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A Fish Called Wanda was supposed to be a crowd-pleasing yuck-a-minute episode about arguably the most successful comedy of all time, but with some extreme technical difficulty and very raw feelings about the morals of the 1980s not living up at all to the standards of the 2020s, we actually had a really emotional episode that very sadly and very accidentally did not include Jaclynn.

You'll remember our guest Sophie from a previous episode where we learned about her expertise in long-form improv theatre, and you'll get to hear from her again while we discuss why this story sounds like a dance to her and how much of an effect it had on her childhood.

There are literal tears, but it's still arguably a pretty engrossing episode so you are highly encouraged to give it a shot and to leave a comment about when the last time you saw A Fish Called Wanda and whether or not you feel like it's appropriate to still hold up as canon ini 2025.

TIMESTAMPS // CHAPTERS:

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We put a six-second Vine of a guy falling outside a 7-Eleven up against Hemingway's baby shoes and argue the getting-up is the whole story — the difference between a joke and a hero's journey is one extra beat of dignity.

This week on The Arc, we throw out the usual movie-review format entirely and spend an episode dissecting a six-second Vine — the one with the glitching GameCube logo and a guy falling outside a 7-Eleven. What starts as a joke turns into a genuine argument about why this clip is a perfect piece of storytelling, complete with Hemingway, Lydia Davis, and a Greek chorus acting exercise nobody asked for. If you've ever wondered how much narrative you can pack into six seconds, this one's for you.

Woe to all who took Vine for granted, and watch the Vine we discuss here.

Because as Jaclynn says, in this episode "we didn't know what we had."

In this episode we look back and break apart what Cole would argue was the best Vine of all time, "The" GameCube Vine.

What we consider the best is baked into the start of the episode (and it plays twice on purpose), but a compilation of all of the rest can be found here.

If aliens arrive to rummage through our digital bones, let them see this creativity so that they might know what it is to be human.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

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Or since you liked "The" GameCube Vine, try Freaky Friday (1976) — another slice of comedy that ages into pure nostalgia, same way that one Vine somehow still gets us.

Vine was a social app that lived and died on a single constraint: six seconds, looping, no more. It's gone now — folded, absorbed, outlasted by TikTok and YouTube and everything else that figured out how to get monetized by an algorithm. Cole brought us one specific Vine to sit with for a whole episode, promising it would be the most relatable, lowbrow thing he'd ever made us watch. It is neither of those things, which is the joke. What actually happens is this: the GameCube startup logo begins its little purple cube-snake assembly, hiccups partway through the way a real GameCube does, and cuts hard to a man tripping in front of a 7-Eleven and dropping his Big Gulp. Then he starts to get up. Then it loops.

That last detail is the whole thing, and Robby is the one who names it — the getting up is what turns a man falling down into a story rather than a joke at a stranger's expense. From there we end up somewhere none of us planned: Robby describing an exercise he did studying theater in Italy, the verticality of a Greek chorus, a person shouting a line to the gods and being shoved back to the ground and rising and being shoved again, which is apparently also what's happening to a guy and his Big Gulp outside a 7-Eleven. Jaclynn quotes Hemingway's "For sale, baby shoes never worn" at Cole, as she reportedly does often, and Cole finally has an excuse to talk about Lydia Davis. Somewhere in here we make fun of Cole for scratching his neck beard like a pretentious Italian theater student, and Cole insists it isn't pretentious if you mean it in your heart.

If you came here looking for a straight explanation of what a Vine is, you now have one, and you can leave. What you'd be leaving is the more interesting question underneath it — whether the shortest possible story is a lesser form or just a harder one, and what it means that a whole medium built entirely around telling stories in six seconds couldn't survive while the ones built around holding your attention did fine. Cole says short-form storytelling has been quietly killed while long-form has never been healthier, cites the four-hour Brutalist without a trace of irony, and Robby brings up Laurence Olivier walking behind his own camera in a Shakespeare film to show you he knows it's a camera. It's the same argument, really: a thing made perfectly for the medium it's on, and the small talent it takes to see that and pull it off. We spend an entire episode proving you can take six seconds of a man and his soda as seriously as anything else, right up until Robby has to go and we throw him out the door.

Vine's founders actually spent weeks testing different clip lengths — including ten, nine, and five seconds — before landing on six. [Source]

The looping playback that makes a fall-and-recovery clip like this one feel like a complete arc wasn't part of the original plan — it was a fix for a problem the founders noticed almost by accident. "The next thing that we noticed was that the videos start quickly but they also end very quickly and that felt anti-climactic," said Hoffmann. "It didn't feel right." That's when the founders added a loop. [Source]

The recording mechanism itself was built for exactly the kind of stop-motion or matched-cut editing we point out in the copycat Vines — to record, users held their finger on the screen and took it off to pause. The ability to quickly pause and resume filming allowed users to easily record stop-motion animation. [Source]

The very first Vine ever posted wasn't a comedy bit at all — Dick Costolo, the then-CEO of Twitter, created the first Vine. It was a video of someone preparing steak tartare at a French restaurant in NYC called Les Halles. [Source]

Vine: Six Seconds That Changed the World (Global Player / all major podcast apps) — this eight-part documentary series, hosted by Benedict Townsend, digs into the genius, chaos and betrayal behind Vine's rise and its sudden collapse, and features exclusive interviews with Vine's co-founder Rus Yusupov, prominent Vine creators, and the Twitter executives who ran the meeting that signaled the app's unraveling — worthwhile if you want the real backstory on why a medium built entirely around six-second storytelling could rise and vanish so fast.

Know Your Meme's entry on Gamecube Intro Remixes — a reference page tracing the video meme based on the Nintendo GameCube startup screen, useful as a quick primer if you want to see how widely that specific visual gag got remixed beyond the fall-and-recovery format the episode focuses on.

We also covered Freaky Friday (1976) — another slice that ages into pure nostalgia, same way that one Vine somehow still gets us.

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 02: The Fantastic Four if you like Marvel movies — and want to hate us forever and tell your friends how lame we are.

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Robert Weinstein, our far too humble host and resident storytelling teacher has written yet another play, which was performed by the Barrow Group, and we get to talk about it, celebrate it, and accidentally tear into it.

Read the play here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1O_pb-vqXSIgZY2o9UsmZRMpkdBG1STGN?usp=sharing

We dig into a ten-minute play about an angry old woman recording an iPad message instead of just calling her granddaughter, and argue the whole thing works precisely because Robby never decided why — the best writing choices are the ones you don't consciously make.

This week on The Arc, an elderly woman records a message to her granddaughter on an iPad, and somehow that's the whole play — no plot, just a furious 67-year marriage's worth of regret, delivered in ten minutes. Robby wrote it under deadline pressure and still isn't sure it's finished, but we argue it's close to perfect, right down to a running gag lifted from David Mamet. You don't need to have read the script first, though we give you the link if you want to.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

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Robby wrote a ten-minute play called Hymns to the Obvious, and this episode is the three of us sitting inside it — the script, the staging, the drinks after with the performer and the playwright — trying to figure out how a thing with almost no plot ends up being all story. Janice Tenexis is a woman in a nursing home recording a video reply to her granddaughter's letter asking for relationship advice, while the attendant, Teresa, quietly narrates the whole thing and, less quietly, the transfer papers sitting on Janice's desk. Janice was married sixty-seven years to a man whose optimism annoyed the hell out of her, and only now, too late, does she miss him. She hates ducks. She calls people morons and figures they know where she stands. She describes a town singing hymns in the church of the obvious and slinging gin fizzies at the cocktail lounge of heavenly matches — lines so good that one of us threatened to get a tattoo of one.

What the conversation is actually about is where writing comes from and when you're allowed to stop. Robby says he writes characters the way he wishes people existed — more patient, more articulate — and that the best line in the play arrived because he heard Janice say it, not because he built it. There's a running device where every mention of the senior center drags along the name of the town and its elementary school and a mandatory "Go Hooks," which the actress found nearly impossible to perform and which Robby refused to cut, because some things feel too good to let go. Cole calls that bit the closest the play gets to the Platonic form of a play itself; Jaclynn, who's realized she can only ever write in her own voice and has made peace with it by embodying the cruel voices in her head instead, keeps circling how you get the picture in your head out into the world without losing it.

The best part, and the reason to spend the time, is Cole asking why Janice records a video instead of just calling — a question so pointed it plays like a profound story choice, until Robby admits, flatly and repeatedly, that he never thought of the other options at all. Cole cannot stop making it worse. It becomes a small essay on the difference between what an artist intends and what an audience swears they meant, complete with a Phoebe Waller-Bridge appearance and Dad digging the hole several feet deeper before anyone can get him to put down the shovel. If you found this searching for the film, know that we treat ten minutes of it more seriously than most people treat features — and that Robby blushes on tape at least once.

• Robert Weinstein — Playwright
• The Barrow Group — Producing Theater

Full cast and director information was not available for this production.

Hymns to the Obvious is an original short play written by Robert Weinstein — our far too humble host and resident storytelling teacher — performed by The Barrow Group. Read the play here.

The recurring "Go Hooks" civic-pride tic that drives Janice crazy is explicitly modeled on a device from David Mamet's State and Main — that film's fictional town of Waterford has its own nonsensical all-purpose chant, connected to the town's history, with "Go you Huskies!" serving as the town's all-purpose rallying cry. Critics have noted this is a hallmark of how Mamet builds comedy through repetition, misdirection, and his own unique dialogue rhythm rather than punchlines — precisely the mechanism Robby borrows for the "Palmer McKinney" refrain.

The Stephen Colbert/Phoebe Waller-Bridge anecdote we use to describe Robby's unintentional depth is also real. During a 2020 remote interview, Colbert asked Waller-Bridge what the fox in Fleabag means, and she declined to answer, then asked Colbert what he thought it meant. Colbert offered that he thought the fox was the "Hound of Heaven," then recited the Francis Thompson poem of that title as his evidence, and Waller-Bridge said she was "completely blown away," responding "Yes, that's what it is!" — she then asked him "Can you do that whenever anyone asks what I said the fox was?", essentially adopting his reading as her own on the spot, which is the exact dynamic we are pointing to when we compare it to Robby's iPad choice.

Sources:

- https://www.avclub.com/david-mamet-s-state-and-main-engineers-a-perfect-punchl-1798240443

- https://collider.com/stephen-colbert-phoebe-waller-bridge-fleabag-fox-explained/

- https://startefacts.com/news/stephen-colbert-s-take-on-fleabag-s-biggest-mystery-is-so-lit-even-phoebe-waller-bridge-gave-up_a138

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 02: The Fantastic Four if you like Marvel movies — and want to hate us forever and tell your friends how lame we are.

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We put Jaclynn's favorite writing-room legend on trial — that Phoebe Waller-Bridge scrapped three finished episodes of Fleabag season 2 to open on a 90-second dinner-table gut-punch instead — and end up asking whether "cut everything until you hit the marrow" is a universal law of good storytelling or just a very expensive miracle only one person on Earth could afford to pull off.

This week on The Arc, we spend an entire episode on roughly ninety seconds of television: the cold open of Fleabag season 2, episode 1. What looks like a throwaway montage turns out to be one of the most efficient pieces of writing on TV — three scrapped episodes' worth of story compressed into a single scene — and the conversation spirals into Dickens, Ted Lasso, and whether "cut the first three episodes" is actually good advice or just a nice thing to say. You don't need to have seen Fleabag to enjoy this one, but you'll want to by the end of it.

Streaming availability as of 2026-07-05.

• Amazon Prime Video (streaming with subscription)
• Apple TV (purchase or rental)
• Amazon Video (purchase or rental)

Home base is Prime, full stop — a fitting arrangement, since the show is currently available streaming on Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Video with Ads, or as a download purchase through Amazon Video and the Apple TV Store. No free option exists anywhere right now, so if Jaclynn's going to keep citing that origin story on a loop, at least Amazon's paying rent for it.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

This one isn't a film — it's the first seven minutes of season two, episode one of Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge's show about a sharp, guilt-ridden woman who talks directly to the camera and would rather make a joke at a grave than admit anything is wrong. What we sat with is a single opening sequence that pulls off something close to a magic trick: a title card ("371 days, 19 hours, 26 minutes later"), a bloody nose in a bathroom, a stranger kneeling on the floor, a woman turning to the lens to tell us "this is a love story" while it looks for all the world like a crime drama — and then ninety seconds that catch you up on a year of a life without ever boring you through it. Waller-Bridge reportedly wrote three full episodes to bridge that gap, decided they were good, and threw them in the bin. The show starts where those episodes would have ended.

That decision is the whole argument, and it's the one Jaclynn has apparently been texting Cole about at 9:47 p.m. on Tuesdays for roughly a decade — "they should have thrown out the first three episodes" being, by Cole's count, the only note she ever gives anything. Watching him get sent over the edge about the note, and then watching Jaclynn quietly walk it back mid-episode — from "this is the measuring stick for all television" to "this is a standard I hold myself to and shouldn't weaponize against writers on a deadline" — is most of what happens here, alongside a genuinely useful detour into why the trick works: the sequence isn't a montage so much as a monologue, a recap, a visual story, and a character reintroduction happening at once, and it only lands because the show already trained you in its own grammar. Robby, mostly, keeps the peace and lands the sharpest observation of the night — that you campaign in poetry and govern in prose, which is to say we critique art in one language and actually make it in a much less glamorous one.

Where it opens up past the clip is the part worth arriving for: Cole once dragged Jaclynn to in-person Edgar Wright screenings to discover she "really likes match cuts"; Jaclynn once handed Cole a technically perfect edit of her own short film and, on his suggestion, threw it out and started over, which is the note enacted on herself. The conversation quietly turns into the thing underneath the argument, which is that the notes we give other people's work tend to be the abusive things we say to ourselves. You do not need to have seen a second of Fleabag to follow any of it. Five minutes in, you'll probably want to.

00:00 — Cold Open

The two hosts joke about a scrapped earlier recording and a habit one of them has of texting angry complaints mid-edit, then explain that this episode centers on the opening minutes of Fleabag season two because one host, Jaclynn, so often cites it as an example of a show that should have cut its first few episodes that the other host, Cole, wanted to finally unpack that recurring reference on air.

02:15 — Jaclynn's Only Note Ever

One host teases the other for repeatedly bringing up the same recurring piece of writing advice about a five-minute scene, joking that it's practically her only criticism of anything she watches, while she pushes back that she has plenty of other notes and defends this one as a genuinely useful lesson about starting a story in the middle, drawn from her improv background and her admiration for Phoebe Waller-Bridge's writing.

04:18 — Phoebe Waller-Bridge Wrote Three Full Episodes & Threw Them Out

The hosts discuss how Phoebe Waller-Bridge scrapped three fully written episodes that would have caught viewers up on a year of missed story, and instead compressed that information into a brief opening title card and the first few minutes of the season, with the two agreeing that cutting the completed material, rather than using it, made the season stronger and reflects a broader creative principle that not everything a writer produces needs to make it into the final work.

06:43 — Jaclynn Taking Her Own Note

The hosts discuss how Jaclynn, one of the podcast's participants, redid a "technically perfect" edit of her short film after being told it felt boring and impersonal, deliberately making it messier and funnier instead, which leads into a debate about whether the film's opening sequence counts as a montage, with one host arguing it's actually a more sophisticated device that gives the audience information quickly without being tedious, while another host is teased for how strongly he reacts to praise of that opening.

10:57 — Why Cole Was "Sent Over The Edge"

One host admits to firing off angry texts late at night when a TV show frustrates her, then the two hosts get sidetracked into recalling how Cole once dragged her co-host to Edgar Wright screenings, before circling back to debate a comparison someone made between modern serialized TV and Charles Dickens's newspaper serials, with one host countering that Dickens wrote that way because he was paid by the word, not for artistic reasons, and they end up agreeing that the comparison isn't really a compliment to TV writing but rather an observation about writing to fit a commercial format.

16:09 — Beat-By-Beat Breakdown

The two hosts walk through the opening minutes of the Fleabag season two premiere shot by shot—the bathroom scene with the bloody nose and the priest's offscreen voice, Fleabag's fourth-wall line "this is a love story," and the rapid 90-second dinner-party montage—then discuss how the show's established visual shorthand and fourth-wall device let it convey a season's worth of character updates almost instantly, before comparing how season one ended on an unresolved, non-redemptive note versus season two's more resolved arc.

25:49 — Robby's Practical Side

The two hosts debate whether Phoebe Waller-Bridge's famous habit of discarding good material to find the best version of a story is a realistic standard to hold all writing to, with one host admitting she initially found the advice frustrating because it glosses over how hard and expensive that kind of ruthless editing actually is, before they settle on treating it as a personal aspiration rather than a universal rule, and one host connects this to lessons on storytelling efficiency learned from working in Broadway marketing, where a show has to be pitched in 30 seconds.

33:20 — Robby Quotes Cuomo & Predicts Mamdani's Victory Speech

Robby recites the Mario Cuomo line about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose that Mamdani used in his victory speech, and this leads us into a discussion of how criticism tends to be poetic while actually making art is more like prose work, with one host admitting he once wrote harsh, regretted reviews for a site called newyorktheater.com.

0:00 - Cold Open

2:15 - Jaclynn's Only Note Ever

4:18 - Phoebe Waller-Bridge Wrote Three Full Episodes & Threw Them Out

6:43 - Jaclynn Taking Her Own Note

10:57 - Why Cole Was "Sent Over The Edge"

16:09 - Beat-By-Beat Breakdown

25:49 - Robby's Practical Side

33:20 - Robby Quotes Cuomo & Predicts Mamdani's Victory Speech

35:13 - Outro - Robby Tries & Fails To Be Mean

• Phoebe Waller-Bridge — Writer — also: Killing Eve, Crashing
• Harry Bradbeer — Director — also: Killing Eve, Enola Holmes
• Phoebe Waller-Bridge — Executive Producer
• Harry Williams — Executive Producer
• Jack Williams — Executive Producer
• Harry Bradbeer — Executive Producer
• Lydia Hampson — Executive Producer
• Joe Lewis — Executive Producer
• Gary Dollner — Editor — Emmy winner for Fleabag Season 2, Episode 1; also known for Killing Eve, Veep
• Tony Miller — Cinematographer

• Phoebe Waller-Bridge — Fleabag
• Sian Clifford — Claire
• Andrew Scott — The Priest
• Olivia Colman — Godmother
• Bill Paterson — Dad
• Brett Gelman — Martin
• Maddie Rice — Needy Waitress

• Emmy Award: Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Comedy Series (Gary Dollner) — WIN
• Emmy Award: Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series (Tony Miller) — NOMINATION
• BAFTA: Best Scripted Comedy (Series) — NOMINATION

Phoebe Waller-Bridge actually wrote two full original episodes before the dinner-party scene, not three, and the reveal came straight from her own account of the process. "I'd written two original episodes, one and two, and it just didn't seem to kick off quick enough," said Waller-Bridge. "So I just chopped those two off and started essentially in episode three, the dinner party scene." [Source]

Director Harry Bradbeer made a deliberate, almost stubborn choice to never move the camera during the dinner scenes, resisting the instinct to "fix" a static setup by roving around the table. "My approach to it as a director was actually to go quite old school," said Bradbeer. "I never moved the camera and I think that was the right decision." [Source]

The team seriously considered cutting Fleabag's signature fourth-wall glances out of the premiere entirely before deciding the show couldn't work without them. The three experimented with removing Waller-Bridge's direct addresses to the camera but decided that this element was needed. [Source]

Editor Gary Dollner's rapid-fire cutting around the stationary table wasn't just stylistic flair — it was a direct workaround for the fact that the whole episode was locked into one physical location. "[It allowed] us to have as many beats going around the table as possible, because we're restricted by location," said series editor Gary Dollner. [Source]

The 371-days-later structure paid off at the Emmys: the episode won for both writing and directing, and Waller-Bridge also took Outstanding Lead Actress for it. Waller-Bridge received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series and Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series, and Bradbeer received a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series at the 71st Primetime Emmys. [Source]

• "It didn't need another season, and word of this new batch had me fearing it was just a network trying to cash in on Waller-Bridge's newfound celebrity" — Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone [Source]
• "With extreme economy, Waller-Bridge re-establishes the relevant characters and relationships at this one farcical dinner" — Willa Paskin, Slate [Source]
• "opened with an episode so gobsmackingly good that I wanted to give her a standing ovation in my living room" — Veronica Lee, The Arts Desk [Source]

For anyone who wants to keep pulling this thread, a few things worth checking out:

"Fleabag – Season 2, Episode 1 Story Breakdown" (Plot Devices)

This piece digs into the structural choices of the premiere specifically, including how Phoebe places three smoke breaks throughout the dinner so Fleabag can have private moments, one establishing her relationship with her dad and the final one acting as a meet-cute with the priest. It's a clean, beat-level breakdown for anyone who wants to see the episode's architecture laid bare. [Source]

"5 Essential Screenwriting Lessons You Can Learn From 'Fleabag' Season 2" (No Film School)

This essay is aimed squarely at writers and makes almost the same argument Jaclynn does on the show — it points out that one of the things to admire about the script is how late we get into scenes, with people already sitting at the table, already having conversations, already in the bathroom, which infuses every scene with kinetic energy and makes the audience play catch-up. Worth a read for the "start in the middle" thesis stated as pure craft advice. [Source]

"Fleabag series 2 episode 1 review: poised, painful, perfect comedy" (Den of Geek)

Written right after the episode aired, this review captures the contemporary critical reaction, calling it "the sort of TV episode that leaves you feeling as though a stranger has just pressed something very precious and very secret into the palm of your hand" — good context for how the premiere landed before the season became the awards juggernaut it's now remembered as. [Source]

Or consider starting from the beginning — Episode 01: The Princess Bride is where we became friends.

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We bring on an actual Chicago improviser to argue that "Don't Think Twice" gets the community right and the improv itself completely wrong — and end up debating whether the film's jealous, unsupportive troupe is a realistic portrait of ambition or just a group chat full of people who need therapy.

This week on The Arc, Sophie Long joins the crew from Sydney by way of Chicago improv school to talk about Mike Birbiglia's "Don't Think Twice" — a movie about a scrappy improv troupe that fractures the moment one member gets cast on a Saturday-Night-Live-style show. The conversation drifts from Buddhist sand mandalas to who actually deserves to make it, and lands somewhere between jealousy, capitalism, and what it means to be happy for your friends. You don't need to have seen the film, or done a single improv class, to follow along — you just need to have ever wanted something a friend got instead.

Streaming availability as of 2026-07-05.

• Netflix (streaming with subscription)
• Tubi (free streaming)
• Amazon Prime Video (rent or purchase)
• Apple TV (rent or purchase)
• Google Play (rent or purchase)
• Fandango at Home (rent or purchase)

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

Don't Think Twice is Mike Birbiglia's 2016 film about a New York improv troupe called The Commune — six people who love each other, do bits together, pat each other on the back and say "got your back" before every show — right up until a scout from Weekend Live (the film's Saturday Night Live) sends two of them to audition, and only one gets cast. From there the group's whole gravity shifts. It's ostensibly a movie about improv, but what it's really about is jealousy, capitalism, and whether any of this is fair: some people make it, some people don't, and Birbiglia's own line for it is that "life is capitalism." Keegan-Michael Key, Gillian Jacobs, Chris Gethard, Kate Micucci, and Tami Sagher fill out a genuine ensemble — the kind you could rewatch six times, once from each person's point of view, and get a whole coherent story every time.

For this one we brought in our first guest, Sophie Long — an improviser and solo-show artist who came up in Chicago (where, as we keep insisting, comedy is born) and now lives in Sydney, and who happens to have actually met and worked with Jaclynn at Second City back when the two of them were hugging at parties promising each other they'd be on Saturday Night Live in five years. Which is the exact plot of this movie. Jaclynn is in this movie — she's in the scene where Ben Stiller shows up — so we had someone on the call who watched them shoot it methodically, camera angle by camera angle, and can confirm the film contains no actual improv and that the fake improv isn't good, which the four of us agreed was hilarious given the subject. We got Sophie to define "mandala" for the 99.9% of us who needed it, argued about whether the improv onscreen reads as New York or Chicago, and watched Jaclynn declare, with total conviction, that she hated every single character and they all need therapy and new friends — which turned out to be the most useful thing anyone said all night, because it's the same self-sabotaging jealousy the movie is quietly about.

The honest disagreement is the whole episode. Robby found Gethard's character — the one working the Whole Foods samples counter by day, torn between ambition and a father he loves — profound, and Cole (who claims not to find funny things funny, and avoids them for that reason) recognized the double life of the retail job from his own before he met these two. Jaclynn saw her own shadow in Miles and couldn't forgive him for it; Sophie, who trained as a therapist and talks about improv as a Buddhist mandala with a straight face, saw two wolves inside every one of them and landed somewhere gentler. If you've ever been in a room full of talented friends and felt happy and jealous at the exact same time, this is the conversation about it. And yes — we're apparently doing Crocodile Dundee next, a film exactly one person in this conversation has seen.

• Mike Birbiglia — Director & Screenwriter — also known for: Sleepwalk with Me
• Mike Birbiglia — Producer
• Miranda Bailey — Producer
• Amanda Marshall — Producer
• Ira Glass — Producer — creator of NPR's This American Life
• Joe Anderson — Cinematographer

• Keegan-Michael Key — Jack — Known for Key & Peele
• Gillian Jacobs — Samantha — Known for Community, Love
• Mike Birbiglia — Miles — Known for his stand-up and storytelling
• Kate Micucci — Allison — Known for Garfunkel and Oates, The Big Bang Theory
• Chris Gethard — Bill — Known for The Chris Gethard Show
• Tami Sagher — Lindsay — Known for writing on 30 Rock and Inside Amy Schumer
• Cameos: Lena Dunham, Ben Stiller, Pete Holmes

• Critics' Choice Award: Best Comedy — NOMINATION

The film also holds a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes from its initial release — not an award, but worth noting alongside the above.

Four of the six lead actors—Keegan-Michael Key, Chris Gethard, Tami Sagher, and Birbiglia himself—came in with real improv backgrounds, but Gillian Jacobs and Kate Micucci had none; Birbiglia explained that "four of the six key cast people had improv experience," while "the two that didn't were" Jacobs and Micucci. [Source]

The stage-set improv scenes weren't shot like typical dialogue coverage — Birbiglia had a Steadicam operator stay at eye level with the actors on stage the whole time, specifically so the audience would feel like "the seventh member of the group" rather than a spectator watching a play. The film's line about art and money traces back to his wife's real comment after watching his UCB improv group perform, pointing out that everyone in the group was "sort of equally funny and talented," yet some were on Saturday Night Live or movie stars while others were "barely paying their rent." [Source]

Gethard's own life practically mirrors his character's arc: his real-life friendship with Bobby Moynihan survived and thrived since Moynihan got SNL while Gethard didn't, and his own group, The Stepfathers, also saw Zach Woods leave for The Office. [Source]

Since Don't Think Twice, Mike Birbiglia has stayed almost entirely in the realm of solo stage-to-screen specials. He premiered The Old Man and the Pool at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre in 2022, then took it to Broadway and later London's West End, before it premiered on Netflix in November 2023. That special picked up real awards attention — it earned a 2024 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for a Variety Special. He followed it with another one, as his fourth Netflix special, "The Good Life," premiered on May 26, 2025. Outside his own specials, he's kept busy as a producer and supporting player — serving as executive producer on Alex Edelman: Just for Us and on Jacqueline Novak's Get on Your Knees, and acting in films like A Man Called Otto.

We haven't covered The Old Man and the Pool yet — but we probably should.

"[T]he biggest thing to get over is the fear. I think every improviser has that." — Rachel Dratch, as quoted on IMDb [Source]

Critic Sheila O'Malley, writing for RogerEbert.com, connected the film's spirit of generosity to a broader idea about how people might treat one another:

"What would it be like if we accepted one another's contributions with generosity and openness?" — Sheila O'Malley, RogerEbert.com [Source]

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 02: The Fantastic Four if you like Marvel movies — and want to hate us forever and tell your friends how lame we are.

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We argue about whether Freaky Friday is a "film" or a "movie" — Cole makes his case on the strength of the cinematography, Robby makes his on how much interior life every character gets — and end up crying, more than once, over a body-swap comedy we all showed up ready to make fun of.

We revisit Freaky Friday (2003) fresh off watching its sequel, Freakier Friday, and only one of us had actually seen the original before this rewatch. What starts as an on-air apology for past dismissiveness turns into a genuine argument over whether this counts as a "film" or just a "movie," a serious question about what communication even means, and a Britney Spears tangent that goes places — including Robby's confession about his own "sexy Britney Spears summer" teaching English in Italy. We also own up to the film's -isms (racism, classism, ageism, all present and accounted for) while still landing on it as an early-2000s classic despite them. You don't need to have seen either Friday to enjoy this one — but you'll probably want to watch the Jamie Lee Curtis café scene again immediately after.

Streaming availability as of 2026-07-05.

• Disney+ (streaming with subscription)
• Prime Video (rent or purchase)
• Apple TV (rent or purchase)
• Google Play (rent or purchase)
• Fandango at Home (rent or purchase)

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

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Or since you liked Freaky Friday (2003), try Freaky Friday (1976) — the original adaptation of the same Mary Rodgers novel, and the film this one remade.

Freaky Friday, the 2003 one, is the body-swap comedy where Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan wake up in each other's lives — an overworked psychologist mother and her band-playing, misunderstood teenage daughter — and have to survive a day as the other person. It's a joyful Disney movie made by two actors at the height of their powers, and it does the thing the genre keeps failing to do: the reveal is an actual reveal, the waking-up-in-the-wrong-body shot is filmed with a queasy, disoriented camera hug pulled straight out of the commercial-world playbook, and the alarm-clock open Robby swears no screenwriter should ever be allowed to use again somehow earns its keep. We came back specifically to talk about Chad Michael Murray, and we're not sorry.

The central argument of the episode is whether Freaky Friday is a "film" or a "movie" — Cole's case rests on the cinematography, which he thinks is more disciplined and purposeful than the genre gets credit for; Robby's case rests on the fact that every character, even the small ones, gets a real interior life instead of a punchline. Underneath that argument is the thing the movie keeps raising and then refusing to dig into — a kid grieving a dead father while her mother remarries three years later, a daughter who's provided for and not once seen or heard. Robby, who has a master's in communication, kept wanting the film to fire the guns it kept loading; Jaclynn made the case that the earthquake only shakes the two of them because they're the only two who matter to each other yet, and pulled it back to empathy and the cafe scene where a forty-year-old woman is flirting with a nineteen-year-old boy and the movie just... lets it sit; Dad, whose own inner critical voice he'll tell you died about a year ago, cried at the beginning, at a rich kid whose needs simply don't register — and honestly, all three of us cried more than once rewatching this. Somewhere in there is the "money buys happiness up to a point" detour (with an impromptu sketch to go with it), a Britney Spears origin story that stops the whole episode cold because there's genuinely no way to make fun of it, and Robby's own confession about a "sexy Britney Spears summer" spent teaching English to teenagers in Italy while she was inescapable.

Robby and Cole originally saw this in a theater packed with teenage girls and their mothers, and both still want a T-shirt that just says "Jaclynn is making me see this movie." We don't pretend the film's -isms — the racism, the classism, the ageism, all quietly present — aren't there; we just land, collectively, on it still being an early-2000s classic anyway. We are three friends — Cole, Robby, Jaclynn — who take movies far too seriously on purpose, then watch that seriousness collapse into the group chat we actually are. You do not need to have seen Freaky Friday to follow along, though we'd bet five minutes in you'll want to. Bring the nostalgia cupcakes. Root canal — that's not fair, they're not our teeth.

00:27 — What You Need To Know Before Watching

The hosts introduce Freaky Friday (2003) as a nostalgic, era-specific mother-daughter body-swap comedy, with one host admitting she'd previously dismissed the film but has now warmed to it and jokingly apologizes to her co-host for having been dismissive, while another says she still didn't enjoy it despite being impressed by the detail her co-hosts brought to discussing it.

01:39 — What Robby, A Storytelling Teacher Thinks

Robby, who teaches storytelling, explains that he judges finished, professionally made work more harshly than students' rough drafts, and uses that framing to praise the film's tight, economical structure and a well-executed reveal, before the group compares it to its "Freakier Friday" remake, debating whether an aging-related joke lands as funny or feels mean in each version, and closes by joking that the original barely even counts as a "movie."

08:12 — Is "Freaky Friday" A Film or a Movie?

The hosts debate whether "Freaky Friday" (2003) counts as a "film" versus a "movie," then dissect specific technical choices — the opening alarm-clock cliché, a torso-mounted tracking-camera shot they compare to the British show "Peep Show" and to cinematographer Matthew Libatique's work, and an earthquake gag that only some characters notice — with one host offering a defense of the earthquake's inconsistent logic as reflecting the mother-daughter relationship, while the others push back that the film raises serious emotional stakes (grief over the dead father) without fully following through on them.

18:18 — When Did We All Cry?

The hosts go around sharing which specific moment in the movie made them cry — pointing to a speech, a guitar scene, and a father's emotional admission — then debate whether the daughter's storyline about feeling unseen by her mother despite material comfort was more emotionally effective than the film's ending, while also picking apart a plot inconsistency about whether the rehearsal dinner or the wedding itself is supposed to be the "most important day," and questioning whether the mother remarrying so soon after the father's death, and dismissing her daughter's big audition, reads as bad parenting.

23:30 — Does Money Buy Happiness + Sketch

The hosts riff on the "money buys happiness only up to a point" statistic to mock a movie character's trivial rich-person problem, then act out a mocking sketch about it, before shifting into a semi-serious discussion of how the film (and their own podcast) tends to introduce heavy topics like dead parents without really sitting with them, which leads one host to reference his mother's recent death and the group to briefly worry, half-joking, that they do the same emotional-deflection thing on their own show.

27:41 — Serious Question: What Is Communication?

The hosts, one of whom mentions holding a master's degree in communication, debate what "communication" actually means, agreeing it involves listening and responsiveness rather than just stating one's feelings out loud, and they use a scene from the film where the mother asks her daughter about a boy but then criticizes her answer as an example of someone claiming to want communication while actually shutting it down.

31:04 — The Big Takeaway: Chad Michael Murray

The hosts discuss how the film includes an unnecessary male love-interest subplot, then dig into the cafe scene where Jamie Lee Curtis's character (Lindsay Lohan in her body) flirts with Chad Michael Murray's character, debating whether the actress's performance worked, sharing their own real-life stories of inappropriate teacher-student flirtations, and ultimately criticizing the scene for playing the "older woman flirting with a teen" awkwardness for a beat and moving on rather than using it to deepen the mother-daughter relationship at the story's core.

35:03 — Jaclynn's Love of BRITNEY SPEARS

Jaclynn explains to her co-host why Britney Spears means so much to her, describing how her resemblance to Spears in college became a running joke and identity among friends, how she leaned into it through parties, an autograph mix-up, and a class project impersonating her, and how she eventually wrote a thesis on Spears' cultural contradictions that helped get her into grad school, framing it all as a lesson in dropping pretension and embracing what she genuinely enjoys.

38:22 — Robby's Way Too "Sexy" Britney Spears Summer In Italy

One host recalls teaching English at a tennis camp in Italy at 29, unsettled by how sexually charged and Britney Spears-obsessed the teenage campers were, which leads into a tangent about loving Britney and having bought her memoir three times in one day, before they awkwardly pivot back to wrapping up their discussion of the film and moving on to favorite lines.

42:33 — Favorite Lines

The hosts read out their favorite lines from the movie, including a repeated "root canal" bit they riff on for laughs, then discuss the stepfather speech and the "you're not the one thing in my life that's perfect" line in detail, sharing how the latter personally resonated with one host's relationship with her own mother, before joking about Chad Michael Murray's line reading and his name.

• Mark Waters — Director
• Heather Hach — Screenwriter
• Leslie Dixon — Screenwriter
• Mary Rodgers — Novelist — based on her 1972 novel

• Jamie Lee Curtis — Tess Coleman/Anna Coleman (in Tess's body)
• Lindsay Lohan — Anna Coleman/Tess Coleman (in Anna's body)
• Mark Harmon — Ryan Volvo, Tess's fiancé
• Harold Gould — Alan, Tess's father
• Chad Michael Murray — Jake, Anna's love interest
• Stephen Tobolowsky — Mr. Elton Bates
• Christina Vidal — Maddie
• Ryan Malgarini — Harry Coleman
• Haley Hudson — Peg
• Rosalind Chao — Pei-Pei Chiang
• Lucille Soong — Mrs. Chiang
• Willie Garson — Evan
• Dina Waters — Dottie Robertson
• Julie Gonzalo — Stacey Hinkhouse
• Marc McClure — Boris
• Mary Ellen Trainor — Diary Reading Patient
• Cayden Boyd — Harry's friend

• BMI Film Music Award (Rolfe Kent, composer) — WIN
• MTV Movie Award: Best Breakthrough Performance (Lindsay Lohan) — WIN
• Teen Choice Award: Choice Breakout Movie Star Female (Lindsay Lohan) — WIN
• Teen Choice Award: Choice Hissy Fit (Lindsay Lohan) — WIN
• Phoenix Film Critics Society: Best Live Action Family Film — WIN
• Golden Globe: Best Actress Musical or Comedy (Jamie Lee Curtis) — NOMINATION
• Saturn Award: Best Fantasy Film — NOMINATION
• Saturn Award: Best Actress — NOMINATION
• Saturn Award: Best Younger Actor — NOMINATION
• Saturn Award: Best Writing — NOMINATION
• Critics' Choice: Best Family Film (Live Action) — NOMINATION

Freaky Friday (2003) is based on Mary Rodgers' 1972 novel of the same name — the same source novel behind the 1976 film adaptation we covered in Freaky Friday (1976), making this the third screen adaptation of Rodgers' story. You can read more about the novel here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freaky_Friday

Bookshop.org search link: https://bookshop.org/beta-search?keywords=Freaky%20Friday

Annette Bening was originally cast as Tess and had already begun preparing for the role before dropping out right before filming, which is how Jamie Lee Curtis — who figured her leading-lady days were over — ended up with the part. "I was telling interviewers I was 44, a little chubby, my hair was grey, I was refusing to dye it, and I was content with my life," Curtis told the Telegraph in 2003. [Source]

Tom Selleck was originally cast to play Tess's boyfriend Ryan, but he dropped out of the project after Bening exited, and Mark Harmon took over the role. [Source]

Lindsay Lohan actually gave what the director considered the weakest audition of the finalists for Anna, yet still got cast because of her raw presence. Before Lohan could be cast as Anna, she had to best four other actresses for the part, and her audition was "probably the worst of the five," though Waters felt "we also agreed she was a star." [Source]

Anna's whole punk-rocker persona in the finished film wasn't the original plan — she was written as goth, and it was Lohan's own audition choice that reshaped the character. Lindsay Lohan's character was originally written as goth, but she felt the persona was too alienating and auditioned in a preppy style, and the character was ultimately rewritten as a grunge-influenced teen. [Source]

• "delivers a mix of heart and humor that works better than most teen-oriented fare" — James Berardinelli, ReelViews, via Wikipedia [Source]
• "genuinely funny" — IGN, via Wikipedia [Source]
• Nick Schager of Slant Magazine and Ed Park of The Village Voice criticized the use of "Oriental mysticism" in the transformation scene, arguing it relied on dated stereotypes.

We also covered Freaky Friday (1976) — the original adaptation of the same Mary Rodgers novel, and the film this one remade.

Or consider starting from the beginning — Episode 01: The Princess Bride is where we became friends.

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We argue Freakier Friday is a box of nostalgia cupcakes that somehow turns into a real conversation about empathy, grief, and exactly how meta you can make a story before the Easter eggs start to break.

Freakier Friday (2025), directed by Nisha Ganatra and starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan, marks Lohan's first leading role in wide theatrical release in 18 years — and on The Arc (thearc.fm), we had a great time unpacking this box of nostalgia cupcakes. Once we got into it, we found a story genuinely about empathy, grief, and growth, with a serious discussion of when the rules of a story's world matter and when they don't. The Favorite Lines segment is especially hilarious this week.

Freakier Friday (2025) is in theaters and available on Disney+.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

Freakier Friday (2025) is Disney making a sequel twenty-two years after the fact, and somehow it works. Jaclynn was going to see it no matter what — that much was established early — and the rest of us came along and found something more interesting than expected inside the nostalgia packaging.

The film is an active meditation on how meta you can make a story without breaking it. Every callback, every returning face, every wink at the audience is a potential Easter egg waiting to crack — and the film mostly holds them intact, which we found more impressive than we anticipated. What's underneath the nostalgia is a story about empathy, grief, and growth that takes its characters' pain seriously even when it's being very funny about it.

We had a real conversation about the rules of a story's world: when they matter, when they don't, and what happens when a film asks you to accept something that strains its own logic. The first half's unkind aging jokes and constant yelling tested us. Jamie Lee Curtis in the second half won us back completely — we argue she deserves an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize, in that order. MUNA's cameo is a highlight. The Favorite Lines segment is one of the funniest we've done, because this was one of the funniest films of the year.

00:00 — The Cold Open

00:21 — Why We Chose It, and Why Disney Made This Movie Literally for Jaclynn

01:44 — Old Guy Seeing The Film Alone In The Theater

02:40 — Robby Liked It?

03:11 — Jaclynn's Memory of the Original 2003 Film

04:50 — The Jane Goodall Theater Experience

07:46 — The Unkind Aging Jokes and Constant Yelling in the First Half

08:14 — Jamie Lee Curtis Deserves an Oscar and a Nobel Peace Prize

09:30 — The Fantastic Four Problem of Hitting Every Nostalgic Button

14:30 — Characters in Pain

17:30 — Real World Consequences & The Rules of the World

25:40 — The Almost Questionable Morality of the Story

28:00 — MUNA's Cameo

30:30 — Favorite Lines Sketch

31:40 — Favorite Lines

• Nisha Ganatra — Director
• Jordan Weiss — Screenplay — story by Elyse Hollander & Jordan Weiss
• Based on Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers (1972)
• Matthew Clark — Cinematographer
• Kristin Burr, Andrew Gunn, Jamie Lee Curtis — Producers

Returning:

• Jamie Lee Curtis — Tess Coleman
• Lindsay Lohan — Anna Coleman
• Mark Harmon — Ryan
• Chad Michael Murray — Jake
• Rosalind Chao — Mama P
• Stephen Tobolowsky — Mr. Elton Bates
• Christina Vidal Mitchell — Maddie
• Haley Hudson — Peg

New to Franchise:

• Julia Butters — Harper Coleman
• Sophia Hammons — Lily Reyes
• Manny Jacinto — Eric Reyes
• Maitreyi Ramakrishnan — Ella

Freakier Friday is based on the 1972 novel Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers — the same source material as the 1976 and 2003 films. We've covered both earlier versions: Freaky Friday (1976) and Freaky Friday (2003).

The sequel came into existence largely because of Jamie Lee Curtis — while touring for the Halloween franchise, she kept encountering fans who asked about a Freaky Friday sequel, which led her to push for the film herself.

Lindsay Lohan's role marks her first leading part in a wide theatrical release in 18 years.

Elaine Hendrix — who played the antagonist Meredith in The Parent Trap (1998) — makes a cameo, reuniting her with Lindsay Lohan on screen for the first time since that film.

The film achieved the biggest domestic opening for a live-action comedy in 2025.

Mark Harmon's appearance is his first non-NCIS-related role in a theatrically released film in over a decade.

We've covered the full Freaky Friday franchise:

Freaky Friday (1976) — the original, and the one AI doesn't even know exists.

Freaky Friday (2003) — this is what AI thinks is the original, but it's not.

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 01: The Princess Bride — or Episode 02: The Fantastic Four if you like Marvel movies and want to hate us forever and tell your friends how lame we are.

We analyze a single sixty-second silent scene from Crashing (UK, 2016) and argue it contains a masterclass in heightening — and a complete portrait of the whole series.

Crashing (UK, 2016) is a six-part comedy series created by Phoebe Waller-Bridge — one of her first public-facing works before Fleabag changed everything. On The Arc (thearc.fm), we spend an episode on a single silent scene that runs less than sixty seconds, arguing it displays perfect heightening and paints a picture of the entire show. We also did a sketch making fun of ourselves for choosing a silent scene for a podcast. Watch the scene first: https://youtu.be/z4Kx3TiS3ow?si=WxhV-XnxFAbh3btN&t=26

Watch the scene we discuss: YouTube — Crashing silent scene

The full series Crashing (UK, 2016) is available on Netflix in most regions.

If you want to understand one of the references in our sketch, check out the Wikipedia page for John Cage's 4'33" — a composed piece of music consisting entirely of silence.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

Crashing (UK, 2016) is what Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote before Fleabag — a six-part comedy about six twenty-somethings living as property guardians in a disused London hospital, paying cheap rent in exchange for keeping the building safe, and inevitably making a mess of their personal lives in close quarters. It stars Waller-Bridge as Lulu and Jonathan Bailey as Sam, and it is, by any measure, a great show that deserves more attention than it gets.

We chose to spend an entire episode on one scene. A silent one. Less than sixty seconds. We are aware of how that sounds for a podcast, and we made a sketch about it.

The scene demonstrates perfect heightening — the storytelling technique of escalating tension, stakes, or absurdity in precise, deliberate steps until the audience feels the full weight of what's happening without a word being spoken. We watched it, described it verbally (the only option), tried to guess what it was about going in blind, and then broke down exactly how Waller-Bridge constructs the escalation. By the end we had traced the scene back through the characters' histories and argued it contains everything you need to know about the whole series.

If you want to follow along: watch the scene here before or after listening. Either works.

00:18 — Sketch: Explaining How To Watch The Silent Scene

01:28 — Verbal Description of the Silent Scene

03:20 — What We Guessed It Was About Blind

05:48 — Perfect Heightening

13:04 — The Characters' and PWB's History

• Phoebe Waller-Bridge — Creator & Writer
• Big Talk Productions — Production Company — known for Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz

• Phoebe Waller-Bridge — Lulu
• Jonathan Bailey — Sam — known for Bridgerton
• Damien Molony
• Louise Ford

No major awards won. The series' cultural impact is its legacy: it launched Phoebe Waller-Bridge's TV career and introduced her distinct voice before Fleabag made her a household name.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge wrote and starred in Fleabag later that same year — which went on to win eight Emmy Awards and four BAFTAs, and is widely considered one of the best television series ever made. Jonathan Bailey has since become a major star, best known for playing Anthony Bridgerton in Bridgerton and for his stage and screen work including Fellow Travelers and the Wicked film adaptation.

We haven't covered Fleabag (the TV series) in full yet — but we probably should.

The series is available to watch in full — Crashing (UK, 2016) on Wikipedia has the full episode guide and background.

For the John Cage reference in our sketch: 4'33" on Wikipedia.

We also covered Fleabag — The Stage Play and Fleabag S02, EP 01 — if Phoebe Waller-Bridge's writing sent you somewhere, those are the next stops.

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 01: The Princess Bride — or Episode 02: The Fantastic Four if you like Marvel movies and want to hate us forever and tell your friends how lame we are.

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We argue The Studio Episode 02 is structured as a flawless bookend where basically every line is a Chekhov's Gun that goes off — and that someone couldn't resist turning it from a pistol into a machine gun, which somehow makes it more perfect.

The Studio, Episode 02 — "The Oner" — is a half-hour of television in which nearly every line is a Chekhov's Gun waiting to fire, and they all do. Directed by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, written by Peter Huyck, and shot to look like a single continuous take, it won the 2025 Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series. On The Arc (thearc.fm), we try not to just gush about how much we love it — and fail, because it truly is that good.

The Studio is available on Apple TV+.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

The Studio, Episode 02 — "The Oner" — is built as a flawless bookend: it opens and closes with the same image, and in between, nearly every line of dialogue is a Chekhov's Gun that fires before the end. The episode is shot to look like a single continuous long take — a "oner" — satirically mirroring the fictional movie being filmed within the story, where a director obsesses over the perfect oner while wasting enormous amounts of time and money achieving it.

We break down the episode almost frame by frame: the micro-nuance of the filmmaking, the bookend structure, the use and misuse of the oner as a concept, the satirical skewering of studio executives, and the character work — particularly Greta Lee, who appears as herself and is, we argue, the best thing in it. We contrast the artistry with the chaos, trace every Chekhov's Gun from plant to payoff, and share real behind-the-scenes stories that illuminate just how much craft went into making something look effortless.

The thesis: this story was simply too perfect to ruin. Even when someone turned Chekhov's Gun from a pistol into a machine gun, the structure held. That's the sign of genuinely great writing.

00:00 — Cold Open

00:39 — Sketch: Chekhov's Gun

01:17 — The Behind-The-Scenes Magic

02:29 — The Bookend Magic Trick & Steering Wheel Acting

06:40 — Skewering Oners As a Concept

10:40 — The Characters

16:02 — Mastery of Craft

19:44 — Pre-Conceived Notions

24:25 — Real Life On-Set Story

27:27 — References & Greta Lee

30:45 — Sketch: Chekhov's Gun + Ending

• Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg — Directors
• Peter Huyck — Writer
• Adam Newport-Berra — Cinematographer

• Seth Rogen — Matt Remick
• Ike Barinholtz — Sal Saperstein
• Greta Lee — Herself
• Sarah Polley — Herself
• Catherine O'Hara — Patty Leigh
• Keyla Monterroso Mejia — Petra

• Primetime Emmy — Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series (Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg) — WIN (2025)
• Primetime Creative Arts Emmy — Outstanding Cinematography for a Series Half-Hour (Adam Newport-Berra) — WIN (2025)
• The Studio Season 1 — 13 total Primetime Emmy Awards including Outstanding Comedy Series — WIN (2025)

The episode is shot to actually look like a single continuous long take — the same device the fictional movie within the story is trying and failing to achieve. The meta-structure (a real oner about making a fake oner) is the joke and the craft simultaneously.

New to The Arc? Start with Episode 01: The Princess Bride — or Episode 02: The Fantastic Four if you like Marvel movies and want to hate us forever and tell your friends how lame we are.

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We suspend our disbelief for two straight hours watching The Rock out-muscle a helicopter — and then completely lose it over one shot of a sunrise — which tells you everything about how precisely David Leitch controls what you see and when you see it.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019), directed by David Leitch and starring Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba, and Vanessa Kirby, is Jaclynn's kinda-sorta favorite film — and on The Arc (thearc.fm), we make the case that it's a masterclass in visual storytelling that goes way beyond the stunts. This might be the most fun episode of Virgo Season, and we workshopped a new Favorite Lines segment, shouted out another ex, and became fully card-carrying members of the David Leitch Fan Club.

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) is available to stream on Peacock, and to rent or purchase on Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, and Google Play.

New episodes of The Arc arrive roughly once a week, but they are ephemeral beings that sometimes take longer — you're encouraged to start from the beginning with Episode 01: The Princess Bride.

RSS

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) is the movie where Dwayne Johnson out-muscles a military-grade helicopter, and we find it completely plausible — right up until one questionable shot of a sunrise that we cannot let go. That's the David Leitch effect: when the visual language is precise enough, you'll believe anything except the one thing the director stopped caring about for a second.

This is Jaclynn's kinda-sorta favorite film, which is how we ended up making it the culmination of Virgo Season — two Virgos, their favorite films, one episode each. Robby brought My Life as a Dog. Jaclynn brought this. They are not the same movie. The episode works anyway.

We are unabashedly a David Leitch Fan Club for the full runtime. His background as a stunt performer means every shot has a physical logic to it — he understands bodies in space, weight, impact, and the geometry of a fight — and Hobbs & Shaw lets him work at the biggest scale of his career to that point. We trace his visual precision from the split-screen opening sequence (which he designed around a specific unreleased song that explained both characters without a line of dialogue) through the slow-motion rain fight, arguing that the film is a masterclass in visual storytelling that operates completely independently of whether you think the plot is smart.

We also workshopped a new Favorite Lines segment live on air, shouted out another ex, and debated what "funny" actually means in an action movie context.

This episode will be revisited. We're planning to speak with an Ivy League astronomer about some of Jaclynn's thoughts on the film — specifically the science of a few of its more ambitious visual and physical claims — and we'll return to it when Virgo Season comes back around in August. Consider this the first conversation.

00:00 — Cold Open & Sample from the Trailer

00:26 — Why We're Talking about Hobbs & Shaw

00:40 — Sketch: Virgo Season Team Meeting

01:38 — The Efficiency of the Storytelling

03:20 — Directed by David Leitch (John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2)

05:12 — The Visual Perfection of Hobbs & Shaw

10:10 — What Robby Wanted More Of

11:30 — How Quickly The Story Set Expectations

11:50 — Jaclynn's Only Problem With The Story

20:26 — Action Movie Voice, What Is "Funny"

23:28 — Robby on the "Heat and Weight" of the Story

27:37 — Favorite Lines

31:05 — Shout Out To An Ex (Discussion & Sketch)

• David Leitch — Director — also known for John Wick, Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Bullet Train, The Fall Guy
• Chris Morgan & Drew Pearce — Writers

• Dwayne Johnson — Luke Hobbs
• Jason Statham — Deckard Shaw
• Idris Elba — Brixton
• Vanessa Kirby — Hattie Shaw
• Helen Mirren — Queenie Shaw
• Eiza González — Madame M
• Ryan Reynolds — Agent Locke (cameo)

• MTV Movie & TV Award — Best Fight (Johnson & Statham vs. Elba) — NOMINATION

The film was a major box office success ($759M worldwide) but did not receive major awards recognition — its legacy is commercial and craft-based, not awards-based.

David Leitch designed the film's opening split-screen sequence — showing Hobbs and Shaw's parallel daily routines — around a specific unreleased song, "Better As One" by The Heavy, that Universal sent him during pre-production. He heard the track and immediately knew it could explain both characters visually without a single line of dialogue. The entire sequence was built backward from that song.

The final slow-motion rain fight was shot at 45 frames per second with Johnson, Statham, and Elba actually performing in slow motion — physically acting out each punch at reduced speed — before post-production added the water effects. Leitch said they were all "geeking out" about the technique on set.

David Leitch has continued to be one of Hollywood's most visually inventive action directors. After Hobbs & Shaw he directed Bullet Train (2022) with Brad Pitt — bringing his career full circle by directing the star he once doubled as a stunt performer — and The Fall Guy (2024), a film that pays direct homage to the stunt community he came from. His next film, How to Rob a Bank, is expected in 2026.

We haven't covered Bullet Train or The Fall Guy yet — but given this episode, we probably should.

Empire Magazine's spoiler interview with David Leitch covers the specific decisions behind the split-screen opening, the slow-motion rain fight, and how he approached the film's visual language — straight from the director. Read it here.

No Film School's breakdown of Leitch's six films as a director puts Hobbs & Shaw in the context of his full career — useful if you want to understand where it sits relative to John Wick and Atomic Blonde. Read it here.

Bleeding Cool's comparison of Leitch's visual style across all his films is the best companion piece to our specific argument about his precision — it traces the same qualities we discuss through his whole body of work. Read it here.

We also covered My Life as a Dog — the other half of Virgo Season, Robby's favorite film, which is about as far from a military helicopter fight as cinema gets. Worth hearing both back to back.

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