I Think You're Interesting

It's a very special episode of I Think You're Interesting, as guest host and Vox culture writer Caroline Framke asks Todd all the questions you asked about criticism, great TV, and life itself. Along the way, they'll discuss whether Todd can possibly watch TV just for fun anymore, what it's like working with an editor, and what his favorite TV show of all time is. Stick around for Todd's answers to the same questions he asks his guests in other episodes!

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The ways climate change is altering our planet can be hard to see, since they happen so incrementally, and often far away. That’s what’s made the documentaries Chasing Ice and Chasing Coral (a finalist for Best Documentary Feature at the 2018 Oscars) so valuable. The former tracks shrinking glaciers, while the latter shows the devastating die-offs of coral reefs, all thanks to the planet’s rapidly warming atmosphere.

But Richard Vevers, a former advertising expert who's one of the main subjects of Chasing Coral, thinks he might have the answer: a better promotional strategy, one that shows human beings how the world is changing, while still preserving hope that something might be done about it. 

Chasing Coral itself is an example of that strategy. Pull it up on Netflix, and you’ll see formerly colorful coral reefs, home to all manner of sea life, bleached pure white. Yet the movie does offer hope that there’s some way out of this, if we change our ways in time.

Richard joins Todd to talk about coral reef die-offs, yes, but also a life spent under the waves, and just what keeps drawing him to the depths of the ocean.

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From the Oscars mixup to the Disney-Fox deal, and from Netflix’s continuing inability to launch major movie hits to the seemingly endless stream of sexual misconduct revelations, 2017 was a big year for entertainment news, arguably the biggest in decades. Every new week brought a new story with the potential to alter the industry in incalculable ways. 

It was such a big year that a near-strike by the Writers Guild of America ended up being a footnote.

Covering all of it was Richard Rushfield, a veteran entertainment journalist whose new newsletter, The Ankler, launched in 2017 and instantly became a must-read for anybody hoping to understand the business of show. Rushfield’s open, chatty publication broke major stories (like the existence of a group of powerful Hollywood women looking for a way to force the industry to deal with its sexual misconduct issues) and offered an often iconoclastic take on the biggest stories of the year.

Richard and Todd got together shortly before the year’s end to talk about all of the biggest stories from 2017, where all of this might be heading in 2018, and (of course) Star Wars.

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Director Nora Twomey and her colleagues at Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon have made a habit of turning out some of Todd’s favorite animated films. From 2009’s The Secret of Kells to 2014’s Song of the Sea, the mini-studio makes beautiful, evocative films about the need for storytelling and the hard-earned magic of growing up.

The company’s latest film — Twomey’s debut as sole credited director — is called The Breadwinner, and it traces the story of a young Afghan girl who is forced to take on the burden of making money for her family after her father is sent to prison. Since the film is set during the rule of the Taliban, the hero has to pose as a young boy to keep making money. This story is balanced against several others in a beautiful feat of storytelling.

Twomey joins Todd to talk about The Breadwinner, her filmmaking philosophy, and finding kids who are also great voice actors.

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John Ridley has been active in Hollywood since the early ’90s, to the degree that he wrote for one of the best obscure sitcoms of that era, The John Laroquette Show. But his career hit turbo speed when he wrote the script for the 2013 Best Picture winner 12 Years a Slave, for which he received an Oscar for his screenplay. Since then, he’s written even more movies and produced American Crime, a three-season ABC series that dug into political and social issues with real nuance and depth, in a way even cable television struggles with, to say nothing of broadcast network television. 

Now his new documentary, Let It Fall: Los Angeles 1982-1992, tackles the long buildup to what are commonly known as the LA riots, but which the film calls the LA uprising. Tracing the history of racially charged incidents leading up to the police beating of Rodney King, as well as the horrific relationship between the LAPD and black Angelenos, the film also looks at how Los Angeles was — and wasn’t — changed by the events of April and May 1992. 

Ridley joins Todd to talk about the ways history has erroneously remembered those events, as well as his long career in Hollywood and his favorite superheroes.

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Few religion podcasts have proved as vital to understanding evangelical Christian America in the Donald Trump era as Bad Christian, a podcast hosted by three friends, who all used to be in a band together. (Two of them still are in that band.) 

Hosts Matt Carter, Toby Morrell, and Joey Svendsen, all Christians, discuss their issues with the modern church, without flinching. They also reveal their personal journeys as believers, which serve as real-time markers of individual Christians’ evolution on particular issues, especially LGBT rights. 

Matt Carter joined Todd this week to talk about the role of the church in Trump’s America, but also his favorite chord progressions, how to protect your voice when you’re scream-singing every night, and how he thinks moving from small-town South Carolina to Seattle influenced his views — religious, moral, and political.

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The Big Sick is a little slice of romantic comedy perfection and one of 2017's best movies. Based on a very real story from the life of very real couple Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon, the movie boasts a script by the two, with Holly Hunter and Ray Romano, two real acting heavyweights, joining them as Emily's parents. The Big Sick manages something too few movies do nowadays. As you watch it, you might find yourself hoping that everybody in it will end up happy and more or less okay, which is rarer than you'd think. From Nanjiani's work as a version of himself to Hunter and Romano's estranged-but-trying-to-fix-things couple, the movie is full of beautifully sketched characters, brought together by an unlikely medical emergency. Now, right as the movie hits streaming on Amazon Prime (on Friday, November 24), Hunter, Romano, Nanjiani, and Gordon joined Todd to talk about The Big Sick — but also everything from Gene Hackman and writing partnerships to the best ear of corn Ray Romano ever ate.

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It’s almost Thanksgiving, which means home chefs all around the United States (Todd among them) are trying to find a way to hew to tradition without turning their plates into a giant pile of indistinguishable starches. And for our first annual I Think You’re Interesting Thanksgiving Spectacular, we’ve invited Samin Nosrat to join us and offer her hints and tips for a successful Thanksgiving meal. Samin’s book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is one of the best cookbooks Todd’s ever read, and the information it provides about how the four elements in the title interact to make delicious food will help any chef — no matter how experienced — cook even better food. But it can also help brighten up that Thanksgiving plate, and Samin offered Todd advice on making tastier turkey, zingier mashed potatoes, and sharper Thanksgiving salads. She also stuck around to talk about writing a cookbook, devouring delicious food she didn’t cook, and enjoying the perfect vegan holiday season. Pull a chair up to the table and dig in.

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W.G. "Snuffy" Walden doesn't read or write music. That didn't stop him from writing the theme for The West Wing. Or Friday Night Lights. Or My So-Called Life. Or Thirtysomething. Or, really, many of your favorite TV shows. Walden's career began as a member of a rock band, and he went on to become a studio musician, even appearing on an episode of Laverne & Shirley as a member of Squiggy's band, "the Squigtones." But his big break, the one that would lead him to a massive career and an Emmy (atop many nominations), came when the creators of Thirtysomething wanted a folkier sound for their show about baby boomers aging into parenthood and responsibility. Walden, who wrote much of the score while trying things out on his guitar, got his moment, and he's scored lots and lots of shows since, including four in production right now. Walden joins Todd to talk about the process of writing music for TV (especially when you're composing for multiple shows at the same time), where The West Wing theme came from, and why he loves Jimi Hendrix.

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You may not know the name Glenn Gordon Caron, but if you’re a TV fan, you’ve heard of one of the shows he’s worked on, especially his groundbreaking ’80s detective dramedy Moonlighting, which popularized the will-they/won’t-they relationship, introduced the world to Bruce Willis, and created a tabloid sensation. But Caron’s résumé is so much more than Moonlighting. He’s worked on numerous films, he’s created a short film about human sexuality for Epcot Center, and he’s made many more TV shows, ranging from one-season wonders (like 1999-2000’s Now and Again) to long-running hits (like Medium, which aired throughout the 2000s). His latest task is taking over as showrunner on CBS’s legal series Bull, and he’s given the CBS case-of-the-week format a bit of spit and polish, focusing more on the characters than the cases but still leaving plenty of room for intriguing investigations and legal maneuvering. Caron joins Todd to talk about how he came to Bull, the height of Moonlighting media attention, why David and Maddie hooking up could have worked, and so much more.

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