Barnyard Odors

Yep, it's another episode of GLoP, where three middle-aged men wander from topic to topic like your drunk uncles at Thanksgiving—except with more references to 1970s TV pilots and less pie. This week’s meandering odyssey covers the full spectrum: wiping Faye Dunaway’s… dignity, debating whether puppies can survive her PR aura, discovering that Superman might be unpopular overseas because America is now “meh,” lamenting the death of big loud comedies (RIP, Naked Gun), and reviewing TV shows no one under 50 has heard of but everyone pretends to watch. Along the way, you’ll get unsolicited opinions on Colbert’s cancellation (spoiler: yay), the economics of late-night TV, why Hungarian tax rebates are the real star of international thrillers, and an extended meditation on historical body odor.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What do we do we get to begin this or
what are we doing?

Speaker 2 (00:02):
So I just start?

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Oh yeah, I mean okay, let's turn somehow make words.

Speaker 3 (00:06):
Go now, I mean why are you here? There must
be a reason for you to be here. Yes, I'm
here to fight for truth and justice in the American way.

Speaker 4 (00:27):
You're gonna end up fighting every elected official in this country.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
All right, well, here we are. It's August. This law
culture of John pod Horns in New York. Somewhere in
the wilds of New Jersey, I believe is rob Long, Jersey.
As we speak.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
I am here. I am in Princeton, Jersey.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
A Princeton Jersey, a beautiful place, is a problematic institution,
architecturally significant, and it has a train called the Dinky.
So these are some of the measure.

Speaker 1 (01:09):
Yes, yeah, I mean architectual significant.

Speaker 5 (01:12):
And and it foisted Woodrow Wilson on our country, so
it has a lot to answer too.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
True. Yeah, I mean architectually significant.

Speaker 2 (01:21):
Architectually notable for its.

Speaker 1 (01:23):
Beautiful I guess yes. Okay, they all look the same.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
There we go, And of course in Washington in his lair,
Jonah Goldberg, how's it going.

Speaker 1 (01:32):
It's good?

Speaker 2 (01:33):
How are you I'm good.

Speaker 5 (01:34):
I was just before we got on. I don't know.
This is probably gonna get me in a lot of trouble.
You may have maybe you've had this experience, maybe you haven't.
But like remember, like in high school, dudes used to
say about girls, oh she's good from far, but far
from good, Like if you saw him at a distance,
you thought they were looking when you got close. I
think we needed a term for that. That for people
who are really attractive in the little thumbnail avatar for

(01:57):
their Google profile or their Twitter profile, and then you
click on it to get a better look at them,
and you're like, oh, oh no, back back to the
thumbnail with you.

Speaker 2 (02:06):
Well, I don't know, thumbnails I'm offended. I'm deeply offended
because obviously you're referring to me, and so I understand
that I look better very little than I do in full.

Speaker 6 (02:19):
So John, right now, I mean, our listeners can't hear,
but I can't see, but I can describe that you
are in what we call soft focus.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
I would say that you are in.

Speaker 6 (02:29):
What some actresses would demand themselves to be filmed in constantly.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
You're right, as I look at our zoom here, I
have gone into some weird pixelated fourth. It's like the
Brood from television in nineteen seventy seven.

Speaker 1 (02:51):
Do not adjust focus.

Speaker 2 (02:53):
I didn't adjust focus in the first place.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
I don't touch anything because right now it's worth.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
The internet is working poorly in some facts, which which
is which is nothing new here on.

Speaker 1 (03:03):
Glock it is.

Speaker 2 (03:04):
I mean, it's any any technical problems.

Speaker 6 (03:07):
It's a Fade don Away kind of situation. You got
a fade down Away thing going on where she would
always demand that her shot be a soft focused and
she would go and check it just to make sure,
just to make sure that she was in fact in
soft focus.

Speaker 2 (03:21):
Okay, So here's the interesting thing about Fade down Away.
It's weird you mentioned fade dun Away because.

Speaker 6 (03:27):
From a millions ago on this podcast, it seems like
it's perfectly on brand.

Speaker 2 (03:33):
Interestingly relating to the little picture of beauty versus the
big thing.

Speaker 1 (03:38):
Sure.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Uh, Chris Starwalt texts me out of nowhere and says,
what was up with Fade down Away? Did people ever
think that she was attractive? And I was like, well, yeah,
she was unbelievably beautiful. I do think that I never
found her sexy, but she was beautiful. And he was like,
I don't know, and I said, actually she was a
really good actress, famously difficult person. And then I think

(04:04):
I may have told We're now in the glop section
where I say, I think I may have told this
story before, but I will now tell the story again.
Stipulated stipulated, Yes, all stories may have been told before that.
I had a friend who was a publicist for CBS
and Fade Down Away did a sitcom on CBS in
like nineteen ninety.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
Four, something like this is my story, but go ahead.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
No, no, this is my story about my friend whose
initials were BA, who was a publicist at CBS, who
took who was taking Fade down Away to the as
it was called the Critics Press Tour at the Universe.
This one was at the Universal City Hotel, the Universal
the show at Universal City, and I was present for

(04:50):
it and my friend, who I will leave not unnamed
because it's her story. It's thirty one years later, but
she doesn't the taurus of having exposed. Faye dun Away said,
before I do my panel, I have to go to
the bathroom. Can you show me the bathroom? My friend
takes her into the bathroom, Faye Dunaway is wearing a

(05:13):
tube dress, very skinny, you know, and like cleaning dress.
And she she calls to my friend, she's excuse me.
My friend is out waiting for her, you know, like
outside the stall, and she says, I'm having some trouble
adjusting everything. I need your help. And basically my friend

(05:37):
had to wipe fade done away and shortly thereafter left
the profession. Well that works public relations.

Speaker 6 (05:47):
Although to be honest, that was not the least dignified
thing he did.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
She public relations, she did.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
At least it was a she.

Speaker 6 (05:55):
It was the top twenty humiliating omens, but not not
number one I did. I already tell you, Mike fate
Don it's just we're to lose all.

Speaker 1 (06:07):
Of our listeners this early.

Speaker 6 (06:09):
I will tell you that she The show she was in,
I think it was the CBS was with Bob Urick,
the actor Robert Urick, and she played his literary agent,
and he played a famous novelist who had moved to
I don't know, rural somewhere and she moved with him
and kind of a green acres thing, and and it
was a comedy. You have our comedy, which so somebody

(06:30):
had some kind of weird brain aneurysm in CBS who said,
I know Fate down Away for this sitcom, So they
put her in a sitcom. Of course, they test focus
group everything, and they focused group the first half of
the season, and the show's not doing very well. Everybody
loves Urick. Nobody loves her. Everybody hates her. They hate her,
they hate her. Dials down on Faye down Away, dials down,

(06:50):
way down. Everything they tried, they couldn't get her dials up.
And this show knew they needed to do something, because
you know CBS, especially reallies entirely on audience reads arch
to make the decision. So they decided to do an
entire episode that they knew was going to be focus
grouped in which fate Alick has to take care of
a box of puppies.

Speaker 1 (07:12):
The theory being that puppy.

Speaker 6 (07:14):
Everyone has puppies, so like she will bask in the
glow of the dials up warm feeling of a box
of puppies. And so they took it and they focus
grouped it, and it turns out that everybody hated the
puppies too.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
Like she was so toxic.

Speaker 6 (07:30):
She was so toxic that she made puppies unlikable, and
I think that.

Speaker 1 (07:35):
That's pretty that's uh, you know, that is an accomplishment.
Put it that way.

Speaker 2 (07:40):
Got to give her, gotta give her credit. I mean,
the thing about her was that she was willing to
play difficult, unpleasant and unsympathetic women at a time when
that was something that a lot of actresses would not do. Right,
she was Evelent Mulray in Chinatown, famously unpleasant. Of course,
her oscar was for playing a like a gorgon the

(08:02):
Network that Diana Christensen in in Network. Uh, and you
know Bonnie and Bonnie and Clyde, and she that was her.
And of course then Joan Crawford like she played unsympathetic
people and uh, and obviously that was typecasting.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (08:20):
The first thing about her is she never had to
ask the director, what's my motivation?

Speaker 1 (08:27):
Anyway, She stayed in character the whole time. In fact,
she's still I have.

Speaker 2 (08:32):
To say, I'm very puzzled by the fact that Starwalt
was somehow allergic or unable to appreciate her beauty, because
she was certainly astonishing.

Speaker 1 (08:43):
Do you think.

Speaker 6 (08:43):
That's a thing though, I mean, I mean, just to
broaden the conversation to include our listeners to the twenty
first century.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
Sidney sweety yeah, can we just we can.

Speaker 1 (08:58):
Okay? Can I can I finish? Do we think that.

Speaker 6 (09:03):
Levels of attractiveness or the way we define attractiveness has
radically shifted in the past twenty thirty years? And I
think it has in only one sense, in that fitness
is I mean, everyone is sort of much more fit
than they ever were. I mean, if you watch old
movies where Kerry Grant takes off his shirt, you're like, yee, dude,

(09:25):
lay off the bread.

Speaker 5 (09:26):
Johnny Weismuller did not have a six pack app as
toz No, No, he looked like a seal. Yeah, I
mean he had some six packs. But that's the difference.

Speaker 6 (09:34):
Yeah, And so, I mean so I guess that is
part of the part of what.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
I don't know. Things change, right, I mean they there
was a thing. Was it Napoleon? I can't forget.

Speaker 6 (09:45):
Maybe it's Louis the sixteenth who was returning home. I
think it was Napoleon returning home after some war or
campaign and he wrote to his either.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
Was Josephine or Louis? Was Maria?

Speaker 6 (09:57):
Tent out of something like He's wrote I will be
home and weeks don't bathe?

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Well, those are those are those are those are changing standards.
That is that is for that is, that.

Speaker 1 (10:12):
Is for dur bathe.

Speaker 5 (10:14):
So was it just who was Josephine the one who
had no teeth? And well, Napoleon had a lover for
whom historians have been trying to figure out in in
his letters about how much he loved and it was
like some expression the zigzags or something like that.

Speaker 1 (10:33):
Okay, I got it, I got it up.

Speaker 2 (10:36):
I'm looking in my explain Andrew Roberts's biography. It does
explain how everything that Andrew has written except that book
and uh, and how.

Speaker 6 (10:47):
That it does explain how long ago that was that
a person felt it was necessary to specify to somebody
in France to not bathe like that's those are eons ago.
My god, you know the world is tilted on different
access now.

Speaker 5 (11:02):
It's like someone writing from Newcastle bring cold.

Speaker 2 (11:06):
I mean, I mean, isn't that whatever? Is that what
everybody says about? How? And I think this is true
of seventy years ago, let alone one hundred and fifty
years ago. That you know, if you went in the
time machine, you went back in time. The thing that
would get you the worst was the smell that we

(11:30):
we don't even understand how much cleaner the air is,
how much how how how much people take care of
their personal hygiene so that and you know how air
conditioning and stuff like that has kept people from living
in a state of complete, particularly in summers, obviously in

(11:51):
complete like sweat, body odor, dampness, right.

Speaker 6 (11:55):
Though, I mean, I know, but I still feel like
this is probably the least pleasant conversation ever.

Speaker 1 (11:59):
But it feels like it should we should have.

Speaker 5 (12:02):
Let's get back to washing starlet's assess.

Speaker 1 (12:10):
An odor for a minute, like and I can we
stop you it?

Speaker 3 (12:13):
No.

Speaker 6 (12:14):
It is also a personal anecdote that there are, of course,
you know, people who taste wine. There's a wine tasting category.
You say, when you taste a certain burguend to yourselfing,
you say, has barnyard odors, And you swirl it and
you try, and sometimes that's something that you want. Barnyard
odors means the the manure manure of a of an herbivore, right,
which is different from the manure of a carnivore. But

(12:36):
manure and the smell of feces is kind of like
it's unpleasant, but you know, you know what, I don't know,
it's like, okay, right, it's okay.

Speaker 1 (12:44):
Sewage.

Speaker 6 (12:44):
You kind of maybe smell it, you know, smell it
walking down the street in New York City. I was
gone for about a month from my home and and
it was in Europe, and during that time I was
in Africa.

Speaker 1 (12:57):
And then during that time.

Speaker 6 (12:59):
There was some worms here and the power went out
and then the power, I guess, came back on at
some point, and the power search was so great that
it knocked out my internet. But it also for some
reason fried the refrigerator. So the power came back on,
the refrigerator did not come back on. So that must
have happened, you know, several weeks before I arrived home

(13:21):
at late at night on a late flight to enter
my home, which smelled like a Charnel house. It smelled
unbelievably terrible, the worst smell ever worked. I mean, the
smell of human feces, the smell of animal fece.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Eh, you know, whatever.

Speaker 6 (13:37):
It's not great, but whatever, but I would have that
would have been an improvement to the smell of rotting food,
rotting meat, which permeated the entire house for two weeks,
and it was so I guess, I guess what I'd
like to say.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
You do? What did you do? How did you get
it out of the house?

Speaker 1 (13:53):
I I empty.

Speaker 6 (13:55):
I threw everything out of from the refrigerator right and
put it in the little back garbage ship. So that
stuff for five days until they can be collected. Anyway,
that's not my job. And then I I kind of
wiped it down with these chloroxy lyesyl bleech wipes and
put all the trays in the boxes and everything in
the dishwasher for seventeen times. And then I went and

(14:16):
bought four cans of coffee and I put it on
four plates and left the door of the refrigerator open
and put a fan pointing to the door. And by
day nine, and I really mean day nine, you couldn't
really smell it.

Speaker 2 (14:30):
So wow, Because what about the rest of the house.
Did you like candles? I mean, what did you what did.

Speaker 1 (14:35):
You I like candles of course all the time, as
you know, well, I know, because you're you're in seminary,
Yeah exactly.

Speaker 2 (14:40):
Well, the first of all, there's prayer and then there's of.

Speaker 1 (14:43):
Course devotional Yeah, yes.

Speaker 5 (14:46):
So because I don't know when I'll ever have an
opportunity on this podcast or any other. When you were
talking about smelling this, it reminded me. I've been reading
what God hath wrought this book about America from eighteen
fifteen to eighteen forty two, so to speak, eighteen fifty
and there's this great passage that really stuck out with me,
and I opened it up on my kindle. I'll read quickly.

(15:08):
Life in America in eighteen fifteen was dirty, smelly, laborious,
and uncomfortable. People spent most of their waking hours working
with scant opportunity for the development of individual talents and
interest unrelated to farming. Cobbler made shoes, being expensive and uncomfortable,
country people of ordinary means went barefoot much of the time.
White people of both sexes were heavy fabrics, covering their

(15:29):
bodies even in the human heat of summer, for they
believe correctly sunshine bad for their skin. People usually owned
only a few changes of clothes and stank of sweat.
Only the most fastidious bathed as often as once a week.
Since water had to be carried from a spring or
well and heated in a kettle, people gave them spells
gave themselves sponge bathses using the washed up Some bathed

(15:51):
once a year in the spring, but as late as
eighteen thirty two, a New England country doctor complained that
four out of five of his patients did not bathe
from one year to the next.

Speaker 2 (16:06):
That's well, there's that story about the cowboys, right, the
cowboys would come into town for their annual bath. Right
that you would go into Fort Worth or you know,
a town in tech after a cattle drive and you
would have your annual bath, and you would your annual bath.

(16:26):
So yeah, so that's the thing about this is the
interesting phenomenon because we don't we don't know how good
we have it in this respect that we don't have
to deal with this question.

Speaker 6 (16:42):
Yeah, but if it always smells bad.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, then it doesn't smell bad anymore or whatever.

Speaker 3 (16:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (16:48):
Yeah, yeah, Like you know, it's like it's like if
everything is like it's sort of like politics and culture. Right,
if everything is terrible and weird, you just have to
have a hard time remembering what's terrible and weird.

Speaker 5 (16:58):
That's it, everybody, Thanks for thanks for listening, Thanks for listening.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
Okay, so we are we are being we have been
requested by our producer, Scott Emergot to discuss the cancelation
of of Stephen Colbert. Right, So here's what I have
to say about that. Yay. I don't really have much

(17:23):
else to say except yeay. I hate him. I've hated
him for years. He's not funny. I don't need to
be preached. You know, if I want to listen to
a televangelist, I will listen. I don't want to listen
to any televangelists, but I certainly don't need to listen
to a liberal televangelist at the eleven.

Speaker 1 (17:40):
Thirty at night.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
And I'm very happy that he had been retired, hasn't
been retired. He's getting ten months two wind down, so
muzzle talk to him. It's all I have to say
is yay. Is there anything else say but yeay?

Speaker 1 (17:57):
I would just say I did.

Speaker 6 (17:58):
The only thing I would want to be persnickety about
because I had this argument with a good friend of mine,
is that Stephen Colbert was not fired and he was
not canceled. His show was canceled. The category was canceled,
so it doesn't make any money. It was really invented
out of whole cloth, just to find a place for
David Letterman. It's a very very very very competitive category

(18:21):
in which the profit overall profit's gone way down, So
the pie is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking, and there
are more people slicing it and slicing it. It made
no financial sense to have that show on.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
It isn't.

Speaker 6 (18:32):
I mean all the people screaming yelling about how oh
my god, you know, he's been censored because he was
too liberal anti Trump.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
The show has been canceled.

Speaker 6 (18:39):
If they really wanted to koutout at Trump, they would
have hired somebody who was a political They didn't they
because it doesn't make any money, and so it's just
important for.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
It was losing, losing, And there was a point at
which Johnny Carson made was it forty percent of the
annual profit of NBC came.

Speaker 1 (18:57):
Oh yeah, Carson was amazing.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
Nobody means forty percent of the profit of a nationwide network.
And he got paid a lot of the three and
he got paid I think the equivalent of two hundred
million dollars a year or something like that when you
took in everything cuts. He got of avertisements and he
worked three days a week and stuff like that like
he did. And by the way, that's an interesting aspect

(19:20):
of this which is a little discussed, is these guys
now I think Jimmy Kimmel and ABC takes the summer off.
But for years the idea was and Leno I think
started this when he came on and was like he
and he and Letterman were locked in more. You know,
Carson had guest host, Carson took ten weeks off, Carson
only did three days a week, blah blah blah. And

(19:41):
as a result of that, he was able to stay
on the air for thirty five years or something like that.
And these guys will not get off the stage like
they want. If they have an hour, they're there for
an hour. They're there two hundred times a year, an
hour every night, and it's like, I wonder they seem
to burn out or not before or get old, or

(20:04):
it's like all old and nobody wants to watch it,
like it's too much. It's like having a podcast every day.

Speaker 5 (20:13):
It's just too much, just too much.

Speaker 1 (20:15):
The audience has fatigue.

Speaker 2 (20:17):
The audience has fatigue.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
You end up just sounding like it's a machine.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
You can just those podcasts where people are on every
single day they just say the same things over and
over and over and over.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
It's just too much, too much.

Speaker 5 (20:31):
So uh, I'm so many ways I could go with this,
but keep it, keep it on Colbert for a moment. Yeah.
I mean, like all the analysis has been said, it
was a broadcast show in a narrow cast media environment. YadA, YadA, YadA.
All that stuff is true. He's doing fan service and

(20:52):
he just had he just had Robert Reisch on his
show because that's what you know, that's what the young'ins
really want.

Speaker 2 (21:00):
Well, he needed someone to pick up that thing that
was between the desk and the wall. You know, no
one else to it.

Speaker 5 (21:08):
But I do think that there's one part of which
is probably worth just sort of glancing over here, one
part of the conservative criticism that I think is wrong
that got a lot of currency out there. You know,
we've talked about a million times that old you know,
Roger All's genius was to discover this niche half the

(21:30):
country argument right and the the whole. And there were
a lot of Conservatis saying doing this whole like Colbert
was only speaking to his fan base, and that's an
MSNBC fan base, and he was sharing it with two
other networks. And I think that's all true. And then
they would saying, look, look at the ratings that Gutfield gets.

(21:51):
The shows that like, you don't have to be a
left winger, YadA YadA dah. Also true. What they kind
of miss is that Gutfield's ratings, which are good for
a which are great for a cable show and better
than a lot of these broadcast networks, it's still just
another niche. It is not you know, he's not getting
Carson numbers or anything like that. And he's just as

(22:12):
partisan on the right as Colbart is on the left.
The thing is like his show costs a tenth as much.
And I do think there are a lot of people
who elided over this point that that gut Faeld doesn't
prove you can do mainstream stuff. It proves that you,
if you get your cost structure right, you can do

(22:34):
niche stuff successfully.

Speaker 6 (22:36):
Well, yeah, I mean I think that's true. I mean
I don't know whether I you know, I have written
about this. Once the audience gets split into twelve pieces
and eleven of them are all one partisan side, then
the guy who is the only one is going to
clean up. Yeah, but if Leno and or Carson were

(22:56):
still in a chair, there will be no Greg Guttfeldt.
I mean we only the conservatives or sort of right
leaning types don't want to be hectored about politics by
the left. They don't mind it from the right, especially
they sort of rabbit. I mean, once you start saying,

(23:17):
all I want is a million people, but you can
always get a million crazies who or rabid diehards who
will watch you and laugh at every joke you make.
But the other problem with all these shows is that
even a successful TV show, people who say to them,
who say to people, I love Colbert, I love Colbert,
and then you ask them, Okay, how many times a

(23:39):
week you watch it?

Speaker 5 (23:40):
Nurse, I love Colbert? How do I work this remote?

Speaker 1 (23:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 5 (23:44):
Right?

Speaker 6 (23:44):
What they What you find is they either don't watch it,
they watch the clips on TikTok or Instagram, or they
watch it once a week and now they think they
watch it every day, but they don't.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
Nobody does.

Speaker 6 (23:54):
So once you start splitting the audience like that, then
the guy that has the most reliable slice this is
the guy who does the best.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
And this is the other part of where the bias
argument does work. Because I agree with you that if
you can dominate a niche, then you are a niche.
You're niche programming, but can be very successful. But ordinarily
in a world in which like this podcast, totally like
this podcast. Ordinarily in a world like that, Guttfeld comes on,

(24:24):
he sort of figures out how to get two or
three million people or whatever it is. He gets it,
and then somebody would chase, like somebody would say, Okay,
he's figured out a formula, let's do a show like his.
But they don't. You see, they don't the other CNN
and MSNBC don't Chase, and CBSNBC and ANBC don't chase.

(24:50):
Just like Angels Studios comes out, they make Sound of Freedom.
Sound of Freedom makes two hundred and fifty million dollars domestic,
and everybody says, oh, you know, in Hollywood, all they
care about is profit. If you can show that you
can make money, you can make a profit, they'll make
the move. That's they're not idiologically driven. They want money
and that's all they want. And all this, where are

(25:11):
the other Sounds of Freedom? It's been through by the way.
Sound of Freedom was made for Fox five years before
it was released and they put it on a shelf.
So there is that weird aspect of this, which is
that underserved audience that Fox has made billions and billions
of dollars on. It has made billions of billions dollars

(25:33):
on for two decades or twenty five years, because it's
still so toxic to everybody else in the news and
entertainment business to even touch the Fox audience that they
have been, they have left it unmolested and totally in
the hands of Rupert and Lachlan and whoever else and

(25:56):
whoever it is that they put on the air. And
that's what's interesting as a market as a bizarre market failure.

Speaker 5 (26:02):
I have slightly different take on that. So, like part
of our argument when we were launching the Dispatch was
this market gap argument that like, there's this eight hundred
pound gorilla of Fox, and then there's a lot of
the mainstream media and there's this stuff. You know, the
economist is sort of in this space. But there are
not a lot of things in the that white gap
that value reporting that are right of center but aren't

(26:24):
like Foxy. And the funny thing is there are a
bunch of places that have tried it. Oh, an started
trying to make that kind of argument, right, And the
problem is is that the sticky eyeballs for cable news

(26:44):
want want red meat, want the raw stuff. And so
O N decided it was going to go crazier than
Fox as the model. So did Newsmax right, and that
the model became Fox has gone to stream to tell
you that the election really was stolen, at least in
its news reporting, and so they went even nuttier. And

(27:06):
that freaked the crap out of Fox because the one
thing they couldn't their brains couldn't handle was being first
of all, losing in the ratings than any fifteen minute increment.
But secondly, you know, I had to go to school
on this because I got I got subpoena and for
the dominion lawsuit stuff, and they had to go They
couldn't freak. They completely freaked out and change their internal

(27:27):
policies in response to Martha McCallum losing for one hour
during the recount crap not recount, the stolen election stuff,
and all of these plans, the pivot back to the
center and be more serious went out the window because
they can just they know everyone's cutting chords. They know
that their viewers are gonna be the last ones to

(27:48):
cut chords. And it's a giant ATM machine, so you
might as well keep pandering for as long as it's
throwing off cash. And they had to crush Newsmax and
Oan for biting into that business model.

Speaker 6 (28:02):
And yeah, I mean the interesting thing about all that
is how much these things develop and how often what
they say they want to do then meets market realities
and they have to change. So I mean, Newsmax went
on TV, became a network, and the business plan of
Newsmax was old people lifestyle stuff. It was not supposed

(28:23):
to be. They didn't want politics. They just want an
old people lifestyle. They wanted vitamins and wellness and culture
of stuff. They wanted all that. And I remember that
because the guy who runs and told me this. And
then you get there and you start, you know, you
start looking and it gets hard and you got to
make the money. And then there's this, you know, there's
this machine where you can make some money and you

(28:44):
and you keep saying to yourself, well, we own you
do this for a little bit, and then we're going
to pivot back to the stuff that isn't toxic and
isn't gonna bring us all down or cost us a
lot of money eventually. That doesn't work, right. I Mean,
the only thing I think you could maybe say as
successful has been the rebranding, which was never done publicly
or never announcement. You could see it on the programming

(29:06):
of Fox Nation, which was supposed to be Fox Nation,
supposed to be the looney bit, right, so everybody who's
too crazy for the for TV, who might get a sued,
We're gonna put on the streaming service and it's gonna
be bananas.

Speaker 1 (29:17):
It's going to be diamond and Silk and Dan Bongino
and all sorts of thing.

Speaker 6 (29:21):
Deputy sorry, Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
Like all that.

Speaker 6 (29:28):
And they discovered that that and they were committing directly
with newsbacks, and they decided that was probably not a
valuable thing to do. It was just too stinky to
the brand. So then they pivoted and now they have
like you know, they have fancy program they good program
in Fox Nation. It's really I mean, I've worked for it,
I've done shows for I'm hoping you do another one.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
And they're great. I mean, they're it's a really great network.
They have really really good.

Speaker 6 (29:48):
Shows, and then Martin Scorsese won and they have you know,
they had the one I did, and they have a
bunch of things, and they are they they understand who
their audience is, but they're not trying to they're not
trying to pander to its politics. Just to as sort
of kind of cultural stance. You really do have to

(30:08):
be able to read the tea leaves to watch Fox Nation, and.

Speaker 2 (30:10):
The basic Fox station is basically the twenty four hour
documentary version of a Budweiser commercial during the Super Bowl
or a Chevrolet commercial during the super Bowl. It's light focus.
America is great, and it's a country of individualists who.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
It's nineteen fifties A and E. Nineteen fifty Yeah, on that.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
That is a good market position. Again, not only does
it not only is it serving an underserved audience. And
it's a subscription service, so they'll know if it doesn't work,
and they'll just close it down or they'll sell it,
or they'll do something else. But again, you're talking about

(30:53):
a kind of view or vision or projection of the
country that you just don't get elsewhere, and that is
part of how you open a market up. There is
this thing going on, and Jonah, you and I should
you and I should discourse on this Superman movie opened, right,

(31:18):
it's the first Superman movie since Man of.

Speaker 5 (31:21):
Steel, since the last one, for sure, No.

Speaker 2 (31:25):
But I mean there was one with called Man of Steel.
Then Superman was in various movies with Batman the Justice.
But Man of Steel, which was in two thousand and
nine and was the humorless brooding Superman fighting the other
Kryptonians after you know, came in after a previous one.

(31:46):
And then there was Christopher Reeve. So here we have
this new Superman and it's doing really well at the
domestic box office, and it's apparently not doing particularly well overseas.
The Chinese market is now basic. China's decided it does
not want to open its cinemas to American movies. It

(32:06):
is now making a lot of movies on its own.
The most popular movie of twenty twenty five is a
Chinese animated movie called Neja two, which has made two
point two billion dollars, almost not of it here. I
think it's made eighteen million dollars here, and you know,
two billion dollars in China and then money abroad. So
Superman's made about three hundred and fifty million dollars here.

(32:29):
It's not making money abroad. And there is this line
that is now being peddled that the reason that Superman
is not popular outside the United States is because the
world now hates America because of Donald Trump, and they
don't want Superman is an American hero and not a
world hero, and they don't like him, and yeah, bah blah,

(32:53):
bah blah, and the thin I don't maybe it's true.
I don't know. Maybe people don't want to see the
most famous the character that originated comic books and made
comic books popular and is the oldest character in comics

(33:13):
except for Batman. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 5 (33:16):
So uh, there's a great irony in this, right, because
I was guilty of it too. Hollywood kept trying to
make Superman a globalist, right, a citizen of the world,
diogenies and tights, right, and and concerned, you know, they

(33:36):
cut out and the American Way from some of them
and all that kind of stuff, and and it was
one of those sort of minor pop culture culture war truveralls.
And so it's kind of funny that now the if
it's true that the headwind for Superman is because he's
an American, that that we're getting that when America during

(34:01):
America first stuff. I look, I don't know, I'm torn.
I suspect that some of it is a superhero fatigue, right,
I mean, we were talking about that twenty minutes ago
before this movie, so obviously that's got to be a thing.
A lot of Marvel movies, you know, petered out because
people were just like enough already. Disney doesn't do as
well as Marvel movies, though, do for good reason, because

(34:24):
it's worth worst content. And so I don't know. I mean,
I think it's entirely possible. I remember one of the
I think the first piece I ever wrote for National
Review was about how the guys who had made Independence
Day their follow on movie was Godzilla, the Matthew Broderick
Godzilla and independancegue I got all this blowback because it

(34:49):
was too American and that America was leading in the
world and all this kind of stuff. And so the
Godzilla movie, the American Army were all hapless losers and
idiot It's the American political leadership was all losers. The
only real badasses who knew what they were doing were
the French, and I think that there's some gaming like that,

(35:14):
you know, for these kinds of things. I just didn't
the only thing I and this is the only thing
where I actually disagree with you, and I'm loath to
bring in Israel. So I was I think it was
more anti Israel than you're you've given it credit for.
And I want to be really clear, I think that
the one of the few things that all of John's
detractors and his super fans will agree on is that

(35:36):
John has very sensitive antennae for insults to the State
of Israel and the Jews. And so when you told
me that it's all stupid, I was like, well, John
says that it's got to be true. And then I
watched it with my daughter, and my daughter like immediately
that they're talking about Israel and and I kind of

(35:58):
waved her off and said, we'll talk about it afterwards.
And then, you know, I understand why people had that interpretation.

Speaker 2 (36:05):
Morea we should explain for people who haven't seen the
movie that Superman involves himself in a cross border war
between a country that is clearly run by a Vladimir
Putin substitute and a defenseless country on his border. Uh,
and everything is being manipulated by Lex Luthor in some

(36:27):
fashion and I can't even remember what, and that the
cross border of the people that he is attacking look
vaguely Middle Eastern and as though they literally just come
out of Lawrence of Arabia or something. They're sort of
like in desert clothing there there. I don't know. They

(36:48):
they have vests, woolen vests, and they have sticks.

Speaker 5 (36:53):
And standing around in.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
A musical note whenever they appear, and it goes.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
No, no, no, it's just that they're staying there facing this.
They're facing this, you know, like first World army, and
then they're a bunch of ragtag rebels. And people have
read this as though this is clearly meant to read
like the Palestinians in Gaza. But I didn't read it

(37:27):
that way for this reason, which is that the antagonist
is Putin and the movie was written and started filming
in twenty twenty three, and remember October seven didn't start
happening until October of twenty twenty three, and so I

(37:49):
thought it was clear that it was supposed to be
some kind of Ukraine thing, except that the Ukrainians look
more like Afghanis than they did like Ukrainians. I don't
dispute that if you watch it in twenty twenty five,
after the last two years, when you look at the
at these people that Superman is trying to protect from

(38:11):
from the evil Putin guy, that that they you, that's
how you would read it. I just don't think that
that was what was intended. But what do I know?

Speaker 5 (38:21):
Okay, So two data points three data points. One, we
should stipulate that the movie is pretty stupid. I mean,
it's fun, but we shouldn't take it too seriously. But
this is a serious interpretation that people are having, right.
So second, the I agree that it's supposed to have
some overtones of the Russia thing too. It's like an amalgam,

(38:43):
but the leader of the evil country kind of talks
more like an Ariel Sharon and looks more like in
Israeli with the with the weird Harry doesn't look like
Vladimir Putin. And he gives this little speech at one
point where he says, America and Zavonia, whatever the name
of the country is, we had a rock solid alliance

(39:05):
until Superman got in the way. Going back decades, we've
never had a Rocksoud alliance with Vladimir Putin right, and
so it was. And also just the unbelievably I mean
you called them the innocent victims whatever rebels. I mean,

(39:26):
they were like literally like holding I don't know, mops
and sticks and stuff, and so it just it seemed
like a hamhanded way to it. If it was trying
to play off of Ukraine, it kind of failed miserably,
I thought, and lent aid and comfort to people who

(39:47):
wanted to say it was about Israel.

Speaker 1 (39:49):
I agree.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
The country the countries in the bad country is called Bravia.
And the country that they invade with the people with
the sticks who were Superman protect who super Instrra, it's
called Jarhanpour. So we're Braven. President's name is a vasil Gurkhos.
So I don't know, Jarhanpour sounds south like it's South Asia. Anyway,

(40:16):
I'm not defending it it is. I enjoyed it. I
enjoyed much of the movie. I wish that it hadn't
gone into this weird place where he's in the anti
matter river that's leading to the black hole and stuff
like that. What was good about it was what is

(40:39):
always good about Superman movies, which is the conflict between
Superman and Lex Luthor, which is always good, and the
relationship between Superman and Lois Lane, which is always good.
And the how he saves people from efforts to trash
them and say he saves them and invent ways and

(41:01):
that's really good. And some of the other superheroes are
funnier than I expected.

Speaker 5 (41:06):
Yeah, I otherwise it's I had to have Tevy Troy,
our friend Tevy Troy explained to me why is Green
Lantern such an unbelievable dickhead? And he explained it to me,
it's a new character, blah blah, but it's a thing
in the comics. The one complaint I have, and it's
true of his Suicide Squad movies too, James Gunn Yeah,

(41:27):
the James Gunner director.

Speaker 1 (41:28):
Yeah, it's like.

Speaker 5 (41:30):
They want these things to be so visually distinct from Marvel.
That but Marvel took all of the good set colors
and paint colors and costume colors, the whole all the
good palette. And so that's a lot of like Japanese
lunchbox pink and weird color profiles that I just I

(41:53):
think there's a reason why Marvel doesn't use those colors
because it's kind of stupid.

Speaker 2 (41:57):
So the whole thing kind of look. I got to
move on, and Rob is looking like he wants to.

Speaker 6 (42:02):
No. I'm actually sort of interesting because when you mentioned
I mean, this is not minutes ago. But I made
a little note because when you mentioned the antimatter thing
and then the black hole, I thought what was interesting
was their comment that the components of traditional science fiction.

Speaker 2 (42:20):
No, but I do have to ask Jonah, because Jonah
is a comic book person and there is this big
comic book movie that came out Fantastic four.

Speaker 1 (42:28):
First steps were moving on, but I guess we're not.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
No, I just want to do two minutes on this
and then move on. So as I understand it, Fantastic four,
which debut I think at the beginning of the sixties.
This is now like the seventeenth effort to reboot the
Fantastic Four. And it looks really good. And because it

(42:52):
looks like The Incredibles, it's like a live action version.
It's like their way of making them.

Speaker 1 (42:58):
A giant first weekend, giant first weekend.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
And then and then it collapsed. But it looks like Incredibles,
and I think the Fantastic four is unbelievably stupid as
a I don't understand why. I mean, I didn't read
that's so, there's stretchy arms, there's his Mariland. Now this
is the other thing is his wife looks like supposed

(43:22):
to look like Marilyn Monroe, but can make herself invisible.
Why Marilyn Monroe want to make herself invisible is not clear.
My brother can light himself on fire and fly, and
then this good looking guy ends up looking like a
giant rock monster, and I guess they all have are
tortured by their various powers and abilities, except in this

(43:43):
version of it, the rock monster guy has no problems
being a rock monster. He doesn't think he's ugly, he's
not complaining about being ugly. The one who slights himself
on fire is perfectly happy to light himself on fire.
She's fine, everybody's fine, there's no conflict, and the powers

(44:04):
are dumb. They're just dumb, Like I so am I wrong?
Like this? Was this a great comic book and it
really like crystallized what was great about comics, and the
movies just haven't been able to match the magic of it.

Speaker 5 (44:20):
Or yeah, I think that's it. I mean, I honestly do.
I mean like, there were all sorts of comics that
just for years didn't lend themselves to making movies about them,
and then CGI kind of caught up and all that
kind of stuff. And the problem is is that I
just think the Fantastic Four, which was a great comic
in its day, doesn't lend itself to it. So it
was kind of smart for them to do the homage

(44:44):
to the Incredibles, which was an homage to the Fantastic
for in the first place, kind of thing. I haven't
seen it yet, but Cliff Asnes, who's even more are
Friendclys Avenues and the subject of the commentary roast this year,
it was even more of a comic book nerd than
I am, and he really liked it.

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Okay, that's all I got for it. It is great
looking great. Now here's something else, a movie that I
think I've seen that you guys probably have not seen,
that I strongly want to urge people to see, though
it'll probably be streaming in about a week because it
really didn't make any money and so the window will close.
But it's this film Eddington, made by the director or

(45:22):
right director Ari Astor.

Speaker 5 (45:24):
Which mister Fantastic in it.

Speaker 2 (45:25):
With pedropuscal in it right, which is about a town
that goes insane in the early days of COVID in
New Mexico, and it is a movie about America losing
its mind over COVID, and it is brilliant, and it
is brilliant because it accepts it. It provides a framework

(45:50):
in which all arguments about COVID are taken seriously, and
all arguments about what happens in America during COVID from
the left. You need to wear You're gonna make other
people sick. And you can't just walk around doing whatever
you want, because we live in a society in which
we need to be able to think about each other.

(46:11):
Or I have asthma. I can't wear a mask. Leave
me alone. I'm six staying six feet away from you.
Stop yelling at me, Let me be. And the conflicts
that arise that get more and deep and more and
more and more crazy, until in the most amazing twist

(46:33):
of all, Antifa actually shows up. There's a George Wood
protest in this empty little town in New Mexico and
Antifa shows up, and it is a sort of portrait
of America gone insane in twenty twenty, and it is remarkable.
I mean, I wouldn't say that it's the most pleasant.
It's very nerve jangling.

Speaker 5 (46:54):
Yeah, that's why I'm reluctant to see.

Speaker 2 (46:55):
But it is great, and like, there's so few movies
that are any good anymore, like The Naked Gun. I
went to see the reboot of The Naked Gun. It's
like I laughed seven or eight times, but it's so
wand you know, and it's like you remember how explosively

(47:18):
funny those movies were, and then you make a wan
new version of it, and you know it's got to
be better, not worse, Like it's got to actually improve
on the original, not be a kind of pale reflection.
So I haven't they a wild comedy and then make
a less wild version of a wild comedy and then

(47:40):
think that's supposed to be open.

Speaker 5 (47:41):
So I haven't seen it, but I have a theory
about why a lot of those kinds of movies stopped
being made. And be curious what you guys think. So
I thought the Police Squad Show TV show was fantastic.
It only thought lasted like what six six episodes? Six episodes?

Speaker 2 (47:56):
Right?

Speaker 5 (47:58):
And I think that part of the problem is sort
of like that movie Top Secret, and there's the airplane movies.

Speaker 1 (48:06):
Right.

Speaker 5 (48:07):
You need a mass audience that has grown up on
certain plot conventions and certain sort of structures that you
feel like, oh, I know what's gonna happen, because this
is the formula for every episode of Dragnet and Streets
of San Francisco and everything blah blah blah, And so

(48:27):
you have it's a double edged sword problem. On the
one hand, the people who do know all of that stuff,
they've heard the joke already, right, so like you can't
keep playing on those things once you've punctured all of them.
And then on the other hand, younger people they don't
know them, right, they haven't seen enough episodes of Banichick
and Matt Bock or whatever.

Speaker 1 (48:48):
Sort of soundchick good.

Speaker 6 (48:50):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think that's probably true. I mean,
I guess the Police Squad didn't really work so well
on TV. I think because there was no place for it, right,
I mean, TV, especially then was really about making sure
there's a programming flow, and you know, there was there's
such a tone shift between Naked Gun, which was I mean,
between Police, Police Squad and everything else around it that

(49:15):
I think it was hard for it to have a
home even though it was incredibly funny.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
And and interesting.

Speaker 6 (49:21):
It lives very very I mean must live prominently on
TikTok because I see clips of it constantly. And then
of course then the Naked Gun movies sort of like
took over that sort of event kind of thing where
you go and you'd sit there and they'd be making
jokes you didn't know you you know, the Queen of
England would be thrown naked into the.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
You know, pig trough or something like that.

Speaker 2 (49:43):
Yeah, it's great.

Speaker 1 (49:45):
So I don't know about this one.

Speaker 6 (49:46):
I mean, this one feels to me like what I
don't want to have happened is for it to not
work and then people to say, oh, this stuff doesn't work,
because it does work, because big loud, noisy, you know,
dumb comedies work.

Speaker 2 (50:00):
What's wrong with is it's not big loud and noisy.

Speaker 1 (50:02):
That's yeah, Actually I just have to get the execution right.

Speaker 6 (50:06):
Yeah, but the category, I mean, people in show business
now are just removing things from the categories because they
did a bad version of it and because they are
now risk averse because of all the things have been
going on, and that is gonna you're gonna get it's
gonna get smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller, like well, okay,
well pretty soon you're not gonna know. The only way

(50:26):
you're gonna know you can make a movie is if
if you're willing to spend five hundred million dollars on it.
And that is the beauty of the naked gun movies.
The beauty of those kinds of comedies is then you
don't have to spend five hundred million dollars on it,
and you can put it on in the summer when
people kind of want to go to the movie theater
and watch a stupid movie. And I just to me,
it's baffling why that product that product line is is disappearing,

(50:51):
Because if McDonald suddenly said, you know, we're not going
to be so much about the burgers.

Speaker 2 (50:55):
Okay, So I uh, two things about that, one of
which is for some reason, COVID killed the comedy twenty
eighteen and twenty nineteen. David Poland, the sort of a
film analyst guy, pointed out that they made there were
twenty five studio comedies in twenty eighteen and twenty seven

(51:17):
studio comedies in twenty nineteen and this year there are three.
And what happened was COVID? How why COVID killed off
the studio. There's all sorts of things, you know, George
Floyd did it? Yea, you know me too did it?
And all that. And they were still making them. They
were still making them and they weren't very good. Was
part of the problem. And then you really, comedy doesn't

(51:39):
the big noisy comedy is something you want to see
in a theater the way you want to see a
horror movie in a theater, because it's a communal experience.
You want to hear other people laughing. That's part of
the pleasure of it. And for some reason it died.
We don't and your our friend Roy Price has many
theories about this, and yes, can this category come back,
It can absolutely come back. This is not one of them,

(52:00):
but I do think that some of it. So there's
the show The Boys, which both Jonah and I really like,
and The Boys is the Naked Gun of the Superhero movie,
by which I mean it is a show and it's
gone four seasons and all that, which is about what

(52:22):
if Marvel, what if you made a satirical version of
a world with Marvel superheroes in it a very dark
but they were all psychopaths and did disgusting things. And

(52:42):
this is where the satire part. It's not family friendly,
but it is totally comic and it is totally satirical,
and it does everything that the that the Zuker Abraham
Zucker guys did with those movies with this one format.
And there's so there were so many Superiero movies over

(53:02):
so long a period of time that you could introduce
all of these related characters that everybody who want as
you would say, as Jonah, you would say, like, this
is the convention and everybody who is alive now knows
which is the conventions of the superheroes, and The Boys
takes it and twists it into these crazy pretzels.

Speaker 5 (53:26):
Yes, but I just want to be really clear for
our audience. First of all, I think it's a very
good point. But second when really clear for our audience,
given what we suspect are the demographics of our audience.
If you thought the fade gunaway tushy wiping scene was
offensive at the beginning of this podcast, yeah, do not

(53:47):
watch The Boys. That is Mary Poppins compared to The
Boys or.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
That or that show whatever. The gen X Boys spin off.

Speaker 5 (53:56):
Is yeah, yeah, just anything Boys related right from the
universe of the Boys.

Speaker 2 (54:01):
But it is effectively that it is sort of like,
if Howard Stern, who is now apparently retiring, got his
hands on a TV network and unlimited resources to make
a nehilistic version of a superhero franchise, you would get
you would get The Boys. It's very depressing, by the way,

(54:23):
because there's there are these trailers for movies of the
sort that we're talking about here, or sort of like
eighties type movies that people used to love that came
out in the last couple of weeks, for movies that
are opening later in the year. James L. Brooks has
a movie out about a young a young female politician.
He's not three years old. It has the worst trailer

(54:45):
I've ever called Ellen mackay, I've never seen a worst trailer.
He's obviously being reward. It's like a bonus for him
to get to make this. Fox is making it because
how much money has he made for Fox by having
created the Simps bill and billion dollars I mean.

Speaker 1 (55:04):
So yeah, like yeah, I mean who knows.

Speaker 2 (55:06):
Who can even calculate.

Speaker 6 (55:08):
But also who knows who knows the motivation here?

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Yeah, but it's hard.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
But there are a bunch of these sorts of like
people are trying to make slice of life dramas of
the sort that dominated the box office in the nineteen eightys,
where movies like that could make two hundred million dollars,
you know, like Out of Africa or ray Man or
you know, Tender Mercies or Kramer Versus Kramer, like things

(55:33):
that you know, you made Kramer Versus Cremer today, which
was The Moat, which was the most successful movie of
nineteen seventy nine, the biggest box office movie in nineteen
seventy nine, and you made it today, you would have
to make it for five million dollars. It would go
to sun Dance and then it would go to Hulu,
and that way it would.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Never get made.

Speaker 6 (55:52):
Because a wonderful moment in Cramer Versus Kramer, which is
one of my favorite moments, where after dust after Meryl
Streep leaves Dustin Hoffman in the morning, or you know,
in the first reel, and he's and he's at his
job and is obviously he's performing. You know, they're they're
worried that he's going to get that he's gonna be
distracted from his job as an advertising executive. And he's

(56:12):
talking to his boss about what happened and he says this.
He goes, I don't know what happened. I mean, she's
a home and there's this we have.

Speaker 1 (56:19):
A neighbor upstairs.

Speaker 6 (56:20):
He's a single goal and you know, they got together
and it was the Women's Lib d and he makes
the little you know, talking YadA yada's gesture, the little
it's so great, and he and his boss are like,
it's like bad men. They're like, well, he'll be back.
She just wants some attention. But I just I just

(56:41):
I can't imagine, man. I can easily imagine that script
in nineteen going through development in nineteen seventy seven, seventy eight,
where they are probably zero development women in the movie business,
but now when they are entirely they're all women.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
There would be like, yeah, you can't and he can't,
he can't, No, he can't. So the Women's lib And.

Speaker 6 (57:08):
It's been in my head for forty fifty years on
I just remember that so well, Women's Lib.

Speaker 5 (57:21):
So they made a few years ago marriage story with
Scarlett Johansson and Am Driver, which I could not get
through it. I don't want to hear people all it
is just screaming about how you're like your mother, No,
you're like your mother, all that kind of stuff. But
there was I just don't find that relaxing. Like No,

(57:43):
but there was a story I think it was in
the Wall Street Journal recently that trust me. The payoff
is here. In order to keep wolves from going after livestock,
they have drones following them and they blare loud like
and human yelling and other noises to scare way the wolves.
And they've decided to instead use argument scenes from marriage story,

(58:09):
bluring it out from the throne the wolves.

Speaker 2 (58:12):
Yeah, but that's why it's such a brilliant scene. I'm
sorry this fight with Adam between Adam Driver and Scarlett
Johansson in which they basically you know which he says,
and I can't believe because we have this child. I
can't believe I have to deal with you for the
rest of my life. We're getting divorced. I hate you,
I want you to die, and I'm gonna have to
deal with you anyway for the rest of my life.

(58:33):
It is a good way to drive away the wolves.
I will agree. I do think it's a brilliant movie.
But but what can I tell you anyway? I really
so I recommended Eddington. I think people really should see
Eddington again. Not not a calming if that's what you're
looking for.

Speaker 1 (58:51):
It's not.

Speaker 2 (58:52):
It's not be calming. But I think Rob just give
us two minutes to just complain about one thing. Joe
and I complaining together. A show we were really enjoying,
which was the latest Star Trek show called Brave New Worlds,
which is the prequel to the original.

Speaker 1 (59:10):
Star Trek Strange Worlds.

Speaker 2 (59:11):
Strange Worlds, which is the captain of the Enterprise right
before Kirk, and he appears in the pilot. His name
is Christopher Pike. He gets What was really interesting about
this show when they debuted it is that everybody knows
who watches Star Trek that Christopher Pike ends up in
this horribly mangled condition, because that's and that rescuing him

(59:37):
is what they try to do in the pilot from
his condition, and so you make him the hero of
the show, and you know he's going to end up
in this you know, like Darth Vader, almost like it
with a body that's a wreck and a machine, and
they set it up, I think, quite brilliantly, which is

(59:58):
that he ends up going through some temper anomaly where
he learns of his fate. The show begins with him
knowing that he has five years to live and then
he's going to be turned into this His body is
going to be destroyed, and that's where it starts. And

(01:00:20):
he therefore is making all these decisions and choices and
things with this haunting knowledge in him. And it was
a really great premise for a show. It was fun,
it was interesting, they had interesting villains and all of that.
And then this third season starts and it is a
catastrophe because it's just become this camp, ridiculous fan service

(01:00:42):
and it's cringingly bad. And I've never seen a show
take a worse turn in sort of like going from
being respectable and interesting and tough to being a total embarrassment.

Speaker 5 (01:00:56):
I am Rob is going to hang up his microphone,
get in a car, drive to DC, and smash my
guitar against the Delta house wall. But I have to
point out at this point that the pilot of the
original Star Trek was not that one.

Speaker 2 (01:01:12):
I know the pilot was actually Pike the original Star
Trek used scenes from it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
Yes, yes, right right yes.

Speaker 5 (01:01:20):
And also I'll look, you have no idea the people
I would hear from if I let that, okay, And
and and Spock was kind.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
Of I knew that too, And I knew that too, Okay,
but ok other.

Speaker 5 (01:01:30):
Than that, I grew with pot one hundred percent. It
is like, it doesn't mean you can't have fun, but
like and I said this on toy today and people
were giving me all this hard time, and I stand
by it one hundred percent. The worst sin, particularly in
science fiction, that you can commit is not taking yourself seriously.

(01:01:53):
Because if you don't take yourself seriously, why in the
world should the audience. And it is so much of
can't be winking, nodding, just silliness this time around, and
it's just dumb. It's just contrary. Like if if you're
I was the show runner and these are the scripts
that were coming in, I would have just said, all

(01:02:14):
of you get out of here. The reason why our
audience likes the show is because it's actually going back
to the original self seriousness of the original Star Trek
and and then a complete blown opportunity, so maybe it'll
pick up in the second half.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
But let me ask you a question. Have you did
you ever work with Carol Kane? She ever appear on
anything of yours?

Speaker 6 (01:02:39):
I did not work with her, but I am not directly,
but I was helped out on something she was in.

Speaker 2 (01:02:48):
Okay, I'm asking this because Carol Caine is on Brave
New Worlds. She is the best character in newly introduced
character on Brave New world She plays a person who
is from a civilize where they live hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of years.

Speaker 5 (01:03:04):
Too much backstory to explain it all, but yes, but.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
Harold Caine has been in show business for fifty five
years something like that. She was in five Easy Pieces,
or she was in some carnal knowledge, like when she
was eighteen she got nominated for an oscar in a

(01:03:29):
movie in which she spoke only in Yiddish when she
was like twenty two. Here we are in twenty twenty five.
Fifty years later, she has this role on Star Trek
a Stranger Worlds, and she is fantastic. And there is

(01:03:49):
this wonderful quality to certain things in show business where
these people if they if they survive and they live long,
and they keep themselves in good shape, and they don't know,
like lose their brains to drugs and all of that.
When they when they emerge in their seventies or however
seventies eighties, into things they can do just incredible. World Like,

(01:04:15):
it's an incredible thing to have half a century of
experience to draw on, to know exactly how to build
a character, to make yourself memorable, to read a line,
to have a presence, isn't that? I mean so that
I was just struck by that thinking about a career

(01:04:39):
like hers, because it's just kind of like just gone
along every decade. She's on one or two shows, She's
in one or two movies.

Speaker 5 (01:04:46):
You know, she was lack of Gravis's wife on taxi.

Speaker 6 (01:04:50):
Yeah, she's a big Jim Brooks and the Jim Brooks Rep.

Speaker 1 (01:04:53):
She's always she always shows up.

Speaker 7 (01:04:55):
Yeah, unusual, just a also like one of these the
seventies characters who just is an unlikely, unlikely recurring character.

Speaker 1 (01:05:07):
I've never you know, not not mind.

Speaker 2 (01:05:10):
She doesn't do it for you, but I mean again,
in your stupid voice, I don't like Okay, you don't
like the voice, but she by the way, does really
funny things with the voice because she has an accent
in this that she's invented, you know, since obviously she's
from a planet, so you can speak in whatever accent
you want to. But I just there are these people
and they pop Sometimes they pop up literally out of nowhere,

(01:05:32):
like this actress June Squibb, who whose most notable credit
before she appeared out of Nowhere and About Schmidt in
like you know, twenty years ago, was that she was
in Broadway on Gypsy as one of the strippers in
the original production, and then went away for forty years
and then showed up as an old lady in About Schmidt,

(01:05:56):
and then in this movie Nebraska. And she was just
the star of this movie called Thelma in which she
played and this hilarious, brilliant movie in which she played
this ninety year old woman. And now she is starring
in Scarlet Johanson's directorial debut at the age of ninety six.

Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
We call that growing into your look.

Speaker 2 (01:06:18):
Okay, so, Rob, you have been very much. Is there
anything you want to talk about before?

Speaker 5 (01:06:22):
You've been a good sport, Rob, I have very good
sport sport if you if you want to talk about
you know, uh some odors twelfth century monastery and it's
you know chance can no, No.

Speaker 6 (01:06:37):
I mean I I that's what I went and traveled
and saw a bunch of those. I would like to
say that I will have watched a TV show that
I enjoyed. I enjoyed the TV show The Day.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
Of a Jackal.

Speaker 2 (01:06:51):
It wasn't bad that he redmain.

Speaker 6 (01:06:53):
Yes, I enjoyed that. I enjoyed the the the adventure.
I enjoyed the thrilling episodes. I enjoyed the hang hanging episodes.

Speaker 1 (01:07:01):
I enjoyed the.

Speaker 6 (01:07:04):
I enjoyed the way that they they echoed and rhymed
a little bit with the original movie.

Speaker 2 (01:07:10):
I am.

Speaker 6 (01:07:12):
I enjoyed the project, and yet I am not. The
problem is that this is something that I enjoyed, and
at no point am I thinking to myself, I can't
wait till the next next one, if they're even going
to do a next one comes out, I just don't care.
And I think I in that respect, I am like
I am the canary in the coal mine, which is
I mean not even at this point advanced bad news,

(01:07:35):
but I think it is.

Speaker 1 (01:07:36):
I am a classic.

Speaker 6 (01:07:39):
Consumer now weirdly of show business product which is that
I just if it's good, if.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
It's in front of me, I'll watch it.

Speaker 6 (01:07:47):
If I'm jet lagged and I need to like do something,
and I'll remember I wanted to watch this one. I'll
get hooked on it and watch it, and I just
have absolutely zero loyalty to it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:55):
And that is.

Speaker 6 (01:07:58):
That's why I show business isn't such big, big, big,
big big trouble.

Speaker 2 (01:08:03):
All right.

Speaker 5 (01:08:03):
So I have a show recommendation. Good uh, My wife
and I we like British crime stuff, and someone recommended
Line of Duty. And one of the things that has
going for it is there are many episodes, so you
can like if you like it. There's some runway, and

(01:08:26):
earlier were talking about like defying conventions. This is one
of these shows where like I'm often stunned or at
least surprised by the twists and turns, not all of
them entirely plausible. But it's a show about an anti
corruption unit basically the I D you know what is it?
Internal Affairs of England, and it's it's sort of you know,

(01:08:50):
I was gonna say about The Jackal One of the
things I like that show too, and I like that genre.
But the way they sort of take fast and loose
with just like Europe being a place where police from
one country do stuff in another country. You know, like

(01:09:10):
there's a lot of like jurisdictional stuff they just sort
of gloss over. There's some of that in this is
like they don't quite tell ever say it's in London,
but it's obviously in London. But anyway, it's a good show,
holds your interest and takes in some surprizing places and
it's like six seasons. You have to be able to

(01:09:34):
answer three questions from a sphinx, pluck a pebble from
a shaman's palm, and several other things to figure out
how to watch it on streaming platforms because it's scattered
across like seven different platforms. But it's good.

Speaker 6 (01:09:49):
You can sometimes tell the story of the shows like this,
usually when they're international productions like Jackler. A lot of
these where crucial story sequences take place in countries that
coincidentally have really really good tax rebate deals for studios.

(01:10:10):
So in Jackal, so much of it takes place in
Hungary for zero reason. So much of it takes place
in Budapest for no Some of the stuff that's supposed
to take place in Spain, clearly took place in Budapest
because Hungary's got these great deals. You know, that's just
my own like I enjoy I enjoy looking at that.
I enjoy seeing that.

Speaker 5 (01:10:29):
That's why how in countless movies, Washington, DC looks remarkably
like Toronto.

Speaker 2 (01:10:33):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I will make one recommendation. Then we
got to go. And it's odd because it's a show
I watched the first two seasons of it and didn't like,
but I watched it because it was like wallpaper and
that's the Gilded Age on HBO. And here's why I'm
recommending so the third season out of nowhere. It's like

(01:10:55):
Julian Fellows who created it and wrote it, like took
his weedies and like the eights and weedies or had
had had had inspiration that he didn't have in the
creation of it and the running of it in the
first two seasons. Because it is really good now and
I don't quite know whether you could if you could
just go to Wikipedia and read the plot summary of

(01:11:16):
the first two seasons and then just start.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
With the stuff happens right in it.

Speaker 2 (01:11:21):
Now, things happen there because I saw a.

Speaker 6 (01:11:24):
Clip I saw a clip of it on TikTok years ago,
I mean last year, at some point in the past
few months, where all the people are begging what's his
name to not destroy them, and one actually gets down
on his knees and says, I'm begging you.

Speaker 1 (01:11:39):
I'm begging you. And I thought, oh, that's interesting.

Speaker 6 (01:11:42):
I want to see that, and then trying to find
that episode and then try to buy that episode so
I could watch that episode, and then buying the wrong
one and watching that one, and then realizing it's the
next episode and watching that one. Nothing happens in these episodes.
Nothing is so insanely boring. It was insanely like very
much like doubt nab that either. Things like the stakes
are so bizarre. It's like, oh my god, you use

(01:12:04):
the run stable spoon.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
Yes, oh my god. This season is about the Gilded Age.
It's about a an investment gone wrong, a railroad problem
and the invention of a new device, a family in crisis,
divorces causing scandals, a book a real book Ward McAllister's

(01:12:30):
books side creating a huge scandal, and so things really happen.
The acting is sensationally good. The set, the set and
it got good, and that's all I'm saying.

Speaker 6 (01:12:42):
But isn't there like I mean, I'm sure it's good, right,
I'm gonna I'm planning to watch it actually, but isn't
there like.

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
A little too much of this?

Speaker 3 (01:12:49):
Oh?

Speaker 6 (01:12:49):
The suffrage movement is very important, and it's more are
in America or fraud?

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
It is? It is more. It is more interesting than
you expect in almost every respect on those matters.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
Okay, that's what that's.

Speaker 2 (01:13:08):
What's so surprising about this third season. That's all I'm
going to say. Hey, we got through a show. Rob
did not yell at us for talking about too much
science fiction.

Speaker 1 (01:13:20):
Thank you Rob for the button really helps.

Speaker 2 (01:13:22):
Okay, that's good. And uh and and also you you know,
playing Candy Crush and.

Speaker 1 (01:13:27):
Stuff like that.

Speaker 2 (01:13:29):
Does anyone still play Candy Crush? I don't even know someone. Okay,
So we'll we'll, we'll, we'll do another one of these
because you people seem to like it. I don't know why.
But you know, as I say, it's not like I
I I don't podcast enough. So that's my problem. So
you know, I need I need an extra you know,
at least an extra hour a month to because no

(01:13:50):
one's listening to me, that's for sure. All these people
podcasting every day, it's crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
What was that was that it No one's taking the bait.

Speaker 5 (01:14:00):
John sa