Pod Insights The Watch The ‘Euphoria’ S3 Trailer, ‘Hijack’ and ‘The Night Manager’ Return, and ‘The Pitt’ S2E2 About this episode Chris and Andy talk about the ‘Euphoria’ Season 3 trailer (5:43) and a particularly wild moment from the third-season premiere of ‘Tell Me Lies’ (13:47). Then they discuss the somewhat underwhelming returns of ‘Hijack’ (23:45) and ‘The Night Manager’ (33:15), before checking in with the series premiere of ‘Ponies,’ starring Emilia Clarke (42:04). Later, they discuss Season 2, Episode 2 of ‘The Pitt’ (53:50).
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Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald
Producers: Kaya McMullen and Kai Grady
Additional Video Supervision: Jacob Cornett
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Transcript 14,622 words · 7 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. The Home Depot has everything you need to launch your holiday season in style. Upgrade your yard with this year's hottest holiday decor, including the showstopping towering Santa. Oh, I like that one. And his impressive reindeer, both 8.5 feet and both designed with incredible detail that stands out day or night. When you want decor that delivers impact, The Home Depot has it. Make your home Santa's favorite stop with the holiday decor you want, all waiting for you at The Home Depot. This episode is brought to you by Boar's Head. You know what I love about football season? It's the football, but also the football watching food. And nothing hits like a Boar's Head sandwich when I'm watching a game. Really, any game day sandwich better with Boar's Head. Philly cheesesteak, layer up buttery slider rolls with Boar's Head London broil roast
0:44 Speaker 00 beef, American white cheese, and picante provolone. Delicious. Then add roasted onions, peppers, and Boar's Head pub-style horseradish sauce. I love horseradish. And you've got the ultimate game day cheesesteak. They've also got a whole lineup of premium meats, cheeses, hummus, and dips, condiments, and more to serve up on game day. Head to your local Boar's Head deli counter to shop now for game day sandwich inspiration and more, visit boar'shead.com. Boar's Head, committed to craft since 1905.
1:17 Speaker 00 I need sports staff to clear the room.
1:20 Andy Greenwald? Stand up and walk now.
1:23 Chris 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, he was just making content, it's Andy Greenwald.
1:36 Andy Greenwald? What am I? You have a title. I just noticed this after 13 years.
1:39 Chris Ryan? You're a screenwriter? You're a bon vivant? You're a gourmand?
1:43 Andy Greenwald? That's right.
1:44 Chris Ryan? You greet every day thinking about what contributions you can make to discourse and to the great conversation that we're all having about TV and film and culture.
1:55 Andy Greenwald? Welcome back to Rome's premier fiddling podcast.
1:59 Chris Ryan? Greenwald. Today on the show, some news and notes at the top. We're doing The Pit, episode two, season two. We're gonna also take a run through some new shows that, or some returning shows that came back. This week.
2:10 Andy Greenwald? I think that if it has been a decade since you last aired, you retroactively can call yourself a new show.
2:15 Chris Ryan? Yeah. So Night Manager, Hijack and Ponies, we're also going to talk about today. We will have a show on Monday. We discussed and decided.
2:24 Andy Greenwald? What's better way to celebrate?
2:25 Chris Ryan? Well, just because season finale of Landman, return of, well, not return, but a Night of the Seven Kingdoms first episode. I'm also going to be talking about that with Mal and Joe as a sort of programming reminder.
2:38 Andy Greenwald? Who gets the real juicy nuggets? You know what I mean?
2:43 Chris Ryan? I think that with Mal and Joe.
2:45 Andy Greenwald? Who gets the main dining room and who gets the private chef's table of opinions?
2:48 Chris Ryan? Well, it depends on which one you'd want to dine at. You know what I mean?
2:51 Andy Greenwald? That's right.
2:51 Chris Ryan? Who gets the Max and Helens of my ideas? I'm burying the lead here. I do have an announcement.
2:58 Andy Greenwald? Oh.
2:59 Chris Ryan? I am joining my buddy Yasi Solak and we are going to be doing a ban spleen from Boston at the end of the month.
3:07 Andy Greenwald? What?
3:07 Chris Ryan? So I just wanted to give people a heads up. We are joining the festivities for the Something in the Way Fest, which is going to be headlined by Sunny Day Real Estate and Explosions in the Sky. We're doing a pod at the Sinclair. That'll be on January 30th, Friday, January 30th at 8:00 PM. And we're going to be joined by Pat Flynn from Fiddlehead. We're probably going to do some kind of draft, but it'll be a really fun show. So me and Yasi will be in town for that on Friday. And then on Saturday, Yasi and I will be at the Coolidge Cinema, which is where we did a bunch of rewatchables stuff last year. And we're going to be presenting a late night screening on 31st.
3:47 Chris Ryan? So just keep your eye out because tickets go on sale at ringer.com/events for that Sinclair show. And we'll let you know about the Coolidge Corner Theater show. That's on Saturday. So keep your eyes out for details. Ringer.com/events. I'll remind people on Monday, but I just wanted to give them a heads up. Tickets will go on sale on Tuesday.
4:05 Andy Greenwald? Can I suggest something or ask? Maybe you've already thought of this. I think that you should offer a premium experience to Chase Sapphire, I'm sorry, Wells Fargo, whoever's Wayfair, whoever's sponsoring this podcast, customers, where you give them an exclusive walking tour of your Boston.
4:23 Chris Ryan? I would, but there's a lot of my haunts are either gone or shadows of their former selves.
4:29 Andy Greenwald? Well, look, I just, as someone who just read a book about pre-war Berlin, I get it.
4:34 Chris Ryan? How many times do you think you can mention that you read this book?
4:37 Andy Greenwald? This is my, this is gonna be my new bit. I thought it was gonna be subtle.
4:40 Chris Ryan? It's not subtle, you do it on text, too.
4:42 Andy Greenwald? It's coming up in hijacks, too, so get ready. So, mark it. Anyway, I think that it still would be of value. You could go by, where was it, Roxbury, where you had like the, the house of the, the guys in the band? And you woke up and there were like rats on the, on the record player?
4:56 Chris Ryan? Like, that would be- It was not rats, it was a couple of mice. Yes, we had a mouse problem at that house.
5:01 Andy Greenwald? Okay, you had a mouse opportunity.
5:02 Chris Ryan? We also had the advantage of, uh, our landlord was deceased, so we didn't pay rent.
5:07 Andy Greenwald? Were you involved in that?
5:08 Chris Ryan? Nope.
5:09 Andy Greenwald? Okay, statute of limitations.
5:12 Andy Greenwald? Uh, okay, so you could go by there-
5:14 Chris Ryan? What is the statute of limitations for murder?
5:16 Andy Greenwald? I didn't say you murdered him.
5:17 Chris Ryan? Oh, well, like, how would I be involved otherwise?
5:20 Andy Greenwald? You just let it happen.
5:21 Chris Ryan? No, I, uh, it was, it was one of those, like, only in the late 90s kinds of situations where you just were like, I think our landlord's not with us anymore.
5:31 Andy Greenwald? So how long did you stay past that date?
5:33 Chris Ryan? We stayed for like eight or nine months, and then the landlord's widow was like, guess what?
5:38 Andy Greenwald? For what it's worth, I had a similar apartment, my first-
5:41 Chris Ryan? Get the fuck out.
5:43 Andy Greenwald? Pretend, leave my mice.
5:45 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
5:45 Andy Greenwald? I had an apartment in, in, my first apartment in Brooklyn, in retrospect, I'm not sure if the people who I paid monthly had anything to do with the actual real estate in which I lived.
5:56 Chris Ryan? Yes.
5:56 Andy Greenwald? Like, I would go to one house, like, by the park, and I would just deliver a check, and then that was it, and then I would just continue to live in this other place on 17th Street.
6:06 Chris Ryan? And those people invented Airbnb.
6:08 Andy Greenwald? And I think they did, but it was also, no, it wasn't Airbnb, because it was more of like a freegan situation, because there was a front door to the building that just didn't lock, and we showed up, and we were like, that's wonderful, it's more part of the community, and then the community repo manned my roommate's bicycle and my laptop.
6:25 Chris Ryan? I forgot about that, I remember those days.
6:27 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
6:27 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
6:28 Andy Greenwald? I could do a walking tour of that, that would be limited.
6:31 Chris Ryan? Um, so yeah, I'm very excited to come to Boston. You know that if, if I'm voluntarily going to Boston at the end of January?
6:38 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
6:38 Chris Ryan? It's hot, it's, it's, it's a, it's a good time. So, Yasi and I are really excited, and, uh, please come, I move here to see people.
6:45 Andy Greenwald? How many layers are you gonna wear?
6:46 Chris Ryan? Untold, like, like an infinite amount of layers. A couple of things at the top-
6:52 Andy Greenwald? Okay.
6:52 Chris Ryan? -before we get to our shows.
6:53 Andy Greenwald? All right.
6:53 Chris Ryan? Our programs.
6:54 Andy Greenwald? Let's do it. Our stories.
6:56 Chris Ryan? Euphoria, season three. We're sitting on a pile of gold over here at Ryan Investments. Not that anybody, this isn't like a hot tip, like bet on Euphoria, but for the haters and the losers and the doubters, you guys are fucking wrong. The show is coming back. Levinson's coming back for the, for his crown and this show looks incredible. As Sean pointed out on Twitter, our buddy Sean Fantasy, it looks like he just made Goodfellas slash Magnolia.
7:24 Andy Greenwald? He's Sean.
7:25 Chris Ryan? With Adibisi from Oz.
7:26 Andy Greenwald? Sean's still cranking it out on X.
7:28 Chris Ryan? Yeah, Sean, I think has a very, he's a samurai. Nothing will distract him.
7:33 Andy Greenwald? I respect it. Okay, so
7:36 Andy Greenwald? the trailer looks like the trailer for a very exciting piece of entertainment.
7:39 Chris Ryan? Yes.
7:39 Andy Greenwald? As someone who, and I think this is unique in the professional critic slash media podcaster space, has never seen a frame of the show.
7:47 Chris Ryan? You've never watched any Euphoria at all?
7:49 Andy Greenwald? Not a frame. No.
7:50 Chris Ryan? Man, you missed out.
7:52 Andy Greenwald? Well, I think I need, or again, like you with the mice, it's an opportunity. You know what I mean? Like I could now engage and I could be a blank slate to respond to whether he has in fact made Goodfellas. He's Magnolia.
8:05 Chris Ryan? You mean when you watch season three with no pre, I, I think, I think we need to normalize this. I think we need to normalize people jumping in, in later seasons. I think that as Hollywood has taken longer and longer to make shows, as movies, franchises have stretched across decades and stuff, I have many people stopping you on the street, tears in their eyes saying, sir, can I watch the Bone Temple if I have not seen 28 months later?
8:31 Andy Greenwald? If I've previously not prayed in that particular house of worship. Yeah.
8:36 Chris Ryan? Um, and I say, yes. I say it's okay. I say a lot of these movies, a lot of these shows will do the work to inform you where they're at. I, I will just tell you, Rue, played by Zendaya, has been in some dire straits.
8:48 Andy Greenwald? Yeah. So I don't understand. I thought this was a high school show. First of all, it's a show.
8:54 Chris Ryan? It's a show. It's for her plotline. It's about addiction and it's about salvation. And it is about her increasing, her deepening descent into the criminal underworld of Los Angeles. At least that's like happening in season two.
9:08 Andy Greenwald? Is the show funny?
9:10 Chris Ryan? Yes.
9:11 Andy Greenwald? Because the trailer had some jokes.
9:13 Chris Ryan? Yes.
9:14 Andy Greenwald? All right.
9:14 Chris Ryan? Don't you, have you seen the memes of like, of Sydney Sweeney in the bathroom being like, are you saying I look like I'm in Oklahoma?
9:22 Andy Greenwald? No. I, I don't know if I need to reiterate it on this podcast, but I recently read an 800-page book about German history. I don't, I don't dwell in these meme worlds.
9:32 Chris Ryan? I honestly do feel like we should get a counter going.
9:34 Andy Greenwald? Can we do a date? I would love that. I would love it. And by the way, I have not.
9:40 Chris Ryan? And I'm going to give you the first dozen times that you've mentioned it the last couple of weeks where you're just like, somebody was on page 230 of a book.
9:48 Andy Greenwald? Well, that was weeks ago because as I've mentioned, I finished the book.
9:51 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
9:51 Andy Greenwald? And I am unsponsored by the New York Review of Books.
9:53 Chris Ryan? I've been a very, I've been really supportive of this project.
9:55 Andy Greenwald? You really have. I think that maybe I'm responding to that more than anything else because you were the one who believed in me early when on my holiday vacation, sent you a picture of the brick that I had purchased.
10:05 Chris Ryan? Do you know what it is? It's a, I didn't think you were going to read it.
10:08 Andy Greenwald? I know.
10:09 Chris Ryan? You bought it and I was like, you, you are such a sucker for New York Review of Books editions. And I feel like you are, you know, a compulsive book buyer.
10:19 Andy Greenwald? I am.
10:19 Chris Ryan? Often hitting me up from Romans, from Skylight. What do you heard about this? What do you heard about that? I'm like, brother, we still haven't finished Anna Karenina. You know, like.
10:27 Andy Greenwald? I have.
10:28 Chris Ryan? I come, my reading, my.
10:29 Andy Greenwald? I read it 25 years ago.
10:30 Chris Ryan? I'm talking about myself. I'm saying my book reading comes from a place of shame from what I haven't done.
10:35 Andy Greenwald? Oh.
10:36 Chris Ryan? And I feel like you, you're like, I got four books going.
10:38 Andy Greenwald? No, we are back in the age of empire. I am expanding. I walk in to Skylight and I'm like looking at Greenland. You know what I mean? Like I could take this. This is great for me.
10:48 Chris Ryan? So, but when you said that you had read like 230 pages off the rip, I was like, this kid's going to finish. It's going to be amazing. I also did anticipate that the price of you finishing this book would be this mercilessly bringing it up in every op. Opportunity, be it Euphoria, be it my live show in Austin, Chelsea, whatever the case may be.
11:09 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, well, this is gonna be a really, really fun.
11:11 Chris Ryan? So you'll go on the Euphoria journey with me, sight unseen, just like blind. I think it's a good experiment.
11:16 Andy Greenwald? I am, I'm interested. Can you go through, I don't have access to it, but I mean, I don't have it called up. But I feel like there was also a lot of, there are a lot of new additions to the cast this season.
11:26 Chris Ryan? Uh, I mean, Sharon Stone's supposed to be in it. She was not in the trailer as far as I remember. And I think Sharon Stone's in it and I don't know if there's other people.
11:34 Andy Greenwald? Maybe Kayak can Google that for us, that there was like, there was like an announcement a few months ago of like Natasha Lyonne or something.
11:39 Chris Ryan? Oh, okay.
11:40 Andy Greenwald? And, and the vibe I did, I got, and this is again, this is not a ding, this makes me interested. I was getting major Gwyneth Paltrow, oh, I wasn't in that movie vibes when she was talking about Spider-Man.
11:51 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
11:52 Andy Greenwald? Like, I don't know, look, Run and Gun, like, kind of, you know, Sam Levinson style of like, we don't know if we're making a TV show or not. Like, that's interesting that this cast may or may not know that they are in this season of television.
12:05 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I think he also shot, it sounds like from the Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, like, press tour that they've done for their respective films that have come out recently, that there's a little bit of a, a little bit of mystery even for the performers about like how their stuff that they shot necessarily fits in with a larger whole. I'll tell you, the reason I have tickets for this show for me entirely is Zendaya. She is so fucking good on this show. And the Rue character is great. Um, I'm, I'm still sad that they did not do the proposed Rue becomes a private detective in Los Angeles.
12:42 Andy Greenwald? That was the rumor, right?
12:43 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I mean, I don't know if that was ever even real, but.
12:45 Andy Greenwald? That's kinda awesome.
12:46 Chris Ryan? That was kinda sick. Uh, but I'm, I'm really impressed that they, I mean, when you think about how complicated the scheduling alone must be for those three stars.
12:54 Andy Greenwald? That's impressive. Oh, right here it is.
12:56 Chris Ryan? What if I started dapping up shows for great scheduling? Nice job, guys.
13:01 Andy Greenwald? It would be amazing. This is a sign of like how inside we've become.
13:05 Chris Ryan? That's a Golden Globe within the next two or three years by, for sure.
13:08 Andy Greenwald? Like, the line producer of the year award for making this shit work?
13:11 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
13:11 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, so here's some of the announced cast. Danielle, Danielle Dedwiler, we love, Station 11. The great Eli Roth, you know, always prefer him in front of the camera than behind it. Natasha Lyonne, Sam Trammell, Kwame Patterson, Homer Gear, young Gear.
13:29 Chris Ryan? Oh, Richard Gere's son?
13:31 Andy Greenwald? Mm-hmm.
13:31 Chris Ryan? Okay.
13:32 Andy Greenwald? Yeah. I guess it wasn't as starry as I expected and I, no one's asking Homer Gear if he's, will return on Doomsday?
13:38 Chris Ryan? Oh, yeah. I'm not familiar with her work, but. She's, she's a YouTuber. Yeah, no, I mean, I'm broadly aware of what she does, but I can't say that I have consumed a lot of it.
13:48 Andy Greenwald? Oh, no, here's more. Okay, here's the other ones. Ready for this list?
13:52 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
13:52 Andy Greenwald? I think you're gonna like this list.
13:55 Andy Greenwald? You mentioned our man out of B.C., Sharon Stone, Rosalia, Marshawn Lynch, Daryl Brick Gibson, shout out to Brick Gibson family, Kadim Hardison, and then a bunch of other people who are probably YouTubers.
14:08 Chris Ryan? Okay.
14:09 Andy Greenwald? Okay, look, I'm ready. I have proven.
14:11 Chris Ryan? I, I appreciate it.
14:12 Andy Greenwald? My willingness to watch things that you want me to watch on this show. And, just so it's clear, for the record, I do not have any like, personal animus against the show. The show premiered during my Albuquerque black hole, which is sounds like what Rue was living in.
14:25 Chris Ryan? She's definitely in that.
14:26 Andy Greenwald? In the show. And if things that happened in that like, late 2018, 2019 zone, I was.
14:33 Chris Ryan? It looks like the season seems to be setting itself up as Rue needs to like, basically her past catches up with her. She, at the end of season two, had gotten into some serious trouble with some drug dealers. There's a lot of Rue on the run stuff, her trying to get clean. And it just seems like that's the main thrust is like, the criminal underworld of Los Angeles coming, coming to get what's theirs from her.
14:59 Chris Ryan? Let me tell you about something else I was watching this week.
15:02 Andy Greenwald? This is, if this is the new format for the podcast, it works for me.
15:05 Chris Ryan? I also just have to, I have, I was kind of teasing Kaio with this before, so this show Tell Me Lies is back.
15:11 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, which, which I feel like you slipped a little bit. You didn't mention that when we were previewing the year.
15:15 Chris Ryan? I forgot.
15:15 Andy Greenwald? And I didn't mention my Tell Me Lies, Drops of God, returning.
15:20 Chris Ryan? Did you, did you check it out yet?
15:21 Andy Greenwald? No, but I completely.
15:23 Chris Ryan? Okay. I forgot Drops of God was coming back too. There's almost, there's too much television right now.
15:27 Andy Greenwald? Please, tell me.
15:28 Chris Ryan? Uh, so Tell Me Lies is in its third season. It's, um, about six people who have escaped from Arkham Asylum and go to Vassar College or some like.
15:40 Andy Greenwald? That tracks with my experience of visiting Vassar College.
15:42 Chris Ryan? It is about six demons who only binge drink and do the most fucked up shit to each other.
15:49 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
15:49 Chris Ryan? And, uh, get the most fucked up shit done to them. It's about these coeds, uh, in the, so the framing device for the show is that it's, um, there's a wedding in 2015 between two of these characters.
16:01 Andy Greenwald? Is this the framing for this season or the whole?
16:03 Chris Ryan? The show itself. So there's like, kind of like a little bit of a mystery element to it where there's this wedding that's happening. You're at the wedding in 2015.
16:10 Andy Greenwald? Right.
16:11 Chris Ryan? But then the flashbacks are happening in 2009, I believe, uh, 2008, 2009, at, uh, some place that seems like Bard or Vassar.
16:20 Andy Greenwald? The present day is 2015.
16:22 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
16:22 Andy Greenwald? Is there, is there a lot of chatter about like what Bill Simmons will do next? Like, is that how we know?
16:30 Chris Ryan? That's right.
16:30 Andy Greenwald? Is that how we know what year it is?
16:32 Chris Ryan? That's right. I can't believe he spoke truth to power about Ray Rice.
16:36 Andy Greenwald? I'm just wondering.
16:37 Chris Ryan? No. Uh, okay. So I'm just setting it up and there's these six people, six people, six characters in this college. And there's all this like, oh my God, this car accident. Oh my God, this, this overdose or whatever. There's a lot of like trauma. But the main thrust of the show is this central relationship between a character named Steven and a character named Lucy.
16:55 Andy Greenwald? Okay.
16:56 Chris Ryan? Steven is Hannibal Lecter, like he is the most evil person of all time. And I'm gonna tell you something that he does in the third season, just to get your reaction. Okay, this is fun. Without giving too much away about our youth, I think you'll get it. Okay, so one night at a college bar, this is a spoiler for something that happens in the first three episodes. And these are the same actors playing themselves with a six-year difference. Yeah, there are juniors and seniors in college in the 2009. You can do that between 22 and 28. Yeah, there's nothing where you're like, what the fuck? So, this guy Steven, he's out with his girlfriend Lucy. Their friends Evan, Bree, Pippa, Wrigley, they're hanging out. These are some white folks. No, there's, and they are at a college bar.
17:40 Chris Ryan? They're drinking and they decide they're gonna do Molly. They're gonna do MDMA, because there's a girl named Molly there who is on Molly. Oh, that's cute. And she's like freak, she's having a great time and they're like, we should do this. So they go and buy drugs from a grad student, who also turns out to be Bree's old foster home brother. Oh, boy. Yeah, there's a ton of stuff going on there, but. High achieving household, though. His whole reason for a living is to psychologically terrorize Lucy. It's just like. But they're dating. Yeah, on and off, like they've cheated on each other. He's with this girl Diana for a while, but they're like, more or less, his job is psychological warfare. Okay.
18:21 Chris Ryan? They all buy ecstasy, they're all gonna do it. Steven fucking pockets his. No. Just as everybody takes their pills, he goes like, oh yeah, and he puts it in his pocket. So the whole night, Lucy's having this great night. Oh, boy. Steven's kinda like hawking her, every time she's dancing with her friends, he's like, he kinda like, gets in the middle. Finally, they go home and she's rolling. And he's like, let's just have like radical honesty with each other, let's be real honest with each other. No. And he's like, tell me every fucked up thing you've ever done to me. And she's just like, what are you talking about? He's like, you know, and like they keep going through it. And he's basically trying to get her to admit that she slept with a friend of his when they were on a break.
19:06 Chris Ryan? But here's the fucking fucked up thing that he does.
19:08 Andy Greenwald? Is he continuing the charade? Is he like drinking lots of water and pretending he likes Sasha and Digweed records? Like, what is he doing?
19:14 Chris Ryan? Uh, he actually, if I were her,
19:18 Andy Greenwald? Okay.
19:18 Chris Ryan? I would be like, I don't think that you are feeling it.
19:21 Andy Greenwald? Okay.
19:21 Chris Ryan? Like, he is never exhibiting like an incredible amount of warmth or, you know, emotional transparency.
19:28 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
19:29 Chris Ryan? But she's just like, I feel so great right now, I'm so high, whatever. They keep going with this conversation. He doesn't get what he wants. And he's just like, hmm, alright, well, I'm gonna go to sleep.
19:40 Andy Greenwald? Well, that's the giveaway.
19:42 Chris Ryan? And she's just like, what are you talking about? I'm so high right now, like, what are you saying? You cannot abandon me like this. And he's like, I'm just tired, I'm going to bed. And it is like, it is the most fucked up thing I have ever seen.
19:55 Andy Greenwald? Now, are you offended for the lies or just the moral party foul of that?
20:01 Chris Ryan? Both.
20:02 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
20:02 Chris Ryan? Both. And things he does in the first three episodes of the third season will dwarf this in terms of like how he should be brought up in front of the Hague. But this is the greatest crime I've ever, like to string somebody along while they're rolling on ecstasy and then just be like, I'm going to bed.
20:21 Andy Greenwald? Leaving her.
20:23 Chris Ryan? To be blown out of her mind on this stuff and is just like, I'm sitting in this dorm room in Poughkeepsie, what am I supposed to do with myself?
20:31 Andy Greenwald? With all of this good energy.
20:34 Chris Ryan? But you know how the energy can go bad?
20:36 Andy Greenwald? It can go bad in a hurry.
20:37 Chris Ryan? You know?
20:38 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
20:38 Chris Ryan? Um.
20:39 Andy Greenwald? Wow.
20:39 Chris Ryan? So that was, that was fun.
20:41 Andy Greenwald? What a monster.
20:41 Chris Ryan? I would describe that as a show that my wife and I are trying to watch between the hour of 10 and 11 PM.
20:46 Andy Greenwald? You're right.
20:47 Chris Ryan? And it is having an adverse effect on my sleep cycle.
20:50 Andy Greenwald? Because of all the drugs you're chasing.
20:53 Chris Ryan? Yes, we're also taking.
20:54 Andy Greenwald? We're rolling.
20:55 Chris Ryan? The whole time.
20:55 Andy Greenwald? And classic Phoebe's like, well, good night. And you're like, no, you are not committing to the bit.
21:00 Chris Ryan? Um.
21:01 Andy Greenwald? Like, in the same way that if you watch Top Chef, you get hungry.
21:03 Chris Ryan? Yeah. So I'm sorry, I guess I should have said spoilers.
21:05 Andy Greenwald? Kai, are you watching this show or are you up on this?
21:07 Speaker 03 Um, I'm only halfway through the first season of the show, but I'm.
21:10 Andy Greenwald? You just spoiled it.
21:12 Speaker 03 That's fine, I think I could see.
21:13 Chris Ryan? I think Kai has a good attitude about spoilers.
21:15 Speaker 03 I think I could see where it's going, too. This is not shocking.
21:18 Andy Greenwald? What is his, is he just like staring at her during this?
21:22 Chris Ryan? He has a thing where he doesn't make direct eye contact a lot. So he'll be like, you have to do this, you have to do this. And it's like, it's, he's, it's, it's, it's an effective show.
21:32 Andy Greenwald? Wow.
21:33 Chris Ryan? It's like the darkest. Soap, I think I've ever watched in some ways.
21:39 Andy Greenwald? I.
21:39 Chris Ryan? But I don't, I don't even mean to demean it by calling it a soap. I mean, it's, it's actually, it's, I think it's pretty good.
21:44 Andy Greenwald? I will say.
21:45 Chris Ryan? I'm in my top 10.
21:46 Andy Greenwald? I, I will say, and I, in the, you know, in, in the spirit of, of radical honesty and transparency, I have never.
21:52 Chris Ryan? You've been on ecstasy this entire podcast.
21:54 Andy Greenwald? Last week. I have never pocketed drugs and allowed other people to go on a, a journey. But I have been guilty of, let's get one more good night.
22:05 Chris Ryan? Oh, you do that. You do do that.
22:07 Andy Greenwald? I know. I feel like it's a little barbed and we should just like put it on the table.
22:10 Chris Ryan? You.
22:11 Andy Greenwald? I, I.
22:12 Chris Ryan? When we were in London for Thirsty Thursday, you were pretty good that night, actually.
22:15 Andy Greenwald? Yes.
22:16 Chris Ryan? It was just me and Phoebe were like, it's, we're, we're about to light this candle and you were just like, I'm gonna go to sleep.
22:21 Andy Greenwald? I misunderstood. I think we had a fun, first of all, I just think that when we were all out in London, there was just a misunderstanding of the night's program. You know what I mean? Like, I thought it was a one act play.
22:32 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
22:32 Andy Greenwald? And you were like, no, no, this is Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia. And we will be exploring the history of Russian socialism until dawn.
22:39 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
22:40 Andy Greenwald? That was the only difference.
22:41 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
22:41 Andy Greenwald? I think we parted as friends, but you just.
22:44 Chris Ryan? I thought you wound up eating like a ham bagel at a, at a football bar.
22:48 Andy Greenwald? That felt vaguely antisemitic.
22:50 Chris Ryan? No, I swear to God. Well, you know, I know you read this book, so it's probably on top of your mind.
22:55 Andy Greenwald? It just brought me back.
22:56 Chris Ryan? I hope that was educational for people. I just wanted to share what's happening on TV.
23:01 Andy Greenwald? Wild what's happening on TV. Because when you, I, I do appreciate it also in a servicey way, because when you're like, what show, what channel is that show on?
23:07 Chris Ryan? Hulu.
23:08 Andy Greenwald? I really thought that it was like, oh, it's like some right turn pretty. And I was like, I bet my kids are gonna start watching this one soon. And now I know what to specifically block.
23:16 Chris Ryan? Yes.
23:16 Andy Greenwald? On their devices.
23:17 Chris Ryan? If they're ever like, I'm, I'm into Grace Van Patten, I wanna watch Tell Me Lies, be like, you, you have to wait 22 years before you could watch that.
23:25 Andy Greenwald? At least.
23:25 Chris Ryan? Yes.
23:26 Andy Greenwald? At least. Talk to Uncle Chris.
23:28 Chris Ryan? One of the problems that I've been having this week is the multi-episode release that's happening for a bunch of seasons that are either returning or whatever. So, we're gonna hit. The first episode of Hijack, the first episode of Night Manager.
23:44 Andy Greenwald? And there's multiple Night Managers up, which I did not get through.
23:47 Chris Ryan? There's three. I've watched like one and a half.
23:49 Andy Greenwald? Okay.
23:49 Chris Ryan? I did not get to Ponies, so I'll have to do, that'll be your tell me lies.
23:53 Andy Greenwald? Okay.
23:53 Chris Ryan? Um, and then obviously we can talk about the pit now if you'd like to.
23:57 Andy Greenwald? Did I mention to you that I watched Ponies early to be prepared for this pod?
24:00 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
24:00 Andy Greenwald? Did that come up?
24:01 Chris Ryan? I, you did. You did. But I also have like a mental Excel sheet of what you haven't watched. You know what I mean? And where I'm like, I know you have the trailer. I know you have that screener. You could, you could knock this out, but you didn't.
24:14 Andy Greenwald? First of all, I don't always have the screeners these days. They, they go for you. They know who's persuadable.
24:20 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
24:20 Andy Greenwald? You know what I mean?
24:21 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
24:21 Andy Greenwald? They, they got real reticent over the last decade.
24:25 Chris Ryan? Old Gene Shalit here.
24:27 Andy Greenwald? I loved content. In every relationship, there's a Sydney Sweeney and a Jacob Elordi. You know what I mean? That's all I'm saying.
24:35 Andy Greenwald? It's just the natural way of things.
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26:26 Chris Ryan? You want to do our new shows first or The Pit first?
26:28 Andy Greenwald? Kai is our producer. Do you think we should run through new shows first?
26:32 Speaker 03 I think that makes sense.
26:33 Chris Ryan? Yeah, let's do that. Let's see if The Pit, because honestly with The Pit, it's more a play-by-play of people getting their shoulders reattached, so.
26:42 Andy Greenwald? Sure thing. Well, let's talk Hijack first, then, and then we'll talk about the spy shows.
26:45 Chris Ryan? Hijack is a show that Andy and I were delighted by in its first season. I think it really knew the assignment.
26:50 Andy Greenwald? Yes.
26:52 Chris Ryan? Idris Elba is one of the most compulsively watchable actors we have. He completely understood that he was entering his Liam Neeson era. I have to admit, I almost found the 10-year gap in Night Manager episodes.
27:11 Andy Greenwald? I was gonna make the same point.
27:12 Chris Ryan? To be less confusing than the way that Hijack Season 2 started, which is not to say that I didn't enjoy myself, but I was just like, truly, what the fuck is happening?
27:21 Andy Greenwald? Not just that, and I appreciate you saying this. I think that as we sundown, it's nice to do it together, because I genuinely have no memory of this show or of The Night Manager. And I did, I can't tell yet, because I've only watched one Season 2 episode of Hijack.
27:38 Chris Ryan? I have a conspiracy theory about this.
27:39 Andy Greenwald? I'm ready to hear it. But I can't tell yet if it was genius or troubling that the quite-long, previously-on-Hijack, left me more confused.
27:49 Chris Ryan? Yes.
27:50 Andy Greenwald? Because I kind of hoped, and maybe this is a sign that it doesn't matter, which, again, I'm kind of into, but I thought that the previously-on-Hijack wouldn't really just be about, this is Sam Nelson, once he was on a hijack plane and it was kind of sick. I thought it would be like, ah, here's the real conspiracy behind the spate of hijackings targeting Idris Elba.
28:10 Chris Ryan? Sure.
28:11 Andy Greenwald? Leading me into the larger plot points of Season 2. That was not the case. That was not the case of the trailer.
28:16 Chris Ryan? Well. It just seems like a lot has transpired in between the two seasons that will, that is yet to be revealed on season two of Hijack.
28:26 Andy Greenwald? It's true. We don't really know where we're meeting.
28:27 Chris Ryan? Which is acceptable. My relationship to Hijack is not much different than my relationship to Speed, the movie.
28:35 Andy Greenwald? The drug.
28:36 Chris Ryan? Because I was just like, here's a cool character who's real good at negotiating, whatever, you know, and the whole thing is just like his bad luck, he's gonna be on a train that gets hijacked. And I was very much here for it.
28:49 Andy Greenwald? Yes, I agree.
28:50 Chris Ryan? I agree with you that the reminders of the Europe-wide criminal conspiracy of, I don't, I can't remember what those guys do. I honestly thought all of those dudes kind of offed each other at the end of season one.
29:04 Andy Greenwald? Yes.
29:05 Chris Ryan? And I'm starting to worry that streamers are making their follow-up seasons so complicated and so delayed that they are forcing people to re-watch things, thus spending more time on platform.
29:18 Andy Greenwald? Oh, it's interesting conspiracy theory. Because Hijack immediately launched to the top of the Apple charts when it returned.
29:23 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure. Look, I will also just say, one thing with this is that the twist at the end of the first episode of Hijack is revealed in the trailer.
29:32 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
29:32 Chris Ryan? So you are essentially sitting there for 44 minutes to achieve what they already told you was gonna happen.
29:38 Andy Greenwald? It was quite apparent, I thought. I didn't feel particularly...
29:41 Chris Ryan? Well, his behavior is quite odd.
29:43 Andy Greenwald? It is.
29:43 Chris Ryan? You know, he's such a warm man.
29:45 Andy Greenwald? Usually.
29:45 Chris Ryan? And usually if you get buttonholed by someone on a German subway, you would definitely give them a job immediately.
29:52 Andy Greenwald? Funny story about the German subway.
29:53 Chris Ryan? Wait, I just, we gotta give Effinger's corner here. How are you gonna connect it?
30:00 Andy Greenwald? I'm just saying, it was remarkable. And I was just thinking of how poor Lottie Effinger would think about her beloved Berlin, seeing how transformed it is, but also about the preponderance of English.
30:12 Chris Ryan? Sure.
30:12 Andy Greenwald? You know?
30:13 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I do find that, I think that English is permeated a lot.
30:18 Andy Greenwald? For sure.
30:19 Chris Ryan? Yeah. Way more than like when I was like first in Europe in the late 90s and it was like, and once you got out of London, you're on your own.
30:26 Andy Greenwald? Do you...
30:27 Chris Ryan? Not London, but like, once you got out of England and Ireland.
30:29 Andy Greenwald? And our listeners who have traveled to do, honestly, the last remaining bastion of Western democracy recently could tell us, like, on the U-Bahn, do they just lead with English announcements at this point? Or do they do both? But, because they seem to only showcase the English announcements on this show. I broadly think that hijack was at its best when it was, oh sick, Idris Elba's on this plane that's getting hijacked.
30:54 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
30:54 Andy Greenwald? And there was a freedom to that. And I don't really care too much about the larger conspiracy. And I find it quite opaque, in fact.
31:08 Chris Ryan? It's been one episode. I'm sure they will, they will hold our hand and bring us into this. Marth from Dark, our beloved Dark on Netflix.
31:16 Andy Greenwald? You could say Martha, we're, we're American.
31:18 Chris Ryan? Martha, she's, plays the, who's the actor?
31:20 Andy Greenwald? Lisa Vikari. It was very happy to see her.
31:22 Chris Ryan? She plays the, I don't know, train control center operator.
31:30 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, she's the, there's, there's a, there's a taking a Pelham 123 vibe.
31:33 Chris Ryan? Yes.
31:33 Andy Greenwald? Where she's like, and again, I respect the show when it plays the hits. Like, she's leaving, she does night shift, and her colleague is like, oh.
31:41 Chris Ryan? Can you stay for another hour?
31:41 Andy Greenwald? Can you stay for an hour? Nothing ever happens on that train line.
31:44 Chris Ryan? Right.
31:44 Andy Greenwald? We're like, oh damn, here we go again.
31:46 Chris Ryan? Um, and so, we'll find out more about this, but there is two or three other subplots. Nelson, Sam Nelson, Idris Elba's character. And I guess I should just say, obviously spoilers for all of this, but like, if you've seen the trailer, you'll know that this particular hijacking is perpetrated by Sam, at least initially. And that it looks like he is under the same pressures that some other characters in the first season were, where it's like, you can't trust anybody because this criminal organization has blackmailed.
32:20 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
32:21 Chris Ryan? Everyone on the plane, and it seems like maybe on the train as well. So, I don't know really what the whole guy with the backpack thing was about in the first episode.
32:30 Andy Greenwald? Well, it appeared to be a misdirect for everyone, because Sam, we know, is vigilant. We know that he is not really a keep to himself kind of guy. He helps people on the escalator early on. You know, he helps the guy with the stroller, so we know that he's kind of, he likes to, he likes to mix it up, he likes to get involved. So, it is not entirely out of character for him to notice a man with a backpack and profile him, basically, and be like, this is sketchy. And it's revealed at the end of the episode that he was, he did that solely to get the cops off the train.
33:02 Chris Ryan? That's right. That's right.
33:04 Andy Greenwald? So kudos to Sam. Also, his wife is still in the mix, but is now-
33:08 Chris Ryan? This is one of the subplots.
33:09 Andy Greenwald? There's a sad anniversary. Has something happened to their son? Has something happened to their marriage? We don't know.
33:13 Chris Ryan? Well, it's his ex-wife.
33:14 Andy Greenwald? Yes, he was ex in the first season, but they shared a son.
33:17 Chris Ryan? Did the boyfriend who was hanging around that house, did he get got in the first season?
33:21 Andy Greenwald? No, I think he was just like, "Who is your ex-husband anyway?" And they were working together on the ground.
33:26 Chris Ryan? Wasn't he like running around and like-
33:27 Andy Greenwald? He was running the fields and that mom went into traffic.
33:29 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
33:30 Andy Greenwald? Do you want me to recount other things that were in the previously on that I remember?
33:33 Chris Ryan? It doesn't matter. She's there, she's in a cabin, she's like trying to get away from it all. And then there's a whole thing happening at the British Embassy with someone who's interviewing or talking to somebody at the Justice Department of Germany. They have one of those. And-
33:49 Andy Greenwald? They do have one of those.
33:50 Chris Ryan? I know, I'm saying they got one about this criminal organization. So, a lot of stuff yet to happen and a lot of buildup to get to this twist at the end of the episode that everybody already knew, which is that Sam is now, he is the captain now. Yeah.
34:05 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, I have to say I was not particularly optimistic after this first episode.
34:12 Chris Ryan? Okay.
34:13 Andy Greenwald? I find, I found the look of it in the subways, a little dark and claustrophobic and-
34:24 Chris Ryan? Is that what you thought?
34:25 Andy Greenwald? I did.
34:25 Chris Ryan? Okay.
34:26 Andy Greenwald? I did. I just didn't find, and I thought the cleverness of the twist was too heavily, they were too heavily invested in that.
34:34 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
34:34 Andy Greenwald? Like that it was all, the entire shape of the episode was built towards-
34:38 Chris Ryan? Yes.
34:38 Andy Greenwald? Aha. So-
34:39 Chris Ryan? It's 40 minutes to get 30 seconds.
34:41 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, and I'm willing to see what happens next. I do note, and I don't know anything about, truly nothing about the backstory or the creation of the show. It just appeared in our lives like two years ago at a time we were quite ready for it.
34:53 Chris Ryan? Yeah. I think it was a gear shift. It was a nice tonal-
34:57 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
34:57 Chris Ryan? Like a- It was a nice digestif.
35:01 Andy Greenwald? It was fun.
35:02 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
35:02 Andy Greenwald? In a way that because it felt free of heavy backstory or heavy intention or ambition, honestly, outside of the desire to entertain in an old school way, which I appreciate. The show was created by George Kay and Jim Field Smith. It appears that George Kay is no longer involved in the show.
35:18 Chris Ryan? He's gone on to other stuff.
35:20 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, he's the writer. So the director, Jim Field Smith, has returned and at least for the first episode, Guy Bolton has written this episode. So again, I'm not saying that like one man was the real captain of hijack. It is just a different, it's a different operation.
35:32 Chris Ryan? This is also probably a case where this would have made an incredible movie. You know, like hijack would have been an incredible movie. It was cool to spend six hours doing it, but you could have done it in two. And creating a, you know, like basically the latticework of the world building that they have to do now might take a little bit of labor. I also don't find subways nearly as terrifying as being stuck in an airplane.
35:59 Andy Greenwald? That one kid was not doing well.
36:01 Chris Ryan? He shouldn't have got on subway. Should have had self determination.
36:03 Andy Greenwald? You think?
36:04 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
36:04 Andy Greenwald? Wow.
36:05 Chris Ryan? Could have just been like, I, you know, I have an allergy to subways.
36:08 Andy Greenwald? Well, he could have walked to Unterdun Linden, which is one of the classic old boulevards of Berlin. You know, culturally it's changed over time, but it is still.
36:15 Chris Ryan? You know, it's funny that you mentioned the look of hijack because I think in my mind, Night Manager had been this deeply lush.
36:27 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
36:28 Chris Ryan? Exotic, beautifully shot show.
36:31 Andy Greenwald? Mm hmm.
36:32 Chris Ryan? And I found myself really bumping against some of the visual stuff in the second season, the first episode of the second season.
36:39 Andy Greenwald? Really?
36:40 Chris Ryan? Like, it just felt like it looked like Jack Ryan to me.
36:43 Andy Greenwald? Well, it's an Amazon show.
36:44 Chris Ryan? I know.
36:45 Andy Greenwald? I mean, I would say the first season, again.
36:48 Chris Ryan? 10 years ago.
36:49 Andy Greenwald? Very unclear how much of it I watched. And I'm not bragging. Like, I'm a little concerned.
36:55 Chris Ryan? Like Elizabeth de Becky is on it.
36:56 Andy Greenwald? Yes. And I remembered that much like Burn Notice was a show about sunglasses, Night Manager, season one, was a show about linen shirts.
37:02 Chris Ryan? Yeah, for some of it. Yeah.
37:04 Andy Greenwald? For quite a bit of it.
37:05 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
37:07 Andy Greenwald? So you felt. All right, I don't, are we pivoting? Are we talking Night Manager?
37:12 Chris Ryan? I think we can. I mean, did you have other hijack notes you wanted to share?
37:15 Andy Greenwald? Uh, no.
37:15 Chris Ryan? Okay.
37:16 Andy Greenwald? Would you, do you feel committed to seeing Sam's project through?
37:19 Chris Ryan? I think I'm, I'm down for another episode, but it's, it's like, like we said, it's an incredibly busy time, so.
37:26 Andy Greenwald? No, so I might not make the cut.
37:29 Andy Greenwald? I did not have an issue with the direction, although I think Suzanne Beer directed the first series. She's a very talented director. Georgie Banks Davies has done really good work. She did I Hate Susie. I love, what's the name of that show?
37:41 Chris Ryan? I Hate Susie.
37:41 Andy Greenwald? Yeah. She's done the second season. For me, it wasn't even the visuals. I think, and I do want to talk about the show in tandem with Ponies in a minute, but we'll just talk about it specifically to begin with. This is a very tricky thing because Night Manager is adapted from the John le Carré novel. And in fact, I didn't remember this at all, but the great man himself, David Cornwell, appeared in the series because he was still alive then.
38:05 Chris Ryan? He did, yes.
38:05 Andy Greenwald? He just had a little cameo at a restaurant. But it was kind of-
38:09 Chris Ryan? He's like Michael Caine at the end of Dark Knight Rises.
38:12 Andy Greenwald? Nod. Feel free to continue this without me, boys.
38:17 Andy Greenwald? The, it was, you know, an exemplar of this project by John le Carré's sons to take the IP and the legacy and spin it into this new era.
38:30 Chris Ryan? Which is a project that is still ongoing.
38:32 Andy Greenwald? Very much so, including-
38:33 Chris Ryan? We discussed the spy who came in from the cold and like, that would be the start of like a series of Smiley. Yeah.
38:40 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, and, and just last year, there was the book that his son Nick wrote. He, he wrote a John le Carré novel, basically, a new Smiley novel. So they are continuing the family brand.
38:51 Andy Greenwald? But this, making a second season of this is uncharted territory because there was no sequel to the book.
38:56 Chris Ryan? And there is going to be a third season.
38:58 Andy Greenwald? Right. And when Amazon picked it up from, I think it was an AMC co-production originally, that the, it was picked up for two seasons.
39:06 Andy Greenwald? And visually, I think what you're saying about the show visually is just generally what I felt about the show in general, which is, this is not, it's not just, you're not your father's John le Carré. It's not just not our John le Carré. I don't think it's really John le Carré. Because everything is so-
39:24 Andy Greenwald? Hyper sexy, hyper literal, and just kind of clunky, you know? And I want you, because you have spent more time in the Lacare verse than I have. You've read more of the books and you care. I think you are more invested in the project largely than I'm even than I might be. But it did not have any of the great man's signature wit?
39:46 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
39:46 Andy Greenwald? Visually or?
39:47 Chris Ryan? I think that.
39:48 Andy Greenwald? Tonally?
39:50 Chris Ryan? One thing that I associate with Lacare, I'm sure people who have also read his books might fight me on this, is a degree of detachment from the action that is happening. And this is more of.
40:02 Andy Greenwald? We should catch people up to, I'm sorry, I jumped past the specifics.
40:05 Chris Ryan? Of what?
40:05 Andy Greenwald? But go ahead, finish your thoughts.
40:07 Chris Ryan? Of the show itself?
40:07 Andy Greenwald? But finish the thought.
40:08 Chris Ryan? Yeah, well, I'll try and explain that by saying, you know, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, there's very little quote unquote "action" in the traditional sense. I mean, there's a shooting, there's a border crossing, but there's really, it's more about following people, reading about people, searching for people.
40:27 Andy Greenwald? And understanding the ultimate flaw of people.
40:30 Chris Ryan? Yeah, and when people describe them as like Cold War novels, I think that it downplays the fact that it's about people in rooms making decisions in an intellectual, a battle of like wit and will, and not really about moving nuclear weapons off one coast or another, or showdowns, or anything like that. And so to have a protagonist in, he's calling himself Alex in this season of the show, but is Jonathan in the first season.
41:04 Andy Greenwald? Is it Tom Hiddleston?
41:05 Chris Ryan? Tom Hiddleston's character, who's, you know, we're introduced to as a night manager at a hotel in Cairo in the first season, who is reluctantly pulled into the world of espionage by Olivia Colman's Angela character and Hugh Laurie's Richard character, Richard Roper. Richard Roper?
41:26 Andy Greenwald? Does sound like the guy who replaced Siskel, doesn't it?
41:30 Chris Ryan? Is it Richard Roper?
41:30 Andy Greenwald? I believe it's Richard Roper.
41:31 Chris Ryan? Um, in any case.
41:33 Andy Greenwald? It is.
41:34 Chris Ryan? The introduction to him in the second season is way closer to Super Spy. And I don't care what you tell me, I must get to the truth.
41:46 Andy Greenwald? Yes.
41:46 Chris Ryan? Like, and we have to set up a, an operation, even though that's not what you people do. And like, it's just, it just kind of feels a little bit more, honestly, like the Krasinski iteration of Jack Ryan in that show.
41:57 Andy Greenwald? This is a successfully executed contemporary thriller series. For all the good that entails and it, you know, I, I thought it looked pretty good. I think the cast is remarkable and we'll talk about that in a second. It hit familiar notes, you know, and I, and we like those notes. We like the song, that's fine. But I think looking at it through the lens of Lakari kind of made, bummed me out. Because what I like about those books is that, as you said, the context is really the framing for deeply interesting and universally relevant psychological explorations of what it means to be a person in a morally complex universe. This is a show where a new character is introduced as being the true disciple of Thanos, I mean, Richard Roper.
42:42 Chris Ryan? Right.
42:42 Andy Greenwald? Where the big discovery is a series of printed, no, is a downloaded JPEGs in which someone has with a Sharpie circled people.
42:53 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
42:53 Andy Greenwald? And, and written important questions about who they might be next to them. Like, that is not particularly complex spy craft. It's also having a hard time, like a lot of spy shows are, updating for the modern world.
43:08 Andy Greenwald? The, one of the fun things about the Lakari, the Lakari spy craft, Cold War spy craft that we love is a world of personal relationships and dead drops and, you know.
43:17 Chris Ryan? Analog spy craft.
43:18 Andy Greenwald? Analog spy craft.
43:19 Chris Ryan? This is a lot of surveillance and a lot of like, well, we have a microphone that can listen across the park, you know?
43:24 Andy Greenwald? And we have, his job is no longer, he is a night manager now for all of London's night, where he has access to CCTV cameras seemingly everywhere to follow all bad guys. Which, you know, not to, to bring it up again, but one of the reasons why I think we were shouting out Oliver Harris's spy novels last fall is because he seems to be, he, to me, he is. He is the true disciple of John le Carré.
43:46 Chris Ryan? Right.
43:46 Andy Greenwald? In the sense that he's like, okay, in a world where you can do deep fakes of everyone, and you can have a fire hose of all data, what does it mean to be a spy? Whereas this is just like, we're still doing it in the kind of politests, like, the, you know, version of the past, but like, now we have microphones that can record anything, and you can clean up dog barking to hear people confess their crimes.
44:05 Chris Ryan? Sure.
44:06 Andy Greenwald? That was kind of a bummer to me. And also, just like the natural drift in contemporary television to be like, well, it's gonna end with a big fucking explosion.
44:13 Chris Ryan? Yeah, uh, so the, this season seems like it's going to center around Columbia and legal arms shipments to Colombia.
44:23 Andy Greenwald? Which I didn't remember, apparently, the Latin America played a bigger role in the book The Night Manager, and that was transposed to the Middle East. So in a way, they are reclaiming some of the original.
44:32 Chris Ryan? That's smart adaptation. Uh, and I will also say Diego Calva, quite good in Babylon. I haven't seen him since then in anything that I remember, and has definitely an edge to him in this second season. So I think as the show maybe centers him a little bit more, it'll get on track. Camilla Morone's also really good, and she was fantastic in Daisy Jones and the Six.
44:53 Andy Greenwald? She was.
44:54 Chris Ryan? Uh, and she is in, in this season. So I will say this, I didn't love the first episode. It was just good enough that I will probably watch all of it.
45:02 Andy Greenwald? The reason I, I appreciate your honesty. The reason I want to talk about it in companionship to Ponies, which is the Peacock show that premiered this week, which is, um, also a, which actually is a Cold War spy thriller, a little bit more comic. It's created by David Iserson and Susanna Fogel, who've worked together before on, I forget, there was the comedy spy movie that they made. This is a, this is a world that they are fans of, and they like quite a bit. It stars Emilia Clarke from Game of Thrones, and Haley Lou Richardson, who people know best probably from White Lotus, season two, as ponies, persons of no interest. They are the spouses of CIA, American CIA operatives in Moscow in the 1970s. I will speak specifically to that show in a second.
45:48 Andy Greenwald? But watching these two shows in tandem in a week that they were both released really reminded me of something that is, you know, I think, front of mind for a lot of Americans these days, wealth inequality.
46:01 Andy Greenwald? It is a very, very strange moment in television when, if you subscribe to multiple services, these all come through the same tube. But they could not be more different.
46:13 Chris Ryan? In terms of like their-
46:14 Andy Greenwald? In terms of their budget and in terms of their execution. I think Pony, like, I liked Ponies more than Night Manager. I'm not completely sold on it yet, but like you, I will like to watch more to see how it develops. I like the originality of the idea. I like the slightly unconventional comic spin of the show and the different way into more established genre terrain. But The Night Manager looks like a billion bucks. The Night Manager is filming on location in London and in Colombia. The Night Manager has a cast that goes so deep that you can have Olivia Colman and Noah Ju- are we saying Jupe or Jupe? I've never actually said his name out loud.
46:52 Chris Ryan? I think it's Jupe. Indira Varma's in this.
46:54 Andy Greenwald? Indira Varma. Up and down the cast list is incredibly impressive. And when you- Kirby Howell-Baptiste, like, when you see, when you see these people show up in these supporting roles, like Kirby as Tom Hiddleston's therapist, it elevates the floor of the experience and, I think, provides like a patina of class and prestige to something that it might not otherwise get. I have no, I intend no disrespect or slight to the hard-working cast and crew of Ponies, which filmed on location in Budapest, which does a pretty credible job, I think, having been and having not actually been to 1970s Moscow, but-
47:33 Chris Ryan? Budapest, which recently was Washington DC for Death by Lightning, so yes, yeah.
47:38 Andy Greenwald? And where the tax breaks remain phenomenal, from what I understand. The cast list is Emilia Clarke, Hayley, Lou Richardson, and then Adrian Lester, who's a great veteran British actor of stage and screen, who basically is a that guy from Primary Colors, which was his first movie, up to like, you have seen him.
47:57 Chris Ryan? Okay.
47:58 Andy Greenwald? And he's great in this as well, as he always is. To, that's basically it. Now, I'm not diminishing the contributions of the other actors in the show, many of whom might become stars.
48:07 Chris Ryan? Sure.
48:08 Andy Greenwald? But they aren't, and you feel it. And I do think that that affects- Our engagement with stuff sometimes, you know, like it's telling us what it is and what it can be, and it feels like it comes with a bit of a of a of a ceiling. Now, I don't want, I didn't want to lead with that aspect of the conversation because I don't want to discourage people from watching it.
48:26 Chris Ryan? I think it's worth having to talk about, though, because I haven't watched Ponies yet. I will check it out. I thought what your your critique or your observation was very interesting because, you know, we've gotten this preponderance of espionage shows. There's clearly like a huge growing audience for these series. I think that there's lots of different ways to execute them. It seems like the night manager is leaning into the globe trotting, international man of mystery side of things. There's also, and we talked about this when Andor was on this show that's on Amazon Prime now, but it's from the early 1980s called Sandbaggers. And Sandbaggers is largely shot, it was a British TV show
49:08 Chris Ryan? about UK spies, and it was largely shot on sound stages that you can tell are sound stages. And it looks like Fawlty Towers. I mean, it looks like a 1980s British TV show. And yet, the writing is at a level that it exudes verisimilitude, even if it doesn't go to the far flung places that these agents are being sent routinely. You can have, you can do a show that doesn't have a lot of money at its disposal, and you can think of really creative ways to kind of color in the outside of the lines that are shown on the TV show and give people a sense. Like, I think that we underestimate contemporary
49:51 Chris Ryan? viewers' ability to imagine what has just happened without showing us kind of a fake CGI version of it. I don't know what it is about Ponies that looks cheaper.
50:01 Andy Greenwald? It doesn't. Well, I mean, you'll watch it and report back. I think that, I'm not saying that Ponies would be improved by access to the same budget as Night Manager. I'm saying it was an interesting exercise to watch them both in roughly the same time period and track my reactions to them. Now, I do think, again, not speaking to the specific development paths of either of these projects, because I don't know them, but one of the challenges of this era, I think, is, you know, beautiful ideas springing from the minds of writers and producers. They are free, they are unfettered, they are fully realized when they exist only on the page. And then they are taken to market and they are offered to, you know, the dwindling number of buyers left in this town.
50:43 Andy Greenwald? The version of that beautiful idea that is ultimately, you know, dream come true and it is executed on Paramount Plus is different than if it is executed on AMC. Sure. Or on Starz. Sure. That isn't new information, but as all of these people are still at least pretending to compete with each other, when in fact, they actually can't, the arms race has been decided and Apple, Amazon and Netflix won, with HBO is, you know, still trying to punch above its weight here, or just ultimately becoming Netflix at this point. It's tricky. And I think that, like, if I could speak from personal, I try not to do this too often, but like, when I think about my experience running Prior Patch, like, the biggest mistake that I, and there are many, but the biggest mistake that I think- Just so we're clear, this is before you read Effin' Chirs.
51:27 Andy Greenwald? I would have reimagined the entire piece as a decades-long exploration of a single Jewish family, yes. So, okay, so that's mistake 1A. But mistake 1B, for sure, was inexperience in terms of, I had wonderful development partners and network partners who were encouraging me to think big, make the biggest show you can. And one of the big thoughts that I had was a certain episode would be an all-out military assault on a mansion, on a compound. Right. In, in, in fiction, it was Albuquerque, but it was in Texas. And- I loved the fun we were having writing an action movie for that episode.
52:07 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
52:07 Andy Greenwald? And it actually took way too long for the rubber to meet the road of we actually have the same budget as like, not even like suits of like Royal Pains.
52:16 Chris Ryan? Mm-hmm.
52:16 Andy Greenwald? You know, like Blue Skies era stuff. And I worked with a brilliant crew who did their best, but it starts getting chipped away of like, well, instead of like, a whole crew of people, uh, you know, like trying to climb a wall with grappling hooks, what if we just built one three-foot wall and put one guy over it?
52:31 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
52:32 Andy Greenwald? And you're like, okay. The whole episode would have been better if it had been written from the perspective of the people inside the house while things are exploding.
52:40 Chris Ryan? Yes.
52:41 Andy Greenwald? That's, so it's a, it's a play, not a blockbuster film. That's the kind of decision-making that has to happen at the beginning. And, um, and I think that that would have resulted in a better episode of television than if you have like, we're gonna make the most, you know, mind-expanding, globe-trotting spy series, but we're gonna have to do it on this soundstage in Budapest. Now, Ponies doesn't deserve this to be its logline or its review from this podcast. It is vibrant, it is fun, it is irreverent, and it is not trying to be Jack Ryan.
53:10 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
53:11 Andy Greenwald? And I respect the hell out of that. And once the premise of the pilot is dispatched with, which is these two mismatched women, both suffer a loss and then decide to solve the crime themselves within the cover of the State, the State Department and the CIA, and there's a guy playing George Bush who, who was the head of the CIA in the seventies.
53:31 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
53:31 Andy Greenwald? So it's a little winking, a little tongue-in-cheek. You're off to the races, and I'm really curious to see the people behind this show, see like, what story they want to tell with it.
53:39 Chris Ryan? Yes.
53:40 Andy Greenwald? It's a premise pilot through and through. So it's not a fair argument for that, but one thing that we all have to think about in this industry, including executives, is like, it's all being shoved into the same trough, and how are we receiving it?
53:51 Chris Ryan? I'll give you another example of kind of what you're talking about is the upcoming Night of the Seven Kingdoms on HBO.
53:58 Andy Greenwald? Coming this Sunday.
53:59 Chris Ryan? Which, you know, there's a big George R.R. Martin interview in Hollywood Reporter today, where he speaks about his, frankly, the, the nonexistent relationship that he has with Ryan Condal, who's running House of the Dragon. And he talks- Talks a little bit about the development process of Seven Kingdoms and how HBO came to him looking for something that wouldn't cost $20 million an episode to make. And I'm not going to give away anything about the series or about the episodes, other than to say, I think this show is fantastic.
54:29 Andy Greenwald? That's exciting.
54:30 Chris Ryan? And it's largely set in a field, one like sort of discreet area. And it's rather than go wide, they go deep, which is, you know, for as many locations as I think early Thrones had, it was still more about what was happening in front of the camera and not the sort of scope of the camera.
54:50 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
54:51 Chris Ryan? And obviously that show is always going to have to grapple with dragons and armies and, you know.
54:56 Andy Greenwald? It didn't start there.
54:57 Chris Ryan? It didn't start there.
55:00 Chris Ryan? I think there's a lot to be learned from this and I think there's, it's a good lesson to think about these things in a, from a creative standpoint, rather than a restrictive budgetary standpoint and be like, okay, like, look realistically, what can we do here? That is not going to like go fully into the red, but is the best thing for this show.
55:20 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
55:21 Chris Ryan? Given how much money we have to spend on it, because I think honestly, those restrictions, I would rather see something that felt like a little bit, like you're saying, like you'd rather have the assault taking place from the perspective of the people being assaulted inside the house and do a lot of stuff with sound and light, maybe, than not get the military assault that you kind of were hoping for.
55:43 Andy Greenwald? You can tell, like, you know, there's a reason why Taylor Sheridan has access to all the actual like Black Hawk helicopters, not currently.
55:50 Chris Ryan? Yeah, but I mean, it sounds like, it sounds like Paramount's asking him to bring the budget down too.
55:54 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
55:54 Chris Ryan? You know, um, and I think that I'm very curious to see the next season of Lioness and to see how many helicopter assaults they have.
56:02 Andy Greenwald? I don't think they need them because the real battleground in America is on college campuses. And at least Taylor has reminded us of that. But, but, but yeah, like I, it's also this, this larger point that I was trying to articulate is also a reason why, and I, and I'm 100% realize that I'm the guy in the hot dog suit wondering who's telling you to do this.
56:21 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
56:22 Andy Greenwald? It is worth watching past the pilot of a lot of these shows.
56:25 Chris Ryan? Yes.
56:25 Andy Greenwald? Because pilots are created in one. Uh, one iteration of a creative existence and often series are written in another.
56:31 Chris Ryan? Well, that's why I, I think I'm going to continue with both Night Manager and Hijack to see if those first episodes felt like they were doing a lot of like, remember last season? Or this show's different now, you better get ready. So I'm, I'm excited for, for checking out the next episodes. And I, I will check out Ponies. Um, let's check, talk about a show that we have far fewer reservations about.
56:53 Andy Greenwald? Yes.
56:53 Chris Ryan? Uh, which is The Pit. Um, this was the 8 a.m. hour. Uh, and my wife asked me this.
57:00 Andy Greenwald? Mm-hmm.
57:01 Chris Ryan? Did we ask Casey Boyes, when he was last on this show, whether The Pit was going to continue to be as gross as it has been in the past?
57:09 Andy Greenwald? So, no.
57:10 Chris Ryan? Did he talk about this?
57:11 Andy Greenwald? What, what, what was interesting?
57:12 Chris Ryan? She's like, I thought Casey Boyes said that this show wouldn't be so fucking gross.
57:18 Andy Greenwald? First of all, it sounds like she didn't not want this particular visit to the bone temple.
57:23 Chris Ryan? Uh, it was, it was actually the arm that bothered her.
57:26 Andy Greenwald? No, there was a bone there too.
57:27 Chris Ryan? And the maggots.
57:28 Andy Greenwald? I see. So you, the boner temple was okay.
57:31 Chris Ryan? Honestly, she was like, this is pretty funny. It was more the, the other stuff.
57:36 Andy Greenwald? Yeah. So let's, let's talk about that. I, we, again, couldn't be us. But sometimes I do think that we become quite entranced with our own narratives and, okay, let me rephrase. I often become very enamored of my own narratives. Um, and like Paul Effinger, just blindly trusting in the good faith of the German people. He just figured they would work it out and surely he would be able to keep the factory.
58:02 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
58:02 Andy Greenwald? Even as the National Socialists rose to power in the 1930s. I, uh, multiple times last year, just pulled out the old chestnut of, you know, the, we under, we misunderstood The Pit's project. That we thought with our, our crude lizard brains, that it would really just be like ER, but NC-17 ER. And it would be more gnarly because that's what they can do on HBO.
58:25 Chris Ryan? And cliffhangers, but you could start, next one, yeah.
58:28 Andy Greenwald? And it did that, but in my memory of the first season, like the, the, the, the, the quiet heroism of the characters and the depth of the characters themselves just quickly became the story.
58:39 Chris Ryan? Mm-hmm.
58:39 Andy Greenwald? And while there were occasional detours into grosser parts of the anatomy, like. It really was building a different sort of show and it didn't need that. And I think we were both like, ah, the parlor tricks of early The Pit can be disposed of. That was not the case with this episode. So I guess it was maybe a necessary corrective, that it was going to continue its commitment to both.
58:59 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
59:00 Andy Greenwald? This, this did feel more extreme than previous, the last few run of episodes, going back to the previous season.
59:05 Chris Ryan? I will say that I, I have found there to be a heightened sense of humor in this season.
59:10 Andy Greenwald? There has been more banter. Like, there's more, been actually more space for the characters to go bang, bang, bang, joke, little extra joke on top.
59:19 Chris Ryan? Dana warns off Robbie's new girlfriend.
59:24 Andy Greenwald? Seems like it.
59:24 Chris Ryan? Seems like it. And she's like, I'm a big girl. And then Dana's like, okay, big girl. Like, they're just, they're like, they know now Dana's a thing. And we're going to give Dana like a couple of lines per episode that are like, oh, yeah.
59:37 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
59:38 Chris Ryan? That's mother, you know?
59:41 Andy Greenwald? The dude suffering from priapism, I believe was the term, says that, you know, he says, uh, well, you know, it was a special night with my wife. And he says, is, is this a big one?
59:51 Chris Ryan? Right.
59:51 Andy Greenwald? I mean, the anniversary.
59:53 Chris Ryan? Right.
59:53 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, there's a little more room for that.
59:54 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
59:55 Andy Greenwald? Before whatever the pit fest that happens this season emerges.
59:59 Chris Ryan? Well, I, they are certainly signaling that, uh, and I, I admire our show for being like, we can talk about, we've just been talking about industry in this fashion, like a show that's like, we have this frame, but like a lot of different things can come in. And clearly like, uh, they're setting up Dr. Al Hashimi as somebody who's trying to modernize and digitize the emergency room.
1:00:22 Andy Greenwald? It's, it's the classic, uh, classic clash between just AI and your gut.
1:00:28 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:00:28 Andy Greenwald? These machines know better than us.
1:00:29 Chris Ryan? Couple of times, instinct and gut versus having our, uh, our computer overlords, uh, take over and accidentally prescribe the wrong medication.
1:00:38 Andy Greenwald? It is how, it's actually an interesting capsule of like how we approach this podcast.
1:00:42 Chris Ryan? Well, and the trailer suggests that this season will feature a computer blackout, which I think will test.
1:00:48 Andy Greenwald? You've really been studying the trailers. I thought this is, usually you're like, I'm good. I don't need the trailers.
1:00:54 Chris Ryan? I guess I just saw a pit trailer. I don't know. I mean, I don't know what to tell you.
1:00:59 Andy Greenwald? Okay, you just seem to know a lot more than I do.
1:01:02 Chris Ryan? So yeah, I found this season to be funny so far. I think that the story device of this is Robbie's last day for a while is good because it kind of gives his character a little bit of senioritis, not that he's taking any
1:01:19 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
1:01:19 Chris Ryan? time off of the intensity of, you know, of his work, but that he is kind of like, yes, you can follow me and maybe, you know, you guys just settle this among yourselves. What do you think of the new recruits as they get more and more screen time?
1:01:34 Andy Greenwald? I did, I just want one last note about the visual stuff.
1:01:37 Chris Ryan? Oh yeah, sure.
1:01:38 Andy Greenwald? I have never been as certain of anything in my many, many years on this earth as I was that there would be maggots under that cast.
1:01:45 Chris Ryan? Well, they, I mean, whatever it was gonna be, I was like, it can't be mice again.
1:01:49 Andy Greenwald? After your experience in Roxbury in 1998?
1:01:51 Chris Ryan? No, because the guy had rats in his, in his overcoat last year.
1:01:55 Andy Greenwald? Yep.
1:01:55 Chris Ryan? So I was like, they gotta up the ante here.
1:01:57 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, I didn't know, did you see that, that, that's, that guy, that's Skinny Pete from Breaking Bad?
1:02:02 Chris Ryan? I didn't know that.
1:02:02 Andy Greenwald? It's really like quite a bookended career, I would say. He's doing great.
1:02:06 Chris Ryan? I wonder if he's gonna be hanging out for a while then?
1:02:08 Andy Greenwald? Seems like it.
1:02:09 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:02:10 Andy Greenwald? The new recruits, you know-
1:02:11 Chris Ryan? And it's also the guy from House of Cards who's like-
1:02:13 Andy Greenwald? Yes, that's who that guy is.
1:02:14 Chris Ryan? I am going to be your Stephen Miller, right?
1:02:16 Andy Greenwald? Uh, yes, and then he's the one who is seemingly resetting a little bit.
1:02:22 Chris Ryan? Yeah, every time they talk to him, he's got a new personality, something's gonna open this noggin.
1:02:27 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, well, the new people-
1:02:29 Chris Ryan? We got Ogilvy who's-
1:02:30 Andy Greenwald? I didn't, did you track that this was Ogilvy's character in 201? This idea that he is a super brain-
1:02:37 Chris Ryan? No, but I think that that's supposed to be like, over the course of the day, the guy gets cockier and cockier.
1:02:41 Andy Greenwald? Well, yeah, the prescription is-
1:02:43 Chris Ryan? And I don't know what's going on with Joy and why she's like looking at her phone and kind of grossed out by medicine and-
1:02:48 Andy Greenwald? Well, that reminds me of my children, so that is not actually that-
1:02:51 Chris Ryan? Yeah, but I don't want your children operating on me.
1:02:54 Andy Greenwald? Fair. I feel like Ogilvy's got a prescription for some comeuppance.
1:02:57 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:02:58 Andy Greenwald? Heading his way.
1:02:59 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:03:01 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, I, I, I, I think that the show is a remarkably well-oiled machine at this point. And the, just like, the accumulating pleasures of ongoing year-to-year TV are just so apparent and so rich in the show, even without Mel sticking your hand into a man's open arm socket.
1:03:24 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:03:25 Andy Greenwald? Um, just the little moments where, um...
1:03:27 Chris Ryan? God, that was fucking gross.
1:03:29 Andy Greenwald? That, did you, cause like, but where are you with the show? Like, she puts her, they, they are using like a pulley system to yank a guy, yeah.
1:03:39 Chris Ryan? To put his shoulder back in.
1:03:40 Andy Greenwald? Which seems, again...
1:03:42 Chris Ryan? Cause it's hanging out of his skin, basically.
1:03:44 Andy Greenwald? That would be, I mean, you used to do a pretty mean Doctor House imitation in the early 2000s. Like, that seems to make sense to me. Like, pop, put it back in.
1:03:51 Chris Ryan? Yeah, I, I was raised on Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson slamming his shoulder against the wall to put it back in.
1:03:56 Andy Greenwald? This is really important. When people wonder why our generation is the way it is, you have to understand that our relationships to bone dislocation was very, very, very, very different and very wrong. It was, it came up a lot.
1:04:13 Chris Ryan? We grew up in the era of guys getting shot by Uzis in the arm and being like, "It's just a flesh wound. I can keep going."
1:04:18 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
1:04:19 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:04:20 Andy Greenwald? But that, like, the entire plot of Lethal Weapon 2, I mean, sure, yes, was it, was it about apartheid? Yes.
1:04:27 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:04:27 Andy Greenwald? But was it really all dependent on, on Riggs's ability to both dislocate and relocate his arm?
1:04:34 Chris Ryan? Do you think Elon Musk would not like Lethal Weapon 2?
1:04:35 Andy Greenwald? I think he, he thinks that movie has clear heroes.
1:04:41 Andy Greenwald? And it is not the mismatch that of cops that you've come to know and love. Do you think that there is a Lethal Weapon 2 Afrikaner cut that's a little bit different?
1:04:50 Chris Ryan? I, I mean, I can't believe he hasn't asked Grok to make it. Yeah.
1:04:56 Andy Greenwald? But he does have diplomatic immunity and thus the movie ends. It's great. No notes. I mean, we're not far off from a recut of like the first Star Wars trilogy where it's like Darth Vader just like doing the Dougie on the Republic, you know what I mean? And everyone's like, that guy had some really good points.
1:05:17 Chris Ryan? Uh, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you.
1:05:18 Andy Greenwald? I think what we, where we went was much better. Oh, no, just that when they were doing that scene and then Robbie's like, well, there's something else we could do. Mel, put your entire hand into the cavity. It is usually protecting his bones. I am now at a place where I thought that Mel's hand was in danger, not that this would work in a gross way.
1:05:35 Chris Ryan? Too, but they're not going to take Mel out of the rotation, you know?
1:05:38 Andy Greenwald? I mean, they almost did. She had head trauma.
1:05:39 Chris Ryan? I know.
1:05:40 Andy Greenwald? And what's going to happen with that?
1:05:41 Chris Ryan? Uh, I hope that guy comes back, the liquor store robber.
1:05:44 Andy Greenwald? Cause are you shipping them?
1:05:47 Chris Ryan? I don't do that. I don't do that with, uh, with characters on the pit.
1:05:50 Andy Greenwald? It was mean that like he seemed like he took a real interest in her.
1:05:53 Chris Ryan? Uh, we've got about, I would say I've got about another hour or two of Al Hashimi being like diametrically opposed to Robbie in every situation.
1:06:04 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
1:06:04 Chris Ryan? Before I'm going to need some like, you guys need to talk about this or there's, see, this is the thing that's cool about the pit is no one ever has time to talk about anything. They're always like, I have another patient. So these conversations and these character conflicts are drawn out because they're happening in 15 second increments. And it actually makes dramatic sense within the pit rather than like on some other random Netflix show where somebody's like, I'm going to leave this room. Because that would make it more interesting that we haven't resolved this. But like on the pit, they actually do have to go somewhere else.
1:06:38 Andy Greenwald? I will also say that, you know, if we've learned anything about how this show is made and like the, the medical boot camp that the actors are put through and how they have to work. It is a different type of acting and there were different opportunities to. Provide emotional exposition for your character that people who were on season one are reaping the benefits of now, like Santos's relationship to this child who appears has been abused is like, is riveting, but also tonally consistent with the character that we saw emerge over season one, and that's great for the actor and it's great for the audience as well. I would say that like the Al-Hashimi thing has been tough because she is introduced as a blunt instrument to be not Robbie, to be the opposite, to be the AI side of it.
1:07:19 Andy Greenwald? And Sephardi Mawafi is a really good actor who I'm excited to have on the show, but hasn't really had a lot of opportunity until that moment when Ogilvy speaks, um, um, perfect Farsi.
1:07:28 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:07:29 Andy Greenwald? To be more than that. So I imagine, and we also have to remember that like, it's not just the visceral stuff and the visually extreme stuff that was a hallmark of season one. Every so often, like they would dim the lights and all the nurses would say, actually in America, nurses are underpaid. It would become, um, clunky in a way that was-
1:07:51 Chris Ryan? They've shed some of that stuff.
1:07:52 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, but it's still in the DNA of the show. And that's okay, especially considering where it's building to.
1:07:57 Chris Ryan? The show's still great, uh, obviously, and, and, you know, like, it's just, these first two episodes have been, uh, I think, I think I felt in the second episode what you felt in the first one, which was, I'm waiting for something insane to happen. And it's, that didn't happen until like episode five or six last season.
1:08:16 Andy Greenwald? I would just say that my experience watching the second episode in a week when I was also doing my homework and watching these other programs that we're talking about was so markedly different.
1:08:25 Chris Ryan? Cause you're like, this shit is so good.
1:08:26 Andy Greenwald? Cause this is so good and this is on a rhythm that isn't, cause like, what are we, like, like Disney is gonna start integrating vertical videos into, like, everyone is still trying to quibby this shit up and be like, how can we capture the flickering attention span of men who have basically given their lives over to British pub reviews on Instagram? Couldn't be us, but-
1:08:44 Chris Ryan? I can never tell whether you're dressing me or talking about yourself.
1:08:50 Andy Greenwald? That's the beauty of us. Which one is which?
1:08:54 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, it's kind of both of us. This show hits. It just, it is entertaining.
1:09:00 Chris Ryan? It's great shit.
1:09:01 Andy Greenwald? And it's fulfilling, and I enjoy the experience of watching it so much more than even pilots that I admire. Just because of, which maybe not, it's maybe not a fair comparison because this show is just absolutely clicking in its second season. But there it is. It's still, it's still not broke and they have still managed to perfect it. Last thing.
1:09:22 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:09:24 Andy Greenwald? I really did feel a little bit, I was shook not by the body.
1:09:31 Chris Ryan? The shoulder.
1:09:32 Andy Greenwald? Cavities, shoulder trauma of that one man, but the guy who was choking on broccoli. Because that could be me, dog.
1:09:38 Chris Ryan? Do you eat a lot of broccoli?
1:09:39 Andy Greenwald? I eat a lot.
1:09:40 Chris Ryan? And you don't chew?
1:09:40 Andy Greenwald? I love broccoli.
1:09:42 Chris Ryan? I mean, that was a fully unchewed piece of broccoli.
1:09:44 Andy Greenwald? It was a floret, as we say.
1:09:46 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:09:46 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, I think, I think, I mean broccoli is not good raw. Fuck your crudités platter. I'm sorry. That's.
1:09:52 Chris Ryan? I don't like broccoli raw. I roast.
1:09:55 Andy Greenwald? Yeah.
1:09:56 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:09:56 Andy Greenwald? You gotta cook it.
1:09:57 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:09:58 Andy Greenwald? Like, crudités platters are a lie. Can we put this at the top? Let's clip this. What do you, like, crudités platter gets put out?
1:10:06 Chris Ryan? I gotta be completely honest. Like, if I'm gonna have a dip, I'm gonna have a chip.
1:10:10 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, you should. Or, okay.
1:10:12 Chris Ryan? I don't mind a carrot. I don't mind a carrot.
1:10:14 Andy Greenwald? Carrot is a good vehicle.
1:10:15 Chris Ryan? Sure.
1:10:16 Andy Greenwald? Celery, if you're wired that way, okay, that's fine. But then you see these people and they put out these little bowls of like raw broccoli, raw cauliflower and cherry tomatoes.
1:10:25 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:10:25 Andy Greenwald? Get out of here. Nobody wants this. This is not what we are meant to do.
1:10:29 Chris Ryan? I hope I'm not letting you down by not meeting your anger. I actually just completely agree with you.
1:10:35 Andy Greenwald? This is good podcasting.
1:10:38 Chris Ryan? It's like, do you ever have that? You know what I mean? Like, we're just like, I'm in total agreement.
1:10:42 Andy Greenwald? Yeah, often. Often. I mean, my algorithm is just providing me with soup content.
1:10:47 Chris Ryan? So much positive feedback.
1:10:49 Andy Greenwald? Oh, no, those are the comments. Not that. Not that.
1:10:53 Chris Ryan? We'll wrap it up.
1:10:54 Andy Greenwald? You think?
1:10:55 Chris Ryan? Any other pit notes? You asked me about a casting decision.
1:10:58 Andy Greenwald? Oh, I was just curious about, um, I forget the name of the woman, the, the social worker from season one. Um, Kiara.
1:11:06 Chris Ryan? She's not there.
1:11:06 Andy Greenwald? She's not there today, which is another incredible thing the show can do.
1:11:10 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:11:10 Andy Greenwald? If they want to move on from cast or if cast isn't available, they're gonna be like, oh, she doesn't work Tuesdays.
1:11:14 Chris Ryan? She comes in later today.
1:11:15 Andy Greenwald? Just elite shit. Um, I was curious about the guy that they brought in as the social worker.
1:11:23 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:11:23 Andy Greenwald? He, he kind of has Bonaduce vibes.
1:11:25 Chris Ryan? Well, he also has, I, I actually do this for a living and they've brought me into the show.
1:11:30 Andy Greenwald? That was my take.
1:11:31 Chris Ryan? Not to take away from his acting, which is fine.
1:11:33 Andy Greenwald? But I couldn't.
1:11:33 Chris Ryan? But I was almost like, is this actually like a therapist?
1:11:36 Andy Greenwald? That is a million percent what I thought.
1:11:37 Chris Ryan? Yeah.
1:11:38 Andy Greenwald? And I would love to know the answer to it.
1:11:39 Chris Ryan? I'm sure it's available.
1:11:40 Andy Greenwald? Any, I don't have that. Verizon blackout dog, I don't know. Um, sorry.
1:11:47 Chris Ryan? Did you get blacked out yesterday?
1:11:48 Andy Greenwald? No, I'm, I'm not a.
1:11:49 Chris Ryan? Phoebe did, she was really mad.
1:11:51 Andy Greenwald? Did she think that this was a dry run for shutting down the country?
1:11:53 Chris Ryan? Uh, I did not share that theory with her.
1:11:56 Andy Greenwald? You know why I know that's nonsense?
1:11:58 Chris Ryan? Cause you had Verizon and you were looking at Twitter all day.
1:12:01 Andy Greenwald? No, because they do that in countries where people didn't vote for that. Do you know what I mean? This was all pretty predictable. So they're not shutting it down. Uh, yeah, I'm curious if that guy is like a real social worker or why, because his.
1:12:18 Chris Ryan? Yeah, but they haven't addressed Dr. Collins's.
1:12:20 Andy Greenwald? Took me a little bit out.
1:12:21 Chris Ryan? Absence, they haven't addressed.
1:12:23 Andy Greenwald? I don't think they're gonna, she's still on do not disturb mode. I don't think they're gonna address that.
1:12:25 Chris Ryan? They will probably mention it at some point.
1:12:27 Andy Greenwald? I don't, do you want, do you want a little, put a little polymarket on that?
1:12:31 Chris Ryan? I still don't understand how that works.
1:12:32 Andy Greenwald? I don't either. I think it's bad for the world.
1:12:35 Chris Ryan? Thanks to Kaya. Thanks to Kai. Thanks to you.
1:12:39 Andy Greenwald? Kai, do you think, do you lean in as you can feel us rounding third to be like, it's probably gonna get weird here and we can harvest something?
1:12:48 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's where I got the Eagles clip from.
1:12:51 Chris Ryan? That's right.
1:12:51 Andy Greenwald? That was nice.
1:12:52 Chris Ryan? Eagles After Dark. Do you want to do any Eagles After Dark before we go?
1:12:55 Andy Greenwald? No, because I think Shields, like, there goes a whole episode for Philly Special. Like, I feel like we should save it for him.
1:12:59 Chris Ryan? Okay.
1:13:00 Andy Greenwald? Also, not much has happened.
1:13:01 Chris Ryan? We are going to be here on Monday, if that's okay with you, because Landman concludes its second season.
1:13:07 Andy Greenwald? You keep saying that first. I don't think that's the reason.
1:13:09 Chris Ryan? I'm just putting it there because it is the last episode of Landman.
1:13:12 Andy Greenwald? And what better way to mark Martin Luther King Day?
1:13:14 Chris Ryan? So you would rather have spent two months talking about it and then not address the finale?
1:13:18 Andy Greenwald? No, I think that my reasoning for doing a show on a federal holiday is that Industry Season, Episode 2, and Night of the Seven Kingdoms.
1:13:27 Chris Ryan? Sorry, I just want to gift the people what they want.
1:13:31 Andy Greenwald? And the people want to spend their vacation hearing me.
1:13:34 Chris Ryan? It's not a vacation. It's a day off. It's just one day.
1:13:38 Andy Greenwald? I can make a vacation out of it. I won't now, because I gotta go to Texas.
1:13:45 Chris Ryan? Okay, Landman, Industry, Episode 2, Night of the Seven Kingdoms, Episode 1. Thanks to Kaya. Thanks to Kai. Thanks to you.
1:13:51 Andy Greenwald? Thank you.
1:13:52 Chris Ryan? Chat to Effengers.
1:13:54 Andy Greenwald? That's a ding for Chris.
1:13:55 Chris Ryan? See you guys Monday.
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Previous ‘Industry’ Season 4 Is Here, and It’s Bolder Than Ever. Plus, the Golden Globes and ‘Landman’ S2E9. Next ‘A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms’ Is ‘Game of Thrones’ at Its Best. Plus, the Future of ‘Star Wars,’ ‘Industry’ S4E2, and the ‘Landman’ S2 Finale. Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated