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

I'm pro-football Hall of Famer Brian Dawkins, and I lived for a long time with something I did not know the name of, major depressive disorder. I carried sadness and anger because I thought I could handle it alone, but I couldn't. Now I want to make sure others know that that support is out there. If you're experiencing similar symptoms, talk to a healthcare professional. Visit mddallies.com to watch my story. Paid partnership with Johnson & Johnson. Brian Dawkins is not prescribed Caplida Lumateperone. I needed more from my antidepressant, so my doctor added Caplida Lumateperone, proven to provide greater relief from depression symptoms than an antidepressant alone, building on my progress without starting over. Caplida is for adults with major depressive disorder when used with an antidepressant and is available by prescription only. Individual results may vary. In clinical trials, weight gain was not common. Caplida is not approved for dementia-related psychosis. 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Tramphya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis. Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tramphya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more or visit Tramphya Radio, www.TramphyaRadio.com. It seems like it would suit you more if we did it that way. I definitely, I'm watching the games. You are watching the games. I'm doing the work. You're still watching TV. Let it be known that Andy will never give up this prestige TV lifestyle. Today on the show, a little bit of news at the top about the world of the home box office slash Skydance company and some future shows that they are making. We're also going to talk very briefly about an upcoming show on Apple called Nocturne, which I believe airs given Apple. I don't love throwing stuff up, but it says it airs. I've watched the first two and I wanted to ask Andy some questions about something that I'll just describe as house style and how it comes out of streamers. We are also going to talk about the fourth episode of the second season of The Lowdown. And then in the second half of the show, I was joined by Joanna Robinson to talk finally about Crystal Lake on Peacock, the fourth highest debut show ever in Peacock history, Andy, and Amazon. Well, I mean, okay. And, and also. And also Kerry. Me and Joe are going to talk a little horror before Halloween. Greenwald, great to see you, man. Was that in the press release? The fourth highest debut in the proud seven-year tradition. This was announced. I believe it was announced. Great. What's up with you, man? Let's take the wins when we can. I love it. I love it. I'm thrilled to be with you. I just feel virally a lot better than I did last week. I mean, I did go viral in Monday's podcast, but not in the way that it's often meant. You did. I'm feeling, feeling free and clear. Not in the Walkman or better than Strokes way. Just like you were, you were just, you were. You're salty about that. No, no, I stand by it. It's just, I'm just, you know, you throw the hospital ball, I try to catch it. Makai Lemon. I didn't really have a ton of news for you this week. People can write us at thewatchatspotify.com and they can, they can hit us up on Instagram, thewatchpod underscore. They can watch us on YouTube at the ringer-tv channel. I'm really appreciating all the YouTube engagement and traffic over there. It's been nice. I was in San Francisco last week and we were doing a live show for the big picture for the Halloween draft and Alex Ross Perry was there. I feel like it was on stage, but it might've been like a dinner or something like that. Some, there was a whole conversation about like how funny it would be if they made a birds TV show, a TV show for the birds. The Alfred Hitchcock film, the birds. Right. Because to be clear, you spend a lot of time in London and when you say, you know, a TV show for the birds, it does suggest that you mean like. Sex in the city. Um, they are making a TV show of the birds and you, one would laugh if, if, if it weren't for the attached talent that I'm about to tell you, we would have a huge chuckle about the birds and we would make lots of jokes about how the birds is going to open with a guy getting his eye pecked out by a bird. And then it's going to say nine weeks earlier. And then it's going to show an egg. And that's the whole first episode. Really? It makes you think about it. Slow TV. Back to the nest. Yeah, but there will be like, you know, it's like a, an ornithologist and, and, you know, how they, how they are trying to save the bird population. In any case, I think we were talking about it because the birds is set in San Francisco. Um, I laughed when I saw that somebody, that they were making a, the birds TV show because of that. But then I started reading about it and it isn't, it is adapted by Tom Speziale who worked on the leftovers. Yeah. And it does star Sarah Snook. So from the succession, I don't want to want this, but I, that's, that's, I, I feel little wings flapping in my mind. Can I just sidebar? Did you just say, I don't think you meant to say it, but I believe that you just said from the succession. And it did remind me that on a phone call with my father the other day, that show came up and first he spent a number of different ways of saying, well, I never watched that. But then he said, I believe it's about a family, which, you know, I can't. I can't decide. It's a 50, 50 thing at this point. Are you impressed at the, you know, the, the, the, the spatial awareness or the cultural awareness or are you like, well, sure. But that's like saying crystal Lake is a show about a summer camp. Do you know what I mean? I know. And it's really a show about a family. Whoa, look at you, look at you, the circle of life. Yeah. Okay. Well, look, so where do you want to go in on this? We can start in the positive way. We could say that, you know, when you have very talented people like the ones you mentioned, you can turn. Pigeon shit into pigeon salad. Um, I'm actually realizing I'm not aware of the actual, uh, genus of the birds that are in the birds, but I'm assuming they're not chickens. Um, wait, what, what, what would, uh, what would Molly Baz call pigeon salad? Hmm. Pidgey Sal's. Oh, I thought you, oh, right. Yeah. That's what she would do. I was trying to think what would, like, if they were putting it on a menu at La Bird-a-den, see what I did there, it would be something like central pigeon. Uh, I don't know if it would be like central park roast, you know what I mean? Or like something you, you, you'd really speak to the terroir. That's right. I like, I like Pidgey Sal's. With a, with a fudgy Pidgey egg in the middle of it. She has like a whole thing at Sweetgreen now as a, as a sort of pretty high ranked Sweetgreen customer. I can tell you this. And it's all just. Are you a power user? Dude, the rewards, when I go up to, to check out at Sweetgreen and I show them the, the QR code on my phone, they're like, they bow down. Like Emperor Palpatine just walked in. They have to get there. It's like gas comes from like out of the door and they're just like, oh my God. Do you know what they just told me here? I don't know if this, if this affects you in any way, but like the, the younger people in, in the office here in New York said that, say that now, like if you go to a bar and most bars, like, you know, they, they scan your ID now because we do, we do live in a dystopian hellscape, but they, they just scan it and if it's your birthday. Yeah. It, it'll, it like plays a little song. What plays a little song? The little machine scanning the driver's license plays a little song. Really? And it, and it's just like, do you want, like, I guess at a bar it's optimal to have your birthday be known because you might get free drinks from it. But I also think a large part of a not insignificant percent of the population's nights involve telling people that it's their birthday when it's not to get free desserts or to get free drinks. And so I feel like that's just been. Another thing that no fun police have come for, but like, do you think ultimately it's good for society that you are getting recognized, you know, that your, your power user status is getting recognized to your salad restaurant that you can't go for a drink in New York without having them know, like literally what day it is? Yeah. I don't know. But you know what? Early on in the, in the two thousands, I signed all that privacy away when the random camel representatives at bars would be like, Hey, would you like a pack of camels? And I'd be like, I, I honestly would love. have nothing more than a pack of camels, and they'd be like, we just need to borrow your driver's license for five minutes. I was like, take hers too. Like, take all the driver's licenses. This is really useful to me because this is the origin story of one of your most enduring bedrock beliefs, which is the ship has sailed on privacy. So please, TSA, let me become a clear Premium Plus member. For certain things, I am willing to donate bone marrow if it means like the experience of the airport is that much easier. You know what I mean? Like, I would much rather it go towards that kind of thing rather than, you know, I am lying in bed thinking about have I ever been in a hammock and then I get 87 ads for hammocks the next morning. You know, that seems fucked up. I just want to have my brain to myself. But when it comes to like, hey, do you want to skip the TSA line? I feel like we should, I'll go through whatever, like, Hegseth interrogation I need to go through to do that I think it's so cute that your biggest boogeyman in the story is Big Hammock. Do you think that. Listen, guys, let me recreate in private. I actually, this did happen where like, I think I said something to my wife, but I was like, damn, did I ever, have I ever like fully fallen asleep in a hammock? And I was like, is that going to be. Because, you know, as the body ages, I feel like it's harder to get out of hammocks, you know? It's harder to get in sometimes. Let's just. Let's just be real with the listeners. So I was just like, I wonder if that's a classic human experience that I'm just going to never have. And my phone heard me and sent me 14, like, it's not too late to get in a hammock, sir. You know, kind of ads. Well, again, but did the ad say, it is too late to get out, sadly. So it's sort of like a funereal hammock. I think your phone's just looking out for you. I think it's very sweet. Is this conversation indicative of your level of interest in the birds? Okay. Look, no, no. My point was, like, you cannot. Like, these are talented people. And so maybe it's good. But it is. Honestly, the idea of remaking the birds into a TV show, like, look, if Carrie did it and Carrie seems to be hit, then sure, there might be more meat on the bone here that was left by these auteurs and the masterpieces they made decades ago. Weirdly, to me, it's a little bit more of like a. In the way Light from Stars is actually thousands of years old, it reminds me of what was a very, very big push about 10 years ago for studios to exploit, like, larger creative tranches of IP. What I mean by that is, do you remember the show Castle Rock? Of course. Which was a very, very heralded thing on Hulu. Yeah. Starring the great Andre Holland, which purported to present a shared Stephen King cinematic universe. Now Mike Flanagan's just doing that. Yeah. He's doing it, but he is, you know, at least to distinguish it, he's just doing the properties. He's not creating. No, dog. That's what. Carrie has got super friends. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we haven't met them yet, but, like, it is indicated that Carrie is part of a larger community of, like. Are we gonna do the Avengers of the Kingverse where Carrie and Danny and the little boy that lives in his mouth are gonna form up to defeat the Chitauri? And Firestarter, and they all get in Christine and drive around? I mean, that could happen. I don't know. I mean, Mike Flanagan's quite busy. They're like, oh, cool. Cujo. Cujo. And then they all freeze frame and laugh. That's. Okay, so I guess I'm completely out of step with the times, or just this is. I say this because I remember active discussions when I was under a deal at Universal that they had the Hitchcock rights. So they were actively trying to generate pitches for something that wouldn't just be the birds, but would also be, I guess, the birds are flying past my rear window. It's giving me vertigo. Like some sort of. The shared cock verse. Yeah. Well, it was gonna be on Peacock, so it was gonna be cock for cock. Yeah. It was. Yeah. Into the double cock verse. Yes. I understand. It would do numbers, is what I'm saying. The number would be two. Honestly, dude, if we gave each other like two weeks, I think we could come up with an amazing, amazing Hitchcock IP universe of like the North by Northwest, like Vertigo, like we could have like a lot of fun with that. I mean, Hitchcock's been adapted many times. I mean, they had the Bates Motel. I mean, there's been stuff. I think you're thinking too small. The real question that we probably should have done as a bit 10 years ago, but we could do now is which director's seemingly unconnected cinematic universe would you like to see explored as a TV show? And I'm just going to mute myself and let you go and cook on the man verse. No, that's a much. This is a much deeper conversation that we can have on Monday if you want. But like this is. That's an incredible idea. Thank you. Would you like to hear a preview of my take on the Ozuverse, which would be eight seasons of 30 episodes each, all about the gently aging members of a Tokyo family? Andy, you wouldn't even watch that. Come on, dog. I would watch it to fall asleep at night and to wake up in the morning. You have no idea the degree to which my attention span has been degraded by modern life and phones and everything is I feel unparalleled, but perhaps it is completely different and completely unparalleled because it's happening to everyone. The one space, Chris, my one sanctuary from this nonstop nonsense world of AI slop influencers and bullshit is three-hour Asian cinema. I watched Yee Yee again this weekend and brother, I was transfixed. What do you mean you watched Yee Yee again this weekend? I have to like trap you in a room to watch like an episode of The Lowdown. You watched Yee Yee? A couple things. One, we're not. You know, we're not going to violate HIPAA on this podcast, but I may have been a little bit under the weather. Yeah. So I was spending a little bit more time with screens than normal. Brother, yeah, I was watching Corey Ada's Afterlife. Come on. Like this, this sustains me, brother. The rest of this is work. That's life. Okay. That's who I am. Anyway, do you want to speak on the snookness of it? Because I feel like that's what drew your attention more than anything else. The show might be good. We don't know. I love her. I did not love all her fault. I still think she's worth the price of admission alone as a performer. Is she going to. Look, I honestly. Sarah Snook is like, is enough to check it out. Tom Speziali's presence here just makes me interested because I'm like, you know, he's been a part of enough interesting television shows for me. It's enough for me to think that this. He must have had an interesting take on this and an interesting pitch. Yeah. I mean, we know him best. We don't know him personally at all. But like you mentioned him in The Leftovers, like he's the kind of person that Damon Lindelof would say is like we were able to do that show because of Tom, because Tom was able to bridge the writer's room in production and be a calming voice. And like, you know, it is the sort of person or at least the sort of profile that you think would lend itself to doing something challenging like this, to do like a high wire act adaptation. In the olden days of television, when TV made stars like it did for many, for years, there would be the rare Clooney who escapes the orbit velocity of TV and just becomes a movie star. And part of that deal was you don't do TV anymore because you don't remind people that's where you came from. And like, I feel like all episodes of Facts of Life and Roseanne in which he plays like Booker, the handyman next door, have all been like memory hold and erased and nobody talks about them. But then there's the problem of like, no one was more famous than the cast of Friends. But with the occasional exception of Aniston, none of them became like movie stars and all of them have had varying experiences of wrestling with the fact that they are famous and rich forever, but frozen. I do think that we have not fully seen or we haven't seen the full tale of like the stars of the last 15 years who have been seen arguably globally more maybe than the stars of Friends were in the 90s. So the stars of shows that have traveled the world and just become memefied and beloved succession among them, Game of Thrones, like that level of fame, I think has not fully been tested in terms of like where the audience will go with them in future projects. And I think some of them, you know, as is often the case with TV actors, like may have, like, I love Kieran Culkin. I love him in everything because he is generally playing a version of Kieran Culkin. And when that is utilized correctly, like it was in the Jesse Eisenberg movie, or like it was when I saw him dash off of a Delta Transcontinental flight that I was getting on the other week when he was almost seemingly completely in character, like that's great. But I don't know if there's an opportunity. I don't know what other versions and flavors of Kieran Culkin we have ahead of us. I think the Snook fandom, for example, is sneakier and realer than we realize. And she's a versatile actress who has a whole long career ahead of her. Yes. So I think it'll be interesting to build things around these people who actually, who actually have more, a higher Q rating than I think you might otherwise believe because Succession, while popular, was averaging, what, like one to three million viewers a week. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure that it was probably netting out like a little higher than that. And certainly towards the end, it was getting bigger numbers. But the conversation about TV versus movie stardom is a really fascinating one. I was thinking about this in relationship to Jenna Ortega, who, to the extent that I am aware of, like her interior, seems loath to keep continue to do Wednesday which is obviously the most popular thing she's a part of yet some of her films I would say most of the more recent films that she has appeared in have not done that well whether it was the the weird unicorn movie that she made like a year or two ago or Clara and the Sun that just came and went and she's obviously a famous person but what does that translate to in terms of like box office and if she was to do say I can't think of like a TV show off the top of my head but a non like IP iconic character like a so not Wednesday would her TV show inevitably be in hit I don't I don't know you know I mean that that that is a little bit of like a like an outlier because she's doing the she's making the transition from being like a young younger late teen actress and to trying to do more adult roles and appear in more adult um you know minded uh stories but it's it's a tough one I mean Jeremy Strong for instance like look at him like has appeared in a lot of um well-regarded and done great work in a lot of well-regarded films but none of those movies have really popped off um you make you make the Karen Culkin point he's won an Oscar and is probably going to be in one of the biggest movies of the year with the Hunger Games film that's about to come out so it's like what what does fame really mean brother I I was with you on the what is it fame really mean until I watched the drama last week and I'm like Robert Pattinson and Zendaya are are gods now because they dragged that movie to over a hundred million dollars more worldwide that is star power dude and that is good marketing and you did you think that movie wasn't Japanese enough was that its problem I fucking hated it so much I hated that it was like good old school hate in a year late too which is perfect for my brand being like oh you suckers my brand oh my god it filled me with rage and I had no one to talk to about it except thank except my buddy Chris who just fired up his phone on the other side of the country was like oh even that one I was just like you've got like two responses from me on this so make it count I feel like I did I got my takes off but but genuinely like that did that is a referendum on stardom and I'm not saying that like with any quotation marks around it like that's incredible to me and good for them to do something weird that they wanted to do can I ask you a question about uh this idea of house style that I've been kicking around this week as I watched two screening screeners for a show on apple that's coming out tonight or tomorrow morning called nocturne uh this is a show that comes from Rowan Jaffe and it's adapted from I believe a Swedish novel a Swedish uh a mystery series by uh written under the pen name uh Lars Kepler but is actually the work of a married couple uh the Andoril family and they're both family the Alexander and Alexandra uh Andoril who who wrote these novels and the the show nocturne is trans uh like translated I guess uh it's moved from the action moves from Sweden to of all places western Pennsylvania and it stars Liev Schreiber uh as an ex-cop who's haunted by a case that went really wrong uh Stephen Graham plays a killer who is I believe during life in a psychiatric prison hospital and then Zazie beats Bill Camp Gary Carr porno Jack Nathan Chrissy Metz kind of round out the cast of people and Rory Culkin plays a actually an essential role in this a key role and so it's set in western Pennsylvania and this cop played by Schreiber and an FBI agent played by beats uh they are a godfather to goddaughter in their relationship and they investigate the appearance of a of a boy who had vanished several years ago and it's tied to Stephen Graham's character so there's like nods to signs of the lambs and seven and I would say I guess the Brad Ingalls be Universal though I found elements of the stuff I've watched so far with nocturne to feel very much like as if a scandinoir was translated to Western Pennsylvania but the thing that leapt out of me and and there's a lot of talent behind and in front of the camera uh on this show and I I think that if you're looking for uh a kind of Crafty mystery this would be fine for you right now um was the similarity in how to me how it looked similar to other Apple thrillers so that it had this kind of I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's it's shared sets with but it looked similar to criminal record and presumed innocent and down Cemetery Road and some of their thrillers and I was wondering you know you've worked on you know the Midbrier patch sort of in late late period blue sky USA era the end I think I killed I killed it but that wasn't I don't I don't get enough credit for that by the way yeah of all the ending original programming on USA and please and and you also your bravery and speaking out about the drama a year later has been has been noted as well thank you but I you know that your show came at the end of an like a very defined aesthetic arrow that that USA had right it was like these shows are going to look this way they're going to kind of attitudinally be a certain way the characters are going to interact in a certain way at various points over the years I think you could say like there is an HBO crime thriller look or there is a Netflix now I mean I think people make meaning in a derogatory way that there is a Netflix look for a lot of their shows to what extent do you as a writer when you're working on stuff receive overall aesthetic notes from production companies or especially the streamers where it's like we want our shows to look and feel a certain way it's a great question I would say just to just to clarify that like Mr Robot what created by our friend Sam who is the executive producer of my show was the pivot point out of blue sky and an attempt to be like we're going to do something different here and so there was no mandate to be similar in fact it was what was incredibly fortunate about my experience and then ultimately you know I think complicating was that I be there was a really generous and genuine encouragement to not be like anything else and to be prestigious and to be bold and to be dark and then we got to Albuquerque and realized we had the same budget as suits uh early suits no disrespect to our good friends from the television show suits who earned all the success and higher budgets they got in later seasons there's also a second piece to your question which is that networks and streamers have creatives that they're comfortable with and not necessarily the people they have overall deals with to write and create the shows I'm talking about the stable of directors that they feel comfortable giving expensive projects to HBO certainly has a list and they also have a list of production designers uh that they that they feel comfortable with or line producers that they feel comfortable with and these are generally ways to control costs to communicate notes better but also maybe to a spoken or unspoken degree maintain some level of consistency I think the next piece of it is increasingly or maybe this has always been the case you find that buyers and by buyers I mean networks and streamers have pre-designed or pre-imagined holes in their schedule that they are eager to fill that either it's something that has worked for them already you know so for example with a network like Peacock I do think something like all her fault was a big success for them yeah so they wanted to continue to service the audience of all her fault they want a tile to the next all her fault or to a suggested if you liked all her fault so then they start to prescribe kind of or at least go in search of the thing um that they are looking for but the last piece that I find interesting and I hope this isn't too inside baseball to talk about is that look I think everybody understands that even really successful and admired writers and creators have the things that they're interested in like when we talk about Vince Gilligan um we would make so many jokes about like these scenes devoted to Doc review in his legal show yeah in Better Call Saul because you know which was slightly less interesting at least in the early going than cooking methamphetamine but he's a process guy and at Vince Gilligan show is going to show us the process about stuff and we don't criticize him necessarily for it it's like what he likes to do and what he knows how to do I would argue that it's kind of under appreciated or underexplored how executives also have the things that they like and the notes that they know how to give and that's how you end up with disparate projects coming into the same pipeline and coming out very similar meaning there are multiple ways to tell a story or multiple ways into a book or a piece of IP that they everyone the creator or the writer the adapter and the network is excited about but the development machinery that's in place there is like well the only way to do this story really is if we make it an investigation and you could be like but it's not a detective show and they would like but there's a way to do it that way that makes sense to our audience or contemporary audiences and you end up that way with a show that begins with the same big big incident how are we going to find out how this happened yes nine months later someone's investigating it whether it's meant to be a romance or it's more cerebral or whatever so there is a flattening effect now I should just also say to stop the monologue they're brilliant and creative executives out there and no no two development processes are the same but I do think that all of these things in concert can lead to a sameness of product and at the end of the day as we all know tech companies want to control the pipeline they want to they want some foreknowledge of what they are spending the money on and what the results will be and it's another attempt to kind of manufacture consistency in a infamously inconsistent and creative field. Well, I was wondering when it comes to the tech companies like Apple and Netflix, whether or not, given all jokes aside, what they know about their customers. Yeah, which is, they know if you like hammocks or not. But, like, I feel like in my mind, the interrogation rooms in multiple crime shows on Apple are the same room. Like, literally the same room. Yeah, that it is like a warehouse-y gray with icy blue. And I would have to go and just read, like, I would have to go back through interrogation scenes in multiple Apple shows. And I'm sure that is my brain playing a trick on me and that the interrogation room in Presumed Innocent is quite different, you know? But it does feel, whether it's like a treatment that happens to the image at some point as it goes up on Apple TV or whatever, that they emphasize that. And, you know, like, there's been discussion about Netflix's aesthetic of, like, very shallow focus so that you can you can't really see, like, the image behind the actor in the center of the frame. There's a lot of, there's a lot of, like, centering a lot of performers in the frame so that, like, it works well for clipping on social media because it just, it's aesthetically, like, a little bit more pleasing than if you have somebody who's in, like, the lower left-hand corner as, like, a scene of life goes on behind them as if they're in, like, a Cassavetes movie or something. Like, that's not how TV really looks anyway. It was just something that leapt out at me while I was watching Nocturne, which I found fine, a little drab, but I think people might enjoy as, like, a, oh, I'm looking for a whodunit. I think the thing that is hard to communicate sometimes is just, like, how many people are involved in a production and how many decisions have to be kept track of at all times. And, honestly, I think that the best, the best shows and certainly the best movies which have a tighter focus, you feel the decision-making in every frame. I feel like there's a, we try to articulate that in any number of ways when we're talking about things we love. And we're about to talk about the lowdown, which is every frame of it, every decision, every reaction, every way Ethan Hawke enters and exits a scene is thrilling to me because you feel the intention and you feel the creative embrace of surprise or just approaching things sideways. But, you know, when you are in the midst of delivering on very expensive things and maybe not maybe you're running more than one show or maybe you're under budget or maybe they couldn't pay for a writer to be on set in Romania that day, the words interior interrogation room, people are going to just interpret what that means because they've seen it before. Yeah. And they're going to give you what you've seen before. And how much time are you able to give as either the showrunner or the executive or whatever to step in there and say, try a little harder on this. Like there aren't, sometimes there's not time. Sometimes there's not money. And this is, by the way, my pet peeve with a show I don't want to kick because it's successful and people, people like it. But, you know, when we were talking about your friends and neighbors, the kids' bedrooms with all of the posters for like rock band, folk singer, are all lined up at 90 degree angles and no teenage child at this or any other time, except maybe a future serial killer, has ever hung up posters like that. Yeah. It's just, I look at that and I'm out of the scene because I'm like, no one thought about this. Yes. But that's the way I watch stuff and I'm, you know, I'm insufferable. But yeah, I think that we're, we're giving pretty niche for me to like, my review of Nocturne is probably a little bit more detailed than, hey, I didn't, I thought that the interrogation room looked like the one from Criminal Record. I don't know. I'm enjoying this show where we're just talking about how we feel about stuff we haven't watched. That's right. This is a nice vibe for me. That really is where we've gotten to. Fan Duel is now available everywhere in the U.S. I've been everywhere, man. So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are. Including these places. Make this your most rewarding season ever with Fan Duel. Age and location restrictions apply. Product availability varies by market. See FanDuel.com for eligibility. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. This episode is brought to you by The Home Depot. The Home Depot is everything you need to launch your holiday season in style. 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And it's as good now as it was when I saw it in the theater, Chris. Did you see it at probably at BAM? Yeah, BAM, BAM. Yeah, probably at BAM. And I probably emerged from it and I imagine in the blinking into the light of day feeling like flush with the connectiveness of all human beings. I probably was like, if only I had a device in my pocket that would allow me to tell Chris about this with a couple emojis while he's, I don't know, drinking on Smith Street. Like, I just. It probably was that moment for me. How do you feel about the lowdown turning into a television show? Is that your take? That's your pivot? Not in a bad way. I don't mean that. What you got? This episode, episode four written by Liz Blood, directed by Scott Teams, who directed the fantastic third episode. It's sort of. I don't know. I thought like a little bit of a bullpen game, mid-season pivot. It does introduce two new characters, Martha Plimpton's Sheriff Vela and her, I don't believe, named boyfriend played by Clifton Collins. So the bench for this show now is 15 deep, you know, like in terms of almost every scene features a performer that you know and love. But I thought that the structure of the episode, while I think this might be the funniest episode of the lowdown I've seen. So funny. It split the baby multiple times where it did an A plot with Ginger and Lee that then turns in an A1 and A2 plot because those two split up to interrogate different sides of a similar mystery with the death of a teenager in Woodrell and where he died and how it's connected to Miko, who is sort of the big MacGuffin of this season. And then there is a B plot which seems pretty much on the other side of the state to the narrative. Although I trust, all trust in Sterling to like bring this stuff all together. But it's Tommy Lee Jones, Michael Hitchcock and Keith David going undercover in the world of black market archaeological finds. And I love both plots and I love even the bifurcation of the Ginger and Lee plot where Ginger gets to go off. What's the name of the actor who was in Briarpatch who's, who's in this episode? Kirk Fox. Kirk Fox. The great Kirk Fox. And, you know, that, that all of that is delightful. I was just curious what you thought about like the more TV bones of this episode. This is the most Briarpatch heavy episode of the pod since 2020. Didn't see it coming. Thank you so much. I would just like to take a moment to say that if, if I, I don't know if it contributed much to the world, but it did briefly create the supernova that was the close friendship between Kirk Fox and Alan Cumming. And the two of them spent, so much time sitting with each other talking nonsense. And this is around the time that Alan Cumming discovered Takis and sitting in his bespoke, like, well, they weren't bespoke. We couldn't afford it, but he had these beautiful suits and he would eat Takis in a way that no one has ever eaten Takis before, which was to take each one out of the bag, suck off the spicy flavoring and then throw away the corn puff beneath. And he and Kirk Fox would just be just, just cooking, talking to each other. Anyway, I think it's fucking incredible that we have a television show in the year of our Lord, 2026, in which Tommy Lee Jones is just a B-story captain that you, last week, I felt like you were joking when you were like, Ethan Hawke just walks into a couple scenes and goes, what are you still doing here? Get out of here. But literally, Tommy Lee Jones is sitting on the couch of Macon Blair's office giving him advice about orgies and Ethan Hawke walks in and says, what are you doing here? Get out of here. And it works. Um, I know what you mean about it becoming a contemporary, like becoming a quote-unquote regular television show with just like a B story. But I mean, first of all, we all assume that they will merge at some point, but it is a testament to the just seemingly bottomless well of creativity and delight that Sterling and his writers have access to. That those three, putting those three performers together on this kind of mission feels as important to my viewing experience as what is clearly the A story. I'll say it again. I can't, I give a lot of credit here to the FX executive team because often the thing that gets bubble shows a second season, and when I say bubble shows, I mean like the lowdown got some awards attention. It got some best of lists. We loved it, but it didn't exactly set the world on fire. Often the thing that gets bubble shows the second season is an undeniable pitch for season two. And maybe there's a big, big, big, you know, mushroom cloud, type story coming, but in many ways, the show feels more modest in its ambition and its storytelling than season one, but it is so much better for it. So the fact that they were able to understand that and greenlight it is incredible to me because it is humming, but it is not necessarily, I tune into every episode with the feeling of surprise and excitement that I think more basic thinking executives believe we want to have. than we would do if every episode was a cliffhanger. Every episode isn't a cliffhanger. Every episode is a, my God, what are we going to see next? Or how does he talk his way out of this one? Yeah. And I think that the show is really good at handing a baton of energy in the act outs or like the last moment of the end of the episode goes right into the next episode in a way that's been very energizing. You know, I feel like it gives me like a rush of blood and then the end of the episode is like, and, you know, you get a lot of laconic discourses on the nature of journalism and truth and, you know. And raw milk. And orgies. Yeah. So it's kind of Sterling Harjo's everything show, but he does supercharge the first and last acts with these kinds of set pieces. And let's just talk about the dentist sequence because like, I don't even know how to put into words the setup because, sometimes the other thing that I'm just obsessed with, like, I feel like this is a kind of an inside baseball episode for us, but like, it's opportunity. It's like they built this crazy, funny, insane, did we just choke out a cop? And then it builds into, as you were saying, builds into this episode with him and his ex-wife's new husband fishtailing towards killer Mike and his attorney friend and all of that. But in the midst of this, they established that Ethan Hawke, that Lee's tooth has been chipped. Yes. So I don't know. I don't know how it bubbles up in the room, but at some point someone is like, should he, does he have time to see about the tooth? Jimmy is a dentist. So this is the perfect opportunity for these guys to like pair off and buddy up. But not just buddy up, then to call Ginger to basically be his mom and hold his hand because Lee is afraid of the dentist. And they all do some bumps of laughing gas, you know? And as they're walking in, Lee being Lee says something like, oh, that film Marathon Man. And Betty Gilpin's like, don't think about the Nazis right now. Yeah. And it's, it's just like every show would be improved if instead of a white noise machine, you just had a Betty Gilpin machine and you just turn it on and you just let it run in the background of every scene. Yeah. And everything is better because of it. Everything is better because of it. Like it's, it's absolutely delightful. I, this is, this is, you know, I know, you know that I am very, very, very Catholic about my top 10 list for the year. But let me just say of the 17 shows that are in my top 10 and have been, have been from jump, this is crashing in. Yes. To the top one, two, three, four, five, or six. It's number one, number two, the third time you watch the drama and realize you were reading it all wrong the whole time. Yeah. Fourth was afterlife, man. That movie rips. And then, you know, whatever else we talked about in the show, I sort of, I stay focused on the present, but furious. Yeah. I think I know your top 10 better than you do. The last thing I'll say about your, your, your framing that like it has sort of become a regular TV show. I didn't say regular. I just, I just meant it's, it's adopting some of the storytelling language of a, of a regular show. We should be so lucky if this could be a regular show, if this could come back every year. And if Tommy Lee Jones is having as much fun on it as he seems to be having, and is just puttering around in the background and Betty Gilpin is like, you know what? There are worse things to do with my life at this time of my career to spend three months in Tulsa with some pals. And we could just hang like this every year. It would be a, would, would be a blessing. You sound like Josh Shapiro right now. We should be so lucky. Do you think, do you, do you think I should, I mean, it's the Obama cadence is working for a number of charismatic Jews right now. Do you think I am third in, should I adopt it? Should I start experimenting? But don't tell me when and, and, and never tell me what it's going to be about. Like I, I really do want you mid discussing black doves next week to just break out pure Obama and see how much longer this podcast lasts. Listen, Barack and I are both podcasters. Like, so really we're kind of in the same ballpark. I, I, I adore the show. Obviously I was just, I was just trying to give you a little bit of a, a curve ball. You know, it's not always, it's not always Mizraki. Sometimes, sometimes you got to throw, throw something different. How are you feeling about, how are you feeling about world champ brewers? You were in Milwaukee this year. I was in Milwaukee. Shout out to DJ pie over at no laying up. I went to a brewers, game with him Phillies. It was, you know, the Phillies lost Jacob Mizraki, shot them out and, and then marched all the way. It's cool. I got to tell you, man, I texted my wife's been out of town and I texted a lot of guys in my life to be like watching the brew crew and nobody was, uh, I feel really bad for the, I mean like I don't really even care about baseball that much that deeply anymore. Uh, relative to like Liverpool and the Sixers. But I was like, I stand, I stand watch man. It's the national pastime. It's the world series. We got to check this out. I watched the extra inning game the other night. And then I was like, I got to watch these dudes of clinch and nobody, people were texting me about like Spurs, the Spurs versus the jazz. Normally I agree with you, but criterion does have a Shinoda retrospective right now. And some of those films, you're really, you're not, you're not helping me today. Listen, this is supposed to be after dark. My grandmother was a big Brewers fan because she grew up in Milwaukee. And so I thought, so I've always had a soft spot. Did the Greenwald migrate East? What happened there? You Milwaukee, your dad was into St. Louis and then you get all the way out to Philly. Absolutely not. No, no. Um, I like the idea that there's, there's a great migration. It's any trail we're on is the trail of tears. Let me tell you that. Uh, no, this is on my mother's side of the family. They, they were all from Milwaukee. Okay. They all, they all, I mean, spoiler, not originally, but they, uh, they did, they did settle in Milwaukee. And can I tell you, by the way, one of the more interesting things is my grandmother to me, maybe no one else, but you know, maybe people are listening at this point. So my great uncle, my grandmother's brother was like a very strange man, but a repository of like a lot of family history that would otherwise be lost. And I found this long letter that he wrote sort of detailing everyone in the family. And he, and there was an uncle of his who, went out to San Francisco for the gold rush. I was like, and like opened like a, I guess the gold rush equivalent of a bodega really to like sell stuff. Cause I was like, first of all, there's no one in my family who was prospecting. I'll tell you that much. That seems like a little tough on the knees, but, uh, anyway. Yeah. He went out to San Francisco. Then he went to new Orleans. Then he came back where someone, other members of the family had like a department store. And then apparently spoiler alert for LA law, he stepped into an elevator shaft with no elevator. Damn. And it's like, you survived the gold rush dog. Like that is, was it like one of the first elevators? It was, Oh, is it a mind first? No, no, this was in a department store. Now we're back in Milwaukee. Oh, I see. And as to your other question, yes, my father who thinks succession is a show about family, correct. Lifelong St. Louis Cardinal fan, but it has nothing to do with the city of St. Louis, which he did not visit until he was in his fifties. It was that when he was a child, he liked the red birds. Gotcha. Okay. Well, you caught up now. Yeah. All good. All good on that. There's going to be a quiz on this. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I'm going to get into my chat with Joe about Carrie and Crystal Lake and Andy and I will be back on Monday chatting about stuff and can't wait to see you in person, brother. I like the deep family dives. I think that's really where we should steer this thing. I think it does numbers. I'll talk to you soon, man. Big numbers. All right. I'm joined by the only telekinetic person I know. Oh, wow. I thought Joe would be, uh, useful here because of her extra century perception. Yeah. And also because she has watched all of Carrie and she liked it quite a bit. I did. And I have watched, uh, a big chunk of Carrie, including the end just to get ready for this pod. Sure. Uh, and listener, I liked it as well. Oh, great. Uh, this, this show, Carrie, we're also going to talk about Crystal Lake and I, I think we could talk about them a little bit together. Um, before we get into those two shows, just a quick thing about in, the intervening moments between when I recorded with Andy this morning and this afternoon with Joe. Patrick Stewart passed away in his 80s. Obviously best known as Professor X in the Fox X-Men films. I think probably best known for those. That's just not what I thought you were going to say. I would say that I know him mostly as Carla from the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy adaptation. Also in my favorite King Arthur movie, Excalibur. Yeah. Do you have a favorite Patrick Stewart performance? Yeah, Captain Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek. It's not a Star Trek guy. Okay, yeah. But he obviously was an ever-present part of my TV life in that sense. Yeah, we were just talking about him because we're covering Vision Quest over on House of R right now, which is run by Terry Metallus, who did Picard's Season 3, which actually was really good. But Terry Metallus is a huge Star Trek guy, so there's just a lot of Star Trek in his Marvel show. And Next Gen is the Star Trek I was brought up on. So Jean-Luc Picard is—we were huge Trekkies in my house. Oh. Wow. And he was a major. Do you find that there's still a Trek-Star Wars, like you can only be one thing with people? No. We've become a wide-open church. And especially since there's no Star Trek in production right now for the first time in a while. No Star Wars in production. I think everyone's just sort of banning a common cause of what happened to our favorite properties. But yeah, I mean, Patrick Stewart is probably best known as Professor X, but Jean-Luc Picard was so important. To me growing up. And just like—I don't know. Then what he did with that fame where he would do—he's like, now I'm going to do Lear on TNT. Just unbelievable. Or I'm going to do a Christmas Carol. I'm going to do all these like classical stage things that I love with my Star Trek, you know, blank check cachet. Yeah, knowing that you can go work six months of the year on any one thing and then spend the other six months doing the thing you love. Not that he didn't love Picard, but like he was always such a huge theater guy, especially in London. And yeah, he has a very— Small role, I guess, although a large presence in Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy. He plays Carla, who is George Smiley's like Russian spy adversary. Yeah. And he is incredible going up against Alec Guinness. Incredible on Excalibur as well, honestly. Amazing. And Dune, original Dune. Oh, that's right. Yeah. He is in the original Dune. Is he Paul's father? Who is he? No, he's not Paul's father. No, I can't remember Paul's name. Gurney. Gurney. Gurney Alec. Gurney. Let's talk about Carrie and Crystal Lake. This is—I've been promising this for a while. Okay. And I originally sort of was watching Crystal Lake just because I had been watching so many Friday the 13th movies up and around rewatchables, but just as a kind of annual tradition of usually throwing on at least one of those from the franchise. Okay. And I think that these two series are unified, if not in their equal accomplishments, in I think relatively bold visions. of two relatively straightforward stories. Carrie, as a novel, is not lean necessarily, but it's not like a big doorstopper Stephen King novel. And the De Palma film is 87 minutes or something like that, 90 minutes. And Mike Flanagan turned it into an eight-hour series. Crystal Lake, which is based on Friday the 13th, but is largely just a prequel about Pamela and Jason Voorhees and how they got to where they are in the beginning of Friday the 13th, is a kind of origin story, traumatic conspiracy thriller that also has elements of sci-fi in it, which I will get to because I know that you didn't go too far with Crystal Lake. But I think I broadly applaud both of these shows for trying something new. What did you think of the scope of at least Carrie, if not Crystal Lake? Well, so Carrie. So Carrie, yeah, I've only watched the first episode. You told me to watch the first episode of Crystal Lake, and then you would tell me what happens on Crystal Lake. On the seventh episode, yes. And I did not want to, like, spoil that for myself. Oh, okay. I don't want to spoil the joy of you telling me what happens on episode seven of Crystal Lake. But I'm a huge Mike Flanagan fan. Yeah. And Flanagan has done some great work inside of the Stephen King universe. He's very enmeshed in it now. You know, like, et cetera. And I think he's, like, one of the few people who really has a feel for, like, what makes King so great. And then also, you know, in Haunting of Hill House and Blind Manor and Fall of the House of Usher. Midnight Mass, yeah. He did this sort of. Well, in those three specifically, he did this sort of, like, let me remix the works of Shirley Jackson or Edgar Allan Poe or whatever. I'm just going to sort of mix and match and do some fan fiction-y kind of thing inside of these authorial universes. Henry James being Blind Manor. And so I was ready for Carrie to be a blend of. I was ready for Carrie to be a blend of Blind Manor. Both of those things. I think what I was not ready for in Carrie I Enjoy, but what I was not ready for was how it's part of his larger overall deal that he's doing this, like, larger Dark Tower project for Prime Video. And I think a lot of the frame narrative that we get inside of Carrie is feeding that larger project. I agree. So that stuff didn't work as well for me as the actual story of Carrie and Chris and what it would mean to be bullied now. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And all of these other things that are on his mind. So, like, in terms of casting and the kids in the show, I think he did a really good job, except for that one kid who looks 40. And then, like. And, like, even when you get something like, you know, Bill and I were talking about this a little bit, but when you get to, like, the prom episode, right? Like, you're waiting. You know, Bill was saying he watched Carrie because he's like, I got to get to the prom episode, which is penultimate. And, like, the way that they shot that. Or that's, like, the finales, both. Like, the way that he had to take one of the most. One of the most iconic moments in cinema and try to find, like, a different way to show it to us, I think was largely successful. But there's a lot of frame narrative around it that I. That feels like it's a servant of a different master. So, Joe's referring to the fact that Mike Flanagan has now done Doctor Sleep, which is a Shining sequel, essentially. Life of Chuck, which is a much different kind of Stephen King story and is much more, like, life-affirming. Gerald's Game, which was sort of a gnarly little. Really good. chamber piece that was on Netflix. A little Netflix film, yeah. Uh, he is currently working on The Mist. He has just done season one of Carrie, which has been renewed, and is working on The Dark Tower. And at the. So, spoilers now. If you have not watched Carrie, you might want to skip ahead to Crystal Lake, or you might just want to wait till you watch both. At the end of Carrie, um, we find out that there's been, like, this, you know, this overall framing device of the series. There's been, um, these interviews being conducted by a character named Adelaide, who is played by Kate Siegel, who is Mike Flanagan's real-life wife. And the director of one of the episodes of the season. And has been in everything with her. Yeah. With him. And she is sort of one half of a two-sided coin hunt for a group of, essentially telekinetic, but powerful children, powerful teens out there in the world. Now, this is alluded to at the end of the novel, Carrie. Mm-hmm. This, the idea that more kids out there have, these telekinetic powers. But, uh, Adelaide, the character, says shine to shine. Like, so, the connection between this and the shining, uh, you could make the leap of logic to, say, Firestarter. You could, uh, bring in any number of characters from the Stephen King universe. Yeah. And that, like you said, definitely seems to be the grander vision that Flanagan's got here. I was listening to an old interview he did, um, with the King cast, hosted by a couple friends of mine. A while ago, where he was talking about, you know, because the Dark Tower series that he wants to do has been a long time sort of getting off the ground. Dark Tower seems unfilmable for a number of reasons. Um, but he was talking about how there are these, like, the interconnected King universe, and how are these, there were these minor characters that are brought in from elsewhere into the Dark Tower series. And he was like, but will audiences, this is, this was, he had this interview a while ago, and he was like, will audiences recognize those characters, and would it be interesting to use, other characters, you know? And so I feel like he's setting up Carrie to be, you know, let's, let's bring in King characters that we are more familiar with. Yeah. To play these roles that are played by other King characters inside of, you know what I mean? So, I don't know. Dolores Clare, like, what, who are we bringing in? Yeah. How close are we getting to Castle Rock at that point? I don't, I don't really know. But, like, again, it felt like it was, you know, the MCU got accused of this, like, when you, when you can watch a project do one thing, but also then try to launch something else at the same time. Yes. That can be distracting. Yeah, I think in, if, some of this is marketing, if they had announced that Carrie was going to be a three-season take on a wider Stephen King universe, I think people probably would have been like, but you're going to do the prom in the first season, right? Right. Like, that's the thing with Carrie, is it's such a perfect dark diamond of a story of, like, this person gets pushed beyond the limit, and then the consequences are so drastic. Right. And it has such a powerful conclusion that to end it in a different way, and honestly, to make some pretty huge authorial choices in terms of, like, what was in Carrie's control and what was in this other character's control. Yeah, Carrie kind of innocent in this version, which I don't know that I wholly, I'm like, I'm compelled by a lot of what he's doing here. Specifically, I would say, and maybe we disagree on this, but, like, that Chris is almost, like, a co-protagonist of the story, Chris the Bully, right? favorite part of the show. Okay, great. I agree. Like, I think, I think Mike Flanagan looking at the story of Carrie and saying, okay, you know, Carrie, we know Carrie, we know what happened to Carrie to get her here. But what happened with Chris to get her to a place where she would dump a bucket of blood on a girl's head at prom? Like what drives a human being to do something like that? And so Chris is not innocent by any means inside of this, but sort of let's figure out the psychology of a person like that. I think that's like a really interesting avenue that he's almost 40% of the show on Chris. It seems like, you know, with her family life, with like all of like the complications with her father being in prison. And I thought Alison Thornton was really quite excellent as someone who's, you know, at once an alpha in her school, but dating kind of like a bad boy and has a father in prison and is kind of at various points got nothing to lose, even though it seems like she has everything to lose. Right. And, you know, Carrie, Carrie is like a story that like, I actually don't like particularly love watching long form bullying as like, as like a, as a plot point, you know what I mean? But this, I think there was just enough extra stuff and maybe soap opera melodrama stuff in this story and in this telling of the story that it, it, it really worked for me. Well, there's a thing with, you know, I'm not a Stephen King expert by any stretch of the imagination. So, you know, please send your emails where you will, but like King and bullying, I'm always slightly bumped on it because he just, he creates these bullies that are so unbelievably evil. And like, I guess from the point of view of a child, like that's what it feels like. But I, I often bump when we get these absolutely sociopathic children characters in a lot of his stories, uh, like an it or something like they're, they're violent. They're all these things. And like, yeah, supernatural stuff happens in all of Stephen King, but I'm like the, the bullying I've always bumped on. So, so to take us inside of Chris's psychology, to, to have some empathy for her, to have all these moments where it's like, where could she have turned the other way? Where could this have gone the other way? There's this lengthy sort of mediation, uh, section of the show where like her family and Carrie's family and the school administration are sitting down. It's just sort of like, we almost get there just like a number of times, but we're barreling towards prom and we all know that it's not going to work out, but it's, it almost gets there. Yeah, because Carrie gives this like big speech trying to convince people to do prom and they're like, okay, yeah. There's also a lot of stuff in this that King couldn't have imagined, which is, um, cyber bullying. Um, and down to Chris making sock puppet accounts and burners or whatever. And, you know, essentially like, uh, harassing one teacher to suicide and harassing, uh, Carrie to the point of no return, obviously. That's a really weird, I mean, I know that you didn't watch maybe every single episode. I've checked it. Like I, like there were a couple and then went to the end of the episode just to do it for this, for this pod. That's another side example of something that I, that I don't fully know that I understand why it's there, which is Raul Coley's character, Raul Coley, who has been a bunch of, um, uh, Mike Flanagan shows his, his teacher character is like a pedophile at the end of the day. And so the argument is like Chris bullying him was good actually, because it exposed pedophilia. It's very confusing, uh, the messaging behind that storyline. Um, but yeah, so it's just one of those, like the, the interior lives of the teachers is something that the show is, it gets into. Desjardins, who's like in the book is kind of like in and out of Carrie, but like saves her from the first like incident and then is at the prom that Amber Midthunder plays her in the show. Right. And so she's, she's like a significant character. There's a great scene earlier in the season when that character, like there are three teachers at happy hour and they're talking about the kids and she's talking about how like she finds Carrie, but like how guilty she feels about that, but just sort of like snap out of it. Carrie, I thought that was like a really good scene, but then there's just some other avenues where I'm just like, if we had tightened this up a bit, I think this could have been an absolute banger. Yeah. I mean, so they're like Flanagan directs four episodes, the first two and the last two. Yeah. The last two are, I think a tour de force in a lot of ways. So to Joe's point, the framing device either will or won't work for you. But what you can't say is that it wasn't a swing and that it wasn't like, I have this idea, you know, so rather than have Carrie kill her own mother, this interviewer who is also powerful does it. And, you know, like the end of the series, I actually like, I have never gotten to the end of like a Carrie story and been like, what's, what's the next day for like this whole situation. And I'm like, yeah. And like now it is kind of fascinating. Although I wonder how much he'll do this in conjunction with King, whether this is just like a brave new world going for, for Mike Flanagan. He has said he sees three seasons and that he has a story he wants to tell. I don't know whether or not it is in the same universe as Dr. Sleep. I don't know whether it's in the same universe as, you know, the, the mist that he is making or whether like how it rubs up against welcome to dairy or what, but it's interesting. It's really an interesting gambit. And I, I kind of liked that he, you know, he's also got exorcist martyrs, which is coming up in the coming out in March. Um, and that he has kind of just embraced this, like they're going to make me do this anyway with the IP plays. So what if I kind of made it into my thing rather than. Yeah. You and I, I mean, you and I both, I think liked Clayface more than we thought we would. And Flanagan, that was Flanagan's like project that he pitched. It eventually sort of gotten taken away from him, but like he wrote the original, like he pitched it. It's why it's part of the earliest slate that this James Gunn administration of the DCU is doing. Um, and there are definitely kernels of a classic Mike Flanagan, um, bad things happen to good people, uh, kind of storytelling in there that I, that I think is part of what I really responded to in Clayface, a movie I did not expect to like as much as I did. There is something in the, the melancholy of, uh, Flanagan story that I just always respond to and, you know, varying degrees of success, but like, I'm always in for, for something that's there. The durational aspect of it is kind of funny because like his shows feel long to me. Yeah. Um, but they wind up really, really hitting somewhat because of the length, somewhat because like if you do three hours waiting for that jump scare and then you get it just the same way as if you do like five or six hours waiting for prom and then she starts waving and blowing up cell phones in people's faces. It's fucking incredible. Like when they finally do, they don't do it in this sustained unrighteousness. Yeah. It's kind of like the, the unrelenting way that De Palma kind of does it. It's more fractured because it's being told by many people. And I think that's the intentional, like it, I can't do De Palma. So let me try to figure out a different way to tell this story. Let me tell you a little bit about Crystal Lake. Please. You watched the first episode. I did. This, as I mentioned to Andy earlier, is being touted as the fourth highest debut season ever on Peacock. Okay. What, what are the other contenders? I don't know. Okay. Uh, but this has been, I, I, I, I think this is, this show has done very well and I think it is got, I believe it as a second season. The entire reason to watch this is Linda Cardellini. Uh, if you are a Linda Cardellini fan, this is a MVP season for her. It just doesn't necessarily feel super like Friday the 13th to me, but unlike the source material for Carrie, where you're like, wow, what an interesting novel and what an interesting like gambit from King to do this and investigate like what it's like to be, you know, look down upon in society or whatever, like was motivating his Carrie book. Like there's nothing in Friday the 13th, the movies that suggests we need the Pamela Voorhees story to get to this point. Like it's so cut and dry on Friday the 13th that this is a woman who's upset that her son died and is terrorizing this camp. And then the son takes over the terrorizing. Um, what did you think of the first episode? Like were you compelled to keep watching? I kind of, because so I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know what to expect at all. Um, other than you seemed excited. Do you like the Friday the 13th movies? Um, enough. Yeah. I guess. Yeah. Um, I love Linda Cardellini though. Um, but I mean, both Carrie and Crystal Lake made me think about that. Do you remember the Patton Oswalt standup where he's talking about the Star Wars prequel? Yeah. He's talking about, he does this like George Lucas impression. He's like, what if Darth Vader was a little kid? And he's like, I don't want to see the little kid version. I don't want to see the little kid version of this. So it's just sort of like this, you know, enduring. Um, I just praise Mike Flanagan for it with Chris. Like what makes someone dump a bucket of blood on someone's head? Like what makes Pamela Voorhees chop a bunch of teenagers? We know. Yeah. We already know. Um, Linda Cardellini is fantastic. Right. Uh, amazing. The kid who plays Jason is endearing. It's pretty good. Um, and, um, I really like the. I don't know if I needed Jason humanized to this point, but yeah. I mean, that's the question. Um, William Catlett, who plays. He plays leave on the, the chief of police. I love him and his whole like investment in her and sort of, he's, uh, interested in her fancies her or whatever. And so the fact that he's going to be paying closer attention to her when she starts killing more people, I don't know. She kills two entire people in this first episode. Yes. She gets after it. This season. A bag of blood, uh, explodes at one point that seemed pretty Friday the 13th E to me, but the episode ends. The first episode ends. With pair of mobsters show up, they've got a, uh, a bag of syringes, right. And, and they're there because she has been on the run with Jason. And the question is, you know, the town doesn't know what you are, not who you are, but what you are. And then we get this sort of Project Argonaut, Project Treadstone-esque thing. So all of a sudden it's like, I was compelled, Chris, by that mystery. It's not unlike what they did with the first Godzilla reboot movie that was like 14 or whatever, the one that Gareth Evans did. Yeah. Where it's like actually about corporate conspiracy is what's behind Godzilla a little bit more than just, I mean, obviously there's like a lot to Godzilla that's like basically prehistoric. But the point is, is that they took this story and since you have basically nothing to go on. And I also feel like we are in this weird moment of with so many mergers and acquisitions and like changeovers and who's running what shop. I kind of. I kind of feel like there's a little bit no lifeguard on duty feeling to some TV now or to entertainment where it's just like, yeah, yeah. I mean, like you guys go ahead and make that. You're saying all the TV execs are off somewhere like fucking in a in a cabin while they should be watching. And perhaps, you know, David Ellison is Jason Voorhees and he's going to come regulate soon. But it's more like I don't really know. Like the Friday the 13th rights themselves have been relatively disputed. This is not unlike the Sons of the Lambs property. Where it's like, I don't think they really can do anything or they can't make it as a movie because it's so disputed. Yeah. But the TV rights are. I was looking into this a little bit like Brian Fuller, who was on this project for so long. Since 22. Yeah. And he was just thinking of like what the Brian Fuller version of this is. I know. Brian Fuller has been fired enough times that I'm pretty sure it's Brian Fuller's fault that he gets fired all the time. But he's very good at talking and had talked up this series to the point where I was like, you're going to have like an. Episode that's on a frozen Camp Crystal Lake. I mean, it's just a chase episode. Sounds pretty sick. I was pretty into it as a huge Hannibal fan. Like I was excited for for that idea or the Kevin Williamson, like Dawson's Creek esque sort of development here. So this has been in the works. I mean, forever. Yeah. In 2022, Brian Fuller was announced as like the showrunner and Kevin Williamson, who wrote Scream, was going to be on like at least write an episode. And Dawson's Creek. And Dawson's Creek. And they were even. It had been rumored or it was it was reported, at least that Adrian King, who plays Alice in the first movie, was rumored to be returning in some capacity. So we've connected tissues to the movies like it seemed like it was going to be maybe more of a sequel prequel or maybe maybe Adrian King was going to be playing a different character. I don't know. And then at one point, this may have been after Fuller left. Charlize Theron was right there and was talked about as as Pamela, which would have been nuts. Yeah. And now. At one point, Nick Antosco was of Cape Fear fame of Cape Fear fame was involved and he came away. And then Brad Caleb came, who is an actor who, as you pointed out to me yesterday, was the voice of Aladdin, the singing voice of the singing voice of Aladdin. Yeah. And has done work on Welcome to Derry. He is the showrunner. And Linda Cardellini is Pamela. And it is essentially takes place in the. It's the Rogue One, I would say, to Star Wars. Of Friday the 13th. I was having trouble with the timeline and then I just decided to, like, sort of give up on it a little bit. I think they decanonized it because in the movie. He goes in the lake in 59. Yes. And she starts killing pretty quickly after that. OK. And then disappears every time the camp shuts down and comes back every time the camp gets rebuilt. OK. So by the Friday the 13th, the Christie's are like opening Camp Crystal Lake for the first time. And Pamela is incensed by this. And it's 70 something. Seventy nine. Yeah. This is half like post hippie free love. There's a plot line in Crystal Lake about like a like a basically like a Manson family that's living on the camp. There is a lot of stuff about journalism with the sheriff's sister. Yeah. Investigating why Pam who Pamela is basically and why these guys were after her. I love that it was she was on the typewriter at his house in the first episode. And she's like just banging out some banging out a cop. And she's like, I got to file this tonight. And I was like, I actually have a note where it's like, how are you writing this down? Yeah. Yeah. As the show progresses and this will get into heavy spoiler territory, but both for you and for our listeners, it's discovered that Jason is the progeny of Pamela and a man named Elias. OK. Elias is played by Hamish Linklater. What? Now I'm back in. And he works at a company called Bellflower, which is like. Dow or DuPont. Sure. And they are trying to, I guess, inoculate or save humanity from a nuclear war. And what they're investigating is what can we learn from the genes and DNA of cockroaches that we can apply to future generations of humans? Not so that they become cockroaches, but so that they have the survival. Sure. So basically it's like. Is Jason part cockroach? They have done stuff to him to make him mimic cockroaches. Yes, splice, cockroach, DNA. So that's why he is strong. That's why he cannot be killed. But he is also, you know, has had a lot of difficulties. Do you not wish you had been in the room the day that they were like, you know how Jason keeps coming back? What if he's part cockroach? It's interesting what they choose they need to explain. Sure. Versus what they're like, yeah, whatever. Yada, yada, yada, cockroach. Yeah. You know, there is a alternative version of this. That focuses more on the stuff that kind of gets brought up in Friday the 13th, 4, 5 and 6, which is not unlike Carrie, but is about this boy, Tommy, who has psychic powers and has perhaps been like, you know, imprinted on by Jason at various points. And those are my three favorite. That's my favorite run of the movies. Okay. But it really is like I'm a middle aged man trying to like divine narrative logic out of films that were made explicitly for the purpose. Of titillating like teenagers, teenage sex and yes, and gore and death. I can't my asthma. And so like the idea of Crystal Lake making sense, the fact that you get to the end of it and you're like, okay, I guess like this woman was essentially episode seven cockroach reveal. Episode seven is Pam sits down with the sheriff and is like, okay, I'll tell you who I am. And it is a flashback episode starring Hamish Linklater starring Hamish Linklater as is this Dr. Elias, who is using his own children. Child as of like a lab rat for future experimentation, which Hamish Linklater bad dad flashback episode is better. This one or Widow's Bay. It's definitely Widow's Bay. This one is probably closer to his weird appearance in Whisper Man that happened this year. I want to know what Hamish Linklater is like, what the plan is, because he seems like he's just like, I'll come through and work for a day or two and it'll be awesome. In any case, this is such a departure. That it actually probably sets this show up to be relatively successful going forward because this is also going to be renewed. And Brad Kane has talked about my idea for the show is that it's kind of Twin Peaks-y and that it is about the town around Crystal Lake and the weird characters and this evil that's in the woods, which is now Pam and Jason. But I, you know, Pamela only lives so much longer. Yeah, canonically. Linda Cardellini is almost here. So I think Linda Cardellini's got one season left and then maybe it's Big Jay for the third season. But that will be happening, you know, now we will be into the movies. What if they get Hamish Linklater to also play Big Jay? He meets a dark end, you know. Right, but I'm just saying. Oh, he could come back. He could come back as Big Jay himself. Yeah. What's interesting is like some of the, because there's this whole like, she doesn't believe Jason has drowned, right? Like he disappears in the water. They can't find him. Nobody has the body. There's an old vet who's like, the body's never come back from the lake. Great, spooky horror movie guy moment. But she has taught him survival. She's like, these woods will be yours. He knows all these like survival techniques. Knows major spoilers, but this is kind of the plot of the God of the Woods, the like upcoming. There's a lot of overlapping DNA that's like very surprising to me. But I guess my question, maybe this goes back to your whole like the lifeguards aren't on duty. I was so confused how Nick Antosca got Cape Fear, like in terms of like juicy properties to get to do. Like no, no major shade on Nick Antosca. I was just like, didn't see what in his CV made him sort of like the guy to go to for Cape Fear. And for Brad Kane, I'm like, I don't, you know, like did some work on Welcome to Derry and then is running the Friday 13th IP that, you know, Brian Fuller and Kevin Williamson and other people have tried to get their hands on. Like, it seems to me that. For these kinds of jobs, I can't think of anything outside. I guess Cape Fear is a really good example of this. Friday the 13th, to some extent, Carrie. The hardest part about it and the thing that I think if you are pitching this that you are most valued for is like, can you generate enough story outside of like the obvious Carrie's got to go to prom. We've got to see this. We've got to see Jason hack someone to death. Right. And you get both in each show. But. We're living the dream. Nobody is going to make like a three. Three episode Carrie or a three episode Crystal Lake. You know, they want to have some sort of like. chunky piece of property that they're going to be running for a while and that they can iterate off of and it's a pretty good idea i don't i find the writing on the show and the dialogue and the characterizations to be a little bit like rote so it's not like exciting and the kills you know brad kane's talked about their uh a lot of practical effects they felt pretty digital to me but i guess maybe like i'm wrong there there's something the bear they're different than the one they're different than the kills in friday the 13th which feel very handmade you know and these are a little bit more like what if this guy's head goes half off you know and her taking the machete to that guy's face in the first episode yes looked pretty great i thought i also enjoyed for what it's worth the incredibly cheesy throwback to the original like opening title credit font moment opening credits are incredible on this show yeah like really really good um but yeah i guess i'm just i hear what you're saying about generating story i'm just sort of like and again no no shade to brad kane who's great as the singing voice of aladdin but i'm just sort of like wow i just don't understand a lot of decisions that are being made in terms of like who's doing this i think mike flanagan makes all the sense in the world sure you know and i think amazon was like happy to buy into the mike flanagan project i think this friday the 13th as a tv series i don't know that there was like i'm sure there was a line but i don't know if it was like they're trying to choose between like you know terrence winter and somebody else when it comes to like showrunners and stuff so i i uh i i think ultimately my message about these two shows those is like good job because these could be really bad these could be um they could feel completely pro forma but like the the amount of like either genre twists or actual story twists and stuff like that is just like it's just like it's just like it's just like it's just like it's just like it's just like it's just like it's just like it's just like i think i was impressed by both but to varying levels i also think just the way they cast it like linda cartolini can carry a lot just on her own and then as we already mentioned like the the young cast of carrie um allison thornton summer howell who plays carrie i think are great samantha sloyan who plays carrie mrs white who is a flanagan regular like his his whole flanagan verse regular cast members like it doesn't work and then like half the cast of battlestar galactica is hearing cameos for some reason katie sackoff trisha helfer michael truco but then like a bunch of them are just like show up in random cameo like as like concerned parents and like a montage like a bunch of other battle trisha helfer's there like i'm just sort of like what's happening battlestar i guess he's just a huge battlestar fan he said that like uh because i think somebody was in one of his shows and he went oh it was truco's in hush in midnight oh yeah and he went and showed hush and like he had the battlestar cast come over and flanagan like freaked out because he was like oh my god i think it's one of his favorite shows but yeah because sackoff is an oculus and then truco's in midnight mass and other things yeah so katie sackoff pretty scary in this and carrie uh as as amanda the the mother of emeline right right um another girl with the shine yeah um yeah okay so you want you're excited for two more seasons of carrie if it's about like carrie and fire starter rolling through the world sure i got excited about the idea i also wrote fire starter i know like i got excited about the fight and like i don't know do we team up with christine in the car like what are what are we doing like i mean i don't know what kind of investigations going on in in is it chamberlain is the name of the town maybe uh where they're like okay so like what happened here right we have a mass murder on our hands um but obviously kate siegel's character is going to be a major part of the next two seasons and if kate siegel and i don't think we see katie sackoff's body she has stopped by opposing cult members but is not we don't ever see like her die i don't think right delaney hailes who's in who i know from interview with the vampire is like plays one of the young cult members um so yeah seeing katie siegel kate siegel who usually has a much bigger role in the plan again projects i was i was suspicious when she shows up as the interviewer and i was like why is she it's planting the seed for something bigger and similarly delaney hailes i was like she's got to be doing something bigger going forward so yeah i mean there's a lot to play with in in the the king verse it's just interesting to me to be doing this potential sort of king mix and match so close to hulu doing castle rock which was like a similar let's play with a bunch of different characters from the king verse but like it's a rich and storied universe cocaine wrote a lot of books you know so there's a lot to go on and i think that there's like probably a feeling that those two series dairy and castle rock were similar efforts to capture a vibe and then also bring in tertiary characters at various points and dairy is like got a lot of pennywise stuff in it but i think that it's just kind of become like a modern folklore and people can take those like you can take carry and you can take shining and you can take these things and if you want like flanagan to weave them all together i think people are here for the the name on the front of the book you know what i mean for like oh yeah dairy i care about like the fact that all these stories take place in the same place like it doesn't seem like any like people are really vibing to that yeah i don't know they're here for the font honestly that they recognize yeah yeah you know and to see carry to see a girl with like a prom queen tiara on the promo and you're just like like bill like all of us are like i can't wait to get to prom i gotta get to prom yeah black prom let's do it uh joe thank you so much for joining me thanks rob uh thanks to kaya and kaya we'll be back on monday and uh everybody have a great weekend this is u.s bank's cozy cash formations with your chief financial playmaker fernando mendoza you are worthy of financial security budgeting is not restriction it's freedom you are smart you are capable you are giving your money a purpose you are learning the language of saving of growing now streaming member fdic copyright 2026 u.s bank this episode is brought to you by whole foods market fall is here and whole foods market has everything you need for cozy meals seasonal treats and easy entertaining elevate your hearty dishes with tasty bone-in beef short ribs or new york strip steaks with no added growth hormones or antibiotics and as the fall evenings draw in why not get ahead of cold season with immunity shots herbal 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