I Think You're Interesting

Few TV shows are better than AMC's Better Call Saul.

But if you told that to someone in 2015, when the show debuted, they might look at you askance. Yes, the show was a spinoff from Breaking Bad, one of the most acclaimed TV shows ever made, but it was still a spinoff, a format with an oft-indistinguished legacy. It was so easy to see how this series could have gone wrong.

Instead, the show's writers, led by co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, have turned Better Call Saul into a sad funhouse mirror of Breaking Bad, a show about a man who desperately kept trying to do the right thing but couldn't escape all of the people who suspected he would just do the wrong thing instead — or, for that matter, his own weakness for ethical shortcuts.

Now four seasons in, Better Call Saul has traced the descent of would-be do-gooder Jimmy McGill into the sleazy, skeezy Saul Goodman in painstaking detail, but in a way that still feels distinct from Breaking Bad.

So this week, in the wake of the terrific fourth season finale, Gould, now the show's sole showrunner, joins Todd to talk about the early days of crafting the show, why comedic actors are so good at drama, and why Jimmy made the choices he did in the fourth season finale.

If you're not caught up, the first two-thirds of this podcast are spoiler-free — and we'll be sure to let you know before the spoilers kick in.

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The circus! At one time, it was one of the country’s most reliable forms of mass entertainment, crisscrossing American backroads to perform for people all over the nation. Everything from the circus train to the people who put up the big tent made its way into American legend.

But the American circus isn’t in great shape anymore. The treatment (or mistreatment) of animals tarnished the image of the once-venerable Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, which closed down in 2017 after it became economically unsustainable.

And yet you can’t quite keep the circus down. There are tons of smaller shows making their mark across the country, and the new PBS documentary, The Circus, details both the history of the American circus and where it might be headed in the future.

Joining Todd today are circus historian Dominique Jando and former ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson to talk about the circus’s past, present — and possible future.

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This episode is a rebroadcast of an episode from 2017, but with BoJack Horseman's fifth season recently debuting, we thought it was a great time to revisit it.

Todd loves few TV shows more than BoJack Horseman, Netflix's weird animated comedy about a sad horse. Its recently completed fourth season, which delved into the histories of many of the characters and talked about the roots of trauma and depression, just might be the best the series has ever done.

 To understand why the season was so potent, creator and showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg, production designer and producer Lisa Hanawalt, and supervising director Mike Hollingsworth joined Todd to talk about not just season four but also the show's evolution and where it might be headed next.

 They talked about balancing different kinds of jokes, making sure the audience understands the subtext, and building dramatic stakes when so much of what's happening is about the characters' emotions.

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Jon Batiste makes some of TV’s best music, night in and night out. As bandleader of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the multi-instrumentalist comes up with perfect tunes to introduce guests, to complement Colbert’s jokes, and to keep the audience hyped up. (Many of the tunes fitting that last category are Batiste originals, performed by him and his band, Stay Human.)

But Batiste’s career stretches beyond late-night TV. He started out making music at a very young age in his hometown of Kenner, Louisiana, and since then, he’s recorded a whole album in and around the New York subway system, performed all over the world, and appeared semi-regularly on HBO’s series Treme. His newest album, Hollywood Africans, is a combination of Batiste originals and terrific covers of iconic songs that he’s put his own spin on. (Wait until you hear what he does with “What a Wonderful World”!)

Batiste joins Todd this week to talk about choosing which classic songs he wanted to put his spin on, his day-to-day life at the Late Show, and why he loves McDonald’s.

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We're focusing on TV scene stealers this week, as we head into a new fall season. These two performers take some of the best shows on TV and make them even better, sidling into any given scene and swiping it right out from under everybody else with a perfect one-liner or pratfall.

First, we're talking with D'Arcy Carden of NBC's The Good Place and HBO's Barry. Her work as Janet (and Janet's evil twin, Bad Janet) on The Good Place is some of the funniest stuff you'll see on TV.

As what amounts to a computer program running off the raw power of the universe and living in the afterlife, Janet is someone who can make cacti materialize as if from nowhere, who can vomit pennies, who can evolve slowly but surely into something almost godlike, all without breaking a sweat. And Carden's work as the character is all sunny chipperness and goofy fun. She's so good Todd listed her as creating one of his favorite performances of 2017 in an earlier podcast.

Next up is Natasha Rothwell of HBO's Insecure. The series, about a group of women in their early 30s, charts the tumultuous process of becoming an adult and having to figure things out. But Kelli, the character Rothwell plays, is exactly the sort of friend who's pretty sure she already has it figured out, and she's not ashamed to tell you just what she thinks of whatever decision you just made.

Rothwell is also involved in the writing process on Insecure, figuring out what's going to happen with all of the characters on the show, which makes her role in the series even more intriguing.

Both women join Todd in this week's episode to talk about why they love what they do, how they got their big breaks, and why working in sketch comedy helped prepare them for some of TV's best shows.

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The Nielsen ratings might not have as much power as they once held, but they still can decide the fate of your favorite TV show. If nobody's watching, it could be canceled. That's always been true. But what's also always been true is that the Nielsen data-gathering procedure is a little opaque and hard to understand.

Don't worry, though, because we've got your back. This week, Todd and guest Joe Adalian, of New York Magazine's Vulture, take you through how the Nielsens work, how they decide which viewers to count for their statistical sample, and just how much networks still pay attention to their ratings in an era when all viewership has plummeted. (The answer is less than they used to but still more than you'd probably want them to if your favorite show has poor ratings.)

Joe will also take you through the world of streaming services and how their refusal to release viewership numbers is and isn't changing the TV game, and he'll pull out some of his favorite ratings tidbits. Joe is one of the sharpest analysts of the industry, so if you just want to understand how the TV business works, this interview is a great place to start. And if you think you already know, you almost certainly don't know as much as Joe.

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Steve James is one of the best documentary filmmakers to ever have lived. His movies examine the fault lines that underlie American society, often (but not always) those of race and class, and how those who have power often attempt to maximize the amount they wield over those who do not. His seminal 1994 film Hoop Dreams, one of the greatest movies ever made, served as a kind of calling card for his interests going forward. He was going to tell stories about what it means to grow up and to live in a country that takes certain social strata for granted.

But Hoop Dreams also marked James as a filmmaker of real ambition. The film took almost eight years to make, and it required shooting 250 hours of footage. That ambition has been further realized in the new 10-part documentary America to Me, now airing on the Starz network. James and his crew trace one year in the life of a racially diverse high school in the Chicago suburbs, and along the way, they reveal some of the underlying hypocrisies in white progressivism, as well as a story of how racial inequities in education can perpetuate themselves even in a school that lauds itself for its commitment to social justice.

James joins the show this week to talk about making America to Me, about his many wonderful other films, and about making movies tackling issues of race as a white filmmaker.

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The new coming-of-age comedy Eighth Grade is one of the surprise success stories of the summer, turning a tiny story of a 13-year-old girl’s last week in the titular grade into a much larger tale of the universally awkward and cringeworthy experience of being an adolescent just trying to figure shit out. Its hero, young Kayla (played by the remarkable Elsie Fisher), deals with trying to launch her YouTube channel, with a crush that goes nowhere, and with her feelings of inadequacy when compared to more popular girls or older teens.

So here’s the part where we point out that it’s somewhat remarkable the film is the product of a man, writer-director Bo Burnham, who makes his feature film directorial debut with Eighth Grade. Burnham launched his career as a teenager making funny videos on YouTube, but he’s gone on to be a hugely successful standup comedian, a director of standup specials, and an actor in numerous great movies and TV shows. But Eighth Grade marks him as an unusually empathetic and humanist director — and as perhaps the first filmmaker to really grapple with the internet not as a blessing or a scourge but as a simple fact of life.

So Todd had Burnham on the show to talk about how to put the internet onscreen, what other movies get wrong about technology, and why he chose to make his first movie about a teen girl.

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The new movie BlacKkKlansman is careful to let you know very early on that, yes, its story is a true one, with a few embellishments for film. And it likely does so because said story — a black man goes undercover and becomes a trusted confidant of people in the Ku Klux Klan, including David Duke himself — would be written off as preposterous if it occurred in a fictional context.

But, no, that man really existed. His name was Ron Stallworth, and as an officer with the Colorado Springs Police Department, he really did talk on the phone with local Klansmen and with Duke. And with the help of his white partner, he was able to infiltrate the organization and work to bring some of its local members down. It’s a great story that is made all the better by virtue of being true, and in both Stallworth’s book about the experience and in Lee’s film, the story becomes a way to look at both the ridiculousness and the poisonousness of American racism.

Stallworth joins Todd this week to talk about seeing his life become a film, being a black police officer, and what was most changed for the movie.

Then: stick around for a chat with writer-director Desiree Akhavan on her new film The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a beautiful coming-of-age story set at a fundamentalist Christian-run gay conversion therapy retreat.

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There’s a reason TV critics and reporters call FX Networks president and CEO John Landgraf the “mayor of television” — and it’s not just because that’s kind of a funny title to give to somebody. Of all the executives in the TV game right now, Landgraf has a reputation as the most thoughtful about the past, present, and future of television, and his semiannual addresses to TV journalists have coined the term “Peak TV” and first raised the issue of Netflix not measuring its viewership.

In this week’s episode, Landgraf joins Todd to talk about where TV is now and where it’s headed, as part of our series of conversations with the most important and insightful executives in the TV industry. He’ll also discuss which show on another network he most enjoys and what he worries the medium is losing from switching over to the binge model.

Then: Todd is joined by actor Jonathan Pryce (of Game of Thrones fame) to discuss his new movie The Wife and a long, storied career, filled with notable firsts.

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