How the Warner Bros. Sale Changes Television. Plus, ‘DTF St. Louis’ and ‘Rooster’ Strike Out.

Chris and Andy talk about what the immediate and long-term impacts of Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. will have on the television landscape (4:39). Then they discuss ‘DTF St. Louis’ (38:45), ‘Rooster,’ (01:01:02), and why the pair of the new HBO shows ultimately don’t work. Later, they close by raving about the excellent return of ‘Top Chef’ for Season 23 (01:09:14) and The Watch: After Dark (01:18:00). Drivers wanted. Learn more athttp://vw.com 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 and Jamie Yukich 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

  I'm pro-football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of: major depressive disorder. I carried sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit MDDAllies.com to watch my story.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins has not prescribed Caplyta lumateperone.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  I needed more from my antidepressant, so my doctor added Caplyta lumateperone, proven to provide greater relief from depression symptoms than an antidepressant alone, building on my progress without starting over. Caplyta is for adults with major depressive disorder when used with an antidepressant and is available by prescription only. Individual results may vary. In clinical trials, weight gain was not common.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Elderly dementia patients have increased risk of death or stroke. Caplyta is not approved for dementia-related psychosis. Call your doctor about new or sudden mood changes, behaviors, or suicidal thoughts right away. Antidepressants may increase these risks. Report fever, confusion, stiff muscles, which may be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High cholesterol and weight gain may occur, as can high blood sugar, which may be fatal. Monitoring is recommended. Common side effects are sleepiness, dizziness, nausea, dry mouth, feeling tired, and diarrhea. These aren't all the side effects.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  Ask your doctor about Caplyta. Learn more at caplyta.com or call 888-252-4824.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.

• 1:37Speaker 03

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• 2:22Speaker 03

  Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more, or visit tremfyaradio.com.

• 2:36Speaker 04

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

• 2:41Chris Ryan?

  Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com. And joining me in the studio after a long hiatus, it's Andy Greenwald.

• 2:56Andy Greenwald?

  First of all, let's pull back the curtain a little bit.

• 2:58Chris Ryan?

  Hey, welcome back, man. Thanks for coming back on The Watch. It's always great to have you.

• 3:03Andy Greenwald?

  Whenever my schedule allows it, I'll be here. You know this better than anyone.

• 3:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Andy Greenwald?

  Podcasting, it's a muscle. You know what I mean? And you have to keep it in, like you do with weightlifting, you have to keep it in elite shape on a schedule. So I'm a little worried today. I'm coming in cold.

• 3:17Chris Ryan?

  You're more like a Jason Tatum. Like, what's gonna happen? Is he still got it?

• 3:21Andy Greenwald?

  But I came back fast, so I was worried about my legacy.

• 3:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24Andy Greenwald?

  Second, what people don't know is that you just gave me a brushback pitch for the ages, right before we started recording.

• 3:30Chris Ryan?

  No, no, no, no. We don't have to. I just, I just. FanDuel is now available everywhere in the U.S.

• 3:40Chris Ryan?

  So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are, including these places.

• 3:49Chris Ryan?

  Make this your most rewarding season ever with FanDuel. Age and location restrictions apply. Product availability varies by market. See FanDuel.com for eligibility. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER.

• 4:02Chris Ryan?

  This episode is brought to you by Petivity. Cat parents are basically mealtime detectives. Who actually ate? Did they finish? Was that less than yesterday? The new Petivity Smart Feeder for cats turns everyday meals into meaningful health insights, helping you identify changes in your cat's habits and be more proactive about their health. Plus, you can feed them from anywhere. Take the mystery out of mealtime. Visit petivity.com, P E T I V I T Y dot com slash cat feeder to learn more. This episode is brought to you by Boar's Head. You know what I love about football season? It's the football, but also the football watching food. And nothing hits like a Boar's Head sandwich when I'm watching a game. Really, any game day sandwich better with Boar's Head.

• 4:43Chris Ryan?

  Philly cheesesteak, layer up buttery slider rolls with Boar's Head London broil roast beef, American white cheese and picante provolone. Delicious. Then add roasted onions, peppers and Boar's Head pub style horseradish sauce. I love horseradish. And you've got the ultimate game day cheesesteak. They've also got a whole lineup of premium meats, cheeses, hummus and dips, condiments and more to serve up on game day. Head to your local Boar's Head deli counter to shop now for game day sandwich inspiration and more, visit boar'shead.com. Boar's Head, committed to craft since 1905. Just noticed that you are wearing clothing from a boutique that I happen to love here in Los Angeles called Brother Brother. Yes. And I, I, I want it to be a big tent.

• 5:26Andy Greenwald?

  The name is Brother Brother.

• 5:28Chris Ryan?

  Only Child, Only Child.

• 5:29Andy Greenwald?

  It's true, it's tough. It's tough, but what I was trying to explain to you is no one is questioning that you Columbus.

• 5:36Chris Ryan?

  I didn't Columbus it. They were, they were blowing up without me. This is really bad podcasting.

• 5:41Andy Greenwald?

  No, we're gonna talk about news and stuff. I, first of all, I think they do. And what I was saying is that like, what I have realized over time, due to your popularity, there's a whole month named after you. Which this is my first podcast.

• 5:53Chris Ryan?

  International Women's Month.

• 5:54Andy Greenwald?

  Since, there's no coincidence that International Women's Day falls during CR Month. I think everybody noticed that. You are an ally. This is my first podcast of CR Month. I was on the shelf for the first.

• 6:04Chris Ryan?

  Oh yeah, well, so you were busy last week.

• 6:06Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. And all I'm saying is I just introduced myself as the person who can help facilitate access to you. I'm Alex Guerrero.

• 6:14Chris Ryan?

  You can reach us at the watch at spotify.com if you want to weigh in on this interpersonal battle. You can follow us at the watch pod underscore on Instagram. DM us. Give us hot news about the Paramount Warner Brothers Netflix triangle if you want, or just make comments about the way we look. Also, you can watch us on YouTube, ringer-tv. You can watch us on Spotify where I bet you're listening to us.

• 6:36Andy Greenwald?

  Look at you, just getting things back in order.

• 6:38Chris Ryan?

  And I have a big show for you today.

• 6:40Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, that's why you're tapping to watch.

• 6:42Chris Ryan?

  No, I want to talk to you because I've somehow we kind of missed the final Paramount Warner Brothers stuff. Then, uh, because we did industry last week, went up on Sunday as the Warner Brothers stuff kind of came out over the course of the weekend.

• 6:58Andy Greenwald?

  Luckily, the facts on the ground did not stop me from blowing my top about it in advance, which created a lovely clip.

• 7:05Chris Ryan?

  That was, that's true. And then I also want to talk to you about the Lanterns trailer.

• 7:08Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, yeah, I want to talk about that.

• 7:09Chris Ryan?

  I want to talk to you about DTF San Luis, which has aired two episodes so far, Rooster, which debuted on HBO last night, and a little bit about a little show, a cooking competition show.

• 7:20Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, it's Top Chef season.

• 7:21Chris Ryan?

  That they counted out. Don't count it out, baby. Uh, Top Chef is back. It's on Peacock, airing the first episode. So we won't get too deep into it, but we'll just sing its praises a little bit.

• 7:31Andy Greenwald?

  You're saying that because you don't want our official commentary to surface until the show airs on Bravo?

• 7:36Chris Ryan?

  I gotta be completely honest, I don't think a lot of people know that Top Chef is currently available on Peacock because Kaia, who is a, I would say, moderate to passionate Top Chef fan, was like, I had no idea.

• 7:49Andy Greenwald?

  Now, in her defense.

• 7:51Chris Ryan?

  And this is something that I would like to address with the entertainment industry across the board, which is.

• 7:55Andy Greenwald?

  Do you want to talk directly to Cameron?

• 7:56Chris Ryan?

  No, I'm just saying, like, we're losing it. We're losing the ability to, like, let people know stuff is on. Did you know a case that Scarpetta is coming out, like, this week?

• 8:06Andy Greenwald?

  No.

• 8:06Chris Ryan?

  There's a Nicole Kidman Amazon show about a medical examiner that has been much ballyhooed, and it is coming out Wednesday, I think.

• 8:15Andy Greenwald?

  Well, this was the case with Reggie Dinkins, where we were very excited about it.

• 8:18Chris Ryan?

  Well, that's because they put one up and then we're like, you guys think about that for three months, and then brought it back.

• 8:23Andy Greenwald?

  I did think about it for three months. It worked. I also think, I hope you don't mind me saying, so Kaia was on a lovely vacation, so she doesn't need to know that Top Chef was available on Peacock. It was waiting for her when she got back at 5:30 this morning before driving to work to produce the watch.

• 8:36Chris Ryan?

  You've already come and gone? What do you mean?

• 8:38Speaker 03

  What do you mean?

• 8:39Chris Ryan?

  I thought you were going like I

• 8:41Andy Greenwald?

  You see how tan she is?

• 8:42Speaker 03

  No, man, I'm back.

• 8:43Chris Ryan?

  No, it's really dark in the studio.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  I'm fresh off the beach.

• 8:45Chris Ryan?

  Damn, dog.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  I know.

• 8:46Chris Ryan?

  That's animal style. Where to go?

• 8:48Andy Greenwald?

  See again, interne-.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  I don't recommend it.

• 8:50Andy Greenwald?

  I talked to our colleagues here. You just swan in, you know?

• 8:53Chris Ryan?

  Let's talk about the only story that really is happening in Hollywood right now. Well, other than the Oscars and everything else, but um, there's a bunch of really good uh, writing and especially podcasting that we've done over here at The Ringer um, from the town and the big picture about the Warner Brothers Discovery slash Skydance Paramount acquisition, or Skydance's acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery. I kinda wanna take this to like the next questions and and shape them a little bit more around the kinda stuff that we tend to talk about. So there are many, many backroom and financial angles to this story. You've got um, the impact that the war in Iran will have on uh, the sovereign wealth behind this deal.

• 9:38Chris Ryan?

  Um, and Matt.

• 9:39Andy Greenwald?

  I've not been tracking that.

• 9:40Chris Ryan?

  Bell and he talked to Jerry Cardinal, who is the head of Redbird Capital or a member of Redbird Capital and I'm not sure which, and he swears up and down that that's not, that's not gonna be a factor. Um, you also have the controversies surrounding Jeff Shell and his involvement with a Las Vegas gambler.

• 9:57Andy Greenwald?

  Um, which is different from his previous uh, involvement.

• 10:01Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and that is also looming over this. And then there are noises coming from various states attorney, is it attorneys general?

• 10:08Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you for asking me that.

• 10:09Chris Ryan?

  Attorney generals.

• 10:10Andy Greenwald?

  It's attorneys general.

• 10:11Chris Ryan?

  Attorneys general, that's my thought, who are talking about uh, interrogating this sale a little bit more deeply than the uh, Justice Department has. Um, but I wanna talk about what it's gonna mean for TV.

• 10:23Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 10:23Chris Ryan?

  Uh, which we obviously can't say with any certainty, but there are some things that we should probably like just talk out, cause I think it would be of interest to our listeners. So the number one thing is. And one that I was kind of curious to hear your perspective as somebody who in his majority of his life is like writing and working on and trying to sell ideas for TV shows is what is the one less buyer thing mean here and how is it different that if Warner Brothers and Paramount become one, how would that be different necessarily than if Warner Brothers and Netflix became one? Now, I know that there was a lot of talk from the Ted Sarandos side about how HBO is going to maintain its independence and

• 11:04Chris Ryan?

  we were buying them for them to be them and you know, like how much they respect that team. David Ellison is, to I guess his credit, said similar things, but not as explicit about HBO's kind of-

• 11:18Andy Greenwald?

  Special status?

• 11:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Andy Greenwald?

  We don't, the answer to all of this is, of course, we don't know. Anyone can say anything when it's all speculative about what it might mean and how these things might play out. I think the biggest red flag to me in the deal in Paramount winning the deal over Netflix is that you don't even have to squint too much to understand why Netflix was making the deal because in purchasing Warner Brothers Discovery, Netflix was getting access to a lot of things that it doesn't necessarily have. A movie studio with a very, very entrenched, well, at least prior to the bride's release, very entrenched success rate at movie theater releases and actually getting people out to the theaters, theatrical.

• 12:04Andy Greenwald?

  You have the HBO tile, which is at least, you know, an institutionalist like Ted Sarandos' mind, still elite and worthy of preserving and not necessarily duplicative of what they do. Although it is worth noting that they, in the past year, Bella, who's head of content for Netflix, hired Nora Skinner from HBO.

• 12:22Chris Ryan?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:22Andy Greenwald?

  And her purview is a lot of HBO-ish type of content, you know, what we used to call prestige stuff.

• 12:29Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 12:30Andy Greenwald?

  And I think the biggest one, of course, being the enormous IP. Netflix has for years been very desirous of having live events. That's why they're pumping out as much Stranger Things content as they can, including the live show. Like having DC, having Harry Potter would be very valuable to them and their attempt to diversify what they offer. So you could see it. I'm not saying it would be good for people, but I'm saying you could see it. And because it was not one-to-one duplicative, there was a hope that it wouldn't cost a lot of jobs. You cannot say that about Paramount taking over Warner Brothers.

• 13:02Chris Ryan?

  That was part of their pitch, is that this will cost a lot of jobs.

• 13:04Andy Greenwald?

  This will cost a lot of jobs and we can, yes, reduce overhead. They have two studio lots, they have two streaming services, they have two theatrical release movie studios. They have a lot of people doing similar jobs at two different parts of Los Angeles. That's potentially catastrophic and ruinous for real life in the town. But to finally end up answering your question.

• 13:28Andy Greenwald?

  This was a seller's market during the boom times of John Landgraf's trademarked prestige TV, when there was just too much TV. If you took a project to market at a certain level, you could pretty, you could feel confident you would get not just one nibble of interest, but another one, which would create, obviously, competition and maybe get you a better deal and

• 13:50Andy Greenwald?

  grease the skids towards actually getting something made.

• 13:52Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 13:54Andy Greenwald?

  That has really fallen off a cliff in the last few years. And it's not just because of some companies like going out of business or streamers closing. It's just the reality of the financial commitment to make a lot of these shows these days. AMC is not competing for the same shows that Apple is anymore. Whereas a few years ago, maybe everyone was in competition for the same stuff. So the idea of some, a buyer going off the board was a fear no matter what happened. But with all of the talk and again, all of the potential roadmap to HBO remaining separate from Netflix. You could still imagine that they might compete with each other in, I don't know if in the most robust way, but in a way.

• 14:36Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, remember, we're not too far away from a time when HBO Max was competing with HBO.

• 14:41Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 14:41Andy Greenwald?

  In a real, honestly, not that thoughtful way. And that's how you ended up with things like Station 11, which was like DNA and HBO show being a Max show.

• 14:51Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 14:52Andy Greenwald?

  They've sorted that out in recent years. There's just, David Ellison has said he wants to keep the HBO Brain Trust separate, but he's also said inevitably we merge the streaming services. So what does that mean? And one less buyer means less competition, which means less opportunity for writers, which means fewer shows, and on and on and on.

• 15:10Chris Ryan?

  He's been going around since way before the actual acquisition, talking about the stack and how he's going to revolutionize Paramount's digital backend. And I would not say, I wish we had a lighting queue for UX Corner. We have a lighting queue now for Watch After Dark. But I would not say that I'm a huge fan of either Paramount Plus or HBO's like user experience, you know? I don't think anybody is really on Netflix's level algorithmically in terms of helping you discover stuff, putting things in front of your eyeballs.

• 15:44Andy Greenwald?

  Remembering you just watched something and might want to keep watching it.

• 15:47Chris Ryan?

  And might want to keep watching it. I think Paramount, at least in my experience, is the worst of it, where you're just like, I do watch Survivor, why do I have to search for it every time, even though I've saved it to like my stuff?

• 15:59Andy Greenwald?

  Peacock is like that as well.

• 16:00Chris Ryan?

  And Peacock is like that as well. But I would say that I would expect a teardown of both and a new thing. The funny thing about that is that like, whenever that kind of stuff happens, I feel like by the time it goes live, like, we've moved into another era of what this stuff is supposed to look and feel like. I often remember when we were working at websites more actively, one of the big meetings that we would always get stuck in is, should we build our own video player? And, you know, the answer was probably like, just use YouTube. But it would always be like, but if we built our own player, what could we? And it was like, you guys took two years to do this, spent a ton of money, and now, like, people still use YouTube.

• 16:45Chris Ryan?

  I don't know what that means, and I'm not making a one-to-one comparison, but it is, when you're talking about like, let's build this like state-of-the-art streaming experience for people, I do wonder like what happens in like three years? If like our- Our parameters have changed for that.

• 17:01Andy Greenwald?

  I think there's also a fundamental misunderstanding of what users want out of their experience these days. I think we could all agree, we can reach across the aisle and say, "It sure would be nice to have to click fewer things to see the things I want to see."

• 17:14Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 17:15Andy Greenwald?

  So, the idea, and this is the idea that Netflix is actively working towards from a position of, like from a great lead in doing so. Netflix wants to be the app you open and stay in. For your reality TV, for your sports, for your prestige dramas, for your reruns, for your podcasts, for everything that you do.

• 17:31Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 17:32Andy Greenwald?

  And that seems like a very smart strategy to be comprehensive. We have not just recent evidence, but recent evidence involving the, one of the companies involved in this transaction, that becoming an everything app is a lot harder than it looks, or than it looks in a initial transaction spreadsheet. HBO Max, formerly Max, doesn't work because nobody wanted Dr. Pimple Popper with their HBO. That's, users weren't using it that way. Like, they, the thought behind it was, "Look how much we can give you." And you, i.e. us, looked at it and said, "No, thank you." They were still seeking out the HBO shows they wanted to watch, and the people who watched the other stuff, watched the other stuff.

• 18:17Andy Greenwald?

  But there wasn't a lot, and I think this has been confirmed on the record by people involved in it, which led to the HBO Max re-rebranding.

• 18:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 18:25Andy Greenwald?

  That there wasn't a lot of peanut butter and jelly mixing up in the mouths of the consumer.

• 18:31Chris Ryan?

  The other thing is just like, how...

• 18:35Chris Ryan?

  My next question is like, what kind of TV shows are gonna get made? And I think we'll probably feel this closer to 28, 29.

• 18:46Andy Greenwald?

  Sure, yeah.

• 18:47Chris Ryan?

  Is when we'll feel the like unified aesthetic of the new Paramount start to come to the fore.

• 18:52Andy Greenwald?

  Assuming this happens.

• 18:53Chris Ryan?

  Assuming this happens, and like, I don't know what happens to like, uh, the fourth season of House of the Dragon. Like, where that really exists. Like, at what point do they close down HBO, uh, as a streaming service and ask everybody to be on Paramount Plus? How long are we gonna have to go through the annoying like ESPN, Hulu, Disney Plus bundle?

• 19:13Andy Greenwald?

  I think I'd pay all three of them independently.

• 19:15Chris Ryan?

  I think I might pay like multiple, multiple accounts of like, and I have no idea how.

• 19:20Andy Greenwald?

  Do you know how I know that I do? I took my kids to Disney and I was greeted by name, saying, "Thank you." You personally funded this wing.

• 19:29Chris Ryan?

  It's Andy Greenwald, one of the three account guys, yeah.

• 19:31Andy Greenwald?

  He's like, will you fund Tomorrowland?

• 19:33Chris Ryan?

  Because like every 15 months ESPN will be like, you don't, you don't have a membership here?

• 19:37Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 19:38Chris Ryan?

  I'm like, oh, I guess I gotta give you $90.

• 19:39Andy Greenwald?

  I called them and they were like, yes, of course. I see this is not duplicative, it's triplicative or whatever.

• 19:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:45Andy Greenwald?

  And then I was like, great, so we can bring it all online? And there was a, oh, well, sir, your Hulu account actually runs until November.

• 19:52Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Andy Greenwald?

  I was like, great.

• 19:54Chris Ryan?

  Call you then.

• 19:55Andy Greenwald?

  But then my ESPN account will be running to June. I need Howie Roseman to do a cap management of my streaming service package.

• 20:02Chris Ryan?

  So like, the reason I'm asking about like, what will TV feel like and what kind of shows are gonna get made is that even your HBO Max comparison is a really good one. That was bringing in some of the aesthetic house style of maybe like a TBS and TNT style show that you might, you might get on linear cable and finding a place under the HBO umbrella to put those things, but still have a little bit of the sensibility of the brain trust of HBO consulting on flight attendant or what have you.

• 20:35Andy Greenwald?

  Right.

• 20:36Chris Ryan?

  That was new to that show, right?

• 20:37Andy Greenwald?

  The Mac Show, yeah.

• 20:38Chris Ryan?

  The Kaylee Coolidge Show, yeah.

• 20:40Chris Ryan?

  I don't see how that happens realistically with the current iteration of Paramount Plus, whatever you consider the remnants of Showtime.

• 20:48Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 20:48Chris Ryan?

  CBS and whatever like, you know, Why Marshals and Tracker stuff that they're still putting up and HBO, you know, and I, and I, I see the vision long-term where they're like, this is great. We have all this IP.

• 21:03Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Chris Ryan?

  And it's all gonna be like vertically integrated and we can start, we can take one of these studio lots and build Paramount Mountain and have dragons flying around. But these are very different experiences for me. Like when I'm, when I'm looking for stuff to watch, Lioness is not the same thing as DTF St. Louis.

• 21:25Andy Greenwald?

  I'd like to think that we're a pretty good podcast. The Ringer Fantasy Football Show is a good podcast.

• 21:31Chris Ryan?

  It is.

• 21:32Andy Greenwald?

  I don't think anyone would argue it would be a better podcast if all five of us were seated at the table at the same time.

• 21:37Chris Ryan?

  Talking at the same time.

• 21:38Andy Greenwald?

  Talking at the same time.

• 21:39Chris Ryan?

  Yes, yeah.

• 21:40Andy Greenwald?

  That is the fallacy of consolidation, and that's the looming problem here. I think one of the under-reported things about the relative success of HBO Max, now again, let's say that Warner Brothers Discovery continues to hemorrhage money and is in massive debt. That is not necessarily HBO's fault, that is the fault of, oh, Captain, my Captain, David Zaslove, who purchased the entire thing on debt and then tried to-

• 22:03Chris Ryan?

  And now this has been purchased with quite a bit of debt.

• 22:05Andy Greenwald?

  And is now going to enrich himself enormously while everyone he leaves behind will lose their job. So that's awesome, capitalism's working great. Let's hear the fantasy football guys say that.

• 22:17Andy Greenwald?

  But an under-reported thing of our pal Casey Boyes, friend of the watch, who we don't need to blow any smoke in his direction whatsoever, but the consolidation, I'll use the word again, of the HBO and HBO Max brand has worked so absolutely dynamically and beyond the expectations of a lot of people because they allowed it to fall under the same office. The HBO HBO Max thing that was challenging for a while was they had two separate programming teams, and then when Casey and his group took over HBO Max, they were able to say, this is an HBO show, this is an HBO Max show, and not in a dismissive way, saying like, we're just going to put the chaff over here.

• 22:58Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 22:58Andy Greenwald?

  This is how we get the pit.

• 23:01Andy Greenwald?

  So the idea isn't that things that don't necessarily sync up, don't work under the same tile, it's that you need to have a unified vision, a broader unified vision of what you're putting up. And if you just put HBO next to everything that you just said.

• 23:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 23:19Andy Greenwald?

  I don't understand what it means. Now, I guess the counterargument is, you couldn't explain the cable bundle either, but I just think we're so far past that in terms of a reference point.

• 23:30Andy Greenwald?

  The other thing to add to this is I'm not entirely sure. I'm certain the viewers don't understand, but I'm not entirely sure that quote unquote, "the town understands" what a Paramount show is at the moment either.

• 23:41Chris Ryan?

  I don't think they do either because I think they're making assumptions based on, "Oh, it's kind of like Red State Curious."

• 23:48Andy Greenwald?

  But if it was Red State Curious, which it has been.

• 23:51Chris Ryan?

  But even if it has been largely through Sheridan's stuff.

• 23:54Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 23:55Chris Ryan?

  That was not Ellison.

• 23:57Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, and one of the first things Ellison did was let Taylor Sheridan walk and bring in Cindy Holland, who is the architect of some of the most thoughtful programming that Netflix has.

• 24:07Chris Ryan?

  I think it was flipped chronologically, but yes. He brought in Cindy Holland and Cindy Holland was like, "We're good."

• 24:11Andy Greenwald?

  But these were two big power moves in the TV space. So Cindy Holland's Paramount does not exist yet in terms of what the viewers are engaging with. There are a lot of similar shifts because other than HBO and FX, and I guess Peacock has had a pretty consistent leadership team as well. But like no one, you could say the same thing about Amazon, which is like, "Oh, well, they're also going after that kind of Tom Clancy, Terminalist, real estate." But behind the scenes, Peter Freeland came over from Netflix and is now putting his mark on their programming and it's not likely to be the same thing. So we can't assume we know what it's going to be. But the thing lurking behind that statement is Cindy Holland made her name in Netflix

• 24:56Andy Greenwald?

  making the kind of thoughtful, Emmy-provoking, HBO-competing stuff that put Netflix on the map. Are she and Casey hunting after the same projects from their separate corners and they're now going to be doing it from the same structure?

• 25:08Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 25:09Andy Greenwald?

  And who benefits from that? It just kind of doesn't make sense. Now, we can leap to assumptions or we could choose not to. We don't actually know how it's going to shake out and from the people that I know involved and from the good reporting that you were mentioning before, like no one actually knows how it's going to go yet, but it is concerning from a fan of quality stuff perspective.

• 25:28Chris Ryan?

  The IP Jigsaw Puzzle was the last thing I wanted to talk about because I think it actually segues into talking about lanterns pretty easily. Paramount now controls the following Warner Brothers pet properties, assuming this deal goes through: DC, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings movies, of which they are currently about to start shooting one in May, apparently. And much, much more Mortal Kombat, you know, some of the greats.

• 25:51Andy Greenwald?

  Are you a big Mortal Kombat guy? Look at the space. Zoom in. Who's your guy? Now I'm talking loud. That's my Marin imitation. Who are your guys?

• 25:59Chris Ryan?

  Sub-Zero.

• 26:00Andy Greenwald?

  You were Sub-Zero guy?

• 26:02Chris Ryan?

  I liked Sub-Zero.

• 26:03Andy Greenwald?

  Everybody liked Sub-Zero. I just didn't know you were so devoted to him.

• 26:06Chris Ryan?

  Sub-Zero was my Graham Platter.

• 26:10Andy Greenwald?

  No matter what was revealed underneath.

• 26:11Chris Ryan?

  Whatever tattoos he had. It's like, finish him.

• 26:15Andy Greenwald?

  Ride with him. No, you were like, he can win.

• 26:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Andy Greenwald?

  That was your attitude.

• 26:19Chris Ryan?

  Uh, yeah, I was a big Mortal Kombat guy. Although, you know, fair's fair. I gotta, I gotta be candid with you. I don't think being an only child shapes you for competition with other human beings in video games.

• 26:34Andy Greenwald?

  I'm posing my computer. This is the conversation I've been waiting to have.

• 26:37Chris Ryan?

  Because, look, when it's just you and the four walls and the roof, you can just hit reset when you're not liking the way things are, the way the wind is blowing. You're just like, oh, I'm losing in this Techno Bowl game or this Madden game? We're just gonna kick the plug out.

• 26:52Andy Greenwald?

  You know what else?

• 26:52Chris Ryan?

  What?

• 26:53Andy Greenwald?

  You can think you're really good.

• 26:55Chris Ryan?

  You can think you're fucking Last Starfighter.

• 26:57Andy Greenwald?

  Exactly.

• 26:58Chris Ryan?

  You're goaded and then one guy comes over.

• 27:01Andy Greenwald?

  I was basically, with my Sega Genesis, I was playing Ender's Game. Do you know what I mean? Like, I was the one who was going to end the galactic conflict and maybe already had.

• 27:11Chris Ryan?

  And then one dude comes over.

• 27:12Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 27:13Chris Ryan?

  And fucking.

• 27:15Andy Greenwald?

  Ends my game.

• 27:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Throws 84 ninja stars at your head and you're like, god damn it, this controller's broken.

• 27:22Andy Greenwald?

  There was, uh, this is also, this is actually dating us more than saying Sega Genesis, but at the, it sounds like I grew up in fucking Riverdale with Judd Head and Betty and Veronica. But there was a pharmacy in the neighborhood that not only had a soda fountain, soda fountain. They had a Double Dragon arcade cabinet.

• 27:40Chris Ryan?

  Played DD by yourself?

• 27:41Andy Greenwald?

  I would ride my bike there during like off hours or weekends and be like.

• 27:46Chris Ryan?

  Stranger thing music is playing. Yeah.

• 27:48Andy Greenwald?

  And then a Stranger Things dude would come up, be like, put a quarter on it. And I'd be like, oh, sir, shall we play cooperative mode? Which didn't exist, you know? Like, you have to understand that there wasn't, Double Dragon was just two guys walking around going like this.

• 28:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I remember.

• 28:04Andy Greenwald?

  There was not a, um, mortality mode like there would be in Mortal Kombat. And yet somehow this guy would find a button combination to finish me.

• 28:12Chris Ryan?

  Right. To break your like, your pelvis. Yeah.

• 28:15Andy Greenwald?

  No, we're trying to rescue the same lady.

• 28:17Chris Ryan?

  Uh, so anyway, yeah, Mortal Kombat also goes to Paramount. Um. You know, this is, this is a really interesting wrinkle to this because there is the just for laughs idea of, of Westeros Sacario, like I have brought up multiple times.

• 28:33Andy Greenwald?

  Westeros Sacario. Yeah, good.

• 28:35Chris Ryan?

  No, but just like having, having, you know, overlapping. And if you don't think that they've like talked about that, about like, could we get a hobbit in Game of Thrones or something like that?

• 28:46Andy Greenwald?

  Is that the Dorne border crossing?

• 28:50Andy Greenwald?

  Just, just like, talk me through it.

• 28:52Chris Ryan?

  Dorne, you're in the land of wolves. Um, but when this Lanterns trailer dropped.

• 28:58Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:59Chris Ryan?

  I was, I was like, this is how long it takes, man. Like when you have talented people working kind of in conjunction. And I know Lanterns kind of predates James Gunn and there's been some rumored James Gunn input or like kind of conversations.

• 29:14Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, the charitable version is how do we bring this into the larger fold of what he's doing?

• 29:19Chris Ryan?

  DC thing that I'm trying to weave. To my, last I checked, he has been relatively quiet about all of this stuff.

• 29:26Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, I was, I was wondering that myself.

• 29:28Chris Ryan?

  He may have tweeted about it. I didn't see, but I, I usually this stuff comes up in feeds if he is, if he's like, I'm so excited to be part of the Skydance family. I haven't seen it. But Lanterns is one of those things where you're like, you know what, man? You guys just did it right. I, I've not seen it. We obviously have a lot of affection for Damon and the people who made this show. And I'm a huge fan of Kyle Chandler and Aaron Pierre. So I'm excited to watch it. It just looks cool to me. Um, I know there's some Lanterns heads out there who are like, not my Lantern, but I worry, I guess, that we're gonna have to start from zero with this stuff in, in a year and a half. And they're gonna be like, yeah, we have some different ideas about what we want Superman to represent, you know?

• 30:11Andy Greenwald?

  Do you see a lot of cars in LA with the blue lantern flag in the back?

• 30:15Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Or the upside down lantern. Yeah.

• 30:18Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I think two things are true. Like, your guy, the guy's name is Jerry Cardinelli? That's incredible.

• 30:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. He owns like pieces of a lot of European football teams too.

• 30:29Andy Greenwald?

  Well, also.

• 30:29Chris Ryan?

  Redbirds got their hands on a lot of pods.

• 30:31Andy Greenwald?

  Cause the Cardinals, the red, the red bird, you know?

• 30:34Chris Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:34Andy Greenwald?

  See that?

• 30:34Chris Ryan?

  I didn't really think about it that way. That's cool.

• 30:36Andy Greenwald?

  That's why I'm on the pod. No, if you had done this last week, that would have been crickets on that point.

• 30:41Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 30:42Andy Greenwald?

  Really being into naming. One step back. HBO has been making exceptional content and Warner Brothers Films has been making, has been on like a historic heater up until this weekend. From a position of deficit, literal deficit, like they, David Tazlov was like, I've created this new company. We are $30 billion in debt. What can we do? So despite those circumstances, they are still producing at a high level and making shows that I would imagine and movies that have been profitable. David Ellison is coming in and now the new company will be saddled with what $80 billion in debt before it starts?

• 31:20Andy Greenwald?

  So that's basically asking them to do three times as much profit generating for one-third of what they've been spending. I mean, I don't actually know how the numbers shake out, but the point is the fastest path, there is no path to profitability. I mean, it's just, it's just nonsense to me, the way that anyone would take this as a credible, like we see a path here. But the fastest path towards shareholder engagement, or at least shareholder fantasy story spinning, is we're going to do what the previous owners of this content have not done, which is absolutely supercharge IP.

• 31:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but I wonder whether more of their gains will come from doing the Disney flywheel thing of creating, whether it's a park or consolidating whatever, you know, parks that they have already sort of started talking about and making it into an actual destination and figuring out merchandising and selling all sorts of digital subscriptions for different things, because I just don't really know, like, what, I don't really know what the margins are on like a show like Seven Kingdoms.

• 32:30Andy Greenwald?

  Is this you asking me directly whether I will also be a consulting producer on Harry Potterland and Abu Dhabi? I cannot confirm or deny that, but thank you.

• 32:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Andy Greenwald?

  That is a real thing. They're building that.

• 32:41Chris Ryan?

  Are they really? In Abu Dhabi?

• 32:43Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, prior to the events, the last 10 days, that was their plan. Yes.

• 32:49Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, they will say that they have a path towards maximizing all of this. There will also be a strong counterpoint to be made. Again, these things will happen slowly in terms of how it trickles down to the consumer. You mentioned House of the Dragon. House of the Dragon will complete its four-season run without any issue. The Harry Potter series is that Hogwarts Express has left the station. Do you know what I mean? And that is a big deal for all these stakeholders involved, the sellers, the buyers, everybody. It's happening. I think one of the reasons why James Gunn probably hasn't said anything is because he needs to do and his team needs to continue to prove that they are the right stewards for this.

• 33:31Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 33:32Andy Greenwald?

  That said, when you look at the deficits on the balance sheets, I think it would be a pretty quick, pretty quick decision that HBO's careful, long-term stewardship of Game of Thrones, which has been successful. I mean, one week on, two weeks on from Night of the Seven Kingdoms, I'm actually still processing how successful that show was and how excited I am to see more of it. That two shows every year and a half is not enough. And that they may hit the supercharge button.

• 34:06Chris Ryan?

  Maybe.

• 34:07Andy Greenwald?

  And again, and then that would take two, three, four, five years.

• 34:10Chris Ryan?

  But if I was running that stuff, I would just point them in the direction of Marvel Television and Star Wars Television and be like, be careful what you wish for. There's only so, we can only make this stuff so fast, given the effects and given the sort of scale of it.

• 34:22Andy Greenwald?

  And then they would point to the screen again where the $80 billion deficit is looming and say, "Well, we gotta spend something to make something."

• 34:29Chris Ryan?

  Right. But then make Top Gun Flight Academy. I mean, there's all sorts of stuff that they can kind of mess around with.

• 34:35Andy Greenwald?

  I think there's options, and I think that you're right, like just from a, what have we learned? I just feel like a lot of the roadmap of recent capitalism doesn't have a lot of, "Well, we've all learned something here."

• 34:44Chris Ryan?

  That's right.

• 34:45Andy Greenwald?

  You know what I mean? I think that's a very beautiful.

• 34:48Chris Ryan?

  Guys, we're never gonna do 2080 again, right?

• 34:52Andy Greenwald?

  Exactly. Let's not get too in front of our skis here. Instead, it's like, what if there were no mountains? So there's no question that all of the dials on all of these properties is gonna get cranked up.

• 35:06Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know what that means. And if it's as good a segue as any to say that like, we, the Andor-loving podcasters, look at the Lanterns trailer. Couldn't be us. And we're like, this is exciting to us.

• 35:21Chris Ryan?

  Close your eyes and think of two guys who love Andor.

• 35:25Andy Greenwald?

  I'm picturing men in glasses.

• 35:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Andy Greenwald?

  The, I, I, we don't, again, we don't know. And the more, what I mean, when I say we don't know, what I mean is, successfully executing Lanterns, which, from the people involved, and it's incredible, murderers are of talent. There's the brilliant comic book writer, Tom King. There's Chris Mundie, who had worked on Ozark and is a great TV producer. Our friend Damon Lindelof, who everyone knows his CV. My friend Justin Britt Gibson is a writer on the show as well. And like, the, the, the pitch was basically True Detective with Power Rings.

• 36:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 36:03Andy Greenwald?

  And it seems like they have executed this in making an HBO quality show.

• 36:09Chris Ryan?

  Did they shoot this in Oklahoma?

• 36:10Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know where they shot.

• 36:11Chris Ryan?

  It looks like, but it looks vaguely like where they shot Watchmen. That's what I was asking.

• 36:17Andy Greenwald?

  But it does not look or feel, at least in the trailers and in what they intended to make, like Supergirl, which is a movie I have high hopes for. But they were able to say like, this is going to work for this part of the company. And you are serving fewer cooks in that template. Like, again, the HBO Max Warner Brothers Discovery tent is probably too big. It's been proven that was just too big of a thing to be successful. But it is so much smaller than what the Paramount Skydance Warner Brothers Discovery thing will be, that you could say, James Gunn can look at his docket and say, well, I'm going to make this well for these people. I'm going to make this well for these guys. And the different margins for what is successful for Warner Brothers Films and HBO, I'm going to make everybody happy and we're going to probably maximize our chance to

• 37:02Andy Greenwald?

  return on our investment.

• 37:04Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 37:04Andy Greenwald?

  If suddenly it's $80 billion of debt and we have to please as many people as possible all the time, or it's confusing who you're pleasing. I guess what I'm trying to articulate is, if Lanterns works in a narrow lane that connects to the larger DC Universe, but only has to satisfy the HBO audience and stakeholders.

• 37:22Chris Ryan?

  The 6 million to 10 million people who might turn in, tune in for it.

• 37:24Andy Greenwald?

  That is a harder, I would imagine that's a harder sell in the even larger ecosystem.

• 37:28Chris Ryan?

  I just think on a practical level, there's. There's very few scenarios in which I can imagine there being a pool of money to be shared across multiple brands, verticals, what have you, that have their own leadership structures and their own development processes. And if I'm running the remnants of the Sheridan universe, or if I'm running, I don't even know, like if I'm running whatever Cindy Holland's kind of version of this is, her dramas and comedies that she's developing, and then you've got Casey and his team doing old HBO stuff and the IP stuff that they were working on, but it's all coming from the same bank.

• 38:13Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 38:13Chris Ryan?

  It's just, it starts to, you can see where that starts to really get complicated because people are just like, why am I competing against him when we both are on the same, you know, at paramount.com email server?

• 38:26Andy Greenwald?

  Let's look at this in the ways we were just saying that venture capitalists don't, which is like, let's look at where we're at now. And it's been incredibly hard for these companies to integrate themselves and keep up with the shifting demands on them. So if you look at Marvel, which, you know, recent box office success aside, like no one will question Kevin Feige's bona fides and like the track record of this company within a company. But the CEO dynamic change at Disney had a ruinous effect on the Marvel brand because the first thing Chapek did was say, we got to pump up these numbers for the streaming service. We are serving that now. We are no longer serving the, I

• 39:08Andy Greenwald?

  mean, I don't want to be so grandiose to think that Marvel Studios started to purely serve the consumer, but like, in terms of storytelling, but as soon as their mandate shifted and their modes of production shifted and their output shifted, quality suffered. And it took us this long since the, five or six years since Jason Kilar tried to blow up Warner Brothers the first time and say, we're going to put everything, you know, straight online and everything.

• 39:33Chris Ryan?

  Operation Popcorn or whatever the fuck that was called, yeah.

• 39:35Andy Greenwald?

  Like, only now, in the midst of all these mergers and turnover, has, it seemed like Warner and DC have figured out their relationship to each other, that we are going to make, they are going to make X number of movies a year, they're going to make X numbers of TV shows a year, and those TV shows are going to fall into these categories. And they're going to play nice with HBO's expectations and demands on quality, and they're going to play nice with Max. That took a long time to get there. And I'm not saying it's like a winning, always successful strategy, but it does, you do get the feeling that it's calmed down and everybody knows what they're doing. And every time one of these mergers happens, you blow up the expectations and you blow up the chains of command and you blow up the whole system. And then it takes years to settle down again. And at that point, someone else is buying you.

• 40:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 40:20Andy Greenwald?

  It's not a recipe for good shit.

• 40:23Chris Ryan?

  Let's talk a little bit about contemporary HBO stuff because there's two new shows on.

• 40:27Andy Greenwald?

  Did you want to say anything else about Lanterns?

• 40:28Chris Ryan?

  I kind of, I mean, they, they are playing into the core strengths of their two leads. So Kyle Chandler, a slightly maybe more cynical and tongue in cheek version of the same Coach Taylor, like.

• 40:44Andy Greenwald?

  This is Coach Taylor post NIL.

• 40:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, this is Coach Taylor, like when he's been like working at Oklahoma State for a while. You know, he's seen some things. And then Aaron Pierre, who was in, had an extraordinary coming out party as an action star in Rebel Ridge.

• 41:00Andy Greenwald?

  He did.

• 41:01Chris Ryan?

  And I think he's got some of that same quality in this show. So I'll be really curious to see how those two work together. And then Kelly McDonald, who's undefeated for, for 31 years now. So.

• 41:13Andy Greenwald?

  It's a great trailer.

• 41:14Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Andy Greenwald?

  And Chandler looks, looks amazing. Like there's just something, we used to talk about how one of the few safe spots for creators of big genre movies would be like, he's got to talk about the fate of Romulus vis a vis Klingon. But if we get a Royal Shakespeare actor to do it, maybe he'll sell it. And they tended to sell it.

• 41:37Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 41:38Andy Greenwald?

  There's something about Coach Taylor being like, I'm a lantern. I'm like, sure you are, buddy. Literally, I trust you.

• 41:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Andy Greenwald?

  Whatever you need. Mold my children to be lanterns.

• 41:48Chris Ryan?

  Is Phileon in this show?

• 41:50Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, Phileon will appear in the show.

• 41:51Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 41:51Andy Greenwald?

  And for what it's worth, from the, from the nerd corner, like Green Lantern is a mythology that allows multiple, it's not like the Spider verse, like they are a core of many people who have rings. You want to talk Spider verse?

• 42:03Chris Ryan?

  What, what do you have to do to get a ring?

• 42:05Andy Greenwald?

  Still no.

• 42:05Chris Ryan?

  What do you have to be?

• 42:06Andy Greenwald?

  What, what do I have to?

• 42:08Chris Ryan?

  I mean, like, what do you have to have, like a college degree? Like what, what's the sort of requirements to get a?

• 42:11Andy Greenwald?

  No, no, no. Remember when Obama was like, trade schools are good too? There was a policy like that.

• 42:16Chris Ryan?

  For lanterns?

• 42:17Andy Greenwald?

  For in the DCU. Yeah. Because you don't want to be a lantern with tons of lantern debt.

• 42:21Chris Ryan?

  No, that's true.

• 42:22Andy Greenwald?

  You want to be able to start your career.

• 42:23Chris Ryan?

  That's true.

• 42:24Andy Greenwald?

  It's just, it's the way the world.

• 42:26Chris Ryan?

  Philadelphia Community Lantern College? This episode is brought to you by Volkswagen. It can be hard to do your own thing when everyone else is following everyone else, but that's what some of the best films are about. An outcast striving to make their own way in the world. And this is your sign to be that outcast. From us, from VW, from the other outcasts out there, take a chance. Make the most of every day and don't be afraid to veer off course every now and then. Because if you don't do it now, then when? Learn more at VW.com. Let's talk a little bit about these two shows on HBO right now.

• 43:02Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 43:02Chris Ryan?

  And I rubbed my eye, both because it itches, but also because I'm not looking forward to this.

• 43:08Andy Greenwald?

  How you doing with these allergies with these Santa Ana winds?

• 43:10Chris Ryan?

  You can hear it in the voice, man.

• 43:11Andy Greenwald?

  It's bad.

• 43:12Chris Ryan?

  Um, my voice or just the allergies?

• 43:14Andy Greenwald?

  Your voice has a nice Chandler-esque growl today. I'm actually enjoying it.

• 43:19Andy Greenwald?

  It's just like a little bit in the pocket, you know what I mean?

• 43:21Chris Ryan?

  DTF St. Louis, which has aired two episodes and it's a cliffhanger-y mystery in one hand, and also a acidic black comedy on the other hand. So, look, if you haven't watched this, I'll set it up a little bit by saying it's created and entirely written and directed by Steve Conrad, who I would describe as one of the few existing cult creators in television.

• 43:48Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 43:49Chris Ryan?

  He has made a show called Patriot, which is beloved, a show called Perpetual Grace LTD, which I actually quite liked and maybe preferred a Patriot. A, what do they call that? Puppet show?

• 44:04Andy Greenwald?

  He made like a cop puppet show?

• 44:06Chris Ryan?

  Ultra City Smiths and has done some feature work, but is here with...

• 44:12Andy Greenwald?

  He started doing feature work, like he's been around...

• 44:14Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, he wrote The Weatherman, right?

• 44:15Andy Greenwald?

  He wrote Wrestling Ernest Hemingway was his first movie.

• 44:18Chris Ryan?

  And the Walter Mitty thing that Stiller made. So, he's been around, but like... His shows are not big, but when I talk to people

• 44:26Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Chris Ryan?

  As recently as Mansoukis on Thursday, and you hear this from a lot of folks, people are obsessed with this guy and are like, he's one of the true, unique voices in television.

• 44:37Andy Greenwald?

  You have banged this drum for a while, how they're really, it's not possible due to the budgets involved to have like an indie television scene.

• 44:43Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 44:43Andy Greenwald?

  And anytime, anytime any Duplass brother makes something self-funded, we are basically like dumpster diving for Drag City records just to try to celebrate it.

• 44:51Chris Ryan?

  They're like, examples of it are like, it's like Cooper Rafe made a show

• 44:54Andy Greenwald?

  Right.

• 44:55Chris Ryan?

  That he wound up getting on MUBI.

• 44:57Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 44:58Chris Ryan?

  Uh, with Lily Reinhardt, um, yeah, the Duplass brothers have experimented with, we're gonna make six episodes of something and then take it to Netflix or take it to whoever. But there is, we are no longer in the Joey Soloway era. Like, we're not getting a lot of different kinds of like radical takes on TV anymore.

• 45:17Andy Greenwald?

  Certainly not from the auteur perspective. And I was gonna say Stephen Conrad in that sense is like the Jan Decker of television, but actually, he's more like the Nick Cave of television in that he's been around for so long and suddenly arenas are booking him.

• 45:29Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 45:29Andy Greenwald?

  Um, although, but Nick Cave is filling those arenas and I'm not sure about that.

• 45:33Chris Ryan?

  And Steve Conrad almost made Night of the Seven Kingdoms. He was the original showrunner on that. He has now done DTF St. Louis, which is based loosely on a New Yorker article, but is like, I think since Pitch, become a completely different animal.

• 45:46Andy Greenwald?

  It is, so I want to be careful when we talk about this because, as you said, we are in a moment in television, if not all media, where truly idiosyncratic creators are not being platformed. Like, and certainly not to the degree that HBO has given him with this. Because you can also see the development process and you can assume something about it, which is that someone had the rights to this story and wanted to develop it. Likely he was offered the chance to develop it, or there was some sort of bake off or whatever, and he got the opportunity to do it. And then he Steve Conrad-ed it. And he did his own thing to such a degree that it is no longer even credited as being based on this.

• 46:25Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 46:25Andy Greenwald?

  Article. That is a level of flex that you don't often see very much anymore.

• 46:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:30Andy Greenwald?

  So, when I watched the first Episode of it.

• 46:34Chris Ryan?

  Should we set it up a little bit, just like?

• 46:35Andy Greenwald?

  Well, right, so DCF St. Louis is like an Ashley Madison-esque website for the St. Louis area, speaking of Redbirds.

• 46:41Chris Ryan?

  That's right.

• 46:42Andy Greenwald?

  And the setup is relatively straightforward that for Stephen Conrad's show, which is that Jason Bateman plays a weather, local celebrity weatherman who befriends his ASL signer, played by David Harbour.

• 46:56Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 46:57Andy Greenwald?

  Who is married to Linda Cardellini, who works for Purina.

• 47:00Chris Ryan?

  She does.

• 47:00Andy Greenwald?

  And Moonlight as a Little League umpire.

• 47:03Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 47:04Andy Greenwald?

  And they, there's some discussion about extramarital opportunities. And then, within the pilot, not a spoiler, we flash forward some amount of time and David Harbour is no longer among the living.

• 47:15Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 47:15Andy Greenwald?

  And there's an investigation.

• 47:16Chris Ryan?

  I believe that's also in the commercials. That's not really spoiling anything. And I would say that this show does the contemporary malady of like, we're gonna do two weeks ago, but now at the end, it's gonna be a flash forward, but that's present tense. So there's a little bit of like, not necessarily like, we're jumping around the timeline a little bit here.

• 47:35Andy Greenwald?

  I want to stay true to our timeline and just say something positive first, which is when I watched the first episode, I was truly unsure of how I felt about it.

• 47:43Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 47:43Andy Greenwald?

  Which is not a bad thing.

• 47:45Chris Ryan?

  I often find these sort of pointless, but like, I will say that when you were texting me incessantly about this show a couple of weeks ago, well, compared to like.

• 47:53Andy Greenwald?

  Frequently.

• 47:54Chris Ryan?

  Do you text about Jalen Carter incessantly?

• 47:56Andy Greenwald?

  That is true.

• 47:57Chris Ryan?

  You frequently texted about DTF St. Louis, even though I was like.

• 48:00Andy Greenwald?

  Well, because I was intrigued.

• 48:02Chris Ryan?

  And you were like, have you watched this yet?

• 48:04Andy Greenwald?

  I was really intrigued because, for a number of reasons. One, because I was curious about Stephen Conrad, who is, as we've said, a really interesting creator.

• 48:12Chris Ryan?

  Did you see any Patriot or Perpetual Grace?

• 48:14Andy Greenwald?

  Patriot is the number one show that I'm told that I would love. And I watched two or three episodes of it, and I enjoyed them, and I didn't go back. And this is probably on me. This is something that Mandzukas has correctly vilified me for. So I'm not gonna make sweeping generalizations about anything.

• 48:30Chris Ryan?

  Jason's hard, because Jason is just like who I wanna be. Like when he was just like Dark Winds is awesome. I was like, I know and I'm bad. I'm a bad guy for just not sitting down and watching three seasons of Dark Winds.

• 48:41Andy Greenwald?

  And he's who I want to be because he sat across his table from you and said the word "Frieren" and "Journey's End."

• 48:46Chris Ryan?

  He said that multiple times.

• 48:47Andy Greenwald?

  I know. And I'm like, I can say that at home with my daughters, but I can't say that in front of you. I mean, I'm wanting to think I'm cool so I can keep going to the clothing stores you frequent.

• 48:57Andy Greenwald?

  It's a tough balancing act, believe me.

• 49:00Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, but I was, I was writing you for a number of reasons. One, because there was a, not unheard of embargo on reviews. So I was watching it a little bit in advance and was really curious in a way that felt almost desperate for like a main line of understanding of how it was being received because it is so, not so, but it was, you know, it's, it's an odd show. Also, I really wanted to talk to someone about it, which now I can't.

• 49:21Chris Ryan?

  It should be a big deal. HBO is riding a high coming off of Night of the Seven Kingdoms and industry being very successful in their own ways. The pit is, is rolling. Like this should be a prime platform for a show starring Jason Bateman, who may be one of the signature sort of adult television. I don't mean that in the Cinemax After Dark way, but he has kind of carved out this role where it's like, people go to these shows to watch Bateman because they think he has good taste, whether it's Black Rabbit or Ozark or what have you. Harbor is coming off of Stranger Things, which is one of the biggest shows in the world. Linda Cardellini is a very well-loved and respected performer in her own right. So I think that there's a lot of pedigree going into this. And you, you were just saying.

• 50:05Andy Greenwald?

  I, I was not unhappy being kind of discomfited by the first hour. I was like, oh, what, where are we going with this? Cause this is funny and this is a good performance and it's a little bit arch and it's a little bit surprising. But there were also aspects to it that were rubbing me the wrong way. And that's, that's okay. That's, you know, art, art should, what is it? Afflict, unafflicted?

• 50:24Chris Ryan?

  Art should freeze a guy and then shatter him like Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat.

• 50:28Andy Greenwald?

  That's our formative art. I don't remember any other quotes past that other than finishing.

• 50:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Fatality is also a big quote from.

• 50:36Andy Greenwald?

  That is, that's right on the screen a lot. Maybe Kai can put that. On the screen.

• 50:42Chris Ryan?

  Whenever Andy kills a show, guys, fatality.

• 50:45Andy Greenwald?

  Well, get the button ready because I watched two episodes of the show. And there are things that I will continue to bring up and be positive about during our conversation of the only two episodes of the show that I plan to watch. I think David Harbour is really good in it. I think Lynda Cardellini deserves more opportunities. Richard Jenkins, one of my favorite actors. But I, after watching two episodes, it's hard to remember a series that I have ultimately disliked as much as this one and that have rubbed me as much the wrong way as this one has. And we can go through the reasons.

• 51:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I have two reactions to this show, pretty much the same as you. I don't, I'm not actively looking to watch a third episode. I might just to see how right or wrong I am about it for myself.

• 51:29Andy Greenwald?

  Right.

• 51:29Chris Ryan?

  There's two problems. One is I think I might be dyslexic for this, this writer. Like I see the words and I see the performances and I see why people like it. And it is not hitting for me. There are moments where it hits. There are lines that I actually sincerely LOL'd at. But I don't know that I, I, I think it's okay sometimes within criticism and within just talking about popular culture or art in general, just be like, it's not my tempo. And I think that we get a little bit into like, there is a objective truth to whether like sinners are one battle of an, or after another are better, which one's a better film?

• 52:06Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 52:07Chris Ryan?

  It's like, yeah, like I think that they're, they do different things and I really respect this guy because he has such a unique cadence worldview. This, this sense of humor is drawing from a kind of absurdist, droll Coen Brothers sensibility that I like a lot in other stuff. But for some reason here, it's missing. I was watching the second episode, which is, uh, is this one called Jamba Juice? The second one, like Meet Me at Jamba Juice or something like that?

• 52:37Andy Greenwald?

  There's a lot of Jamba in it. Shout out Tyler Child.

• 52:39Chris Ryan?

  This is shot in Atlanta and set in suburban Missouri.

• 52:44Andy Greenwald?

  St. Louis area. The second episode is called Snag It.

• 52:47Chris Ryan?

  Well, I guess I was wrong. It's set in the Jamba Juice largely. It's shot Atlanta, standing in for suburban St. Louis. The sky is almost white slate gray. Everything is beige. It's shot.

• 53:01Andy Greenwald?

  Asian blue.

• 53:02Chris Ryan?

  In a kind of shallow focus where it's just kind of these people wandering through their lives in this very. Almost dreamlike way, but what it makes me feel is a deep sense of nausea about living in America.

• 53:19Chris Ryan?

  And it's like watching people walk around this cemetery of cities or suburbia or wherever they're going. And there's nothing there and it doesn't seem like there are any other people and they're going to Jamba Juice's and sitting there and like looking at their phones. And I actually think it just might be a world I don't want to spend any fucking time in. Now, I like you, thought there were elements of the first episode that I kind of dug. And you know, when it jumped up for me, when I kind of started to feel it, it's when Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday showed up. Because I don't know why, but I feel like their way of being antennas for Conrad's

• 53:59Chris Ryan?

  stuff and broadcasting it to me made more sense than Bateman, Carleen and Harbert.

• 54:05Andy Greenwald?

  I think that what you're, I think one of the things that might be worth exploring is the disconnect between the script, between Stephen Conrad, the writer and Stephen Conrad, the director, and he is the auteur of this entire series.

• 54:18Andy Greenwald?

  There is a level of hyper-styлизation here that sends me to Mars. I'm completely kicked out of it. And it is, maybe this is also subjective, but I like Richard Jenkins in anything. Richard Jenkins is in his eighties and is an active detective in the show. I'm like, okay, well, I guess they have a different attitude towards retirement ages in this world, but as, as does America.

• 54:41Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 54:41Andy Greenwald?

  You know, we'll elect anybody, so that's fine. The St. Louis Municipal Police Station looks like where they store crossbones in the Captain America movies. It is a cement brick tower with screens everywhere and all interviews are done on cement boxes very far away from each other in the lobby.

• 55:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:02Andy Greenwald?

  And no one ever calls a lawyer. So it's layers of unreality that are being imposed on us that run in conjunction with the show that I think, my sense is that people behind the show want you to feel a little bit of toxic nausea about the dead endness of their lives. For me, it veers too far into outright scorn and mockery. I think there's an element where we're-

• 55:30Chris Ryan?

  I was wondering if you were gonna say this.

• 55:31Andy Greenwald?

  We're celebrating ordinary working folks who might need a go-getter smoothie in the middle of the day. And then there's the way the camera lingers on these sort of debased, hungry, lonely people suckling at the teat of their 67 Big Gulp ounces of pure sherbet.

• 55:49Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 55:50Andy Greenwald?

  That feels a little judgy. Maybe I'm the one judging, but I don't think so. There is a little bit of contempt and mockery at work here, and it's a fine line. Like, the character of Floyd, David Harbour's character and his performance, it's broad. And when you introduce him, ASL signing next to Bateman in a very dangerous tornado, I laughed. When he is dancing in a hip-hop intermediate children's dance class so that he can, when he is signing the side of the stage of a hip-hop and R&B festival so that he can bring some rhythmic feelings to the signing, I laughed because it's a great physical performance. And then when he's onstage doing it and Lynda Cardellini is weeping because she's so moved at how sensitive he is and how much he wants to be great,

• 56:36Andy Greenwald?

  I'm out.

• 56:37Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 56:38Andy Greenwald?

  So, it is a specific cocktail to mix the hyper-stylized with the mocking tone. It can be done, and it can be done within this. But then when you add the third rail, which I think you were alluding to earlier, which is what I think is just a loser of a design at this point, which is a show that begins with characters at the start of their journey, then fast-forwards to the end of the journey, and then says, "Guess how we're going to connect the two." That is anti-story to me at this point.

• 57:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:08Andy Greenwald?

  I am not interested in stories with telegraphed dead ends.

• 57:12Chris Ryan?

  I don't know if that's a note that he got and that they had this weird show on their hands and they were like, "We need to have a murder mystery."

• 57:17Andy Greenwald?

  I think he wanted to. We don't know.

• 57:20Chris Ryan?

  I, I, I think you might be right. There's a, there's a bit of like, how can we white lotus this? To, to this show, um, and make it a little bit more almost, and, and there are elements quite obviously of it's, it's a noir setup. It's the lovable oaf, his possibly emergent femme fatale partner. And the guy who gets in the middle and

• 57:44Andy Greenwald?

  The nor- the normie.

• 57:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And the guy who breaks that up and, and, and you know, everybody's got a secret. The secrets kind of like are slowly parceled out. I think there is a real unique individuality to this show that I don't want to tamper down. You know what I mean? By with my criticism, but I think this is kind of like when I'm like at a stoplight. And I look over and I see three, four lease signs on storefronts and then a smash burger. And I'm like, you know what, man? Fuck this place.

• 58:16Chris Ryan?

  There are certain elements of like being in the muck that I like, you know, like to live and die in LA and stuff.

• 58:22Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 58:23Chris Ryan?

  I don't really know if I like the muck as a like, isn't life just absolutely fucking pointless?

• 58:28Andy Greenwald?

  But also exactly like, what are we learning from that?

• 58:31Chris Ryan?

  I know.

• 58:32Andy Greenwald?

  People are sad and lonely and circling the drain. Yeah, dude.

• 58:37Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, hello.

• 58:39Chris Ryan?

  It fucking peaked when I beat Mortal Kombat on my own and no one was there to see it.

• 58:43Andy Greenwald?

  You're not wrong. I think that, I think that the hesitation that anyone is hearing in our voice is that I would rather a hundred DTF St. Louis flowers bloom.

• 58:53Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 58:53Andy Greenwald?

  They're not always going to hit. I mean, it's a similar thing that we said about, um, the sympathizer, which ultimately did not work. Um, as a television show, but man, that was cool that they tried it and invested a lot of interesting capital and creativity into it. Um, we're living in a world of, like the characters of DTF St. Louis, we're living in a world of shrinking margins and expectations. And so the fact that this exists, uh, is rare.

• 59:19Chris Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:20Andy Greenwald?

  Um, and the fact that it doesn't work shouldn't be a obituary for Stephen Conrad's autourish career or this type of show working on HBO. There were a couple of decisions here that I think probably sunk the whole thing. But there's also, like, I understand in watching it. It doesn't seem like, like an aberration. Like, I understand why everyone involved here got involved.

• 59:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Andy Greenwald?

  And for Bateman, for example, who's very, very smart about the creative management and of his own career.

• 59:52Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 59:52Andy Greenwald?

  That the one, the last time we saw him was with his beautiful, shaggy mane being the bad boy.

• 59:58Chris Ryan?

  He was basically doing the Tom Helfrey role of Ozark, but on Black Rabbit.

• 1:00:02Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. He, he, he, cause also he lily pads studios, projects, networks, because he's building, he's the rare actor who's like, has the foresight. I think he's building his career reel in a way that other people don't either have the foresight or the ability to do. He's, I'm gonna play a, I'm gonna play a normal guy.

• 1:00:19Chris Ryan?

  Came up in the news where it's his production company is making a show for Netflix with Jacob Tierney, who made Heat Rivalry.

• 1:00:28Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:00:29Chris Ryan?

  About a teenage Alexander the Great and his being a student of Aristotle.

• 1:00:35Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:00:35Chris Ryan?

  That's fucking crazy. Like that, like that's, that's how you build it all up. Yeah.

• 1:00:40Andy Greenwald?

  Um, and honestly, you know what, you know, it'll be the lead thing in, he's gonna live a long and healthy life, but like his number one career credit globally will be the voice of the sardonic fox in the Zootopia movies.

• 1:00:52Chris Ryan?

  I don't think that'll be the lead of his obit.

• 1:00:54Andy Greenwald?

  First of all, he's gonna live it long enough that the generation of young people who are like absolutely in love with this sardonic fox, and I'm speaking from household experience, they will be the ones writing this obituary and they will be like, Nick the Fox has left us. I promise you that. Um, that is like the most successful movie in the history of China. Zootopia 2. Take a long drink of water. You have to think about watching that. Anyway, um, so I see why he did it. He's building something here. He gets to play a normal guy in a different way than he has been. David Harbour is a freak of an actor and it's been really interesting to watch his career develop because you and I remember like the first 10 years of it where he was just like,

• 1:01:38Andy Greenwald?

  He was the, not leading man, but he was kind of like the straight news anchor guy who had a secret.

• 1:01:44Chris Ryan?

  No, but he was also like, yeah, walk along, yeah, he was, he was a great.

• 1:01:47Andy Greenwald?

  There's a dark shadow to it, but it was playing off of the fact that he looked like the most normal guy ever. And now there's a mania to the way that he rips into some of these parts that's really compelling on screen and sympathetic. Like, I think he's making someone who's a real person and not a cartoon. But, man, the unreality of it and the relentless unreality of it just, just, just broke me.

• 1:02:09Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and I also, you know, I think coming off of, um, the, if we're talking about it from an HBO perspective, coming off the adrenaline shot of industry.

• 1:02:20Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Chris Ryan?

  And the economy of A Night of the Seven Kingdoms. I was not ready for a kind of dull 57-minute show. And I definitely felt it. And that's, that's a me problem more than anything else, but it's interesting when your habits go in different directions because of what's being programmed to you. And I found myself really being like, is there another fucking scene in this? Like, what is happening?

• 1:02:46Andy Greenwald?

  We don't need to tell these guys how to do their job. They're the best at what they do, but, and it's not easy to find things that fit this template. But I would say that just from a, a value sensibility, but also ultimately a quality sensibility, it would behoove them so much more to have three to four baby industries in the hopper. Maybe they do more than three or four splashy one-and-dones. You know, like, and again, you, you can't talk about the success of industry, which we talk about frequently, without talking about the relative uniqueness of its development process. That show exists because they were exploring low-cost. Co-pros, especially in the, in the thick of the pandemic.

• 1:03:30Andy Greenwald?

  And no one who signed that deal, including Mickey and Conrad at the start of it, would have thought that they would be heading into their fifth and final season as a flagship anchor show of HBO's Sunday Night.

• 1:03:42Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:43Andy Greenwald?

  Lineup.

• 1:03:43Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:45Andy Greenwald?

  The ceiling of this, of a DTF St. Louis, I guess, is you capture the zeitgeist and the imagination and the conversation for a few weeks like a white lotus, and you get a lot of love for an Emmy time. But I don't know if that juice is worth the squeeze.

• 1:03:57Chris Ryan?

  I'll be, if I stick with the show, it's going to be to see. To what extent what we're watching in these early episodes is changed with any kind of suggestion that there are unreliable narrators in this? Now, the POV of it, I mean, I feel like in the course of the second episode, like, you know, like, there's mystery developments that suggest we'll get different looks at different characters over the course of the next five weeks, if you wanted to keep watching through episode seven. But tonally, I think I have a high hurdle to clear to do it.

• 1:04:32Andy Greenwald?

  For me, the last straw was, to your point, like, yes, the possibility of a structure like this is unreliability, seeing truth play out in opposition to a cover story or a narrative. This episode showed us in flashback, the more aggressive behavior of Linda Cardellini's character in ensnaring Jason Bateman's character. The episode ends with Richard Jenkins being like, "He seduced her." And then the other cop saying, "No, he didn't. She seduced him because I went to Jamba Juice."

• 1:05:08Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09Andy Greenwald?

  We saw that.

• 1:05:10Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Andy Greenwald?

  That wasn't an episode-ending revelation. It was just not interesting to me on a dramatic level for that reason.

• 1:05:14Chris Ryan?

  This actually works as a footnote to the conversation we just had.

• 1:05:19Andy Greenwald?

  I think so.

• 1:05:20Chris Ryan?

  Bill Lawrence does not need our thumbs up because Bill Lawrence has multiple incredibly popular series on television right now. He is obviously one of the minds behind Ted Lasso. He does Shrinking, also for Apple TV. He does Bad Monkey for Apple TV. He has now got the show Rooster on HBO.

• 1:05:40Andy Greenwald?

  Scrubs reboot.

• 1:05:41Chris Ryan?

  He's got the Scrubs reboot.

• 1:05:42Andy Greenwald?

  Which he's, I guess, because he's at Warner Brothers, he's not involved in Day to Day, but that was his show back in the day.

• 1:05:46Chris Ryan?

  He is a, he's minted. Like, he doesn't need, nobody cares really what we think. And we have obviously never really commented on Shrinking. I would say Shrinking is just not my, not for me. It's a little too saccharine for me. I think that I enjoy utopian, found family, like, everybody basically gets along stuff in a 22-minute sitcom. I don't really love it as a dramedy. And I find...

• 1:06:20Chris Ryan?

  I find his shows to be also existing in a realm that I am not familiar with, I guess is.

• 1:06:26Andy Greenwald?

  Pasadena?

• 1:06:27Chris Ryan?

  Um, yeah, sure. Or, you know, like, I think even as Ted Lasso went on, I was just like, this is just kind of silly. Um, Rooster is a campus comedy, campus dramedy, I guess.

• 1:06:43Andy Greenwald?

  Sure.

• 1:06:43Chris Ryan?

  Set in a New England liberal arts college. Steve Carell is a famous, I guess, like, would you say he's like a mystery author or like a kind of, seems like Mike Hammer, you know?

• 1:06:54Andy Greenwald?

  He's kind of inspired by Carl Hyacinth.

• 1:06:56Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:06:56Andy Greenwald?

  Who wrote Bad Monkey, in the sense that he's like a nice, regular guy who writes sort of.

• 1:07:01Chris Ryan?

  Crime novels.

• 1:07:02Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And he's got a daughter who is in a relationship. She's a teacher at that college and she's in a relationship with another professor. That relationship has just come to an end. Carell shows up kind of to help her out, but also to do a reading at the school where he meets a huge, as Bill Lawrence's want, like, usually you just get like an immediate kind of 10-person bench, immediately circulating through the show. It's a lot of banter. It's a lot of quips. It's ultimately got a very warm heart, for the most part. And, um, I was, I was curious about, like, there are elements of this show that I'm

• 1:07:44Chris Ryan?

  curious about, and I could see myself, like, sticking around for a couple of weeks. But the central kind of like, I don't really see people. I see like a bunch of like really like kind of fun one-liners to one another. And the one-liners trump any stakes of any scene, kind of. So even if the daughter character has burned down someone's house, or the president or the dean of the college likes to walk around naked and stuff like that, like, it all is like, wouldn't that be funny? But it has no, like, consequences. Um, so I don't know. I didn't really love this, but I wasn't sure.

• 1:08:24Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I have no malice in my heart when I say I hated this show.

• 1:08:29Andy Greenwald?

  But it's okay. Everybody, it's okay. There are actual problems in the world.

• 1:08:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:08:35Andy Greenwald?

  This is not one of them.

• 1:08:36Chris Ryan?

  No.

• 1:08:36Andy Greenwald?

  You know, I don't know if you ever watched this. This is, I think it's available streaming on HBO Max, but there's the show Chopped, where they get the mystery basket of ingredients.

• 1:08:43Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I never liked Chopped.

• 1:08:44Andy Greenwald?

  Okay, well, bear with me for a second.

• 1:08:46Chris Ryan?

  No, I'm just saying, I was thinking about this the other day with Top Chef, and I never liked Chopped.

• 1:08:49Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, we haven't even talked about Top Chef yet. I'll just say,

• 1:08:53Andy Greenwald?

  if you gave me a basket with all of the ingredients of the show, including many of the actors, I would be delighted and think that I was in line for a really nice plate of food. And then I just hated the dish.

• 1:09:03Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 1:09:05Andy Greenwald?

  I found it just completely cloying and uninterested in committing to any genuine moment of hardship or emotion, or frankly, comedy. I've seen other reviews of it, and I just, I mean, I don't want to piggyback, but I agree with them, where they're like, it kind of is a campus comedy, but not really. It kind of is a father and daughter, girl dad, coming of age kind of thing, but it kind of runs away from that, too. It seems like maybe Steve Carell was pitched an opportunity to shade his familiar sitcom presence a little bit with some more dramatic notes, which he is good at playing. But at least in the early going, kind of leans away from those as well.

• 1:09:48Chris Ryan?

  His post office career is so fascinating.

• 1:09:51Andy Greenwald?

  Do you feel like it's been, because I think broadly speaking, he is beloved and also

• 1:09:58Andy Greenwald?

  talented enough to diversify, like he's taken on many different types of roles.

• 1:10:03Chris Ryan?

  I can't help but feel like he probably doesn't ever want to do six to seven years of Michael Scott again. You know what I mean? Not Michael Scott, literally, but like, I think that he has tried a bunch of different things that almost seem engineered not to last forever, but like, Space Force was something I did not care for. Then he's done a couple of dramatic turns and things like The Morning Show. I guess you could call his performance in Mountain Head comedic, but not entirely.

• 1:10:30Andy Greenwald?

  He was also good in The Four Seasons.

• 1:10:33Chris Ryan?

  The Four Seasons, yep. And what was the show with Dom McGleeson?

• 1:10:37Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, The Patient.

• 1:10:38Chris Ryan?

  The Patient. That was interesting. Just a really interesting, wide-ranging, kind of wandering bit of post-office stuff. I will still say that the funniest he has ever been is standing in the background of the scene in Forty Year Old Virgin where Kevin Hart and Romany Malco get into a fight at Smart Tech.

• 1:10:57Andy Greenwald?

  I hear that, but I would say, when's the last-

• 1:10:59Chris Ryan?

  Is this your boy? You just got fucked up with him.

• 1:11:01Andy Greenwald?

  When's the last time you watched his Between Two Ferns?

• 1:11:04Chris Ryan?

  Oh, I don't, I can't, not, not a long time.

• 1:11:06Andy Greenwald?

  Should we watch Chris watch that? No, but that's, that is maybe, maybe we peaked as a society then. The other thing-

• 1:11:14Chris Ryan?

  Holy twenties.

• 1:11:16Andy Greenwald?

  Shout out, shout out. I think, I think it was in The Hollywood Reporter, this might have been a Daniel Feinberg thing where he was basically like Danielle Dedwiler, who we love in Station 11, is on the show as someone who is desperate to sleep with Steve Carell.

• 1:11:28Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:11:29Andy Greenwald?

  And then, and then is hurt when he rejects her. I believe his point in the review was that like, she is not a seasoning, she is the dish, and it's good to see that she has been cast as the lead in Ryan Coogler's reboot of The X-Files.

• 1:11:40Chris Ryan?

  It's very good.

• 1:11:41Andy Greenwald?

  She's fucking awesome. When she's on the screen, it's like, oh, that's a, I'd like to watch this show.

• 1:11:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, she's one of my favorite actors, probably.

• 1:11:48Andy Greenwald?

  I don't want to be cynical about it, but maybe the way to bring things full circle is that, and maybe this speaks to the, the future, maybe we'll be wrong about the viability of HBO and its unique and established programming culture under the Paramount umbrella because they have been survivors. Because you could look at this show quite cynically and say, Bill Lawrence has been under a very rich overall deal at Warner Brothers for a very long time and has had this career resurgence selling Warner Brothers shows to other streamers. And it would have been malpractice if someone within the company didn't say, why can't we buy one of these shows and do a shrinking for us?

• 1:12:32Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:32Andy Greenwald?

  And you get Steve Carell involved and you get all, and suddenly it's an HBO show. There is nothing about this show that has the DNA of what an HBO comedy has been under this regime and Amy Gravid and Casey and anything. That doesn't mean it shouldn't exist. HB, I would say the same thing about The Penguin, or Dune Prophecy, or whatever it's called. And those are doing fine. It is good business to make, to bring this stuff in-house.

• 1:12:58Chris Ryan?

  Have you ever done Dune Prophecy back?

• 1:12:59Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:13:01Andy Greenwald?

  Prophecy wasn't done.

• 1:13:02Chris Ryan?

  No. We still don't know.

• 1:13:04Andy Greenwald?

  We don't know.

• 1:13:05Chris Ryan?

  We just can't be sure. Is it really Paul?

• 1:13:08Andy Greenwald?

  I think we're pretty sure. Well, I don't know. Apparently it's gonna be Michael B. Jordan, not, not Paul at the Oscars next week. Anyway, I, I don't think the reason to review or to like or dislike Rooster is to judge their programming decisions, but I understand why it's on their air and it's fine. And if you like those other shows, which we are allergic to, there's probably something to be charmed by here.

• 1:13:28Chris Ryan?

  Briefly, let's just hit Top Chef.

• 1:13:30Andy Greenwald?

  I don't want to do it briefly, but I know we're out of time.

• 1:13:31Chris Ryan?

  Well, it's not even out of time as much as my worry that, that people were not aware that Top Chef is, the first episode is currently sitting there on Peacock for you to watch. Can't wait. Lot of ink spilled about Survivor these last couple of weeks, because Survivor 50 is back and it's pretty fucking good. I gotta admit. It's, it's definitely relit my Survivor candle.

• 1:13:51Andy Greenwald?

  Is it, is it good? I mean, your Survivor torch.

• 1:13:53Chris Ryan?

  It's just a high level of gameplay.

• 1:13:54Andy Greenwald?

  It's right, torch is right there for you. You said candle?

• 1:13:57Chris Ryan?

  Oh yeah, I guess I did.

• 1:13:57Andy Greenwald?

  You want to run that back?

• 1:13:58Chris Ryan?

  Uh, no. Let's just, let's live with it.

• 1:14:00Andy Greenwald?

  Words and all?

• 1:14:01Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Andy Greenwald?

  Has it been good?

• 1:14:03Chris Ryan?

  High level of gameplay. Just like everybody knows exactly how to play Survivor.

• 1:14:06Andy Greenwald?

  But is it an all-star season?

• 1:14:08Chris Ryan?

  It is, but it's from across all 50 seasons. So there's people there from the first, there's the, the woman who won last season is on. A couple of episodes of that have gone on and it's got a lot of, of press. Obviously I did not, like, I think I was a little bit mixed on, mixed is, is a kind thing to say. I was not super into where Top Chef was going. I personally felt like I felt a budget crunch on that show where it was like a lot of shooting stuff on sound stages. I felt like there was a lot of, um, inane, cross-promotional, quickfire challenges. You know, we laughed when it was the minions. It just feels like we're getting minionsed out. This new season is in the Carolinas.

• 1:14:54Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 1:14:54Chris Ryan?

  It's Kristen's, what, like, third? Third season hosting. Within about 10 minutes, I was like, it's, Top Chef's fucking back. And it was, I realized that because my wife and I were yelling at the screen as if it was the finale. We were like, oh my God, and oh, she's, she's not gonna make it. And like, that level of intensity.

• 1:15:18Chris Ryan?

  And also a couple of dicks in the cast, like people who are like, I really, I really am here to bust some heads.

• 1:15:25Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:25Chris Ryan?

  Is kind of a new thing for this show after a few years of just being like, hey, everybody's really trying to help each other out.

• 1:15:30Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31Chris Ryan?

  And I just, I'm so psyched to see this thing return to form.

• 1:15:35Andy Greenwald?

  It is so back. This was an excellent premiere. I think it's interesting though, what you said about feeling a budget crunch. Cause I would say I continue to feel it.

• 1:15:43Chris Ryan?

  I don't know. I mean like.

• 1:15:44Andy Greenwald?

  Well, one of the reasons why.

• 1:15:45Chris Ryan?

  Quickfire was pretty impressive.

• 1:15:46Andy Greenwald?

  Well, there, there's no, there's no shame in the fact that Top Chef is, its locations are about chasing tax breaks. And like which areas and which states will allow them to film there and give them the promotional opportunities to do things like at Motor Speedway.

• 1:15:59Chris Ryan?

  Do you have a Whole Foods seems to be a top requirement.

• 1:16:02Andy Greenwald?

  But I would also note that there is some other, there's some changes behind the scenes, like San Pellegrino is no longer sponsoring them. Grazia olive oil, which by the way, thank you everyone in the east side of Los Angeles for giving this stupid squirt bottle. Oil company enough money to sponsor our favorite cooking show. You've done a service. You've done a service.

• 1:16:20Chris Ryan?

  It's a part of the watch. It's brought to you by Grazia.

• 1:16:23Andy Greenwald?

  Fucking Instagram lemmings. You bought us another season of version. No, it's fine, but like.

• 1:16:27Chris Ryan?

  Is it more expensive than like?

• 1:16:29Andy Greenwald?

  Yes. Cause it's in a, cause they were like, put it in a squirt bottle. And everyone's like, oh shit.

• 1:16:33Chris Ryan?

  I don't find olive oil that affordable.

• 1:16:35Andy Greenwald?

  It's not affordable.

• 1:16:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Andy Greenwald?

  Especially now they have to sponsor Top Chef. It's great.

• 1:16:40Chris Ryan?

  I may need it to fuel my car pretty soon.

• 1:16:43Andy Greenwald?

  That's a great point. Um.

• 1:16:46Chris Ryan?

  Just squirt the Grazia in the outie.

• 1:16:48Andy Greenwald?

  Come on, baby.

• 1:16:49Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Andy Greenwald?

  I, I, I also noted that it appears that BMW is no longer faring them around. So they no longer get into their cars and go BMW, drive me to Whole Foods.

• 1:16:58Chris Ryan?

  Oh yeah. I noticed that.

• 1:16:59Andy Greenwald?

  It, it doesn't matter. We're not here to like check, you know, to see if they're still financially solvent. Whatever the case may be, there seemed to be an embrace of what they have as opposed to what they don't have. And the biggest change, we're one episode in. We're going to watch the season. Hopefully we'll talk to Gail at the end of it. The biggest change I think is in a subtle shift. In the editorial POV of the show. It used to be that the judges were, you know, the hammers, they stepped in at the end. And there was a, you know, a strong pipeline, as I'm sure there will continue to be, of esteemed guests and chefs and legendary people that made everyone feel nervous. I don't know whether it's the changing times, I don't know whether it's the changing nature of the hosts,

• 1:17:42Andy Greenwald?

  but this is fully Kristen's show now, in a way that is remarkable. And it also reminds me now, not of other cooking competitions that we've talked about before, but it feels a little Great British Baking Show. Great British Baking Show has a more mellow familial, the judges aren't our friends, but they're kind of like our extended family. And the role, the way Tom and Gail and Kristen acted throughout this episode, being there from the quickfire, being there at the end.

• 1:18:10Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:10Andy Greenwald?

  The way Tom was like, actually, I still think this was the best expression of the sweet potato.

• 1:18:14Chris Ryan?

  I thought that was bullshit.

• 1:18:15Andy Greenwald?

  Even though, it might have been, even though she didn't get, you know, left a ring mold on it, that all felt a little warmer and friendlier and more nurturing in a way that was interesting. And the thing, the, the secret sauce of Kristen, who is an absolutely unique talent, like an absolute unicorn in that she won the show, is clearly an elite cook, but is also an exceptional TV person who is just effortless at being what appears to be her real self. The promise of hiring her was always, so you had someone in that chair who could relate.

• 1:18:46Chris Ryan?

  So let's.

• 1:18:46Andy Greenwald?

  And they ran towards this moment in the premiere in a way that was really moving.

• 1:18:49Chris Ryan?

  If you haven't watched it, stop.

• 1:18:52Andy Greenwald?

  Kaya.

• 1:18:53Chris Ryan?

  And Kaya.

• 1:18:53Andy Greenwald?

  Leave the room.

• 1:18:54Chris Ryan?

  Feel free to.

• 1:18:55Andy Greenwald?

  Kaya's honestly dozing right now. She smells of coconut oil and is just kind of.

• 1:19:00Chris Ryan?

  Um, there's a moment in the first episode where, and this, I thought this was a fantastic challenge because it immediately tied the show to the region where they're given all these different. This is the sweet potato challenge. And so they're given all these different kinds of sweet potatoes. They get assigned different ones. Different people have like, they're like, fuck, this is like a really starchy, bland sweet potato. The other one, some people are like, you barely have to do anything to this sweet potato. At the end, Nana, who's one of the chefs, basically has like a time crunch. Like she tried to do too many things. She is the aforementioned person who left a ring mold in one of her bowls.

• 1:19:43Chris Ryan?

  And if plating mattered, it would be like a disqualifying thing. And plating sometimes does matter, you know? Her, the end of her service or the end of her cook is just chaotic. I think some, some dishes are unfinished or whatever, but certainly like just a mess. There's also a chef named.

• 1:20:03Andy Greenwald?

  Nana has like a panic attack.

• 1:20:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, and she also has a panic attack while she's about to serve.

• 1:20:07Andy Greenwald?

  Which, which the judges who are awaiting her dish notice and Kristen, in her empathy, gets up and goes to her.

• 1:20:13Chris Ryan?

  Yes, and I thought that was, without putting too fine a point on it, a defining moment for Kristen's hosting of the show where I've, you know, in the past, like, you know, you can see her tearing up as she has to like let people go and, you know, obviously has like a real emotional connection to what these people are experiencing. But she calmed Nana down, told her to take a beat, have her come back out. And then I thought crucially what happened was they serve this, they're going in sets of three. And then the judges, along with Sean Brock and some other guest judges, are ranking live who they want.

• 1:20:55Chris Ryan?

  Who wins versus one, two, three. Tom puts Nana first.

• 1:21:04Chris Ryan?

  And Kristen is like, really? And I thought that was awesome because it was. She was kind of like, I definitely feel for her as a person, but let's be real. There was a, a cooking mold in my, in a dish.

• 1:21:18Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:21:19Chris Ryan?

  And I was, when I was watching it, I was like, that should, that should be disqualifying, right? Like you leave a piece of metal in somebody's dish, that should probably be disqualified. Instead, it's this woman, Day, who made like an undercooked fish and.

• 1:21:31Andy Greenwald?

  But she made it, it tasted like, like a soap bar.

• 1:21:33Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:33Andy Greenwald?

  She piled it with.

• 1:21:33Chris Ryan?

  And put a bunch of herb de Provence on it. So I thought it was just a great, great, great start to the season.

• 1:21:40Andy Greenwald?

  And to your point, maybe this is a little bit more, they have steered away from intermural shenanigans, you know, in terms of the chef testings competing against each other, disliking each other, having any tension. And this season, they not only have identical twin brothers competing, they have a husband and wife.

• 1:21:57Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:21:57Andy Greenwald?

  Or not, they're not actually, but they're lifelong.

• 1:22:00Chris Ryan?

  Partners.

• 1:22:00Andy Greenwald?

  Business and personal romantic partners.

• 1:22:03Chris Ryan?

  I hope they're still romantic partners after going on reality television together.

• 1:22:06Andy Greenwald?

  Exactly. So there's a little bit more opportunity for some shenanigans, but I don't know. There have been good seasons, but they like hit it really hard.

• 1:22:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:13Andy Greenwald?

  In a way that was exciting. If you had won the quickfire.

• 1:22:15Chris Ryan?

  Is this watch after dark?

• 1:22:16Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, I know they want to, they want.

• 1:22:18Chris Ryan?

  I want to see the.

• 1:22:19Andy Greenwald?

  All right. So thanks for listening.

• 1:22:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Andy Greenwald?

  You're glowing.

• 1:22:22Chris Ryan?

  I, that's the thing.

• 1:22:22Andy Greenwald?

  Skincare? Drop the regime. No.

• 1:22:26Chris Ryan?

  Do you know I went on jam session once and talked about my, my skincare routine?

• 1:22:30Andy Greenwald?

  I, I have a hard time listening to you on other podcasts.

• 1:22:33Chris Ryan?

  Do you?

• 1:22:33Andy Greenwald?

  It's not because I don't enjoy you, but I feel left out and I talk back. The Sicario podcast was elite. I did listen to that.

• 1:22:39Chris Ryan?

  Did you talk back to it? You're like, go off, king.

• 1:22:42Andy Greenwald?

  Shut up, Sean. CR month. Jeez. I wanted to ask you this for after dark. Had you won, this is top chef related, but I don't think it's spoiling anything. They opening quickfires at the, the motor speedway.

• 1:22:56Chris Ryan?

  NASCAR.

• 1:22:56Andy Greenwald?

  NASCAR. The winning chefs, their prize, I think they get some cash, but they also get a, a lap in the front seat of the car.

• 1:23:05Chris Ryan?

  Get up to 170.

• 1:23:06Andy Greenwald?

  Would you have eagerly accepted that win?

• 1:23:09Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:23:10Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:11Chris Ryan?

  I have gotten up to 100 in a car. I think around 100. What's the fastest you've ever driven?

• 1:23:18Andy Greenwald?

  Probably with you on the New Jersey Turnpike once in 2003.

• 1:23:22Chris Ryan?

  I think I was once in high school and I was on the Blue Route and I got up to 100 just to see if it would happen.

• 1:23:28Andy Greenwald?

  Was it before the Blue Route was officially open?

• 1:23:30Chris Ryan?

  It kind of was that vibe, you know, it was like the autobahn.

• 1:23:35Andy Greenwald?

  Except Pennsylvania Dutch, not actually German.

• 1:23:37Chris Ryan?

  I haven't really pushed it like that. Every once in a while on the two, we see, we see what we can get up to when it's real open.

• 1:23:43Andy Greenwald?

  I want to begin by saying unsurprisingly, I would have said thank you, no thank you to that opportunity to be in the car.

• 1:23:49Chris Ryan?

  We just haven't answered how, what's the fastest you've ever driven?

• 1:23:52Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, I mean.

• 1:23:53Chris Ryan?

  65?

• 1:23:54Andy Greenwald?

  I think 66 once. A couple of comments here. One, I think the only, I want to be, I want to be straight with you. Like if, if I were a for hire political consultant, I would bring you the oppo research on you, which would be limited because you are beloved for a good reason.

• 1:24:13Chris Ryan?

  But I have some skeletons.

• 1:24:14Andy Greenwald?

  It's not the skeletons in your closet. It's the one, I think your one vulnerability from the left and the right is your casual abuse of automotive laws.

• 1:24:24Chris Ryan?

  I don't think.

• 1:24:25Andy Greenwald?

  They come up sometimes on this podcast.

• 1:24:26Chris Ryan?

  I'm not entirely sure. When's the last time you've seen anybody get pulled over on a highway?

• 1:24:32Andy Greenwald?

  Like seen in front of me for speeding or whatever? It happens very rarely.

• 1:24:35Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. So why have speed limits? We're not going to enforce them.

• 1:24:40Andy Greenwald?

  Whoa.

• 1:24:40Chris Ryan?

  Everybody's like running me off the road anyway. So like, why are we even pretending like there's a speed limit? Either go full surveillance, minority report and start like ticketing everybody for, with a camera in the sky? Or just fucking give it up, man, and let us rock.

• 1:24:55Andy Greenwald?

  This is, this is an incredible.

• 1:24:56Chris Ryan?

  And then let's get super road warrior with it and let's soup up our cars and take like the safety plates, like the restrictors off, you know?

• 1:25:02Andy Greenwald?

  I don't think this is Nithia's platform to improve Los Angeles.

• 1:25:06Chris Ryan?

  Could I get to the Central Valley in 30 minutes if I got my car souped up enough?

• 1:25:11Andy Greenwald?

  Now, as a point of comparison, what I do is I just nobly, some, some have said.

• 1:25:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:19Andy Greenwald?

  Just set a model for the other people how to behave.

• 1:25:21Chris Ryan?

  By getting into the fast lane and driving the exact speed limit?

• 1:25:25Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, I don't go in the fast lane. The fast lane? Oh, yes, I do. But one change for me is, you know, with these, with these, the way cars, cars are.

• 1:25:36Andy Greenwald?

  My children, especially my younger daughter in the backseat, was like looking at the Google Maps display and will comment if the number ever goes red. Cause you know, it's like, it says you're driving 66 or 67 or 68 in a 65 mile zone. They love to comment.

• 1:25:53Chris Ryan?

  They like to be like, you're going too fast?

• 1:25:54Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:25:54Chris Ryan?

  Real quick.

• 1:25:55Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Chris Ryan?

  Imagine these lights have a green tint now?

• 1:25:59Andy Greenwald?

  Hmm.

• 1:26:00Chris Ryan?

  You think Jalen Carter will be on the Eagles when we do the pit and the industry mailbag on Thursday?

• 1:26:05Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:07Chris Ryan?

  That's all I got.

• 1:26:07Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think AJ Brown will be on the Eagles when we do our podcast on Thursday?

• 1:26:10Chris Ryan?

  Yes. No, I don't.

• 1:26:11Andy Greenwald?

  You don't?

• 1:26:11Chris Ryan?

  I don't. I don't. I think Alec Pierce resigning with the Colts.

• 1:26:15Andy Greenwald?

  Clears the path to the Patriots making the trade?

• 1:26:17Chris Ryan?

  I mean, we, I haven't looked at ESPN. It could, could have already happened.

• 1:26:20Andy Greenwald?

  I don't think anything's happened.

• 1:26:20Chris Ryan?

  All right. This is the kind of reporting that the world needs right now.

• 1:26:23Andy Greenwald?

  The Falcons sign Jahan Dotson.

• 1:26:25Chris Ryan?

  Oh, and Tua?

• 1:26:27Andy Greenwald?

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:26:28Chris Ryan?

  Thanks to everybody for listening. I think this has been, uh, I, I thought we started out really strong today.

• 1:26:35Andy Greenwald?

  The end is gone. Not so great?

• 1:26:37Chris Ryan?

  I think it's just been, I, I, I, you're, you, you gave me pause. I don't want to make it sound like I'm an unsafe driver.

• 1:26:42Andy Greenwald?

  I'm dinging you up in the primary ahead of the general.

• 1:26:45Chris Ryan?

  That's right. Our iron sharpens iron.

• 1:26:47Andy Greenwald?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:26:48Chris Ryan?

  Right?

• 1:26:48Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. You will be a far better candidate.

• 1:26:50Chris Ryan?

  And Graham just going at it so that he emerges.

• 1:26:53Andy Greenwald?

  Who's, am I fucking Janet Mills?

• 1:26:55Chris Ryan?

  You're older.

• 1:26:58Andy Greenwald?

  I was hand selected and put on this podcast.

• 1:27:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:02Andy Greenwald?

  But to be the institutionalist and yet.

• 1:27:05Chris Ryan?

  Thanks to Kaya. Thanks to Kai. Uh, we will be back on Thursday. As I said, uh, the pit, we didn't really talk about the last episode. Um, and we'll have a new one to talk about and we have your wonderful questions about, uh, the television show industry.

• 1:27:17Andy Greenwald?

  And your questions about the tattoos Chris is hiding under that shirt.

• 1:27:22Chris Ryan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:27:31Chris Ryan?

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• 1:28:15Chris Ryan?

  You are giving your money a purpose. You are learning the language of saving, of growing. Now streaming. Member FDIC Copyright 2026 U.S. Bank.