Is ‘Widow’s Bay’ Too Good? Plus ‘Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed’ and ‘Top Chef’

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This episode is brought to you by the Active Cash Credit Card from Wells Fargo. That's a mouthful, but that's because it packs a lot in. Earn unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases with it, big or small. So whether it's buying tickets to the game or grabbing a coffee, it earns unlimited 2% cash rewards on purchases. Say it with me, the Active Cash Credit Card from Wells Fargo. Be a 2%-er. Learn more at wellsfargo.com. Active Cash. Terms apply. 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 doesn't want a refund. He just wants the person who did this to find out. It's Andy Greenwald! That was a joyful opening for what might be a sad show. I wanted to let you know that I have accepted an offer. I feel qualified to do this based on. You have a little bit of a built-in vibe to you, you know? Wow. In what sense? Gadfly. Overconfidence. Spectacled. Yeah. Ready to tear down boomer privilege. Moving from industry to industry, just sort of like a, hey guys, let's open the box and then throw the box off the table. Jokes aside, I do believe I was a finalist, but his writing credit on The Idol, I think is what pushed him over the top. We can talk about 60 Minutes if you want. We can also talk about, name them. Name the stuff. Widow's Bay. Hell yeah. Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. Yeah. Top Chef. Okay. I have a prompt for you that's related to Star City, but will not involve people having watched Star City. And will not be in its native Russian. Yeah. I have a couple of things to say. One, you can email us at thewatchatspotify.com. You can follow us on Instagram at thewatchpod underscore. That's on Instagram. And then you can watch us on YouTube at the ringer-tv channel, along with the Prestige TV pod. They're going to be rocking Cape Fear on Friday. You and I. You and I both gritting our teeth trying to decide, are we jumping back in with Max Cady? I don't know. What else? What else? What else? You can also listen to us on Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. I told you what we're listening to today. And Star City. We'll probably talk about episodes two and three in detail on Monday. So if people are watching, I will repeat to anyone who skipped through our Star City conversation. A, I love it. B, you don't need to have seen For All Man. You don't need to have seen For All Man. And then since then, Sean and Amanda have talked really, really intelligently about what it means for movies. Sean wrote a great piece on his Substack projection about, you know, I don't even know, it is projections. For a second, I thought it was a singular projection, but that wouldn't really make sense. Not the way he lives his life. No. On his Substack, he wrote a great piece about what this moment means in movies. And it has been a minute since I have felt that way about TV. I also have a different relationship to television than Sean does to movies, where I think Sean very much sees the movies as a kind of like quasi third space religious kind of pastime for himself. And television is cool. This is how I feel about movies and TV too, honestly. I don't think he's wrong. No, yeah, but I don't have like that William H. Macy and Sports Night like tearful conversation about television being the American campfire kind of thing. I have a William H. Macy and Boogie Nights attitude towards television. People working between the two medians. What am I trying to ask about this? We've had conversations before about whether any outsiders could come into television and talked about the hurdles to like independent television making and how expensive and complicated it is to put together a long form series. But it does feel like Obsession and Backrooms have moved into like pole position and moved movies into like a real like center of the culture kind of environment. Everybody you know, people at the gym, people at the coffee shop are like, hey, have you seen Backrooms? Have you seen this? Like, what did you think of it? So I would say it's interesting the way you're framing it because I think there's a different way to look at it. I think there's a way to look at the rise in an important way, certainly for the big picture podcast and the movie industry to look at the success of those movies as fresh blood coming in, fresh voices, fresh perspective, and audiences desire to be taken on those trips. What I would counter with is the most recent, um, comparison to something like a phenomenon like Backrooms would be The Pit. And the reason I say The Pit is not because these are young people showing you a fresh way in. That is the opposite of what The Pit is. It is old hands. What both have done though, I would say, is remind people why we engage with these mediums in the first place in a collective celebratory, uh, way. Meaning The Pit has both reminded multiple generations and taught a new generation. That this little box used to give us a story every week. And it used to give us stories that we were excited about, surprised by, compelled by, and it built over time. And we would talk about it. Like, I think it is safe to say that, like, in terms of water cooler chat, if people even, for those of you who aren't working from home, like, The Pit dominates. People were talking about it in a way that we used to talk about television shows. So I think that in terms of putting things back in the center of culture in a way that felt both affirming for those of us who work in those spaces, but also giving us a sense of optimism that maybe a new generation might begin to speak that language. That would be the comparison. That's an awesome take. Thanks, man. I got to tell you, I, you know, I don't even have, like, one that's comparable. I think that, you know, I was listening to The Town and Matt and Lucas Shaw were talking about this phenomenon and Craig chimed in, Craig Horlbeck, who was our producer on The Rewatchables as well, and was just like, "You guys are going back and forth about whether studios are going to keep making IP." And he's like, "The point is, is that, like, younger people don't give a shit about 1980s franchises or 1990s franchises." And we'll see. I mean, there's a world in which you can A/B test this easily, but, like, there's a world in which Cape Fear is a sensation. There's a world in which, like, not a single person you know watches it. It's an example of something where it was like, who is asking for this? Is this even. It's an intellectual property that is worthy of expansion. - Right. - They've had two movies. You can say you're going back to the book, but we all know, like, people are tuning in to watch - Bardem do De Niro and do Mitchum. - Yeah. Um, what is kind of, like. You're taking something that was a polished diamond of a thriller and now expanding it, I believe, to ten hours. Well, I think the comparison, though. I think Cape Fear's. The margin for. Cape Fear isn't going to convince anyone. I think when we talked about it before, that at whatever level these conversations exist at Apple, I don't think they are actively saying, or at least they're not even addressing the idea of, like, reinventing Cape Fear for a new generation. - Yes. - This is comfort prestige food for a generation that doesn't go to the movies anymore. - Right. - The comparison, I think, that Craig was right to point out would be, there's a fucking He-Man movie opening this weekend. Which is. And it's apparently pretty good. But. But. Okay. - We'll leave it at that. - Stopped you dead in your tracks, didn't I? That is not a. That was a take. - But. But. - I was not a He-Man man. - But. But. - So, I don't know. Those toys were fine. - Those toys were 40 years old. - I think that there are guys out there who are waiting to see Skeletor do his work like this for a long time. Wake me when Tony Gilroy does the Orko spinoff. - Okay? - Just let. Let me know when that's on the docket. I can't. Okay. You're too afraid of my dangerous ideas. - That's why I'm in here and not in. - I recently saw a bunch of behind-the-scenes photos of Tony on the set of Michael Clayton, you know, wearing a cool parka and going, "I'm going like this. We should just Photoshop it." - But with floating. - Mad fucking He-Man character. To be clear, Orko was the floating magician who didn't have a body - and was just like a shirt. - Sure. That was a cool time for us to watch cartoons. My point isn't even that, like, I don't. The Masters of the Universe thing, even if it's good, there's a cynicism baked in the root of it, where, like, I don't think there's even. They're not converting a new generation to, like, follow the story of Eternia. There wasn't even really a story. From everything I understand about the movie, it's, like, apologizing for itself as the bit throughout, which is just such loser cul-de-sac culture shit. Somewhere at Venice Beach, at the outdoor gym at Venice Beach, some guy's like, "There is a story!" Well, that's because, guys, I've always been an Adam, not a He-Man. Like, I think there's two types of. - Yeah. - There are two genders, you know? So I get it, but. But, yeah, like, I think we would both want the. fresh, young voice in television, but television is a. such a profoundly different beast, and it's a lot harder. I mean, television is an assembly line, even at its most prestige or auteur-driven. You still need to, unless you're being asked to do something that is radically outside the norm of a series order, you have to conform in ways, and you have to have. You have to kind of know what you're doing or surround yourself, people who know what they're doing, in a way that I think is less. I mean, that exists in movies, obviously, but I think it's less interventionist maybe in movies, where a kid has a vision for something, and then, obviously, he has line producers and professionals, like, making it a movie, but that's different than saying, "We will write this and execute it across ten hours "and deliver it in traditional television." Yeah, and I think, you know, we were gonna talk about some series today that I think have grappled with some of the requirements of being what they are, you know, and being told in the format that they're being told. I do feel like, you know, maybe the closest comparison I have, it's not necessarily. They're nowhere near as big as these films have wound up being, but the moment that I'm thinking of for TV is probably that. And my dates could be wrong, but that 17 through 20 era of "Atlanta Fleabag," "I May Destroy You," "Industry Coming On," this feeling that not only was there diversity of POVs, but there was, like, a generational shift, and that people. were speaking to, like, a cohort of the audience that often doesn't feel kind of seen or addressed or vocalized, you know? I think that's right. And I think that that felt like also, formally, we were getting some different kinds of stuff then. I think you're right. I think I'm being too conservative in my vision in that way. Like, there was a moment when. It wasn't just that there was a moment when streamers needed to get attention, not just retain subscribers, so they were willing to take some bigger risks on things in the hopes of hitting a home run, but that creators like Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Donald Glover and a host of others, Michaela Cole, I would put in there as well, essentially jumped the line in what has been often to its detriment, but sometimes, parentheses, the pit, not to its detriment, kind of stodgy and kind of wait your turn. Yes. And there's, like, a 10- to 12-year process of starting at the bottom of a writer's room. Yes. and getting all the way up to executive producer. An example we use a lot is, like, Mad Men. The Mad Men pilot was the spec that Matthew Weiner wrote when he was working on the Ted Danson sitcom Becker in order to be hired by David Chase to spend however many years, four, five, six years at his knee, basically, writing that show. Mm-hm. before he got a chance. And the reason he got a chance when he was older than those creators we just mentioned was because AMC was in a position that, a few years later, Netflix and Amazon were in slightly, where they were like, "We'll do the thing everyone else won't." And we're kind of. kind of past that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We talk about IP, and we roll our eyes. Us? A bit. Sure. Right now, I'm gonna play a little game with you about a piece of IP, 'cause apparently For All Mankind is IP. We talked a little bit on Monday's show about Star City, which is the series on Apple that's already aired to tomorrow. It'll be the third episode where it's a sort of retelling of the period of For All Mankind, from the POV of the Soviet space program. I don't know. I would assume that Apple's going to do it, Apple is going to give this show more than one season just because that's Apple's MO. But I don't know if they're going to time jump at the exact moments that For All Mankind has. So it might be interesting. There may be some, you know, if you were a For All Mankind completist, you might be able to watch Star City and be like, oh, so that's what it looked like when this happened that was off screen in For All Mankind. Anyway, I wanted to play a fun game with you because we'll talk more about episode two and three on Monday. But take a well-regarded, or not, show and then craft an alternative POV of the main narrative. So this is kind of what Star City is doing. Now, you are not restricted to following a letter of the law way of this prompt, but I thought, what else would you Star City here? Well, I've got five options. Jesus. You know, you walk, can I just tell people, he walked in with none. That's what I'm working with here. He is, when the light goes on, he can compare back, back rooms to the pit, and he can come up with five other Star Cities. In my offense, I started my day on London time today. So you are, these are peak hours right now. Well, it's transferred out. You know, the transfer window is open in England, so. Do you, could we transfer ourselves? Do you want to go back and forth? Let's go back and forth. Okay. And you're doing so well today. I want you to go first. Okay. Which one should I start with? Well, some are, I'll start with the most, obviously, Star City, which is, if we take the premise where For All Mankind is a respected and beloved show that has never set the world on fire, and you're going to tell the Russian side of events, are we ready for a spinoff of The Americans? Called The Russians. So wouldn't The Americans actually be the American side of things? It wouldn't be Noah Emmerich's home life? The season of television would be the KGB trying to, to ferret out deep cover American agents in Moscow in the 80s. Okay. See what I mean? Yeah. Oh, I see. The Russians, right. How small can we make the aperture for something that we would like? And are Star City using those Lithuania sets all year round, or can we get it? We could do like The Pit and The Night Shift, where they just keep rolling. Yes. You use the same cast, honestly. Okay, my first one, the smoking section. Oh, you've named these shows? You've named these shows? Yes. Ah, damn. See, that's what I could have done yesterday. The smoking section. All right. The X-Files, as told from the POV of the cigarette smoking man. Hell yeah. Now, I'm gonna. It's basically a guy who loves smoking and has to like fend off these pesky FBI agents from time to time as he tries to bring aliens to his return. So it's autobiographical. Yes. This is a deeply personal project to you. I'm always fending them off. My only. Cash, stop calling me, man. Instant green light. Instant green light. Instant green light. Who are you casting as the younger cigarette smoking man? Because the original actor, sadly, is no longer with us due to. Not due to the cigarette smoking. Well. He's one of those guys that looks like he was born 64 years old. Great. It's hard to imagine him as Nicholas Gazeltine or whatever his name is. Oh, because no one looks like that anymore. Yeah. So. Who do you. Who looks like shit? It's not who looks like shit. It's like he's a guy who is probably pretty attractive. Right. And then smoked three packs a day until he looked like Mike Schmidt's Fielding Glove, you know? So you want to cast someone almost too beautiful. Yeah. So maybe you do want Gazeltine. He's ready to go to TV after this movie. Okay, let's do that. Let's do Nick. Do you like him? I don't know. He's in He-Man. No, I know. So you think that this is a soft landing spot for him after this movie tanks? Once he's done being swole for He-Man, he can come. He can smoke away the pounds? Yeah. Okay. I like it. Okay, go ahead. You're doing your next one. Okay. My next one is a show called Recreation in Parks. It is a comedy show set in Eagleton, Indiana, starring Parker Posey. And it is just that side of the story of the run of Parks and Recreation, which for people who don't watch the show, there was a kind of like. Echoing The Simpsons, there was a Springfield, Shelbyville, like there is the evil other town. In the case of Parks and Rec, it was Eagleton where everything was rich and fancy and perfect. And the Parks department there was run by Parker Posey. Parker Posey's character who was Leslie's friend turned nemesis. And who doesn't want Parker. Sam Elliott was on the show. Oh, yeah. He was in Eagleton, wasn't he? He was the hippie run. That's right. You know, who wore sandals. That's right. There's a lot there. We could do it. Sam Elliott would love to be sitting in more television shows at this point. So, yeah. I mean, who can blame him? My next one is Veep. Vice President John Hoynes' POV on the Bartlett administration. Nicholas Gaiseltine. This is so niche right now. We are going so small, Bore. Yeah. But what if we brought in some of the cast of Veep to work in his office? Yeah. You know, just have Hitmaker, you know, get Tony Hale in. But they're earnest now? Yeah. So the zag is Veep was a show that prefaced, that like foreshadowed the clown car of American politics in the decade. to come. So when you watch Veep now, it feels really prescient. Whereas if you watch Parks and Rec now, you're like millennial cringe. Yes, right. And if you watch West Wing, you're like, is this the expanse? Truly. What are you talking about? Oh, this is for all mankind where there's an alternate. So this would be zagging back to earnestness. I mean, this would be a bad TV show because it would be a guy being like, damn, I'm frustrated. This other guy is really kicking ass. What do you mean it's a bad TV show? That's Breaking Bad. But you could have the campaign, you know what I mean? All TV shows, are men frustrated that other men are doing better? No, but those guys are all really good at one thing. On those shows. Yeah. I'm good at advertising. I'm good at math. Who played Hoynes? Tim Matheson. Oh, right. So what was he good at? Fundraising, I think. Okay, bundling. I think he was the Texas, I think he was a Texas politician. Let me push you the way a good showrunner might. How do we storify that? You want to add something that makes it more interesting or is he hosting parties in Texas and he becomes privy to something? Well, maybe I start to connect the C-R-I-P-C-U. Wait, say it again. C-R-I-P-C-U. Print it. Put that on a shirt. And we have John Hoynes working in conjunction with the cigarette smoking man to bring aliens. This will stop Bartlett. And what's amazing is we never saw. Bartlett was seeing all kinds of crazy shit with like cornfields and bees and oil. Yes. And still he was just like, what heals America is our common thread of decency. Is granting clemency to a turkey. Every more often than you'd think. Yeah. You got another one. That's great. I got one more. Yeah. I mean, this is sort of obvious, but industry and YC. Oh, I have an industry one as well. Yeah. Which would be the events of industry of the past few seasons, but told through the pure point New York office. The Adler, the Adler verse. The the expanded Adler verse. Where and here's what this is the part that's going to be slightly different. And I want you to stay with me because it's kind of breaks canon a little bit. But the sexy young people who work on Wall Street go out and do drugs all night and fuck each other in sexually curious ways. Oh, I was going to say that's kind of like what if all they did was go get matchas and work out and walk their dogs. Yes. They just like they live in Williamsburg and they just go to the Equinox that's next to the Chase Bank now. Yeah. Storify that. I think we lived it. My industry spinoff is called Valley Boy and it's the previous season of industry told from the perspective of Rob living in California. That's a good show, actually. And he could just it's not even the perspective of the season. It's just put that character and all of a sudden the audacity is interesting. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I'm sorry. That was a stray. We haven't watched it, but I think our lack of interest is. No, I haven't. I haven't checked it out, so I don't know. But those are my three. Did you have one more you wanted to do? Yes. Oh, I have two more. What one is called Thoroughbreds. Did you just name it in this moment? No. OK. Yes. OK. Thoroughbreds. I didn't know we had to come up with cool names. You guys. And what are Thoroughbreds, Chris? How do you define a Thoroughbred? What is a Thoroughbred? A racehorse. Not just a not just a racehorse. What? Using a different adjective. What makes them racehorses? They run fast. Fasthorses, baby. OK. This is a show. Slow fast. This is a show set in the modern England English secret service with the people who are good at their job. Oh, so the Chris and Scott Thomas. Who's the blonde lady? Who's the head of the dogs? Yeah. No, but it's not even about the dogs because the good agents don't need the dogs. Oh, it's the Chris and Scott Thomas side of things. Like when she's not dealing with Gary Oldman. Yeah. Like it's just the agency in London with Chris and Scott Thomas and they don't fuck up and like pass gas all the time. Yeah. And actually have like big things to do and not just like. Yeah. What's wrong with that? Some spy died on a bus. Like, you know what the pit taught us? It's like show about doctors doing doctor stuff. Good. Yeah. Spy show. Also, the last one is, you know, I think what was interesting about Star City was that it took, it began in the same place essentially that For All Mankind began. Yes, the same moment. For All Mankind begins with the Soviets landing on the moon and spins off an alternate history. Star City begins however many years later. I think it's six or seven years since For All Mankind premiered despite however many seasons they've put out. Same, went back to that initial alternate history hinge point and went off. Back to the pilot episode of a beloved series, all the way back to 2007, when a little show called Mad Men began with a young woman coming to Don Draper and saying, we would like to hire your firm to do the advertising for our department store. And Roger Sterling said, why don't they get a Jewish firm? Reader, I listened. Jewish Mad Men? Mad Mitzvah, baby. It's just the ad game with guys who- It's a Krumholz? It's 100% Krumholz. Who else is in it? I didn't do all the homework here, but I'm sure we could probably find a couple Jews in Hollywood who are ready to act on a television show. Krumholz is obviously the heavy. He's the Draper? I don't know if he's, no, he's not the Draper. You need more of like, if we're looking for a young half Jewish stars, at least like you need, like a Chalamet energy to be the young person. But Krumholz is like, Krumholz is definitely the Sterling, Roger Sterling. It's his family firm. And, you know, basically everything is the same, except you can't mix meat and dairy. That's it. You can't mix it? No. Keep kosher. You can't- Do you keep kosher? You don't do that, right? No. Yeah. How long have we known each other? You love having a steak with a glass of milk. I had one right before this podcast. You can tell by my energy. Okay. So that's like, we'll get back to that. We'll get back into Star City on Monday. That was fun as hell. You love a game. I do love a game. I don't know. We didn't really award each other points, so who knows who won. But if you guys have your own ideas for Star City shows, hit us up. Also, if you have any ideas over who won, make that very clear in the emails. I won't see them. Fan Duel is now available everywhere in the U.S. So you can get in on the sports action no matter where you are. 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. Tramphya. Tramphya. Before treatment, get checked for infections, and tuberculosis. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more, or visit TramphyaRadio.com. Would you like to do Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed first, or would you like to do Widow's Bay first? You call it, man. We're staying on the Apple platform. You know what? Here's the problem with Widow's Bay, which is. This will be the first problem. Uh, it is, is now getting. Is Widow's Bay too good? You know, like, I almost. Is that your concern? Well, you know, I, I hate being like, you texted me this because people aren't privy to this, but you were like, so it's just showing off now? Yeah. And, uh, this episode, Your Baggage, uh, which aired on, uh, I think Tuesday night, right? Sure. Uh. This week? Written by Emma Ketchum and directed by Andrew DeYoung. Andrew DeYoung did, uh, the Mushroom Trip episode from a couple of weeks ago. He directed the Tim Robinson movie, Friendship, and there are big chair company vibes in this episode. Um, basically, it's about every character confronting their past. Patricia with the boogeyman, uh, Evan and Tom trying to come to grips with what happened to Evan's mother and Tom's wife. And Wick kind of going over, uh, a childhood trauma that split him up from Jerry, who works in the historical society and now has a nice enough but annoying husband. Uh, and, you know, this was obviously a bit broadcast when the movie was released. And the previous episode ended with, "We got 'em! It's, it's all good!" And there's a great moment at the beginning of this episode that was, um, kind of reminded me of, uh, uh, Pulp Fiction when they're in the diner and they're kind of, like-- - In the morning, they're wearing the clothes that they had to change into. - The banana slugs t-shirts, and they're like, you know, just kind of at peace, uh, before, uh, there's an armed robbery. But I, I almost am, like, getting to the point with this where I'm like, "I don't really have any notes, man. You guys are able to, every week, do an homage p.n. to a great American, either sub-genre or explicitly a film." Um, the monster of the week thing continues to work seamlessly. The running time of the episodes makes none of them a chore. Uh, there is legitimate, like, this would be among the best slashers I have seen in years if they just made this into a movie. - Right. - But also is the funniest thing I have seen in a long time is watching Kate O'Flynn run from an incredibly slow but persistent slasher who is the incarnation of Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. - Yes. - What did you think of this episode? - I want to, I feel like I, I loved everything about it. I am not historically a fanboy of any kind, but I believe I wrote "Hell yeah, Patricia" in my notes. Like, I was fucking on Twitter in 2014. - Yes, queen! - When she had the shotgun, because it felt so good. - Yeah. - And then her holding the shotgun on the hopefully dead, not undead, but undead body of the boogeyman throughout his cremation process was incredible. So I am just loving it and I am a fan full stop. But I always want to engage with the show also in the myriad ways in which it just fucking impresses me. And a moment ago, I was, I was half kidding, but I was talking about like showrunners saying like, how do we make it story? Because you can have all the good ideas in the world and you can have all the speculation and thematic dream making, but how do you do it, communicate it practically, because that's actually what the job is. And so two examples of this episode are just remarkable to me. And what Katie Dippel, who's the creator and showrunner, is able to accomplish by making these decisions that seem obvious or seem simple once they're done well, but actually many, many shows, good shows, struggle to find them. Week to week, it dazzles me. So one, number one would be, where are we in the real time story? And how can we take that to the next level? And how can we make advantage of that moment? So you could look at the fact that they've dispatched the ancient evil supposedly at the end of the last episode and think of it maybe in a way where you're like greedy to get onto the next thing. You're worried about a lull. You want to show the audience you want, but no one's seen the show yet. So this is entirely in your own head. And the fact that she and her writers were like, no, let's let them sit in a moment of happiness and peace. And what does that look like? And more importantly, not just what does it look like in terms of the comedy, what does it look like in terms of storytelling opportunity? What can we explore? Second point was the past, your baggage. I think I saw an interview that Katie did this week or one of the writers, I believe it was Katie, saying that-- - Is this the script notes one that she did? - It could have been. I didn't listen to the whole thing. I just saw this as a takeaway. But the big shift in the episode that made it click for them was that they were going to tell Patricia's story with a boogeyman and flashback. And then they realized not to do that. And that unlocked everything in the episode 'cause it connected it to the forward momentum. It's a smart choice after back-to-back episodes, one of which was a giant flashback and one of which was about an ancient evil. But then the execution to make Patricia in real time complaining about her takeout order and then running screaming out of her house from a masked killer with a knife, make that feel both like tonally and emotionally and narratively consistent with-- Tom and Matthew Rhys' really affecting performance. Him weeping over the fate of his deceased wife. - Yeah. - How do you do that in a way that-- But they do. It does not feel like whiplash to go between those storylines. - There was two really lovely, surprising, in the hands of another show would not have maybe gone this way moments that I wanted to throw at you. I think it ties to what you're saying here. The Matthew Rhys, the Tom and Evan conversation, is something that you could draw out for episodes. And for all I know, because of the thunderstorm and the terror of the island, like Matthew Rhys is gonna go, or Tom's gonna go back on his promise to take Evan to Boston. I assume he will. - I'm glad it didn't happen in this episode. - But Evan basically being like, I get it. Like when his dad explains to him what happened and he's got these letters and he's like, you shouldn't have hid this from me. And you know, Tom is like, it would make me sadder than I already am for you to know what happened to your mother. - Yep. - And Evan kind of forgives him. And also they have like a hug. Like there is like a genuine moment there. And most other shows would be like, now these two are angry at each other. So Evan is gonna put himself in danger so that Tom has to save him so that they can realize the true spirit of Christmas. So that's one thing. - The show has the confidence and fearlessness. of something. Like, they're not afraid to resolve stories. Yes. Because there's a belief that they carry, rightfully so, that there is more story to mine. There's also like the kooky Patricia stuff. When she shows up at the book club and Chrissy, is that who it is? I think who or Chris gives her like the riot act and is like, you're just insane. And that's why nobody's your friend. And like, you're just so fucking weird. And bye bye. And then Patricia tases her. And she's like, I'm sorry, she's the worst. She's just the fucking worst there. It's just great that you give a character like Patricia, like full bodied POV to be like, I know I'm weird, but like she is a bitch. You know, she sucks. Yeah. The sometimes the other lesson I think from successful rooms is sometimes all of the work that you do is in pursuit of the simplest solution. Yeah. And you can feel in the same way you can top chef judge can taste when dough has been overworked. You can tell when a show has been big brain. And I'm glad you mentioned the Tom scene. I circled that like the line about the pictures. They make me sadder than I already am is a thunderclap like that. That is such simple writing, but it is everything. It's all you need to know as an audience. It's all Evan needs to hear. And I also think like we are under when we've been praising. I know we've praised him last week. We've been praising all the great character performers. But Kingston Rumi Southwick, who plays Evan, has such an interesting affect. As as a performer where he he's very soft spoken and he underplays things in a way that is so refreshing for young actors, a but B, it allows him to both express the anger and the resentment and the surprise and joy that was more childlike. But then more than anything else, it allows us, I think, to understand the forgiveness coming off of that line and all that that story, that resolution for now was started seven weeks ago. Well, and also when you think about how this show started, this is another example of what we're talking about in terms of knowing how to pace character development rather than story. Yeah, a lot of other shows would have Tom and Wick at odds for like four episodes, five episodes, six episodes of like Tom is this buttoned up new money trying to like modernize the island. And Wick is this myth myth believing old wacko. Who thinks that the fog carries a demonic spirit and he is going to do everything he can. He's going to keep setting off like the storm sirens and you know, like that could have been the tension of these episodes for three hours, four hours. And then you could be like now Tom believes and now the second half of the season is going and instead Tom's pretty much in like he's like, I don't really love the way we're going about doing this, but I believe by the end of the second episode, you know, it good character writing is yes anding. Yes. So to your point about Patricia, she is crazy, but also Chris is the worst. Wick is right, but also he's a weird, sad, lonely guy. Yeah. Tom is a kind of a prick, but also deeply, deeply hurt and sensitive. And you know, all of these things can be true. And if you embrace that again, all this comes from a level of confidence and I hope we can talk to Katie about it. I'm sure I've never met a showrunner who says I was quite confident. About this. Yeah. No one ever will. But I, it, it strikes me that more than anything else that the show is the product of enormous creative confidence and, and on the part of Katie, but also on here, Mariah and Andrew DeYoung and every other director and performer we've, we've called out, like whatever the secret sauce is, they all understood the assignment. Uh, do you know, do you understand the macro, what is happening here? Cause you were able to kind of be like, ah, yes, the, you know, the, there could be another and, and the, the link. Lineage of the Warren family might actually extend to Evan or Patricia or whoever it is that we, you know, it might be, I am so dazzled on an episode to episode basis of with the, not only the monster of the week, but the, uh, homage of the week and how they are like doing a jaws episode or doing a haunted house episode or doing a Halloween episode or doing, um, a wicker man episode that I am, uh, actually a little bit behind. On my, so what, what is going on here? Like Richard Warren made a deal with Satan, but maybe not to protect this island. And now his lineage is cursed, but, and so the curse will continue as long as the lineage lives on the island. And they thought they ended the lineage with Richard Warren, but now it would seem that did not happen. No. So my assumption is that Evan is the lineage and this creates an issue of Tom wants to take him off the island, which will kill him, but wick and others may want to kill him. Uh, and yeah. That, that would be, that would be challenging. Evan being the part of the lineage would indicate that Tom is not it's that his mom was. Yes. Okay. And then a matriarchal line, if you will. And just in terms of the way that these, uh, different, um, spirits get activated. Like, so for the boogeyman, that's just like, Hey, if you, every day that goes by something is going to happen until you guys end this. The less I know about the, the tick tock of that, not the website. The like clock, um, the happier I am. I don't want an answer as to why the boogeyman was activated the day after Richard Warren. You know, I, I, I don't even, even as we reach the point in the series, which is probably the same time it would happen in a movie where the metaphor goes away, you know, like I think there's, it's a, it's a, it's a trope of the sort of storytelling where it's like the boogeyman does represent, you know, uh, adolescence or insecurity or whatever, and no one believes in. But until it starts slashing everybody and then it just becomes an action movie, we are at that point, but I don't really want to know. And I'll be very curious to see how the show handles a resolution in the short term while still being invested in this being a boogeyman of the week next week. Fair enough. I want to ask you before we move on, what made this in, in your mind, an excellent, um, evocation of the silent, slow masked knife killer? Uh, I think it's the setting. There's something very Haddonfield about the streets of, uh, of Widow's Bay, the way DeYoung kind of shot that scene where it's got evocations of, I think definitely the first Halloween and maybe even the second, maybe the second where there's, there's a lot of like screaming and crying and banging on doors and people turning their lights out and people like ignoring the, the, the hysteria happening outside their house. Kitty Genovese. Yeah. And, and a little bit of that. And I thought that the, um, just when you think he's dead, he's not, he pops back up stuff. The, you know, the, the scene with the ambulance drivers was amazing. It's like, Hey, welcome back, pal. He's like slashes at his throat. So there was just a real, the, the, the thing that you, that would be the biggest hallmark is the slow methodical pace of the slasher that seems to always keep up with the running screaming victim. Um, and then Patricia. Turning into the final girl in the, in the, in the last few minutes and hilariously holding a shotgun on him in the ambulance. And then in the, um, not sure exactly how that cleared all, all barriers of like investigation to the point of cremation that night, but I'm okay with it. I'm all for an expedited municipal. Also Bashir was on painkillers. Um, that's right. You know, the little character moments of him in the convenience store being like, I have to eat this year and my wife doesn't want me to like, there's just a humanity. That exists in every frame of the show. That's not just serving the, how can we frame this correctly? But because I'm a relative novice, which is to say, I'm too scared to watch those movies. I didn't know that it would be possible for no one to be inside of the mask. Oh yeah. It's this, it can be a spirit. Do you know what I mean? Like, cause there's the scene, the wick scene is interrupted or it ends with him seeing that someone has broken in and stolen the stolen, the murderer's mask, which is a cool thing to have on display. So I, my mind was wondering. I don't know. I thought maybe someone had been either had always been the boogeyman and re re-energized or someone had been like, uh, captured by the spirit. So I didn't know if the mask was going to come off and she'd shot Dale. Yeah. You know, or someone from the office. Yeah. I'm glad it wasn't that. Jeff Hiller or something. Yeah. That's Dale. That's what I meant. That's what I thought was going to be in there. Um, oh, I got confused with Dale Dickey. That's why. Dale Dickey who played, I did the same thing, who plays Rosemary. Yeah. Did you have any comments on Shell Bashir's late breaking? Pregnant wife who is about to give birth and hopefully not on the island. And Patricia's like, we got to get you off the island. It's just, it's just a thunderstorm coming. It's just good plotting. Every game day you show up for your team. Now it's your time. Ask your prescriber about WeGoV, some maglutide injection, 2.4 milligrams, a GLP-1. Call 1-833-4-WEGOV. Or visit WeGoV.com to view the medication guide and to learn more about WeGoV. Why wait? WeGoV. Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no. No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice. Rejoice? - I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyers rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. Let's talk a little bit about Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, which, Blink and You Miss It, is now up to episode four. And we missed it. We were behind. Yes, on Apple TV. This is a new series from. David J. Rosen. David J. Rosen, who's worked on Hunters, has worked on Citadel, has worked on Sugar. Who wrote the novel, I Just Want My Pants Back. I don't know that one. 20 years ago. What is that? It was like a young adult novel about living in New York and hooking up with chicks. And it was turned into, briefly, into an MTV series, executive produced by Doug Liman. It lasted one season. Okay, cool. Does he get his pants back? I can't tell you that. You might watch it. This one stars Tatiana Maslany as Paula, a magazine fact-checker going through a rough divorce and custody battle. Who blows off steam one night having cam sex with a guy named Trevor. Not one night. Seems like it's ongoing. I think that's. I'm saying. One night. Oh, you're setting up the pilot. She happens, yeah. Oh, oh, oh, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. You're accurate. I was like, don't. Put some respect on that relationship. And during this experience that they're having together through their screens, he gets attacked on screen. And Paula sees this. But it becomes apparent that this attack was part of a scam. And then it becomes apparent that this scam has gone haywire and Trevor has been killed. Paula investigates and pulls at a thread that undoes her life. Hmm. So you watched two of them? I watched two. I watched. I'll say three. I started the fourth one. What did you think? I really, really enjoyed what I watched, especially the pilot. David Gordon Green directed it. And I really appreciated. I really appreciated something that I think is hard to pull off in this contemporary moment of TV, which is that it was. It's highly stylized. Mm-hmm. It is screen dependent. I would say that this may be the most successful product integration show that Apple has had in a number of years. And I don't mean that as a backhanded compliment. The show correctly uses the most annoying Apple ringtone to be annoying. The show does depend on FaceTiming on MacBooks and having your phone available at all times in ways that feel relevant. But I think it's hard. It's a hard needle to thread. It's hard to have something that is frenetic and highly stylized and about, you know, the collision of crime into a normal existence, but also feel like someone is keeping. Someone's touching grass in terms of trying to remember at all times who this character is and who she wants to be and what her relationship is with her ex-husband, played by a friend of the pod, Jake Johnson, with her TikTok trend dancing daughter, Hazel, and her co-workers and her life. So I. So I really appreciated the way. The entry point for the story, the style in which it was done, but mostly the fact that I was. I felt like it was focused on the right half of that equation throughout the first episode. I'll also say that, like, another very contemporary thing that I see with a lot of these shows is we collectively are getting better and better at premise and asking cool questions. And then when pilots become series, that's when the real work starts. And so in watching episode two, I was like, okay, now I see the shape of the storytelling taking place. And that was a bumpier transition, but it's harder work, you know, to go from one to the other. I think I see what you're saying. You know, the rest of the episodes almost feel closer to, like, whatever the Apple version of the Safdie brothers is. You know, like, where I think it's more or less, like, 80% to 20% unrelenting tension, anxiety, how the hell is she going to get out of this situation? You've got an interesting. So visually and tonally, I feel like it really ramps up in the second, third, fourth episode. They also weirdly. Not weirdly, but they are trying to have kind of a couple of different treatments of the mystery story. For one thing, Murray Bartlett plays, quite obviously, I think, the killer, I would assume. I mean, we don't know that. Yeah, we don't know more, but he is introduced one way and then pretty quickly established as the other. Yes. Murray Bartlett from Looking. Looking and White Lotus fame. Great actor. Ben is great in this. It's cool how they split the mystery, quote unquote, or the investigation to the extent that there is one. So Paula is trying to get to the bottom of what's just happened with Trevor, but Murray Bartlett's Frank character is trying to investigate Paula, you know? And so you've got these sort of two convergent mysteries. There's two things that I think are. Not rubbing me the wrong way, but I'll be interested if we continue with this show to kind of check in on. One is there's a little, like, Apple expansion pack happening as the episodes go on where we keep bringing in supporting characters. Yeah. And now it's like we're up at, like, eight. You know, now I would say that the show seems pretty cutthroat so far in terms of endangering people and having stakes, and it's pretty cool. So there's that. And then there's also just. They're playing around with flashbacks, and you were talking about the Widow's Bay thing with the idea of showing Patricia's boogeyman experience as a flashback and instead doing it in the present tense. Always if you can do that. They're doing a lot of, like, cliffhanger and then flashback to explain the cliffhanger. Not a lot, but they've done it a couple of times on Maximum Pleasure, and I don't know if I love it because it turns into a little bit of, like, we're built. We're wrapping the story around the concept of a cliffhanger rather than we're wrapping the story over how a cop would find out about information or how somebody would be like, I'm in a tough situation. I need to be transparent about this, but obscure that. And instead it seems like I'm on a TV show, so wouldn't it be cool if at the end of an episode you found out this isn't my first dead body that I've encountered? Or wouldn't it be cool if we found out, like, you think that this woman is like this, but she's actually like that because we went back. You know. It's just, it is a way of telling a story, but it isn't quite worked for me on this one. It's funny or it's annoying, depending on your perspective, to be TV-brained enough, as we are and maybe many of our listeners are, to see things come in and out of fashion narratively. I think, and how long it takes for the messages to be sent. Like, the tipping point of exciting scene six weeks earlier, the amount of time it took for creators to realize, A, everyone else was doing it. And, B, audiences were rebelling against it. There's a long tail, because then it takes years of producing things to move on from that. Similarly, like, something like DTF, which, you know, we engaged with briefly, but, like, enough to say, there is a similar, there's some similar things at play here. Mm-hmm. In terms of a surprising, maybe not a murder in the way you think, told through flashback with quirky cops. In that case, it was Richard Jenkins. In this case, it's Dali de Leon, who was in Triangle of Sadness. Yeah. Is a, we are in the midst of a golden era of cam content and OnlyFans stuff. We sure are. Both, I meant, we are. Margot, Maximum Pleasure, and Euphoria, yeah. But also what we've been up to. Well, only for the two of us, though. We're just straight, hey, man. Yeah, we don't, exactly. The Watch After Dark is actually just Andy and I camming. What's fun is that, like, there was a period of time when Sam Esmail wouldn't text. He would only communicate over Signal, because he was worried about, you know, being hacked. And so that's why we have stopped texting and calling. We only communicate over cam soda. That's right. Just the two of us. Remember Chat Roulette? Remember? I'm still holding on to that. Anyway, yeah. And so I would say that I appreciated the use of screens as mitigating factors and intimacy and the chat stuff on the show because it is, well, because A, the relationship that Paula has with her cam boy, is gentle, and there's other layers to it to be unwrapped, but it is, like, emotional and interesting and surprising. And then there was a great scene where she's talking to her colleagues at work, and it's one of those, like, hinge moments of, like, what do we gain by spilling it and what do we gain by withholding? And she's like, I was being scammed by a camera that I had come inappropriately connected to. And they're like, oh, that's the most interesting thing you've ever said. And they hug her. You know, one of those, the boy is Julia Louis-Dreyfus' son. I didn't know that. You know, I'm on Nepo Watch. He's good. I'm just watching. Now, is he in the campian kind of, like, I'll allow it? He seems like he was raised right. Yeah. Yeah. So I'll, thank you for asking, I'll allow it. But we are monitoring the situation. I saw, then the Times did a piece about, or maybe it was Wall Street Journal, did a piece about Leon Black's son, who's in charge of, like, a shadowy but very important, like, United States government investment fund kind of thing. And I was like, how'd he get that job? Just, you know, he worked harder than everyone else. Yeah. Um, yeah, I, uh, the, I'll, I'll swing back to the positive. But the other thing that I was, the only other thing that I was slightly bumping on, and this is not, this is actually not criticism. This is a reflection of getting a show made for Apple TV, which is, I struggled with Tatiana Maslany being a woman who is struggling with all aspects of her life, including her appearance. She is a lovely, charismatic person who reads as young. She's certainly plausible as a. 40 year old woman who with a child like I'm not arguing her acting chops or whether I could buy it but in a different world this is the melanie linsky show and and i'm like i it clicks into place a little bit more but that's not apple's business model i have not uh you know she obviously broke onto the scene with orphan you haven't really seen her very much huh tat should i do what i'm just saying like there are actors who are big but if they are big on shows like i don't think i watched orphan black you did watch a season or two i didn't yeah i thought maybe you were orphan black and she hulk ignorant i am she hulk ignorant i find that she has like the appropriate kinetic energy for something that's a million percent you know you need the rhythm of the show and she's athletic and there are there's things that demand her climbing through skylights and jumping off i mean the first episode or is it the second episode where she gets the second tin can in her arm is crazy uh cool it's it's like it's a cool show you know as with everything there's like uh do i urgently feel the need to keep up with this or like is this something i don't i don't really know what the the alchemy is anymore of like what eclipses that was fine watching it for three or four episodes versus like this is now what i'm watching for 10 weeks i think this is this one for me stands out a little bit because of there's a there's there's surprise like i think jake is playing slightly against type yes and i think he's doing a great job i think that one of the hard things to navigate in you know the last 30 years of television which are essentially shows about people with families being drawn to the dark side is how do you balance the family stuff i think the stuff with hazel is the daughter's name um i think that's being it's pitched at the right place for me to believe that so far anyway through the episodes i've seen it hasn't tipped fully into genre it is still attempting to be someone the most fantastical elements of the show so far aren't the crime and violence the most fantastical elements of the show so far are that a she drives around new york all day and b she's still employed as a fact checker do you think they shot this in new york yeah i think so not my new york why not your new york included magazines so yeah no i don't mean that it's just like the the traffic situation seems pretty pretty relaxed and is it set in ridgewood it's queensy yeah um keep an eye on that aren't you happy to see like that they're still the magazines are still employing a vibrant fact checking department before barry weiss takes over as editor-in-chief i am i thought that was cool i hate to do this it's a fun show uh the only thing i was thinking while i was watching it because i think there are several shows i just can't think of one off the top of my head that take this kind of like unbelievably tense premise and they're just like and now let's tell it over the course of 10 episodes but i was watching this and you know as i think about how widows is employing monster of the week or how the pit is doing a medical procedural but with durational storytelling over the course of a day so i think it's a fun show i think it's a fun show i think it's a fun show you can have some new school ideas about making tv i almost feel like i'd be more curious about the version of this show that is paula solving this whole thing in an episode and then the rest of the season is paula private detective helping people who've been scammed wow look at you look at you i don't i wonder if that's a more durable repeatable like idea or or is that something that david j rosen has considered for season two perhaps that's true and i i but i i i think because of widows i have been looking at different tv shows and being like was this written for tv was this and was this written to be because of something that's exciting to watch every week other than how is the story going to end well 100 i mean it is katie dippold of widows bay worked in parks and rec and i think it is one of the enduring legacies of mike sherman and i think it is one of the enduring legacies of mike sherman and i think it is one of the enduring legacies of mike sherman and i think it is one of the enduring legacies television shows is that he found a sweet spot it's different in the 30 minute realm or the now the 35 minute realm a sweet spot of um you can you can tune it you can tune in week to week but there is a larger spine of a serialized story and i'm not afraid of pushing towards it um but you're not going to be you're never going to see an episode that's just connective tissue whereas at least on one episode um maximum pleasure guaranteed is more of the new school approach of we are going to light a match in the first episode and it will burn through yes and dynamite happens in episode but within that framing the show that made me think of speaking of another person who could have started in it is run which was the the one season phoebe waller bridge show with donald gleason and merritt weaver and that show started with similarly like an enormously grabby and exciting premise but i didn't feel like and i feel like the marketplace agreed with me it didn't have the conviction or the gas or the horses to make it a season to to earn that that beginning this maximum pleasure guaranteed seems more successful to me for that fair enough uh let's hit tc real quick top chef uh before we get out of here i just want to tell you a personal anecdote since oh it's culinary corner it's culinary corner before it's top chef okay so i've been kind of seduced by uh these instagram and youtubes of like clean out your pantry pastas or clean out your pantry like hey do you have keepers and this look what you can do so i was like i have some like fly by jing instant noodles what's in my pantry slash fridge that i can like get going into and and and create like i had some rotisserie chicken and emulsify with pasta water uh why we'll get to that okay i mean i know that that's supposed to happen do you do that with like ramen too well i don't make ramen i don't make ramen at home i only go to like a true like kotowari shop where like each ingredient is made but this isn't about me i'm fucking out this isn't about me i quit i don't want to do this show um so i was like okay i'm going through it and uh i was like okay i got the rotisserie chicken i'm looking for like kind of a an acid maybe like a pickle kind of thing but i was like i could use some green in here and i came across some frozen peas at our freezer okay um my wife historically uh this is i'm not violating hippo by saying she has a bum knee and often needs to ice her knee and these peas are her knee peas on reddit these are so i go on reddit the expiration date for these peas is november of 2025 oh it's not it's not as bad as i thought and i should note that they have been thawed out upwards of 25 times okay so that's kind of like what is like what is your age versus your real age yeah and so on reddit of course you can be like these peas are past their expiration date should i eat them can i eat them and everybody's like yes that's just a suggestion and if they've been frozen and i get like pretty deep into the process you have your mise en place and your prep and your and and you know i've kind of like scraped the freezer burn off the peas and individually no but like i kind of like washed them a little bit to thaw them out a little bit and i go back to the reddit thread now i was like it seemed like that went on for a while let me see what they're talking about um i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know and apparently there's a whole thing about yeah boo-boo peas peas that people keep just for oh this is a thing yeah and they're like don't eat the boo-boo peas because that's where listeria can get in when you're thawing out and freezing and thawing out and freezing so just as a public service announcement i stopped this i mean this was an incredibly boring dinner because i did not have a green and i didn't really have a pickle or an acid for it it was just basically chicken with chicken with noodles sweet and spicy ramen noodles i'm not mad at this but i would say that um it was dull and i almost got listeria and my wife was pretty pissed off that i used her boo-boo yeah how's her knee that's fine but she was like you gotta get next time she finished this dinner you cooked for and tried to stand up oh no she didn't it hurts she was out i was this was a solo like she didn't um you if you ever eat the frozen peas you know they they cycle through real you know you know like on the other videos we watch on instagram where people are seeing how the guinness is drinking this evening when they're just like people have been hitting it so it's like it's fresh uh-huh the lines are clean it's yeah you want to let 12 guys go first when like these like when that like giant dude prime mutton is like the lads have been drinking it into form and i'm like what is the form is it physically your form because that is what i'm most worried about despite my love of a fine stout oh my god anyway that uh the lads the frozen peas in my house are because and i will you're gonna say this came from me with my kotowari ramen but it did not my children who have relatively conservative palates i would say i.e they're just kids normal kids about this one of their favorite snacks is frozen peas not heated they like bowls of frozen peas to just pop in how's that texture wise is that good i mean have you ever had a frozen grape yeah that's not my favorite no so i i don't share this passion with them but i'm just you know that the peas are eating into form constantly so if you need a bag for any purposes will they hit some frozen peas roll it back up and throw it back in the freezer no they kill a whole bag on a sitting first of all this this presupposes that they are helping themselves and doing anything independently despite their advanced age i have noticed yeah you've got some notes for your kids recently sure about about their contributions to the to the house and let me tell you they - They are receptive to these notes. There is nothing they like more than when old pops says maybe you could have picked that up when they go out into the world in a couple of years like the light switch is gonna flip and they're gonna be like i know how to do this this is what we all hope yeah this is what we all pray for i don't i try to think that like because because when you're like one one thing that young parents come up against a lot is like their kids come up from school and they act insane and then there's a worry that they are acting this way in school and then good teachers or lying teachers will say they behave they behave all day and then being home is like then the the shackles come off it's mardi gras they get it all they get it all out yeah you know it's rumspringa every day at 4 p.m so my hope is that they would not let's say leave chipwich wrappers decorating the windowsill in the homes of their friends or people they respect right i don't know right but the but all the way back to your point about the frozen peas um no no i i take the bag out frozen i pour some frozen into a bowl back in there seal it up yeah put it back in okay good to know top chef uh the penultimate episode of season 23 which andy and i have had a fair amount of notes for yeah uh i don't have a ton of like nitpicks about this one it was my favorite episode of the season i think yeah fair i realized that it's sort of like the matrix where you're like you're using your eyes for the first time i felt like the judges were basically like food like they were so delighted they liked every that they were like finally real cooking so we got down to uh sherry um lawrence rhoda jonathan yep and that's your final four they were asked to do basically a plating um exercise where they could choose these sort of exotic or uh funky uh delivery systems for their this is after the stupid 20 questions thing uh yeah i mean i i enjoyed it because it just seemed funny that they would be like spinach and he's like no and they were like i'll put some spinach i'm paying very close attention um and it was very funny that they all got mad at jonathan for asking questions that they thought were stupid um those questions were dumb as hell well i don't really even know what like it didn't seem like a big deal that he asked if it was a side dish but like i am often the person who asks a question where somebody's like why are you fucking asking that who does that uh interviews no not in interviews well jesse armstrong once no i'm just kidding you've never you've never done that it just seemed like based on the judges reactions to the food that this was at a high high high level and they pushed each other even jonathan who as soon as he was like i am making bread and butter i was like thanks for playing also i want to put a pumpkin on a candlestick well the only tension for the episode was really like is lawrence gonna accidentally fuck up his rice wrappings his his sort of uh the rice rolls the rice rolls is the because he's from carolina and it didn't steam and but that wasn't the issue was that he the episode implied or at least tried to create drama from the implication that there was some fuckery with the oven not intentional jonathan used it first and it lingered on jonathan being like i set it up for you bro and he's like it's all good it's gonna take a few minutes to cool down to the steaming setting and then you're good and then lawrence walked back over like five minutes later and was like this this thing is not so then he had to kind of like rather brilliantly like ad hoc multiple trays steaming in pots and it just made it a little bit thicker i guess yeah that was the draw um i thought that each one of those winning dishes or the dishes that passed through to the final three were amazing looking um rotas especially on the tree bark i don't know that i would want to eat off of tree bark but it would look really cool someone hasn't been to noma uh not it certainly not you know what i mean what an ally so yeah i i stand with my brothers on the line what did you think of this episode i mean you're right it's a shame that it took 14 weeks to get to an episode in which the challenge is creative and is met with with a an elevation of execution like that's what the that's what the show is supposed to be yeah it wasn't like and you have 12 seconds to do it but but also like it was challenging and they elevated their game they rose to the challenge which hadn't really happened consistently and i generally say a version of this every year which is like i don't know i don't know i don't know if i'm gonna be able to do it unlike some more drama forward competition shows excellence begets excellence on top chef like the best episodes are ones where tom is happy where everyone has done a good job and the conversation is more about like nitpicks rather than like how obvious it was that someone just face planted um that said it was obvious jonathan was going home even when it was revealed he did a very good job because the ambition of what he was doing was so much less than what everyone else is doing and the plating was kind of silly do you think tom's been a little bit cranky this season well i think i think there's every reason to be cranky but but the counterpoint is when he's really happy and kristen's like oh happy tom is here and he seems quite engaged he still can be engaged when it's all going well i think the criticism remains the criticism which is there is something that just feels claustrophobic and off about the penultimate episode to send people to the finals and i'm not even sure if they traveled for the finals usually they're like next week or they tell them like you're going to paris yeah you're going to star city if we can get a brand activation like correct me if i'm wrong but they didn't say anything about where they were going and it looked like they didn't do they used to take a long break like four to six weeks oh i think they take a break because i think i noticed i always i always enjoy when people come and they have like a slightly different look yes yeah that said it will be another wind horse fingers like if they just didn't travel and they're just like still in the carolinas somehow about the budget things because this is the penultimate episode and we're supposed to be crowning achievement before we get to the the the obviously challenging but also the known quantity of make the best meal you've ever made yes and in the episode to send people to that great opportunity they played 20 questions in the studio and then picked out plates in the studio and then filming picked up in a relatively claustrophobic restaurant with the great john yow of kato here in la being like who did a good job yeah it feels so small and that's a little bit of a bummer and maybe that's as i say every week like that's the reality of it now um or maybe you tell me maybe this is just a nitpick when the execution was i think that the when when the cooking feels like it's push like i feel like those three those four chefs but specifically the three that advanced we're actually pushing each other yeah i think that there is even there's this awareness that rhoda has momentum and that she's and and that she's won a bunch of things there's like i think sherry is actually the one that's going to win i think sherry is actually the one that's going to win i think sherry is actually the one that's going to win i think sherry is actually like beyond her cooking like an interesting television character who clearly has a lot of self-confidence and is a little bit i don't know is she prickly i don't know i mean my kids hate her okay sorry sherry but like i'm watching this season for the first time finally with the key but i think she's like i think i can win this and like i'm gonna kind of operate from that assumption and and and i just you know this this season is peaking at the right time this season has had a lot of like false starts it's had a lot of like pratfalls it's had the weird last chance kitchen situation so it's nice to see it ending with like three people whose food i would want to eat and who i think are are pushing each other we should wrap it up there uh thanks to everyone for listening and we'll be back on monday with some star city and um maybe like a you know a couple of other surprises but i'm not exactly sure well there's stuff we haven't like we haven't we started legends we didn't finish it um there's a hot recommendation for you you've watched something i did i don't know if you can handle it i mean that's fair are you watching dark wizard oh i should watch that yeah so bro so first of all it's seriously scratching my hundred foot wave itch yes same filmmakers or just hbo documentary hbo documentary about a mountain climber a free solo climber dean potter uh and his rivalry with alex honnold and it just in terms of like the aesthetic of everybody's wearing patagonia and the mid-2000s it's awesome um i will say no more but it is fucking tense i can probably handle it i was knee-jerk avoiding it because my wife's like palms were sweating watching it you just get a frozen peas on them just dr house whatever you need i i i selfishly was like i feel like i've done enough with potters and dark wizards and hbo recently yeah but now what but i said that glibly not knowing it was a documentary about mountain climbers yeah at all yeah so i think that's a good rec people have been talking about it uh okay so we'll see you guys on monday this episode is brought to you by whole foods market now this is a player in the food space that has championed winning food standards and quality since 1980 that means no added growth hormones or antibiotics in their meat and no synthetic nitrates or nitrites in their deli hot dogs or sausages plus all their seafood is responsibly farmed or wild caught they've even banned some ingredients storewide to make sure there's nothing to mess with the flavors you 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