‘Crystal Lake,’ ‘Carrie,’ and ‘The Lowdown’ S2E4

Chris and Andy talk about the news that HBO is developing a limited series starring Sarah Snook based on Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The Birds’ (2:28). Then they discuss the Apple TV crime drama ‘Nocturne’ (19:53) and ‘The Lowdown’ Season 2, Episode 4 (31:18). Later, Chris is joined by Joanna Robinson to remember Patrick Stewart (45:12) before breaking down a couple of recent horror releases in ‘Carrie’ (49:09) and ‘Crystal Lake’ (01:02:21). Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of The Watch and so much more! Follow us on IG and TikTok! Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Guest: Joanna Robinson Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Studio Production: Trevor Rabone and Jacob Cornett Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:46Speaker 00

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• 1:17Speaker 01

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

• 1:23Chris Ryan?

  Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com and joining me on the other line, it's not beef, it's lamb chops, it's Andy Brie-Wald.

• 1:36Andy Greenwald?

  Should we drop the pretense that this isn't primarily a sports podcast at this point?

• 1:40Chris Ryan?

  It seems like it would suit you more if we did it that way.

• 1:43Andy Greenwald?

  I definitely, I'm watching the games.

• 1:45Chris Ryan?

  You are watching the games. You're also, you're still watching TV. Let it be known that Andy will never give up this prestige TV lifestyle. Today on the show, a little bit of news at the top about the world of the home box office slash Skydance company and some future shows that they are making. We're also going to talk very briefly about an upcoming show on Apple called Nocturne, which I believe airs, given Apple, I don't, but throwing stuff up, but it says it airs tomorrow night. I, I've watched the first two and I wanted to ask Andy some questions about something that I'll just describe as house style and how it comes out of streamers. We are also going to talk about the fourth episode of the second season of The Lowdown. And then in the second half of the show, I was joined by Joanna Robinson to talk finally

• 2:28Chris Ryan?

  about Crystal Lake on Peacock, the fourth highest debut show ever in Peacock history, Andy, and Amazon.

• 2:36Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I mean, okay.

• 2:39Chris Ryan?

  And, and also Carrie, me and Joe are going to talk a little horror before Halloween. Greenwald, great to see you, man.

• 2:46Andy Greenwald?

  Was that in the press release? The fourth highest debut at the, in the proud seven year tradition.

• 2:52Chris Ryan?

  This was announced, I believe it was announced.

• 2:56Andy Greenwald?

  Great.

• 2:57Chris Ryan?

  What's up with you, man?

• 2:58Andy Greenwald?

  Let's take the wins when we can. I love it. I love it. I'm thrilled to be with you. I just feel virally a lot better than I did last week. I mean, I, I did go viral in Monday's podcast, but not in the way that it's often meant. So feeling, feeling free and clear, feeling good.

• 3:13Chris Ryan?

  Walkman are better than Strokes way, just like you were, you were just, you were.

• 3:17Andy Greenwald?

  You salty about that?

• 3:18Chris Ryan?

  No, no, I stand by it. It's just, I just, you know, you throw the hospital ball, I try to catch it. Mackay-Levin. I didn't really have a ton of news for you this week. People can write us at the watch at spotify.com and they can, they can hit us up on Instagram, the watch pod underscore. They can watch us on YouTube at the ringer dash TV channel. I've been really appreciating all the YouTube engagement and traffic over there. It's been nice. I was in San Francisco last week and we were doing a, a live show for the big picture, for the Halloween draft and Alex Ross Perry was there. I feel like it was on stage, but it might've been like a dinner or something like that. Some, there was a whole conversation about like, how funny it would be if they made a birds TV show, a TV show for the birds. The Alfred Hitchcock film, The Birds.

• 4:02Andy Greenwald?

  Right. Because to be clear, you spend a lot of time in London and when you say, you know, a TV show for the birds, it does suggest that you mean like.

• 4:08Chris Ryan?

  Sexy. They are making a TV show of the birds and you, one would laugh. If, if, if it weren't for the attached talent that I am about to tell you, we would have a huge chuckle about the birds and we would make lots of jokes about how the birds is going to open with a guy getting his eye pecked out by a bird and then it's going to say nine weeks earlier.

• 4:33Andy Greenwald?

  And then it's going to show an egg. And that's the whole first episode. Really makes you think about it.

• 4:41Chris Ryan?

  Slow TV.

• 4:43Andy Greenwald?

  Back to the nest.

• 4:43Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but there will be like, you know, it's like an ornithologist and, and, you know, how they, how they are trying to save the bird population. In any case, I think we were talking about it because the birds is set in San Francisco. I laughed when I saw that somebody, that they were making a The Birds TV show because of that. But then I started reading about it. And it is, it is adapted by Tom Spezialey, who worked on The Leftovers.

• 5:10Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 5:11Chris Ryan?

  And it does star Sarah Snook. So from the succession, I don't want to want this, but I, that's, that's, I, I feel little wings flapping in my mind.

• 5:21Andy Greenwald?

  Can I just sidebar? Did you just say, I don't think you meant to say it, but I believe that you just said from the succession. And it did remind me that on a phone call with my father the other day, that show came up and first he spent, a number of different ways of saying, well, I never watched that. But then he said, I believe it's about a family, which, you know, I can't decide. It's a 50 50 thing at this point. Are you impressed at the, you know, the, the, the spatial awareness or the cultural awareness? Or are you like, well, sure, but that's like saying Crystal Lake is a show about a summer camp. You know what I mean?

• 5:53Chris Ryan?

  I know. And it's really a show about a family.

• 5:57Andy Greenwald?

  Whoa, look at you.

• 5:58Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:59Andy Greenwald?

  Look at you.

• 6:00Chris Ryan?

  The circle of life.

• 6:00Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. Okay. Well, look, so where do you want to go in on this? We could start in the positive way. We could say that, you know, when you have very talented people like the ones you mentioned, you can turn pigeon shit into pigeon salad. I'm actually realizing I'm not aware of the actual genus of the birds that are in the birds, but I'm assuming they're not chickens.

• 6:20Chris Ryan?

  Wait, what, what would, what would Molly Baz call pigeon salad?

• 6:25Andy Greenwald?

  Hmm.

• 6:26Chris Ryan?

  Pigee salz?

• 6:28Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, I thought you, oh, right. Yeah, that's what she would do. I was trying to think what would like, if they were putting it on a menu at La Birda Den, see what I did there? It would be something like Central Park roast. You know what I mean? Or like something, you, you'd really speak to the terroir.

• 6:44Chris Ryan?

  That's right.

• 6:44Andy Greenwald?

  I like, I like pigee salz with a, with a fudgy, pigee egg in the middle of it.

• 6:49Chris Ryan?

  She has like a whole thing at Sweetgreen now as a, as a sort of pretty high ranked Sweetgreen customer, I can tell you this. And it's all just.

• 6:58Andy Greenwald?

  Are you a power user?

• 6:59Chris Ryan?

  Dude, the rewards, when I go up to, to check out at Sweetgreen and I show them the, the QR code on my phone, they're like, they bow down like Emperor Palpatine just walked in. They have to get, it's like gas comes from like out of the door and they're just like, oh my God.

• 7:19Andy Greenwald?

  Do you know what they just told me here? I don't know if this, if this affects you in any way, but like the, the younger people in, in the office here in New York said that, say that now, like if you go to a bar and most bars, like, you know, they, they scan your ID now because we do, we do live in a dystopian hellscape, but they, they just scan it. And if it's your birthday.

• 7:39Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Andy Greenwald?

  It, it'll, it like plays a little song.

• 7:43Chris Ryan?

  What plays a little song?

• 7:44Andy Greenwald?

  The little machine scanning the driver's license plays a little song.

• 7:49Chris Ryan?

  Really?

• 7:50Andy Greenwald?

  And it, and it's just like, do you want, like, I guess at a bar, it's optimal to have your birthday be known because you might get free drinks from it. But I also think a large part of a not insignificant percent of the population's nights involve telling people that it's their birthday when it's not to get free desserts or to get free drinks. And so I feel like that's just been another thing that no fun police have come for. But like, do you think ultimately it's good for society that you are getting recognized? You know, that your, your power user status is getting recognized or your salad restaurant, that you can't go for a drink in New York without having them know like literally what day it is?

• 8:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know.

• 8:25Chris Ryan?

  But you know what? Early on in the, in the 2000s, I signed all that privacy away when the random camel representatives at bars would be like, hey, would you like a pack of camels? And I'd be like, I, I honestly would love nothing more than a pack of camels. And they'd be like, we just need to borrow your driver's license for five minutes. And I was like, take hers too. Like take all the driver's licenses.

• 8:49Andy Greenwald?

  This is, this is really useful to me because this is the origin story of one of your most enduring bedrock beliefs, which is the ship has sailed on privacy. So please TSA, let me become a clear premium plus member.

• 9:05Chris Ryan?

  For certain things, I am willing to donate bone marrow if it means like the experience of the airport is that much easier. You know what I mean? Like I would much rather it go towards that, that kind of thing rather than, you know, I am lying in bed thinking about, have I ever been in a hammock? And then I get 87 ads for hammocks the next morning, you know? That seems fucked up. I just want to have my brain to myself. But when it comes to like, hey, do you want to skip the TSA line? I feel like we should, I'll go through whatever like Hegseth interrogation I need to go through to do that.

• 9:41Andy Greenwald?

  I think it's so cute that your biggest boogeyman in the story is Big Hammock.

• 9:45Chris Ryan?

  Do you think that?

• 9:46Andy Greenwald?

  Listen, guys, let me recreate in private.

• 9:51Chris Ryan?

  I actually, this did happen where like, I think I said something to my wife, but I was like, Tam, did I, have I ever like fully fallen asleep in a hammock? And I was like, is that going to be, because you know, as, as the body ages, I feel like it's harder to get out of hammocks, you know?

• 10:08Andy Greenwald?

  It's harder to get in sometimes. Let's just, let's just be real with the listeners.

• 10:12Chris Ryan?

  So I was just like, I wonder if that's a, a classic human experience that I'm just going to never have. And, and my phone heard me and sent me 14, like, it's not too late to get in hammocks, sir, you know, like kind of ads.

• 10:25Andy Greenwald?

  Well, again, but did the ad say it is too late to get out sadly? So it's sort of like a funereal hammock. I think your phone's just looking out for you. I think it's very sweet.

• 10:35Chris Ryan?

  Is this conversation indicative of your level of interest in the birds?

• 10:38Andy Greenwald?

  Okay. Look, no, no. My, my point was like, you cannot, like, these are, these are talented people. And so maybe it's good, but it is what's honestly, the, the, the idea of remaking the birds into a TV show. Like, look, if Carrie did it and Carrie seems to be a hit, then sure, there might be more meat on the bone here that was left by these auteurs and the masterpieces they made decades ago. Weirdly, to me, it's a little bit more of like a, in the way Light from Stars is actually thousands of years old. It reminds me of what was a very big push about 10 years ago for studios to exploit like larger creative tranches of IP that, what I mean by that is, do you remember the show Castle Rock?

• 11:20Chris Ryan?

  Of course.

• 11:20Andy Greenwald?

  Which was a very, very heralded thing on Hulu.

• 11:23Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Andy Greenwald?

  Um, starring the great Andre Holland, which purported to present a shared Stephen King cinematic universe.

• 11:29Chris Ryan?

  Now Mike Flanagan's just doing that. Yeah.

• 11:31Andy Greenwald?

  He's doing it, but he's, but he is, you know, at least to distinguish it, he's, he's just doing the, the properties. He's not creating.

• 11:38Chris Ryan?

  That's what, that's what.

• 11:38Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, he's doing it?

• 11:39Chris Ryan?

  Carrie, Carrie has got super friends. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we haven't met them yet, but like, it is indicated that Carrie is part of a larger community of like.

• 11:52Andy Greenwald?

  Are we gonna do the Avengers of the King verse where Carrie and Danny and the little boy that lives in his mouth are gonna form up to defeat the Chitauri?

• 12:02Chris Ryan?

  And Firestarter, and they all get in Christine and drive around. I, I mean, that, that could happen. I don't know. I mean, Mike, Mike Flanagan's quite busy.

• 12:10Andy Greenwald?

  Aw, Kujo. And then they all freeze frame and laugh. That's, okay. So I guess I'm completely out of step with the times or just this is. I, I say this because I remember active discussions when I was under a deal at Universal that they had the Hitchcock rights. So they were actively trying to generate pitches for something that wouldn't just be the birds, but would also be, I guess, the birds are flying past my rear window. It's giving me vertigo. Like some sort of thing that was.

• 12:40Chris Ryan?

  The shared cock verse. Yeah.

• 12:43Andy Greenwald?

  Well, they were, it was gonna be on Peacock, so it was gonna be cock for cock.

• 12:47Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:47Andy Greenwald?

  You know what I mean? It was.

• 12:49Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Into the double cock verse. Yes. I understand.

• 12:53Andy Greenwald?

  It, it would do numbers is what I'm saying. The number would be two.

• 12:57Chris Ryan?

  Honestly dude, if you gave, if we gave each other like two weeks, I think we could come up with an amazing, amazing Hitchcock IP universe of like the North by Northwest, like Vertigo. Uh, like, we could have like a lot of fun with that. I mean, Hitchcock's been adapted many times. I mean, they had the Bates Motel. I mean, there's been stuff.

• 13:17Andy Greenwald?

  I think you're thinking too small. The real question that we probably should have done is a bit 10 years ago, but we could do now is which director's seemingly unconnected cinematic universe would you like to see explored as a TV show? And I'm just going to mute myself and let you go and cook on the man verse.

• 13:33Chris Ryan?

  That's, that's a much, that, this is a much deeper conversation that we can have on Monday if you want. But like, this is, that's an incredible idea. Uh.

• 13:40Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you. Would you like to hear a preview of my take on the Ozu verse? Which would be eight seasons of 30 episodes each, all about the gently aging members of a Tokyo family.

• 13:53Chris Ryan?

  Andy, you wouldn't even watch that. Come on, dog.

• 13:56Andy Greenwald?

  I would watch it to fall asleep at night and to wake up in the morning. You have no idea the degree to which my attention span has been degraded by modern life and phones and everything is. I, I feel unparalleled, but perhaps it is completely paralleled because it's happening to everyone. The one space, Chris, my one sanctuary from this nonstop nonsense world of AI slop influencers and bullshit is three hour Asian cinema. I watched Yi Yi again this weekend and brother, I was trans.

• 14:29Chris Ryan?

  Yi Yi again this weekend. I have to like trap you in a room to watch like an episode of the lowdown. You watched Yi Yi?

• 14:38Andy Greenwald?

  One, we're not, you know, we're not gonna violate HIPAA on this podcast, but I may have been a little bit under the weather.

• 14:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 14:45Andy Greenwald?

  So I was spending a little bit more time with screens than normal. Brother, yeah, I was watching Coriata's Afterlife. Come on. Like this, this sustains me, brother. The rest of this is work. That's life.

• 14:58Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 14:58Andy Greenwald?

  That's who I am. Anyway, do, do you want to speak on the Snookness of it? Cause I feel like that's what drew your attention more than anything else. The show might be good. We don't know.

• 15:08Chris Ryan?

  I love her. I did not love all her fault. I still think she's worth the price of admission alone as a performer. Uh, is she going to? I, look, I honestly, Sarah Snook is like, is enough to check it out. Tom Spezia's presence here just makes me interested because I'm like, you know, he's, he's been a part of enough interesting television shows for me to think that this, he must have had an interesting take on this and an interesting pitch.

• 15:44Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. I mean, we know him best. We don't know him personally at all, but like you, you mentioned him in The Leftovers. Like, he's the kind of person that Damon Lindelof would say is like, we were able to do that show because of Tom, because Tom was able to bridge the writer's room and production and be a calming voice. And like, you know, it, it is the sort of person, or at least the sort of, the sort of profile that you think would lend itself to doing something challenging like this, to do like a High Wire act adaptation. In the olden days of television, when TV made stars like it did, uh, for many, for years, there would be the rare Clooney who escapes the orbit velocity of TV and just becomes a movie star. And part of that deal was you don't do TV anymore because you don't remind people that's where you came from.

• 16:29Andy Greenwald?

  And like, I feel like all episodes of Facts of Life and Roseanne, in which he plays like Booker, the handyman next door, have all been like memory hold and erased and nobody talks about them. But the, then there's the problem of like, no one was more famous than the cast of Friends, but with the occasional exception of Aniston, none of them became like movie stars. And all of them have had varying, varying experiences of wrestling with the fact that they are famous and rich forever, but frozen. I do think that we have not fully seen, or we haven't seen the full tale of like the stars of the last 15 years who have been seen arguably globally more maybe than the stars of Friends were in the nineties.

• 17:13Andy Greenwald?

  So the stars of shows that have traveled the world and just become memified and beloved.

• 17:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Andy Greenwald?

  Succession among them, um, Game of Thrones, like that level of fame, I think, has not fully been tested in terms of like where the audience will go with them, uh, in future projects. And I think some of them, you know, as is often the case with TV actors, like may have, like, I love Kieran Culkin. I love him in everything because he is generally playing a version of Kieran Culkin. And when that is utilized correctly, like it was in the Jesse Eisenberg movie, or like it was when I saw him dash off of a Delta trans, transcontinental flight that I was getting on the other week, when he was almost seemingly completely in character. Like, that's great, but I don't know if there's an opportunity. I don't know what other versions and flavors of Kieran Culkin we have ahead of us.

• 17:58Andy Greenwald?

  I think this, I think the Snook fandom, for example, is sneakier and realer than we realize. And she's a versatile actress who has a whole long career ahead of her.

• 18:06Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 18:06Andy Greenwald?

  So I think it'll be interesting to build things around these people who actually have more, a higher Q rating than I think you might otherwise believe. Because Succession, while popular, was averaging what? Like one to three million viewers a week.

• 18:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that, that it was probably netting out like a little higher than that. And certainly towards the end.

• 18:25Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Chris Ryan?

  It was getting bigger numbers, but the conversation about TV versus movie stardom is a really fascinating one. I was thinking about this in relationship to Jenna Ortega, who, to the extent that I am aware of, like her interiority seems loathe to continue to do Wednesday, which is obviously the most popular thing she's a part of. Yet some of her films, I would say most of the more recent films that she has appeared in, have not done that well, whether it was the, the weird unicorn movie that she made like a year or two ago, or Claire and the Sun that just came and went. And she's obviously a famous person, but what does that translate to in terms of like box office?

• 19:08Chris Ryan?

  And if she was to do, say, I can't think of like a, a TV show off the top of my head, but a non like IP iconic character, like a, so not Wednesday, would her TV show inevitably be a hit? I don't, I don't know. You know what I mean? That, that, that is a little bit of like a, like a outlier because she's doing the, she's making the transition from being like a young, younger, late teen actress into trying to do more adult roles and appear in more adult, um, you know, minded, uh, stories. But it's, it's a tough one. I mean, Jeremy Strong, for instance, like, look at him, like, has appeared in a lot of, um, well-regarded and done great work in a lot of well-regarded films,

• 19:50Chris Ryan?

  but none of those movies have really popped off. Um, you make, you make the Kieran Culkin point. He's won an Oscar and is probably gonna be in one of the biggest movies of the year with the Hunger Games film that's about to come out. So it's like, what, what does fame really mean?

• 20:04Andy Greenwald?

  Brother, I, I was with you on the what does fame really mean until I watched the drama last week. And I'm like, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya are, are gods now because they dragged that movie to over a hundred million dollars more worldwide. That is star power, dude, and that is good marketing.

• 20:22Chris Ryan?

  And you, did you think that movie wasn't Japanese enough? Was that its problem?

• 20:27Andy Greenwald?

  I fucking hated it so much. I hated that. It was like good old school hate. And a year late too, which is perfect for my brand being like, oh, you suckers.

• 20:37Chris Ryan?

  My brand.

• 20:37Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, my God. It filled me with rage and I had no one to talk to about it except thank, except my buddy, Chris, who just fired up his phone on the other side of the country was like, oh, Chris.

• 20:47Chris Ryan?

  Even that one, I was just like, you've got like two responses from me on this. So make it count.

• 20:53Andy Greenwald?

  I feel like I did. I got my takes off. But genuinely, like that did, that is a referendum on stardom. And I'm not saying that like with any quotation marks around it. Like that's incredible to me. And good for them to do something weird that they wanted to do.

• 21:06Chris Ryan?

  Can I ask you a quick question about this idea of house style that I've been kicking around this week as I watched two screening, screeners for a show on Apple that's coming out tonight or tomorrow morning called Nocturne. This is a show that comes from Rowan Joffe and it's adapted from, I believe, a Swedish novel, a Swedish mystery series by, written under the pen name Lars Kepler, but is actually the work of a married couple, the Anduril family, the Alex Sander and Alexandra Anduril, who, who wrote these novels. And the show Nocturne is translated, I guess, it's moved from, the action moves from Sweden to of all

• 21:51Chris Ryan?

  places, Western Pennsylvania. And it stars Leif Schreiber as an ex-cop who's haunted by a case that went really wrong. Stephen Graham plays a killer who is, I believe, serving life in a psychiatric prison hospital. And then Zazie Beetz, Bill Camp, Gary Carr, porno Jag Nathan, Chrissy Metz kind of round out the cast of people.

• 22:18Andy Greenwald?

  Roy Colkin.

• 22:19Chris Ryan?

  And Roy Colkin plays, actually, an essential role in this, a key role. And so it's set in Western Pennsylvania and this cop played by Schreiber and an FBI agent played by Beetz, they are godfather to goddaughter in their relationship. And they investigates the appearance of a, of a boy who had vanished several years ago. And it's tied to Stephen Graham's character. So there's like nods to Silence of the Lambs and Seven, and I would say, I guess, the Brad Ingalls B. Universe, although I found elements of the stuff I've watched so far with Nocturne to feel very much like as if a Scandi nor was translated to Western Pennsylvania. But the thing that leapt out of me, and, and there's a lot of talent behind and in front of the

• 22:59Chris Ryan?

  camera on this show. And I, I think that if you're looking for a, a kind of crafty mystery, this would be fine for you right now, was the similarity in, to me, how it looked similar to other Apple thrillers. So that it had this kind of, I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's, it shared sets with, but it looked similar to Criminal Record and Presumed Innocent and Down Cemetery Road and some of their thrillers. And I was wondering, you know, you've worked on, you did Briar Patch, sort of in late, late period, Blue Sky USA era.

• 23:37Andy Greenwald?

  The end. I think I killed, I killed it.

• 23:39Chris Ryan?

  But that was a.

• 23:40Andy Greenwald?

  I don't, I don't get enough credit for that, by the way.

• 23:42Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, dude, of all the things.

• 23:43Andy Greenwald?

  Ending original programming on USA, but please.

• 23:46Chris Ryan?

  And you also, your bravery in speaking out about the drama a year later has been, has been noted as well.

• 23:51Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you.

• 23:51Chris Ryan?

  But, you know, that, your show came at the end of like a very defined aesthetic era that, that USA had, where it was like, these shows are going to look this way, they're going to kind of attitudinally be a certain way, the characters are going to interact in a certain way. At various points over the years, I think you could say like, there is an HBO crime thriller look, or there is a Netflix, now, I mean, after people making, meaning in a derogatory way, that there is a Netflix look for a lot of their shows. To what extent do you, as a writer, when you're working on stuff, receive overall aesthetic notes from production companies, or especially the streamers where it's like, we want our shows to look and feel a certain way?

• 24:35Andy Greenwald?

  It's a great question. I would say, just to, to, just to clarify that, like, Mr. Robot, what created by our friend Sam, who was the executive producer of my show, was the pivot point out of Blue Sky and an attempt to be like, we're going to do something different here. And so there was no mandate to be similar. In fact, it was what was incredibly fortunate about my experience. And then ultimately, you know, I think complicating was that I, there was a really generous and genuine encouragement to not be like anything else and to be prestigious and to be bold and to be dark. And then we got to Albuquerque and realized we had the same budget as Suits. Early Suits, no disrespect to our good friends

• 25:18Andy Greenwald?

  from the television show Suits, who earned all the success and higher budgets they got in later seasons. There's also a second piece to your question, which is that networks and streamers have creatives that they are comfortable with. And not necessarily the people they have overall deals with to write and create the shows. I'm talking about the stable of directors that they feel comfortable giving expensive projects to. HBO certainly has a list. And they also have a list of production designers that they, that they feel comfortable with, or line producers that they feel comfortable with. And these are generally ways to control costs, to communicate notes better, but also maybe to a spoken or unspoken degree, maintain some level of consistency. I think the next

• 25:59Andy Greenwald?

  piece of it is increasingly, or maybe this has always been the case, you find that buyers, and by buyers, I mean networks and streamers, have pre-designed or pre-imagined holes in their schedule that they are eager to fill. That either it's something that has worked for them already, you know? So for example, with a network like Peacock, I do think something like All Her Fault was a big success for them. And so they wanted to continue to service the audience of All Her Fault. They want a tile to go next to All Her Fault, or to have suggested if you liked All Her Fault. So then they start to prescribe kind of, or at least go in search of the thing that they are looking for. But the last piece that

• 26:41Andy Greenwald?

  I find interesting, and I hope this isn't too inside baseball to talk about, is that, look, I think everybody understands that even really successful and admired writers and creators have the things that they're interested in. Like when we talk about Vince Gilligan, we would make so many jokes about like these scenes devoted to doc review in his legal show, in Better Call Saul, because, you know, which was slightly less interesting, at least in the early going, than cooking methamphetamine. But he's a process guy. And at Vince Gilligan Show is going to show us the process about stuff. And we don't criticize him necessarily for it. It's like what he likes to do and what he knows how to do. I would argue that it's kind of underappreciated or underexplored how executives also have the things that they like and the notes that they know how to give. And that's how you

• 27:26Andy Greenwald?

  end up with disparate projects coming into the same pipeline and coming out very similar. Meaning, there are multiple ways to tell a story, or multiple ways into a book, or a piece of IP that they, everyone, the creator, the writer, the adapter, and the network is excited about. But the development machinery that's in place there is like, well, the only way to do this story really is if we make it in an investigation. And you could be like, but it's not a detective show. And they would be like, but there's a way to do it that way that makes sense to our audience or contemporary audiences. And you end up that way with a show that begins with the same big, big incident. How are we going to find out how this happened?

• 28:05Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 28:06Andy Greenwald?

  Nine months later, someone's investigating it, whether it's meant to be a romance, or it's more cerebral or whatever. So there is a flattening effect. Now, I should just also say to stop the monologue, there are brilliant and creative executives out there. And no, no two development processes are the same. But I do think that all of these things in concert can lead to a sameness of product. And at the end of the day, as we often say, tech companies want to control the pipeline. They want, they want some foreknowledge of what they are spending the money on and what the results will be. And it's another attempt to kind of manufacture consistency in a infamously inconsistent and creative field.

• 28:43Chris Ryan?

  Well, I, I was wondering what it comes to the tech companies like Apple and Netflix, whether or not, given, all jokes aside, what they know about their customers?

• 28:53Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, which is, they know if you like hammocks or not.

• 28:56Chris Ryan?

  But, like, I, I feel like, in my mind, the interrogation rooms in multiple crime shows on Apple are the same room. That it is.

• 29:05Andy Greenwald?

  Literally the same room?

• 29:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, that it is like a warehousey gray with icy blue. And I would have to go and just read, like, I would have to go back through interrogation scenes in multiple Apple shows. And I'm sure that is my brain playing a trick on me and that the interrogation room in Presumed Innocent is quite different, you know? But it does feel, whether it's like, a treatment that happens to the, to the, to the image at some point, as it goes up on Apple TV or whatever, that they emphasize that. And, you know, like, there's been discussion about Netflix aesthetic of like, very shallow focus, so that you can't really see like, the image behind the actor in the center of the frame. There's a lot of, there's a

• 29:48Chris Ryan?

  lot of like, centering a lot of performers in the frame so that like, it works well for clipping on social media, because it just, it's aesthetically like a little bit more pleasing than if you have somebody who's in like the lower left-hand corner as like a scene of life goes on behind them, as if they're in like a Cassavetes movie or something. Like, that's not how TV really looks anyway. But it was just something that leapt out at me while I was watching Nocturne, which I found fine, a little drab, but I, I think people might, might enjoy as like a, oh, I'm looking for a whodunit.

• 30:23Andy Greenwald?

  I think the thing that is hard to communicate sometimes is just like, how many people are involved in a production? And how many decisions have to be kept track of at all times? And honestly, I think that the, the best, the best shows, and certainly the best movies, which, which have a tighter focus, you feel the decision-making in every frame. I feel like there's a, we, we try to articulate that in any number of ways when we're talking about things we love. And we're about to talk about the lowdown, which is every frame of it, every decision, every reaction, every way Ethan Hawke enters and exits a scene, is thrilling to me. Because you feel the intention and you feel the creative embrace of surprise, or just approaching things sideways. But, you know, when you are in the midst

• 31:08Andy Greenwald?

  of delivering on very expensive things, and maybe you're running more than one show, or maybe you're, you're under budget, or maybe they couldn't pay for a writer to be on set in Romania that day, the words interior interrogation room.

• 31:22Andy Greenwald?

  People are gonna just interpret what that means because they've seen it before.

• 31:25Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 31:25Andy Greenwald?

  And they're gonna give you what you've seen before. And how much time are you able to give as either the showrunner or the executive or whatever to step in there and say, try a little harder on this? Like, there aren't, sometimes there's not time, sometimes there's not money. And this is, by the way, my pet peeve with a show I don't wanna kick because it's successful and people like it. But, you know, when we were talking about your friends and neighbors, the kids' bedrooms with all of the posters for like, rock band, folk singer-

• 31:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Andy Greenwald?

  Are all lined up at 90-degree angles and no teenage child at this or any other time, except maybe a future serial killer, has ever hung up posters like that.

• 32:01Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 32:01Andy Greenwald?

  It's just, I look at that and I'm out of the scene because I'm like, no one thought about this.

• 32:06Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 32:06Andy Greenwald?

  And that's, but that's the way I watch stuff and I'm, you know, I'm insufferable.

• 32:09Chris Ryan?

  And that, yeah, I think that we're, we're giving pretty niche, for me to like, my review of Nocturne is probably a little bit more detailed than, hey, I didn't, I thought that the interrogation room looked like the one from Criminal.

• 32:22Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know. I'm enjoying this show where we're just talking about how we feel about stuff we haven't watched.

• 32:27Chris Ryan?

  That's right.

• 32:27Andy Greenwald?

  This is a nice vibe for me.

• 32:28Chris Ryan?

  That really is where we've gotten to.

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• 34:32Chris Ryan?

  Why don't we talk about something that we have watched before I get you out of here and bring Joe in?

• 34:35Andy Greenwald?

  Is this the, the Yi Yi podcast?

• 34:37Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 34:37Andy Greenwald?

  We finally, Edward Yang's 2000 masterpiece. Two hours and 55 minutes of really just a family.

• 34:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Andy Greenwald?

  You know what I mean? In Taiwan, and it's as good now as it was when I saw it in the theater, Chris.

• 34:50Chris Ryan?

  Did you see it at home for him?

• 34:51Andy Greenwald?

  Bam.

• 34:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, bam, bam.

• 34:52Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, probably at Bam, and I probably emerged from it and I imagine in the blinking into the light of day, feeling like flush with the connectiveness of all human beings and emotion, I probably was like, if only I had a device in my pocket that would allow me to tell Chris about this with a couple emojis while he's, I don't know, drinking on Smith Street. Like, I just, it probably was that moment for me.

• 35:15Chris Ryan?

  How do you feel about The Lowdown turning into a television show?

• 35:18Andy Greenwald?

  Is that your take? That's your pivot?

• 35:20Chris Ryan?

  Not in a bad way. I don't mean that.

• 35:22Andy Greenwald?

  What you got?

• 35:22Chris Ryan?

  Uh, this episode, episode four, written by Liz Blood, directed by Scott Teams, who directed the fantastic third episode. It's sort of, I, I thought like a little bit of a bullpen game, mid-season pivot. It does introduce two new characters, Martha Plimpton's Sheriff Vela and her, I don't believe, named boyfriend, played by Clifton Collins. So the bench for this show now is 15-deep, you know, like in terms of almost every scene features a performer that you know and love. But I thought that the structure of the episode, while I, I think this might be the funniest episode of The Lowdown I've seen.

• 36:02Andy Greenwald?

  So funny.

• 36:03Chris Ryan?

  It, uh, split the baby multiple times where it did an A-plot with Ginger and Lee that then turns into an A1 and A2 plot because those two split up to interrogate different sides of a similar mystery with a, uh, the death of a teenager in Woodrow and where he died and how it's connected to Miko, who is sort of the, the big MacGuffin of this season. And then there is a B-plot, which seems pretty much on the other side of the state to the narrative, although I trust, all trust in Sterling to like, bring this stuff all together. But it, it's Tommy Lee Jones, Michael Hitchcock, and Keith David going undercover in the

• 36:47Chris Ryan?

  world of black market archaeological finds. And I love both plots and I love even the bifurcation of the Ginger and Lee plot where Ginger gets to go off, what's the name of the actor who was in Briar Patch, who's, who's in this episode?

• 37:02Andy Greenwald?

  Kirk Fox.

• 37:03Chris Ryan?

  Kirk Fox.

• 37:03Andy Greenwald?

  The great Kirk Fox.

• 37:04Chris Ryan?

  And, uh, you know, that, that, all of that is delightful. I was just curious what you thought about, like, the more TV bones of this episode.

• 37:13Andy Greenwald?

  This is the most Briar Patch-heavy episode of the pod since 2020. Didn't see it coming. Thank you so much. I would just like to take a moment to say that if, if, I, I don't know if it contributed much to the world, but it did briefly create the supernova that was the close friendship between Kirk Fox and Alan Cumming. And the two of them spent so much time sitting with each other, talking nonsense, and this is around the time that Alan Cumming discovered Takis and sitting in his bespoke, like, well, they weren't bespoke, we couldn't afford it, but he had these beautiful suits, and he would eat Takis in a way that no one has ever eaten Takis before, which was to take each one out of the bag, suck off the spicy flavoring, and then throw away the corn puff beneath. And he and Kirk Fox would just be just, just cooking, talking to each other.

• 37:58Andy Greenwald?

  Anyway, I think it's fucking incredible that we have a television show in the year of our Lord 2026 in which Tommy Lee Jones is just a B-story captain? That, that you, last week, you, I felt like you were joking when you were like, Ethan Hawke just walks into a couple scenes and goes, what are you still doing here? Get out of here.

• 38:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:18Andy Greenwald?

  But literally, Tommy Lee Jones is sitting on the couch of Macon Blair's office, giving him advice about orgies, and Ethan Hawke walks in and says, what are you doing here? Get out of here? And it works? Um, I know what you mean about it becoming a contemporary, like, becoming a quote-unquote "regular television show" with just like a B-story, but, I mean, first of all, we all assume that they will merge at some point, but it is a testament to the just seemingly bottomless well of creativity and delight that Sterling and his writers have access to, that those three, that putting those three performers together on this kind of mission feels as important to my viewing experience as what is clearly the A-story.

• 39:01Andy Greenwald?

  I'll say it again, I can't, I, I give a lot of credit here to the FX executive team because often the thing that gets bubble shows a second season, and when I say bubble shows, I mean, like, The Lowdown got some awards attention, it got some best-of lists, we loved it, but it didn't exactly set the world on fire.

• 39:18Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 39:18Andy Greenwald?

  Often the thing that gets bubble shows the second season is an undeniable pitch for season two. And maybe there's a big, big, big, you know, mushroom cloud-type story coming, but in many ways, the show feels more modest in its ambition and its storytelling than season one, but it is so much better for it. So the fact that they were able to understand that and greenlight it is incredible to me because it is humming, but it is not necessarily, um, I tune into every episode with a feeling of surprise and excitement that I think more, uh, uh, basic-thinking executives believe we would do if every episode was a cliffhanger. Every episode isn't a cliffhanger.

• 40:01Andy Greenwald?

  Every episode is a, my god, what are we gonna see next?

• 40:04Chris Ryan?

  Or how does he talk his way out of this one? Yeah. And it, I think that the show is really good at, um, handing a baton of energy in the act-outs or like, the last moment of the end of the episode goes right into the next episode in a way that's been very energizing, you know? And it, I feel like it gives, gives me like, a rush of blood. And then, you know, you get a lot of laconic discourses on the nature of journalism and truth and, you know-

• 40:35Andy Greenwald?

  And raw milk.

• 40:35Chris Ryan?

  And orgies. Yeah, so it's kind of Sterling Hardjo's everything show, but he does supercharge the first and last acts with these kinds of set pieces.

• 40:46Andy Greenwald?

  And let's just talk about the dentist sequence because-

• 40:52Andy Greenwald?

  Like, I don't even know how to put into words the setup, because sometimes the other thing that I'm just obsessed with, like, I feel like this is a kind of an inside baseball episode for us, but like, it's opportunity. It's like, they built this crazy, funny, insane, did we just choke out a cop? And then it builds into, as you were saying, builds into this episode with him and his ex-wife's new husband fishtailing towards Killer Mike and his attorney friend and all of that. But in the midst of this, they establish that Ethan Hawke, that Lee's tooth has been chipped.

• 41:25Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 41:26Andy Greenwald?

  So I don't know how it bubbles up in the room, but at some point, someone is like, should he, does he have time to see about the tooth?

• 41:33Chris Ryan?

  Jimmy is a dentist, so this is the perfect opportunity for these guys to like, pair off and buddy up.

• 41:39Andy Greenwald?

  But not just buddy up, then to call Ginger to basically be his mom and hold his hand, because Lee is afraid of the dentist. And they all do some bumps of laughing gas, you know? And as they're walking in, Lee being Lee says something like, oh, that film Marathon Man? And Betty Gilpin's like, don't think about the Nazis right now.

• 41:56Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 41:56Andy Greenwald?

  And it's just like, every show would be improved if instead of a white noise machine, you just had a Betty Gilpin machine and you just turn it on and you just let it run in the background of every scene.

• 42:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 42:07Andy Greenwald?

  And everything is better because of it. Everything is better because of it. Like, it's absolutely delightful. I, this is, this is, you know, I know you know that I am very, very, very Catholic about my top 10 list for the year, but let me just say, of the 17 shows that have consistently been in my top 10 and have been from jump, this is crashing in to the top 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6.

• 42:32Chris Ryan?

  It's number 1, Yi Yi. Number 2, the third time you watched the drama and realized you were reading it all wrong the whole time.

• 42:40Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. Fourth was Afterlife, man, that movie rips. And then, you know, whatever else we talked about on the show, I sort of, I stay focused on the present, but.

• 42:49Chris Ryan?

  Furious, yeah. I think I know your top 10 better than you do.

• 42:53Andy Greenwald?

  The last thing I'll say about your framing, that like, it has sort of become a regular TV show.

• 42:58Chris Ryan?

  I didn't say regular.

• 42:59Andy Greenwald?

  No, no, no.

• 43:00Chris Ryan?

  It's adopting some of the.

• 43:02Andy Greenwald?

  Storytelling language of a regular show. We should be so lucky if this could be a regular show, if this could come back every year, and if Tommy Lee Jones is having as much fun on it as he seems to be having, and is just puttering around in the background, and Betty Gilpin is like, you know what? There are worse things to do with my life at this time of my career to spend 3 months in Tulsa with some pals, and we could just hang like this every year would be a blessing.

• 43:29Chris Ryan?

  You sound like Josh Shapiro right now. We should be so lucky.

• 43:34Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think, do you think I should? I mean, it's, the Obama cadence is working for a number of charismatic Jews right now. Do you think I am 3rd in, should I adopt it? Should I start experimenting with that?

• 43:47Chris Ryan?

  But don't tell me when, and never tell me what it's gonna be about. Like, I really do want you mid discussing Black Doves next week to just break out pure Obama and see how much longer this podcast lasts.

• 44:00Andy Greenwald?

  Listen, Barack and I are both podcasters. You know what I mean? Like, so really, we're kind of in the same ballpark.

• 44:07Chris Ryan?

  Uh, I adore the show, obviously. I was just, I was just trying to give you a little bit of a curveball, you know? It's not always, it's not always Mysrowski. Sometimes, sometimes you gotta throw something different.

• 44:20Andy Greenwald?

  How you feeling about, how you feeling about World Champ Brewers? You were in Milwaukee this year.

• 44:23Chris Ryan?

  I was in Milwaukee. Shout out to DJ Pi over at No Laying Up. I went to a Brewers game with him, Phillies. It was, you know, Phillies lost, Jacob Mysrowski shut them out, and, and then marched all the way. It's cool. I gotta tell you, man, I texted, my wife's been out of town, and I texted a lot of guys in my life to be like, watching the Brew Crew? And nobody was. I feel really bad for, I mean, like, I don't really even care about baseball that much that deeply anymore, relative to like Liverpool and the Sixers. But I was like, I stand, I stand watch, man. It's the national pastime, it's the World Series, we gotta check this out.

• 45:08Chris Ryan?

  I watched the extra inning game the other night, and then I was like, I gotta watch these dudes clinch. And nobody, people were texting me about like Spurs, the Spurs versus the Jazz.

• 45:18Andy Greenwald?

  Normally, I'd agree with you, but Criterion does have a Shinoda retrospective right now in some of those films.

• 45:24Chris Ryan?

  You're really, you're not, you're not helping me today.

• 45:26Andy Greenwald?

  Listen, I'm.

• 45:27Chris Ryan?

  This is supposed to be After Dark.

• 45:29Andy Greenwald?

  My grandmother was a big Brewers fan because she grew up in Milwaukee, and so I thought, so I've always had a soft spot in my heart for them.

• 45:36Chris Ryan?

  Did the Greenwalds migrate east? What happened there? Milwaukee, your dad was into St. Louis, and then you get all the way out to Philly?

• 45:42Andy Greenwald?

  Absolutely not. No, no.

• 45:44Chris Ryan?

  Reverse wagon train?

• 45:46Andy Greenwald?

  There's a great migration. It's, any trail we're on is the Trail of Tears, let me tell you that. No, this is on my mother's side of the family, they, they were all from Milwaukee.

• 45:55Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 45:55Andy Greenwald?

  They all, they all, I mean, spoiler, not originally, but they, they did, they did settle in Milwaukee. And can I tell you, by the way, one of the more interesting things is my grandmother, to me, maybe no one else, but, you know, maybe people are listening at this point. So my great uncle, my grandmother's brother, was like, a very strange man, but a repository of like, a lot of family history that would otherwise be lost. And I found this long letter that he wrote, sort of detailing everyone in the family. And he, and there was an uncle of his who went out to San Francisco for the Gold Rush. I was like, and like, opened like, I guess the Gold Rush equivalent of a bodega.

• 46:35Chris Ryan?

  Really?

• 46:35Andy Greenwald?

  To like, sell stuff, because I was like, first of all, there's no one in my family who is prospecting, I'll tell you that much. That seems like a little tough on the knees, but, anyway, yeah, he went out to San Francisco, then he went to New Orleans, then he came back, where some other members of the family had like, a department store, and then apparently, spoiler alert for LA Law, he stepped into an elevator shaft with no elevator.

• 46:57Chris Ryan?

  Damn.

• 46:57Andy Greenwald?

  And it's like, you survived the Gold Rush, dog. Like, that is tough, right?

• 47:02Chris Ryan?

  Was it like, one of the first elevators?

• 47:04Andy Greenwald?

  It was.

• 47:05Chris Ryan?

  Oh, is it a mine?

• 47:07Andy Greenwald?

  No, no, this was in a department store now, we're back in Milwaukee.

• 47:09Chris Ryan?

  Oh, I see.

• 47:10Andy Greenwald?

  And as to your other question, yes, my father, who thinks Succession is a show about family, correct. Lifelong St. Louis Cardinal fan, but it has nothing to do with the city of St. Louis, which he did not visit until he was in his 50s. It was that when he was a child, he liked the Red Birds.

• 47:24Chris Ryan?

  Gotcha. Okay.

• 47:26Andy Greenwald?

  You caught up now?

• 47:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, all good, all good on that.

• 47:29Andy Greenwald?

  There's gonna be a quiz on this.

• 47:32Chris Ryan?

  Thanks for hanging out with me today. I'm gonna get into my chat with Joe about Carrie and Crystal Lake, and Andy and I will be back on Monday chatting about stuff, and can't wait to see you in person, brother.

• 47:44Andy Greenwald?

  I like the deep family dives, I think that's really where we should steer this thing.

• 47:47Chris Ryan?

  I think it does numbers. I'll talk to you soon, man.

• 47:49Andy Greenwald?

  Big numbers.

• 47:52Chris Ryan?

  All right, I'm joined by the only telekinetic person I know.

• 47:55Speaker 07

  Oh, wow.

• 47:55Chris Ryan?

  I thought Joe would be useful here because of her extra-century perception.

• 48:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:01Chris Ryan?

  And also because she has watched all of Carrie, and she liked it quite a bit.

• 48:05Speaker 07

  I did.

• 48:06Chris Ryan?

  And I have watched a big chunk of Carrie, including the end, just to get ready for this pod.

• 48:13Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 48:14Chris Ryan?

  And, listener, I liked it as well.

• 48:17Speaker 07

  Oh, great.

• 48:17Chris Ryan?

  This, this show, Carrie, we're also gonna talk about Crystal Lake, and I think we could talk about them a little bit together. Before we get into those 2 shows, just a quick thing about, in the intervening moments between when I recorded with Andy this morning and this afternoon with Joe, Patrick Stewart passed away.

• 48:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 48:33Chris Ryan?

  In his 80s, obviously best known as Professor X in the Fox X-Men films, I think probably best known for those, but.

• 48:40Speaker 07

  That's not what I thought you were gonna say.

• 48:41Chris Ryan?

  I would say that I know him mostly as Carla from the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy adaptation. Also, in my favorite King Arthur movie, Excalibur.

• 48:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:53Chris Ryan?

  Do you have a favorite Patrick Stewart performance?

• 48:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek.

• 48:57Chris Ryan?

  Not a Star Trek guy.

• 48:58Speaker 07

  Okay, yeah.

• 48:59Chris Ryan?

  But he obviously was an ever-present part of my TV life in that sense, yeah.

• 49:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, we were just talking about him because, you know, we're covering Vision Quest over on House of R right now, which is run by Terry Mathalas, who did Picard Season 3, which actually was really good. And, but Terry Mathalas is a huge Star Trek guy, so there's just like, a lot of Star Trek in his Marvel show.

• 49:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 07

  And Next Gen is the Star Trek I was brought up on, so Jean-Luc Picard is, I, we were like, huge Trekkies in my household.

• 49:29Chris Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 49:29Speaker 07

  And like, he was a major.

• 49:31Chris Ryan?

  Do you find that there's still like, a Trek-Star Wars, like, you can only be one thing with people? No, it's, we've become a wide-open church.

• 49:37Speaker 07

  And especially since like, there's no, there's just Star Trek in production right now, for the first time in a while.

• 49:44Chris Ryan?

  Star Wars in production.

• 49:47Speaker 07

  I think everyone's just sort of banning in common cause of like, what happened to our favorite properties. But yeah, I mean, like, yeah, Patrick Stewart is probably best known as Professor X, but like, Jean-Luc Picard was so important to me growing up, and, and just like, I don't know, then what he did with that fame, where he would do, he's like, now I'm gonna do Lear on TNT, or I'm gonna do A Christmas Carol, I'm gonna do all these like, classical stage things that I love with my Star Trek, you know, Blank Check, Cashé.

• 50:15Chris Ryan?

  Knowing that you can go work 6 months of the year on any one thing, and then spend the other 6 months doing the thing you love, not that he didn't love Picard, but like, he was always such a huge theater guy, especially in London, and, yeah, he has a very small role, I guess, although a large, a larger presence in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. He plays Carla, who is George Smiley's like, Russian spy adversary.

• 50:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 50:41Chris Ryan?

  And he is incredible, going up against Alec Guinness.

• 50:44Speaker 07

  Incredible on Excalibur as well, honestly.

• 50:46Chris Ryan?

  Amazing.

• 50:47Speaker 07

  And Dune, original Dune.

• 50:48Chris Ryan?

  Oh, that's right. He isn't the original Dune. Is he Paul's father? Who is he? No, he's not Paul's father, he's.

• 50:53Speaker 07

  No, I can't remember, hold on. Gurney, Gurney Alec.

• 50:56Chris Ryan?

  Gurney. Let's talk about Carrie and Crystal Lake. This is, I've been, I've been promising this for a while.

• 51:02Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 51:03Chris Ryan?

  And I originally sort of was watching Crystal Lake just because I had been watching so many Friday the 13th movies up and around rewatchables, but just as a kind of annual tradition of usually throwing on at least one of those from the franchise. And I think that these 2 series are unified, if not in their equal accomplishments, in, I think relatively bold visions of 2 relatively straightforward stories. Carrie as a novel is not lean, but necessarily, but it's not like, a big doorstopper Stephen King novel. And the De Palma film is 87 minutes or something like that, 90 minutes?

• 51:47Chris Ryan?

  And Mike Flanagan turned it into an 8-hour series. Crystal Lake, which is based on Friday the 13th, but is largely just a prequel about Pamela and Jason Voorhees, and how they got to where they are in the beginning of Friday the 13th.

• 52:03Chris Ryan?

  Is a kind of origin story, traumatic conspiracy thriller that also has elements of sci fi in it, which I will get to because I know that you didn't go too far with Crystal Lake. But I think I broadly applaud both of these shows for trying something new. What did you, what did you think of the scope of, at least Carrie, if not Crystal Lake?

• 52:26Speaker 07

  Well, so Carrie, yeah, I've only watched the first episode. You, you told me to watch the first episode of Crystal Lake and then you would tell me what happens on Crystal Lake.

• 52:34Chris Ryan?

  On the seventh episode, yes.

• 52:35Speaker 07

  And I did not want to like spoil that for myself.

• 52:37Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 52:38Speaker 07

  I didn't want to spoil the joy of you telling me what happens on episode seven of Crystal Lake. But I'm a huge Mike Flanagan fan.

• 52:44Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 07

  And Flanagan has done some great work inside of the Stephen King universe.

• 52:49Chris Ryan?

  He's very, he's very invested in it now.

• 52:51Speaker 07

  Doctor Sleep, you know, like et cetera. And I think he's like one of the few people who really has a feel for what makes King so great. And then also in, you know, in Haunting of Hill House and Blind Manner and Fall of the House of Usher.

• 53:04Chris Ryan?

  The Night Mass, yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 07

  He did this sort of, well, in those three specifically, he did this sort of like, let me remix the works of Shirley Jackson or Edgar Allan Poe or whatever. I'm just going to sort of mix and match and do some fanfiction-y kind of thing inside of these authorial universes. Henry James being Blind Manner. And so I was ready for Carrie to be a blend of both of those things. I think what I was not ready for in Carrie, I enjoy, but what I was not ready for was how it's part of his larger overall deal that he's doing this like larger Dark Tower project for Prime Video. And I think a lot of the frame narrative that we get inside of Carrie is feeding that larger project.

• 53:47Chris Ryan?

  I agree.

• 53:48Speaker 07

  So that stuff didn't work as well for me as the actual story of Carrie and Chris and what it would mean to be bullied now and all of these other things that are on his mind. So like in terms of casting the kids in the show, I think he did a really good job, except for that one kid who looks 40. And then like, and like even when you get something like, you know, Bill and I were talking about this a little bit, but when you get to like the prom episode, right? Like you're, you're way, you know, Bill, Bill was saying he watched Carrie because he's like, I gotta get to the prom episode, which is penultimate. And like the way that they shot that, or that's like the finale is both, like the way that he had to take one of the most iconic moments in cinema and try to find like a different way to show it to us, I think was largely successful.

• 54:33Speaker 07

  But there's a lot of frame narrative around it that I, that feels like it's a servant of a different master.

• 54:38Chris Ryan?

  So Joe's referring to the fact that Mike Flanagan has now done Doctor Sleep, which is a Shining sequel, essentially. Life of Chuck, which is a much different kind of Stephen King story and is much more like life affirming. Gerald's Game, which was sort of a gnarly little

• 54:53Speaker 07

  Really good.

• 54:54Chris Ryan?

  chamber piece that was on Netflix.

• 54:55Speaker 07

  Taut, taut little Netflix film, yeah.

• 54:57Chris Ryan?

  He is currently working on The Mist. He has just done season one of Carrie, which has been renewed and is working on The Dark Tower. And at the, so spoilers now, if you have not watched Carrie, you might want to skip ahead to Crystal Lake or you might just want to wait till you watch both. At the end of Carrie, we find out that there's been like this, you know, this overall framing device of the series. There's been these interviews being conducted by a character named Adelaide, who is played by Kate Siegel, who is Mike Flanagan's real life wife and director of one of the episodes of the season.

• 55:29Speaker 07

  And has been in everything.

• 55:30Chris Ryan?

  And has been in everything with her, with him. And she is sort of one half of a two side of a, two sided coin hunt for a group of essentially telekinetic, but powerful children, powerful teens out there in the world. Now, this is alluded to at the end of the novel Carrie. There's the idea that more kids out there have these telekinetic powers. But Adelaide, the character says shine, to shine. Like, so the connection between this and the Shining, you could make the leap of logic to say Firestarter, you could bring in any number of characters from the Stephen King

• 56:15Chris Ryan?

  universe.

• 56:16Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 56:17Chris Ryan?

  And that, like you said, definitely seems to be the grander vision that Flanagan's got here.

• 56:22Speaker 07

  I was listening to an old interview he did with the King Cast, hosted by a couple of friends of mine a while ago, where he was talking about, you know, because the Dark Tower series that he wants to do has been a long time sort of getting off the ground. Dark Tower seems unfilmable for a number of reasons. But he was talking about how there are these, like the interconnected King universe and how are these, there were these minor characters that are brought in from elsewhere into the Dark Tower series. And he was like, but will audiences, this is, this was, he had this interview a while ago and he was like, will audiences recognize those characters and would it be interesting to use other characters, you know? And so I feel like he's setting up Carrie to be, you know, let's, let's bring in King characters that we are more familiar with.

• 57:05Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Speaker 07

  To play these roles that are played by other King characters inside of, you know what I mean? So, I don't know, Dolores Claire, like what, who are we bringing in? How close are we getting to Castle Rock at that point? I don't, I don't really know. But like, again, it felt like it was, you know, the MCU got accused of this, like when you can watch a project do one thing, but also then try to launch something else at the same time.

• 57:32Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 57:33Speaker 07

  That can be distracting.

• 57:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I think in, if, some of this is marketing, if they had announced that Carrie was going to be a three season take on a wider Stephen King universe, I think people probably would have been like, but you're going to do the prom in the first season, right?

• 57:46Speaker 07

  Right.

• 57:47Chris Ryan?

  That's the thing with Carrie is it's such a perfect dark diamond of a story of like this person gets pushed beyond the limit and then the consequences are so drastic.

• 57:57Speaker 07

  Right.

• 57:58Chris Ryan?

  And it has such a powerful conclusion that to end it in a different way and honestly to make some pretty huge authorial choices in terms of like, what was in Carrie's control and what was in this other character's control.

• 58:14Speaker 07

  Carrie kind of innocent in this version, which I don't know that I wholly, I'm like, I'm compelled by a lot of what he's doing here specifically, I would say, and maybe we disagree on this, but like that Chris is almost like a, like co protagonist of the story, Chris the bully, right?

• 58:30Chris Ryan?

  Chris is my favorite part of the show.

• 58:31Speaker 07

  Okay, great. I agree. Like I think, I think Mike Flanagan looking at the story of Carrie and saying, okay, you know Carrie, we know Carrie, we know what happened to Carrie to get her here. But what happened with Chris to get her to a place where she would dump a bucket of blood on, on a girl's head at prom? Like what drives a human being to do something like that? And so Chris is not innocent by any means inside of this, but sort of let's figure out the psychology of a person like that. I think that's like a really interesting avenue that he's journeying down.

• 58:59Chris Ryan?

  They spend like almost 40% of the show on Chris, it seems like, you know, with her family life, with like all of like the complications with her father being in prison. And I thought Alison Thornton was really quite excellent as someone who's, you know, at once an alpha in her school, but dating kind of like a bad boy and has a father in prison and is kind of at various points got nothing to lose, even though it seems like she has everything to lose.

• 59:24Speaker 07

  Right.

• 59:25Chris Ryan?

  And, you know, Carrie, Carrie is like a story that like, I actually don't like particularly love watching long form bullying as like, as like a, as a plot point, you know what I mean? But this, I think there was just enough extra stuff and maybe soap opera melodrama stuff in this story and in this telling of the story that it, it had, it really worked for me.

• 59:49Speaker 07

  Well, there's a thing with, you know, I'm not a Stephen King expert by any stretch of the imagination, so, you know, please send your emails where you will, but like King and bullying, I've always slightly bumped on it because he just, he creates these bullies that are so unbelievably evil. And like, I guess from the point of view of a child, like that's what it feels like. But I, I often bump when we get these absolutely sociopathic children characters in a lot of his stories, like in It or something like, they're, they're violent, they're all these things. And like, yes, supernatural stuff happens in all of Stephen King, but I'm like, the bullying I've always bumped on. So, so to take us inside of Chris's psychology to, to have some empathy for her, to have

• 1:00:32Speaker 07

  all these moments where it's like, where could she have turned the other way? Where could this have gone the other way? There's this lengthy sort of mediation section of the show where like her family and Carrie's family and the school administration are sitting down. It's just sort of like, we almost get there, just like a number of times, but we're barreling towards prom and we all know that it's not going to work out, but it's, it almost gets there.

• 1:00:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, because Carrie gives this like big speech trying to convince people to do prom and they're like, okay, yeah. There's also a lot of stuff in this that King couldn't have imagined, which is cyberbullying. And down to Chris making sock puppet accounts and burners or whatever.

• 1:01:09Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:01:10Chris Ryan?

  And, you know, essentially like harassing one teacher to suicide and harassing Carrie to the point of no return, obviously.

• 1:01:18Speaker 07

  That's a, that's a really weird, I mean, I, I know that you didn't watch maybe every single episode, but that's like

• 1:01:23Chris Ryan?

  I checked, like I, like there were a couple that I was like, okay, got it. And then went to the end of the episode just to do it for this, for this pod.

• 1:01:29Speaker 07

  That's another side example of something that I, that I don't fully know that I understand why it's there, which is Ro Kholi's character, Ro Kholi, who's been in a bunch of Mike Flanagan shows. His, his teacher character is like a pedophile at the end of the day. And so the argument is like, Chris bullying him was good actually because it exposed pedophilia. It's very confusing, the messaging behind that storyline. But yeah, so it's just one of those, like the, the interior lives of the teachers is something that the show is, gets into.

• 1:02:01Chris Ryan?

  Dejordanne, who's like in the book, is kind of like in and out of Carrie, but like saves her from the first like incident and then is at the prom.

• 1:02:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:09Chris Ryan?

  But ever mid-thunder plays her in the show.

• 1:02:10Speaker 07

  Right. And so she's, she's like a significant character. There's a great scene earlier in the season when that character, like there are three teachers at happy hour and they're talking about the kids and she's talking about how like annoying she finds Carrie. But like how guilty she feels about that, but just sort of like snap out of it, Carrie. I thought that was like a really good scene, but then there's just some other avenues where I'm just like, if we had tightened this up a bit, I think this could have been an absolute banger.

• 1:02:35Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I mean, so like Flanagan directs four episodes, the first two and the last two.

• 1:02:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:02:40Chris Ryan?

  The last two are, I think a tour de force in a lot of ways. So to Joe's point, the framing device either will or won't work for you, but what you can't say is that it wasn't a swing. And then it wasn't like, I have this idea, you know, so rather than have Carrie kill her own mother, this interviewer who is also powerful does it. And, you know, like the end of the series, I actually like, I have never gotten to the end of like a Carrie story and been like, what's, what's the next day for like this whole situation?

• 1:03:12Speaker 07

  Let's carry on to next.

• 1:03:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. And like now it is kind of fascinating, although I wonder how much he'll do this in conjunction with King or whether this is just like a brave new world going for, for Mike Flanagan. He has said he sees three seasons and that he has a story he wants to tell. I don't know whether or not it is in the same universe as Doctor Sleep. I don't know whether it's in the same universe as, you know, the mist that he is making, or whether, like, how it rubs up against Welcome to Derry or what, but it's really an interesting gambit.

• 1:03:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Chris Ryan?

  And I kind of like that he, you know, he's also got Exorcist Martyrs, which is coming out in March.

• 1:03:53Chris Ryan?

  And that he has kind of just embraced this, like, they're gonna make me do this anyway with the IP plays. So what if I kind of made it into my thing rather than?

• 1:04:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, you and I, I mean, you and I both, I think, liked Clayface more than we thought we would. And Flanagan, that was Flanagan's, like, project that he pitched. It eventually sort of gotten taken away from him. But like, he wrote the original, like, he pitched it. It's why it's part of the earliest slate that this James Gunn administration of the D C U is doing. And there are definitely kernels of a classic Mike Flanagan.

• 1:04:27Speaker 07

  Bad things happen to good people, kind of storytelling in there that I, that I think is part of what I really responded to in Clayface, a movie I did not expect to like as much as I did. There is something in the melancholy of a Flanagan story that I just always respond to. And, you know, varying degrees of success, but like, I'm always in for something that's there.

• 1:04:51Chris Ryan?

  The durational aspect of it is kind of funny, because like, his shows feel long to me.

• 1:04:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Chris Ryan?

  But they wind up really, really hitting, somewhat because of the length, somewhat because like, if you do three hours waiting for that jump scare and then you get it, just the same way as if you do like, five or six hours waiting for prom.

• 1:05:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:05:11Chris Ryan?

  And then she starts waving and blowing up cell phones in people's faces.

• 1:05:15Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Chris Ryan?

  It's fucking incredible. Like, when they finally do try, they don't do it in this sustained, unrelenting way that De Palma kind of does it. It's more fractured because it's being told by many people.

• 1:05:26Speaker 07

  And I think that's the intentional, like, I can't do De Palma.

• 1:05:30Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30Speaker 07

  So let me try to figure out a different way to tell this story.

• 1:05:35Chris Ryan?

  Let me tell you a little bit about Crystal Lake.

• 1:05:36Speaker 07

  Please.

• 1:05:36Chris Ryan?

  You watched the first episode?

• 1:05:38Speaker 07

  I did.

• 1:05:38Chris Ryan?

  This, as I mentioned to Andy earlier, is being touted as the fourth highest debut season ever on Peacock.

• 1:05:44Speaker 07

  Okay, what are the other contenders?

• 1:05:46Chris Ryan?

  I don't know.

• 1:05:47Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:05:48Chris Ryan?

  But.

• 1:05:48Speaker 07

  Traitors?

• 1:05:48Chris Ryan?

  This has been, I, I think this is, this show has done very well. And I think it is got, I believe it has a second season. The entire reason to watch this is Linda Cardellini. If you are a Linda Cardellini fan, this is a M V P season for her. It just doesn't necessarily feel super like Friday the 13th to me. But unlike the source material for Carrie, where you're like, wow, what an interesting novel, and what an interesting, like, gambit from King to do this and investigate, like, what it's like to be, you know, looked down upon in society, or whatever, like, was motivating his Carrie book. Like, there's nothing in Friday the 13th, the movies, that suggests we need the Pamela Voorhees story to get to this point.

• 1:06:31Chris Ryan?

  Like, it's so cut and dry in Friday the 13th, that this is a woman who's upset that her son died and is terrorizing this camp. And then the son takes over the terrorizing.

• 1:06:41Chris Ryan?

  What did you think of the first episode?

• 1:06:44Chris Ryan?

  Like, were you compelled to keep watching?

• 1:06:46Speaker 07

  Kind of, because, so, I didn't know what to expect at all, other than you seemed excited.

• 1:06:53Chris Ryan?

  Do you like the Friday the 13th movies?

• 1:06:55Speaker 07

  Enough.

• 1:06:56Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:56Speaker 07

  I guess.

• 1:06:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 07

  I love Linda Cardellini, though. But, I mean, both Carrie and Crystal Lake made me think about that, do you remember the Patton Oswalt stand-up where he's talking about the Star Wars prequel?

• 1:07:10Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:13Speaker 07

  He does his, like, George Lucas impression. He's like, what if Darth Vader was a little kid? And he's like, I don't want to see the little kid version of this. So it's just sort of like this, you know, enduring, I just praised Mike Flanagan for it with Chris, like, what makes someone dump a bucket of blood on someone's head? Like, what makes Pamela Voorhees chop a bunch of teenagers?

• 1:07:32Chris Ryan?

  We know.

• 1:07:32Speaker 07

  We already know. Linda Cardellini is fantastic.

• 1:07:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Speaker 07

  Right? Amazing, the kid who plays Jason, endearing. And I really like.

• 1:07:43Chris Ryan?

  Not, I don't know if I needed Jason humanized to this point, but yeah.

• 1:07:46Speaker 07

  I mean, that's the question. William Catlett, who plays Levon, the, the chief of police, I loved him.

• 1:07:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:54Speaker 07

  And his whole, like, investment in her, and sort of, he's interested in her, fancies her, or whatever. And so the fact that he's going to be paying closer attention to her when she starts killing more people, I don't know, she kills two entire people in this first episode.

• 1:08:10Chris Ryan?

  Yes, she gets after it this season.

• 1:08:11Speaker 07

  A, a bag of blood explodes at one point. That seemed pretty Friday the 13th-y to me. But the episode ends, the first episode ends with a pair of mobsters show up.

• 1:08:22Chris Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:08:22Speaker 07

  They've got a, a, a bag of syringes, right? And, and they're, they're, because she has been on the run with Jason. And the question is, you know, the town doesn't know what you are, not who you are, but what you are. And then we get this sort of Project Argonaut, Project Treadstone-esque thing. So all of a sudden, it's like, I was compelled, Chris, by that mystery.

• 1:08:45Chris Ryan?

  It's not unlike what they did with the first Godzilla reboot movie that was like 14, or whatever, the one that Gareth Evans did.

• 1:08:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:08:55Chris Ryan?

  Where it's, like, actually about corporate conspiracy is what's behind Godzilla a little bit more than just, I mean, obviously, there's like, a lot to Godzilla that's like, basically prehistoric. But the point is, is that they took this story, and since you have basically nothing to go on, and I also feel like we are in this weird moment of, with so many mergers and acquisitions and like, changeovers and who's running what shop, I kind of feel like there's a little no lifeguard on duty feeling to some TV now, or to entertainment, where it's just like, yeah, yeah, I mean, like, you, you guys, go ahead and make that.

• 1:09:35Speaker 07

  You're saying all the TV execs are off somewhere, like, fucking in a, in a cabin while they should be watching?

• 1:09:41Chris Ryan?

  Maybe, and perhaps, you know, David Ellison is Jason Voorhees, and he's gonna come regulate soon, but it's more like, I don't really know, like, the Friday the 13th rights themselves have been relatively disputed. This is not unlike the Sons of the Lambs property, where it's like, I don't think they really can do anything, where they can't make it as a movie, because it's so disputed.

• 1:10:02Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:10:02Chris Ryan?

  But the TV rights are.

• 1:10:04Speaker 07

  I was looking into this a little bit, like, Brian Fuller, who was on this project for so long, said it.

• 1:10:08Chris Ryan?

  Since 22.

• 1:10:09Speaker 07

  Yeah. And then just thinking of, like, what the Brian Fuller version of this is.

• 1:10:13Chris Ryan?

  I know.

• 1:10:14Speaker 07

  Brian Fuller has been fired enough times that I'm pretty sure it's Brian Fuller's fault that he gets fired all the time, but.

• 1:10:20Chris Ryan?

  But he's very good at talking, and had talked up this series to the point where I was like, you're gonna have like, an episode that's on a frozen camp, Crystal Lake? And it's just a chase episode?

• 1:10:30Speaker 07

  Sounds pretty sick.

• 1:10:31Chris Ryan?

  I was pretty into it.

• 1:10:32Speaker 07

  As a huge Hannibal fan, like, I was excited for, for that idea. Or the Kevin Williamson, like, Dawson's Creek-esque sort of Crystal Lake thing, you know?

• 1:10:40Chris Ryan?

  Development here, so this has been in the works, I mean, forever.

• 1:10:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Chris Ryan?

  In 2022, Brian Fuller was announced as like, the showrunner. And Kevin Williamson, who wrote Scream, was gonna be on, like, at least write an episode, if not.

• 1:10:52Speaker 07

  And Dawson's Creek.

• 1:10:53Chris Ryan?

  And, and Dawson's Creek. And they were even rumored, or it was, it was reported, at least, that Adrian King, who plays Alice in the first movie, was rumored to be returning in some capacity. So we've connected tissues to the movies, like, it seemed like it was gonna be maybe more of a sequel prequel, or maybe, maybe Adrian King was gonna be playing a different character, I don't know. And then, at one point, this may have been after Fuller left, Charlize Theron was, Theron was talked about as Pamela, which would have been nuts.

• 1:11:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Chris Ryan?

  And now, at one point, Nick Antosco was.

• 1:11:28Speaker 07

  Of Cape Fear fame?

• 1:11:29Chris Ryan?

  Of Cape Fear fame, was involved. And he came and went, and then Brad Caleb Kane, who is an actor, who, as you pointed out to me yesterday, was the voice of Aladdin?

• 1:11:40Speaker 07

  The singing voice of Aladdin.

• 1:11:42Chris Ryan?

  The singing voice of Aladdin.

• 1:11:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Chris Ryan?

  And has done work on Welcome to Derry. He is the showrunner, and Linda Cardellini is Pamela. And it is essentially, takes place in the, it's the Rogue One, I would say, to Star Wars, of Friday the 13th.

• 1:11:56Speaker 07

  I was having trouble with the timeline, and then I just decided to, like, sort of give up on it a little bit.

• 1:12:00Chris Ryan?

  I think they de-canonized it, because in the movie.

• 1:12:04Speaker 07

  He goes in the, in the lake in 59.

• 1:12:06Chris Ryan?

  Yes, and she starts killing pretty quickly after that.

• 1:12:08Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:12:09Chris Ryan?

  And then disappears every time the camp shuts down, and comes back every time the camp gets rebuilt.

• 1:12:14Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:12:16Chris Ryan?

  So by the Friday the 13th, the Christie's are, like, opening Camp Crystal Lake for the first time, and Pamela is incensed by this.

• 1:12:24Speaker 07

  And it's 70 something.

• 1:12:26Chris Ryan?

  79.

• 1:12:26Speaker 07

  79.

• 1:12:27Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. This is half, like, post Hippie Free Love. There's a plotline in Crystal Lake about like, a, like, basically like, a Manson family that's living on the camp. There is a lot of stuff about journalism with the sheriff's sister.

• 1:12:43Speaker 07

  Sister, yeah.

• 1:12:44Chris Ryan?

  Investigating why Pam, who Pamela is, basically, and why these guys were after her.

• 1:12:49Speaker 07

  I love that it was, she was on the typewriter at his house in the first episode, and she's like.

• 1:12:53Chris Ryan?

  Just banging out some copy.

• 1:12:54Speaker 07

  Banging out a copy, some copy, and she's like, I gotta file this tonight. And I was like, what?

• 1:12:58Chris Ryan?

  I actually have a note, where it's like, how?

• 1:12:59Speaker 07

  Are you writing this down to the?

• 1:13:03Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. As the show progresses, and this will get into heavy spoiler territory, both for you and for our listeners, it's discovered that Jason is the progeny of Pamela and a man named Elias.

• 1:13:16Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:13:17Chris Ryan?

  Elias is played by Hamish Linklater.

• 1:13:18Speaker 07

  What?

• 1:13:21Speaker 07

  Now I'm back in.

• 1:13:22Chris Ryan?

  And he works at a company called Bellflower, which is like Dow or DuPont.

• 1:13:26Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:13:27Chris Ryan?

  And they are trying to, I guess, inoculate or save humanity from nuclear war. And what they're investigating is what can we learn from the genes and DNA of cockroaches that we can apply to future generations of humans? Not so that they become cockroaches, but so that they have the survival.

• 1:13:51Speaker 07

  Sure. Is Jason part cockroach?

• 1:13:56Chris Ryan?

  They've done stuff to him to make him mimic cockroaches.

• 1:13:59Speaker 07

  Yes, place cockroach DNA.

• 1:14:00Chris Ryan?

  So that's why he is strong, that's why he cannot be killed, but he is also, you know, has had a lot of difficulties.

• 1:14:07Speaker 07

  Do you not wish you had been in the room the day that they were like, you know how Jason keeps coming back? What if he's part cockroach?

• 1:14:13Chris Ryan?

  It's interesting what they choose they need to explain versus what they're like, yeah, whatever.

• 1:14:18Speaker 07

  Yada, yada, yada, cockroach, yeah.

• 1:14:20Chris Ryan?

  You know, there is a alternative version of this that focuses more on the stuff that kind of gets brought up in Friday the 13th, four, five, and six, which is not unlike Carrie, but is about this boy Tommy who has psychic powers and has perhaps been like, you know, imprinted on by Jason at various points. And those are my three favorite, that's my favorite run of the movies.

• 1:14:44Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:14:44Chris Ryan?

  But it really is like, I'm a middle-aged man trying to like divine narrative logic out of films that were made explicitly for the purpose of titillating like teenagers.

• 1:14:57Speaker 07

  Teenage sex and gore.

• 1:14:59Chris Ryan?

  And death, I can't, my asthma.

• 1:15:02Chris Ryan?

  So like the idea of Crystal Lake making sense, the fact that you get to the end of it and you're like, okay, I guess like this woman was essentially.

• 1:15:10Speaker 07

  Wait, is episode seven cockroach reveal?

• 1:15:12Chris Ryan?

  Episode seven is Pam sits down with the sheriff and is like, okay, I'll tell you who I am. And it is a flashback episode.

• 1:15:19Speaker 07

  Starring Hamish Linklater.

• 1:15:20Chris Ryan?

  Starring Hamish Linklater as this Dr. Elias, who is using his own children, child, as of like a lab rat for future experimentation.

• 1:15:30Speaker 07

  Which Hamish Linklater bad dad flashback episode is better, this one or Widows Bay?

• 1:15:35Chris Ryan?

  It's definitely Widows Bay. This one is probably closer to his weird appearance in Whisper Man that happened this year. I want to know what Hamish Linklater is like, what the plan is, because he seems like he's just like, I'll come through and work for a day or two and it'll be awesome. In any case, uh, this is such a departure. That it actually probably sets this show up to be relatively successful going forward because this is also going to be renewed and Brad Kane has talked about. My idea for the show is that it's kind of Twin Peaks-y and that it is about the town around Camp.

• 1:16:12Speaker 07

  Okay.

• 1:16:12Chris Ryan?

  Crystal Lake and the weird characters and this evil that's in the woods, which is now Pam and Jason. But I, you know, Pamela only lives so much longer canonically.

• 1:16:25Speaker 07

  Lynda Cardellini is almost here.

• 1:16:28Chris Ryan?

  So I think Lynda Cardellini's got one season left and then maybe it's Big Jay for the third season, but that will be happening, you know.

• 1:16:35Speaker 07

  What if they get Hamish Linklater to also play Big Jay?

• 1:16:38Chris Ryan?

  He meets a dark end, you know?

• 1:16:41Speaker 07

  Right, but I'm just saying, like, he could come back as Big Jay himself.

• 1:16:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Speaker 07

  What's interesting is like some of the, because there's this whole like, she doesn't believe Jason has drowned, right? Like he disappears in the water, they can't find him.

• 1:16:55Chris Ryan?

  Nobody has the body.

• 1:16:55Speaker 07

  There's a, an old vet who's like, the body has never come back from the lake. Great spooky horror movie guy moment.

• 1:17:03Speaker 07

  But she has taught him survival. She's like, these woods will be yours. He knows all these like survival techniques, knows major spoilers, but this is kind of the plot of The God of the Woods, the like upcoming, there's a lot of overlapping DNA that's like very surprising to me.

• 1:17:20Speaker 07

  But I guess my question, maybe this goes back to your whole like the lifeguards aren't on duty. I was so confused how Nick Antoska got Cape Fear, like in terms of like juicy properties to get to do. Like no, no major shade on Nick Antoska, I was just like, didn't see what in his CV made him sort of like the guy to go to for Cape Fear. And for Brad Kane, I'm like, I don't, you know, like did some work on Welcome to Derry and then is running the Friday 13th IP that, you know, Brian Fuller and Kevin Williamson and other people have tried to get their hands on, like.

• 1:17:53Chris Ryan?

  It seems to me that for these kinds of jobs, I can't think of anything outside, I guess Cape Fear is a really good example of this. Friday the 13th, to some extent Carrie. The hardest part about it, and the thing that I think if you were pitching this, that you were most valued for, is like, can you generate enough story outside of like the obvious Carrie's got to go to prom, we've got to see this, we've got to see Jason hack someone to death.

• 1:18:18Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:18:19Chris Ryan?

  And you get both in each show, but.

• 1:18:21Speaker 07

  We're living the dream.

• 1:18:22Chris Ryan?

  Nobody is going to make like a three-episode Carrie or a three-episode Crystal Lake. You know, they want to have some sort of like chunky piece of property that they're going to be running for a while and that they can iterate off of. And it's a pretty good idea. I don't, I find the writing on the show and the dialogue and the characterizations to be a little bit like rote, so it's not like exciting. And the kills, you know, Brad Kane's talked about their, a lot of practical effects. They felt pretty digital to me, but I guess maybe like I'm wrong. There, there's something.

• 1:18:57Speaker 07

  The bear.

• 1:18:58Chris Ryan?

  They're different than the one, they're different than the kills in Friday the 13th, which feel very handmade, you know? And these are a little bit more like, what if this guy's head goes half off, you know?

• 1:19:09Speaker 07

  Her taking the machete to that guy's face in the first episode.

• 1:19:12Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:19:12Speaker 07

  Looked pretty great, I thought. I also enjoyed, for what it's worth, the incredibly cheesy throwback to the original like opening title credit font moment.

• 1:19:25Chris Ryan?

  The opening credits are incredible on this show.

• 1:19:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, like really, really good. But yeah, I guess I'm just, I hear what you're saying about generating story. I'm just sort of like, and again, no, no shade to Brad Kane, who is great as the singing voice of Aladdin, but I'm just sort of like, wow, I just don't understand a lot of decisions that are being made in terms of like who's doing this. Mike Flanagan makes all the sense in the world, you know, given his body of work.

• 1:19:48Chris Ryan?

  And I think Amazon was like happy to buy into the Mike Flanagan project. I think this Friday the 13th as a TV series, I don't know that there was like, I'm sure there was a line, but I don't know if it was like they're trying to choose between like, you know, Terrence Winter and somebody else when it comes to like showrunners and stuff. So I, I, I think ultimately my message about these two shows though is like, good job because these could be really bad, these could be, they could feel completely pro forma, but like the, the amount of like either genre twists or actual story build outs that they put into these, I think I was impressed by both, but to varying levels.

• 1:20:32Speaker 07

  I also think just the way they cast it, like Lynda Cardellini can carry a lot just on her own. And then as we already mentioned, like the, the young cast of Carrie, Alison Thornton, Summer Howell, who plays Carrie, I think are great. Samantha Sloyan, who plays Carrie, Mrs. White, who is a Flanagan regular, like his, his whole Flanagan verse regular cast members, like it doesn't work. And then like half the cast of Battlestar Galactica is hearing cameos for some reason.

• 1:20:58Chris Ryan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:20:58Speaker 07

  It's like very strange.

• 1:21:00Chris Ryan?

  Katie Sakoff, Trisha Hellfer, Michael Truco.

• 1:21:03Speaker 07

  But then like a bunch of them are just like show up in random cameo, like as like concerned parents in like a montage, like a bunch of other, Trisha Hellfer's there. Like I'm just sort of like, what's happening, Battlestar?

• 1:21:14Chris Ryan?

  I guess he's just a huge Battlestar fan. He said that like.

• 1:21:16Speaker 07

  Among us, you know?

• 1:21:17Chris Ryan?

  Because I think somebody was in one of his shows and he went, oh, it was Truco's in Hush.

• 1:21:22Speaker 07

  In Midnight, oh, yeah.

• 1:21:23Chris Ryan?

  And he went and showed Hush and like he had the Battlestar cast come over and Flanagan like freaked out because I think it's one of his favorite shows, but.

• 1:21:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, because Sakoff is in Oculus and then Truco's in Midnight Mass and other things. Yeah, so.

• 1:21:35Chris Ryan?

  Katie Sakoff, pretty scary in this, in Carrie, as Amanda, the mother of Emmeline, right?

• 1:21:41Speaker 07

  Right. Another girl with a shine.

• 1:21:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, okay, so you want, you're excited for two more seasons of Carrie?

• 1:21:49Chris Ryan?

  If it's about like Carrie and Firestarter rolling through the world, sure.

• 1:21:53Speaker 07

  I got excited about the idea. I also wrote Firestarter in my note. Like I got excited about the, and like, I don't know, do we team up with Christine in the car? Like what are, what are we doing?

• 1:22:01Chris Ryan?

  I mean, I don't know what kind of investigations going on in, is it Chamberlain is the name of the town?

• 1:22:06Speaker 07

  Maybe.

• 1:22:08Chris Ryan?

  Where they're like, okay, so like what happened here?

• 1:22:09Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:22:10Chris Ryan?

  We have a mass murder on our hands.

• 1:22:13Chris Ryan?

  But obviously Kate Siegel's character is going to be a major part of the next two seasons. And if Kate Siegel, and I don't think we see Katie Sakoff's body, she is stopped by opposing cult members, but is not, we don't ever see like her die, I don't think.

• 1:22:28Speaker 07

  Right. Delaney Hales, who's in, who I know from Interview with the Vampire, is like plays one of the young cult members.

• 1:22:36Speaker 07

  So yeah, seeing Kate Siegel, Kate Siegel, who usually has a much bigger role in the Flanagan projects, I was, I was suspicious when she shows up as the interviewer and I was like, why is she, it's planting the seed for something bigger. And similarly, Delaney Hales, I was like, she's got to be doing something bigger going forward. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to play with in, in the King verse. It's just interesting to me to be doing this potential sort of King mix and match so close to Hulu doing Castle Rock, which was like a similar, let's play with a bunch of different characters from the King verse, but like it's a rich and storied universe. Cocaine wrote a lot of books, you know? So there's a lot to go on there.

• 1:23:15Chris Ryan?

  And I think that there's like probably a feeling that those two series, Derry and Castle Rock, were similar efforts to capture a vibe and then also bring in tertiary characters at various points. And Derry is like got a lot of Pennywise stuff in it. But I think that it's just kind of become like a modern folklore and people can take those, like you can take Carrie and you can take Shining and you can take these things. And if you want like Flanagan to weave them all together, I think people are here for the, the name on the front of the book, you know what I mean? Not just for like, oh yeah, Derry, I care about like the fact that all these stories take place in the same place. Like it doesn't seem like any, like people are really vibing to that.

• 1:23:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Chris Ryan?

  I don't know.

• 1:24:00Speaker 07

  They're here for the font, honestly, that they recognize.

• 1:24:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, and to see Carrie, to see a girl with like a prom queen tiara on the promo and you're just like, like Bill, like all of us are like, I can't wait to get to prom.

• 1:24:13Chris Ryan?

  I gotta get to prom.

• 1:24:14Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:24:14Chris Ryan?

  Black prom.

• 1:24:14Speaker 07

  Let's do it.

• 1:24:15Chris Ryan?

  Uh, Joe, thank you so much for joining me.

• 1:24:17Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:24:18Chris Ryan?

  Uh, thanks to Kai and Kaya. We'll be back on Monday and everybody have a great weekend.

• 1:24:30Speaker 06

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• 1:24:41Andy Greenwald?

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• 1:24:42Speaker 06

  Even our news is uplifting.

• 1:24:44Andy Greenwald?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 1:24:45Speaker 06

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