, I, this is part optimism and also I do think there's some evidence to considering things this way. That, you know, the deal, the development happens in one era of history and in the world. The deal making happens in another and then the shows are released in a different one. And I have to say, if there are two words that make me less interested in something in art, work or life, it's visionary billionaire. Because fucking show me one.

• 24:37Chris Ryan?

  Well, you know what? It depends on the treatment of that visionary billionaire.

• 24:40Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I'm going to go.

• 24:42Chris Ryan?

  Excesses of succession and the excesses of industry.

• 24:46Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, but I don't.

• 24:47Chris Ryan?

  Different than say the excesses of billions, you know?

• 24:49Andy Greenwald?

  Absolutely. Great point. But I don't think that the log line for succession would have been the three visionary junior billionaires of the Logan Roy family struggle to communicate their vision in the teeming power, sexy power structure of Manhattan.

• 25:05Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 25:06Andy Greenwald?

  It was about fail sons and a failed daughter.

• 25:08Chris Ryan?

  That's not how they pitched it. They were like, it's the Murdochs.

• 25:11Andy Greenwald?

  Well, you have insight into them, but it is a soap opera with, and also when you hire Jesse Armstrong, you have, you understand that there's going to be a political and comedic point of view brought to it.

• 25:22Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 25:24Andy Greenwald?

  I think that having this much of our entertainment valorizing the 1% and that idea of there being some sort of interesting aspect to how deeply fucked we are. Sorry. Maybe this is the through line through this episode. I think is a misread of the populace.

• 25:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 25:42Andy Greenwald?

  I'm not being, uh, I'm, I'm not trying to just be a bomb thrower here. Like I think that there is always going to be a place for escapism in our entertainment. And that is a key plank of what a lot of these richer streamers offer. I mean, in their way, like Margot's Got Money Troubles on Apple, for example, is ostensibly about a young woman who is in such dire financial straits that she turns to OnlyFans to do it. But there's also a version of telling the story of that show in which it is an incredibly rich package with famous people, you know, angling for Emmys to play people who are a little bit downtrodden. Like it is again, a kind of a top down way of telling a story. And this is not me trying to like, you know, take, do a drive by on David E. Kelly, who's one of the greatest writers of the medium's history.

• 26:27Andy Greenwald?

  I'm just saying that like, to your point, this is not, this is not the wire. This is not bottom up storytelling in that way. And, and, and I think that it is, it has been a successful, uh, plank of Casey's stewardship of HBO to make sure that the people who watch Real Housewives will have an HBO show that has some of the same temperament, which is the White Lotus. I would like to see more, more pit and less of whatever's happening in Elysium.

• 26:57Chris Ryan?

  I think you can have both. I think somebody somewhere, I think mayor of East Town and task, I think.

• 27:02Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 27:03Chris Ryan?

  You know, the pit, obviously like you can tell stories that are about the 99% of people out there. I just really think the, the, I'd love to understand what it is psychologically about having shows about the filthy rich. That feels good for people, you know, like.

• 27:25Andy Greenwald?

  Well, yeah.

• 27:25Chris Ryan?

  Because I think, I think there's some things that are about it that are like, it's just really convenient that the Roy's in succession can always fly private. Because it allows them to globetrot in a way that's, you know, televisually incredibly enticing. And also it's like, yeah, you know, Jeremy Strong is not, we don't have to shoot him in a public airport or whatever. You know, like there's a certain kind of like mechanics that gets baked into the storytelling itself. So I think my point of even to bring that up is just like, every one of these shows can be good or bad based on its own merits. But your overall idea.

• 28:00Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 28:00Chris Ryan?

  That, um, based on the development cycle and the, the amount of time it takes to get things from, we've bought an idea to it's on the air, we could be living in a completely different world by then.

• 28:12Andy Greenwald?

  I, I think.

• 28:13Chris Ryan?

  We might not have any diesel left. So like.

• 28:15Andy Greenwald?

  Right. I'm saying like, do you, are you particularly interested?

• 28:18Chris Ryan?

  That's why I'd like to pitch my show called Diesel, about Franklin Diesel, the guy who invented Diesel.

• 28:23Andy Greenwald?

  Played by Vin Diesel. I think that, I think that that might be in, I, like, if we are rationing gas in a year and, you know, so then to have Javier Bardem be like, hmm, I'm a visionary. I'll fly two planes today. Like that is kind of discordant. But my point is, the reason we communicate or connect with anything is for, is, is the opportunity to see threads of common humanity. And the thing about succession wasn't just that they didn't have to film in Burbank on a Friday afternoon, which is the Burbank airport, which is pretty rough. It was also because.

• 28:57Chris Ryan?

  They're refurbishing, by the way.

• 28:58Andy Greenwald?

  I've heard, but that also looked like AI and I was like, where is this new terminal and how do I get there?

• 29:03Chris Ryan?

  I did see that.

• 29:05Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. So it was like a news report in there like this beautiful new terminal has arrived at Burbank.

• 29:11Andy Greenwald?

  Did Claude draw this for you?

• 29:14Chris Ryan?

  Are you in the Mandalorian?

• 29:15Andy Greenwald?

  It was very confusing.

• 29:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Andy Greenwald?

  But it was to see in succession that like, it wasn't all comedy. It was like, oh my God. The ones who are making all these decisions that affect us on election night are even more flawed than we are.

• 29:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:29Andy Greenwald?

  Right? And, and, and that was both chilling and funny and normalizing and equalizing in a peek behind the curtain. And there is another strain of television, which has plenty of value, which is just like, isn't it cool that they have nice watches? And that's sort of the problem I have with like your friends and neighbors, which I think, you know, just requires.

• 29:48Chris Ryan?

  Flirts with the idea of like.

• 29:50Andy Greenwald?

  This incredibly rich guy.

• 29:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:52Andy Greenwald?

  Is stealing from the other incredibly rich guys in order, so he can stay incredibly rich. And that's where the commentary ends.

• 29:58Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 29:59Andy Greenwald?

  The, the, it is a shared understanding, compact with the audience, that being a master of the universe with really, really nice golf clubs in Westchester, I mean, that's a must. So you have to have that. And if you assume that that's the floor, anything else on top of it is fun. And I don't find that compelling on a dramatic or a human level.

• 30:18Andy Greenwald?

  Maybe I'm wrong, you know, maybe President Vance will make this feel good for everybody, but I'm just saying.

• 30:22Chris Ryan?

  He's, he, he has a

• 30:24Andy Greenwald?

  A populist streak?

• 30:25Chris Ryan?

  Touch that's just like, he can just kind of communicate matters of the heart to the masses.

• 30:31Andy Greenwald?

  Make us understand what, what matters most.

• 30:33Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

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• 32:20Chris Ryan?

  Speaking of HBO.

• 32:21Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 32:22Chris Ryan?

  And this is, this is like an example of, I suppose HBO making a show that covers the spectrum of human and superhuman experience. Let's talk about Lanterns. Let's talk about the sixth episode.

• 32:33Andy Greenwald?

  Yep. Bad Optics.

• 32:34Chris Ryan?

  Bad Optics is the name of it. It was written by Justin Britt Gibson and Damon Lindelof. So of special interest to us, given, given you have personal relationships with Justin and we both know Damon.

• 32:45Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, friends with both. And these were the brain trust behind the Star Wars movie project that I was lucky enough to work on briefly in 2022.

• 32:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, Obi-Wan, you know, it was

• 32:58Andy Greenwald?

  Obi-Wan came back.

• 33:01Chris Ryan?

  Let's, let's talk about this from a picking up the pieces perspective, because in some ways, I think episode five acted as a kind of finale. So episode six is in, is, is a first episode of the last two. I mean, I know a first episode of the last three episodes, but a first episode in and of itself. You know what I mean? Like a soft relaunch even.

• 33:24Andy Greenwald?

  Sure.

• 33:24Chris Ryan?

  What did you think of Detective Jon Stewart in our contemporary time trying to figure out what happened to his buddy Hal?

• 33:32Andy Greenwald?

  Can I just start with one kind of Mitch McConnell-y thing, which is a little bit like, you know what? Let's not say Mitch McConnell. Let's say like a Ryan Kirkering. Let's make it really like universal, like a Phillies thing. Let's just talk about a worrying loss in velocity and command that I would like to cop to.

• 33:46Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 33:46Andy Greenwald?

  Which is, I cannot believe that I didn't, maybe neither of us, or maybe you said it on Midnight Boys, didn't understand that the alt Hal that lives inside the ring was the way to have Kyle Chandler on the show going forward.

• 33:59Chris Ryan?

  Oh, we discussed it. Yeah. Like, I mean, I actually thought that the Hal in the box was the Sentry, but I was aware that the Sentry was going to be in the mix.

• 34:08Andy Greenwald?

  I, I'm worried, frankly, that that didn't even like come across my radar as like, oh, I see what the fix is going to be.

• 34:14Chris Ryan?

  You kind of are getting at something that I think is part of the charm of Lanterns for me, which is the multiple, multiple experiences you can have with it.

• 34:21Andy Greenwald?

  Totally.

• 34:22Chris Ryan?

  And they are, the, the, the three leads to me, Aaron Pierre, Kyle Chandler, and Kelly McDonald are so engaging and charming to me that sometimes I miss little blips of, of lore.

• 34:37Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 34:37Chris Ryan?

  Of connective tissue, of storytelling, building blocks that are important to keep in mind. So yeah, I did not think that Kyle Chandler was no longer going to be on the show or would only be a corpse.

• 34:49Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 34:49Chris Ryan?

  You know, this, this, this episode does something kind of fascinating. It continues to have references to things that have happened off screen.

• 34:59Chris Ryan?

  For instance, Hal's jail sentence, which may or may not have been terrestrial and his return to Rushville, his amends process that he's making amends process with the people there, although that didn't work. And then his romance with Sheriff Carey. It also has, I guess, a decade of Jon Stewart's life that goes by where he becomes an architect, reconnects with one of his brothers.

• 35:25Andy Greenwald?

  Well, and bankrolls another.

• 35:27Chris Ryan?

  Bankrolls another and becomes incredibly alienated from his parents.

• 35:30Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 35:30Chris Ryan?

  Who in turn, his mother becomes close to Hal Jordan in a, in a friendship way, one would assume. And it's just a tremendous amount of work going off, off screen and

• 35:45Andy Greenwald?

  It's Jasmine Cephas Jones, right? Who plays, so have there been any Hamilton, say no to this Hal Jordan kind of mashups? Would you like to make one?

• 35:55Chris Ryan?

  I mean, I think we have different algorithms, but I have not seen that yet. Yeah.

• 35:58Andy Greenwald?

  All right. I, I assume that exists.

• 36:00Chris Ryan?

  Talk to me about the difficulties of, of having this much action happening off screen.

• 36:04Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I, I want to start with a positive, which is Aaron Paul is playing a different character at a different point in his life, and I thought that was really impressive. He is just, he's physically changed. His demeanor has changed, his access to his humor and his emotions have changed.

• 36:18Chris Ryan?

  Facial hair has changed.

• 36:19Andy Greenwald?

  His facial hair has definitely changed in that he has some now. And he is just, that, that's hard to do. I mean, I know it's on one level, it's acting, but it's also impressive because what he was doing in the first block was very, very aggressively a choice. And it was very similar to his Rebel Ridge character, which is sort of ex-military and buttoned up and very intense. And so it was nice to see him let the air out a little bit. And that in and of itself was a reminder of one of the things that I find both compelling on a structural level, but also slightly frustrating on a week to week level of the series, which is it is clearly made to be accomplishing a lot more in, in every episode to be accomplishing a lot more than what you see in that episode.

• 37:02Andy Greenwald?

  There are a lot of things that I would imagine would reward or flatter a rewatch. There are a lot of things that are connected inevitably to larger James Gunn storytelling, but also future seasons of Lantern storytelling. Even the things that I didn't enjoy in the moment in previous week's episode, you know, I, I definitely have the feeling that they will make more sense in the fullness of time in terms of, you know, characters getting short shrift in the big explosions and stuff. So it a hundred percent just might be a subjective, like I want more now without having to bank on later thing, or maybe I'm just impatient.

• 37:37Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 37:37Andy Greenwald?

  I, I guess I was happier with this episode in some ways than previous episode because it just lived where it was. It was picking up these pieces and I didn't necessarily miss seeing Oa, or I didn't necessarily miss seeing Hal's prison sentence. That said, and I'm curious where you netted out on this. I, I, maybe I'm not being an attentive viewer here because I came out of that last episode being like

• 38:06Chris Ryan?

  The one prior to this.

• 38:07Andy Greenwald?

  The prior, the giant explosions episode, the Rushville de Nouant. I was like, this is a catastrophic outcome. You know, they are definitely showing the destruction, but I did not think that this was going to be, you know, the, the, the last hurrah of Hal Jordan, that this was the end of his career as a Lantern, that he would be going to prison for what he did there. Did you have a similar discordant reaction or have we just, have I just been Sokovia pilled and it's nice to see consequences for mass destruction in a comic book show? And we hadn't seen, we're not used to seeing that.

• 38:39Chris Ryan?

  I think it's also cool, the way that they're doing the timeline. You pointed out Pierre, but I thought it was cool to see like a kind of same jacket, but sad guy at the diner, working on some pancakes and kind of looking like the, the kind of dude who's just been nailed to a bar stool for 10 years, but obviously has just been run through the wringer. You know, there are some elements of this episode that I found at least initially like Either distracting or convenient, whether it's the diner waitress who wants reparations for what happened to her family and is trying to blackmail John. Although it's unclear who she would be blackmailing him to.

• 39:23Chris Ryan?

  I guess Sheriff Carey?

• 39:25Andy Greenwald?

  I guess.

• 39:26Chris Ryan?

  Like, would she tell Guy Gardner? Like, I don't know who would.

• 39:29Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I don't. Right. Like, I don't know how to be a regular cop or a space cop, but it seems to me that it's fairly plausible that he would punch him and not shoot him.

• 39:41Chris Ryan?

  Well, whatever Hal knew about what was going on in Rushville and what was gonna happen to him, he was like, "You can't tell anybody that you were here."

• 39:49Andy Greenwald?

  That's right. That's the last thing he says to him in that scene.

• 39:51Chris Ryan?

  Whether that means protect your mother or protect your parents or something, like, I don't know.

• 39:54Andy Greenwald?

  I would imagine, though, this show makes it look real easy to get in and out of rural Nebraska. You know what I mean?

• 40:01Chris Ryan?

  That was a good question I had. So, are we supposed to imagine that in this fake or DC version of the United States?

• 40:08Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 40:09Chris Ryan?

  I was under the impression that Midway, which is where he is in the beginning of the episode, is Chicago.

• 40:14Andy Greenwald?

  I think that's a fair assumption. Like, Coast City is kind of Seattle, I think, and Metropolis is New York.

• 40:20Chris Ryan?

  What is that, like a 10-hour drive to somewhere in Nebraska from Chicago?

• 40:24Andy Greenwald?

  Gotham is... Is Gotham Philly?

• 40:26Chris Ryan?

  I thought Gotham was New York.

• 40:27Andy Greenwald?

  Well, Gotham is New York, but Metropolis is New York. So, we have two New Yorks. We have like a shiny one and a dark one. So, it's Philly.

• 40:34Chris Ryan?

  Jets, Giants, you know?

• 40:36Andy Greenwald?

  Sure. So, it's New Jersey. Yeah. Regardless of whether it's like a fast drive or not, I guess.

• 40:42Chris Ryan?

  Didn't bother me. But, yes. Yeah.

• 40:45Andy Greenwald?

  I just meant that, like, surely in 2026, even in the DCU, there are flock cameras where it's like you could tell who came to the diner? I'm just saying, like, that was... No one can know I was here, driving and punching someone in a public space in a tiny town. I feel like that's a little...

• 41:01Chris Ryan?

  Well, he punched them. I think he punches him and then is told, "No one can know you were here."

• 41:06Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. I'm just saying, they're fighting hard for a secret that I think is relatively hard to keep.

• 41:12Chris Ryan?

  Did you feel like the Sentry version of Hal Chewbacca'd that character at all? In terms of the Rise of Skywalker? Was it Rise of Skywalker or is it Force Awakens when Chewbacca gets into it?

• 41:27Andy Greenwald?

  No, no, it's the third one.

• 41:28Chris Ryan?

  It's the third one, where for two minutes, you're like, "Did they just kill Chewbacca?"

• 41:32Andy Greenwald?

  Well, it was the only moment in that trash fire of a movie where they were like, "We will actively engage with your 40-year investment with this in ways that might surprise, hurt, or alarm you." And they were like, "Just kidding. We gotta sell toys."

• 41:45Chris Ryan?

  Did you know that I've started to see the faintest signs?

• 41:50Andy Greenwald?

  No.

• 41:51Chris Ryan?

  Of a ROS revival?

• 41:53Andy Greenwald?

  The pendulum swinging back?

• 41:54Chris Ryan?

  Just being like, "JJ was cooking right here."

• 41:58Andy Greenwald?

  What?

• 41:59Chris Ryan?

  I was wondering if maybe for our last episode ever, we should do like a re-watch of ROS.

• 42:06Andy Greenwald?

  Somehow Glupshido has returned. Oh, my God.

• 42:11Chris Ryan?

  Come on, keep the mood up. Just because Rise of Skywalker happened and Javier Bardem is...

• 42:18Andy Greenwald?

  I heard Rise of Skywalker is Rob Bonta's favorite Star Wars film. He thinks there's a lot of promise there. Yeah. What are we saying?

• 42:25Chris Ryan?

  Did the kind of like...

• 42:26Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, the Sentry?

• 42:27Chris Ryan?

  Psyche's alive, but just slightly nicer?

• 42:29Andy Greenwald?

  No. No. I mean, I think I was grateful to have that not-at-all-hidden-puzzle-piece reveal to me. Like, again, maybe that's an example of, the show is working, the show is obviously working in multiple timelines, but the effort of the writers' room to be writing every scene mindful of multiple timelines and multiple timelines of audience experience is remarkable in that, like, they soft-prepped us for that in one of the very first scenes of the show.

• 42:57Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 42:58Andy Greenwald?

  That that would exist. And if you had been a more thoughtful or attentive viewer, that would have taken some of the sting out of the end of 101 to begin with. I think it was a success that it didn't, and yet, my feeling coming out of it was, "Oh, that's actually a relief," because I don't think I was done with this character, and it doesn't seem like Kyle Chandler is done with this character.

• 43:15Chris Ryan?

  Did you know who Carol Ferris was, the woman who was at the funeral?

• 43:18Andy Greenwald?

  The nerdiest part of my ears, which I guess is where the Vulcan tips would be, perked up. But I don't actually know. I'm not really about that Oa life, you know? Not to that degree.

• 43:31Chris Ryan?

  I knew it must be something notable, because nobody is like, "Carol Ferris." You know, like, you would just be like, "Oh, I believe you're Carol, right?"

• 43:40Andy Greenwald?

  No, but John was like, "Carol Ferris? Surprised to see you here."

• 43:44Chris Ryan?

  So, I immediately, like, just Wikipedia'd her.

• 43:45Andy Greenwald?

  And you saw that Blake Lively brought her to life in the Green Lantern film with her...

• 43:50Chris Ryan?

  I've never seen the Green Lantern film.

• 43:52Andy Greenwald?

  Why are you saying that it's like some lacune in your cultural fucking Library of Alexandria? What?

• 43:59Chris Ryan?

  I just haven't.

• 44:00Andy Greenwald?

  Neither have I.

• 44:01Chris Ryan?

  Okay. I mean, I don't know if, like, maybe back then, like, you were...

• 44:03Andy Greenwald?

  I got down like that? Come on.

• 44:05Chris Ryan?

  What else from this episode stood out to you? Do you want to talk about the diner waitress, the blackmail, the sort of overtones of that scene? Like, what do you want to hit?

• 44:15Andy Greenwald?

  Well, did you think, I want to go back to my senator, I want to go back to my question. Who won the 2020 presidential election? Who, did you think, was your takeaway from all the Zoe nightmare, death-from-above episode, was that Hal was gonna go to jail? Did that surprise you, or did that feel commensurate with what you saw on screen and your understanding of who was responsible for what?

• 44:38Chris Ryan?

  My guess is that that probably is deeply tied to the transferance of the ring from one Lantern to another. And obviously, they get it off of his finger. He brings it to the Guardians, but then says, "Pass on the job offer."

• 44:55Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, and they go hang it in Cooperstown.

• 44:57Chris Ryan?

  So, I think that whether he did time like in a federal penitentiary or a celestial one...

• 45:04Andy Greenwald?

  I think it was federal. They said that.

• 45:06Chris Ryan?

  Then, yeah. Like, I think he would be kind of, I thought that was cool. I thought it was...

• 45:10Andy Greenwald?

  It was interesting.

• 45:11Chris Ryan?

  Also, an interesting way to run that character. You had to give that character some reason to be back there. And imprisonment and letter-writing and like the little things that came out of that made a lot of sense and also humbled him a little bit.

• 45:26Andy Greenwald?

  And being in love with Carey was nice. It was telling the story of this man's superhero's downfall through a personal story. I really liked it. I thought Kelly McDonald was outstanding in this episode. You hire her to do the other parts for episodes like this, and I thought she was spectacular. I think that, again, in terms of like, yeah?

• 45:43Chris Ryan?

  I think I know what you're reacting to here.

• 45:45Andy Greenwald?

  Tell me.

• 45:46Chris Ryan?

  I think that this, we've spoken about this with a couple of different shows. In fact, we were just talking about this with Slow Horses. I bet you would like this show more if it was a binge. Now, I don't know how fast you would watch it, but I think that you seem to be holding or reserving judgment on a lot of it, because you're like, "How is it gonna fit together?"

• 46:04Andy Greenwald?

  It's more, you're right, but I'm coming at it from the other end, which is, I don't, I'm not with, I don't like that it seems so intently built that way. Like, it's not, they knew it wasn't a binge. This is a DC show. It's gonna be on HBO. So, I think then it's incumbent on them to make everything stand on its own. And I think, I feel them laboring towards that, and sometimes I feel the labor, and sometimes I let it go. Another example of like the labor here, which is not inconsiderate, is like, they're making the show into a world in which James Gunn, who took over the universe at some point in the development of this show, he has already given it, bequeathed a Green Lantern onto it. And it's the funny one, the jerk one, from the 80s in comic book timeline.

• 46:48Chris Ryan?

  And is that canonically, as far as you know, not how the Green Lantern succession plan works?

• 46:54Andy Greenwald?

  I have no idea how it works. I think it's probably all in that 2014 movie that we should probably revisit.

• 46:58Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 46:59Andy Greenwald?

  But more so that in the...

• 47:01Chris Ryan?

  It would be funny if like Rogan, it was like Joe Rogan-style, and we could just be like, "Kaya, pull up the Green Lantern succession line."

• 47:08Andy Greenwald?

  Pull up the way that they captured Kilowog in this scene, where he's going up against Mark Strong Sinestro. Regardless, they could have decided that anybody can have a ring, but for the story that they wanted to tell with Hal Jordan and Jon Stewart, there was only one, and only had ever been one from Earth, which meant that they had to paint themselves out of that corner creatively to say that when the Guardians were thwarted by John, they gave it to this dickhead gym teacher.

• 47:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Andy Greenwald?

  Which is tough. And it's the kind of alignment that comic books have to do all the time, or even movies where Jon Bernthal's Punisher jumps from what he does in that one shot and then what he does...

• 47:43Chris Ryan?

  In Spider-Man.

• 47:44Andy Greenwald?

  In Spider-Man. So, I thought that the integration of James Gunn's funny Guy Gardner character into the tone of this universe was impressive, and I enjoyed those scenes. And I liked the implication of some shared history and some, you know, "You owe me everything you've ever gotten," and that it was, that the characters were pliable.

• 48:05Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 48:06Andy Greenwald?

  And could bend in that way. But, you know, it was a lot of work that they then steered towards a story they wanted to tell, which was, inevitably, we're gonna have to address that there's already a Green Lantern in the Gunn verse. What can we do with it? And it seems like the best idea in the writers' room, which was a clever idea, was we're going to use a small sense of humanity and guilt for him to go to Oa, which I love that they're not showing, to get the ring and bring it back so we can move on with the story.

• 48:31Chris Ryan?

  I thought, to your point about...

• 48:35Chris Ryan?

  How Pierre's character, how his Jon Stewart has changed over 10 years. That was a very good scene to show that.

• 48:43Andy Greenwald?

  He's wearing a different kind of jacket now.

• 48:45Chris Ryan?

  It's not even the superficial, like, it's not even the wardrobe or the facial hair changes. That's a guy who earlier in the season is, everything is yes sir, no sir. He's still active or was recently active military and is coming from a military background and treats his apprenticeship as if it's, that's my commanding officer. And 10 years later, we find him and everything that's happened to him has put him in a position where he's cursing a lot more. He's blackmailing people or he's putting the, you know, he's guilting them.

• 49:17Andy Greenwald?

  He's eating meat.

• 49:18Chris Ryan?

  And he's like having a Henry Hill driver around Rushville where he's got phone calls coming in from the nursing home with his dad, from his brother who's like, I'm not gonna go pick him up, you should go pick him up, but he's like, I'm funding your album and all this stuff.

• 49:33Andy Greenwald?

  Funding your album?

• 49:33Chris Ryan?

  People are calling him chosen in a kind of tongue in cheek derogatory way. I just really liked the scope of this performance and the scope of, I thought the writing was like very subtly deepened by showing what's happened to this guy since the 10 years since he shot Zoe from across town and put down the Manhunter. You know, I would probably venture to guess that most people watching this are wondering if the Manhunters are truly extinct.

• 50:05Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 50:05Chris Ryan?

  And I think the clubhouse candidate is the Allstate quarterback Noah, who seems incredibly well adjusted for a guy whose parents are divorced, whose town has been decimated by robot aliens, satellite technology. And, you know, is trying to decide whether to stay home, play Huskers football, or take his talents elsewhere, probably for a huge NIL deal. Meanwhile, is kind of just like popping around town and keeping it all together in a way that makes me feel like he might be a Manhunter.

• 50:42Andy Greenwald?

  I think that's a, it's a good read on the situation. Is that a satisfying story for you?

• 50:47Chris Ryan?

  Who does he seduce then? Because they were talking about how like Manhunters tend to have these sort of heterosexual conquests.

• 50:54Andy Greenwald?

  I don't think they're necessarily heterosexual.

• 50:55Chris Ryan?

  Not necessarily.

• 50:56Andy Greenwald?

  No, I mean, Anton was like, oh, you're the one. They just go to the alpha, right? So I don't know. I'm sitting here trying to formulate a question of like, is that a satisfying third act for the season? And I guess we don't actually know what it's gonna look like. And I guess it is, because it has to be in this place and the mystery of what's happening there has to be the central question. Jon has a ring now, which is, you know, Surf Dracula got his board earlier than we thought, which is good. I like the way that it is, there's more of a there there in terms of understanding where Jon has been, where he's going and what the stakes are for him now.

• 51:37Andy Greenwald?

  I like the relationship with Carrie because it's got some years on it and some shared experience and some trust. So it's not introducing everything all at once, which again is a challenge of the show. So I actually feel, I don't know, I don't mean this to be a zag. I liked this episode more than the previous episode, which I think was kind of one of the quote unquote, big ones. I think that the show, the show still does certain things that I'm like, I think the dependence on jackets to communicate character is frustrating. I think the over dependence on swearing is just like bizarre. I feel like me, I don't think this is just me as a parent now, but like every character has to say, like even the kid is just like, god damn it, mom, this is good meatloaf. I'm like.

• 52:22Chris Ryan?

  Do your kids curse at you?

• 52:23Andy Greenwald?

  Relax.

• 52:23Chris Ryan?

  Not at you, but do they curse around you?

• 52:26Andy Greenwald?

  There's been some light experimentation.

• 52:28Chris Ryan?

  Do you think that they're actually cursing, you just don't know the new curse words?

• 52:32Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, no, they use the old ones.

• 52:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:35Andy Greenwald?

  No, the old ones are, the degree to which my older, the speed with which my older daughter went from wanting to like, me to turn the volume down on the three times they swear in Hamilton, to basically talking like Jon Stewart when he's on an op is remarkable.

• 52:55Chris Ryan?

  Talking like Tommy from Goodfellas.

• 52:56Andy Greenwald?

  Truly though. So we also call out one other thing, which is, we always try to walk this line and be careful about it, you know? The way TV works is the credited writer for an episode is invaluable to that episode, but the degree to which those words are the exact ones that writer wrote and there's, you know, the shared credit and there's rewrites and room written stuff. So we try to always like lift up the writer and, but not overly indicate who's responsible.

• 53:20Chris Ryan?

  I think we spent a lot of time earlier in this season talking about this show as if it was Damon Lindelof's auteur project, and I think that we probably did a disservice to the other people involved.

• 53:29Andy Greenwald?

  And then this episode happens.

• 53:31Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 53:31Andy Greenwald?

  When a character says, uh, spazkaban. And I will bet my life and my professional reputation on Damon contributing that as a placeholder in the room, and then everybody saying it enough that it just became what they said in the show. There are many like spy shows and stuff that we like where someone calls someone to see if it's okay, and they say, yeah, I just put Rufus to bed. And just like, good, I'm glad you did. Click. There is no one named Rufus. They've been compromised. We must go.

• 54:01Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 54:02Andy Greenwald?

  This was a call from inside of the machine of proof of life of Damon.

• 54:06Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 54:07Andy Greenwald?

  This is the most Damon line that has ever Damon.

• 54:09Chris Ryan?

  Do you want to explain the joke for people who like, who don't know what you're talking about?

• 54:13Andy Greenwald?

  Well, Chris, as you know, the Harry Potter universe is quite popular around the world. So the reference to Azkaban, which is the wizarding prison introduced in book three, the prisoner of Azkaban, is relatively well known, but the idea of a space Azkaban, now, now we're cooking with gas.

• 54:28Chris Ryan?

  So in this world where Chicago is next door to Nebraska, Harry Potter also exists.

• 54:35Andy Greenwald?

  I would say that it's a safe bet that anything in the larger Warner Brothers Paramount collective universe probably exists.

• 54:42Chris Ryan?

  Right, so what would be my, my wish for like franchise, like crossover?

• 54:49Andy Greenwald?

  I'll give you a second to think about it, to say that my, my daughters and I rewatched the classic film, The Lego Movie last night, which is really fucking, that movie's really funny.

• 54:57Chris Ryan?

  You were busy yesterday, like two and a half hours of Eagles.

• 55:00Andy Greenwald?

  I'm busy all the time, you know? What do you, we just did another podcast where you're like, you know, I've been slow rewatching Miami Vice in my spare time. And I'm like, motherfucker. I made dinner at 7:30. Anyway, my point is about The Lego Movie was, in it, one of the charms of it is that, oh, Batman's in it and Dumbledore is in it and Gandalf is in it and, you know, other, you know, if they made the movie today, I bet Dr. Robbie would be in it. Wouldn't that be nice?

• 55:31Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Maybe he could have been like first on the scene at Zoe's slaughter of the innocents in Rushville.

• 55:39Andy Greenwald?

  Oh my God, the crossover potential here.

• 55:42Chris Ryan?

  I want to ask you something that is, I guess Damon adjacent, Damon Lindelof adjacent, but I think it's something I've been thinking about, especially over the last couple of episodes, is this show is gonna be inevitably looked at through the lens of Watchmen, I think, by a lot of people or by some people. And one of the things that Watchmen did so brilliantly is not only use the source materials, mythology and storytelling bones, but also built its own, but also had something to say about the real world, right? Like through, obviously the Tulsa episode, but just generally speaking, I thought, spoke

• 56:22Chris Ryan?

  very beautifully about being a black woman, the black experience in America, using superheroes as metaphors in a lot of ways. This show's a little bit more like you see the duck both above and below the surface of the water. Like you can kind of see all the work they're doing to kind of set, get Guy Gardner in here, let's set this up, who, who has the ring? We got Sinestro, somehow Sinestro's escaped.

• 56:49Andy Greenwald?

  Oh yeah, we didn't mention that.

• 56:50Chris Ryan?

  Space prison.

• 56:50Andy Greenwald?

  That's cool.

• 56:52Chris Ryan?

  All these things that are happening in the DC part of it, do you think that the show is also successfully telling, saying something about real life or doing that kind of like, because I think it's, it's doing a very good job. I think Watchmen might be one of the great achievements of television, so like it's hard to.

• 57:12Andy Greenwald?

  No, but it's also, it's trying to, it's just a very, very different assignment.

• 57:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Andy Greenwald?

  I think that one of the things that has been nice to see, and I think this was at its strongest in episode three, was that there is a very, very sincere attempt to bring in some, and I say this, you know, non-traditional perspective, outsider perspective to the show. And I mean that through the, the careful consideration of the Stewart family dynamics. And, you know, there's been references to not just them, their blackness, but skin tone in relation to each other.

• 57:46Chris Ryan?

  When Zoe is redoing his.

• 57:48Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, exactly.

• 57:49Chris Ryan?

  His body.

• 57:49Andy Greenwald?

  And he and his brothers, the way they talk about things. Even last night, you know, there's this idea that what's the waitress say, like, we're not racist here, we're just, we just don't like Green Lanterns or whatever. Like, and then the camera is smart enough and Stephen Williams is a smart enough director. He directed this episode and the third episode, you know, he lingers on Aaron Pierre's face in reaction to that. So I don't want to compare them one to one. I think Watchmen was singularly, its, its purpose was a story that Damon felt the urgency to tell with the collaborators he chose, and he found a vessel for it in Watchmen, whereas they were gonna make a Green Lantern show no matter what. And this might be the best, and I mean this non-prejudically, like this is a good faith attempt to make a thoughtful, inclusive, questioning show that was, is also going to

• 58:33Andy Greenwald?

  explain to you how we can have Guy Gardner and Jon Stewart. So in, under that rubric, it's getting an A plus for me. But if you go under the hood a little bit more, like, do I think that it's, it's viewpoint on class, race and the world or is equal to these other shows? Absolutely not, but you're getting a little extra for your buck when you tune in to watch a show about space cops.

• 58:54Chris Ryan?

  That's very smart.

• 58:57Chris Ryan?

  Should we do a little watch after dark? What's your?

• 58:59Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, do you want to go from green to green? I got a few minutes.

• 59:03Chris Ryan?

  I want to like.

• 59:04Andy Greenwald?

  I got a sick kid at home, but I always put football first.

• 59:06Chris Ryan?

  I want you to call the Philly special. Very briefly, how are you? Because I watched the game on mute yesterday. I had something else going on, so I had like the game in the background. I could tell where it was going. I could tell how it was going.

• 59:19Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 59:20Chris Ryan?

  But, you know, I was engaged, but I would not say living and dying with every snap. And then when the final drive came, because I don't think I had truly experienced the grind of it, you asked the group of us that we all chat about the Eagles during Sundays, what's our confidence level on this final drive? And I was like, six.

• 59:40Andy Greenwald?

  This is your brand. You are a very generally positive person with sports. You are able to, I think, compartmentalize. And I admire that about you. I envy that about you, and sometimes I just lean on it a little much. You know the phrase like, you know, if you're looking for the asshole, sometimes you're the asshole, you know, like, you know, it's like, so if you're always like, I'm beginning to worry about my role in the group chat because I think that my, sometimes the level of venting and the frequency of my venting in it, I'm like.

• 1:00:13Chris Ryan?

  Don't be self-conscious.

• 1:00:13Andy Greenwald?

  No one else has this valence.

• 1:00:15Chris Ryan?

  I worry that this isn't fun for you.

• 1:00:17Andy Greenwald?

  It's never, it's never been fun for me. I really was thinking about how important sports are in my life in terms of like a thing to think about when falling asleep, a thing to, you know, I listen to the podcasts all the time. I'm reading the articles like it sustains me and I like to think about like off season stuff, but I think off, I think I don't like the games. I think that, you know, in many ways I'm like Brad Pitt in Moneyball, but like the number one way is that I think that.

• 1:00:42Chris Ryan?

  You just lifted during Eagles games, think about where we would have, we would have.

• 1:00:45Andy Greenwald?

  I would be, that would be my peak achievement because when I was watching the game, it wasn't that, I was not demonstrative, I was not scaring anyone, I was not, noises were not coming out of me, but there was like a sad, there was just a sadness.

• 1:00:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Andy Greenwald?

  Because the particular way that it was going was one that was familiar.

• 1:01:04Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:01:04Andy Greenwald?

  What was unfamiliar was that they fucking won.

• 1:01:07Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Andy Greenwald?

  Because Jalen balled out and that was cool as hell. And so I think ultimately you are right about many things, but your prediction that we may just have to remember what it's like to root for a normal football team in that, you know, it's hard to win every week.

• 1:01:21Chris Ryan?

  Win some and lose some.

• 1:01:21Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. And that you don't just win them and that your offensive line just isn't elite always. But it's, it's, the best part has been the most unexpected zag is that actually the one thing the season is proving is that our quarterback is not the 17th best.

• 1:01:37Chris Ryan?

  I think he might even be better than Justin Herbert at this point.

• 1:01:40Andy Greenwald?

  Say it with your full chest.

• 1:01:41Chris Ryan?

  I've said it with my full chest the whole time.

• 1:01:43Andy Greenwald?

  All right.

• 1:01:43Chris Ryan?

  It's like, what are we evaluating? The guy's been to two Super Bowls, like.

• 1:01:47Andy Greenwald?

  And was the best player in both of them.

• 1:01:50Chris Ryan?

  I think it's going to be, it feels like an Andy Reidy season.

• 1:01:54Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. Oh, see, that's what it reminded me of.

• 1:01:56Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Andy Greenwald?

  There was a feeling of creeping crepuscular darkness that we used to experience when we would arrive at the bar in a weekend autumn daylight and be like, ah, this first beer will buoy our spirits and restore the demons from last night. And then just the clock management would just grind out every part of our hope to dust. And we would wander out and suddenly it would be 40 degrees a night.

• 1:02:21Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:02:22Andy Greenwald?

  That is our, that is a core memory for us. We did that together for years.

• 1:02:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. It was probably not good for our mental health, but look, it got us here. Thanks for spending time with me after dark.

• 1:02:32Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think those were our reps? You know what I mean? Like the 10,000 hours?

• 1:02:34Chris Ryan?

  Everything about like those first 10 years got us ready for this, the real arena of our friendship.

• 1:02:39Andy Greenwald?

  Of ideas.

• 1:02:40Chris Ryan?

  Thanks to Kaya and Kai. We'll be back on Thursday. I'll have a special guest, no Andy on Thursday, but we'll.

• 1:02:47Andy Greenwald?

  I'll be traveling.

• 1:02:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. We'll put something together in your honor.

• 1:02:52Andy Greenwald?

  Is it, is it going to be like the beacon Guy Gardner left in Rushville?

• 1:02:55Chris Ryan?

  Or are you flying into Newark? Like, I'm not sure like how certain we are you're landing.

• 1:03:00Andy Greenwald?

  That's fair. I guess we'll find out.

• 1:03:01Chris Ryan?

  Talk to you guys soon.