Is ‘The Uprising’ a Secret Robin Hood Movie? Plus, ‘The Pitt’ Season 3 Trailer, an ‘Adults’ S2 Preview, and Late Summer Recommendations.

21:16Andy Greenwald:You either make six or 25. And instead, we somehow ended up meeting in the middle where we now both do the exact same thing in lockstep. Yes. Where I said it last week, this is actually something people are saying that eight is the new 10. Then everything is shrinking. And, you know, we don't need to talk about this today, but downriver effects of all that aren't just for the audience. It is shrinking the income and stability of all creative careers in the industry and causing mass chaos. I randomly got served. I think I was telling you about this, a Neil Patrick Harris interview where he was talking about the schedule that they used to have for How I Met Your Mother.

21:51Andy Greenwald:Famously the best schedule. And he was like, this is the best job that you can ever have. I worked for an hour on Monday. I went in briefly on Tuesday and Wednesday to rehearse and do blocking. And then we shot Thursday, Friday, Saturday. And if you weren't in scenes, you just didn't have to be there. And they would schedule it as such. and he was like and he got paid $250 ,000 a week or whatever and you had every fourth week off so that the writers could catch up and we fucking killed the golden goose man we had something beautiful everyone who has ever done a multi-cam sitcom says that it is the greatest schedule working schedule in entertainment you were 22 weeks a year?

22:33Andy Greenwald:something like that? yeah half the year the actors do yeah everyone I've ever talked to about it has said that. Do you remember years ago we had Laurie Metcalf come on? I'll never forget it. And I think... Her description of working on Roseanne was like, I would drive over the hill into Hollywood, go to Fort Knox, take my giant gold bar out of BBC and go back to the valley. Yeah, and we would just like laugh with John Goodman for an hour. Yeah, and then I would go do Steppenwolf and whatever, like when I had free time. It's pretty good. Yeah. We broke it. gray roots entering the chat uninvited garnier's got you garnier color sensation root retouch covers up to 100 of grays in just 10 minutes no ammonia no mess and the color lasts up to four weeks it's as easy to apply as shampoo plus it's vegan and cruelty free 10 minutes sensational color sensational price with those savings your next girl's night is basically free find your perfect match at walmart.com or at a store near you This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios.

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25:11We do seem to be seeing some signs of things going back to the way they were, though. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about this, I think, remarkable development in television. So this was from Axios. They do like a media newsletter and then Parra Analytics contributes to it. and Parrot we've mentioned before. Julie Alexander who writes for the town occasionally or not for the town, but for Matt Bellany's What I'm Hearing newsletter and has done a lot of, she used to work at Parrot. So I think that there's, I'm aware of what they do and they try to like give some metric statistical understanding to what is a very vague and opaque system now of what do these streaming minutes really constitute and subscriptions versus time spent and all this stuff.

25:59This is from a quote from that Axios and Parrot report. For the first time last year, the supply of streaming shows in the United States more than doubled that of binge releases, a testament to how much streamers have changed their strategies since the binge show dropped first became popular in the late aughts. Now, I must say that it was chilling to think of the late aughts as time in memoriam. but it is the case that you get sometimes with the case of the bear or something like that you still get your binge drop outside of Netflix most networks have gone to a we'll put two up and then it's once a week or we put the three up and it's once a week after that and I think it's working I think generally speaking and anecdotally so not para-analytically speaking we're seeing a lot more shows that are developing a traditional slow burn.

26:58Have you seen this? Have you seen this? Have you seen this? You have to catch up with it kind of audience. Do you agree with that?

27:04Andy Greenwald:Yeah. I mean, the caveat we always have to say is obviously as podcasters, we would prefer a weekly model. That serves us. But I genuinely think and have, I think, always thought that the binge model does a disservice to almost everybody except the shareholders of the tech company that is attempting to launch a profitable streaming service, which is why it started to begin with. It was both an attempt to disrupt and break the model and surprise people, but also an attempt to flood the zone for attention and interest and give people a different kind of relationship to the service, much like the introduction of Reels on Instagram to just basically get you into the ecosystem and get you locked in and wanting more and expecting more and not turning away.

27:52Andy Greenwald:Fundamentally, I mean, I don't know the numbers of it, but even Netflix that still does mostly binge releases, just the library is so large now that the new releases don't have to have the same cadence as everything else because you're likely going to be there and find that other binge relationship anyway. I know I lean on this too often as my like, In the same way that our beloved Thomas Friedman in the New York Times always leans on the cab driver in Karachi that told him about how the world economy really works. Yes. That's how I use my children on this podcast. But I promise you, they are real.

28:27Andy Greenwald:And I was really interested that this weekend, my older daughter was saying that she, because I've said before, and I believe this to be true, that their relationship to TV generally is so different from ours. Oh, my God. Because it's like the, it's more like the way movies had gone in the sense that like for event shows that are cultural touchstones for, I'll use my older daughter, for her generation. So Stranger Things or Wednesday, we'll get her to be like, when's it coming out? You know, let me watch it. But otherwise, like I was saying last week, she's on a steady diet right now of Modern Family and The O.C., all of which finished their run quite some time ago.

29:03Andy Greenwald:That said, this weekend, she was saying that she preferred the way Summer I Turned Pretty came out because it felt momentous. It felt that same way that we talk about those halcyon late days of the end of Breaking Bad, for example. Late teens? Yeah. Mid-teens? Anyway, that's the way she was talking about it too. Like it was a nice event to have over a period of time. And it just strikes me as one of those things like, you know, three years ago, everyone's writing off the movie experience as outdated or not meeting the customer where he or she is. And then suddenly we have a couple of years where people are like, no, actually, it's pretty good.

29:41Andy Greenwald:We like it. It actually works. Maybe there's a way to even connect it to your point about, you know, the episodic model, which is we just keep breaking stuff because we think we need to iterate all the time when maybe people like the way it is. Yeah, I also would ask you from a creative standpoint and from a development standpoint, whether or not the timelines for these shows have changed drastically in relationship to when the shows are going to be released. So my question is essentially like if you were to be working on tires or adults, let's say like something like tires that gets released.

30:20Andy Greenwald:I got respectful passes for both, but thank you. you guys would have to write and produce the entire season and deliver it it wouldn't be like we're four episodes ahead i mean and when it starts airing and we're kind of like iterating off of things and seeing what people are responding to and changing the material as the season goes on yeah i think that i think the issue is more that there are in this brave new world like there are series that benefit from a different sort of schedule that certainly benefit from if there's only five episodes of story make five episodes and if that's the case and especially if it's a limited you could treat it more like a film and perfect it and get it right and then deliver it to the network you know to do as you see fit and then of course there's the other category that just simply didn't exist 10 plus years ago of the massive visual effects spectacle show that requires almost 8 to 12 extra months.

31:16Andy Greenwald:And that's just always going to be that way. I think one of the real problems, though, is the sort of the virus of prestige and how prestige TV gets made infected all shows. So that the timeline and the way things are put together is just this like really, really incoherent mix of hurry up and slow down. That it's going to take what it's going to take, but also we needed to decide two weeks ago, but also we want to hit this window, but then also we're going to sit on it for a year because our numbers say that our audience doesn't like this anymore until Love Island comes back or whatever. So everything, the entire industry got fed into the same, like, production woodchipper, timeline woodchipper of certain shows that require or even benefit from a certain timeline.

31:59Andy Greenwald:I think that's why not just, like, we every year, we're like, whoa, they really did it. The Pit's really coming back in January when anyone older than, even older than us is like, you mean it's a TV show? But it's like some lost art that we forgot collectively how to do. And it is talked about that way internally, too, inside the industry of like, wow, that's remarkable. They shoot in L.A. and they do it every year. I don't understand why we can't get back to that. But maybe it is because that middle, the middle class of TV shows fell out of favor. And so it's either, I mean, CBS is still churning out 20 episodes of Elspeth a year.

32:37Andy Greenwald:but then you know when you turn to like prestige things on other services they are they're in a different business entirely i saw recently that there was i can't remember the netflix show but it was like something is moving production from north carolina to georgia because of the vagaries of tax breaks yeah and uh yeah i mean the one thing i i whether or not you believe that everything should be made in LA or that, you know, what the issues are with like shooting overseas, which a lot of stuff does now. It would be nice if like these studios just took a haircut every once in a while and we're like, yeah, it's going to cost a little bit more, but we're going to get the best people and those people get to live in the city that they make do their job in.

33:21Andy Greenwald:I mean, it is so deeply entrenched in every fiber of American business now that a corporation should never, ever, under any circumstance, pay the people who work for them a little bit more. Right. Like, and somehow we have all... I don't even know if it's been paying them that much more. It's like, make it easier for them to do their jobs. And it's like... Those are connected. Yeah, of course. But we're all... But getting to live where you work is the number one thing, you know? Listen, I completely agree with you on that. I just think that we don't... They've done a really good job. They. Like, we cheer for, like, corporate earnings reports.

34:02Andy Greenwald:You know, like the whole narrative, even the way the Hollywood Reporter, when they're not busy trolling X accounts to see how they feel about the Peasants' Revolt, like definitely, that's probably the only attention they pay to the Peasants' Revolt in terms of like, why the fuck does this all cost so much? Like, we're not actually interrogating any of that. And then, you know, suddenly this became a completely different kind of revolt. But like, you know, the entire nature of the conversation isn't we should make more episodes of something and we should allow people to live where they work and establish a beachhead of like consistency and all of that.

34:38Andy Greenwald:Instead, the conversation is, David Ellison doesn't get what he wants. He's going to pull up his whole company and move it to Texas like Joe Rogan. Like, what? It was actually Tennessee. I think he was really looking at, right? Was he? Yeah. Oh, well, Joe Rogan pulled up and went to Austin, right? He did, man. Yeah. And it worked out. I guess. Is he hiring? Because I can switch that opinion real quick. A show that I think is a very traditional show in a maybe non-traditional way, or it's about younger people who are living together, making their way in New York City, even though it's quite obviously shot in Toronto, is Adults, which is coming back for its second season on FX tonight.

35:15Two episodes dropped tonight. I believe it's an eight-episode season like the last season. I wish it was 15 episodes or 12 episodes. I'm not trying to make anybody's life harder than it needs to be, but it is. I find the show really delightful and I think the second season is a big leap forward look I admit that I have just like a weakness slash soft spot for sitcoms and I kind of still use it as a reward for making it through another day in America is just to fire up like 22 minutes of something like mildly funny before I go to bed and this is just an example of like a show that just needs a little bit of time to find the rhythms of not only how like the writing works but also like how the characters interact with each other it's essentially like a screwball comedy of like I believe five people who wind up living together in Queens as they try to like navigate like getting jobs your numbers check out

36:14Andy Greenwald:by the way about five people I was just backstopping you there are five members of the cast awesome my favorite actor or my favorite performer on this show is probably Owen Thiel, who's also like a podcaster. And I just think he's fantastic in this show. But yeah, I know that you had mixed feelings about the special, the between-season special that they put up. I thought it was really interesting that, well, we touched on it briefly in a different conversation. I thought this was really, really interesting. John Landgraf, longtime head of FX, prides himself on thinking outside the box. and zagging and looking for inefficiencies and trying to do things the way other people don't or at least getting ahead of the curve.

36:59Andy Greenwald:And many, many examples in the television landscape and in the television cemetery of shows that just felt like they launched wrong, you know, and they wish they could do a do-over, whether it's they didn't, the pilot wasn't the right episode to begin with or, you know, I imagine that I have to believe, both because I'm a fan and because I do think this is partially true, that the failure of the late great FX show Terriers and the fact that people just didn't like the name probably still rankles. Like if it was just called like Oceanside Detectives, it would be in season 41 right now because they were doing two seasons a year because everyone was like this rules.

37:35CSI San Diego.

37:37Andy Greenwald:Basically, cool surf individuals. That's what it stands for. So that he basically... A Robin Hood story. Why not? If this was called Adults, A Robin Hood Story, we could see. So if anyone did or didn't check out this first season, it began with a scene that like all pilots do, wants to set the tone, what the comedy is going to be and who the characters are in a outlandish circumstance. And in this circumstance, our five friends were on a New York subway car and encountered something that all of us who have ever lived in New York encountered, which is a gentleman pleasuring himself on the train.

38:11Andy Greenwald:And then one of the characters, I believe it's Isa? Isa, yeah. responds by pleasuring herself in kind. And I believe FX has... You don't see that on Modern Family, I'll tell you that. Although I did see it once on a J-train, I will tell you that. Because the streaming era, FX definitely has the numbers and could probably show you on the curve when all of the audience dropped out at that moment and never came back. Really? I mean, I'm exaggerating, but it wouldn't surprise me if they pointed to that as like maybe not the best way to onboard people to the show. I think you're right. That is probably the sitcom's way of doing like a dead body and then saying six weeks earlier.

38:53It's like you have to like, you have to lead with the most outrageous thing that will grab people.

38:57Andy Greenwald:Yeah, and that was definitely encouraged. And then they were like, well, this, we actually think, it's also a sense that they were like the creators, Ben Croningold and Rebecca Shaw, and Nick Kroll as an EP on it, that they were like, we believe in these guys and we believe in the ensemble in a way that we often say like comedy needs time to gel. So they let them make a second pilot. called Marathon Day. And they released it a few weeks ago. We talked about it briefly. And they dropped it. This was the most interesting part for me. Not like the Gary episode of The Bear, which is a similar outside-the-box thing.

39:25Andy Greenwald:It doesn't exist in its own little box. This new episode, Marathon Day, is now the first episode of the show on the Hulu menu thing. And it is canonically... A prequel. A prequel to the show itself. So I admire... It's how they meet this character, Paul Baker, who's played by Jack and Anna. It's really, very good. I admired the moxie of that and the creative thinking of that. I hated the episode. And I don't really feel like continuing with the show because comedy is, you know, deeply subjective. Sure. And for me, everything about the episodes I've seen are just, it's really trying, really trying hard at all times to make you interested, care, laugh, shocked.

40:10Andy Greenwald:and I don't feel any actual chemistry or warmth or... Wait, so you watched this special? Yeah. And you watched how much of the first season? The first 30 seconds? No, no, no, no. I'm saying I think that's what their data said. I watched the first six, I think, of the first season. Nice, look at you. I do the work. Dig in deep. I think that they found a rhythm in the second season that's quite delightful. Okay. I recommend the show. Andy does not. And you can hear more of Andy's thoughts on comedy in our tires episode.

40:46It's not all negative for you and me, though, brother. No. So I wanted to take a brief minute since we are recording this on Thursday. Next Monday, we'll have a little bit of a Frankenstein episode about the finale of Furious, which airs on Sunday. And then we'll talk about Lanterns and maybe Lioness the following Thursday.

41:09Andy Greenwald:I gotta say that I would be I would be more invested in Lioness if I could watch you and Van talk about it don't tempt me with a good time I mean because you tell me things and I'm human I watched that clip well you showed me the clip I was like look at the engagement I just hope a lot of people are saying like why do they why are these views numbers so elevated why are they all coming from one phone i i'm not saying that that we're recognized but we were in the like the zone of interest so to speak where people are like so you are more often than not and there was a moment last night when in that zone where you are exposed you know we are potentially visible where many people could have seen you holding up your phone showing me you talking on our podcast i was just showing you that Van was very good and very funny.

42:09Andy Greenwald:And how are you? I was fine. I thought you looked great. Thanks. But I also thought that like this moment when you told me that Joe, Zoe Saldana, is being tortured and her torturer pauses to give a disquisition on what they did to us with COVID. Uh-huh. Maybe it is just better if I update you on where we're at on the season and you don't have to watch it. I did want to talk about some things that we had been enjoying. So as it is a late summer kind of dog days moment we were going to do some recommendations of things we are reading, things we are watching and things we are listening to. The thing we are watching we obviously basically breathlessly account for all watching on this show but we didn't really talk about Tony we had seen it a couple weeks ago it's had a very sort of like staggered rollout it seems like it's a hit I think people really like it.

43:03But not just critically

43:04Andy Greenwald:it seems like box office, the slow rollout is really working. And sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it doesn't. I think the word of mouth was both infuriating but good for this because I think people were like, why do people keep saying this is a masterpiece and it's not playing in my city yet? And now that it is finally starting to get out there, I think people are going to and I think it's people who cared about Anthony Bourdain and people who were indifferent and or didn't care at all, you know, and because it's a really good movie. Yeah. And that is maybe what the future of biopics should be thinking about is like they always should have been yes yeah is like let's make a good movie first and worry about servicing this person's legacy and story second do you think do you think somewhere in Liverpool Danny Boyle is hearing this podcast being like shit I gotta go back to the drawing board of these Beatles movies that's Sam Mendes oh I'm sorry yeah Danny Boyle why did I think he was making that I don't know oh because he made yesterday yes he did I mean we don't recognize that as a Danny Boyle film I mean it's a Himesh Patel movie I respect it we all have ways of entering I apologize for the error Sam Mendes probably was listening to it from I don't know Canary Wharf where do you think Sam Mendes is listening to our podcast Abbey Road probably yeah where you're shooting those guys walking across the street anyway I wanted to give you a platform to talk about the movie because I got to chat about it on Big Pick with Sean but I like what did you think and I love this movie.

44:35Andy Greenwald:I genuinely felt exhilarated by watching it. And to your point, not really because I read and loved Kitchen Confidential or think a lot about Tony Bourdain or who he was and what he was and his legacy, which we talked about in a special podcast episode a few weeks ago. I thought this movie from the opening frames is so tactile and organic and alive and in a way that many contemporary movies don't feel to me. And I wonder if this is a hallmark of Matt Johnson who made it. I haven't seen Blackberry yet. I haven't seen Nirvana, the band, the movie, the TV show, the movie. That's it. You got it the first time.

45:13Andy Greenwald:Did I get it? More or less. Yeah. That's a Danny Boyle picture? Yes. It was just so evident to me from the beginning that he understood the assignment maybe even more than the people who gave the assignment in the sense that this movie, he very much wanted to make a movie about a coming of age story set at a certain time with a certain kind of rough-hewn feel to it and was able to do something that I think is very hard for anyone in the public eye. But certainly when dealing with beloved stories, he was able to filter out what he felt was irrelevant to this movie he wanted to make. And it just had all these little touches that felt, I keep wanting to say old fashioned, and I don't mean to like disparage movies because I've been enjoying a lot of movies this year.

45:57Andy Greenwald:I think good movies are still made, obviously. But sometimes I'm watching things and I feel them kind of slip away. Like the fact that the main character of this movie, that the version of Tony played by Dominic Sessa is an asshole and is not a great guy sometimes and is selfish and ego driven and deeply fragile. And then beneath that is a sensitivity that you understand and that you can connect to the real person that we saw later in life. And that in some ways was, is kind of the skeleton key to understanding his whole existence, private and public. But the permission to do that and not make him a magic boy or a magic saint, you know, who is just needed to be unlocked in the right way was really, really appealing.

46:39And then you throw into it just like you populate a world

46:43Andy Greenwald:and it's a period piece that doesn't feel like it's winking at you all the time being like, there were no cell phones. What's the line in the shards? There were no cell phones, only serial killers. Like it wasn't that at all. It was 70s, but other than a few details and like cars and fashion choices and nunchucks, it could be any era. Yeah. And just all the performances. Banderas, Amelia Jones, and especially our guy, number one draft pick, Leo Woodall. Unbelievable in this. What a great year. Have you seen Tuner? No. He's really, really good. And it's like, it's basically a very down and dirty small stakes like crime film.

47:19not even small stakes quite large stakes but it's him and Dustin Hoffman and he plays Dusty's still acting a piano tuner with auditory problems sometimes I think

47:29Andy Greenwald:you're making movies up no it's great though you should check it out did Sean see it at Cannes? like how it came out in the spring I think of of 26 of this year are you sure? yes okay am I sure? did you see it on Iraqgoals.net? it's already come out on streaming it's already on on VOD anyone else in the studio ever hear of this movie no can't say I have see the box on the tile you just don't believe that these movies exist unless they are served right to you isn't that a great way to be I love this film and I echo all of your sentiments I think that there are so many sequences in this that have stuck with me like the I don't want to give it away no spoilers here but like there's a specific fishing scene that I love Yeah.

48:18It was shot by Michael Bauman, who did One Battle After Another, or Licorice Pizza, and is one of PTA's collaborators. It just looks incredible. So yeah, I just think it's probably my favorite movie of the summer.

48:34Andy Greenwald:Yes, it's so vibrant. I mean, Dominic Sessa, from The Holdovers, he is a star. He's super charismatic and fun to watch. But there's this very specific kind of electricity that you can feel when you sit down in a movie theater and you feel like you're in good hands and you feel like you're going to be told a story. And in a way, this is a connected conversation to what you were saying about the problem with TV bloat, you know, where it's the wrong number of episodes or things like that. Like, this is a story about a specific person in a specific circumstance in a specific place in a certain amount of time.

49:06Andy Greenwald:And it does not, other than as you alluded to at the beginning, there's a little bit of off-roading or onboarding into the future at the very end, which is sort of like a nice little grace note. But otherwise, it does not feel any pressure to explain everything or really anything other than what happened to one guy, kind of. I think it's also a great movie about the choices you don't know you're making in your life. at various points in this film the Tony character is presented with different paths he can follow and one of them is the Leo Woodall character and that's kind of more of a model of self-destruction one of them is the Antonio Banderas character who is somebody who seems to have become a little bit like living within himself now like he tried once and got his ass kicked and now makes four things well but only four things at a quick serve fish and chips restaurant on the Cape.

50:08And he doesn't want either of those things. There are parts of each that are attractive but you can see him formulating his own ideas about who he wants to be by reacting to what other people have become.

50:18Andy Greenwald:It's myth-making and I think that one of the things that is underserved in the debate about whether Tony would have liked this or whatever is that he loved myth-making and he loved myths and he loved running at them and challenging them and celebrating them and some of the best episodes of his TV shows were absolutely just running at, not cliches, but tropes of the movies he loved or of the celebrities that he admired or the painters and poets. Yeah, he made the George V. Higgins one in Boston. He made the Pasolini. The Pasolini episode. And so I think that what he would have, it's a fool's errand to even say this, but I think the version of him that I briefly knew, I think, and observed, I think would have been tickled at the idea that he was worthy of such totemic adulation and given this movie in which exactly as you say, there's enough of it there to put together something deeper and bigger, which doesn't mean truer, but in some ways, it doesn't mean more accurate, but it might mean, it might be more truthful.

51:13Andy Greenwald:Meaning the Antonio Banderas character, Chef, who doesn't really have a name until the very end, it's such a, it's a beautiful performance. He's just such an incredible actor and presence on the screen. Tony always in his life, at every moment when he was interviewed, at every stage of celebrity, would say what he really wanted. And what he really wanted was for the first few years, he was going to just unplug and live in Vietnam for a year to write a book that would be inspired by Graham Greene or whatever. He would talk about, in the interview that I referenced that he did with me in 2013, he talked about, you know, his happy place being raising his daughter, whether it was in New York or with his wife's family in Sardinia.

51:51Andy Greenwald:He was always talking about the quiet. What he'd rather be doing. The rather doing in the quiet shack or whatever. And also, he loved wearing those sweaters. He loved wearing those same kind of like corded seafarer sweaters that Banderas wore. And the thing about if you're 15 minutes, if you're anything but 15 minutes early, you're late, was him in everything. That was canon. And that was my experience and everyone's experience who ever interviewed him. Were you on time for him? Did I ask you this? He was there before me. Yeah, I know. Were you on time? I was on time for him. Well, you weren't there that day.

52:23Andy Greenwald:You were in California. Yeah, of course. And in the Leo Woodall character, there's elements, as you said, of self-destruction that he later experienced in his life. And for deep, deep Wikipedia truthers about him, like the Amelia Jones character is Nancy, who is his first wife, who is a very, very important and very underrepresented and kind of misunderstood figure in his life because she was with him during everything up until the point when he became who he became. And that adds an extra level of sort of ghostliness to the movie. I don't know. I just thought it was like, it's an incredibly difficult thing to do, but it was done with such style and personality and I thought it was an exceptional movie.

53:13It comes with our highest recommendation. So let's talk about some other things we recommend. Want to do books first since you brought show and tell here? I brought show and tell. So why don't you go first? What have you been reading recently that you like?

53:27Andy Greenwald:Well, I know that you wanted to save my thoughts on Saul Bellow for like a special podcast. Is that right? It depends on if that's what you think Stick the Landing should become is Saul Bellow talk. I have not stuck the landing of Humboldt's Gift yet. I will tell you that. That was the wrong book to bring poolside this weekend. So you were on a Saul Bellow journey, but that really just means reading some of Humboldt's Gift. It just means, you know, there's different reading experiences. like the book I'm about to talk about, I read basically in a day and a half. And then there's the one that you sort of chip away at in the background.

53:56Andy Greenwald:And you're going to recommend a book, I think, that I said to you I meant to bring with me for my little vacation that I was on this week. And at the last minute, I decided, no, no, I shouldn't bring that out. I should bring Humboldt's gift to the poolside. And it didn't get a lot of burn. But yeah, I'm going to hold up. This is the new novel by one of our favorites, one of our heroes who's been on the podcast before, George Pelicanos. As NPR says, a modern master, storytelling master. What does CR say? A modern master of storytelling. Pretty much the same thing. Yeah. Isn't that what got the guy at New York Magazine in trouble?

54:29Oh, just like remixing NPR? Just remixing the words.

54:32Andy Greenwald:This is a novel called The Blue Flame. It is the first novel starring one of his, he has a sort of a stable protagonist. This is the first Derek Strange mystery that he's written in, I think, probably 20 years. It's a little background. We've talked about Pelicanos before. George has been on the podcast. He is like the bard of Washington, D.C. He has written, I think, 23 novels now, all of which are set in the district that he knows so well, which is not the city of House of Cards or even Veep. It is a city of real people, a predominantly black and brown city that has like a deep cultural legacy and history that goes well beyond like Beltway politics.

55:13Andy Greenwald:and his early books are incredibly important to us. When he was writing about a loosely autobiographical kind of wild child Greek-American investigator named Nick Stefano. Coaked out punk rock fan. Like jump roping out coke sweats while listening to The Replacements' Tim. So I would say that we loved these books. Real ones will understand how important that is. Then he matured into writing these books, I think we're big fans of and we recommend as a jumping off point always the DC Quartet, which is a series of four books that he wrote, again, over 20 years ago now about a black and white investigative team, basically.

55:57Andy Greenwald:Marcus Clay and Dimitri Karras. Each book is set in a different decade. 70s, 80s, 90s, up to the 2000s. King Sucker Man is the 70s. Sweet Forever is my favorite. It's set during the 80s. Yep. Shame the Devil. Oh, and then there's The Big Blowdown, which is not set in the 2000s. It's a... Prequel, right? Prequel. But yeah, I think Sweet Forever is the one we always recommend the most because it's an entire like weekend of like debaucherous violence set against the backdrop of the NCAA tournament and Len Bias' untimely passing. And it's just an incredible crime book. And then George's went on, he was integral to The Wire and The Deuce and the Wayne Jenkins story.

56:37Andy Greenwald:We Are the City as well. So he's done tons of TV and stuff. But what's really cool about this book, I would say, which is a very fast read, is his writing has gotten more, it's gotten slower, it's gotten more thoughtful, it's gotten more heavily researched, like in terms of the attention to detail and how murder police do their job and how cases actually move through the system. But what he never forgets are two things. One, the dignity of the people involved in the kind of cases that don't get covered in the Washington Post. But also, he just fucking loves what he loves. and there are long, like he introduces a murder cop named Angie and then there's just an entire page where it talks about how Angie grew up loving Slant 6 and once played at Fort Reno before she became a police officer.

57:22Andy Greenwald:There's a lot of stuff about vintage cars. There's a lot of stuff about old movies and I think the best way to consider a lot of his more recent books is that they are westerns and Derek Strange is the aging sheriff called back one more time. Trying to make sense of a world that's changing around him. Yeah, but the things that matter to him still ought to matter which is like a decent day's work, you know, respecting people around you. You know, basically what I do by showing up on time to this podcast every day. But just a great writer who never gets enough flowers, but is still doing it. A couple from me that I got via an excellent newsletter that I subscribed to recently by a writer named Max Reed, who used to work at Gawker and has a Patreon newsletter called Reed Max.

58:06and I don't know how I like arrived at this specific element of his work which is a lot of it is about technology and social media and writing about the sort of digital world around us but then he also has like a tremendously deep reservoir of book and film recommendations so I highly recommend people first of all sign up for Max's newsletter but the two books that I grabbed off of his recommendations one is called Declare which is a bio writer named Tim Powers

58:35Andy Greenwald:that's the one I should have brought with me I bought it as soon as you told me about it I'm still really curious to know whether you're going to vibe with this so like I personally have not ever really done much hard sci-fi or fantasy and I wouldn't describe either of these books as those but they have elements of them and Declare is like an epic I would liken it to I would say Le Carre but I don't even know which specific Le Carre I would liken it to so I'm going to say Alan first who we obviously love very much is a writer who writes a lot of espionage books set during World War II. His first one, Night Soldiers, is sort of his epic that he wrote if he wasn't going to get to write another one.

59:14Andy Greenwald:And then he wrote the same book 12 more times but shorter. It's basically this arc across the entirety of World War II from the late 30s until the end. And Declare is very much like that if also the Bible was real and like there's like some Raiders of the Lost Ark stuff happening and it's fantastic I mean it's it's dizzying and at times kind of like almost hard for me to wrap my mind around some of the ideas or visuals that he's painting but it is like a really fun spin on the usual like one perfect spy moving through you know 40s Paris and Berlin um so I I highly recommend Declare. Another one that I picked up off of Max's recommendations is a book I'm reading now called Life During Wartime, which is a book by a guy named Lucius Shepard.

1:00:09And it is about Americans stationed and fighting a war in Guatemala in the 80s, I think. And it has elements of like, it's a little bit of Joseph Conrad and a little bit of Jonathan Hickman. Look what you're doing here. I like this. so Jonathan Hickman obviously a comic book writer that Andy and I love but writes a lot about psychological warfare and psychic warfare and I would say that's a huge element of this I'm still early days in this book probably about 75 pages in but again like another one of those where you get to a scene that you've read a few times before in other books but then you're like wait what did he just say but now it's multiversal or whatever like it'll be like something slithering in this guy's arm like what you know like

1:00:56Andy Greenwald:That sounds cool. Yeah, so I love this, and I've recommended this before, but the last one I'll throw out there is just London Falling, the Patrick Raddenkief book. You finished it. I did finish it, and obviously it had been excerpted to some extent in The New Yorker, or he had written a piece in The New Yorker and then wrote a full book treatment of this case of a suicide, but was it a suicide or was it a prompted suicide, and what happened to this young boy who leapt off a balcony at Canary Wharf, of all places. in London and what's happened to London over the last 25 years or so. Would you like me to weigh in on that?

1:01:33I'm sure you have plenty of opinions. Any records that you're banging right now?

1:01:37Andy Greenwald:I feel like this is the one that you would have brought up, honestly. Well, I have a couple I wanted to throw out. Specifically this God of War record. Yeah. You all about that life, right? Yeah. You talk about that. I absolutely have no right to be the one to talk about this album because they're gunning a body of water. I had Doug from there gunning a body of water on the pot last year. And this is his side project that he has with another band from Philly called Hooky. Who are awesome. Who are awesome. I've recently discovered them. And it's basically like really glitchy, gorgeous pop. Drone kind of shoegaze pop.

1:02:16Yeah. This is a short EP. You can listen to it on your drive to or from work. And it rules though. I mean, I don't know if you have any like further descriptions of it.

1:02:26Andy Greenwald:My description of it was, I think all of the verbs and adjectives that you said I was getting from my kids, I used in a text about this record. Rips Owens. I loved it. Crazy bro. I loved it. I also am really into this band called The Tubbs, who are Welsh, and they kind of are like, what if the Pogues were teenage fan club? Does that make sense? We're getting really good at describing stuff. It's almost as if this was our job 25 years ago. But it's also like, why can't we do this for TV? Why can't we just knock that out? That's our job. This is fun. Yeah. They have a new record called Hard Life coming out really soon.

1:03:04Andy Greenwald:I think it's in two weeks. And it's their first record on Merge. And every song from it has been better than the last song. And I love it. But the other thing that we do have to mention, I think I had it open here, was that the Lauren Laverne BBC 6 playlist that she did last week. which is speaking of how London has changed. So Lauren Laverne's radio BBC presenter who fronted one of my favorite 90s bands, Kinnicky. And she did a special for her show on BBC Six Music called Rave Forever 90s, where she had the drum and bass producer Goldie on to talk. And then they just played nothing but the best drum and bass bangers from the 90s for an hour.

1:03:49Which you did have a brief, but deep and passionate love affair with.

1:03:53Andy Greenwald:I would say it was passionate and quite expensive. Yes. Because you'd be like, do you want to come to Boston this weekend? And I would be like, I would love to. Unfortunately, I've just spent$40 on LTJ Bookham's Earth compilation on import, which comes in a lovely cardboard box. And the most important part about this was that we weren't going dancing. Never. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. We were very, you know, the line in Waiting for Guffman where Eugene Levy says, I wasn't the class clown, but I sat next to him and studied it. That's what I did with rave culture. Nothing was more interesting to me than the idea of taking drugs and going to large dances.

1:04:35Andy Greenwald:Can't say I did much of either at that time. Yeah. But I found it very interesting and I studied it closely. And yeah, this playlist is, I don't know what other words to use. Where is it found? Oh, if you Google, it's on bbc.co.uk if you search one of your favorite websites I mean it's bookmarks if you go to if you just search Lauren Laverne Goldie you will get this playlist you can play it off of you can play it off of their website I wonder if somebody has made a Spotify playlist of it that's why I was asking when this this song Valley of the Shadows came on by Origin Unknown I briefly left my body and saw myself from a far distance jumping rope thinking about raves that happens a lot in the books I've been reading I know I looked at my arm and I saw something squirming and it was the youth I should have had it was so intense do you know what those songs are usually like six and a half minutes long yes do you listen to the entire thing just five out well no but I'm not like because my problem with DJ sets is I'm often like this is the best collection of music I've ever heard I will now assemble it as a playlist so I can re-experience this because I'll listen to something on like NTS or whatever yeah and then you're like oh all these songs are actually five and a half minutes and it's much different if nobody's mixing them together.

1:05:48Andy Greenwald:Oh, because you're not getting the best of it. You're just getting like the whole experience. Yeah, which is totally fine. But like, I think it depends how you're experiencing music. I mean, at this point in your life, with the number of screens we have, the number of podcasts you have to do, how many playlists are you really just sitting like, you know, cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, low disposition, just experiencing? I gotta tell you something. Yeah. Not having children is remarkable. You know? nobody tells me what to do oh my god do you know how many Midnight's bonus tracks I had to listen to on the drive yesterday a couple other records I wanted to recommend the new Afghan Wigs record oh hell yeah soft control is out and it's really great Greg Dooley obviously a favorite of mine has been making records for 40 years occasional guest on this podcast his new album with the with the wigs is called soft control.

1:06:42And I would say it is a really beautiful reckoning with like his like age, you know, where it's like, I think he knows what he can and can't do anymore in terms of like what kind of music he wants to make. And it's got some really glistening, beautiful melodies on this kind of like tapestry of surprisingly like modern R &B rock songwriting. So it's really, really great.

1:07:06Andy Greenwald:Can I tell you, I think you probably have your own version of this and maybe everyone has their own version of this. But like one of my happiest moments of happenstance of like, oh, I've made it to the other side of something and I'm a different phase of my life was walking into an acupuncture clinic in Los Angeles. And Greg Dooley is sitting there and he's like, hey man. It's like, wow. Like, did he recognize you? Yeah, because I was right around when he had been on the podcast. And like once he, I think once he invited us to the Dodger, like he's a very nice man to us. We've been, like we first interviewed him on his tour bus for the Twilight Singers record in New York in 99 or 2000.

1:07:43Andy Greenwald:But just the fact that like if you had said to either of us and certainly to him in 1999 that one day you will be living a very happy and healthy life getting acupuncture somewhere in Highland Park. I think it would have been like a very much like the novel Declare. Yes. One more record I'll shout out is this band Idol County which is I think they're from North Carolina and they have a new record, a new album called Long Gone Saviors. This is my no depression shit. Yeah? This is... Back on it? I'm back on it. This is for fans of Uncle Tupelo and Sundvall, Jason Isbell, Zach Bryan, MJ Lenderman.

1:08:29It's fucking good. It's a great, great, great country rock record.

1:08:33Andy Greenwald:I want to hold up that record and instead of the NPR quote, it just says, it's fucking good, Chris Ryan. That would move units. Certainly in Silver Lake. On the title track, I have played like 50 times this week. I thought you were going to do, I thought you were going to do a little gotcha journalism with me though about music. Oh, well, we can talk about West Side Cowboy if you want to. Do it. West Side Cowboy is a British band who just released their debut album. And I think it's fantastic. I don't even know exactly what I would compare it to. I think it's just like, it's not that much different than Tubbs.

1:09:11Is it?

1:09:13Andy Greenwald:I wouldn't compare it to Tubbs, but I think they're very good. How would you describe them? I mean, musically, I think it is, I feel like it's from this. They kind of feel like Los Camposinos-y to me too. Yeah, well, there's like Black Country, New Road, Dry Cleaning. These are bands that do more spoken word stuff. Dry Cleaning does more spoken word stuff. It's not that, but it is that kind of like American influence kind of groovy percussive and then with bigger ideas thrown on top of it. I like the record a lot. But. Well, my only thing was like I, you know, you had our friend Lane Brown on talking about the way the algorithm is cooked and fixed and all this.

1:09:50Andy Greenwald:And I was like, this was served to me. And I was like, cool, this indie band, you know, obviously serves and also serves my interest to be like, oh, I wonder if I've got the drop on Chris with this one. You know, like I've discovered them first. It's not competitive. man a little bit but then you know and i'm and i'm listening to them and i like those early singles and i'm like they're on island who cares they formed two years ago who cares i just don't know how that a windhorst fingers i just don't know how that happens anymore like why would you in the year of our lord 2026 be a young band from manchester and put your first record out on a major global maybe the majors are so cooked they're taking what they can get maybe they know that like real bands are back.

1:10:31Who knows?

1:10:31Andy Greenwald:I'm not trying to diss them. I hope they earn back whatever advance they got and the record is good. But I was actually bringing it up as a point. You were like, this is a psyop. No, I didn't say it was a psyop. Yes, you did actually. You did say it was like, this is more of a psyop than geese. Neither are psyops, but this is more of a potential psyop than geese. You know where we can - Or legitimately great. We can continue this conversation at the New York Film Festival premiere of Paul Thomas Anderson's Cameron Winter concert film. that's a side up yeah that's that's a side up that's happening I know uh thanks everybody for listening uh thanks to Kai and Kaya uh for producing and we'll be back on Monday with a standalone discussion of Furious the finale which is airing on Sunday uh hopefully some guests joining us for that one yeah and then we'll be back next Thursday for regular scheduled programming i.e.

1:11:24lanterns and anything else that comes across the

1:11:26Andy Greenwald:but definitely lanterns because it's gotten short drift from us I feel like It actually has. And we like it. Yeah. Yeah. What an ending. Yeah. We call that an act out in the industry. Strong.

1:11:45This episode is brought to you by Whole Foods, who has your back to school eats sorted. Wow. We're going back to school already. They've got your fast and easy breakfast covered with frozen waffles and pancakes. Lunchboxes are looking tasty with organic seedless grapes and baby carrots and essentials like cheese sticks. Then for dinner, you can build your own meal. Choose from a variety of entrees like chicken scalopini in two sides, and it's all good too. Whole Foods has banned more than 300 food ingredients store-wide. Shop back-to-school must-haves at Whole Foods Market in-store or online. This episode is brought to you by ChatGPT.

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