BONUS PREVIEW: "Primetime" gets it

Sit down and take a seat with Ryan & Grant. They discuss the recent release of Primetime as a follow-up to this week’s episode. Want to hear the rest of this conversation? Or ad-free episodes, bonuses & exclusives, and access to our members-only Discord? Sign up for a membership for 6.66 bucks a month at https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Can you just explain to me what you're doing here?

• 0:02Ryan Broderick?

  Why don't you sit down, take a seat. Uh, can you please sit down and take a seat?

• 0:06Speaker 00

  I'm already seated, but I will sit down to discuss a movie, Primetime, for May 24.

• 0:13Ryan Broderick?

  It's a great movie. I have a lot to say about it. I have a lot of thoughts about it.

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Can I, can I intro the show first?

• 0:18Ryan Broderick?

  Yes, you can. You can, you can intro the show.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And today, a very special bonus, where we're talking about a movie we both liked, Primetime. I'm Grant Irving, joining me, Ryan Broadbent.

• 0:52Ryan Broderick?

  Thank you for having me on my show. I feel like this is a very, I feel like this can easily go into the sort of canon of American weirdness that we talk about on this show a lot. Eddington and this movie have a lot in common. Panic World, Panic World has a lot in common with it. Backrooms has a lot in common with it. Um, I thought the use of sort of analog horror in this movie was really interesting. And I'm really happy I saw it in a theater, actually, because the movie is doing something to people emotionally that is awesome when the payoff finally hits.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  Do you want to say what that is, or do you want to hold it?

• 1:29Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah, I mean, there's not much that happens in the movie. It's just like, if you're expecting a play-by-play, like, it would actually be very boring. The movie is basically about the moment where To Catch a Predator gets added to NBC's Primetime slot. And they're competing with Lost. And the movie is building towards, if you listen to our To Catch a Predator episode, you'll already know about this, it's building towards the famous suicide of the district attorney in Texas. And the movie is sort of told through a couple of different characters' points of view. And it's making you, I don't know, I went into it like, pre-repulsed. I found like, the people involved in making the show

• 2:10Ryan Broderick?

  pretty reprehensible. My theater, I think, did not. And my theater was laughing a lot at the different pedophiles that were sort of embarrassed and harassed and then arrested and, you know, whatever, on the show. And it wasn't until they get to the disabled man in Texas. And when he comes out of the car, my entire audience like, audibly groaned. Everyone got real uncomfortable, I think, with how much they've been having fun with the movie up until that point.

• 2:42Speaker 00

  It's interesting that you say Eddington, because I was listening to an Ari Aster interview about, about that. And, you know, spoilers for Eddington, a movie that-

• 2:52Ryan Broderick?

  We've talked about many times on the show.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  The ending where he's paralyzed and his mother-in-law is having sex in bed with him next to him and, and like, he's suffering dignity after indignity, that just kind of seemed like, uh, it's funny for me to make you sit through this joke so long. Ari has said in an interview that he's like, "Do you feel empathy for this, like, guy who sucks now? How about now? How about now?" Like, can you still recognize him as human?

• 3:20Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 00

  Even though, like, obviously Ari Aster made a reprehensible character who is terrible? And it's like, but like-

• 3:27Ryan Broderick?

  You're talking about Pedro Pascal's character?

• 3:29Speaker 00

  Yeah. And Pedro Pascal, personally.

• 3:31Ryan Broderick?

  As a person, yeah.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  But like, how much do you enjoy seeing them suffer? And what does that say about you? The both, the questions are being asked in both places.

• 3:41Ryan Broderick?

  We need to go deeper into this because, okay, so in my, when I watched the movie, I was like, okay, the movie is trying to say something really interesting. And it's, and it's saying it in a couple of different ways. So first, you have Chris Hansen effectively grooming Decoy Dan. Like, their whole relationship is Chris Hansen trying to convince Skylar Gazondo, who's so good in this movie, that what he is doing is righteous and holy and good. You also have Chris Hansen, in a lot of ways, being exploited by Andy Bender, the producer, until it flips on her and she almost leaves the show at the end. And then you also

• 4:26Ryan Broderick?

  have the National Enquirer exploiting and sort of, like, stalking Chris Hansen. And so, like, the movie is, and then obviously you have the To Catch a Predator crew, like, hunting human beings, effectively. Pedophiles, of course. So the movie, from my point of view, is like, trying to tell this, like, very complicated story about how, like, I mean, the reason it made me think of Eddington is because the very end of the movie is Andy Bender, the producer, being like, "Well, we need to get the interview. We're gonna strap cameras on your guns." And so, the movie is sort of telling this thing about, like, justice and exploitation and the media. And all of these worlds sort of cave in on themselves

• 5:11Ryan Broderick?

  at the very last scene, where it is literally a TV film crew operating in tandem with the police, trying to turn guns into cameras, or cameras into guns. All of the different layers of exploitation completely collapse on each other. And, and I thought that was just, I don't know, I've been thinking about it for the last 24 hours. I think it's a, it's an amazing idea. Eddington is the closest I've seen to something making a similar point of, like, the act of filming and the act of turning someone else into content, turning someone else into media, is, is equal to violence. And that eventually, they become the same thing. And I want to put a pin in it, because I do want to come back to what I think is the most, the most incredible part of the movie, which is, um, the cosmic

• 5:56Ryan Broderick?

  horror demon sequence, which we will, we can talk about, but like, because I think that's another important part of this.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  Which direction do you, you know what?

• 6:05Ryan Broderick?

  I said I wasn't gonna do a play-by-play, but it's probably the easiest. So like, the show, the, the, the movie opens, basically, with To Catch a Predator already existing. It's 20, it's 2006, it's a ratings hit, and they meet with Jeff Zucker, who's played by Jeff Zucker, um, who was shot very, have you seen Network in a while? He's shot very much like the executive from Network, which I, I love that. And like, you know, his opening line is like, um, "I just want to let you know, like, I don't like your show." And, and, and then there's the whole thing with Stone Phillips, who's sort of portrayed as like this gigachad, real journalist.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  You can feel the-

• 6:45Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  The envy rating off of him as he's like-

• 6:49Ryan Broderick?

  Right.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  "I'm about to go to Afghanistan."

• 6:51Ryan Broderick?

  Right. He's a sideshow, and Stone Phillips is like a real reporter.

• 6:55Speaker 00

  Let's pause there for one second.

• 6:56Ryan Broderick?

  In fact, in fact, it happened to me. Basically, for people who aren't like, in newsrooms or in media, there are the people who discover something popular. And there are the people who are handsome enough, or well-educated enough, or rich enough, or well-connected enough, to do the thing that's good. And every newsroom on earth has that dynamic of the people who basically put kindling into the furnace, and keep the lights on, and do the slop that no one wants to do. And then there are people who are allowed to do the real stuff. And I think this movie is like, very accurate, where it's like, it's, it's like, very dangerous in journalism, I think, in media, in entertainment, to find something ugly and, you know, emotionally

• 7:41Ryan Broderick?

  reactive, that people are drawn to. It's sort of the story of like, almost all social media creators right now, where it's like, they, they tap into something dark and ugly, and people like it, because people like that stuff sometimes. And then they're trapped doing that forever. And then, like, we see in this movie, they're forced to sort of come up with explanations for why they're doing it, and why it matters. And those explanations can become like, increasingly delusional, because it is really hard to sort of ignore that part of you for, for, for that long. And I think that's the story that Decoy Dan is kind of telling. He, you know, he enters into the movie early as this, like, as a

• 8:24Ryan Broderick?

  singing rent, um, into his tryout tape. And he becomes sort of the new decoy working with, um, working with Phoebe Bridgers, who's amazing in this movie. I mean, everyone's amazing in this movie. But like-

• 8:35Speaker 00

  The only character who is like, "I'm not going to, here's my, here's my limits. Here's what I'm not going to do. And if you cross these lines, like, I'm, I, I've made a negotiation with myself about what we're doing. I'm not hemming and hawing about it."

• 8:50Ryan Broderick?

  See, I didn't read her nearly as, as altruistic.

• 8:54Speaker 00

  Oh, I don't think it's altruistic. I, I think it's compromise. But, but she, but she goes like, she's like, "Here are my red lines."

• 9:00Ryan Broderick?

  Maybe. I mean, I, I have to watch it again, because like, there's something that she's doing. She goes into this, like, dead-eyed, sort of sociopathic thing. Like, she's portrayed as like, a straight-up sociopath. And she does seem to have, like, red lines, as you said. And so there's a sequence in the movie where she gets mad that they're selling merch. And one, part of, one of the pieces of merch is a bikini.

• 9:23Speaker 00

  It's a thong.

• 9:25Ryan Broderick?

  Yeah.

• 9:25Speaker 00

  I don't even think it's a bikini.

• 9:27Ryan Broderick?

  There's that great line where Chris Hansen's like, "What's a, what's a merch store?"

• 9:32Ryan Broderick?

  But there's, but the movie is trying to say something about her, too, because like, she, like, there's that really spooky sequence where she's teaching Decoy Dan, Skylar Gazondo, how to do it. And she's like, in mid-sentence, and then just drops into like, teenage boy voice on the phone.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:47Ryan Broderick?

  It's really unsettling. Like, her character is unsettling. She talks about how, like, she sees herself as an activist. But like, I'm not sure we're supposed to take that at face value either. I, like, her character's really interesting. And then there's the dynamic between her character and Matthew Mayer's Xavier, who's like, a vigilante, like, pedophile hunter character. And they have, they're, they're clearly supposed to be sort of offering two versions of this. And Xavier ends up winning in the end. The movie is like, doing really interesting things with, like, creating different angles through which to view this extremely complicated question of, like, is this TV show, is this genre

• 10:32Ryan Broderick?

  of entertainment inherently exploitative?

• 10:36Speaker 00

  If you'd like to listen to Ryan and I talk about a movie longer, patreon.com/panicworld, $6.66 a month. And, uh, there's other stuff, too. But like, thanks for listening. We'll be back with a full episode next week. Talk to you soon.