Netflix Shakes It Up, ‘VisionQuest’ Series Premiere, and ‘The Lowdown’ Season 2

This episode is brought to you by Major League Baseball. There is nowhere left to go. Two teams, one championship. Watch the World Series. Yeah, the World Series presented by Capital One on Fox and Fox One. No time like October. Visit mlb.com slash postseason to learn more. I need supports to have to clear the room. Stand up and walk now. Hello and welcome to The Watch. My name is Chris Ryan. I am an editor at TheRinger.com and joining me on the other line, preparing for the darkest Watch After Dark of all time. Dude, dude, it's too soon to record this. What's up, big dog? So today on the pod. I gotta get something off my chest. I need my lungs. I know, we're gonna talk about the Netflix shake-up. We're gonna talk a little bit about the True Detective casting. We're gonna talk about the Lowdown Season 2 and Vision Quest Season 1. A little bit of housekeeping. Andy and I are both in New York today, but in separate parts of the city, so we're recording remotely, which is still. I can still feel your locality. That's okay. I can feel your energy from across the river. On Thursday, we will have a full pod episode of an interview with Zoe Kazan that I did talking about East of Eden. So if you are dilly-dallying and have not yet completed East of Eden, now is the time. East of Eden, I actually think, is a pretty good segue into our first topic of news that we wanted to ask. We wanted to chat about it, Andy, because there was a massive shake-up over at Netflix. I mean, Friday, over the weekend, it continued to evolve in the midst of the company's most significant set of layoffs in four years, I believe. Netflix replaced their chief content officer, Bella Bejarria, with former Disney executive Peter Rice. They also let go of Dan Lin. That news broke today. Dan Lin was the chairman of Netflix Films. So that is a complete and total vibe shake-up. That's a complete and total, you know, basically rebuild of their content strategy, at least in the headline. Now, we can get into, like, how much does this change? When will we feel these changes? For people who are kind of just sort of passive Netflix industry viewers. And by the way, for people who are just passive industry viewers, we should say that we're going to talk about Vision Quest and we're going to talk about. Yeah, I said that, yeah. Did you say that? Okay. Yeah. Sorry, I was just scanning the NFL medical. I know you're just, like, looking at Bellacero's Twitter. Bella Bejarria, who was the chief content officer, is occasionally credited by us and often wrongfully credited with the phrase gourmet cheeseburgers as the kind of Netflix operating strategy of what they were serving. This is actually a phrase from one of her deputies, Ginny Howe, but Bella talked about it in a New Yorker profile from 2023. That was kind of taken and run with to be a blanket assessment of everything Netflix did in the last few years, which included getting lots of live rates for sports, reality shows. I would not necessarily say bottom of the barrel, but I would say mass market entertainment, both on the film side and on the TV side. There's also been an attrition of some of the big names that I think we associate with Netflix, whether it's the Duffer Brothers on the TV, with Stranger Things who went to Paramount, or some folks who had overalls at Netflix that never really panned out. We also saw a move away from buzzy awards fair, like House of Cards, Orange is the New Black, or the things that kind of were instrumental in Netflix's first phase, and a move towards more grabby, kind of salacious, and or easy to digest entertainment, rather than, say, Ripley or Adolescence, which, to be fair, both came under Bella Bajara's, like, rate. - Yeah, which also happened, yeah. - I say all that just to say that none of this stuff is easy and cut and dry, where it's like, this person liked shit, and now they're gone, and now good stuff will happen. I can only hope, but I don't think it's as easy as that. So help me start thinking through this. What was your reaction when you heard about Bella? - Not total shock. Again, I say this as someone, I have not been paying incredibly close attention to these tea leaves, but there were rumors, rumors, that maybe Ted Sarandos was not happy with some of the programming. - Just for the context of what you're saying there, it's like, this is coming in the failed attempt to acquire Warner Brothers Discovery on Netflix's part. There's stagnant growth and a sinking stock price. - Yes, and so, really, when a company that's entire identity is based on increasing, just everything constantly going up, I mean, first of all, there is a limit to the amount of subscribers that you can have, 'cause there are limits, there are finities, and there's a finite number of people on earth who have the money or the interest in paying for a service like Netflix. And obviously, Netflix is a huge headstart, but there are many other services jockeying for those same dollars, and everybody's wallets are a little bit thinner than they used to be. And the thing is, when you have a larger circumstance, which is, as you mentioned, the diminishing stock price, the lower market share, what can you do to juice things other, you can do two things. You can raise prices, which they've done, pretty consistently, and maybe have hit a point where they need to pause on that for a second, he said, hopefully, or you fire the manager. I mean, it is absolutely the baseball analogy of like, Rob Thompson, to use the Phillies analogy, wasn't the one who was making base running blunders, but you have to light a fire, and you have to change things around, and as you said, get a vibe shift, so they changed the managers. Now, I think you could point to, as you said, there are many, many good things that Bella did in her tenure, and there are many things that are questionable. And I thought it was very, very interesting that a lot of the language that accompanied the hiring of Peter Rice was about basically juicing the, what are they called, the UCAN market, or the USCAN, the United States and Canadian market. A lot of Netflix's greatest success in the last few years has been global expansion, and the importation of hit shows, whether it's Squid Game from Korea, or other formats, it's growing the international side. - Money heist, yeah, for sure. - The Harlan Coben shows, it's like just a cottage industry of reliable top 10 content, which are American author shows being produced by the UK branch, it's just been a win for them. But the one thing that you could point to that Bella didn't do, and I don't really know how anyone could just do this, it's the nature of being in a, trying to make regulated business out of an artistic medium, she didn't replace Stranger Things. I don't know if anybody could replace Stranger Things, I don't know how many networks have their own Stranger Things, but Stranger Things was a massive, massive inflection point for Netflix, not just in terms of the company that they had been and what they were becoming, but what they hoped to be, in the sense of like, an original IP farm that could generate hits, that could start, get shows on Broadway, and could create spinoffs. They, like many people, struggled to do that, and I think that's probably as big a sign as any why they felt that she had to go. Now, the flip side of that, with the U.S. Cannes stuff, is Peter Rice, who you mentioned, was a very highly respected executive at Fox, came over in the merger, and then was fired by Bob Chapek. Not sure what Bob Chapek had to say about that firing in his recently published memoir, but we'd be very curious to hear. - It's in my queue, though, yeah. - I'm sure it is. I have never met Peter Rice, I have no knowledge of him personally, I have no business with him, but every single person that I spoke to in the business was uniformly rapturous about him. I think he's an executive, and as one person said to me, he's one of the few real human beings in the business. So, it's interesting to note that in this moment of when they are in flux, they seem to be pivoting, there's a potential that Netflix is pivoting back towards quality, which maybe brings you back to the East of Eden conversation. It doesn't mean that they won't be saying the floor is lava and that's not cake. It might be that they are saying, we need to really focus on what most networks focus on, which is really exciting, innovative content for our home market, which is something that they may have ignored for too long. - Yeah, I don't know how you have in-house IP without a long-term vision for the content you make. And that's something that I think has been sort of nagging at me about what Netflix is doing recently. There's been a significant amount of success on the limited series side for them, whether it's adolescence or even something like Black Rabbit, which I enjoyed, you know, like a crime show that definitely had a finite cap on how much you would do. - But Baby Reindeer too. - Exactly, but they lost that creator at HBO. I mean, like there's a, after there's this sort of sensation, the experience people have of like 300 million people can watch my thing tonight, you know, that's pretty amazing. I think that there isn't an understanding or a suggestion as to how do we nurture this relationship and how do we nurture this show? I think Netflix was, I don't know, I don't know. I think Netflix was really the first company to do that. I think Netflix was the first company to do that. create relationships, long-term relationships, relationships with it. So on the TV side, I just think they were really falling behind in their ability to look. And A Widow's Bay on Netflix, it may not have been the same show and it may not have looked exactly the same. Who knows? But that's the kind of show that if in two years that has become kind of a comic horror sensation, Netflix could have like a Widow's Bay Island that you could go visit. I mean, these are the kinds of things they need to be thinking about if that's what matters to these corporations. I think it's a very smart observation. And I find this whole thing very interesting. And, you know, of course, the spirit of full disclosure, I am currently in New York. I am working for Netflix. So I, but I had obviously had no knowledge of this and I was not working on the, I wasn't trading with Bella the day that this went down. Yes. But I am interested just as an observer, the idea that there may be a shift in their strategy from being the everything company to being a something company, because it does seem like in this world of sort of like frictionless access to everything all the time, that there is real value in brand identification for a certain thing with enthusiasm. Netflix had its moment to be the place and will continue to, because it is a global business that, you know, just bought the world, the next world cup or two world cups from now, like they are not stopping that global plan to be the Kleenex to all tissue, the thing that you just turn on. But they already have that. The question is what do you go there specifically for apart from just turning it on? And I do think that this conversation that we're having, you know, there, there've been a lot of dominoes falling, the sky dance thing being one of them. And we're not doing this just to glaze our loyal listener, Casey Bloys, but I, you know, what we were talking about in terms of the way he arranged the HBO cupboard in advance of it being open for potential sellers was, is a very, very interesting story to me because, as we talked about last week, and we're about to talk about it again, True Detective was ready. There's a White Lotus that's ready. There is a specific way that they are managing Thrones and the DC stuff that is immediately understandable, both to the, the town, but also to the audience. And I can't say that Netflix has that, um, uniformity of vision in terms of what they are putting on. It's just the place where you can have a bunch of great things, a bunch of, you know, misses, and then a lot of the middle. Yeah. I, I can't stress enough that Netflix, you know, it's been, you know, a, it's been, I can't stress enough that Netflix is like a global company that is trying to program what would be, it would, it would even dwarf the content offering of the big three networks back in the 1980s, where that was the only television you could watch. I mean, this is, they have to have stuff for every single one of their 300 plus million subscribers or however big that number is now. And I do think that the easiest read is like Peter Rice is going to come in, Dan Lin, who's been let go, um, from running films that comes at the end of a couple of weeks stretch where there was some suspicious, suspiciously timed, uh, David Fincher's leaving Netflix because he clashed with Dan Lin. Greta Gerwig has some issues with how Narnia has been handled by the Netflix side of things. And Ben Affleck kind of post game, you know, was there problems behind the scenes with Netflix in terms of how animals was handled? All of those things are like various, obviously levels of sourcing that you can see out online. But I did find it suspicious that those three stories happened in succession. And then you get Dan Lin's being let go while Mike DeLuca and Pam Abdi have been let go from Warner brothers and our free agents. So there's a lot of like moving around going on, but I don't think we should pop bottles and be like, prestige is back, you know, cause like, A, it's going to take a while and B, you know, what is, what is going to be the constant for Netflix? I don't think it's going to be the constant for Netflix. I don't think is growth and their share price. Um, ultimately whether they retrench, uh, and say, do we want to compete with YouTube or did we want to destroy skydance? Like, can they do both? I don't know. You know, like, I don't really know what the vision is for it. And I don't know if they're going to go out there and say, okay, now that this is all settled down and maybe the midterms over and maybe there's X, Y, and Z. Do they look at any of the remaining content offerings to acquire? I have no idea, Dia, but it should be fine. Fascinating. I, I was curious whether off the top of your head over the last three or four years, is there a title that came across your, you know, your eyes on Netflix that you wish could have had perhaps a little bit more TLC or a different kind of, um, launch or release that would have maybe given it a better chance if, if it wasn't among all of, for lack of a better term, the cheeseburgers. I don't have a good answer for that because we generally talk about it. I don't have a good answer for that. I don't have a good answer for the stuff that we watch, but I, I'm, I'm sort of interested in the example of the show. What was it called? Like his and hers is the, the John Bernthal. I think rather successful. This is my point. What's odd about Netflix. And I, is that a show that was like taken in by that was announced with a lot of promise and fanfare. These are very attractive, very compelling actors, you know, uniting in the kind of show that people, we constantly are like, let's have more shows that seem fun like this. And then was immediately roasted critically and deemed, you know, it did not get a very warm, critical reception, which I think led, I mean, I, I don't know where you landed out, where you netted out with it as a Bernthal, um, you know, day one, but I didn't even engage because it just did not seem like it had succeeded. And yet from an internal perspective, it was living in the top 10 and is judged by Netflix to be a success. What's so, so confounding about all this is the opacity of that success. Like, is it worth it for them to spend X amount of money to make a show that people, that the people who they are still trying to curry favor with don't like that? Maybe that lack of respect from the critical community maybe had some effect on their relationships with the talent who feel like they were hung out to dry, or they weren't showcased successfully in it. Does that matter or however much money they threw at it? Does that matter when it is a quote unquote, a success for them in that people watched it? It's sort of the same way. I feel about the movie side of things where you could look at the Dan Lynn thing and you could say, you know, it was a failure because of the, the, the, the relationships ruptured or the lack of, you know, prestige films pursued, or you could look at it and be like the strategy of just like kind of flooding the marketplace with a certain type of schlock, maybe did the right, not kind of numbers for them. You know, I I've, I've seen spin going that way. So is it similar in the sense that they want a more refined product, meaning it communicates what it is, it succeeds, what it, at what it intends to do. And it comes in at a price point, as opposed to this kind of like, we are throwing every noodle at the wall, no matter how expensive the noodles are. And the fact that the wall is covered in noodles at the end of the day means we did something right. Yeah. Look, I'm looking at the top 10 shows right now below, which we haven't really talked about, which I kind of, I, I really rather enjoyed as like a, my wife and I watching a sea monster show with Josh Hartnett. And it's, it's very satisfying. It's not, it's, it's not trying to, it's not trying to do widow's bay. It's more like, this is a very, you know, specific monster in the lake story or monster in the bay story. I thought it was widow's bay, B-A-E. Oh yeah. It's Hartnett back. Diplomat, which we are criminally underprepared to talk about. Love is blind, obviously. East of Eden, you know, from movie side of things, where is the movie list? I don't know where, oh, the list, they have animals, sacrifice, Romain Garvey's movie with Anya Taylor-Joy, which I only am just learning that is up. Uh, and several films I've never heard of and including some like twilight, you know, which I have obviously heard of, but which are just kind of recycled into, into its, into its top 10. Well, how much of that would they trade right now to have bought the rights to you can see everything and, and have that kind of like the whole world is, is dialed in on this, this weekend. And that's, that's what I'll be curious to see about whether they can, ever find something like that. The one title I was thinking about that I would have loved to do over on is a three body problem, which I think suffered greatly from not having a very coherent marketing strategy, which very few Netflix shows have. Uh, there is often the experience of like, where, what is this? When is it coming out? You know, like unless you're glued to sort of actor interview Instagram, you really don't know about these things. And I think, I don't really know the nuances of what happened with that production or why the second season that's also post maybe a third season that's supposed to wrap everything up, why we don't have that yet, or whether that that's being actively worked on or is going to be swept under the rug. But that's a show that I think really could have been very captivating if had they done it correctly. A great example. I have a question. I'll just put this in the ether. And I know our loyal listener, maybe not as loyal as Casey, but pretty close. Uh, Sean fantasy could tackle and we'll talk about that in a little bit, but I think it's a great question. I think it's a great question. What is the conversation around Digger? Because they're not showing like the box office historically does not matter to Netflix. Although I don't think that's entirely true. And is it a better fit for Netflix because they would be reaping the benefits of the, the zag discourse of which you were a member that actually it's a masterpiece. Then actually this was worth all of it. And you guys don't get it yet, but we are proud to have made it and we are proud to support it and it can live on a platform that paid for it. And more and more people can find it and you could clip it with that little Netflix moments thing. And is that, does that benefit a production like that? Is that an argument for Netflix to be the place to take those swings because it can absorb the hits and it has a different accounting strategy and ability to override you know the vagaries of one weekend at the box office yeah we can wrap up our netflix thing there i i will say that uh just in terms of the other big news that came out it was the nick cage and antonio banderas have been cast in the fifth season of true detective this was rumored since uh new york comic-con when cage kind of let slip that he was doing it which had already been rumored for quite some time uh this season is uh alleged to take place in jamaica bay outside of new york city or in new york city but in an outer borough uh isa lopez is back uh helming and banderas's addition is as exciting to me as cage for as much as i know that people love i love nick cage everybody loves nick cage nick cage does nick cage i i know what i'm getting when this happens i was so fired up about banderas and this era of his acting off at the tony you that i am thrilled that he is going to be a part of this and it really is like like give it shoot it into my veins etc etc i'm here for the bandera sons i'm exactly with you on this i think that it was for me it was a one-two punch and it's a very on brand it's not just he was so incredible in tony in a performance that is like it's not like we didn't think he had it in him he's always been a great actor but like the embrace of that type of role for him at this moment in his career and his life is awesome but at the same time when he was doing press for it he did a q a with him and he was like i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it i'm gonna do it the new yorker that i cannot recommend highly enough where he talks about how he mostly just lives in rural spain now and works with a theater troupe and how like art and politics for him are forever intertwined and you realize like that this guy who got famous in america for zorro and marrying melanie griffiths has lived a very rich and complicated life and continues to do so yeah and so the fact that he's going to do parts that might reflect some of his earned experience is very exciting for me have you spoken on the record about the x-files reboot going to no thank you for reminding me this was the thing that i forgot to bring up when we were talking about girls the other week and yes the least surprising uh green light to series was uh the news that ryan kugler's reboot of x-files with mesh patel and daniel deadweiler is going to go to series that pilot was you know shot on 65 millimeter or something uh by automark paul and we cannot wait to see that but i was curious to see whether or not one of the most inventive and durable old-school 20 some episodes per season summer monster of the week summer serialized storytelling whether they would be able to capture any of that magic and go into a season and obviously whatever they showed the disney executives in that pilot they were like let's let's go with this it's a really cool use of juice because kugler loves the show and then was like i want to do this and then as you said he got like the some of the sinners band back together ludwig gerransen composed new theme music for it it was announced in the press release um these are two of our favorite working television actors and it's thrilling that they would be united in a project like this i'm really really interested in and excited about the possibility of them taking the thing that made the x-files special which was it's very unique even for the time juggling of serialized storytelling of like the deeper mystery the deeper like canonical stuff with the cigarettes smoking man and the monster of the week we could be anything at any time and both halves of that um partnership have thrived you know i think in the television landscape but it was tough to do then and i'm curious to see how they will do it now in a way that like like widow's bay pulled it off but in the end you know it's a shorter episode uh order for the season and because of that whether it's the heart the mind or just the nature of the way we watch tv now the larger canonical serialized stuff tends to win out yeah and and widow's bay except when 13 year olds are like i want to watch five seasons of this stuff you know what i mean like it's until actual tv fans are like can i watch as much of this as possible and are there cool episodes that i haven't found yet that's when we may have run out of stuff to feed them because we don't make shows like that anymore did did this i don't think it did the x-files press release name a episode order they did not i don't believe so i'm interested anyway the other thing that's really exciting about it i'll just say is that the showrunner of the show coogler's getting all the attention but the showrunner is jennifer yale who i met back in the legion writers room 10 years ago and is very very exciting very capable of this and i think it'll i have very high hopes uh thank you to you tom palacero for letting me know that no the tom palacero take would be how much does this lady love tv huh here's this abject awful thing but what an incredible time is very good i mean tom palacero is a a newer addition to the ringer and is on the ringer nfl show and goes on bill's show a lot and and has been very good at scoops and i found out what it's like to get scooped in like in terms of having my soul scooped out of my body and dropped on a subway track this episode of the watch is brought to you by fanduel fanduel is here even live in georgia california texas and florida call what you think will happen across biggest sports football basketball baseball mma soccer and more trade player props from touchdowns and three pointers to home runs and goals build a combo with up to eight predictions to boost your potential payout use live scores and updates to adjust your strategy as the game changes new customers get 100 in bonus when you trade at least one dollar for five consecutive days download fanduel and get in offered by fanduel prediction markets llc a registered futures commission merchant 18 and over only valid in select states on first deposit required bonus issued as non-withdrawable predicts bonus with 24-hour expiry restrictions apply trading derivatives involve significant risk and may not be suitable for all investors manage your activity with our consumer protection tools see terms at fanduel.com slash predicts slash new dash customer dash offer i want to talk to you about two tv shows let's start with the one that i think we feel more warmly about that's the lowdown andy and i were vowed uh just absolute heads for the first season it was everything that we are down with from the music to the maya to the references and the vibe and the feeling and ethan hawk and i dare say after two episodes of the second season i'm even more excited about this show because ethan hawks lee raybon is back and this is the second season of sterling harjo's tulsa noir detective journalist series on fx this season lee is drawn into a mysterious case involving uh missing missing prison inmate uh the prisoner's paranoid public defender and complicating matters his estranged father who shows up after 17 years the lack of um necessary throat clearing or setting everything up or introducing how tulsa works and what lee does and where he works and what he's doing you can just go into a scene now and just just like yep killer mike's there he's a fixer yep that's the that's the crew hangs out outside of the bookstore i love them and so it's nimble it's it's just way more like it just feels like a featherweight fighter now rather than than a heavyweight trying to drag around history with it yep um furthermore the performance is now like hawk is i kind of know what to expect from hawk in this part so i was really delighted to see the two new additions if you want to talk about them or we can we can go wherever you want with this um i i think i think where you started is really important if you were for whatever reason listening to us talk because you're falling asleep or washing dishes or whatever but you haven't watched the low down let us say at the top you do not need to watch season one to jump in in season two you're missing out season one's awesome but it is a real testament to what they're building here that it just feels like a perfectly reasonable jumping on point if you want to see what's going on with some of these new actors or just if the story feels more interesting to you that is a that is a really really smart choice i think for a show like this um in the same way that you could read a chandler not you could you could pick up any philip marlowe novel and you kind of get it um i will also say that one of my favorite things before we steer into like what is what is being done so well here um i do want to just continue to say that one of my favorite things about the show is that it really does have not too much of this but a persistent spirit of i can't fucking believe he's getting away with this no to make it more clear a little persistent spirit of i think sterling is actively saying i can't believe i'm getting away with this and it's not just like my hero lives in my hometown and has a used bookstore and is friends with some of my real friends who are also from tulsa and this is a really good diner and let me educate you on things that matter to me it's also now seeping into and i'm sure it always was this way but seeping into the filmmaking sterling writes and directs and not every episode but he directs the first two of this season which are both up now and i'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun and i'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun and i'm sure it's going to be a lot of fun and the opening of season two is the most intensely loving homage to paris texas that i could ever imagine it begins with an elderly man wearing a suit and a red hat shuffling down uh a completely like ghostly desert highway and it is not harry dean stanton it is tommy lee jones doing what i would say is in some ways a tribute to harry dean stanton um as a slightly over the hill confused texan or southern man um it's awesome that he can just sort of flex like that and be like let me remind you what my influences are and what i'm playing with but making it distinctly my own um i want to talk about the guest stars but we got to talk about hawk yeah we got to do just a moment of hawk talk we love him And he can do many, many things well, but there is something very satisfying about the combination of an actor and a director who knows what the actor is capable of, knows what the actor is good at, and just steers him into these scenarios. You know, I think there's a, there's a common thread with like a lot of the great directors that you and I like, um, and talking like major, major names, like whether it's Tarantino or whether it's Wes Anderson or more recently, like the Safdie brothers who are like, I'm going to, I look into the souls of the people I work with and I extract something that is essential to them and give them a chance to succeed. I mean, that's on another level, but in the sense that like Hawk is doing, Hawk is in his bag, but it does not feel like he's doing anything. Like the greatest hits are a bit, he's fully present in this character. And I don't know if he's played the same character twice before outside of the before movies, right? Yeah. I know he's done some horror sequels, but I mean, in terms of like a character that he's been able to live in. No, I mean, the before one is obvious, obviously a really good touchstone. The thing that jumped out at me is that in the same way that, you know, I was talking about how in the first season you sort of have to get used to the mechanics of everything with the series. You also have to get used to Hawk's performance. Which I think I was wrong footed by, if I am being honest. I think in the first season, I thought Ethan Hawk was going to be Elliot Gould in Long Goodbye. And so he was going to be cool. And the thing about Lee Raybon is that he is too sincere and too romantic to be cool. And he's too punk rock to accept an award, but he can't even be punk rock in a cool way. He has to be punk rock in a way that upsets his daughter. And he takes drugs at the wrong moment and sticks. His nose where he shouldn't, but is like, got all this accoutrement, like his like white tank top and his hat and like his cowboy hat and his, his cool shirts and all the kind of flair of like, I'm a rebel journalist, but is like, always, always about to step on the banana peel and fail. And it just took me a minute to get used to that, but I was fully used to it and ready for it this season. Yeah, that's a great call. Furthermore, the two new additions to the cast. Betty Gilpin as. Ginger, a public defender who unintentionally slash intentionally brings Lee into her, her crisis. And Tommy Lee Jones, who plays Lee's father, give him two really interesting foils. Ginger, perhaps as nervy and jumpy as he is, if not more. And Gilpin is Betty Gilpin out. This is the perfect place for her to play every gesture, every touching her face, every eyebrow raise, every like. And she is pure. Energy. Can I just shout out as you're saying this? There's a scene in the second episode that Sterling shoots like it's the conversation. Yes. It's on the steps of like, like the courthouse and, and the way he uses and the way the performers use the space between them, the way she keeps being like, I'm done, I'm done enough. And then she walks away and then she comes back. And he's like, let's get lunch. And she's like, shut the fuck up. Like it's, it's so electric and great. Yes. And then you have him acting against a Sphinx. And for the. Scent that we have seen Tommy Lee Jones on this show so far. His motivations for being back in Tulsa are unclear. He is. We were told that he is a con man. Much bluer language is used by Ethan Hawke to describe him. He pops up at the end of the first episode. And then the second episode starts with a. You could hear a pin drop. Ethan Hawke acting against Tommy Lee Jones while Tommy Lee Jones is eating cereal. Fruit Loops with a ladle, basically. And he's, they're so good. They're so good. I don't know how, I don't, Tommy Lee Jones is eating cereal and he's just like, he's just staring at his son and you're just like, God damn it. I could watch this for 45 minutes. There's a, it is not, it is no longer strange for legendary actors at any point in their career to agree to a part on a TV show. That is the world we live in now. Um, and there are many different reasons why those actors have for taking these parts. And sometimes like, as is the case with a bunch of the Taylor Sheridan shows, which I'm not trying to besmirch, they're like, honestly, I would imagine they're like, this would be fun. This would be a good paycheck. I'm going to act against Helen Mirren, or I'm an act with Harrison Ford, or I'm going to, um, get to hang out in beautiful Montana. Like there are many reasons why you take jobs. What was so thrilling to me about Tommy Lee Jones just through two episodes here is that he showed up to do some. Acting that we haven't seen from him before he is playing with a different, he's using a different tool in his toolbox than I've seen in a while. And certainly one that I've, I don't know if I've ever seen with him at this advanced age, because there is a, um, fragility underneath his very familiar projection of authority and strength that he does not seem to be, have any qualms about accessing. Yeah. There's a softness, even though he is quite hard and quite mean. I mean, everything I've been for the last five years in the absence of Tommy Lee Jones working, like everybody has kind of been like, I have a Tommy Lee Jones story in which he is, is he's, he's a rough character. Like he's a hard ass who you see him as, you know? And I think he doesn't really suffer fools and he doesn't like dumb questions or any questions. And sometimes doesn't even like to be like, how's it going? You know, like I cannot wait if we get a chance to talk to Sterling to find out about how this happened, how, how Tommy Lee Jones popped up, just shows up in Tulsa. And it's like, I'll hang out, but it's a tribute to what they've built with this show. And this was, you know, I, there's a lot of really cool people going on this show. And I think Sterling is probably an ambitious guy who has a lot of ideas about stuff you'd like to do. I, I would love nothing more than if this show was around for five or six seasons. Also the second episode, we should say is a showcase for an actor that you and I have like, not just Tommy Lee Jones and Ethan Hawke, but Paul Schneider, who is a great actor in David Gordon Green film. And in the assassination of Jesse James infamously, the romantic lead for the first two underappreciated seasons of parks and rec shows up. And it's not that he's unrecognizable, but I did have to, like, you told me he was in the episode and I started asking you about Paul Schneider. And I think you were like, why are you asking me about this? Cause you and I had a late night on Saturday. So I figured that maybe your mind was just wandering and I was going to support it. But, um, he's incredible. He's incredible. And this performance that is like nervous. Nervy and, and bizarre and funny and engaging. And it's just like, this is a showcase for actors to do that. It's really coming alive in the second season. Like I, we love the first season, but I am a lot, I'm super dialed in on where we're at with this show right now. I think that they also are doing a really good job of just having Macon Blair and killer Mike and some of the, um, yeah, just in the mix, you know, and it's like when Tommy Lee Jones, all the guys. The guys from the bookstore, other than Ethan Hawke, take Tommy Lee Jones to the diner and start letting slip the exact information that Lee did not want them to tell him. It's great. Uh, I have no real comments on the mystery other than, did you read the end of, and this is a spoiler for the second episode. I think we can say that this is a wholehearted and full throated recommendation. If you haven't seen the lowdown yet, check it out. Uh, just briefly, I'll ask you at the end is the prison guard who is, is screaming and chasing Lee. He shoots Paul Schneider's character. Is he saying where's like the other prison guard guy or the other guy? He seems to not also not know where Miko is. Okay. And, and I also wondered the prisoner that we're looking for. Yeah. Sterling has a film called Miko from a few years ago that I have not seen that involves prison. And I do, and I feel like maybe he answered my question in this episode because the guys who hang outside the bookstore are like, I know a dozen Miko's, so maybe it is, but I didn't know if this season. Was putting the lowdown in the larger Harjo extended universe. So it's just something to watch. Yeah. I'm, I'm excited to learn more about the Oklahoma prison system. It's really fun watching. Like we ask his guys, the security guys, like, but you heard, I thought you were getting affiliated. Um, okay. Let's talk about vision quest. And I, I, uh, say that only just because, um, I don't think this show worked for me very well and I don't want to end on like a really negative note. So I have a couple of bigger picture things to ask you about. When it comes to Marvel television, would you like to give me a capsule review of your feelings about the first two episodes of this series? If we consider that the bar to clear for passing entertainment these days for Marvel TV is relatively low. I think it cleared the bar. I think Terry Metellus, who is the showrunner of this has done really good work in the Star Trek extended universe recently. And you can sort of feel that, um, in the sense that like having the multiple AIs chatting about the nature of humanity and also instead of making another reference to the, to the ship of Theseus, just like having James Spader dismiss it. Like these feel very Star Trek next generation to me. These feel like data conversations. These feel like conversations that are very, a safe space for fans of this sort of genre stuff. And that's not a bad steer when you're making a show that if you actually squint, or maybe if you take meetings with Marvel TV in the last five years, you understand is really just like. Like story spackle to make absolutely batshit storylines make sense ahead of doomsday. Like I do want to take a step back and say that if you had asked me, and by the way, I wish someone had asked me like. pre deep or pre like phase four MCU. I have this written down the exact, go ahead. Which storylines do you think would be like, not only near impossible to adapt, but like, why would you even create this problem for yourself? I would say the Scarlet Witch and her reality warping, sometimes mutant, sometimes not mutant powers and how at various points have done things, at various points they have done things like create children with her robot lover. I would have said, maybe steer clear. Like, I don't know if there's a satisfying way to end up with two characters that you want to join the Young Avengers someday. Like, it's kind of a weird backwards way of plotting things because I would say that just to even just put a button on the Young Avengers question that you didn't even ask. When Allen Heinberg created the Young Avengers 20 years ago, nobody was checking for speed and Wiccan. No one was like, how can we answer to these questions? He was just like, these are available and it might be fun to make something of them. These shows, like three series now, Good Faith series, honestly, probably among the highest like Rotten Tomatoes scores of the MCU generally, have all been in service of a witch-robot relationship and having it make sense. I guess what I'm saying is I question the premise. The execution? Okay. I have some positive things to say in addition to some negative things, but I question the premise. Yeah. I had written down, it's funny that there have been three shows out of this collection of characters from WandaVision that they've decided to kind of say, this is what works. But even in that knowledge, for I'm sure a variety of reasons stemming from reallocation of creative resources away from TV and back into film, of deciding, you know what, what we're going to try and do is draw a line under things and move forward with the X-Men and move forward with the X-Men. Fantastic Four and whoever else from the world that we, from the MCU that we're now pivoting to. Did you know that we've, you know, now it's 2026, almost the end of 2026. And so this will be like a, basically five-year experiment that they had. And out of all the shows, the live action series that they manufactured in this period, Loki and Daredevil are the only MCU live action shows to make it to a second season. Okay. And that includes Wanda, Hawkeye, Falcon and Winter Soldier, Moon Knight, Ms. Marvel, She-Hulk, Secret Invasion, Echo, Agatha, and Ironheart. And Wonder Man, which got a second season and they got it taken away. So when you look at the fact that they have not been able to sustain any of these titles, with very few exceptions, and the fact that in those shows themselves, very little has happened to be like, wow, what? That's not a complete statement. How could you continue this? You have to just say that this was a mistake. You know, that there was, this was, they probably would have been better off in 2021, either repurposing or rebooting Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and having done that, you know? And just sort of doing, what could we do within this world that's like pretty usual, like typical procedural stuff. It's generally, like one of the things that makes movies special, is their relative scarcity. Like that you have to choose the most interesting moments of your characters' lives because movies aren't multi-seasons generally. Movies are not four to seven hours other than my favorite superhero movie, John Dielman, which is, you know, that's my Captain Marvel. Very good. The strategy that Marvel suggested, which was, which, you know, is borne out in the comics, but it was really borne out in the, you know, the financial projections for the Disney Plus, was that, look how many stories we're leaving on the table and we can just keep pumping them out. But there actually weren't that many stories on the table. Certainly not the spirit with which they felt they could do them if they were going to be connected to the larger Marvel universe. This is the time when I feel contractually obligated to say that the character of Vision is the star of one of my favorite comic book stories in the last 25 years, which was Tom King, one of the co-creator of Lanterns, when he was briefly at Marvel, wrote a, a, a limited Vision series in which the Vision tries to have a robot family that he creates for himself with a wife and two children. And it goes haywire. Okay. And it's incredible. And it's really interesting and insightful and complete. And you can feel the show. Haywire like hilarity ensues like Modern Family or Haywire like? Not really. Yeah, okay. It doesn't work out great for him. But like, you feel that something, like similarly to the Hawkeye show, which like tried to sort of skim some cream from Matt Fraction's similarly limited and brilliant Hawkeye miniseries, like there's an element that they were aware of in this. Like even just that doorbell in his brain mansion that says the Visions, like that's from the Tom King series. But the people living in the house are a constructed family, not just the most, not just the, the most read the room plot point maybe ever for 2026. Yeah, having four charming AI agents that are in charge of like various quadrants of Visions. Like personality quote-unquote is a tough beat in 2026. And honestly, like I don't want to give short shrift to like the production designers or the writers of the show. Like the time when like the action AI is like look more closely and she picks up an old kid's viewfinder to communicate what she's doing or like James Spader sends an email, but it looks like a carrier pigeon. Like these are clever ideas, but this is to me, it's like building an incredibly elaborate ship inside of a bottle. Like look at the tiny thing that you did. In service of what? So. And then the heart of the show is supposed to be this father-son relationship. And what happened here is I'm going to put my hand up and tell you this. Yeah, sure. Brought back PTSD of high school math where first two weeks of any given class, I'm like, I think I got this. I think I, I think I understand conceptually what this guy is talking about or this woman's talking about. And this will be something that I can get a, get a B minus in, you know, like, math is always really difficult for me. And then like two weeks go by and I feel like one day I walk into class and I've had like a full, like neurological event because I don't understand any of the words that are being said and they're asking, they're like, okay, and now we're going to pull out this tool. And I'm like, I don't have that, you know, like, and that's how I feel watching the Tommy Billy hybrid soul jumping Wiccan speed Maximoff guy that we get in the second episode. That is, I think the, going to be the core of the show is vision trying to protect or re-engage with this version of his son, right? I mean, he's, he's lost his older brother, the AI known as Jarvis. So that's a loss for him. Yeah. I do have to ask, like I genuinely would like, maybe like Matt Bellany could, could take a break from the Netflix beat and just find out how much money Marvel offered Carrie Condon, on the heels of an Emmy nominee, an Oscar nomination to play Friday IRL and what the response was. Right. Yeah. So it's, it's Tommy. This is the Tommy story. And I saw someone at Marvel saying that, well, the heart of the Agatha show was Billy. And this is the Tommy show because they're going to try to make these characters. And those two guys are Wanda's kids. They're her twins. Yes. And they, and they, they've cast very good actors, you know, in them. I think they're, they're compelling actors and they may have a future in the MCU, but it is a lot of expensive work to prop them up as important figures for the story going forward, especially when you have a lot of other nonsense rolling around it. Like I don't really care about which version of vision this is. I just don't find that particularly compelling of a robot being like, I once knew love. It was really funny in the opening, like 15 minute prelude to like explain why we're gathered here today. When Bettany is like, and then I was killed. Then you see Thanos tear his fucking. Tear his face off. But, but, but the other problem is that like that the Tommy storyline where he's a pickpocket and then there's like the evil British prison guard with the electric stick. It's just like, that was a rough sequence for me. Because you can, again, you feel the notes and you feel the good faith execution of the notes that Terry Metellus and his team did of like, how do we make this feel? This feel urgent, present tense, non-robot brain. Okay, we're going to build the set piece and it's going to be, it's a lot of labor for relatively so far, I would say skimpy returns. The one thing that I will say that I, unlike vision, I am but a man. And I, you, I do bleed when cut. And I do respond to things when I see them that are undeniable. And seeing the fully bearded spader playing a, just kind of nebbishy prissy version of the killer robot that he last played in the much maligned Avenger sequel, Age of Ultron. It works for me. I got to tell you. Spader is a really good TV actor and Spader is having fun. My hair on my arm went up when, when he said the word Sokovia, you know, it was just, Did you? Yeah, it was breathtaking. I thought there were moments where I wasn't sure if Bettany and Spader had even been on set together in terms of like the blocking of some of those scenes. But I, yes, he's delightful. I'm glad it's not entirely shot in his mind palace, where he's just gonna be talking to these people. I'm glad that. We're out in some sort of version of the real world. I will say that when this is all said and done and it's 2040 and President Pat McAfee has brought peace to the Western world, I would love to have a beer or a soda with Kevin Feige and be like, why did you make every one of these shows about a mysterious figure that we have to tune in next week to find out if their identity is going to be revealed? And I am the biggest simp for that. Like, obviously, I thought Reed Richards was going to be in WandaVision. I've been on the Mephisto watch for so long that when he actually shows up in Ironheart, right? You're committed to the E sound in Mephisto. You know, because it's local. I feel like one thing that we're losing, we're losing accents in this new homogenized digital world. And Mephisto is the Philadelphia pronunciation for Mephisto, you know? Oh, is that it? And you're a private school kid. You wouldn't get that. That's right. Well, no, we're both Quaker private school kids, but my school is in the suburbs. Yes. So I didn't really understand. Do you think Big Dom says Mephisto? Yeah. When he's referring to the medical staff of the Philadelphia Eagles. We're getting there. Because the Paladin thing in this show. Yeah. Is there's just a lot going on where it's like, this is a guy named Paladin, but he is like a centuries long line of bounty hunters who is working for someone who can just like jump into his Bluetooth. You said that with such enthusiasm. My thing is like, we will never get access to any of these companies' financials, but we do know that the strategy that fueled the last six plus years of television was the bet that all these companies made. And it does not appear to be a massively winning bet that they would scale by spending. And eventually things would, they could raise the prices and it would even out because they have built a library for these siloed services that they've done. So the flood the zone, strategy was intentional and the commitment to quality was well-intentioned, I think from the, you know, the people who are in charge of that, but ultimately impossible to maintain. And so is the next pivot, the best case scenario, like what we were saying about Netflix, which is we need to make things that have some perspective, not any or all perspective. They need to have a reason to exist separate and apart from our, I mean, this is me wishcasting. I hope that's the case, but you know, lanterns was a flawed show, but I think that I, I think we need to understand the ways in which the now skydance corporation will deem it a hit because you can, you can logically make that argument to someone that they took their time with it, that they cast it well, that they aimed for something and that they mostly achieved those goals and that you left that series. I think casuals, I think the hardcore fan is a tough person to predict and cater to. But I do think that people who look forward to a certain level of quality on their Sunday night, HBO shows who also has a taste for capes came out of that being like, when season two not, Oh God, I guess I got to wait for a movie in six months or that was not the worst use of my time. And I feel like that's been the bar for the last few years of Marvel shows. So if they really are just like, we're clearing the decks now and we're not doing this anymore, except for this upcoming show Zodiac, which I don't, you know, which they are intentionally being coy about. I don't blame them for saying it's time for a comic title. There's, there's some, cause I saw it was supposed to be a spy show and I was like, you know, you got me before with secret, secret invasion supposed to be a spy show, but people are grasping at straws for some like textual basis for what the show is. Okay. But then there were some rumors that it is, it is in some ways going to be like another, but like a international agents of shield type spy show, but we'll see. I think the announcing it and being coy about it, it might be that they are now attempting to say we are going to do a, we are going to do something on TV that is not just story spackle for the movies, but we'll see. You and I saw a play on Saturday night because we are Saturday afternoon. It was a bad neighbor because we're both in the city and we love spending time together and we love, we just love the arts. And during this play, which you could, we could speak about or, or, or not, there is a, like an interstitial moment when there there's like some of the stories advanced through podcasts. The play is called holes. Yeah. The holes. And it is playing in the lower end in the, in the East village. And it is about all kinds of holes and no need to get into it now. Yeah. I think it's written by Max Friedlich is right. Right. So I'm not trying to be dismissive of the actual thing, but I, what I wanted to get to this, one of the story devices in between scenes is like, you hear audio from recording radio or podcast recordings. And one of the storylines is that because of a very particular type of hole, the town upstate town of Kingston, New York is having a resurgence among certain types. And one of the last things, you hear from this pod, this fake podcast voice saying is I heard even, I heard Chris Ryan bought a house there. Yeah. Now I sat bolt upright in my seat. You did. And I looked immediately at Phoebe who was looking at me and you were looking more, you know, you were just sort of taking it in. I thought for a second that it was like, I heard Ryan bought one. Like I, I didn't, it didn't register to me as quickly as say my sampling on the, on the, on the, on the rap record from earlier, the Tom Hardy record from earlier in the year was, and I still am like 30%. Like that could have been, I misheard it or something, but yes, it was, it was strange. And it's very flattering to imagine that I would be able to influence people to buy in Kingston. You know, I think that it's this commitment to both. First of all, you are passionate about real estate. You have holdings across the world. Everybody knows this about you, but two, you have quite a portfolio, but two, I thought it was sort of, I, I definitely took it as a compliment that you were an immediate, like now everyone understands the type of influence that this dive bar with a glory hole in the back of it is, is, you know, the influence that it has. If even you thought leader are moving there. Now that you put it that way, I do wonder whether or not that's it. You move markets is what this is saying. An environment that I would be associated with. You move markets. I was, I was stunned. It was cool. It's been cool to go to like, Starstruck plays in museums and have crisp fall air and have my, my bud here. I do want to talk about the dark side of being friends with you and being from Philadelphia. And that is, you know, we didn't watch yesterday's game together. I think it would just be, we'd be remiss if we didn't comment on the pretty much end of the Philadelphia Eagle season, which reported today that Jalen hurts will be missing for the rest of the season due to complications with a blood clot. That's very not funny and serious. And Jalen I like really, really, I'm just hoping that he is healthy and it'd be nice if he gots gets to do whatever it is he wants to do. And if it's play football down the line, like I hope that happens for him. But this was like, do you think Jalen hurts has ever evinced interest in doing anything other than playing football? Maybe he wants to come pot with us. This is noncontact. You know, I would wish us luck. I do you think, do you, do you think he's like vision quest is the best show I've ever seen. I don't think he's ever watched a television show. Oh, that's not true. I bet Jalen Jalen hurts has watched TV. Do you think he's, do you think he's like a real MCU guy? Do you think he thinks echo is underrated? I wouldn't be surprised. You know, he probably can take the rest of these, but the point is, is that this sucks for Jalen. 99% of this is just like, I hope Jalen's okay. Yes. So 1% is that I do not remember staring into an abyss of a season like this in a long time. Uh, this early in the season, I guess the dream team sucked. I mean, you know, those chip years got dicey and gamey, really fast, but, um, it's been a minute. I forgot how it felt. I forgot how it looked. I forgot how long football games are when they're awful. I mean, the caveat, the caveats here are plentiful. Like we won the super bowl. I'm good. I'm good for a minute. I I'm okay. Thank you for asking. Uh, I know how good we've had it and how most fans have teams like this all the time. And, and that the incredible injury luck that we had for a number of years has to, has to come, it has to turn. So the fact that every single player on our team is hurt, um, has given me a certain level of emotional distance that I do not feel anguished. Like we were saying yesterday, like it would be at some levels, it would be much more strenuous and stressful if we were playing our actual starting players and losing in excruciating fashion. The fact that they clearly have, um, maybe are like time-sharing the Sixers medical staff here. Like this is the final straw for me. Like I can't wait for head coach Declan Doyle to restore some level of competency next season, because I just want to be clear. As I said on this podcast a few weeks ago, Jalen hurts is my guy. That's my QB. The handling of this is abhorrent bordering on criminal and I'm fucking furious. It's despicable. I know that before this pod gets out and this is getting into like a real NFL pod at this point, but like, I think Nick Sirianni is doing a press conference. At three. I hope how he's with him. Um, because they need to like clear this up. Cause like, I think Nick was like, here's the statement. I refer to the statement all week and I get that and it's Jalen's private medical whatever HIPAA, but they need to explain like the timeline and like who thought flying to London and or staying up for 36 hours was a good idea. This is the thing. Yeah. So they fly to London and they do an ultrasound on him and they're like, you have a superficial blood clot. Our advice to you. is that to fall asleep could be life-threatening. but to play full contact football 36 hours from now, that's fine. Yeah. I could barely make it through a nice Sunday lunch with a lack of sleep at a transatlantic flight, let alone play the situation that he was put into. Yeah. So that alone is disqualifying. And if the player is just like, I just want to stay awake because I want to play football and play with my team. That's why you have an organization to be like, take the car keys, you know, like you can't do that. And then the result of all that international travel and jet lag and insomnia and staying awake and playing football nonsense is the blood clot is now deep vein thrombosis in your lungs, fire everybody genuinely. Like I think that he, I mean, I don't, I I'm, I'm, I've tried my best while you were talking during this pod to educate myself further on hematology generally. Like I'm just trying to multitask. It seems as if this is not necessarily a, uh, like a condition, that it will be part of his life, that with treatment and blood thinners and taking the season off, he can be back to football behavior. And I hope that's the case. And I hope that's the case for our team and that he's not so furious. That's it. But this sucks, man. Take care of people. My mind does go, as you mentioned, the Sixers medical staff. I do think about how usually the Sixers have like a three to four month kind of grace period because everybody's like, I just care about the birds. Yeah. Um, and now it's, it's going to be like every guy who usually blocks out 17 Sundays to scream at his television is like, guess I'm watching Sixers wizards tonight. The degree to which I have considered taco fail being signed as a two way player. I mean, that's the kind of, that's the kind of attention I usually pay to practice squad transactions. Luckily you and I have always been mostly devoted to the Sixers on our group chats and in our, our life, like that's always been our number one. So, uh, welcome to the party. Uh, thanks to everybody for producing us today. Kai, Kaya, Remy, and we will be back on Thursday. My pod interview with Zoe Kazan, the creator and writer or co-writer of every episode of East of Eden. I had a lovely talk with Zoe last week, and we're going to run that on Thursday. So you have a couple more days to catch up with these to be. And if you haven't, um, and then back to regular scheduled programming the following week, we'll hit the slow horses finale on the top. I understand that people might be like, you guys aren't hitting slow horses finale on the night of, but I think, I think we'll still have stuff to say next Monday. Do you want to preview my take? I bet it's delightful. I bet it's, I bet it's another wonderful episode and a good season. I feel fairly confident saying that. Uh, thanks to everybody. We'll be back next week.