I Think You're Interesting

Adora Crellin is a difficult woman to love. The monstrously suffocating mother of Camille, the protagonist of HBO's terrific murder mystery miniseries Sharp Objects, Adora keeps finding ways to undercut her damaged daughters and to visit the deep-seated trauma in her soul upon the women who should be able to rely on her most.

So just imagine playing Adora and how that might seep into your soul. Fortunately, we've got Patricia Clarkson, one of America's finest actors for portraying difficult, damaged mothers (who seem to pass along those qualities to their difficult, damaged daughters), in the role. She finds notes in Adora most actors wouldn't even look for. It's spellbinding work, among the best work in the esteemed actor's career, and she's been nominated for every award you can think of.

Clarkson joined Todd this week to talk about knowing which moms are the right ones to play, what Sharp Objects gets right about the South, and which of her roles people most notice her for. And after that conversation, stick around for a chat about the state of the TV industry with PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger.

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The riotously funny, incredibly inventive new movie Sorry to Bother You has become one of the summer’s most acclaimed films, as well as an unlikely hit in arthouses. The movie’s tale of a young man named Cassius Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield), who takes a job in a call center, drifts wildly from genre to genre, sometimes seeming like a comedy, sometimes like a call to political action, and sometimes like a near-future science fiction movie.

But uniting all these ideas is a commitment to forthrightly leftist politics, and director Boots Riley dropped by the show to talk with Todd not just about making the movie but about how he wants to use it to explore ideas about unions, about political organization, and about building a movement.

We follow that up with a chat with Jonah Levy and Matt Silva, the makeup artists behind the movie Uncle Drew, who turned a bunch of NBA legends into their older selves. They talked to Todd about the basics of movie makeup and their favorite movie makeup designs of all time.

I Think You're Interesting has been nominated for this year's People's Choice Podcast Awards! Cast your vote for I Think You're Interesting free before Tuesday, July 31st at podcastawards.com.

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Neko Case’s nearly 20-year career has been marked by some of the best songs of that time frame, chronicles of a country and world that often seem to be plunging into chaos but always manage to just avoid doing so. Her solo albums, including the brand new Hell-On, have been a major part of that, but so has her work as a vocalist with the indie-pop group the New Pornographers and as part of a trio of singer-songwriter superstars with K.D. Lang and Laura Veirs.

Case’s songs don’t always provide easy explanations or answers. They’re about what it means to find yourself caught between what you need and what the world needs, or between the expectations others have of you and the expectations you carry for yourself. 

Case joined Todd in the studio this week to talk about crafting her career across those nearly two decades, the notion of writing timeless songs in a world that keeps rushing forward, and the idea of building a place within the music industry where women can feel supported.

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Believe it or not, the summer entertainment season is half over. Fall TV will be firing up in just a few short weeks, and the summer movies of 2018 have just about run out. (Mission: Impossible — Fallout is the only big release still coming.) That makes it a great time to check in on some of the biggest pop culture items of the summer, in this special episode with two different segments.

First, Salon's Melanie McFarland and Vanity Fair’s Sonia Saraiya join Todd to talk about the second season of Hulu's The Handmaid’s Tale, which all of them liked until they found certain elements of its ending deeply polarizing. They’ll talk about the baffling moments of the finale, the show’s depiction of racial issues, and where they think it might be going in season three.

Then, Vox's Karen Han and The Undefeated's Soraya Nadia McDonald join Todd to talk about the summer’s biggest movies, from blockbusters to smaller films you might have missed. If you’re looking for something to see at the multiplex this weekend, this is a must-listen, so check it out.

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Call the APM Reports production In the Dark a “true crime" podcast, and everybody involved in it will bristle, just a bit. Yes, it starts from the place of exploring crimes that really happened. But it’s not interested in exploring the crimes so much as it is the injustice of the American justice system.

So my apologies for calling In the Dark a true-crime podcast, when it’s so much more than that. But every week, when I listen to it, I’m reminded that the form could be so much more than it has been. 

With each new season, In the Dark digs deeper and deeper into the ways that the American justice system lets down the people it’s supposed to be protecting. Its recently concluded second season centered on the case of Curtis Flowers, who was tried six times for the same spree killing, his convictions consistently overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. The season was a master class, exploring everything from the failures of prosecutors to racial bias in jury selection.

This week, In the Dark’s producer, host, and head reporter Madeleine Baran joined me to talk about the second season of the show, as well as how the best true-crime … er … criminal justice podcast gets made.

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Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Gosford Park. Moonrise Kingdom. The original cast of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. These might seem like wildly different projects, but they have one man in common: actor Bob Balaban.

Balaban is one of the consummate “hey, it’s that guy!” actors. His name might not immediately ring a bell (unless you, like me, love to keep track of all the great character actors), but the second you see his face or just hear his voice, you’ll instantly know who he is. He’s been working steadily on stage and screen for 50 years, and he’s also written and directed his own projects. (Heck, Gosford Park emerged from an idea he had.) If you love good movies and television, you’ve become well acquainted with Bob Balaban.

His newest project is Condor, a spy thriller on the DirecTV Audience Network. Balaban is exactly the sort of person you wouldn’t expect to pop up in a series so high-octane. It's all the more delightful that he’s there, seeming like the quiet, sensible one amid all the foot chases and action sequences. He joins Todd to talk about his long, illustrious career, and just why it was time to finally play a spy.

Show notes:

The actor Balaban is talking about in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is Anton Wolbrook.

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Hari Kondabolu identified a problem. His self-hosted, self-produced 2017 documentary, The Problem With Apu, which aired on TruTV, discusses how The Simpsons character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon created a caricature of South Asians and perpetuated a stereotype that hung over South Asian kids like Hari and followed them into adulthood. The documentary isn’t a call for Apu to be removed from the show or fired into the sun or anything like that. No, it’s an earnest discussion of how these types of stereotypes can still hurt people.

But The Problem with Apu has come to define Hari’s work in a way that is both deserved — it’s a really good little documentary — and maybe a little unfair. See, Hari is also a tremendously funny stand-up comedian, someone who tells jokes about racism and the divisiveness of American politics, all the while making you laugh at the way many of us have only built up those divides. In his new Netflix special Warn Your Relatives, Hari jokes about race, homophobia, the Trump administration, and the time he got heckled by fellow comedian Tracy Morgan.

So Todd was thrilled to be joined in the studio by Hari, who discussed telling jokes about Donald Trump, telling jokes about his mom, and, yes, telling the truth about Apu.

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Does Aisha Tyler sleep? That’s a question you might reasonably ask after looking at her IMDb page for a moment or two. She’s a regular on two TV shows — FXX’s Archer and CBS’s Criminal Minds — while also hosting Unapologetic, a new talk show for AMC. And that’s in addition to all the other one-off hosting gigs she takes on. And yet she’s always fresh, funny, and on point.

Tyler got her start as a standup comic in the late '90s, at a time when, she says, black women were often pigeonholed into a certain style of comedy while she was much more comfortable making jokes about her love of all things geeky. She followed that up with a hosting gig on Talk Soup, and from there, her career took off and continues to fly high.

So Aisha joins Todd in the studio this week to talk about her career, her time in standup comedy, and playing Lana Kane on Archer for nine whole seasons. It’s the longest she’s played a single character, she says — unless you count all that time she spent playing Aisha Tyler. And after this interview, we think maybe we do.

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Another TV season is over. You might not have noticed its end, thanks to the way TV never goes away any more, but technically, the TV season wraps at the end of May.

So it seemed like a good time to get some of the best TV showrunners together and ask them how they create great standout TV, when there's way too much of it. Salim Akil of Black Lightning (CW), Aline Brosh McKenna of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' (CW) and Tanya Saracho of Vida (Starz) join Todd for a lively discussion about this era in TV.

Topics include producing good TV on a budget, telling stories about communities traditionally underrepresented in fiction, and finding a way to stand out amid all that clutter. If you're a TV fan, or just curious about what it means to work in television when there are nearly 500 scripted series, you'll love this discussion.

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If you've listened to this show ever, or read anything Todd has ever written, then you know The Americans is one of his favorite shows of the past several years. Last night, it ended.

For this special episode of the show, Todd is joined by star Matthew Rhys (who plays Philip) and writers Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, who run the series, to talk about the series' incredible final season and its even more remarkable finale. There are spoilers if you haven't watched the entire series, but also lots of talk about finding the series' voice and the whole, wild six-season ride.

And, if nothing else, if you've never heard Rhys's real, Welsh accent, well, you're in for a treat.

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