‘Spider-Noir’ Is Unsure of Itself. Plus, ‘Widow’s Bay’ E6-7, ‘Euphoria’ S3E7, and ‘Top Chef’ S23E12.

Chris and Andy talk about the controversy surrounding ‘MobLand’ (8:12) and their anticipation for the upcoming second seasons of ‘The Agency’ (15:43) and ‘Sugar’ (20:09). Then they discuss ‘Widow’s Bay’ Episodes 6-7 and the growing excitement around the show (25:26). Later, they react to the series premiere of ‘Spider-Noir,’ a superhero period drama starring Nicolas Cage (46:27). Finally, they touch on the penultimate episode of ‘Euphoria’ Season 3 (01:07:27) before breaking down ‘Top Chef’ S23E12 (01:16:49). Subscribe to the Ringer TV YouTube channel here for full episodes of The Watch and so much more! Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady Additional Video Supervision: Sarah Reddy Order and it will come. Like today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:35Chris Ryan?

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

• 1:06Speaker 02

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

• 1:12Chris Ryan?

  Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at theringer.com. And joining me in the studio, wondering if Hamish Linklater can play stretch four for the Sixers, it's Andy Greenwald.

• 1:26Andy Greenwald?

  Look at the way you wove it together.

• 1:28Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, all of our interests. Widows Bay, the Philadelphia 76ers.

• 1:31Andy Greenwald?

  Free agency.

• 1:32Chris Ryan?

  Andy, free agency. It's great to see you. Today on the menu. Let me tell you a little bit of how we do things at this restaurant.

• 1:38Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, great.

• 1:39Chris Ryan?

  It's small plates. They're meant to be shared. It's farm-to-table.

• 1:43Andy Greenwald?

  How many do we need per diner?

• 1:45Chris Ryan?

  We're gonna do the most recent two episodes of Widows Bay, which both came out this week.

• 1:49Andy Greenwald?

  I'm gonna stop you. Before you even start, we're gonna do the last four episodes of Widows Bay because we're not on the record together about any of them since episode three.

• 1:58Chris Ryan?

  Oh, so you obviously didn't listen to any of my monologuing.

• 2:01Andy Greenwald?

  No, I heard that you did it. I said, "We're not on the record."

• 2:04Chris Ryan?

  And we also are gonna talk about Spider Noir. We're gonna talk about the most recent episode of Euphoria and the most recent episode of Top Chef.

• 2:12Andy Greenwald?

  Mmm, man.

• 2:13Chris Ryan?

  I also have some news at the top, but it's been a minute. It's been a minute since I've seen your beautiful visage in person.

• 2:19Andy Greenwald?

  You've been traveling a lot.

• 2:21Chris Ryan?

  Not that much. Really? I mean, I took two trips within the United States.

• 2:25Andy Greenwald?

  Two trips within the United States within the last two weeks. That's traveling a lot.

• 2:29Chris Ryan?

  That is traveling a lot. I did it. Pacific Northwest and uh...

• 2:32Andy Greenwald?

  What are you trying to hide?

• 2:34Chris Ryan?

  What have I do? I'm just raising a lot of money, you know?

• 2:36Andy Greenwald?

  You're bundling.

• 2:37Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, exactly. Um, it's great to see you. You can reach us at thewatchatspotify.com. I noticed we just got a flood of new emails. Every once in a while, I gotta tell you, we're getting to the point where we might be able to do an Andy-only, Effingers-only mailbag.

• 2:51Andy Greenwald?

  Stop it.

• 2:51Chris Ryan?

  But it's all just people being like, "I'm gonna read Effingers, too."

• 2:55Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, well, there's a lot. I see a lot of gonna. I don't see a lot of actual, like, page turning. You know what I mean?

• 3:00Chris Ryan?

  Um, you can follow us on Instagram at thewatchpod underscore. You can watch us on YouTube at the Ringer- Dash TV channel where we're there with the Prestige TV pod. And you can watch us on Spotify where I hope you'll listen to us, but we're also available elsewhere where you want to listen to podcasts.

• 3:14Andy Greenwald?

  Is our email address, has anyone signed it up for any, like, ActBlue emails or recurring donations?

• 3:19Chris Ryan?

  No, doesn't seem like it. I mean, I do get a lot of, like, I feel like I've seen an uptick in, like, random PR emails where I'm like, "You don't know your audience." Like, "Would you guys be interested in covering the Ironman race?" But not, not Tony Stark, but like, guys who have to run, swim, and bike.

• 3:36Andy Greenwald?

  I thought it was gonna be Tony Stark versus, like, Ironheart. You know what I mean? Versus War Machine.

• 3:42Chris Ryan?

  I always, uh, kinda had a sneaking suspicion that I might be able to do an Ironman.

• 3:48Andy Greenwald?

  Okay, hold on. This is the earliest time I've ever closed my laptop.

• 3:51Chris Ryan?

  But just in the, "I can do all three things."

• 3:54Andy Greenwald?

  I had, you know what?

• 3:55Chris Ryan?

  But I can't, I don't know if I could, how long I could do them. Is there like a, like, an Ironman for softies? You know, like, Soft Batch?

• 4:03Andy Greenwald?

  Iron Boys? An Iron Boy competition where you get on a little tricycle?

• 4:08Chris Ryan?

  Does anybody know about an Iron Boy competition?

• 4:10Andy Greenwald?

  Wait, wait. When was the first time?

• 4:12Chris Ryan?

  Maybe it's on an island somewhere.

• 4:14Andy Greenwald?

  When was the first time, careful. The first time you ever learned about the Ironman competition?

• 4:19Chris Ryan?

  80s ESPN.

• 4:20Andy Greenwald?

  Right. So, basically, I wanna, I'm gonna ventriloquize this for you. I feel like we probably had a similar experience. Like, maybe you're home from school one day and you turn on the Ocho or ESPN dose at like 2:35 PM on a Tuesday.

• 4:32Chris Ryan?

  Dude, it was on flagship. They didn't always have college football, bro.

• 4:35Andy Greenwald?

  So you turn it on.

• 4:36Chris Ryan?

  They used to show some crazy shit.

• 4:37Andy Greenwald?

  And you would just see someone, like, weeping, running in a speedo.

• 4:43Andy Greenwald?

  You know, which is usually would be Cinemax at 11:30 PM on a Friday. But in this case, it was the middle of the day. And I also was entranced by this for exactly the reason you said. I can physically do those three actions.

• 4:55Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I was kind of like, it actually seems like it would be refreshing to take a dip after a long bike ride.

• 5:00Andy Greenwald?

  That's right. And you know what else I thought was really good about it? I thought the order was reasonable.

• 5:04Chris Ryan?

  So what is it? Goes swim, bike, run?

• 5:08Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I think that's what it was. Someone can Google that for us while we go here.

• 5:11Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean, like, honestly, the only thing that bothers me about it is like, wouldn't I get a little chilly on the bike? After getting out of the ocean?

• 5:16Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, because my only reference to this wasn't that sports were hard and I wasn't qualified to do them. It was, my favorite feeling isn't getting out of the ocean. I'd love to like dry for a little bit so I don't chafe. But 100% you have locked in on something that I haven't thought about in decades, which at no point did I think, I'll never be able to do that.

• 5:35Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:35Andy Greenwald?

  I was like, oh, that's something to put on my list.

• 5:37Chris Ryan?

  Well, also, I think as only children, we had no tutelage. Our fathers, they turned their backs on us at an early age.

• 5:44Andy Greenwald?

  Certainly athletically.

• 5:45Chris Ryan?

  But I didn't have an older brother to be like, this is how you bowl. So a lot of what I do, much like Natasha Henstrigen's species, is mimicry. You know? And so you see someone.

• 5:57Andy Greenwald?

  I thought you were gonna say is very sexual and violent at the end. But okay, your version works too.

• 6:03Chris Ryan?

  Um, I would watch a guy bowl on ESPN. And if there was a bowling birthday party, I would do like an elaborate, like, kind of fucking.

• 6:13Andy Greenwald?

  You would go for spin?

• 6:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I would be de Jesus and I would like throw a ball six lanes left because

• 6:19Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 6:20Chris Ryan?

  I'm not like a professional bowler and I'm not an Iron Man, but I probably would start really strong. The other thing, and I'm sorry to delay on, on the wide world of sports that we're gonna talk about today.

• 6:32Andy Greenwald?

  This is more interesting than the last two episodes of Euphoria.

• 6:34Chris Ryan?

  It makes it seem, I, I'm, I'm kind of under the impression that we've made like great leaps in protein intake in the last. Seven years.

• 6:41Andy Greenwald?

  Like you and Craig or like who?

• 6:43Chris Ryan?

  No, just like gels, bars, all those things.

• 6:46Andy Greenwald?

  Like you could put it into more.

• 6:47Chris Ryan?

  But did like guys back then, if they needed protein during like a race, like just eat turkey? Or what would they do?

• 6:54Andy Greenwald?

  The pace car for the Ironman triathlon was the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. And it would drive alongside the athletes and the athletes would take ham and salami and they would eat it. And then they would light a cigarette.

• 7:06Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 7:07Andy Greenwald?

  As they ran.

• 7:07Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Andy Greenwald?

  It was a purer time. Here's the secret. Everybody was fine.

• 7:12Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, no, I know.

• 7:13Andy Greenwald?

  Everybody was fine.

• 7:14Chris Ryan?

  Those guys all lived forever.

• 7:15Andy Greenwald?

  Did they?

• 7:16Chris Ryan?

  I don't know.

• 7:17Andy Greenwald?

  Their hearts exploded Maui.

• 7:20Andy Greenwald?

  And they were like, you're too old for this. And they're like, I'm 25.

• 7:23Chris Ryan?

  Well, there was that Dennis Leary bit for a while where it's always like joggers, joggers who die of heart attacks. Oh, no, that was about joggers that get hit by buses. Never mind.

• 7:32Andy Greenwald?

  You could, you could iterate.

• 7:34Chris Ryan?

  I could. I have a lot of, I feel, I feel like I have a Dennis Leary-esque quality to me sometimes.

• 7:39Andy Greenwald?

  You've both been in Boston.

• 7:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. I've been to Boston.

• 7:42Andy Greenwald?

  You're wearing denim. You secretly want to be a, a dramatic actor.

• 7:47Chris Ryan?

  I do. I do.

• 7:48Andy Greenwald?

  You love firemen. Should I stop?

• 7:50Chris Ryan?

  What do you want to start with news wise? So we have.

• 7:52Andy Greenwald?

  That was exhilarating. I don't care what we do now.

• 7:54Chris Ryan?

  Okay, so I have one thing for, for you, which is a new segment I'm introducing to the Watch Podcast.

• 8:00Andy Greenwald?

  And just, you know, for first time listeners, of which there, I'm sure there are zero. As with every other segment.

• 8:06Chris Ryan?

  This will be a consistent staple for two weeks of the show.

• 8:08Andy Greenwald?

  And I've never been prepped on it.

• 8:09Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, well, often. Here's, here's a behind the curtain, behind the curtain. I will be like, it's time for us to do this segment. And you're like, I don't have, like, remember, I'm like, oh, what are we reading this week? Like, or watch of the week, what did we watch this weekend? And you'd be like, nothing. Yeah, I didn't do anything.

• 8:27Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Chris Ryan?

  And then you Instagram and you're like, look at this cool book I read, you know?

• 8:32Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 8:32Chris Ryan?

  I think you save a little bit of your stuff for IG.

• 8:35Andy Greenwald?

  That's for my personal brand.

• 8:36Chris Ryan?

  That's right.

• 8:37Andy Greenwald?

  Which is floundering. So if you could give me a cosign or a retweet.

• 8:41Chris Ryan?

  Our new segment.

• 8:42Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Chris Ryan?

  It's called Your Silence Is Deafening.

• 8:44Andy Greenwald?

  This is great. This is great. I'm already in on this.

• 8:47Chris Ryan?

  It's been 48 whole hours.

• 8:50Andy Greenwald?

  We say this to each other all the time on text.

• 8:52Chris Ryan?

  And you have not publicly commented on Tom Hardy's exile from Mobland.

• 8:56Andy Greenwald?

  Not publicly, but I've been huddling with my team, trying to craft the correct response because-

• 9:03Chris Ryan?

  So while you spin your wheels trying to decide how you're gonna phrase this.

• 9:07Andy Greenwald?

  Because to be clear, I did prep a statement, but it was flagged. It was really came in too hard.

• 9:15Chris Ryan?

  For folks who don't know, Mobland is a show on Paramount Plus. It was created by Ronan Bennett, who did Top Boy and then taken over, showrunner and executive producer, written by Jez Butterworth, who also does a show we're gonna discuss in a second called The Agency. And Jez Butterworth is an accomplished screenwriter and playwright in England. He apparently, according to reports, had a falling out with Tom Hardy, which is not the first time this has happened with Tom Hardy. The second season of Mobland is completed and it was announced, strangely, I thought, since I don't think the third season has been renewed or greenlit, that Tom Hardy would no longer be on the show. That there was some sort of ultimatum. Butterworth or Hardy? And it seems like Jez Butterworth had won that fight.

• 9:57Chris Ryan?

  Then hilariously, I think, a lot of leaked accounts of Tom Hardy behavior.

• 10:05Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 10:05Chris Ryan?

  Some, I saw some counter narratives flying around certain circles, yeah. And then, as of today, the last thing I saw was that, and this is not from a super reputable source, was that there is some efforts to bring Hardy back into the fold.

• 10:21Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, who's leading that charge?

• 10:23Chris Ryan?

  Who's leading that charge in the media or who's leading that charge to do that? I think David Glasser, who is the kind of 101 Studios impresario, who also oversees a lot of Taylor Sheridan stuff. Everybody's waiting. Where do you land? Mirren or Hardy?

• 10:36Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, I'm on the clock now? Wait, so you as one of the media's biggest Tom Hardy boosters-

• 10:43Chris Ryan?

  If anybody's ever listened to me, they're gonna know.

• 10:47Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Chris Ryan?

  Look, it is what it is. If you sign Tom Hardy up, man, you sign up for the whole ride. You can't get off midway.

• 10:55Andy Greenwald?

  I would say-

• 10:56Chris Ryan?

  Can't get off after season two.

• 10:57Andy Greenwald?

  There are certain things. This is, I've been referencing this a lot because I love it. And he's been saying this for years. But our friend and colleague, Brian Curtis', is now they tell us-

• 11:04Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 11:04Andy Greenwald?

  Notebook Dump, which is the piece that appears after a coach is fired or someone is-

• 11:08Chris Ryan?

  At the end of the season, yeah.

• 11:09Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, and suddenly, like, all the reporting that they didn't feel they could source or verify or even report on freely, they can now say because that person is out of the building. The oppo dump for the big anti-Tom Hardy lobby was locked and loaded.

• 11:24Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 11:25Andy Greenwald?

  This is not a secret that he is challenging in the workspace.

• 11:28Chris Ryan?

  Just read Kyle Buchanan's Fury Road book.

• 11:30Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, and so while I appreciate your Bane boosterism. Or join the rest of us in not watching Taboo. I think that, I'm just curious, I'm gonna float a hypothetical.

• 11:42Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 11:43Andy Greenwald?

  Let's say that you were scheduled to do a podcast with me. And at the appointed hour, you arrived, sat down, and I was nowhere to be seen. Now, so far, this is not a hypothetical, this is every week other than today.

• 11:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but then you come bustling in three minutes late and you're just like, apologies, apologies.

• 12:02Andy Greenwald?

  What does that sound like? Jesus, so sorry, everyone, there was a horrid mess on the tube this morning.

• 12:11Andy Greenwald?

  Tom Hardy, according to the accounts in Kyle Buchanan's book, left Charlize Theron sitting in the, I believe the term is war rig.

• 12:22Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:22Andy Greenwald?

  For three hours before sauntering onto set.

• 12:26Chris Ryan?

  Well, I think he was trying to locate his voice, you know? He was trying to get.

• 12:29Andy Greenwald?

  We locate it, it's always at the bottom of an old well. It's always the same voice, what are you talking about?

• 12:34Chris Ryan?

  I just like, I think, I don't want anybody to get their feelings hurt or be in any kind of physical danger. I do find stories of onset, like, you know.

• 12:46Andy Greenwald?

  Sure.

• 12:47Chris Ryan?

  You know, cultural or personality clashes to be pretty interesting to read about. If Hollywood never had any of those, it would be a little bit less interesting to read about.

• 12:57Andy Greenwald?

  Okay, that's fair.

• 12:58Chris Ryan?

  You know?

• 12:58Andy Greenwald?

  It's just, I don't know. Are you that concerned about the third season of Mobland?

• 13:04Chris Ryan?

  No, and I didn't really like the first season of Mobland that much. I mean, I watched, I think I finished it, I can't remember. But it was just one of those things that I knocked out, like, two episodes on a plane ride kind of thing, after the first couple of episodes. And I love that cast, and I think.

• 13:18Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 13:19Chris Ryan?

  You know, it's been a strange show, it was supposed to, initially, the idea was it was gonna be a Ray Donovan spinoff. Then I think it kind of mutated into half Gangs of London, half Yellowstone, set, you know, in London with this crime family. And some of the reporting suggests Hardy's been a little bit aggrieved by the fact that it went from being a Tom Hardy show to a Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren show. And it sounds like Helen Mirren specifically are butting heads. Allegedly.

• 13:49Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, what is the-

• 13:50Chris Ryan?

  I wouldn't want Big Mirren getting in her litigation bag against me.

• 13:54Andy Greenwald?

  What if, um, yeah, Helen Mirren doesn't care about what we say, but her husband Taylor Hackford is incredibly litigious and a longtime listener of The Watch.

• 14:00Chris Ryan?

  I'm not entirely sure that's the case. Helen Mirren may very well care what I say.

• 14:05Andy Greenwald?

  You're, wow, you've changed since your trip.

• 14:07Chris Ryan?

  No, I'm just saying, I still maintain, I know for a fact Taylor Hackford has listened to Proof of Life. I think there is a-

• 14:14Andy Greenwald?

  We listened to the-

• 14:15Chris Ryan?

  The Proof of Life rewatchables. There is a 50% chance that he was like, you're gonna get a kick out of this and played it for Helen Mirren. And then there is a 25% chance within that that she was like, this is my favorite podcast. I love these guys.

• 14:31Andy Greenwald?

  Keep playing out the- Then, there's a 10% chance that what? That she's like, let me deep dive this guy's podcast career. Music Exists was really, really thought provoking. And then, then she makes the full connection after reading all of Chuck's books, that you're the one playing pool.

• 14:48Chris Ryan?

  Let me just add, there's a, there is a non, non-zero chance that Tom Hardy is also doing this to get off the show, which sometimes happens.

• 14:56Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I, I, I think the most interesting segue for me from this is that Mobland has the kind of incredibly contemporary representative-

• 15:06Chris Ryan?

  Did you watch an episode of this?

• 15:08Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, the first two. A torturous development cycle of many, many shows, uh, of the moment, particularly, we're gonna get to Spider Noir in a minute. What is, I feel like there's a, um, it's not a meme, but I feel like it is a saying that like, like if you put the dev, the dev boys on something, you're gonna end up with like a fish with feet.

• 15:25Chris Ryan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:26Andy Greenwald?

  I, I'm getting the, the analogy wrong, but there's some idea that if you keep developing something, you will end up with something that is so far from the initial purpose that you're not even sure why it exists.

• 15:35Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 15:36Andy Greenwald?

  And I kind of feel that way about Mobland. It's fine, and all of the people in it are good, but I, I, I don't know, I'm chasing after an observation that I can't quite land about like, that's what Tom Hardy's doing? Okay.

• 15:49Chris Ryan?

  I got the impression when this first started, when Mobland, if I remember correctly, I can't believe how long we're spending on this, I believe he said-

• 15:57Andy Greenwald?

  You can, you love it.

• 15:57Chris Ryan?

  I wanna be in London, close to my family. This is a steady gig that I like.

• 16:03Andy Greenwald?

  That is so close to what I said about Harry Potter. There was just one, what was the word he said that he wanted to be close to?

• 16:09Chris Ryan?

  His family. Right.

• 16:11Andy Greenwald?

  He's figured it out, man.

• 16:12Chris Ryan?

  So another show that is on Paramount Plus, along with Mobland, is The Agency. And The Agency is coming back, I think, June 21st.

• 16:21Andy Greenwald?

  Soon.

• 16:23Chris Ryan?

  And I'm pairing The Agency's return with the return of a

• 16:29Chris Ryan?

  a bit malign show on Apple TV, but one that is close to your heart. A Passion Project viewers, which is Sugar, the Colin Farrell detective show. Also returning for its second season. Honestly, surprisingly, it's been two years, it seems like.

• 16:43Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 16:44Chris Ryan?

  Has it?

• 16:44Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know. Sure. Yeah.

• 16:45Chris Ryan?

  When was Sugar on your top 10 insanely enough?

• 16:48Andy Greenwald?

  It was not on my top 10.

• 16:49Chris Ryan?

  Oh, yes, it was.

• 16:50Andy Greenwald?

  No, it was not.

• 16:51Chris Ryan?

  Didn't you put Sugar in your top 10?

• 16:53Andy Greenwald?

  No, I love to zag. I love to surprise and delight you, but no, sir.

• 17:00Chris Ryan?

  I'm just gonna look up Sugar season one, excuse me.

• 17:02Andy Greenwald?

  I promise, no. I think that I said that the pilot was one of my favorite pilots of the last few years.

• 17:08Chris Ryan?

  It's 2024 is when it debuted.

• 17:11Andy Greenwald?

  Wow, it was a different time.

• 17:12Chris Ryan?

  2026 now.

• 17:13Andy Greenwald?

  It was Joe Biden's favorite show.

• 17:14Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 17:16Andy Greenwald?

  We've changed. Maybe that's what you're mistaking me with.

• 17:21Andy Greenwald?

  Also, isn't it funny that this is the new normal, where we are talking about these shows? It's like, oh, The Agency's coming back, Sugar's coming back with its normal two-year gestation process.

• 17:29Chris Ryan?

  Agency was last year, wasn't it? Damn, really? That was also Joe Biden's favorite show?

• 17:36Chris Ryan?

  Joe Biden loves The Agency, you know what I mean?

• 17:39Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think?

• 17:40Chris Ryan?

  I was Googled Joe Biden, The Agency.

• 17:42Andy Greenwald?

  The Agency? What are you gonna get if you do that?

• 17:46Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, anyway.

• 17:47Chris Ryan?

  2024, you're it.

• 17:48Andy Greenwald?

  No way of knowing, but I'm glad you Googled it. Okay, which one do you want to talk about first?

• 17:51Chris Ryan?

  I want to talk about, like, well, first of all, like you alluded to, coming back after such a long interval, but also where you're at with these, like, the opportunity for, since we're doing a lot more recurring television now than in recent years, a show that maybe was wrong-footed at certain points in its first season, tonally was still trying to find its voice, et cetera. Which one of these do you think has the biggest opportunity or the most likely opportunity, most like, highest likelihood of improving in its second season?

• 18:20Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I will start by saying both have delivered excellent trailers for their second season.

• 18:25Chris Ryan?

  They sure have.

• 18:25Andy Greenwald?

  No question about it. And both, if you were just going by the trailers, present a pretty exciting vision of

• 18:34Andy Greenwald?

  2020s television where very attractive movie stars fully embrace the genre trappings

• 18:41Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 18:41Andy Greenwald?

  of that are that are really possible to explore within serialized television. So that's cool. I think the, that said, there is no question, I'll just say this now, like, The Agency, season two is going to be much better than Sugar.

• 18:56Chris Ryan?

  Because we know what it's about, because it's about, it's based on Le Bureau. So we know where season two goes.

• 19:01Andy Greenwald?

  So let's separate the conversation for a second to say that The Agency, one of our favorite shows of two years ago, both because it was stylish and incredibly well acted and was low key a pretty good London hang show, despite all of the stress that Martian was going under, going through.

• 19:21Andy Greenwald?

  It is, as you said, it is a fairly devout adaptation of one of the greatest shows probably ever on television, the French series Le Bureau. And as the season progressed, I think it started to develop its own kind of chilly swagger that suggested that it was going to deviate in ways, maybe not always plot, but in terms of the delivery of the plot in ways that felt kind of exciting. And second season of Le Bureau is better than the first season with a lot of very cool set pieces and moments of tension. And this trailer looks so sick, it made me so excited to watch it. And it actually made me appreciate even more how nice it was to have such a quality, consistent entertainment for those 10 weeks, two years ago.

• 20:02Chris Ryan?

  One of the crazy things about The Agency is that, you know, it's got a pretty star-studded cast, Jeffrey Wright, Richard Gere, Catherine Waterston.

• 20:10Andy Greenwald?

  Richard Gere is Homer's dad from Euphoria?

• 20:12Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 20:13Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 20:13Chris Ryan?

  Carrie Lowell and Richard Gere's son is Homer. Well, Dylan on Euphoria, that's the character.

• 20:19Andy Greenwald?

  I just wanted to make it relevant to our young TikTok fans.

• 20:21Chris Ryan?

  They will have more to do this season based on, so if you were watching season one and you were like, Richard Gere's in like six scenes and Catherine Waterston's not on this show, really.

• 20:29Andy Greenwald?

  Apparently.

• 20:29Chris Ryan?

  And John McGaro, like, what's he doing, you know? They'll have stuff to do this, this season.

• 20:34Andy Greenwald?

  It looks awesome.

• 20:35Chris Ryan?

  It does. Sugar.

• 20:37Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 20:37Chris Ryan?

  So, okay, I can't even, we can't have this conversation without spoiling an element of Sugar. Many people listening are probably like, what are these guys talking about? I haven't even heard of Sugar. Sugar came out two years ago, detective show set in California, like I'm, LA, like I mentioned, stars Colin Farrell.

• 20:53Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 20:54Chris Ryan?

  People sometimes ask, do I have to watch the first season to start the second season? We have started to push the limits on what

• 21:00Andy Greenwald?

  We have.

• 21:00Chris Ryan?

  we are capable of with that. I would like to take like five seconds of just staring at you and maybe vamping.

• 21:08Andy Greenwald?

  Sure.

• 21:08Chris Ryan?

  And in one second, we are going to spoil.

• 21:11Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, we are.

• 21:12Chris Ryan?

  A big part of what makes sugar sugar.

• 21:14Andy Greenwald?

  And you know why we're gonna do it? Because fucking Tim Apple doesn't want you to know.

• 21:19Chris Ryan?

  He doesn't want us to know.

• 21:20Andy Greenwald?

  This trailer hides the ball, and by the ball, I mean one of the great television bag fumbles in recent history.

• 21:27Chris Ryan?

  Do you know what I said when I watched this trailer? Are you having a fucking laugh?

• 21:30Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, because this is a trailer for the show Sugar Should Have Been. And let me tell you, it's not.

• 21:36Chris Ryan?

  But also, it's like, is this the first season of Sugar?

• 21:40Andy Greenwald?

  Also, you can't just trailer your way into the movie you wish it was. We've seen this fail in movies again and again.

• 21:48Chris Ryan?

  Three, two, one. Colin Farrell's character on Sugar.

• 21:52Andy Greenwald?

  Is a fucking alien.

• 21:54Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 21:55Andy Greenwald?

  He's a blue spaceman.

• 21:56Chris Ryan?

  When does that come out?

• 21:57Andy Greenwald?

  Like, episode five.

• 21:59Chris Ryan?

  Right.

• 21:59Andy Greenwald?

  It's excruciating.

• 22:01Chris Ryan?

  Did you know that, like, when you were watching it?

• 22:03Andy Greenwald?

  No.

• 22:04Chris Ryan?

  And then he's an alien.

• 22:06Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, and then I stood up, went out for a pack of cigarettes.

• 22:09Chris Ryan?

  Never came home.

• 22:10Andy Greenwald?

  Never smoked them.

• 22:12Chris Ryan?

  Uh, did you?

• 22:14Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 22:14Chris Ryan?

  I think I stopped watching Sugar. Does his alienhood?

• 22:18Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 22:18Chris Ryan?

  Play a major role in the second half of the season?

• 22:21Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Chris Ryan?

  Oh, okay.

• 22:22Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, dude.

• 22:24Andy Greenwald?

  Wouldn't it in yours?

• 22:26Chris Ryan?

  I don't know, this second season trailer makes it look like he loves boxing. Like, I don't know.

• 22:32Andy Greenwald?

  We don't know. I keep waiting for DJT to tell us what aliens love. I keep hearing there's a press conference coming.

• 22:37Chris Ryan?

  I know.

• 22:38Andy Greenwald?

  And maybe it's like they love noir movies.

• 22:40Chris Ryan?

  A lot of people on the streets are like aliens right now.

• 22:43Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Chris Ryan?

  They're coming up to me with tears in their eyes.

• 22:46Andy Greenwald?

  No, that's just the Alien Earth F Y C campaign, which is all over town.

• 22:49Chris Ryan?

  Um, yeah, this is a huge twist in the show that they are not giving away in the trailer.

• 22:54Andy Greenwald?

  Because it is a fucking.

• 22:56Chris Ryan?

  Second season.

• 22:57Andy Greenwald?

  Anchor around the neck of what could have been good. It is, I wish I had done the prep to prepare for a.

• 23:07Andy Greenwald?

  The same thing, the fucking fish with feet. This is what we have here. Like, it's okay to do a small thing well.

• 23:16Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 23:17Andy Greenwald?

  Like, Ina Garten made a whole career out of it, and she should work at Apple TV, frankly, because you have Colin Farrell, one of the most stylish and compelling and charismatic actors of our time, looking incredible in beautiful suits, driving a sports car in a neon-

• 23:32Chris Ryan?

  Colin Farrell, Rockford Files.

• 23:34Andy Greenwald?

  Tinged, yes, but like, also really embracing the idea of like, what LA light looks like and what a noir would look like in bright color, not in whatever fucking rinky-dink technicolor they did to Spider Noir to try to appeal to multiple audiences at once. We'll get there.

• 23:49Chris Ryan?

  This is coming attractions for Andy's Spider Noir tapes.

• 23:52Andy Greenwald?

  I'm just saying. And that would have, in the great words of the fucking Seder dinner, Dayenu, like, that would have been enough.

• 24:02Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Andy Greenwald?

  But instead, they were like, no, no, there's also a secret society because this guy likes noir movies because he's an alien. We don't needed that.

• 24:10Chris Ryan?

  Do you think that Colin Farrell signed up for this to play a detective or an alien?

• 24:14Andy Greenwald?

  I think Colin Farrell signed up for this for a chance to wear suits that weren't fucking fat suits in the back lot of Warner Brothers doing Penguin.

• 24:20Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 24:22Andy Greenwald?

  And yet, he does have to wear an alien suit at some points in the show. In a perfect world, this show gets renewed because they're like, just do the parts that work. We don't care that he's an alien. That's fine. And maybe they did lean into it because they beefed up the cast. Like, you were pointing it out.

• 24:36Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, Shay Wiggum, Sasha Kaia, Tony Dalton, like, a really great ensemble this season.

• 24:42Andy Greenwald?

  The plot already looks more interesting than the kind of-

• 24:45Chris Ryan?

  It looks like a detective investigating like, a missing boxer. And then Tony Dalton, Lalo from Better Call Saul, plays a sheriff's deputy, I think, and Shay Wiggum seems to be a fixer.

• 24:58Andy Greenwald?

  It's just so, so, so weird to me. And it, I don't know, like, at a time when Widows Bay is on the docket for us to talk about, like, I'm kind of, I'm definitely giving, I don't really want to rail on Apple's development process for why this happened the way it happened. And even within the context of it's an alien show and a detective show, the big reveal being, just being slow-walked to episode five was also such a weird fumble in season one. Anyway, it's just a bummer because I watched that trailer and I was like, this is the show I want. And I think they're probably smart to do that and say like, look, all the stars are on Apple and they're all kind of doing genre stuff. And you'll have a good time with this. Listener, I don't know if that's true.

• 25:39Chris Ryan?

  Well, I can, I can assure you that we'll, we'll, we'll at least give the second season a college try. I'll jump back in. Yeah.

• 25:46Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, you don't care anymore. You don't care.

• 25:48Chris Ryan?

  You showed me the way. You led me down the path of, we don't have to watch TV to talk about TV.

• 25:53Andy Greenwald?

  I was a trailblazer in that field.

• 25:55Chris Ryan?

  Let's be positive.

• 25:56Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 25:56Chris Ryan?

  And let's talk about Widows Bay. Widows Bay released two episodes this week for a very clear purpose. These two episodes are linked in ways that I found, just like this series itself, surprising and delightful. Episode six is called Our History and it's directed by Ty West.

• 26:12Andy Greenwald?

  It was a big deal.

• 26:13Chris Ryan?

  Great horror director, directed Pearl and Maxine and X. And he directed House of the Devil. Like, he's a great horror director. Also directed a really cool, like Brian Jonestown, kind of Jonestown-esque movie called The Sacrament that I really liked. Anyway.

• 26:33Chris Ryan?

  He directed this episode, Our History, which is set in 1702. It stars Betty Gilpin as Sarah Westcott, who comes to the Widows Bay island, betrothed to Richard Warren, who is the town, you could say leader, savior, captor. And Richard Warren's played by Hamish Linklater, kind of in a sly nod, I think, to his Midnight Mass character, who was also a priest who worked on a, in a rural island.

• 27:05Chris Ryan?

  And when we find these two uniting in 1702, a plague of violent insanity is kind of gripping the island.

• 27:12Andy Greenwald?

  Reminiscent of what we saw in The Fog in the premiere episode.

• 27:15Chris Ryan?

  That's right. And Sarah finds herself in the center of these proceedings and attempts to save herself and Warren's children, as he and some of the townsfolk aim to stop her. Should we just talk about these episodes separately or together?

• 27:27Andy Greenwald?

  I would like to, actually, take one, if I may, brief step back, just to contextualize our conversation of these episodes. When they revealed that he was an alien. Widows Bay is the best television show of the year to such a staggering degree.

• 27:45Chris Ryan?

  Look who's trying to get on a poster. Look who's trying to get an F Y C campaign.

• 27:47Andy Greenwald?

  Let me try again. Which camera? Widows Bay is the best television show of the year, M dash, Andy Greenwald, comma, primary host of the Watch podcast.

• 27:56Chris Ryan?

  Whoa.

• 27:57Andy Greenwald?

  That's for the poster.

• 27:59Chris Ryan?

  Primary.

• 28:00Andy Greenwald?

  You were traveling.

• 28:01Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 28:02Andy Greenwald?

  Of course, I was gone for a week too. But anyway, my point is, this show is so good in a way that staggers, humbles, and delights me. Like, my experience watching it is such that I am enjoying it, I'm laughing, I'm riveted, and I can't stop thinking at every moment of all of the brilliant creative decisions that went into almost every frame of it. Before we even talk about these episodes, we can talk about like, the directorial and cinematograph and camera choices that are involved in a show this specific, this tonally and aesthetically specific, that shifts.

• 28:45Andy Greenwald?

  It's a period piece this week. Previous week, it was a crazy drug trip.

• 28:48Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:49Andy Greenwald?

  There have been, I believe, four directors so far. Hero Marais, Sam Donovan, Ty West.

• 28:55Chris Ryan?

  Andrew DeYoung.

• 28:56Andy Greenwald?

  And Andrew DeYoung, who works with Tim Robinson a lot and is fantastic. There is no aberration from episode to episode.

• 29:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Andy Greenwald?

  That's the kind of thing that you see in a long-running show, where there's enough of a book on it and a style guide that when people come on, they feel comfortable knowing what it is they're stepping into. To do that from a cold stop is just remarkable.

• 29:17Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Andy Greenwald?

  The tonal balance of this show, to be legitimately scary, to be legitimately funny, and to be legitimately emotionally gripping, is something I've never seen done before. And it's doing it in such a, it's subtle, in the sense that this is not a giant, expensive, starry adaptation of something. It is not based on pre-existing material. It is not, it was not presented to us as the next big show. The way that it was put together with just this like, quiet, confident competence, and, you know, occasional brilliance is...

• 29:57Andy Greenwald?

  Wild to me.

• 29:57Chris Ryan?

  I

• 29:58Andy Greenwald?

  It's wild to me.

• 29:58Chris Ryan?

  Co-sign everything you just said.

• 30:00Andy Greenwald?

  The And every and by the way, I know this isn't really a valuable comment, but everyone's talking about that.

• 30:05Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 30:05Andy Greenwald?

  Like everyone, when I have conversations with people, someone will be like, oh, my God, the editing. The editing is so exceptional.

• 30:10Chris Ryan?

  Oh.

• 30:11Andy Greenwald?

  Someone will say, oh, notice Alison Jones, the legendary casting director, you know, Freaks and Geeks, Barbie, The Office, Veep. She worked on this and you can tell like down to the guest stars week to week. I'm blown away.

• 30:23Chris Ryan?

  Well, and to your point, uh, several shows that I have been

• 30:30Chris Ryan?

  from not engaged to highly engaged with over the last couple of weeks have come out on Netflix and Amazon. Spider Noir, for instance, dropped its whole season.

• 30:37Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 30:38Chris Ryan?

  Legends, we talked about like The Burrows on Netflix, I talked about with Joe last week.

• 30:45Chris Ryan?

  Feels like in the sort of larger conversation, their their moments already come and gone in some ways. Because you just your your engagement with a binge is individual and personal. Nobody's on the same page. You can feel Widows Bay uptick in group chats and in conversations at, I'm sure, school pickup or whatever, where it's like, what are you watching? Or like dinner parties or conversations at restaurants. And it's like, people are picking up on Widows Bay. They are catching up on Widows Bay. They are excited about Widows Bay. I feel like there was like a almost like an awareness that this is a special two-part event this week. Completely agree with you. There's also something like, you know how I I always

• 31:28Chris Ryan?

  I heard Sam S. Mail in my head where it's like, you cannot get mad at a piece of art for what it didn't do.

• 31:35Andy Greenwald?

  He was talking to me.

• 31:36Chris Ryan?

  But like, you can't be mad about the choices

• 31:38Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:38Chris Ryan?

  that it makes. It's like you have to evaluate the choice it did make, not what it could have done.

• 31:43Andy Greenwald?

  Right.

• 31:43Chris Ryan?

  I want to just say that in less shorehands or in a a less certain showrunner's hands, like other than Katie Difield, like this would have been this art history episode would have been drug history. It would have been Betty Gilpin doing kind of Krasinski Jim Jim Office Faces while all this stuff is happening because she basically is doing a no perfect 18th century like Puritan woman, but also Doing Amy Poehler in Parks and Rec. Like, she has comic timing and she is giving it a modern sensibility, I think.

• 32:22Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 32:23Chris Ryan?

  That is like, as soon as I got here, I was like, what the fuck is going on? You know what I mean? Like, she has like that kind of like, I know you're watching me and this is a break from this show's reality.

• 32:34Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 32:34Chris Ryan?

  But I'm going to be consistent with the way Matthew Reese reacts to things on the island as well, even though it's 300 years apart.

• 32:41Andy Greenwald?

  How did they do that?

• 32:42Chris Ryan?

  I don't know.

• 32:43Andy Greenwald?

  How did they do a 300-year flashback episode with the confidence of a show that has been running for multiple seasons?

• 32:52Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 32:54Andy Greenwald?

  There's these subtle choices that I'm dazzled by. Like, we watched the first episode and we raved about it. And then we watched the second, the second one. And I think we took time to praise the fact that the show seemingly pitched itself in the first episode as, here comes the big trouble. Like, this is going to be an event series, for lack of a better word. But then, almost immediately, it walked it back. The tourists did come and there was suddenly more space for episodic situational comedy or hijinks of this type of horror film, this type of horror story. And I was ready to settle into a perceived take of, that's pretty smart for a show that might run multiple seasons, made by someone who worked on Parks and Rec, for example.

• 33:33Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 33:34Andy Greenwald?

  Then I realized it was doing both at the same time. To make the commitment to do the flashback to the island's founder and then deal with that character and blow it up.

• 33:43Chris Ryan?

  This is exactly where I wanted to go.

• 33:44Andy Greenwald?

  With multiple episodes to go is a level of confidence in the larger story project that is remarkable. And it caused me to go back, though, and notice all the little smart decisions, like the fact that episode three, Sea Hag, and episode four, Beetreads, which is a contender for episode of the year, are happening concurrently.

• 34:07Chris Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:08Andy Greenwald?

  So, playing with time in a way to pre-address the idea.

• 34:12Chris Ryan?

  Beetreads is the Patricia episode?

• 34:13Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 34:14Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:14Andy Greenwald?

  To, to, to almost pre-counter the, the criticism that it can't, that, that befouls a lot of television, which is, it can't be the most important thing that's ever happened if we have time for a bottle episode or a side quest. All of these things are not amateur decisions. You know, they are not rash decisions. They are thoughtful, considered decisions that are paying off the story. And so all of that is preamble to say, these two episodes were ballsy as hell.

• 34:42Chris Ryan?

  The uh.

• 34:43Andy Greenwald?

  And I'm glad they dropped them together, which is another smart decision.

• 34:46Chris Ryan?

  When they were digging him up at the end of, uh, is it, I think at the end of our history, they start digging him up?

• 34:51Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 34:52Chris Ryan?

  I was like, that was cool. And I'm sure they're digging him up to get the necklace, right?

• 34:56Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 34:56Chris Ryan?

  Or something, you know?

• 34:57Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, my gosh, yeah. That's not what they did.

• 35:00Chris Ryan?

  This is comic screenwriting that is being applied to a sort of chamber horror drama. Where it's like, what if he was still alive in that box? And then what if Hamish Linklater was just on this show for an episode? And what if instead of being on Frozen Caveman Lawyer, who's freaking out about like there being electricity and stuff? He's actually like, I've decided I, I, I need to die because I've been tortured for hundreds of years. And then he's like, actually, I kind of want to live.

• 35:37Andy Greenwald?

  Can I throw one more what if at you? What if our, our, meaning the audience's introduction to his resurrection, or he never died, that the fact that he's still alive? Is played entirely through the perspective of Tom waking up from one of the most hellacious 24 hour mushroom trips in recorded history. So that he shows up and, and Richard is already upstairs.

• 36:00Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 36:00Andy Greenwald?

  There is no jump scare in the coffin.

• 36:02Chris Ryan?

  And Patricia is rattled and Wick has already cut his hand trying to open, like, there has already been all this stuff happening while Tom is like, I've been asleep for a day.

• 36:12Andy Greenwald?

  That is another sign of filmmaker confidence, storyteller confidence, that we don't need to hit every potential.

• 36:19Chris Ryan?

  It's funnier to have them be like, don't open that. We, we tried that already.

• 36:23Andy Greenwald?

  We already did it. We're behind, our main character is behind the story.

• 36:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, so in Seasickness, uh, which is directed by Sam Donovan, as Andy mentioned, who, you know, worked on Skins and Severance and The Crown, and written by Dave Harris. Um, I've seen this, many people say this has got a lot of Jaws juice on it and.

• 36:40Andy Greenwald?

  Jaws juice?

• 36:41Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, well, just like the, the three of them on the boat singing and kind of looking for something out there. Uh, I thought this was a really cool episode and. I really liked how even though it's basically all shot within the cockpit of Wick's boat. The time it takes to be like, here's the practical amount of space and time that needs to be covered. He has to get to this buoy, but Wick can't go past the buoy. Tom can, Richard needs to, to be evaporated into bones, but you know, like, you never leave anything and it isn't an exposition dump, but you do get a sense of like, oh, when's Wick gonna get off the boat?

• 37:26Chris Ryan?

  And how is, or how is Tom gonna be able to sail the dinghy? And what's?

• 37:29Andy Greenwald?

  What are the rules?

• 37:29Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, what are the rules? And it's still only 40 minutes or whatever it is, and it still flies by. And has time for a B plot of Evan discovering that his mother at least didn't die during childbirth. If not, is, I would imagine, I'm starting to wonder if she's still alive somewhere, right?

• 37:48Andy Greenwald?

  Well, I think, are we now onto supposition corner? I mean, I, I think, I don't know if this is like.

• 37:54Chris Ryan?

  Supposition corner could be another recurring segment for us.

• 37:56Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know if it's gonna go well for us. I don't know.

• 37:58Chris Ryan?

  Not as good as your silence is deafening.

• 38:00Andy Greenwald?

  That's a much, that was awesome. I'm a little spooked because this is the week because the Knicks swept their way to the finals.

• 38:07Chris Ryan?

  I don't know what you're talking about.

• 38:08Andy Greenwald?

  It's a basketball team, that all of the video footage of NBA experts being like, the Knicks overpaid for Jalen Brunson. And this is not the kind of signing that will get you to the finals.

• 38:17Chris Ryan?

  Becky Hammond being like, you'll never win with a small guard.

• 38:20Andy Greenwald?

  I'm just saying, I don't wanna, I wanna be very careful now that I know that these takes live forever. I didn't know that.

• 38:24Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:24Andy Greenwald?

  Until this week, I thought, I didn't know that all of these podcasts remained on Spotify.

• 38:28Chris Ryan?

  If we talked about anything of consequence, I think that might matter, but since we're mostly talking about, did you ever watch Iron Man?

• 38:33Andy Greenwald?

  That dude was an alien. Okay, that's fair.

• 38:37Andy Greenwald?

  No, so, okay, I could say this as a supposition corner, or I could say it about like, the, the, watching a show that is made by people who know what they're doing. It's just such a pleasure, but in the second episode, when Tom locks himself into the hotel overnight, we do see weird paintings and scary paintings. And we see that also in the first episode when he's touring Bashir Sullad and through the, um,

• 38:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 38:58Andy Greenwald?

  The museum or whatever. And I think when we saw that, we were like, well, Katie Dipold really learned from Parks and Rec about how funny historical shit can be.

• 39:05Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 39:07Andy Greenwald?

  Uh, one of the paintings in the hotel is of what appears to be a toddler loose at sea. And I, I, I feel like I'm not the only person, I've not read any. Coverage of the show yet, but like, that is clearly Richard's daughter who received the brooch. Coming off of the boat, making it back to the mainland, and then beginning a bloodline that ends with Tom's son.

• 39:31Chris Ryan?

  Look at the big brain on Brad.

• 39:34Andy Greenwald?

  This is probably the most covered idea.

• 39:38Chris Ryan?

  Damn, dog, that's my job is to go dig it in the crates for that kind of stuff.

• 39:41Andy Greenwald?

  That just appeared in this crate.

• 39:42Chris Ryan?

  You know, it's a testament to there's many ways to watch this show. And you can watch it with a scalpel, or you can watch it and you can sit there and just marvel at the comic tone and the spooks and the creaks in the night, you know?

• 39:57Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I actually, I think, I mean this as praise. I don't care that this kid is related to the founder of the island. Like, my enjoyment of the show is not dependent on lore.

• 40:08Chris Ryan?

  I see some people be like, they should have thrown the bones overboard, because I think they bring Richard's bones back.

• 40:12Andy Greenwald?

  There's ways they should have behaved. That's a cool way to watch television.

• 40:16Chris Ryan?

  No, I mean, like, that will probably come back to literally haunt them, that they did not get rid of Richard's bones.

• 40:24Andy Greenwald?

  And his Vienna sausages.

• 40:25Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 40:28Chris Ryan?

  If you were Richard, and you're 330-some years old.

• 40:32Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 40:34Chris Ryan?

  Isn't a gift shop blowing your mind? Aren't you just like, holy shit?

• 40:37Andy Greenwald?

  I'm on a t-shirt.

• 40:38Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. There's lights.

• 40:40Andy Greenwald?

  I, I don't know. I was basically, you know, living alone in-

• 40:46Chris Ryan?

  The Knicks have gotten how far with a small guard?

• 40:48Andy Greenwald?

  Dude, I'm just like, I was living alone in London, one of the greatest cities in the world, for seven weeks, and I almost lost my mind.

• 40:54Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 40:55Andy Greenwald?

  He was in a box for 300 years, and he came out pretty chill.

• 40:59Chris Ryan?

  I know, take that, Nate.

• 41:02Andy Greenwald?

  I'm saying-

• 41:03Chris Ryan?

  Maybe keep it together a little.

• 41:05Andy Greenwald?

  Chill out.

• 41:07Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, so I, I was okay with that. He's a little bit, he's a little bit touched, you know? He's a little bit different kind of guy. Buried alive, having a moment?

• 41:16Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Top five burials alive, alive burials.

• 41:20Andy Greenwald?

  Don't list the other three.

• 41:21Chris Ryan?

  The Bride.

• 41:23Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, you want to do the other three? Because this could burn us if there's another one we're forgetting.

• 41:26Chris Ryan?

  The Bride, the Ryan Reynolds movie, uh, Buried.

• 41:28Andy Greenwald?

  Which was a remake of a, like a Danish movie, right?

• 41:31Chris Ryan?

  Of course, you know that, yeah.

• 41:32Andy Greenwald?

  This is what it means to be, this is the international sign for being buried.

• 41:35Chris Ryan?

  How would you know that?

• 41:36Andy Greenwald?

  Because the movie's in Danish and I didn't understand any of it, except when the guy was like this.

• 41:39Chris Ryan?

  Who's another really good buried alive person?

• 41:41Andy Greenwald?

  Uh, Nicky Santoro in Casino.

• 41:43Chris Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:44Andy Greenwald?

  Spoiler, sorry.

• 41:46Chris Ryan?

  Nicky's barely alive when he goes in.

• 41:49Andy Greenwald?

  I don't think that's a distinction that's worth noting.

• 41:51Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, doesn't, don't they hit him with a bat like 150 times?

• 41:54Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, but not, but he's alive. I'm not saying he's alive for long, but.

• 42:00Chris Ryan?

  Burial alive, burials alive, hit us up, thewatchatspotify.com. Let us know your favorite.

• 42:07Andy Greenwald?

  That'd be good.

• 42:08Chris Ryan?

  Evan, now you, you've talked a little bit about the, the links you're seeing. The theories you're, you're theorizing about.

• 42:19Chris Ryan?

  He is an example of another thing that this show does really well, which is it can have storylines that last 25 minutes.

• 42:27Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Chris Ryan?

  And are deeply satisfying. It can have storylines that last multiple episodes, like, say, the mushroom trip, which obviously has after effects. If you were Tom and you had just tripped your balls off for multiple days, you'd probably be like, am I still high when you meet a 300-year-old man?

• 42:46Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 42:46Chris Ryan?

  But it turns out he shares something in common with him because of the mushrooms spoke to both of them. The Evan plot is obviously like, I guess, would you call this a season-long runner? Is this guy's rebellion?

• 42:56Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 42:57Chris Ryan?

  And search for self?

• 42:58Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, and by the way, Kingston Rumi Southwood, who plays the kid, is, is the presumed innocent cast having a moment?

• 43:03Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 43:04Andy Greenwald?

  Him and Chase Infinity, both having.

• 43:06Chris Ryan?

  They are having a moment, yes.

• 43:07Andy Greenwald?

  He's great.

• 43:07Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, I think that it's, again, it's just the smart construction where it is often rebellious teenage characters are created purely to exist as stress and plot creators for the main character, but this kid is given the dignity of his own plotline, like, there's Tiny moment in the episode where he is, you know, called out or caught by Bashir, the sheriff.

• 43:34Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 43:35Andy Greenwald?

  He says to him, would it be cool if when I turned around to go back to my friends, I yelled, fuck you, pig?

• 43:39Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 43:39Andy Greenwald?

  And Bashir says, absolutely not. But then he, but then the camera cuts back to him to smile about it. And it's like, that's a human moment.

• 43:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Andy Greenwald?

  Show that would otherwise, you know, might not need to have room for that. I do want to digress again, which I know is off brand for this podcast, especially today. But as our resident pharmaceuticals expert, you were asking, Tom's experience in the previous, uh, two episodes ago, was that similar or dissimilar to when we met for the second time ever on the streets of South Philadelphia in 1996?

• 44:11Chris Ryan?

  Was nearly as intense as the guys. I think that they were dealing with some serious shit. Mine was like four hours long.

• 44:17Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Chris Ryan?

  That night.

• 44:18Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 44:19Chris Ryan?

  And largely enjoyable, other than seeing the death star in the sky.

• 44:25Andy Greenwald?

  Oh.

• 44:26Chris Ryan?

  And maybe feeling like I was in apocalypse now.

• 44:30Andy Greenwald?

  Somehow the death star.

• 44:30Chris Ryan?

  And then my buddy tried to climb into, um, like a two by two shelf in his closet.

• 44:37Andy Greenwald?

  How'd that go?

• 44:38Chris Ryan?

  Didn't work. I mean, but he was like, I'm going in there.

• 44:40Andy Greenwald?

  But what's weird is, and people want the full story of this, can listen to the, uh, Trainspotting episode of Rewatchables. I think we get into this great, great granular detail, but.

• 44:48Chris Ryan?

  We should create a lore playlist for.

• 44:50Andy Greenwald?

  For my, my, my memory of what was weird about my experience was that me and my girlfriend at the time were walking downtown towards Tower Records to buy the Tribe Called Quest record that came out that night. But we were stopped. I do the work. Hashtag ally before that was a thing.

• 45:09Andy Greenwald?

  We were walking and we were stopped by.

• 45:11Chris Ryan?

  Is that the love movement or Beatrice?

• 45:13Andy Greenwald?

  In life, we were stopped by police officers from walking down a street saying, no big deal. Can you go around? There is a suspect on the loose on this street. And then, a block later, I see your ass and you're just like, "Hey, what's up?" Now, did you interact at all with the police activity that night?

• 45:32Chris Ryan?

  Uh, if I did.

• 45:33Andy Greenwald?

  Because I think that would have freaked you out.

• 45:34Chris Ryan?

  I, I don't think I did. I did, I was aware of that activity, but you know-

• 45:39Andy Greenwald?

  You were focused on the big picture in the sky.

• 45:41Chris Ryan?

  I also think Philly PD, they try to keep the crowds moving. You know what I mean? Like it's-

• 45:45Andy Greenwald?

  They always say it.

• 45:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah. Man, what a show. I'm so excited for these last few episodes. So eight, nine, and 10 still to come, uh, over the next three weeks.

• 45:53Andy Greenwald?

  As a segue, because we're going to talk about Spider Noir in a second, and Spider Noir does not deserve all of these strays, but it's just, it's what we got this week.

• 46:00Chris Ryan?

  It is what it is.

• 46:00Andy Greenwald?

  I want to uplift Widows Bay even further, just to say that this show exists because Katie Dippold was passionate about a story and a vibe and a tone and a type of show that she wanted to make. And she found incredible partners who were, um, open-minded and excited to join in and bring their talents and hero morale and everyone else that she assembled to make the show. It only comes from that relatively pure creative act.

• 46:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Andy Greenwald?

  Her, which is rare in movies and in TV these days, where a lot of what we see is an example of people doing their absolute best work to clear a relatively arbitrary bar that has been set for them by rights holders or development executives or network executives or whatever. That's part of the job.

• 46:46Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:47Andy Greenwald?

  Um, and it can be done well.

• 46:48Chris Ryan?

  You guys are all free to write novels, you know?

• 46:50Andy Greenwald?

  Exactly. For free. To be subsumed by generative-

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• 47:54Chris Ryan?

  I think this is actually segues nicely into Spider Noir, as you alluded to. So Spider Noir is a new show, executive produced by Lord Miller on Amazon Prime. Whole season's already up. It is a extension, I guess, or a riff on a character that Nicolas Cage played in Across the Spider-verse, I believe?

• 48:17Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, in the Spider-verse movies, he voices a version of this character. I do think it's a sad sign of how cooked we are that all of the press for this show makes it clear that this is not the same character. Because it could be. This is another iteration or expression of the idea.

• 48:31Chris Ryan?

  It's really weird that like they that they are making that. Like, it's almost like they want to keep the sanctity of these animated blockbusters and do like a spin-off of it, but not explicitly because like, what if it doesn't work? We don't want to damage the brand? I don't, I don't know.

• 48:49Andy Greenwald?

  Well, also that it's more, but it's even more than that. It's that there is an established canon to these fanciful and honestly brilliant Spider-verse movies that contain the idea that there are thousands of spider people, and sometimes spider horses and cars, and that each one has a very distinct identity. And so to protect the gentle souls of these devoted fans, they have to be, make it clear that this Spider Noir is not the same Spider Noir, there's just more than one.

• 49:17Chris Ryan?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 49:18Andy Greenwald?

  Are you feeling better about that?

• 49:19Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, this is a show set after World War I.

• 49:21Andy Greenwald?

  One.

• 49:22Chris Ryan?

  Uh, and it stars Nicolas Cage as Ben Riley, who is this sort of retired spider man, now private detective.

• 49:33Chris Ryan?

  Investigating anonymously, like beyond synopsis, set of missing persons cases and trying to track people down and trying to get blackmail and interacts with several, I would assume canonical Spider-Man.

• 49:50Andy Greenwald?

  Iterations of them.

• 49:50Chris Ryan?

  Iterations of Spider-Man villains. It is an incredible cast of Cage, Lamorne Morris, Brendan Gleeson, Lucas Haas.

• 50:01Andy Greenwald?

  Legion.

• 50:01Chris Ryan?

  Legion. Legion Lee.

• 50:05Chris Ryan?

  Cameron Britton.

• 50:06Andy Greenwald?

  Your guy, Jack Huston.

• 50:08Chris Ryan?

  What, this goes on? You ever watch Boardwalk?

• 50:12Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 50:13Chris Ryan?

  The whole thing?

• 50:14Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. Do you remember Grantland?

• 50:15Chris Ryan?

  We used to do the damn thing back then. We put seven shows up.

• 50:19Andy Greenwald?

  Yep.

• 50:19Chris Ryan?

  And we talked about them.

• 50:21Andy Greenwald?

  Who put the shows up? The podcast?

• 50:22Chris Ryan?

  The TV networks. They were like, here's seven TV shows this year. Enjoy.

• 50:25Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, yes.

• 50:27Chris Ryan?

  And we were like, yes.

• 50:28Andy Greenwald?

  I wasn't. I was like, actually, this is problematic. And people hated me for it.

• 50:31Chris Ryan?

  Boardwalk Empire?

• 50:32Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Chris Ryan?

  Was that the first time you snowflaked out?

• 50:35Andy Greenwald?

  I didn't, first of all, I've been snowflaking out since I first watched The Triathlon in 1986.

• 50:41Chris Ryan?

  Who will think about the sea life that these people are disturbing?

• 50:44Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, their legs are damp. Who wants to sit in a wet bike seat?

• 50:49Chris Ryan?

  That is actually like a pet peeve of mine.

• 50:52Andy Greenwald?

  See?

• 50:52Chris Ryan?

  Wet, wet swimming shorts on a bike seat. Chafing.

• 50:57Andy Greenwald?

  Thank you for speaking your truth. Usually you hang me out to dry with this stuff.

• 50:59Chris Ryan?

  The way I say it, it sounds kind of cool and like normal.

• 51:02Andy Greenwald?

  You know, it also suggests that your childhood was like fucking Goonies all the time. And I was just alone in my backyard going like this, except didn't have a backyard. Anyway. No, Boardwalk Empire, I was like, it was kind of like prestige karaoke even then. It had some moments.

• 51:20Chris Ryan?

  The reason why Widows Bay is able to pull off the two episodes that they did this week is because of choices, confidence in those choices and commitment to those choices.

• 51:32Chris Ryan?

  I think that nothing sums up how I feel about Spider Noir, the two episodes that I watched and sort of some light scrubbing through some of their episodes. Nothing sums up how I feel about it more than the fact that when you click play on the Amazon Prime Video app or site, you are offered a choice between true hue color or authentic black and white. Now, there's a probably a reaction some people have where they're like, cool, I love choice. I want, I want them to choose. I don't actually like this.

• 52:09Andy Greenwald?

  Present the show you want me to see.

• 52:10Chris Ryan?

  And I think it's, I think it's indicative of how I ultimately feel about this show that neither looks very good.

• 52:16Andy Greenwald?

  I agree.

• 52:17Chris Ryan?

  The black and white is not high contrast enough for my taste. It doesn't have the atmosphere of old noir movies that I think it's looking for. It kind of has a monochrome to it.

• 52:28Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 52:28Chris Ryan?

  And the true hue looks like running Sin City through a color, like colorizations program to like pop colors. And I kind of found it really distracting. And I, I have to say, I don't know if I've really ever talked about this.

• 52:48Andy Greenwald?

  Oh.

• 52:49Chris Ryan?

  I'm not a huge Nicolas Cage guy.

• 52:50Andy Greenwald?

  Wow.

• 52:51Chris Ryan?

  I like him.

• 52:52Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Chris Ryan?

  I like him at his peaks. I like him at his, his Lynch weirdness. I love Raising Arizona. I love Wild at Heart. I love.

• 53:02Andy Greenwald?

  Moonstruck.

• 53:03Chris Ryan?

  I love The Rock and Con Air. But I am not like, everything this guy does is so fascinating and.

• 53:11Andy Greenwald?

  I agree with that.

• 53:12Chris Ryan?

  And awesome. And do you feel like he's like, kind of playing with one hand behind his back in this game? Like, or something like, or, I don't know, why am I like, I'm like way more into Brendan Gleason and Lucas Hoss in this show than I am Nicolas Cage?

• 53:27Andy Greenwald?

  I. I feel like I'm gonna meet you halfway on this. I think that Nicolas Cage being the star of the show and making the choices that he makes is probably the most interesting thing about it. That said, I agree that it ultimately is not that interesting. I think it's fun seeing an actor who, I think, this is not a controversial opinion, hasn't had laser focus for swaths of the last two decades in terms of his career choices.

• 53:55Chris Ryan?

  Got some notes to pay off.

• 53:56Andy Greenwald?

  It's true. So to see him kind of like relatively locked into something that he could do quite easily is amusing. And there are moments, like there's a moment in the second episode when Ben Riley pretends to be a plumber, and so it's Nicolas Cage pretending to be someone pretending to be someone, and you feel the liveliness of it that pops even in the, I agree, the kind of cloudy black and white sidebar. Like, if you want to see an argument for black and white in the 2020s, watch Ripley, which is every frame is so beautifully considered and composed that there's no other way that you could imagine seeing it. And I would say, I don't think this is-

• 54:34Chris Ryan?

  Elswood goat season.

• 54:34Andy Greenwald?

  But it's also, it's not anecdotal to say this. This was like Garrett Bash, who's the producer of that and producer of many, many other FX shows, works with Taika Waititi a lot, basically said that they just shot it one way, and then they told Showtime who they were making it for. That's what we did. Because Showtime was like, can you give us options?

• 54:53Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 54:53Andy Greenwald?

  And I think giving options is a hallmark of a successful contemporary creative career, but it is not necessarily the quickest or straightest path to great creative solution. So in the case of the show, Ora Nuziel is the showrunner, and I think that he has done a really, really solid job doing something that I'm not sure is possible to do in a way that would satisfy.

• 55:19Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 55:20Andy Greenwald?

  And what I mean is, he is clearly a talented writer and clearly a talented storyteller, and clearly confident in the ways that are necessary to get something like this over the finish line and get it made. But some of the things that are most on display here is a very contemporary writerly skill, which is tightrope walking. Which is finding or trying to find a healthy balance between the two great flavors that don't always necessarily taste great together. You can see the indecision in the options of how to screen it, but for me, the most damning indecision of the show is, is this a noir show or is this a superhero show? And I know which side I find more interesting, and I found it as I watched a couple of episodes of it, the constant safe return to the home base of, but actually, that guy's the Sandman.

• 56:04Andy Greenwald?

  Actually, it's just gonna be a superhero fight.

• 56:06Chris Ryan?

  If he gets pushed off the roof, he can always sling some webs to...

• 56:08Andy Greenwald?

  I found that, I don't even know what the word is. It's not disappointing. I just found it non-elevating.

• 56:15Chris Ryan?

  I think that because of the dominance of superhero and comic book stories over the last 20 years, you and I have often said, like, use it as a Trojan horse to make the thing you really want it to make. And I don't back off of that, but if a guy gets shoved off a building, it's supposed to be a dramatic moment where you're like, is this it for this character? Or, you know, even if he's just the edge of the building, because that's a place, I'm sure there's dozens of noir moments where guy's got a gun on our hero and he's standing at the edge of a roof and it's just like, what's gonna happen? I think that if you can throw webs from your wrists to save your own life, it kind of just robs the dramatic moment.

• 56:58Chris Ryan?

  And that's something that comes up a couple of times in these two episodes that I've watched. I also, I mean, as noir storytelling goes, I have found it a little bit too in between one long story and episodic stories of like, I know I have another case this week, you know? It's a cool idea, and I applaud them being able to do it. There's also a little bit of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. stuff happening here where I'm like, you guys, is it Spider-Man or what? Like, you know, like...

• 57:29Andy Greenwald?

  Choose.

• 57:30Chris Ryan?

  Just, if this is, like, let these guys cook. Like, let them have the toolbox, or don't.

• 57:36Andy Greenwald?

  To me, what would be interesting, I hear your point about like, it's kind of a cheat code to reduce stakes if everybody can survive anything. The thing that I was disappointed to see, but not surprised to see, was that everyone has superpowers.

• 57:51Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 57:52Andy Greenwald?

  What's interesting to me about the concept would be about a guy who's a private eye, who is basically cursed with abilities that other people don't have. And then what do you do with it? Like, the idea that he could... Because it is a classic trope of detective fiction and noir, that the detective takes more damage than anyone could possibly survive.

• 58:12Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:12Andy Greenwald?

  And keeps coming. He would have maybe a more legitimate reason for being able to get back up again despite the bruises. But the first person he encounters in his detective mission can ignite himself.

• 58:23Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 58:24Andy Greenwald?

  On fire. Which is immediately makes me just... To me, that flattened the stakes. If there's going to be two shows where there are the normals, and Lamorne Morris is doing a great job playing Robbie Robertson, another canonical journalist character from the spider verse. He fits into this world like a glove and is having a lot of fun. And the scenes with him and Nicolas Cage pop for me.

• 58:43Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 58:44Andy Greenwald?

  But he's existing down here with the normals, and Ben Riley's up here with the superpowered freak shows. And that is less... I find that less interesting.

• 58:53Chris Ryan?

  Did you like the stuff with Gleason and Haas, the Silvermane stuff?

• 58:56Andy Greenwald?

  I like those actors.

• 58:57Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 58:58Andy Greenwald?

  I like those actors. I think my biggest disappointment is,

• 59:04Andy Greenwald?

  as television shows' budgets have gone up and visual spectacle has gone up, the opportunity to really, to make the writing, for lack of a better word, more muscular and kind of the star, has gone down. And certainly, there are plenty of things that are overwritten. But the idea of the writing being the star of a show is not really in vogue. Everybody wants to have room to have the banter that goes bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, and then the scene starts.

• 59:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 59:33Andy Greenwald?

  That bang, bang is noir. That's noir dialogue. And so I wish there had been more opportunities to play that out. Because instead...

• 59:42Andy Greenwald?

  It kind of fell flat to me. You have the trappings of what it's supposed to be with Lee Jun Lee as a, you know, as an ingenue.

• 59:49Chris Ryan?

  Femfetal, yeah.

• 59:49Andy Greenwald?

  Femfetal. And you have Ben Riley as the put upon.

• 59:53Chris Ryan?

  Gumshoe.

• 59:54Andy Greenwald?

  Gumshoe wanders into her place of business where he doesn't belong and he's, he's declassing the joint. And then you have dialogue where he's like, well, a singer has to know all the numbers. Maybe a detective has to know all the answers. That's not that snappy. That is a simulacrum of snappiness, you know, so I, but again, there are a lot of mouths to feed when you have a show like this.

• 1:00:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:14Andy Greenwald?

  And, you know, I, I want to be transparent because we touched on this when we brought up the trailer, like this was, this was something that, that I pitched on and I was involved in. And I don't want this to sound like sour grapes because I did not get this job. I did not deserve to get this job and Or New Zealand did a much better job than I ever would have. But it was interesting to be inside of the process of how stuff like this gets made. And truly the way stuff like this gets made is off of the success of the Spider-verse movies.

• 1:00:42Chris Ryan?

  I think that anybody who works, I, most people who work in 2026 probably know the experience of, wow, there's a lot of people on this Zoom now. How did this happen? You know what I mean?

• 1:00:51Andy Greenwald?

  Yes.

• 1:00:52Chris Ryan?

  And it's like, it's not, that's not a bad thing. Nobody involved probably has ill intentions and, you know, the way that those things kind of bloat is natural. But there, you could probably do like a hard, a clear eyed assessment of like, what's this person? What's the, like, what is the reason why this person is now giving me notes about this stuff or whatever? And it's, you're right. Part of the job of the 21st century screenwriter showrunner is to please all the different stakeholders.

• 1:01:24Andy Greenwald?

  And because the genesis of this is Spider-verse was a big hit. And so Sony and Lord and Miller sold a package of Spider-verse shows.

• 1:01:34Andy Greenwald?

  Creatives unattached to Amazon.

• 1:01:36Chris Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:37Andy Greenwald?

  And the first one, which was Silk, went through two or three showrunners over a period of years and eventually frittered out and never got made. The process that I was a part of for this one frittered out years ago and was stopped. And then restarted a year later and then this was the development process of it. And but even in my limited experience, like Lord and Miller are, I mean, I think they're geniuses with what they do. No one does what they do and it's incredible to watch the final product of. They are also creators. So to walk into a process that's like, we have these toys. What do you want to do with them? Because Amazon's going to make the show if we hit the target that we haven't been able to fully articulate yet.

• 1:02:21Andy Greenwald?

  And then you also have the stakeholders who wanted a superhero show and the stakeholders who wanted to be involved, but maybe not as involved. And then there's the Marvel presence and then there's Amy Pascal. And like, that's really, really hard. So I bring that up not to spill personal stuff, just to say like, to get this show on the air looking really good is fucking amazing. It's just ultimately not something I think, I think we want to spend eight hours watching. And it's incredible that it's there. All these good intentions, good performance and good thinking that went into it.

• 1:02:54Chris Ryan?

  What do you think is the logic behind making it a binge?

• 1:02:59Andy Greenwald?

  I have no idea. I mean, the only thing that I would say is maybe, like, if you watch The Boys, or if you remember how The Boys was released.

• 1:03:10Chris Ryan?

  Yes, 3111.

• 1:03:11Andy Greenwald?

  But the first season was a binge.

• 1:03:13Chris Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:13Andy Greenwald?

  So I think that Amazon has some internal metrics that are like, for this type of genre show or this fan base, it's better to give it to them.

• 1:03:21Chris Ryan?

  Well, it seems like, yeah, if I remember correctly, I think, I think Off Campus, which is a big hit for them, went up as a binge. I imagine any successive seasons of Off Campus, I could see that being pulled back. I think the summer item pretty happened. I mean, it's been interesting to watch that network.

• 1:03:38Chris Ryan?

  I wouldn't say stumble into because I'm sure it was very, very conscientious like kind of owning YA and owning like young female romance stories. They have like a whole vertical there where it's like obsession is in session and it's like not only is it a bunch of originals, but they've curated all these like movies that they could fit into this aesthetic. I wonder whether or not they'll continue to do stuff like that. And Peter Friedlander, uh, you know, who we remember from Netflix is in charge over there now. But like, I, it'll be interesting to see if that streamer in particular becomes less about release dates and more about like centers of interest, verticals, basically.

• 1:04:22Andy Greenwald?

  I think that's a, that's a, I don't know if it's smart. I think it is a clever and defensible programming strategy. But I would say that the executive mandates and executives themselves have moved around so much that a lot of these streamers and services that even what we, we have done podcasts where we were like, ah, Paramount Plus's central argument for existence is coming into focus.

• 1:04:46Chris Ryan?

  Yes, right.

• 1:04:47Andy Greenwald?

  It's working for them. They found a couple of things that work and they're building from them, mostly Taylor Sheridan and, and it's just the shows that fit into that aesthetic. Taylor Sheridan's gone under the new, uh, leadership there.

• 1:05:01Chris Ryan?

  I mean, Dutton's doing very well.

• 1:05:03Andy Greenwald?

  No, I mean, it continues.

• 1:05:04Chris Ryan?

  I think he's going to finish out a couple of shows, but yes.

• 1:05:07Andy Greenwald?

  For sure. Dutton Ranch is a huge hit. I'm just saying that like he is now moving to Peacock. And so what will Peacock do? Similarly, um, you know, Amazon seemed like it was finding some, some, some fertile ground with the YA stuff and then also the MA stuff.

• 1:05:23Chris Ryan?

  The Terminal List and Reacher and Jack Ryan and like dad stuff.

• 1:05:27Andy Greenwald?

  And we don't fully know what their direction is going to be under Peter Friedlander, but I thought it was, but I noted with interest, and we talked about this briefly with, with Kaya, not the show itself, but the release strategy, that Terminal List, I think has been on the shelf and is finally getting a release date for its second season, um, in October. So if they wanted to keep pumping that well until it was dry, they haven't really done it. And that might signal that that's not what they're doing. So I, I don't know the, the.

• 1:05:51Chris Ryan?

  They just want to get Terminal List closer to midterms.

• 1:05:54Andy Greenwald?

  Oh, yeah. Or are they trying to read the electorate?

• 1:05:59Andy Greenwald?

  Do you think that the plight of the white Afrikaner farmer is like gonna be a real driving issue in Maine?

• 1:06:04Chris Ryan?

  I, I just wonder, this is probably a topic for a, a different show, but I wonder if in, I, I know that when we've talked to Casey Blais, when Casey came on the show, he talked about how he was like, I'm on 20, spring of 28.

• 1:06:18Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:18Chris Ryan?

  I'm, I'm planning out, HBO has that thing where there's this baton pass from one show to the other over the course of year.

• 1:06:26Andy Greenwald?

  They try to do that.

• 1:06:26Chris Ryan?

  There's usually like a couple of weeks of like docs or event programming or whatever, but you know, you usually have like a Sunday night, like show that to hang your, your laundry on. And I just wonder whether or not as people increasingly find themselves detached from the cable bundle.

• 1:06:44Andy Greenwald?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:45Chris Ryan?

  And also watching things almost entirely on their own schedule and entirely up to their own tastes in the same way that like, I know Drake put three albums out last week, but in some ways I don't feel like that happened, you know, because in my algorithm, it's just not a huge deal. Do you basically get away from the release schedule as a paradigm for television and make it more about like, what we want is to have stuff there so that when people have found a vibe that they like, they can continue to watch things. Netflix has explored this for sure.

• 1:07:17Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:18Chris Ryan?

  But Amazon and their really strong links to, uh, the publishing industry, I think, is exploiting their kind of ability to be like, this book is hot, make it into a show. This book is hot, make it into a show. So it'd be, it'll be interesting to be talking about this deep into the Talarico administration, you know?

• 1:07:36Andy Greenwald?

  I, I can't wait. I think that one of the less talked about in terms of the front-facing, like actually watching TV show storylines is, are these streamers better serve programming for untapped viewers who will sign up for the service? Or?

• 1:07:52Chris Ryan?

  Making deep obsessives of the people who already have it.

• 1:07:54Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah, and I think that was the Star Trek strategy that Paramount was doing for a while of like, our floor is the however many people watch everything that says Star Trek on it, and we know that they'll pay for our service, because that's what we have. There was some really interesting reporting in the last- Month and also a good episode of the town podcast about this, which is like Peacock saying, we're getting closer to profitability and then looking under the hood and what does that mean?

• 1:08:16Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:16Andy Greenwald?

  And the most interesting thing about that to me wasn't the, the, the rise in subscribers and what the NBA has done for them. It's the fact that like apparent, I, I, I'm paraphrasing here, but that the churn rate was still very, very high.

• 1:08:28Chris Ryan?

  Of people signing up and then like,

• 1:08:30Andy Greenwald?

  They sign up for the NBA season and they sign off.

• 1:08:32Chris Ryan?

  To see how many people cancel after NBA.

• 1:08:33Andy Greenwald?

  And I, so that, so maybe the tier isn't the subscriber number, it's the stability number of like how many people you maintain from the people you get at hot times of the year.

• 1:08:42Chris Ryan?

  The reasons why I've always been confused when there seems to be overlapping Taylor Sheridan shows. Cause I'm like, couldn't you just spread these out so that there's 12 months of Taylor Sheridan shows and you don't have anybody ever trying to cancel?

• 1:08:53Andy Greenwald?

  That sounds like a, like a wipey.

• 1:08:54Chris Ryan?

  That's a neat.

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• 1:09:54Chris Ryan?

  Problem.

• 1:09:57Chris Ryan?

  Let's talk a little bit about Top Chef and, and just do some After Dark, huh?

• 1:10:00Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. Do you want to, so we, should we just wrap up Euphoria?

• 1:10:04Chris Ryan?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:10:05Andy Greenwald?

  Next week?

• 1:10:05Chris Ryan?

  You can keep Euphoria. Well, I, I like After Dark for Euphoria. It mirrors Nate's last moments.

• 1:10:10Andy Greenwald?

  Well, should we, I mean, we could touch on it. I feel like we should hit it harder next week.

• 1:10:13Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, but let's just, I, I wanted to just say I, I am up to date on Euphoria as are you.

• 1:10:18Andy Greenwald?

  I am up to date on Euphoria. I like to text you to let you know I am.

• 1:10:21Chris Ryan?

  This is the penultimate episode of the season and likely the series, I would imagine.

• 1:10:27Chris Ryan?

  And for the first time.

• 1:10:30Chris Ryan?

  Perhaps in this show's history, I was bored. I've been using that as a bit of like, a little bit of a metric, but I just found despite the intensity of the episode, I felt like I had seen these scenes before. Like, there had been, we were repeating a lot of beats. And I thought cinematically, there was some brilliant stuff in it. I would watch Coleman Domingo and Zendaya, as I have in the special that they did, where the two of them talk about addiction and spirituality and salvation and redemption extensively. I think that their relationship, Ali and Rue's relationship is fascinating. And I thought Ali's, you know, sort of origin story and him going through the pandemic,

• 1:11:13Chris Ryan?

  losing people that he's the sponsor of was heartbreaking and fascinating.

• 1:11:18Andy Greenwald?

  Not only heartbreaking, one of the things, I mean this as a compliment about this season of television, is that there have been a number of fully formed, pretty compelling television shows just tossed out on the table, like stuff you find in your pocket.

• 1:11:32Chris Ryan?

  The cutting and the shooting, like Natasha Lyonne makes a cameo as a prostitute living with Ali for a while, like, the cutting and like, the banter and the energy and the electricity coursing through that is absent when Matty is on like, page, like, the 70th iteration of, "I'm a pimp, but I'm also a manager's assistant, but now I'm a pimp again." And I, I think ultimately, like, Levinson probably had to like, unite the threads in some ways.

• 1:12:06Andy Greenwald?

  I didn't know he was going to try, honestly.

• 1:12:08Chris Ryan?

  Lexi narcs out everybody, and then Matty narcs out everybody thing. I, I just really hit my head against that. I was like, I don't think these people would be that naive. I don't think Matty would be so naive as to like, idly tell Alamo that... Rue is now working for the DEA?

• 1:12:25Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Chris Ryan?

  That's fucking crazy.

• 1:12:28Andy Greenwald?

  But didn't you feel it coming when she just brought it up, when Rue blurted it out?

• 1:12:32Chris Ryan?

  Yes, and I felt it coming when that scene went on for a long time, being like, obviously, this is going to get away from Lexi as she just passes this along.

• 1:12:41Andy Greenwald?

  And not to carry water for it, I was starting to feel like in this episode, there is a version of, or there's a defense of the show baked into the idea that the Hollywood writer from the comfort of her very nice apartment with beautiful old film posters that she clearly bought it on Posterati, great place to browse, no ads, but I like it, that all of this madness is springing from her imagination in a way?

• 1:13:07Chris Ryan?

  Well, that was a season two element, was like, you know, Lexi writing a play about season two, basically.

• 1:13:14Andy Greenwald?

  So, okay.

• 1:13:16Chris Ryan?

  But yeah, I think I had, the last time we talked about Euphoria, I had sounded the alarm that, or maybe when I was kind of monologuing about it, at which point I-

• 1:13:24Andy Greenwald?

  On the podcast or in your life?

• 1:13:26Chris Ryan?

  On the podcast, where I mistakenly said that Jesus Christ saw the burning bush and not Moses, which goes to show you what Quaker education does for your biblical studies.

• 1:13:34Andy Greenwald?

  Was that the light within?

• 1:13:35Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:35Andy Greenwald?

  Was it the burning bush?

• 1:13:36Chris Ryan?

  I, uh, I just thought that the crime stuff was starting to reach its, it was getting a little high up in the atmosphere and losing oxygen, and I think this has been proven true, like, bringing together Alamo, Nas, Nate, Maddie, Cassie, and by extension, Rue and the Lori stuff, I just think it's just like, he has to do that to end the show, but it just didn't feel as graceful as some of the other moments of this series has for me.

• 1:14:10Andy Greenwald?

  I think the biggest compliment you could give the show is that it is a wildly expensive, wildly audacious, improvisatory exercise by someone who had, not a blank check, but had a lot of open road and a lot of big stars and a very small window in which to get them all together and to see what happens.

• 1:14:28Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Andy Greenwald?

  It's diminishing returns in terms of just compelling entertainment, I think is fair to say. I do want to just circle back to the idea that Coleman Domingo is so alive in everything that he does. And the show, I don't know if it's a full show, but about a recovering addict who has become a sponsor, trying to keep people alive during COVID, I would watch that show.

• 1:14:53Chris Ryan?

  Sure.

• 1:14:54Andy Greenwald?

  And the short story version of it we got was incredibly compelling and also has something. This is not really a fair audience thing to do, I think, consistently. But it's, but sometimes I feel like you can feel a creator lean in, you know, to things that are touching the third rail.

• 1:15:14Chris Ryan?

  I mean, Alamo origin story too, I'm sure you, I know that you were like probably rolling your eyes a little bit at that. But I thought that had energy and I thought it had POV, it had like.

• 1:15:25Andy Greenwald?

  It had juice.

• 1:15:26Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, it had juice. And so.

• 1:15:27Andy Greenwald?

  And that is a marked distinction, I would say, from the scenes that increasingly to me feel like outtakes from like a Bugsy Malone movie where kids are playing dress up.

• 1:15:37Chris Ryan?

  Well, and then you get to the Nate part, which is just like, I suppose on one hand, I can make a defense for it where it's like, you know what, like there is no such thing as character armor on the show and or plot armor or whatever the term is. But like, just because it's Jacob Elordi, doesn't mean that he's going to escape from a burial. You know, that was a, one of those character arcs that makes you frankly wonder like what the relationship between the creator and the performer is.

• 1:16:07Andy Greenwald?

  It's aggressive.

• 1:16:09Chris Ryan?

  Because he doesn't really have a lot to do other than get mutilated this season and then he dies, you know.

• 1:16:14Andy Greenwald?

  And I need your context for this because we touched on this, not watching the first two seasons. I am completely unaware of.

• 1:16:23Chris Ryan?

  That character's a bad fucking guy. And like, you could say.

• 1:16:26Andy Greenwald?

  So was this justice?

• 1:16:27Chris Ryan?

  But that's the thing is that as Rue and Ali talk about redemption and, you know, how do you feel about like the fentanyl you've brought over? Has killed people and what is, what is salvation and redemption in the eyes of that? Like, you know, obviously Nate.

• 1:16:45Chris Ryan?

  I think that might be what they're trying to say is that like this is a guy who didn't deserve to get out of the hole. I don't know. I mean, like, that is also like, I would be very curious to know what Sam Levinson said about that. You know, maybe at the end of the season, he'll talk a little bit more openly about some of this stuff. Um, you know, you can also speak to Lorde's popularity as an actor and his, his busy schedule and wonder how much of this was like, we have X amount of time with Nate. It doesn't work. He's not going to be able to show up at Lori's house with two guns to save Cassie or something like that. Here's what we're going to do with it. But that felt like a very small plot, like a subplot that just got extended for seven hours. And it's, it was a unsatisfying conclusion to an end

• 1:17:29Chris Ryan?

  of a character's been on the show the entire time, I thought.

• 1:17:32Andy Greenwald?

  I, I hate the Maddie and Cassie story more.

• 1:17:34Chris Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:35Andy Greenwald?

  I find it just completely torturous to watch and so, so deeply uninteresting, especially because it just kind of, this episode just undoes everything that happened in the episode before. It's like the, she's popular on OnlyFans. Now she's going to be in a TV show. Now she's not on a TV show. Now she's going to go back on OnlyFans. And it's like, I, I don't, I don't find that particularly compelling drama for characters.

• 1:17:56Chris Ryan?

  There's also just something missing there where so like, was, I thought Cassie was sending Nate money. Was he not using that money to even put?

• 1:18:02Andy Greenwald?

  Or had she stopped because during this brief respite?

• 1:18:05Chris Ryan?

  She was like, this is awesome. I'm getting so much money, but I'm still living in like a courtyard apartment. I got, I didn't really-

• 1:18:09Andy Greenwald?

  But maybe the money stopped concurrent with the brief pause on her OnlyFans account during the moment she thought-

• 1:18:15Chris Ryan?

  Or like people canceled, but like she would have made-

• 1:18:17Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know.

• 1:18:17Chris Ryan?

  I, I just don't understand like what happened there. Like the-

• 1:18:20Andy Greenwald?

  I, I don't either. And I will say again, you know, who, you know, who is giving one of my favorite performances on the show is Sharon Stone.

• 1:18:28Chris Ryan?

  Where she's like, you're right. Who gives a shit?

• 1:18:31Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. The Brian Grazer cameo.

• 1:18:32Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Andy Greenwald?

  There are a lot of, I mean, there are a lot of good ideas and good performances tossed, tossed out here.

• 1:18:40Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Andy Greenwald?

  But, but what is it building towards? And I guess it's building towards like, most entertainments, a massive shootout.

• 1:18:47Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:49Chris Ryan?

  You know, I thought it ended with like, a really good, like, fuck cliffhanger, like Faye, you know, a little out in front of her skis intellectually, probably as a character, being like, I don't really know who to trust, I feel betrayed by Rue, I'm gonna wake Wayne up now, there's gonna be like this drama, so, excited for that, excited for the finale.

• 1:19:10Andy Greenwald?

  When, when you, when you're faced with a choice between an old friend and a Nazi, what can we do? It's kind of like voting in a Texas senatorial race.

• 1:19:18Chris Ryan?

  Let's do Top Chef, crash out season.

• 1:19:20Andy Greenwald?

  Wow.

• 1:19:21Chris Ryan?

  This is spoilers for the most recent episode of Top Chef.

• 1:19:23Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Chris Ryan?

  I-

• 1:19:25Andy Greenwald?

  And I would say this episode was so upsetting, Kai is not even here today.

• 1:19:28Chris Ryan?

  Yes, she, she has, she's taken a personal day to just think about Seeger and what he went through, and whether that moose killed anyone. The chicken liver pate.

• 1:19:38Andy Greenwald?

  The moose, yeah, not the snake.

• 1:19:39Chris Ryan?

  I enjoyed this a lot as television.

• 1:19:41Andy Greenwald?

  Okay.

• 1:19:42Chris Ryan?

  Did you enjoy it as Top Chef?

• 1:19:45Andy Greenwald?

  His, well, his behavior?

• 1:19:47Chris Ryan?

  In the, in the, after the, uh, the elimination cook, which takes place-

• 1:19:51Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Chris Ryan?

  Over the course of several, multiple days, but then ultimately they have to cook in the woods in the heat.

• 1:19:57Andy Greenwald?

  Uh, yeah, I, it didn't bother, that part didn't bother me at all. Like, I'm excited to talk about it, it was unexpected, especially for a show that has increasingly trended towards, actually we can all get along, actually I am here to make friends. So to see someone behave in such an unconsidered way was almost refreshing. I do think that the emails we got, um, back, like asserting that Seeger is actually a pretty cool guy, um, all of them came from, I guess, [email protected].

• 1:20:28Chris Ryan?

  There were people from, I think, Chicago who were like, this, that was actually not representative of who he is.

• 1:20:33Andy Greenwald?

  I would say that it is, I, he still could be a good guy.

• 1:20:35Chris Ryan?

  I think he just has a temper, yeah.

• 1:20:37Andy Greenwald?

  But, yeah, yeah, I would say so. And so, to see him crash out was a burst of energy in a show that hasn't had a ton of adrenaline this season.

• 1:20:48Chris Ryan?

  We haven't had a moment like that in years.

• 1:20:50Andy Greenwald?

  In years, and the judges were shocked by it. And it was such an insane hill to die on because as you alluded to, he served melting chicken livers on a 100 degree day.

• 1:21:01Chris Ryan?

  And I think that if he goes back and watches this show, whether he thinks it's edited against him or not, I think he would see, you know, pride comes before the fall. And there was several moments where, you know, whether it was the whole hog cook that sent him home the first time, or this particular one where he was so confident that the gelatin was gonna make his chicken liver.

• 1:21:21Andy Greenwald?

  Cause he's done it before.

• 1:21:22Chris Ryan?

  Cause he's done it before, but probably not in the woods with coolers of ice, which one was left open at a certain point. And then I think like him trying to like, in fact, let's go to the tape on them.

• 1:21:34Andy Greenwald?

  That was wild.

• 1:21:35Chris Ryan?

  Has never worked in the history. Nobody's ever done that. Like, I don't think anybody's ever been like, let's look at the bylaws of Top Chef.

• 1:21:42Andy Greenwald?

  Also, he.

• 1:21:45Chris Ryan?

  He also tried to take Jonathan down with him.

• 1:21:46Andy Greenwald?

  He's also a good cook. He might be a good guy as his friends attest. I don't, this is a TV show. And being a good cook and a good guy doesn't have anything to do with winning the very specific peculiarities of Top Chef, which involve cooking a dish to the rules, but also to the technical specifications and arbitrary likings of a well-established panel of judges. Let alone vox populi of like a bunch of people showing up and being like, I don't want to eat that.

• 1:22:11Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:12Andy Greenwald?

  You lost on that alone, even if it was well executed, I think. So that, that was wild. And it was particularly wild because as you just alluded to, he shouldn't have been there anyway. Like, the show messed up earlier by giving him a glide path back onto the show that almost no contestant has ever been granted the grace of having.

• 1:22:31Chris Ryan?

  I don't even know if it was really that much of a glide path. I just think it is the way that they edited the series this year to allow for Last Chance Kitchen to have suspense. Also meant that there was like a three week liminal space of, is Jen on this show? Is Seeger on the show? Who's in Last Chance Kitchen?

• 1:22:50Andy Greenwald?

  They were caught very off guard by their own rules of a different sort. And I think Daniel Feinberg in The Hollywood Reporter has a pretty good blow by blow of the screw up. But basically like continuing to tell Jen that she could hang out for as long as she wanted to, even though she couldn't. Perform on the show and also wasn't really lighting the place on fire anyway. Created a circumstance where Seeger is outright eliminated, skips Last Chance Kitchen, where he probably would have been defeated by Rhoda, and then acts in this episode like he is entitled to his spot in the finale.

• 1:23:18Chris Ryan?

  Well, Justin could have taken Seeger's spot. You know, Justin could have just been like, yes, I will go instead of Jen, I will.

• 1:23:24Andy Greenwald?

  So all of that, but the bigger issue is the show's clearly just ravaged budget is really, really showing up on the screen now. And I know that we spent time two weeks ago being like, they never go outside anymore. And then they were literally outside sweating, watching their parfaits melt this week. But there's different versions of outside and being outside. And a week in which they go to Asheville, which in some ways is the show at its best, being like, as chefs, we have a unique role.

• 1:23:56Chris Ryan?

  The Asheville part was fantastic.

• 1:23:58Andy Greenwald?

  The Asheville part was okay, and here's why.

• 1:24:01Chris Ryan?

  The Asheville part made me want to go to Asheville.

• 1:24:03Andy Greenwald?

  100% successful.

• 1:24:04Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:05Andy Greenwald?

  So if that is the goal, to both highlight a place that looked awesome and also highlight its recent struggles and suggest what we can do and why we shouldn't forget about it. So mission accomplished. In terms of the flow of Top Chef, I would say an episode in which they're like, we're not going to do a quick fire. You guys are going to get into unbranded vans because we lost the BMW sponsorship and drive two and a half hours to a town in which you will drive by three to four interesting sounding restaurants and eat snacks at 1:00 with no judges or the host present, felt pretty rinky dink to me. Like, have the courage of your convictions and fucking film there, or tell Kristen to get in one of these cars and go there too.

• 1:24:46Chris Ryan?

  Well, it's strange too because.

• 1:24:47Andy Greenwald?

  And don't be like, drive by. I mean, this is what I do when people visit LA, where I'm like, that's a pretty cool small plates restaurant. And my guests are like, should we go there? And I'm like, no, we couldn't get in. Like, what purpose does that serve for anyone other than my own ego? Do you know what I mean? Like, that was insane. And then later.

• 1:25:05Chris Ryan?

  You can eat there if you want to eat at 4:45 or 10:00 PM.

• 1:25:07Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. You're welcome to it, but I'll be in bed at both those times, weirdly. But like, then when Rhoda's like, I made Filipino food because I was inspired by this restaurant.

• 1:25:17Chris Ryan?

  And the chef's like, that's my restaurant.

• 1:25:18Andy Greenwald?

  That's my restaurant. Okay, could we see it? Oh, you couldn't afford to show it to us?

• 1:25:22Chris Ryan?

  It's a strange thing because a lot has happened this season where I feel like they have been battling the elements. As my wife pointed out the other day when we were chatting about this, she was like, you know, it goes back, you remember the finale of Denver where like people's bread didn't rise because they were cooking on the top of a mountain, you know, like

• 1:25:39Andy Greenwald?

  I think about it constantly.

• 1:25:40Chris Ryan?

  This, uh, this is not the first time the Top Chef has made elements an element of the show.

• 1:25:46Andy Greenwald?

  The rain in the Portland season.

• 1:25:47Chris Ryan?

  And there's also, you know, I think I am being a little bit, um, more easily annoyed by, you know, and now everybody's switched foods with the person to your left, or

• 1:25:59Andy Greenwald?

  That was despicable.

• 1:26:00Chris Ryan?

  You know, and now mystery diners are voting and we're not, or now like there's a lot like

• 1:26:06Andy Greenwald?

  Remember when they were like, and now let us bring out our guest judge for Quickfire, a guy no one's ever heard of. Congratulations, you really, you really, you really did it.

• 1:26:15Chris Ryan?

  Thing to me is that Canada, which I know was a passion project for Gale and I have the show go there, was in my memory largely shot on a soundstage.

• 1:26:24Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, it was.

• 1:26:25Chris Ryan?

  And North Carolina and South Carolina, which seems hot as fuck, has been 10 shots, like 10 shoots out like at a NASCAR track or in the middle of a public park or in Asheville in the forest, or not Asheville in the forest because they went back to Charlotte for the forest.

• 1:26:42Andy Greenwald?

  On the Appalachian Trail with a snake.

• 1:26:44Chris Ryan?

  That just seems like, why, why'd you guys do that? I mean, I guess maybe they listened to us and we were like, get the fuck outside. And they're like, you asked for it. Now it's hot as shit and nobody's moose congeals. Like, I guess we should take some accountability there, not that we can dictate what Top Chef does, but I just feel like there's been, and Feinberg and the Hollywood Reporter, it's a really good piece, writes about these two institutions that he, like, I agree with Dan, I wish every Monday had a Top Chef and every Wednesday had a Survivor. I would be a happier person if it was like a 12 month, a year thing, but

• 1:27:20Andy Greenwald?

  And which night are the Sheridan shows running in this 12 month scenario?

• 1:27:23Chris Ryan?

  Uh, they just run on my Vision Pro.

• 1:27:26Andy Greenwald?

  There you go.

• 1:27:26Chris Ryan?

  I think that in some ways, like, they've iterated too much to keep up with maybe perceived Joneses.

• 1:27:33Andy Greenwald?

  I don't think it's the iteration. I think, I just think there's a, there's a budget thing going on that we're not qualified to talk about or even ask about. And I think that the, the, the answer to the question, if you ask it too loudly is, do you still want the show? And, you know, it is the only reality show left, uh, competition show left. No, it's the only competition show on Bravo. It didn't used to be. I mean, Project Runway and remember, I was still a fan of Work of Art, the art world one with Jerry Saltz.

• 1:27:57Chris Ryan?

  I mean, couldn't Magic Well sell it to Food Channel, like Food Network?

• 1:28:02Andy Greenwald?

  Uh, I, I have no idea. It clearly still works on some level for the, the Bravo Comcast brand.

• 1:28:09Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:09Andy Greenwald?

  It's just they want it to work in this way. And I think you can see the, like, this is a small thing because we watch it, we either watch Screeners or we watch it on Peacock, but it currently the show is, this season, the show is premiering on Bravo linear on Mondays at a time TBD each week. So much so that I saw Kristen on social media being like, don't forget, we're on at 9:30 tonight for some reason. Like they're not.

• 1:28:33Chris Ryan?

  She said that?

• 1:28:33Andy Greenwald?

  Yes, they're not loving that aspect of it.

• 1:28:35Chris Ryan?

  Cause it's getting swallowed up by like Summer House stuff, right?

• 1:28:38Andy Greenwald?

  I, I would assume. Um, but I do think it needs a rethink because this, this host and these judges can make worthwhile television and the finale still could be good. It's not their fault that they tried to iterate by having brothers and a couple and it amounted to nothing.

• 1:28:55Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, I find that the judges have been marginalized this season too. There's way too much noise going on around them. I don't feel like I'm hearing, the thing that I love about this show and probably my greatest engagement with it was this sort of run where I think they encouraged chefs earlier in the season to cook, quote, their food.

• 1:29:14Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:14Chris Ryan?

  And to, you can think it's cheesy to be like, I'm telling a story or this is about like my background, but it actually produced compelling televisual storytelling to have somebody be like, I've grown up through this, you know, French culinary tradition, but now I'm really going to start cooking the stuff that my mother used to make me, but put it, put my spin on it. Or I'm bringing technique to something that traditionally is very rustic or whatever it is. I feel like Tom and Gail and Kristen and then at various points, you know, before Padma were really like, you're on Top Chef, fucking impress us. Like do it. And now I feel like there's just been way too many goofy things that

• 1:29:56Chris Ryan?

  have stopped someone like, for instance, Sherry or, or Jonathan who.

• 1:30:02Chris Ryan?

  I just think Sherri is only now starting to be like, I'm making this fritter because this is

• 1:30:07Andy Greenwald?

  That was cool.

• 1:30:08Chris Ryan?

  this thing that, and nobody's ever had this before or whatever. And, you know, even Lawrence, who I don't think is very like demonstrative about what's going on, but has been cooking this amazing food all year. I don't even feel like they're celebrating it. I don't feel like they're-

• 1:30:21Andy Greenwald?

  Well, because I think that the ceiling this season has just been wildly lower. Now, again, you cannot, this is the vagaries of a competition show. You cannot guarantee-

• 1:30:30Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:30:30Andy Greenwald?

  a Buddha, a Gregory, a Tristan-

• 1:30:31Chris Ryan?

  Survivor 50 just had this where it was like, all the really great players kind of got voted off. And I think Aubrey's good, but like, you just have like, at the end, this sort of weird mishmash of people.

• 1:30:41Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. And I think that there was a moment earlier in the season where we're like, oh my God, Rhoda is another, like a Melissa or someone who's just like, Melissa King, like who's just like, day one, oh my God, you are rising to every occasion and you're surprising yourself and we're on a generational run here. Or, you know, you hope for someone like a Tristan who catches fire later and you're like, oh my God, the prince who was promised was here all along.

• 1:31:02Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:31:03Andy Greenwald?

  You can't guarantee that year after year. But what we're creeping towards now is Lawrence is gonna win, which is deserving.

• 1:31:11Chris Ryan?

  I don't know about that anymore.

• 1:31:12Andy Greenwald?

  But, but, but, but what he has execute, what he has done is a very, very technically precise and satisfying execution of what you were talking about, which is like, I grew up eating this kind of food in a Cantonese household and I am going to be able to execute a version of it that is elevated.

• 1:31:28Chris Ryan?

  Yeah, like a fried catfish on a bow is like really cool.

• 1:31:30Andy Greenwald?

  And he baked the bread. That was awesome. That was an incredibly compelling performance, performance on Top Chef in which you, the viewer who can't taste the food, sees the degree of difficulty and can just see that they nailed the execution and that's satisfying as a viewer. The rest of them are just kind of stumbling their way to the finish line and maybe someone will step up. But I, I find it very hard to imagine that there's going to be a level of excitement, exhilaration, or inspiration in a finale for the way this season has played out. And I- Don't, I think it would be a mistake though.

• 1:31:58Chris Ryan?

  I think Road to Lawrence and Sherry is a good final three.

• 1:32:01Andy Greenwald?

  It would be a decent final three.

• 1:32:02Chris Ryan?

  Jonathan's still there, obviously, you know.

• 1:32:04Andy Greenwald?

  The loss of Anthony hurts. That was a bummer.

• 1:32:06Chris Ryan?

  That sucked.

• 1:32:07Andy Greenwald?

  But I think that it would be a mistake to walk away from the season and be like, eh, you know what? Sometimes like, uh, was the guy that won Denver, like perfectly like Joe. Seems like a really good guy, good chef, good on TV.

• 1:32:19Chris Ryan?

  Good.

• 1:32:19Andy Greenwald?

  But like, not necessarily the heights of ambition or technical, you know.

• 1:32:24Chris Ryan?

  Or maybe not the drama of Brooke and Kristen or whatever.

• 1:32:27Andy Greenwald?

  Right. So, okay. So you can't guarantee that every year. There have been down seasons in terms of the excellence on display or whatever. But I think it would be a mistake to focus on that at the expense of the fact that the clear, clear, clear diminishment of ambition and budget is hurting the final product of the show. And I don't know what to do about that because we're lucky to still have it.

• 1:32:45Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:45Andy Greenwald?

  But I don't know. I feel like that's the elephant in the room.

• 1:32:48Chris Ryan?

  I would like to also, like, at some point, we have gotten so many emails about The Padma Show. And.

• 1:32:55Andy Greenwald?

  Did they have budget? Maybe they did.

• 1:32:57Chris Ryan?

  I think it might be worth checking out a little bit more thoroughly to see. It's odd that it was running concurrently, like, you know.

• 1:33:05Andy Greenwald?

  I mean, not odd, aggressive.

• 1:33:06Chris Ryan?

  Aggressively. Uh, let's wrap it up there.

• 1:33:08Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:09Chris Ryan?

  Monday, this Euphoria finale.

• 1:33:11Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah. And so there's a couple of other shows I want to check out.

• 1:33:14Chris Ryan?

  Yes.

• 1:33:14Andy Greenwald?

  I don't know if it'll be for Monday, but we have maximum pleasure guaranteed on Apple. We have the Amadeus show that is on Starz that was on the UK last year.

• 1:33:22Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Andy Greenwald?

  I feel like there was probably others. I feel like.

• 1:33:27Chris Ryan?

  We need to also address the fact that like, we're getting a lot of new shows.

• 1:33:30Andy Greenwald?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Chris Ryan?

  And.

• 1:33:32Andy Greenwald?

  It's tiring.

• 1:33:32Chris Ryan?

  It's hard to finish them.

• 1:33:34Andy Greenwald?

  Did you watch The Burrows?

• 1:33:35Chris Ryan?

  I did. I didn't watch all of it, but I watched like three episodes of it.

• 1:33:38Andy Greenwald?

  Is it weird to see actors that we think of as relatively young people be like in Cocoon?

• 1:33:43Chris Ryan?

  This is just like, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:33:47Chris Ryan?

  It's very well done though.

• 1:33:48Andy Greenwald?

  A friend was telling me about the show and was like, well, you know, there's a great scene in Bill Pullman's retirement home. And I'm like, I'm gonna need you to stop there.

• 1:33:54Chris Ryan?

  It's true. It's true. Uh, Kai, Sarah, thank you. Kaya, thank you. Andy, thank you.

• 1:34:00Andy Greenwald?

  Kaya's coming back for the Top Chef finale. That's why she's not here today.

• 1:34:02Chris Ryan?

  Thank God. Uh, we'll see you guys on Monday. Everybody have a great weekend.

• 1:34:06Andy Greenwald?

  You have a great weekend.

• 1:34:07Chris Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:08Andy Greenwald?

  I include you in that.

• 1:34:09Chris Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 1:34:09Andy Greenwald?

  All the Branskys.

• 1:34:19Speaker 04

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