‘Avengers: Doomsday’ Footage, ‘Euphoria’ S3E2, and ‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’ Episodes 1-3

Chris and Andy talk about the news that ‘Avengers: Endgame’ will be rereleased later this year with new footage that ties into ‘Avengers: Doomsday’ (8:11). Then they discuss Season 3, Episode 2 of ‘Euphoria’ (18:04). Later, they run through a quick power poll of spring television (43:45), before discussing the first three episodes of ‘Margo’s Got Money Troubles’ and whether this book adaptation would have been better as a movie (49:28). Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of The Watch and so much more! Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Additional Video Supervision: Sarah Reddy Order and it will come. Like today. 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.

• 0:05Chris Ryan?

  I need sports staff to clear the room.

• 0:08Andy Greenwald?

  Stand up and walk now.

• 0:11Chris Ryan?

  Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com. And joining me in the silver slipper.

• 0:21Andy Greenwald?

  Good.

• 0:22Chris Ryan?

  Because he loves dance.

• 0:24Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 0:24Chris Ryan?

  It's Andy Greenwald.

• 0:25Andy Greenwald?

  And I like free nachos.

• 0:26Chris Ryan?

  Do you think they have those?

• 0:28Andy Greenwald?

  Uh, I don't remember because I was on ketamine.

• 0:32Andy Greenwald?

  It's possible.

• 0:33Chris Ryan?

  I love how you pronounce ketamine as like.

• 0:36Andy Greenwald?

  Ketamine.

• 0:36Chris Ryan?

  At like a Jewish dentist from Philadelphia.

• 0:39Andy Greenwald?

  First of all, I am much closer to a Jewish dentist from Philadelphia than I am to a habitué of the silver slipper. The, the, the truth is, you caught me. I started to back out of the comment two thirds of the way through, but I was pot committed. And frankly, that's how I live my life.

• 0:54Chris Ryan?

  That's why I love you, man. Cause you fucking, when you're in, you're in. And we're in on Euphoria, season three, which we will be talking about the second episode today, as well as the first three episodes of the new Apple TV series, Margo's Got Money Troubles. Problems or troubles?

• 1:09Andy Greenwald?

  Uh, she's, Margo's Got Money, well, I think it's troubles. Again, no way of knowing.

• 1:15Chris Ryan?

  It's troubles. It's troubles. Did I say troubles?

• 1:18Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, but you were thinking of Northern Ireland.

• 1:20Chris Ryan?

  That's the problem. It's like, you know, Margot and the Dairy Girls is a much different thing. Uh, it's really good to see you. What a weekend for us.

• 1:28Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, was it?

• 1:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, no, I mean, I just mean, what a weekend for United States of America. The NBA playoffs, the NHL playoffs.

• 1:34Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I was, uh, sports wise, you're right to switch allegiances. You should leave the Phillies hat at home.

• 1:40Chris Ryan?

  I'm fine with the Phillies. I have the Phillies hat at home. There's no, there's no deviation from the plan.

• 1:46Andy Greenwald?

  I know.

• 1:46Chris Ryan?

  I told you on Thursday, wait for game 60. I'm getting miserable texts from you. But I'm getting actually, honestly, a whole variety of awesome texts.

• 1:54Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I sent some pretty funny texts this weekend, if I do say so myself.

• 1:59Chris Ryan?

  Um, how are you doing? I have one news story for you today before we get into our TV talk, but I just wanna do a temperature check.

• 2:05Andy Greenwald?

  Great. Temperature feels good. The studio's nice.

• 2:07Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, no, I mean, like emotionally and spiritually and also just like artistically. Where's your soul at when you're, did you search around this weekend and watch anything that was not necessarily an assignment, but just a pleasure?

• 2:19Andy Greenwald?

  No, this weekend, there was quite a lot on the TV docket.

• 2:22Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23Andy Greenwald?

  You know?

• 2:23Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24Andy Greenwald?

  So, uh, no, I was focused. I was just working for you all weekend.

• 2:28Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I was actually gonna say, it might be good after we do Beef on Thursday. So we're gonna, I don't know that we're gonna cover all of Beef, but-

• 2:36Andy Greenwald?

  You have beef with Beef.

• 2:38Chris Ryan?

  I don't. I watched the first two episodes.

• 2:40Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 2:40Chris Ryan?

  And I would definitely say that it's better than I thought it was gonna be.

• 2:43Andy Greenwald?

  Well, you had, you were very down.

• 2:45Chris Ryan?

  No, all I, all I did was say, this is what people are saying about it. And if it's true, watching eight hours of this is not necessarily what I want to do this weekend.

• 2:55Andy Greenwald?

  Straw men everywhere coming up to me on the street, tears in their little straw eyes, saying, sir, sir. Beef season two is underwhelming.

• 3:04Chris Ryan?

  Uh, you know, speaking of film production, uh, today I went to go get my custom, not custom, like they make it special for me, but like, uh, my coffee at my coffee shop.

• 3:14Andy Greenwald?

  See our blend.

• 3:15Chris Ryan?

  They were shooting, somebody, they were shooting something there.

• 3:18Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 3:18Chris Ryan?

  Probably fucking nobody wants this or something. And-

• 3:22Andy Greenwald?

  Tim's working. Be nice.

• 3:24Chris Ryan?

  I was just like, you guys gotta be kidding me. Of all, of all the gin joints that you couldn't find in London or Budapest, Vancouver, you decided to take my coffee shop?

• 3:34Andy Greenwald?

  Are you zagging on LA film production?

• 3:36Chris Ryan?

  I'm, I'm very happy for them, but like-

• 3:38Andy Greenwald?

  This is, wait, hold on. You're being a nimby about Hollywood film production within Los Angeles?

• 3:46Chris Ryan?

  I think that-

• 3:47Andy Greenwald?

  This is a wild new character for you.

• 3:48Chris Ryan?

  It's just like, I have a few things that need to go right for me during any given day.

• 3:52Andy Greenwald?

  All right, let's go through them.

• 3:53Chris Ryan?

  Finding my, getting my coffee.

• 3:54Andy Greenwald?

  Uh huh.

• 3:56Chris Ryan?

  Having the right kind of Nicorette.

• 3:58Andy Greenwald?

  What like as opposed to off brand like what?

• 4:00Chris Ryan?

  Well, off brand or like the new flavors that the Nicorette company like introduced. So we talked about this like it's just like I have to have like everything kind of line up in the stimulation category and then we can get, we can get into our day. But if I, I show up and Sydney Lumet's like, now, now here's what you're gonna do. And it's like, no, man, I need an Americano. And also, you know what I really don't understand?

• 4:23Andy Greenwald?

  You snort the ketamine.

• 4:24Chris Ryan?

  Why does, why do you guys have to shut shit down?

• 4:26Andy Greenwald?

  To shoot.

• 4:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, be like a little guerrilla filmmaker in style, you know, good darn, you know, get in there while I'm ordering.

• 4:32Andy Greenwald?

  Sean Baker, tangerine style iPhone horizontal.

• 4:35Chris Ryan?

  Put me in an aura. I'll just be getting my coffee, you know?

• 4:38Andy Greenwald?

  I think that not as many people like passersby are historically not as open minded and artistic as you.

• 4:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:46Andy Greenwald?

  They do not.

• 4:46Chris Ryan?

  That's probably because if the camera was on me, I'd just turn to it and go.

• 4:51Andy Greenwald?

  He would frame mog? I'm, I'm, I'm workshopping that slang.

• 4:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, you really like the mog thing. Why don't you get your book out?

• 4:57Andy Greenwald?

  No.

• 4:57Chris Ryan?

  I want you to. You want to save it for the library after dark? Watch, watch in the books, in the stacks?

• 5:02Andy Greenwald?

  No, but what if you start, you know, maybe you have an anecdote to camera about a film you saw, I'll just get a little reading in.

• 5:07Chris Ryan?

  Okay, I did see a film this weekend and I wanted to recommend it to our viewers. It's The Christopher's. The new film from Steven Soderbergh in the news recently for saying that he was gonna use AI to visualize some of John Lennon's dreams in an upcoming documentary he has about John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

• 5:24Andy Greenwald?

  That's what he said.

• 5:25Chris Ryan?

  Yes. He was gonna use AI to do some visual effects or some like imaginative visualizations of like John Lennon's dream life.

• 5:35Andy Greenwald?

  Oh.

• 5:35Chris Ryan?

  Uh, and he was like, and I never would have been able to do this or would have been like a visual production house, effects house that cost me an arm and a leg and now it's easy. Or not easy, but.

• 5:44Andy Greenwald?

  But basically is, is this now under the rubric of like, he can now do it himself? Like he does everything else?

• 5:49Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think he's always been like, how can I, what's, what's the, not market inefficiency, because I don't even think it's economic. I think he's just a tools guy. He's interested in tools.

• 5:58Andy Greenwald?

  What if Mike had real magic? And the magic was AI? Is that what he's doing?

• 6:04Chris Ryan?

  You know what? Honestly, I think that, you know how they name all these goddamn AIs like just, you know, Claude, you know? What if the AI was named Magic Mike?

• 6:13Andy Greenwald?

  I would use it.

• 6:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, me too. If I was like, can you make me some furniture, man?

• 6:17Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, yes, can you?

• 6:21Andy Greenwald?

  You still hang out with Olivia Munn? What's that like?

• 6:24Chris Ryan?

  Um, I did have one piece of actual Hollywood news for you. Christopher's is fantastic. Ian McKellen, Michaela Cole. It's essentially a two-hander chamber piece. It's about, um, a, I don't know if it would be like a Damien Hirst, Julian Schnabel era. Like, I can't tell exactly. He seemed like an enfant terrible British painter now in his twilight, living in Bloomsbury, it looks like. Which hit close to home.

• 6:47Andy Greenwald?

  Now I'm listening.

• 6:47Chris Ryan?

  And lovely, lovely, three-story, four-story house in Bloomsbury. And Michaela Cole is an art restorer slash painter who takes a job with Ian McKellen's aging artist to catalog some of his work.

• 7:02Andy Greenwald?

  In his home?

• 7:03Chris Ryan?

  In his home.

• 7:03Andy Greenwald?

  So easy access to Essex Market in Farringdon.

• 7:05Chris Ryan?

  All that.

• 7:06Andy Greenwald?

  Great lunches.

• 7:07Chris Ryan?

  But she is, I mean, Deco, I'm surprised Cafe Deco didn't come up.

• 7:10Andy Greenwald?

  Deco's at the south end of it, but I would imagine that she would probably get the lunch deal at Quality Wines.

• 7:16Chris Ryan?

  It's not a deal, dude. You wind up walking out smelling of liver when you, when you go to Quality Wines.

• 7:21Andy Greenwald?

  That's not their lunch special.

• 7:22Chris Ryan?

  Oh, okay. What's the lunch special?

• 7:23Andy Greenwald?

  We don't need to get into it. I'm just saying, it's very reasonable. I wanna, I'm interested in the job she took.

• 7:29Chris Ryan?

  She takes it surreptitiously, though, because she's in fact working for Julian's children who want her to finish a series of unfinished portraits called The Christopher's of his lover that he did in the nineties. And they would fetch quite a bit of cash, but he has thus so far refused to finish them.

• 7:47Andy Greenwald?

  Are you one of the Christopher's?

• 7:48Chris Ryan?

  No, sadly not. Uh, but it's, uh, that was wonderful. And it was just like a great type movie. It's gonna come up later when we talk about Margo's got money troubles, uh, problems.

• 8:00Andy Greenwald?

  No, it's troubles.

• 8:01Chris Ryan?

  God damn it. I really gotta get that right. You know what? And they, those two words probably have like different meaning to different people.

• 8:07Andy Greenwald?

  Again, in Belfast, they do.

• 8:09Chris Ryan?

  I wanted to let you know that Joe Russo, one of your favorite filmmakers.

• 8:13Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, yes, yes. He is the visionary.

• 8:15Chris Ryan?

  He appeared via Zoom at the St. Andrews Film Festival, which is in Scotland. Um, and this is a film festival, I believe I've, I've read about the Russos being patrons of before.

• 8:25Andy Greenwald?

  What do you think that is?

• 8:26Chris Ryan?

  I don't know. I really don't. Any other podcaster would probably be like, well, you have to understand.

• 8:32Andy Greenwald?

  I was waiting for that.

• 8:33Chris Ryan?

  But honestly, I feel like I sometimes it's okay to be like, I have no idea. But I've read like them, I've read bits and pieces of them appearing at this festival. I mean, he did this via Zoom to talk about Doom's Day.

• 8:48Andy Greenwald?

  What a, what a journey this has been.

• 8:50Chris Ryan?

  I'm trying to do a cool, like, intro to this. It's essentially that, you know, they're making Doomsday and now they're going to re-release Endgame.

• 8:58Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 8:59Chris Ryan?

  In September, I think, with either re-contextualize old footage, I imagine, or perhaps new footage from Doomsday that they're putting into Endgame.

• 9:10Andy Greenwald?

  Right.

• 9:11Chris Ryan?

  But to put Endgame now on the Doomsday narrative rails.

• 9:16Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Chris Ryan?

  And I thought this was really interesting because, first of all, it is kind of a tacit admission that the last six years of, seven years of Marvel has kind of not worked.

• 9:29Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 9:30Chris Ryan?

  Between the multiversal shenanigans and Kang and Jonathan Majors and some of the other things that they've tried that haven't worked and the fact that Fantastic Four, I mean Fantastic Four is obviously going to be a major part about this, but was not maybe living up to people's expectations.

• 9:46Andy Greenwald?

  Right.

• 9:47Chris Ryan?

  What do you think about the idea of a filmmaker going back and tweaking something in midair to connect it to another part of the franchise?

• 9:54Andy Greenwald?

  Greedo shot first.

• 9:56Chris Ryan?

  But they never actually made that canonical, did they?

• 9:59Andy Greenwald?

  Who's they, in this case?

• 10:01Chris Ryan?

  Disney. George Lucas?

• 10:02Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, if he made it, I mean, he touched it.

• 10:04Chris Ryan?

  Okay, but like in

• 10:06Andy Greenwald?

  But, but the point is of like

• 10:08Chris Ryan?

  Solo of a Star Wars story.

• 10:10Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 10:10Chris Ryan?

  I don't know. I mean, like, has this been done before?

• 10:13Andy Greenwald?

  I think the, I think what you're asking is interesting because in terms of like tweaking a prior movie to retcon it into alignment with a sequel, I'd be hard pressed to think of an example of that. I mean, I think Disney, especially, like the animated movies.

• 10:33Andy Greenwald?

  Like Frozen 2, a movie I know that's near and dear to your heart.

• 10:36Chris Ryan?

  Honestly, this is where your expertise-

• 10:37Andy Greenwald?

  I talk to my kids, we talk about this a lot because one of the things that I find really interesting about that movie from like a process standpoint was the entire movie is created out of whole cloth of a larger overarching plot that 100% didn't exist at any point during the decade plus development of Frozen.

• 10:53Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 10:53Andy Greenwald?

  Where they like retcon that the parents, like in the opening of the first movie, the parents went off on a boat adventure and sadly, spoiler for the first 30 seconds of Frozen, did not survive. The second movie suggests that they were actually going on a quest to discover the origin of their daughter's powers when they were sunk.

• 11:12Chris Ryan?

  It's suggested that they told the daughter it was a boat, like a cruise-

• 11:16Andy Greenwald?

  No.

• 11:16Chris Ryan?

  That lied, or?

• 11:17Andy Greenwald?

  No, we know kings and queens are always going on boat trips, probably.

• 11:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:21Andy Greenwald?

  You know, you know, we've all got troubles.

• 11:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:24Andy Greenwald?

  But, uh, but no, but to answer your question, Frozen was not re-released with swashbuckling footage-

• 11:31Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 11:31Andy Greenwald?

  Of the dead parents attempting to get to the-

• 11:33Chris Ryan?

  And I don't know the extent to which they are gonna tweak Endgame. I think it's a pretty savvy idea, although I'm surprised we're finding out about it via Zoom in Scotland instead of like a big CinemaCon announcement or like a big-

• 11:45Andy Greenwald?

  Well-

• 11:46Chris Ryan?

  Maybe even a trailer for the re-release of Endgame to prep you for Doomsday, but I'm sure that's coming.

• 11:51Andy Greenwald?

  The Doomsday, there's Doomsday footage has been screened.

• 11:55Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 11:55Andy Greenwald?

  They, they played it at CinemaCon, it has not released yet, but every single detail of it has been leaked.

• 12:01Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:01Andy Greenwald?

  And I think it was intentionally designed to push back on your, uh, I think quite accurate observation, the last six plus years have been a complete wash. The footage features many characters from this cursed phase engaging with each other.

• 12:18Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 12:19Andy Greenwald?

  Like it's Shang-Chi fighting Florence Pugh.

• 12:21Chris Ryan?

  No, fighting Gambit. I read, I read the same recap, bro.

• 12:24Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 12:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. That's a bummer. Yeah. I, I, I pushed the Atlantic magazine out of the way and I said, "Let me read this blog post describing the Doomsday trailer."

• 12:33Andy Greenwald?

  That was a text I sent you. I said, "Attention, a little worried about things at FBI HQ. Thoughts?", question mark.

• 12:42Andy Greenwald?

  You didn't respond.

• 12:43Chris Ryan?

  And then I wrote back flyers.

• 12:45Andy Greenwald?

  Go Flyers. So I, I, I, I don't know, but they are also, I found it interesting that they are doing a really interesting thing where they are trying to convey complete confidence that they have this thing in the bag. And so there's, there's a beginning drumbeat of this tested better than anything since Endgame. They're dropping all these things like we had 40 actors on set standing in a blank room, you know, where they drew in the backgrounds later. Um, they're, they are re-releasing one of the, was it Endgame? Like top three most successful movies of all time. They're re-releasing that to prime the pump, to remind people of how great this was with new footage to get people in the theaters. They are claiming that they don't need the IMAX screens, that Dune 3-

• 13:28Chris Ryan?

  Oh, because they're making a proprietary technology of like, so that it always shows in the way it's supposed-

• 13:34Andy Greenwald?

  Infinity vision?

• 13:35Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:36Andy Greenwald?

  Can you just make a proprietary format?

• 13:38Chris Ryan?

  I hope it makes Euphoria season four an infinity vision.

• 13:41Andy Greenwald?

  Because, so it'll go on forever? The episodes, I think, are made in infinity vision.

• 13:46Chris Ryan?

  Honestly, they breeze right by me.

• 13:47Andy Greenwald?

  Incredible.

• 13:48Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Andy Greenwald?

  So, yeah, I don't, I don't know. I mean, where, what's your, what's your doomsday temperature check?

• 13:54Chris Ryan?

  I was, I immediately started thinking about other franchises that have perhaps made some wrong turns and filmmakers going back and tweaking them, you know? So the first, first franchise that comes to mind is Star Wars and, you know, they've had this largely

• 14:12Chris Ryan?

  stalled out movie production development process where they've given out all these like deals to people to make trilogies and to make one-off movies that haven't really come to light or haven't come to fruition. They've continued to kind of mine these in-between years between the, the trilogies and to some success, but I think that the thing that's missing is the feeling of forward momentum and the feeling of the unknown because like, any kind of well-versed Star Wars fan can watch one of these shows and just be like, yes, and then this has to happen because this happened. Star Wars, legendarily, does not mess with canon.

• 14:45Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 14:45Chris Ryan?

  Marvel is a little bit more like, guess what? Everybody was dreaming that day, you know, like-

• 14:49Andy Greenwald?

  Well, or it was a different universe.

• 14:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And that's, they've been playing with that for a few years. But if, if you were doing Star Wars and if you were like, hey, why don't we just go back to right before Force Awakens? Or why don't we go back to right after The Last Jedi and just do this? And basically, I mean, it sounds like Steven Soderbergh's- The Hunt for Ben Solo movie was in its own way, like, well, what if he wasn't dead? And that was, that was a bridge too far for Bob Iger, but it is kind of interesting that like,

• 15:19Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 15:20Chris Ryan?

  the same company is like, yeah, we'll tweak a little bit of Endgame and probably like yada, yada, some of the stuff that's happened in between.

• 15:26Andy Greenwald?

  I think that the main difference here is that in the case of Marvel, they are going back to their last greatest success and just basically moving the off-ramp in a different direction.

• 15:34Chris Ryan?

  Yes, I suppose Steven Soderbergh wanted to revisit the rise, the last Skywalker.

• 15:39Andy Greenwald?

  Well, yeah, because those Star Wars movies-

• 15:41Chris Ryan?

  The Rise of Skywalker, right?

• 15:42Andy Greenwald?

  I think in retrospect, those movies are not thought of fondly.

• 15:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Andy Greenwald?

  But particularly, they are not just thought of fondly, they are like, um, ground zero for a lot of the toxicity of fandom and fandom's relationship to the projects that they love or that they love to hate. And so it would just be a minefield to go back because it wouldn't just be like, let me pick up on the really cool adventures of Admiral Holdo or whatever Laura Dern's name was. It was like, let us pretend none of that woke shit that Rian Johnson did ever happened. Please attribute that quote to Chris because he needs a couple of dings in his Mando armor online.

• 16:20Chris Ryan?

  Come on!

• 16:21Andy Greenwald?

  I'm just saying.

• 16:23Chris Ryan?

  This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. Ever have a plan come together out of nowhere and realize you're missing something? Like a last minute beach day, a spontaneous hike, or an outdoor movie night you didn't plan for? That's when Prime's same day delivery has your back, getting you exactly what you need, fast and reliably, so you can actually join the moment instead of watching from the sidelines. Same day delivery, it's on Prime. Visit amazon.com/prime to find millions of items delivered fast, available in select areas. Terms apply. Was your reading of the doomsday trailer, uh, were you excited?

• 17:00Andy Greenwald?

  The scrolls? Not the scrolls, the scrolls. Um- I'm choosing to be very excited about this movie.

• 17:08Chris Ryan?

  Good.

• 17:09Andy Greenwald?

  Why not?

• 17:09Chris Ryan?

  Great.

• 17:10Andy Greenwald?

  You know?

• 17:10Chris Ryan?

  That's fantastic.

• 17:11Andy Greenwald?

  I want to know how you're feeling about the X-Men casting rumors. I know, I know Van doesn't like it when we talk about that.

• 17:17Chris Ryan?

  Uh...

• 17:19Andy Greenwald?

  Your girl, your girl Odessa is being circled for Rogue.

• 17:23Chris Ryan?

  I didn't know that.

• 17:23Andy Greenwald?

  And our guy, Sir Dunk, Peter Claffey, is rumored to be Beast.

• 17:28Chris Ryan?

  But they haven't gotten Cyclops.

• 17:30Andy Greenwald?

  No.

• 17:31Chris Ryan?

  They haven't gotten the new Wolverine. Wake me when that happens.

• 17:34Andy Greenwald?

  Is there gonna be a new Wolverine?

• 17:36Chris Ryan?

  So old-ass Hugh Jackman is gonna be hanging out with Peter Claffey and Odessa Ozion?

• 17:42Andy Greenwald?

  First of all, we are now on the other end of these cross-generational-

• 17:45Chris Ryan?

  Odessa Ozion, like she's also in the troubles.

• 17:52Andy Greenwald?

  I think that they are going to slow-walk Wolverines. I think they are gonna go back to some of the original X-Men.

• 17:58Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 17:59Andy Greenwald?

  Before he joined.

• 18:00Chris Ryan?

  Okay, cool. Keep me up to date on that.

• 18:02Andy Greenwald?

  I will. Hold on. Breaking news? No, let's talk about Euphoria.

• 18:04Chris Ryan?

  Euphoria. Episode 2: America, My Dream. The title of the episode is spoken by Cassie, played by Sydney Sweeney's housekeeper at one point when she is taking some content shots.

• 18:16Andy Greenwald?

  Say her name. Wana.

• 18:17Chris Ryan?

  Wana. Well, it comes up a lot because there's a lot of jokes made at her expense.

• 18:21Andy Greenwald?

  Sure.

• 18:22Chris Ryan?

  This one is a tale of two or three different TV shows, I think.

• 18:28Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 18:28Chris Ryan?

  I mean, I think this is a really useful conversation that I think also bleeds into Margot.

• 18:33Andy Greenwald?

  Okay, so let's-

• 18:34Chris Ryan?

  Because it's about, like, tone and it's about making a couple of different things at once. But I think for Euphoria, personally for me, it works.

• 18:41Andy Greenwald?

  Well, let's also preface this by saying for people who are just, this is their first-ever episode of The Watch.

• 18:45Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 18:45Andy Greenwald?

  This is my second-ever episode of Euphoria.

• 18:47Chris Ryan?

  And I gotta admit to you something.

• 18:49Andy Greenwald?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:49Chris Ryan?

  I'm about 70% in on this bit, but the number, the interest level I have in this bit shot up last night when you sent me one text message.

• 19:00Andy Greenwald?

  I had a question. I've tried to avoid asking questions.

• 19:04Chris Ryan?

  It was like 9:45 PM and I was just like, tomorrow, okay, what are we gonna talk about? And Andy sends a text message that just goes, is Rue canonically gay?

• 19:14Andy Greenwald?

  I didn't know. And I thought I should, you know, be prepared with that information.

• 19:19Chris Ryan?

  But the word canonically is what got me.

• 19:23Andy Greenwald?

  I, because first of all, I need to know who she's romantically interested in before she returns in Doomsday.

• 19:29Chris Ryan?

  Yes, yes. Uh, yes, Rue is canonically gay.

• 19:33Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you. Was that, was that so hard?

• 19:34Chris Ryan?

  But it is an interesting situation for you because I have a question. Now, we're gonna talk a lot about the Rue stuff because that remains the, the thing that I think I'm most attached to about this show.

• 19:45Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think I should keep a list of questions I almost ask you and deliver them live on the podcast?

• 19:49Chris Ryan?

  Absolutely. Yeah, I am also not necessarily the keeper of Euphoria lore, nor do I think Euphoria is being overly, um, sort of sanctimonious about like everything that's happened in these characters' lives adding up to something.

• 20:03Andy Greenwald?

  Which I appreciate.

• 20:04Chris Ryan?

  That being said, I wanted to start in a stranger place than maybe you thought I would for this episode, which is Nate, the Jacob Elordi character, who, uh, is so far been portrayed as a sort of flustered, uh, I'm in over my head, but I'm ultimately seemingly a good guy who likes to get his work done. And I just don't have the money right now for $50,000 worth of flowers for my wedding, but I've got an alcoholic dad who's also quite a sex pest. I have, uh, my fiancee Cassie, who, you know, is making certain demands of me and-

• 20:40Andy Greenwald?

  And making certain content?

• 20:42Chris Ryan?

  And making content. And also he's in hock to a seemingly like a underworld figure for about half a mil.

• 20:50Andy Greenwald?

  Underworld figure in the sense that he services bodies to the underworld.

• 20:54Chris Ryan?

  Yes, I also think if he's like dealing out $500,000 and is like in a week that will be $600,000 or whatever, then that's-

• 21:00Andy Greenwald?

  Well, you think he has some untoward-

• 21:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I think the interest rate is maybe above Wells Fargo's, for instance.

• 21:05Andy Greenwald?

  I think Sam Levinson is blowing the lid off this whole coffin thing.

• 21:08Chris Ryan?

  But guess what, man?

• 21:09Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:09Chris Ryan?

  Nate's kind of a piece of shit.

• 21:11Andy Greenwald?

  Oh!

• 21:11Chris Ryan?

  And I didn't know if you knew that.

• 21:13Andy Greenwald?

  No, he seemed like a good guy.

• 21:15Chris Ryan?

  No, not really. He's pretty, pretty dark prince.

• 21:18Andy Greenwald?

  One thing about me, I'm very credulous with people. I take them as I see them.

• 21:22Chris Ryan?

  Well, I was wondering what you thought. I was wondering, like, there's a line in this, in this episode when Wana, the aforementioned Wana, the housekeeper, is going through every single thing from their barbecue.

• 21:32Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 21:33Chris Ryan?

  And is like, would you like to keep this?

• 21:34Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 21:35Chris Ryan?

  Would you like to save this? Would you like to save that? And at one point he goes, "Wana, I'm going to kill you."

• 21:39Andy Greenwald?

  He did say that, yeah.

• 21:40Chris Ryan?

  Uh, now, he says it very dryly. It's a, it's a laugh line in the episode, I think. But that's Nate's vibe. Like, season one to Nate can get pretty fucked up.

• 21:50Andy Greenwald?

  It's very, we mentioned this last week, but there's a Brett Eason Ellis aspect to it, that he is a little American psycho. Like, he is the, the perfect scion of a west coast dynasty and, you know, has the right jawline to either run for office or to go to jail forever for murder.

• 22:06Chris Ryan?

  Yes. And so I was curious whether or not you picked up on that, as this being your only, your second episode of, of Euphoria.

• 22:14Andy Greenwald?

  I, I didn't because this episode, well, I'll say two things. One, part of his storyline I, is probably at the bottom of my power rankings because this is, we're now two for two in him voicing something that I have to believe is near and dear to creator Sam Levinson, Sam Levinson's heart, which is that all Californians of good standing should care about P and Z laws-

• 22:37Chris Ryan?

  Why can't you-

• 22:37Andy Greenwald?

  And how difficult it is to build here.

• 22:39Chris Ryan?

  Why can't you separate art from artist?

• 22:40Andy Greenwald?

  Literally, the guy's like, "All Californ-" It's like the pit. He like turns to camera and is like, "Do you know planning and zoning regulations?"

• 22:47Chris Ryan?

  Is Euphoria the Republican pit?

• 22:49Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, this is how we win at podcasting. Say it slower to the camera.

• 22:54Chris Ryan?

  Actually, women are allowed to make content about whatever they want. You know, I mean, like, that is sort of what this show is doing.

• 23:00Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I, I don't know if I agree that all Californians should be worried that it's challenging to build here.

• 23:07Chris Ryan?

  How do you feel about the zoning laws of this, of this great state?

• 23:10Andy Greenwald?

  It's not my top 20 of current concerns about living in this great state. No, it's really not.

• 23:15Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 23:16Andy Greenwald?

  Um, but then again, I'm not really, you know, part of a real estate empire.

• 23:19Chris Ryan?

  The ironic thing is I do, I don't think it's lost that Nate is complaining about starting a, like, a somewhat nefariously funded. You know, he's like an honest businessman. It's like Nate's for the furthest from, you know?

• 23:33Andy Greenwald?

  I, I.

• 23:34Chris Ryan?

  He's like, have these guys move sand around when the developer, when the investors come.

• 23:38Andy Greenwald?

  The, the reason I've liked my experience watching the show Cold is because it is never boring. And I actually feel like, and this is obviously self fulfilling, but that my experiment is supporting itself. That like, there's very little that I need to be standing on to just be present with these characters as they are going about whatever it is they are building towards in this undoubtedly final season of the show. That said, um, your question brings up one thing that I, that I was picking up on, which is as certain, um.

• 24:10Chris Ryan?

  Threads.

• 24:11Andy Greenwald?

  Threads, currents bubble up, some of them are tonal, but some of them feel canonical or biographical in ways that I'm at sea with. And I, and it's hard to.

• 24:20Chris Ryan?

  The Maddie, uh.

• 24:22Andy Greenwald?

  So exactly.

• 24:23Chris Ryan?

  Cassie Nate love triangle. Yeah.

• 24:25Andy Greenwald?

  Absolutely no idea what any of that was about.

• 24:28Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 24:28Andy Greenwald?

  Um, nor did I honestly have any idea what Maddie was, who she was and what she was doing. I found that less compelling.

• 24:35Chris Ryan?

  Did you look it up on Wikipedia?

• 24:36Andy Greenwald?

  I didn't, I didn't. Um, you know, I was reading the new Jonathan Franzen novel at the time and so.

• 24:41Chris Ryan?

  Does that, do you have it with you by any chance?

• 24:43Andy Greenwald?

  I do, but we're, I'm pretty locked in right now.

• 24:46Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 24:46Andy Greenwald?

  And I'll let you know if that changes. And people watching at home will see as my interest level dips in the show. It's like retreat to the warm embrace of literature, uh, my true home.

• 24:57Andy Greenwald?

  But, uh, yeah, so, so the, the backstory of that was a little bit confounding. And I, I guess I'll say that the Cassie Nate relationship.

• 25:10Andy Greenwald?

  As far as I can tell, I don't actually care what they were like in high school. Them as starter pack.

• 25:15Chris Ryan?

  He used to date Maddie in high school.

• 25:17Andy Greenwald?

  Sure, but them now as a starter pack, upwardly mobile, you know, would be nouveau riche couple living in this hellscape, like, works for me. It's fine.

• 25:25Chris Ryan?

  I think that the show, it's interesting to hear you say that. I think that the show is very much depicting them as like frozen in amber out in Calabasas somewhere and not truly part of like the kind of zeitgeist and maybe even tapped into the money stream that runs through Los Angeles.

• 25:42Andy Greenwald?

  Right. Cassie is very excited to be on the roof of the peninsula.

• 25:45Chris Ryan?

  Yes. And where's like, what was that? Magenta fuchsia? What was her top? What color was that?

• 25:51Andy Greenwald?

  I was not staring at her top in that scene. I have to say, I was not focused on that because.

• 25:56Chris Ryan?

  What were you looking at?

• 25:57Andy Greenwald?

  The Hildebrandt family in 1971 Chicago, they're the protagonists of Crossroads. Were, it was pretty interesting.

• 26:03Chris Ryan?

  Did you like this episode of TV?

• 26:05Andy Greenwald?

  I actually, I really did enjoy it. But I really enjoy it because the, first of all, I do like the chaos theory approach.

• 26:15Andy Greenwald?

  Sorry. Does that make me the bad guy?

• 26:19Andy Greenwald?

  There are other things on the screen, you know?

• 26:22Andy Greenwald?

  I am enjoying, full stop, like we said last week, I'm enjoying Zendaya. I don't know what's going on with this character or where she's headed, but I just think it's pretty funny. And I also really like that, I have no sense of how much time is passing at any moment in an episode of the show. So the fact that she like goes to this silver slipper club, I have no idea where this is either. It looks like it's.

• 26:42Chris Ryan?

  Antelope Valley, Palmdale, Lancaster, I don't know, maybe, yeah, maybe Nevada? I don't know.

• 26:47Andy Greenwald?

  Unclear, but she immediately just starts running shit there and is just like hanging with everyone. I found that to be kind of fun.

• 26:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:53Andy Greenwald?

  And I also have to say that I'm interested in the way.

• 27:01Andy Greenwald?

  Okay, so wait, one step back. During the long gestation period for this season, we had heard all these stories about the type of show that it would, Euphoria, if it were to return, how it would return.

• 27:11Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 27:11Andy Greenwald?

  And the one that obviously we fixated on was, oh, it's going to be a private detective show. Watching this episode particularly, there were moments when Sam Levinson moves the camera or sets up scenes in ways that suggest the things that interest him may have outstripped the bounds of the show that he's making.

• 27:29Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 27:29Andy Greenwald?

  So when Maddie arrives at the peninsula and it does this like wide shot of her crossing the boulevard and it's like classic Hollywood noir. And I'm interested in that. And I kind of like the idea of him casting his Hollywood fantasia,

• 27:48Andy Greenwald?

  whatever this is, spectacular, with not just the actors from his previous high school piece, but the characters of his high school piece, who are now playing very different roles in the movie he wishes he was making. When the show so far has elevated to me this season, that's what he's been doing. And that's when what's on screen and what clearly is in his head seem to align. The moments that I'm less interested in are on the margins and lead to me almost sending you texts, like I almost did in the first 10 minutes of this episode, asking if this blonde woman coming to LA during COVID was the Cassie origin story. Didn't she go to high school with them? Because again, maybe it's I wasn't looking at the right part of her. I didn't, I thought that was Sydney Sweeney.

• 28:29Chris Ryan?

  No, it was not. You were just staring at her eyes.

• 28:32Andy Greenwald?

  Just locked in.

• 28:33Chris Ryan?

  So it's interesting to hear you say that. I probably give this show credit because it's doing something that I rather enjoy when TV shows at least effort to become, which is the bucket show that allows a showrunner or creator to basically be like, on the side of the bucket, it says Euphoria. Or on the side of the bucket, it says Leftovers or The Americans or whatever.

• 28:55Andy Greenwald?

  Industry.

• 28:56Chris Ryan?

  Industry. But we're going to make it

• 28:59Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Chris Ryan?

  a receptacle for everything that we're interested in. And for Sam Levinson, obviously, he is interested in.

• 29:07Chris Ryan?

  The American dream, the American debt, uh, the absolute, uh, attraction repulsion nature of California to the point where he talks about its geological evil magnet that's underneath.

• 29:19Andy Greenwald?

  The big magnet under the soil attracting evil.

• 29:22Chris Ryan?

  It's spoken by a character named Angel.

• 29:23Andy Greenwald?

  I like that.

• 29:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Uh, and I think he's obviously playing with a bunch of different styles of, of filmmaking within this. And for him, you know, if Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and Sydney Sweeney are in something, 20 million people about are gonna watch it every week. So it's gonna be this big, this big thing. And he could kind of then get away with making a spaghetti western mystery movie if he wants to, or a, uh, like pop art almost commentary on exploitation slash also a piece of exploitation itself. I think that's fascinating. And I think also like, this show is not boring. And I've been struggling for the last couple of months with

• 30:06Chris Ryan?

  the shows that aren't ones that you can tell that Andy and I have really positively responded to, that it's hard for me to get by on like a 65 or a 70 with a show. Or like, it's like, it's pretty good. It's like, this show like is exciting to watch. I don't know what's gonna happen next. Yes, there are things that perhaps like offend people. And there are things that I feel like I've watched that pig conversation, like the one that Alamo and Marshawn Lynch have in any number of Tarantino and Tarantino ripoff movies. Like, there's definitely like homage that borders on.

• 30:39Andy Greenwald?

  This was Kirkland Tarantino.

• 30:41Chris Ryan?

  Sure. But I, I, I just give it a ton of credit for holding my interest and for being, I know, I, I, I don't want this to be clipped, but stimulating.

• 30:50Andy Greenwald?

  I'd like to be clipped, but connected to something we were talking about about two, three minutes earlier. I'll, I'll come into the, the studio with you guys later.

• 30:59Chris Ryan?

  It's, it's, the show is stimulating.

• 31:04Andy Greenwald?

  I never thought I would say this, but I understand Sam S. Mail better. No, when our friend Sam would come on the podcast and do his top 10 list, often what he would rail against would be, you know, what he was joking about as laundry folding shows. And he would praise things that were aesthetically bold and directorially driven, even past the point of what I and maybe sometimes we felt were reasonable or like entertaining or even generous in terms of the effort they were making to include an audience. Now, Sam, despite being very successful and very good at making television, historically doesn't love or watch a lot of television.

• 31:49Andy Greenwald?

  So he's less interested in the things that we praise for hitting familiar, comforting, technically excellent beats like The Pit, for example, or the story connecting the bits on Mad Men where despite pushing things forward visually and thematically, they are just a family in the workplace at the end of the day.

• 32:07Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 32:07Andy Greenwald?

  All of that being said, the moment we're in with television where everything is received, received through this lens and viewed through this lens, that everything is excellent and everything is prestige, whether it's because of the money Apple or whomever has spent on it or the actors who are in it, we're used to seeing them in films. When, in fact, a lot of the meat of television shows from minute 14 to minute 48 are laundry folding.

• 32:36Chris Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:36Andy Greenwald?

  You know, this will come up with Margot as well, I think. It can be elite laundry folding, but it's laundry folding. And the best thing that I want to say at the end of this long digression is there's no laundry in the show. And if I had been watching it.

• 32:54Andy Greenwald?

  With any laundry in mind, over the past few years, I think that I would be having a lot harder time just breezing along. But because I have no stakes here, I like the fact that I don't have any idea where it's going. And that everything on the screen, somebody had an idea.

• 33:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Andy Greenwald?

  Sometimes too many ideas, maybe.

• 33:15Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 33:15Andy Greenwald?

  And too many ideas piled on top of each other, but they had some ideas.

• 33:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and I also, I mean, frankly, find the photography of Southern California and the desert that he's doing to be as like exciting as anything that happens inside of The Silver Slipper. Like, I think that he's doing really, really beautiful work in being evocative of the entirety of the Southern California region.

• 33:38Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, it's Southern California, not LA, in a way.

• 33:40Chris Ryan?

  But it's relationship to Los Angeles and this idea of suburbs and city, it's almost antiquated, or at least because I moved here so late in life, it never really resonated with me as like, you know, you growing up in the valley but going into the city for fun, like, that doesn't scan for me.

• 33:56Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 33:57Chris Ryan?

  But it is obviously something as an LA kid that he is thinking about, yeah.

• 34:01Andy Greenwald?

  Maybe as an LA kid, he's thinking about that, but also maybe as an LA rich person, he's thinking about it the same way, like, you know, the great Kanye song, "No More Parties in L.A." which is basically about how annoying it is to drive from Calabasas to a party.

• 34:14Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:15Andy Greenwald?

  Super relatable. But like, this is a show built by people who exist only in siloed spaces and only ever traverse through the middle of the city either ironically or being driven in an air-conditioned SUV. Like, and I'm not saying that Rue's perspective is of a rich person, but I think the vision of it, which is not to invalidate the vision, it is incredibly haunting and it feels very of the moment and it's claustrophobic and also agoraphobic in equal measure, but everything about it is siloed, and I think intentionally, and I feel like that aesthetically is kind of interesting to me, that Cassie goes from her, you know, golden prison somewhere out in the hills, and where she goes that's exciting

• 34:56Andy Greenwald?

  to her is the roof of a building. We never see her actually touch the ground, and suddenly she's around people again. Or at the very end, when Rue goes to visit Jules, who's a character I've never seen before or encountered before.

• 35:08Chris Ryan?

  Jules is a major, major, major character on the show.

• 35:11Andy Greenwald?

  Once again, like absolute siloed somewhere at the penthouse of a building.

• 35:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, a lot of Jules and Rue. This is, Jules has historically been the sort of, I would say, the love of Rue's life. But in some ways, you wonder whether it's she is just an object of her kind of fascination and affection more than it is like a life partner kind of thing, just because of the way they are talking at the, at the end of that episode. A lot of their romance tends to happen in an almost fantasy world, at least to my eye visually. And you could see in the flashback of Jules's time at art school, when Rue goes to visit her, it's taking place in a loft that looks like a soundstage, basically. And that.

• 35:59Andy Greenwald?

  It's like a Hollywood romance.

• 36:00Chris Ryan?

  And her high-rise apartment, luxury apartment that she's living in, that Jules is living in at the end, has like the fakest of fake sort of nightscapes outside of the window. So I think from scene to scene and from storyline to storyline and from coupling to coupling throughout the show, it almost has a completely different visual language. It's to a credit, to the show's credit, that you can have something like Sydney Sweeney's bubblegum, like far out, like pop, pop, pop LA, the sort of glam luxury night noir of Jules's LA. Rue's desert scape.

• 36:43Chris Ryan?

  And that you can go from like Sydney Sweeney's pretty comic arc so far this season to Rue in a bathroom with another woman, telling her that her best friend just died of a fentanyl overdose and that it's being kept from her.

• 36:57Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 36:58Chris Ryan?

  And then that woman spiraling out on drugs.

• 37:00Andy Greenwald?

  Who's the character who I met last night, who I'm forgetting, who's working as a management manager, Nate's ex?

• 37:07Chris Ryan?

  Matty.

• 37:09Andy Greenwald?

  And Matty storyline, which is more or less the Rachel Senet storyline from I Love LA.

• 37:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 37:14Andy Greenwald?

  You know, which is just like the, the day-to-day nuts and bolts of managing this crazy town, you know? And I, but I say that not, I say that to support your point that there's all these different visions of it. Ultimately, in terms of vision. Why I am like good faith enjoying this exercise is because the shot of Rue begging her mother to come home while a gas station late, the gas station goes out behind her is, it's an astonishing image. It's a beautiful image.

• 37:45Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 37:46Andy Greenwald?

  She's acting the hell out of it. And every so often, every time the show starts to trip into something where I want to take out my like stern little red pen and mark it up, it does something that is genuinely moving and quite eye catching and breathtaking and beautiful. And that's enough to keep me going. I would say largely, and we don't need to segue now, although we could, and you don't need to have watched both episodes for this point to be relevant and not spoilery. Euphoria and Margot have both staked out some terrain on OnlyFans Island and-

• 38:16Chris Ryan?

  What a moment for OnlyFans.

• 38:17Andy Greenwald?

  Great. I'm just glad the little guys are succeeding. As in-

• 38:20Chris Ryan?

  Well, the guy who made OnlyFans is dead.

• 38:22Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, no. Did he set everything up? So are his children gonna benefit? Look, probate court-

• 38:30Chris Ryan?

  I shouldn't be laughing.

• 38:31Andy Greenwald?

  Probate court is a mess, you know, so I hope that he had his affairs in order.

• 38:35Chris Ryan?

  I think it was the OnlyFans guy.

• 38:36Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, it was.

• 38:38Andy Greenwald?

  But we don't know about who's-

• 38:40Chris Ryan?

  I don't know what-

• 38:41Andy Greenwald?

  Who's taking a little taste.

• 38:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, in some ways, we all are. We're all sharing in the wealth because OnlyFans redistributes, you know, it goes back to the content creators.

• 38:50Andy Greenwald?

  You know, really, Karl Marx was only a fan of that kind of redistribution of wealth.

• 38:55Chris Ryan?

  Um, yes, we could get into Margot if you'd like, yeah.

• 38:57Andy Greenwald?

  But we don't need to segue necessarily. I just wanted to make the point that the euphoria vision of this is in keeping with there is a devil magnet underneath the San Andreas Fault and everything is absolutely cynical and evil. And this is just a turbocharged vacuum attached to what was already a soul sucking enterprise of celebrity and fame and devaluation of human spirit. And then you have the Margot vision of it, which is, isn't that neat? We can all take advantage of this and become better people and pay for diapers.

• 39:27Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 39:28Andy Greenwald?

  And I would like to posit, I know this is a little radical, that somewhere in the middle of these two aesthetic viewpoints, there might be some nuance in a even more interesting story.

• 39:37Chris Ryan?

  I wish you luck with your third way.

• 39:39Andy Greenwald?

  My third way. I'm gonna do the Andrew Yang storyline of OnlyFans. Clip that, I dare you.

• 39:46Chris Ryan?

  Trying to think if I had anything else really to say about Euphoria. There's not. Obviously, Eric Dane, this is his final performance on camera.

• 39:56Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think he will appear in other episodes?

• 39:57Chris Ryan?

  I do. I do think that this season seems to be building towards this wedding. I have not, we have not watched ahead, but obviously the wedding is an opportunity to bring together the entire cast in a way that I don't know necessarily we will have otherwise.

• 40:13Andy Greenwald?

  Right.

• 40:13Chris Ryan?

  And I would imagine, given everybody's, you know, release schedules in the major,

• 40:20Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:20Chris Ryan?

  you know, movie theaters, that he shot Zendaya stuff and sometimes Alexis Demme would be on set for that. And he shot Sydney Sweeney's stuff with Jacob Elordi. And, you know, like, I think he kinda had to work around a lot of schedules to do this. And so maybe some of the separation is representative of that. But then again, you know, you're not necessarily always around people you went to high school with, even if you live in the same city. So I think it is a legitimate depiction of their lives, even if it doesn't necessarily feel like they're all on the same TV show all the time.

• 40:52Andy Greenwald?

  I have not seen what people have, many people have, many people celebrated Eric Dane's performance on the show, that it was very different than what he'd done before. And, but even without that knowledge, I thought this was pretty great.

• 41:05Chris Ryan?

  I have to say that him being vulnerable enough about his illness, but that took his, I believe it was MS, correct?

• 41:13Andy Greenwald?

  No, he had Lou Gehrig's ALS.

• 41:15Chris Ryan?

  Sorry, ALS. To take that and be like, what I'll do is have, we can have Cal basically be always four beers deep.

• 41:23Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, and seated and they, and they treated, seemingly treated him with dignity and gave him the opportunity to deliver a very good performance that was not in any way like a, it wasn't just like a, you know, moist eyed tribute.

• 41:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, here you go, big guy. Thanks, man. Yeah, it was, it was really cool. Honestly, like, just the Zendaya note that I will hit every week, which is that she's compulsively watchable. She communicates so much of the necessary.

• 41:49Chris Ryan?

  Ambiguity that should come with a show like this because it would be easy to take everything at face value, but like, obviously, her trepidation, so as you obviously probably have deduced, the Rue character has been through several, like rehab and intervention situations, including just absolutely astonishing intervention in second season. Her dropping Angel off at this sort of, looked like K-Town, sort of like fly-by-night rehab facility that didn't quite scream wellness to me.

• 42:26Andy Greenwald?

  On the level?

• 42:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Andy Greenwald?

  It seemed like she was gonna be-

• 42:28Chris Ryan?

  It seemed like a waystation. It seemed like where you stash people that you don't want out in the world for whatever reason.

• 42:33Andy Greenwald?

  And potentially never want them to appear again.

• 42:34Chris Ryan?

  Yes. And the lighting of that whole scene and her promising her that she was gonna come pick her up in a couple of weeks, I thought was great. And that they never come out and have Rue say like, "This place doesn't seem like a reputable facility, but I'm gonna look into it." It's just everything is looks, everything is the texture of the plexiglass between the person who's just playing video games behind the counter. It's just really good.

• 42:57Andy Greenwald?

  The one counter to your beautiful bucket analogy that I generally agree with in terms of ongoing television shows, because honestly, nothing is worse than a show in which the creative team behind it has lost interest in what they're doing and going through the motions. I'll say that the, even as, you know, potentially overheated and pulp fiction coded as the whole Alamo Silver Slipper storyline is, I would be really interested in the, this is the first season of that show, of Zendaya working at this place in the middle of nowhere.

• 43:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, Zendaya's strip club Michael Clayton. Yeah.

• 43:35Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, when you put it like that. But yeah, like that, that pops.

• 43:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 43:38Andy Greenwald?

  And the rest of the stuff is interesting, but it is not that.

• 43:42Chris Ryan?

  I'm just gonna throw up a quick note here, which is I was trying to do a power poll of shows that are on right now. This is like a post-Pit, Rooster, DTF.

• 43:53Chris Ryan?

  So stuff that's-

• 43:53Andy Greenwald?

  We were very busy watching all three of those shows.

• 43:56Chris Ryan?

  I think I gave DTF a college try. I have not received, there's never been a show I have received more-

• 44:03Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 44:04Chris Ryan?

  contentious emails about, basically insisting that I, that like I did not get it and that I should try again.

• 44:12Andy Greenwald?

  People want Joe Russo to go back and change the ending to that podcast, like they're changing Endgame.

• 44:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 44:18Andy Greenwald?

  So that you become a big DTF fan.

• 44:19Chris Ryan?

  So Bill often does, Bill Simmons often does like power pulls in the midst of an NBA season where he's just like, I'm just gonna kinda go from bottom to top here, or from top to bottom and rank these shows. We have not watched maybe enough of this to do a hearty power pull. For instance, I have not watched any of The Miniature Wife with Elizabeth Banks and Matthew McFadden.

• 44:39Andy Greenwald?

  Neither have I.

• 44:41Chris Ryan?

  But Margo's Got Money, Money Troubles, Your Friends and Neighbors, Euphoria Beef, Big Mistakes, which is the new series from Dan Levy on Netflix, which honestly wasn't that bad. I watched two episodes of that.

• 44:53Andy Greenwald?

  Look at you doing the work.

• 44:54Chris Ryan?

  Honestly, it's like an end of the evening, kind of like before we fall asleep thing. And I was like, this is pretty, this is pretty good. Yeah.

• 45:02Chris Ryan?

  Bande, which we talked about last week, Rochaunt's new Martinique-based-

• 45:07Andy Greenwald?

  What were the numbers on our Bande convo?

• 45:09Chris Ryan?

  I don't know. It's still in the top 10 in Netflix. You know what I'm saying? Like sometimes you gotta look beyond your echo chamber, you know?

• 45:15Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you. I appreciate that.

• 45:17Chris Ryan?

  Hacks, which I have not discussed. Have you discussed it when I, when I wasn't looking?

• 45:21Andy Greenwald?

  No.

• 45:22Chris Ryan?

  Okay. Abbott Elementary, which I still, I still watch and still love.

• 45:26Andy Greenwald?

  Huge in my house, but we're behind.

• 45:28Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 45:28Andy Greenwald?

  Kids, the kids are watching it on Hulu this season. We're behind.

• 45:31Chris Ryan?

  And then two AMC shows, one which I have often said to my own detriment, I have not watched Dark Winds, but I want to and half, I was half thinking about-

• 45:41Andy Greenwald?

  Just Euphoria.

• 45:41Chris Ryan?

  Pulling a Greenwald and just jumping in on season four and then if it works, going back. And The Audacity, which is a new series with Billy Magnussen and Zach Galifianakis.

• 45:53Andy Greenwald?

  I feel like we owe, we owe that a watch.

• 45:55Chris Ryan?

  Because we run AMC as a network.

• 45:57Andy Greenwald?

  Well, no, we're gonna be inheriting it and we're gonna have to make the decision about greenlighting season two.

• 46:01Chris Ryan?

  Inheritance seems to be on your mind.

• 46:03Andy Greenwald?

  Well, it's heavy. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm trying to accrue powers of attorney as much as possible across, you know, any field in relation to my parents.

• 46:14Chris Ryan?

  Do you think you'd like that responsibility for me?

• 46:16Andy Greenwald?

  To be, to have your power of attorney?

• 46:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, you'd just be letting all my doctors know DNR.

• 46:21Andy Greenwald?

  Listen, he's here for a good time.

• 46:24Chris Ryan?

  He's coming in because he tore his labrum weightlifting, but don't take any extraordinary measures to keep this guy on the table.

• 46:30Andy Greenwald?

  By all means, compliment him on what it's done to his physique.

• 46:35Andy Greenwald?

  No, I don't want that smoke.

• 46:37Chris Ryan?

  In your estimation, I mean, obviously, I think against all odds, Euphoria would seemingly be your number one right now?

• 46:43Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, although I, you know, I'm approaching Beef with excitement.

• 46:47Chris Ryan?

  With open.

• 46:48Andy Greenwald?

  And optimism.

• 46:49Chris Ryan?

  With an, with an open and an empty stomach.

• 46:51Andy Greenwald?

  Empty stomach, big appetite.

• 46:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, so this is an interesting moment. I.

• 46:55Andy Greenwald?

  There's no clear alphas, what you're saying.

• 46:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and I, and I think also with something like Your Friends and Neighbors, which has already been renewed for season three.

• 47:02Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:03Chris Ryan?

  And I could see being a four, five, six, for as long as Ham wants to do this.

• 47:07Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 47:07Chris Ryan?

  Kind of thing.

• 47:10Chris Ryan?

  You kind of get to a point where there's some, some of these shows and you're like, this is going to be what it is and I will, if I like it, I'll keep watching it.

• 47:17Andy Greenwald?

  Before we even answer the question you're smartly asking, I will say that this is an interesting snapshot of kind of what TV is now in a way that it hasn't been.

• 47:25Chris Ryan?

  This is what I wanted to get into. This is the stuff.

• 47:27Andy Greenwald?

  A number of the shows you're mentioning, especially shows like Your Friends and Neighbors and Rooster, those are ongoing shows. They're designed to be ongoing shows. They're going to be greenlit before the first seasons or something, you know, current seasons have, have, have ended. And similarly, the other types of shows that we're talking about on the margins, Margot and stuff, like there's, if Apple had its way, there is always going to be a Margot-like show on the air. And we will discuss and debate the merits of the show in particular, which I think is worthy of our conversation. But what's interesting about all the shows we're talking about is that they are starry at a certain level and they are safe on a certain level. And I don't mean that judgmentally.

• 48:11Andy Greenwald?

  When we talk about them individually, I'm happy to be judgmental about their attitude towards risk and storytelling.

• 48:16Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 48:16Andy Greenwald?

  But they are dependable. And even like Your Friends and Neighbors and the season three announcement, and this wasn't a surprise that it was getting renewed again even before the second season premiered, much like last year, they said it's coming back and James Marsden will be one of the Friends and Neighbors. This year, Michelle Monahan is. Joining friends and neighbors.

• 48:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:32Andy Greenwald?

  And who better to represent that certain type of affable, contemporary television plus celebrity than those two? Very, very high approval ratings.

• 48:43Chris Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 48:43Andy Greenwald?

  Good in basically everything, dependable, and feel like the people who have always been on these shows, even if they haven't been before, and even if they're only doing an arc.

• 48:52Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Andy Greenwald?

  This, this is a relatively healthy snapshot of a moment that even if we're not engaging with a lot of it, or are we necessarily fired up about it?

• 49:01Chris Ryan?

  And I think some of it is, is firing these shows all off around one another to get in under the wire for Emmy consideration.

• 49:07Andy Greenwald?

  There's that. Usually that window ends around May 31st.

• 49:10Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, so the next couple of weeks will also be busy. I'll be curious to revisit this list after we've gotten a chance to maybe watch some more of Beef, maybe The Audacity. I think we'll pick Hacks up as a, where are we at as the final season comes to a close kind of thing? Let's talk about Margot, a show from David E. Kelley. It's adapted from a novel.

• 49:33Andy Greenwald?

  By Rufe Thorp?

• 49:34Chris Ryan?

  By Rufe Thorp. It's only 2024 novel, so it's a quick turnaround from, from page to screen.

• 49:38Andy Greenwald?

  She's been recommended to me as a bard of Orange County?

• 49:42Chris Ryan?

  Do you know Rufe Thorp at all?

• 49:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I read, I read this book.

• 49:45Chris Ryan?

  There you go. This is actually useful. And Kaia, if you feel like it, please jump in. I don't have a specific prompt for you.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Um, I felt mid about it.

• 49:54Chris Ryan?

  That's how I feel about this show. Uh, but here's what I want to ask you.

• 50:00Chris Ryan?

  You know, ever since The Wire, we've talked about TV as the great opportunity to novelize story.

• 50:06Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Chris Ryan?

  To tell a long form story. And I think now we've kind of bled into, especially since Apple has thrown its weight around in the adaptation space and Amazon as well, and a bunch of these places are now like just buying up novels that seem to have a viable screen story for TV.

• 50:26Chris Ryan?

  If you gave me Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Nick Offerman, and if you even gave me a Fullerton English student unexpectedly gets pregnant by her creative writing teacher, or her writing teacher, and decides to keep the baby.

• 50:46Chris Ryan?

  I don't know if in like 100 years I would have come up with this specific mixture of character and tone that this show did. And I wonder whether or not it's just because it's like we're adapting this book and that's what the book is like.

• 50:59Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 51:00Chris Ryan?

  But I'm starting to wonder whether or not like TV is the right place to adapt novels. Because this to me is like a perfectly fine example of like, in 1996, this would have been an adaptation of a Mona Simpson novel that lots of people liked.

• 51:17Andy Greenwald?

  Can you imagine Curtis Hansen's Margo's Got Money Troubles?

• 51:20Chris Ryan?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 51:22Andy Greenwald?

  Would have been very enjoyable, and you know what it would have been? Better than anyone expected and really satisfying.

• 51:28Chris Ryan?

  Yes, and there's something about this, you were talking about the safety of it, I think we were talking about the element of surprise that Euphoria packs in to each scene, to each shot.

• 51:42Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Chris Ryan?

  There's, part of it is because I know what is gonna happen on this show, because you watched a trailer for it, so you know that Margot gets into OnlyFans and you know that her father was an ex-professional wrestler who's gotten out of rehab to come back to her and...

• 51:57Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I mean, the log line of the book was like, it almost felt like a ChatGPT stunt to get optioned.

• 52:05Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 52:06Andy Greenwald?

  Which is, again, people really liked the book. Kay had not so much, but like it was a hit book and it is a legitimate thing. I am not trying to discredit the author, but the series of words strung together, I was like, well, that's gonna get adapted.

• 52:20Chris Ryan?

  I've been having a sensation when I'm watching shows now, and Kate Herron directed the third episode, like it looks cool, like Elle Fanning is wonderful, like...

• 52:28Andy Greenwald?

  Dierba Walsh, who did Bad Sisters, really talented Irish director.

• 52:33Chris Ryan?

  I hate when scenes start and I know exactly how they're gonna end.

• 52:36Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, I am, if you think I'm insufferable, imagine me watching the show, saying what was gonna happen in this, yes.

• 52:43Chris Ryan?

  And it's not like, oh, let me guess, she's actually gonna do OnlyFans, but I mean, like, let me guess, she's gonna get insulted by this HR work person, or let me guess, like, Michelle Pfeiffer's not gonna be able to take care of the baby tonight, so she's gonna ruin her restaurant job, or let me guess. And, I, yes, like, TV, there's a huge swath of television, where I'm like, I want a reliable, repeatable, emotional experience,

• 53:11Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 53:12Chris Ryan?

  along with a couple laughs, or a couple of thrills, every week, for 42 minutes, or 59 minutes, or an hour and five minutes, or whatever it is. But more and more, I think, TV like The Pit and Industry and, you know, Euphoria kinda makes it hard for me to watch stuff where I'm like, no shit, that happens.

• 53:32Andy Greenwald?

  If you're committing to eight, 10 hours of something, you don't necessarily want extremity, which I think is what was a misunderstanding of a lot of the last 10 years, in terms of pushing genre things, or violence, or shock, to the forefront to get people to keep watching. You don't need to be surprised, I think you ought to be delighted. And when you get the feeling that things are moving along a predictable track, that, for me, saps my enthusiasm of spending this much time watching something. Now, if I had a lot of laundry to fold, I get it. I will also say that, like, uh, this is from the book, I am, this might be considered a zag, considering I am the Daddington of this particular island, but I do find the unexpected pregnancy story arc to be diminishing returns.

• 54:15Andy Greenwald?

  I've, I, I dare someone to show me a version of this story that follows a different path, other than throwing up in public and finding out the hard way, and taking multiple tests, and saying, no, no, no, and then the chat, like, it's hard, and this is a legitimate part of the human experience, but dramatically, it's increasingly kind of inert, because it follows a very similar pattern. Before we get specifically even more into the weeds of the show, I wanted to say some positives.

• 54:42Andy Greenwald?

  I think that, I think that the, first of all, production design, I'm biased, this is Richard Bloom, who worked on my show, but I think he did a beautiful job showing a part of, attention, Sam Levinson, a part of Southern California that is very specific and not the version you often see. This is like on the outskirts of Pomona-ish. And one of the things that I noticed that I really appreciated is like in Margot's apartment, Margot's the main character played by Elle Fanning, it doesn't look like poverty porn.

• 55:13Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 55:14Andy Greenwald?

  And it doesn't look like there's a bowl of plums on the table for no reason.

• 55:17Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 55:17Andy Greenwald?

  Which is often the case.

• 55:19Chris Ryan?

  It's right in the middle.

• 55:19Andy Greenwald?

  It's right in the middle. It's like, oh, some people live here and sometimes they eat cereal. And I noticed that in, location to location to location. And when the show does like put a little curlicue on it, like the scene in Bloomingdale's when Margot has sort of a panic attack and falls on the ground, and Michelle Pfeiffer is yelling at her to get up, you can see that he hung these like furry Cassie and Nate-esque lilac lamps over her, which I don't believe are a feature of Bloomingdale's, but accentuated the shot.

• 55:44Chris Ryan?

  I was just in Bloomingdale's last weekend and I did not see them.

• 55:46Andy Greenwald?

  You were shopping for Strollers?

• 55:47Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 55:48Andy Greenwald?

  As a gift?

• 55:48Chris Ryan?

  Right. We were looking for Home Goods and we went to a Bloomingdale's that didn't have them.

• 55:51Andy Greenwald?

  Okay, well, you should go to the one near Pomona. It's classier. And, you know, the music, original music is by Nathan McKay, who we love from Industry and executive producer and I think essentially day-to-day showrunner is Eva Anderson, who's an incredibly talented writer, who I work with, who I love to see her succeed in something like this. I will also credit one other huge thing here that maybe goes against our initial take. The episodes are like 36 to 42 minutes. Bravo.

• 56:22Chris Ryan?

  Huge.

• 56:23Andy Greenwald?

  Let's normalize this.

• 56:24Chris Ryan?

  And once you get through the Your Friends and Neighbors trailer, 38 minutes.

• 56:28Andy Greenwald?

  Although this started with a trailer for itself.

• 56:30Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 56:31Andy Greenwald?

  Which I was like, relax, Apple. You have a winner, I'm here. I really appreciated that. Like, there's nothing, few things worse.

• 56:41Andy Greenwald?

  Few things worse than you fire it up and it's like 64 minutes.

• 56:43Chris Ryan?

  I'll tell you right now.

• 56:44Andy Greenwald?

  But you know what else is worse than that? A 36 minute, half hour comedy. But if you tell me it's an hour long drama and you hit that 40 minute sweet spot, I'm paying attention.

• 56:53Chris Ryan?

  I sincerely would probably, I would be, I would watch every episode of Fallout if they were 42 minutes.

• 56:58Andy Greenwald?

  It makes a huge difference.

• 56:59Chris Ryan?

  Huge difference.

• 57:00Andy Greenwald?

  So there's that. I think the other thing, um, I will say that's really positive is I think Nick Offerman is amazing so far in the show. Three episodes in, he's playing a, just out of rehab, uh, former wrestling great.

• 57:13Chris Ryan?

  Name Jinx.

• 57:13Andy Greenwald?

  Name Jinx. He, this, this feels a little like, you know, you, you talking about the tops on Euphoria to say this, but like the, the version of the show that's focusing on the, the man is pretty interesting. He's really good.

• 57:30Chris Ryan?

  Well, this is, this is kind of the thing is like.

• 57:32Andy Greenwald?

  But it's a different show.

• 57:33Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And I was most delighted by, um, the opening episode, the first episode. Specifically Elle Fanning in college and like maybe being in Fullerton and having a gift that should be bigger than Fullerton.

• 57:50Andy Greenwald?

  And the great Michael Angarano, who I love.

• 57:52Chris Ryan?

  And.

• 57:52Andy Greenwald?

  Wearing a weird gold button blazer.

• 57:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but like, like, um, suburban, ex bourbon, California, higher education, living in a, an apartment with a bunch of roommates who all seem like they could have their quirks and would be pretty interesting to get to know. And Elle Fanning kind of working at a Bennigan's or a Chili's or whatever, and, and having dreams beyond Fullerton, but not really sure how to get to them. In a, in a different world, that's enough.

• 58:22Andy Greenwald?

  That's a good show.

• 58:23Chris Ryan?

  That's a good show, man. Like I, I would watch Elle Fanning doing Frances Ha, you know, like I would watch her kind of just be like, yeah, like I wish, I wish there was something bigger out there for me. But I think. Part of it might be because when you get big, big, big stars like Michelle Pfeiffer, who is married to David E. Kelley and I think has made a turn to television in these last few months with The Madison in this, her storyline with Greg Kinnear is kind of bigger than I thought it would be.

• 58:52Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 58:52Chris Ryan?

  Or maybe bigger than it needs to be. And then Offerman could just be a dad that comes back into the picture, but you add on this whole element of wrestling.

• 59:01Andy Greenwald?

  It's a lot of extra. But I would also, and the baby becoming the fulcrum to reunite this kooky family.

• 59:08Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 59:08Andy Greenwald?

  And make things work out. I mean, look at us. We're just a couple of kids who started a TV podcast and now we're talking about Michelle Pfeiffer projects twice a month. So really, the culture moved to us.

• 59:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:18Andy Greenwald?

  So, thank you.

• 59:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Andy Greenwald?

  Gratitude. Practice gratitude. I found that the tone and the consistency of the characters to be all over the place, and I wondered if it was the creeping reach of celebrity. And what I mean by that is when we first meet Michelle Pfeiffer's Cheyenne character, she is, and it was interesting, she is made up heavily and is seemingly trying to embody this lower-class ex-Hooters waitress, piecing it together, now trying to pretend to be a different person to marry a preacher who apparently only dines at chain restaurants, played by Greg Kinnear. The next time we see her, she looks completely different and a little bit more like she does

• 1:00:01Andy Greenwald?

  on The Madison, which is, Michelle Pfeiffer looks incredible all the time, at any age of her life and in any setting, and she seemed a lot softer and more likeable and nicer. And so then, when the turn is that she won't hold the baby, her grandchild, or, you know, or take care of him, or help, or talk to her daughter, it felt like suddenly we've twisted it again. The drift towards likability and wanting to be a hero in a story that almost inevitably will turn to some kind of mush started really, really early. Maybe it's the familiarity with these characters. Maybe it's a little bit of the ego of who they want to play and how they want to be seen creeping in. But what I didn't understand really was the troubles that anybody was in.

• 1:00:46Andy Greenwald?

  Up until a certain point, everything seems to be working out fine. You know, she's spending hundreds of dollars in diapers and things up until one of the roommate moves out and then suddenly the crisis is writ large for us.

• 1:00:58Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:58Andy Greenwald?

  Suddenly she says, "I could have moved in back with you, but your dress is filled in the other rooms." And I don't really understand the peril. Everything is a little bit agreeable. Everything is a little bit nice until it's not for the purposes of the plot. So a character who is kind in one scene comes over to pick another fight with someone else because we're in episode three and we need more conflict.

• 1:01:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and we introduce, I think it's in, is it two or three that we introduce Marcia Gay Harden, who plays Michael Arango's mother.

• 1:01:27Andy Greenwald?

  Michael Angarano's character is a professor, the father of the baby. Marcia Gay Harden shows up, really shows up and turnt up as a character who immediately announces that her hair looks like a skunk and she has some of the...

• 1:01:40Chris Ryan?

  Raccoon.

• 1:01:40Andy Greenwald?

  Sorry, a raccoon. Are you sure it was a raccoon? I think it was skunk.

• 1:01:43Chris Ryan?

  Raccoon, because she's like, "And I fight like one, too."

• 1:01:46Andy Greenwald?

  That's generally, again, you know, I've been paying a lot of attention to inheritance and family matters and legal stuff. That's generally how people behave in legal mediation type of circumstances. You show up and you say, "I'm a villain. Now please speak to my attorney." It's all over the place.

• 1:02:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Andy Greenwald?

  Right?

• 1:02:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Andy Greenwald?

  I feel like I'm sounding more negative than I intended to be because it is a good expression of what Apple likes to do and tends to do on things either executive produced by Nicole Kidman or spiritually executive produced by Nicole Kidman.

• 1:02:19Chris Ryan?

  It's, maybe it's Hello Sunshine Corps, but it's also like, it's not dissimilar to how I feel about the episodes of Shrinking that I've watched, which is, this is about taking these incredibly vulnerable, destabilizing moments in characters' lives, but creating the feeling that everything is fine and safe and good.

• 1:02:43Andy Greenwald?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:43Chris Ryan?

  And...

• 1:02:44Andy Greenwald?

  Cushioning.

• 1:02:45Chris Ryan?

  I don't mind going either way. You know what I mean? Like, I don't necessarily need everything to be last exit to Brooklyn, but if somebody loses their wife in a car accident or someone has an unexpected pregnancy and finds themselves in dire straits economically...

• 1:03:01Chris Ryan?

  I find it difficult to sometimes like square the circle of, but actually in the terms of the televisual experience that you're gonna have, it's fine, you know? It's like, it's safe and it's cool and it's nice and like, you're gonna get to know and love these characters and honestly, let's just try to keep these characters in play for two, three seasons, but keep them more or less in the same milieu. Like, so we're gonna want them all existing in this same world and in the same circumstances forever.

• 1:03:30Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:03:30Chris Ryan?

  And in some ways, that's how I feel about Your Friends and Neighbors, which is like a cool concept that I would have liked to have watched a 90-minute to 120-minute movie about a guy who's fallen out from an investment bank and starts robbing houses in his rich neighborhood. But when you're like, here's episode 11 of him doing the same thing.

• 1:03:48Andy Greenwald?

  But also, the central problem with Your Friends and Neighbors, and maybe this is just the note that they don't give at Apple, or maybe this is just Apple where everything is smooth and contoured and works out fine.

• 1:03:58Chris Ryan?

  Well, maybe they're like, this is exactly what we want.

• 1:03:59Andy Greenwald?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:04:00Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Andy Greenwald?

  Jon Hamm's character in Your Friends and Neighbors turns to a life of crime for reasons that are kind of shrug emoji. Like, he loses his job that pays him seven figures, so he starts stealing paintings, but don't worry, his daughter still gets into Princeton? Like, the stakes are never really that bad for them, even when they try to create the sense that they are. The biggest risk he has is of maybe not being able to pay for the tennis club membership anymore, or hang out in the sauna with his equally rich friends.

• 1:04:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Andy Greenwald?

  This is not really a problem. It is a conceit for a television show, fine, but we are living in this moment where it does feel like some of these streamers, studios, creators are trying to cherry pick the trappings of a grungier, more intense kind of drama that we have history and success with on television, but really just standing off the edges and making it TV.

• 1:04:57Chris Ryan?

  Maybe you can't get in the door unless you're like, here's the sticky, hooky part of this. If you pitch Jon Hamm loses his job at a big-time investment fund, or private, you know, badge fund, and in the midst of a divorce, needs to recalibrate how he fits in to this tony Long Island community. That's just like Jon Hamm doing Jon Cheever and I'd probably be really into it. And I wouldn't have any expectations about

• 1:05:24Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:05:24Chris Ryan?

  how he does and doesn't change. But to get it sticky, you have to be like, and then he turns to a life of crime. But don't worry, it's not like Breaking Bad where like,

• 1:05:32Andy Greenwald?

  It's not like Breaking Bad. I mean, this is the, this is the example. It is not something we generally do, which is hold up one of the, you know, generally acknowledged

• 1:05:40Chris Ryan?

  Greatest shows ever.

• 1:05:41Andy Greenwald?

  Rushmore shows ever and say, well, you're not doing that. Nobody needs to do that. Very few people could do that. And if they did it again, we'd be like, you're just doing that. I, I, I hear all of that. But early on in that show, Walter White reaches the first of what ends up being, you know, dozens upon dozens of absolutely existentially catastrophic decision points. And he does the thing that you can't believe that he's going to do. It begins with the first, you know, the guy who's in the basement, who they then have to, like they melt his body in the bathtub. You can't really walk back from that. What a lot of these other shows do is they create a clever opportunity and circumstance parachute to get away from, you go near the body in the bathtub, but then you're not really responsible for it and he was just sleeping anyway.

• 1:06:26Andy Greenwald?

  And you're off to, to, to flirt with danger again the second, you know, the next week.

• 1:06:30Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:31Andy Greenwald?

  That's kind of a bummer. And I, I can understand why you might do it in an ongoing show, but.

• 1:06:39Chris Ryan?

  But it's like, something about the mechanics of the storytelling sticks out to me too. If you were going to pitch Justified as a movie, you would pitch it as, uh, Oliphant versus Goggins. And then end of the movie would be their showdown.

• 1:06:53Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:06:54Chris Ryan?

  If you pitch it as a TV show, you're like, this is a show, a week to week show about a really cool marshal who, who returns home to Kentucky after he gets in trouble in Florida and has to deal with all of the like rural crime

• 1:07:07Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Chris Ryan?

  outside of, of Lexington in the hills outside, you know? And that's awesome. And then it emerges over the course of the season that there's going to be this big bad. But they are like, from any given week, you're not going to know what the story is going to be and it's all these different cool little procedural marshal stories. I don't think that they are using the same logic of like, what makes an entertaining television show week to week anymore? Understandably, because a lot of people are waiting for all the episodes of Your Friends and Neighbors to go up so that they then just watch them over a weekend or whatever. And I, I don't know, with Margot, it's the same thing. It's like, How much, how long can you do a show about someone who didn't expect to be a mother and now is?

• 1:07:52Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I think it-

• 1:07:53Chris Ryan?

  You probably could do it for a while, I guess.

• 1:07:55Andy Greenwald?

  But we should sell, we could separate the, the conversation because, Kay, how would you characterize the book? Like, is the book surprisingly dark at times? Or is it essentially like a fun read that touches on contemporary society?

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say the latter. I think my issues with the book are also like my, I watched the first episode of this and I, I think the tone of the book was a little bit off putting to me. Similarly, in the way that the tone of this show is a little bit off putting where it just feels like overly twee.

• 1:08:26Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I think, like, I, I don't think, it's not necessarily fair to combine that into this conversation. Because if this is true to the spirit of the book, like, one thing that David Kelly is just expert at, and especially in this later part of his career, is he's really good at finding the thing that made the thing successful.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:08:43Andy Greenwald?

  And he just expands on that and celebrates it. So turning this into a glossy but affirming, sort of twee, magical, creative, family story, that's fine. There's plenty of space for that on TV. There are a lot of talented people working to make that happen. And maybe it'll have a couple twists and turns along the way. And also with a show like this, it's like, oh, that's Carrie Kenny Silver in one scene being funny. That's Laura Sangiakamo as a minor character who haven't seen her in a minute. That's great to see. Like, it's attracting Marcia Gay Harden. Like, it's of a very, very, very high level. But the, the bummer is when that sensibility, that kind of apple just contoured smoothing everything out sensibility,

• 1:09:25Andy Greenwald?

  becomes the lingua franca of the medium or becomes the expected thing. Now, to bring it all the way back to the first point we were making when you were talking about what's out there right now.

• 1:09:35Andy Greenwald?

  Historically, TV is pretty laundry folding and affirming and magical and fill space and fill time. And it's okay to bring some of that back into our lives. The pit proves that you can be pretty boundary pushing and thrilling within some, using some of that old language. I think the problem becomes when all of the resources at the shrinking number of- Streaming services pour all of those resources into that. Now, we're not at that point. There's still 300 new shows.

• 1:10:02Chris Ryan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:10:03Andy Greenwald?

  And Apple UK especially is putting out a lot of really interesting things.

• 1:10:05Chris Ryan?

  And this also might speak to the difference between watching TV as a professional pursuit versus watching TV as like a way to let off steam at the end of a long day.

• 1:10:13Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Chris Ryan?

  So I acknowledge that and I, you know, I, but there is something fuzzy going on with me and with these shows where I'm just like, I'm not connecting with as many as I usually do.

• 1:10:26Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I think, I think that goes back to the, I think you were right about the shrinking observation and I also think that it's just a lot of hours to fill. Like not many stories are deserving of this much of our time, frankly, you know? And some, even some of the spy shows that maybe people think we overrate, but it's like, well, I also read a lot of spy books in my spare time and probably couldn't tell you about half the plots. Like that is, that is something that I enjoy doing once I'm in that world. But I wouldn't give the same, I probably wouldn't give the same grace to books in different genres just to fill time. It would have to earn my, my attention.

• 1:10:58Chris Ryan?

  Thanks for your participation in the show today. Thanks to Sarah Kaya.

• 1:11:04Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think I had other plans?

• 1:11:05Chris Ryan?

  Uh, no. I got another pod I gotta go to.

• 1:11:07Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, well, please, by all means.

• 1:11:08Chris Ryan?

  And we'll be back on Thursday with Beef, Top Chef and...

• 1:11:14Andy Greenwald?

  Wildcard?

• 1:11:15Chris Ryan?

  I mean, I listened to all those shows. Maybe we should check out the Audacity for that.

• 1:11:17Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, I don't want to over commit because it's kind of a busy week, you know, with all the probate stuff I got going on, but...

• 1:11:22Chris Ryan?

  I don't really, I gotta get to the bottom of this.

• 1:11:24Andy Greenwald?

  No, I'm just, that was just a bit.

• 1:11:25Chris Ryan?

  Thanks, everybody for listening. We'll be back on Thursday.