Loading summary
Transcript34 lines
- [00:04]
A
Hi. It's Saturday. It's the Saturday show. And sometimes we bring you an appearance on another podcast where you can hear me talking to other people. I like those other people. And this week those other people were Sonny Bunch and Peter Suderman. They are two thirds. But the two thirds who joined me on the podcast across the Movie Aisle. The idea was one of their regular members, a Washington Post critic. More to the left, Suderman's libertarian, Sonny Bunch, self identified conservative. They do it for the Dispatch. I have had Sonny. I've been listening to that podcast for a while and they had me on to talk about my substack piece about the Pit, which. My piece focused on the fact that the Pit can get a little preachy, that there's never been an asshole patient on the Pit who wasn't white. There was one recently. It was pretty yellow, but she was jaundiced. So we talked about that. We talked about Hollywood and we talked about messaging and over the top messaging and what people want and what people like. I'm going to give you most of that conversation. I'll hold a little bit back because you should check out the across the Movie Aisle podcast on your own. The way to get there is in the show notes and I just beseech you to enjoy.
- [01:33]
B
Welcome back to this extra special bonus episode. It's a bonus bonus episode of across the Movie Aisle. I'm your host, Sonny Bunch. I'm joined, as always by Peter Suderman. And we've got a very special guest today, Mike Pesca of the Gist. He's got his. He's got. He's a podcasting superstar. We were just talking about the podcasting economy right before we started here. I feel like, you know, Mike's right at the top of it. He's got it. He's got it all figured out. So we're going to take some lessons from him here today. But we. I mean, I'm excited.
- [02:00]
A
By top, you mean Bleeding Edge, right?
- [02:02]
B
Yeah, the Bleeding Edge. Mike M. Thanks for joining us. How are you?
- [02:06]
A
I'm the sentinel chicken of podcasting. Remember those when the avian flu was around, they put a chicken in a cage and if it died, watch out for the flu. That's how I think of myself.
- [02:15]
B
That's. That's cheery. Peter, how are you?
- [02:18]
C
I'm so happy to be talking about movies or television shows or sentinel chickens with Friends.
- [02:23]
B
Yeah. All right. So the reason we're doing this episode is because my gear people reach out. They said you wanted to come on and talk about the Pit. And I have also wanted to talk about the Pit. It's, you know, it's HBO Max's big surprise hit. It's wrapping up its second season in a couple of weeks here. The problem is that I am the only person at. Across the movie aisle who has actually watched the show. Watched the entirety of the show. I think Alyssa watched some. Peter's watched a couple of episodes. He's here mostly to talk about health policy wonk stuff today, I will say, but I'm glad to have you on because I have wanted to do an episode on this for a while now. You, Mike, have been watching every episode. Am I right? Is that if I.
- [03:02]
A
Yes, yes. Up to date. Watched them.
- [03:04]
B
All right, you're all. You're all clear. And I want to be. So we are recording this Tuesday, April 7th. So we have not seen the episode that is coming out Thursday, April 9th. I'm not 100% sure when this will go up. This is going to go up before or after, but just so if something crazy. If a nuke goes off in the pit. We have not seen that. We won't have any thoughts, but I don't think that will happen. Hopefully. Theory. In theory. Anyway, Mike, you've watched the show. You've got an asshole tracker for the pit. We can talk about that in a minute. I'm excited to get to the asshole tracker myself, but I just want to talk about why I was drawn to the show. Because I do think it's really interesting. First and foremost, it's just compelling television, right? The structure is pretty much perfect. Each season covers a shift in a busy Pittsburgh hospital emergency room. We have this core cast of doctors and nurses and security guys who are following. They're led by Dr. Robbie, who's played by Noah Wiley. Funny story here. This was originally kind of intended as an ER spinoff and they couldn't work it out with Crichton. The Michael Crichton estate, of course, who own. He's the creator of the show. So they were just like, why don't we just do another doctor show with Noah Wiley? Led to some lawsuits. But. But it's, you know, it's. It's not. It's not far off of er anyway. The students from the first season have graduated to Residents in the second. There's a new crop of young docs. They're all kind of prickly. They all have different facets to explore. They're all both stupid and brilliant kind of in, you know, alternating fashion. It's. It's really fun. Turns out An ER is a good place for drama called all of humanity Watches up through it at their weakest and at their worst and sometimes at their best. I guess there's a reason that medical and police procedurals continue to dominate the form of television. And this is the second reason I find myself drawn to the Pit. It's really fun watching prestige TV rebuild network TV from first principles, right? Like the seasons here are longer. The. You know, usually a season Hbo is eight to 10 episodes. These are 13, I believe. They. They drop weekly instead of all at once. You know, the binge model is. Is kind of dying. HBO never really went to the binge model. They've always kind of held firm here. But this is a sort of. Sort of show that works perfectly. You try to binge these, which I did in the first season, it gets a little overwhelming. Gets a little overwhelming one hour at a time. That's good. Anyway, it turns out there's a reason that ER ran for 15 seasons. Grey's Anatomy is, like, nearing the quarter century mark. I think it's at season 22 or 23, something like that. And this creates kind of a secondary but also interesting business story. I don't know if you want to talk about it at all, Mike, or if you have any thoughts, but, like, the Pit is a rare show that is filmed entirely in Los Angeles, right? It's a real success story for a town that kind of finds itself in the weird position of struggling to attract big productions which have largely fled overseas. So, like, the Pit is fun. It's got kind of a neat story behind it. It's a neat business of Hollywood story, which I always like, calls to mind kind of previous great eras of tv. But. Mike, you've got some notes. Mike, you've got some thoughts. I know you've got some issues with it, so I've said. But you like the show. I want to be clear. This is a show we try to predicate things on, like finding things to enjoy on shows. I feel like that's. You do enjoy the show, right? You. You do.
- [06:19]
A
I do. I quite love the show. I guess my two favorite kinds of television are where they reinvent something from scratch that we never thought of before. So the rehearsal and both seasons of jury duty, the second one just ended. Hats off to them what they were trying to achieve and what they did. And the second type of show that I really like, Pluribus, maybe goes in that category too. Like, your mind is just blown by the. But by. By the ambition. But I love exquisite execution and that's what this is. This is exquisite execution. I think it's probably the best written show on television. My TV writer friends tell me that everyone wanted to be staffed on it. The interconnecting storylines. Why we watch television is we identify with characters and they have a panoply of doctors and almost all of them you want to know more about. You love them, you love to watch them. But the flaws of the show are very much in line with the fact that it's made in Hollywood and it's made from Hollywood. So as I reported out on my substack, the Pesca profundities piece, actually. Sorry, it was. Here's my own branding. It was maybe a just list piece. Yeah. Like, people listening to this, like what. What are these words?
- [07:35]
B
Willing to.
- [07:36]
A
Yes, they have gone in league with a USC program that wants to teach television and movie professionals the realities of health care. And in doing so, I would say it's up to the professional writers not to totally imbibe what might be called the indoctrination or propaganda. I'm sure that the people at this program have the best of intentions and want reality. And there is a. You know, certain people who write for these shows and produce these shows want to reflect some sort of version of reality on the screen. I remember 15 years ago, I was working for a program called on the Media, and we did a story on how the Smithsonian was now consulting with movies. And the movie that it consulted with to get the verisimil to. To get the reality was the. The Patriot, the Mel Gibson movie, which turned out to be entirely unrealistic in
- [08:29]
B
terms of like, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's not going to be any Mel Gibson's Patriot slander on this show today, sir. This is one of the great triumphs of American cinema.
- [08:39]
A
So it turns out the Gullah people maybe weren't that enthused about being slaves. That would be what the Smithsonian wasn't consulted on. But the buttons on the military jackets were all exactly like the buttons would be. So that's the version of. Of. Of reality that the Smithsonian was after. I think what they specifically remember with
- [08:59]
C
that movie that they advertised that you will see a cannonball hit a body in a way you've never have before. And it was like, oh, we're going to do cannonball violence for real.
- [09:09]
A
I did the mental checklist of the six ways I have seen a cannonball hit a body. I'm like, all right, both limbs, then the head, gut shot. What's left? And it turns out the cannonball to ass was unprecedented in cinematic history. So, okay, so this USC program wants to get across the difficulties, the realities. And then I think it's up to the showrunners, it's up to the producers to say thank you very much and we'll take that as far as it goes. What I think the Pit has done to diagnose the problem before I even describe it is they've taken it a bit too far. So we see in the Pit with all this great acting and chaos and very realistic seeming blood gushing out, we also see a certain movie of the week preachiness. And what I wrote about is they seem, they are, up to this point, unable to present a patient, a supporting character who is an asshole. There are many assholes unless that asshole happens to be a white person. So that's what I was noting. And it's of a piece with. We want to use the Pit to do a lot of social messaging. And part of, or I think maybe the most glaring example of that we as viewers might not know. Oh, is this the reality of the, the medical system? Is this really how payment works if you're poor? I think we do know, statistically speaking, if there are 50 assholes who show up in the ER, that all 50 of them would be white out of a multicultural cast of people.
- [10:41]
B
This is, this is a Hollywood problem though, right? You, if you talk to, if you talk to almost any screenwriter, they will talk about the villain problem. And the villain problem is that if as soon as you start making the villains non, non white or non Eastern European, you get into very like, oh, well, is this an Islamophobic film? Is this, you know, is this racist against. And like that is. That is a broad Hollywood filmmaking, television making problem. That's. That is. I feel like I will defend the Pit here in the sense that it is just a product of its environment. And that is, that is one of the elements of that environment.
- [11:23]
C
I have actually spoken to a writer who did some, who's done some work in the Hollywood orbit, who told me of the existence of a document by one of the major streaming companies that explicitly laid out what minority characters were and were not allowed to do and what kinds of portrayals of minority characters. Now, I've not confirmed this document. I'm going to tell you, like, this is, this is like third level rumor here. Like, I don't know that this is real kind of from somebody that I trust. And also look at the shows. Look what you see on tv. This, this does not shock me as like, I. This seems like it is plausibly true.
- [12:06]
A
So that is true. If there is a villain. I mean, that's probably true overall, but it comes to the fore and challenges the exact thing. One of the main exact things that the show is trying to do, which is reality or verisimilitude, is if There is a 50 out of 50, not a 47 out of 50, but a 50 out of 50. 100% rate of white assholes and not even villains. And there's many things to say about the black villain problem, and one is that most black actors hate it. Black screenwriters hate it. Just everyone involved in the creative community hates it for a number of reasons. But when you play it out to this degree and this often, I think it becomes glaring and it hurts the overall show in a non. Abst. In a more concrete way than they introduced this character in season four. It was an African American. You wondered, oh, is it going to be a good guy and a bad guy? And they resolve it to, oh, it seemed like a bad guy for two episodes, but then they were really the good guy. Undercover, you know, that critique is. Well, that was obvious given the document you presented and what has been the trend in Hollywood for the last few years. Sure. To make up for past injustices. Given, granted, stipulated. But with this show, it's eye rolling after a while. I've reached that while. And we'll be back in a minute with some more of my conversation with Sonny and Peter from the across the Movie Aisle podcast. We're back. I've been talking about the Pit with Peter Suderman and Sonny Bunch, and here's some of the rest of that conversation that I had on the across the Movie Aisle podcast.
- [13:45]
B
All right, I want to, I want to push back on this very slightly in the sense in. In the, in your definitions here, because I do think that you could categorize the ICE agents on this season as I think the ICE agents fall into the asshole category. They seem like, you know, they seem. And they were both actors of color. They were.
- [14:04]
A
They seem to be under the mask. So my assessment of that is that is there are many. I think that a disproportionate, if not majority of. Now just let's go with disproportionate number of ICE agents are in fact Latino. But I think the point there was to make the ICE agents who were not just doing their job or even doing their job harshly, were pretty much assholes, to make them first and foremost be nameless, faceless functionaries of the superstructure. And that's why the agent had the mask on. And the other thing I'll say is that people have said Dr. Santos is an asshole, or some of the other doctors of color have their asshole moments. I exclude the doctors because the doctors are supposed to be fully fleshed out people, and none of them are villains. Right. They can be people who make bad or hard choices, but we do. We are meant to sympathize with them. And their purpose in the plot is not just to complicate things for the people we root for. So that's why it's a patient tracker. And then I went even further, and I didn't put this in the piece, but an EMT from Pittsburgh, I think maybe they call themselves EMS personnel, did get in touch with me, and they said that many of these stories are ripped from the headlines of things that actually happened. And in several examples that he documented, the actual malefactor was a person of color. But on the show, it's depicted to say, a white fraternity guy.
- [15:28]
B
Yeah, I want to. I want to switch tracks here slightly because I do. I. The. The lesson of the week issue is. Is for me, that's. That's a little more glaring. And I don't. I don't even mind it that much in the sense that, like, I. Again, I don't expect. I don't expect much else here. That said, it does. It does get to. It does get to be a little. What are. What are some of your favorite examples of this on the show through the first two seasons here, where we just have, like, here's a. Well, look, this is why the system is broken and, you know, this is what we have to do to fix it and that sort of thing.
- [16:06]
A
Right. So in season two and the latest episode, though, not when people hear this will be the return of a father who was very hardworking and I think, diabetic and got himself in a precarious health situation because they had no health care or. That was a major reason. And there were. I don't. I didn't actually think that this was shoehorned so artlessly into the show and things like that this must happen. But it was very clear that they stopped the narrative drive to do a lot of explaining and exposition about the precarities of health care and the health care system and what can happen and then what can happen if you don't have health care. And then this guy came back, quite plausibly having maybe attempted suicide. Not a phrase they would ever use on the Pit.
- [16:51]
C
Or.
- [16:52]
A
Yes, he came back maybe because of. Yes, yes.
- [16:57]
B
Committed Is not, can you say attempted?
- [16:58]
A
I don't know.
- [16:59]
B
Well, it wouldn't be suicide. That would be either.
- [17:02]
A
An unliving, conscious unliving. Yeah, yeah. In season one, there was a very over the top blaring message of the week exposition about how white doctors, or even at this point, EMTs who are, I count them as assholes because the EMTs are almost always heroic, except in the one case where they miss what might be actually happening to a black patient and that they didn't know it was their ignorance and it's often mistaken for some sort of drug reaction. But in fact she had, she had an underlying condition very prevalent in the black community that of course white people wouldn't be able to understand. And then before season two in which there was an act of violence against a member of the nursing staff, season one ended with that. And there was another moment in season one that was extremely ham handed where there was a lecture, a mini lecture about the prevalence of violence against health care workers somewhere in the middle of the season. So that comes up again and again. And if you look at the chart that I reproduced from USC in season one, they had a checklist of how many episodes talked about the issues that they wanted talked about. And the answer is every episode had at least one message from this USC program. And most of the episodes had some sort of violence. Precarious state of the health care worker today.
- [18:28]
C
Yeah, I guess like an adaptation problem. I mean we, on the show this week, we talked about difficulties with adaptation and you know, sort of the question of whether or not when you're adapting Lord of the Rings or Spider man, different kind of thing. But like when you're taking source material, you need to be deeply true to the material or you need to maybe do like what Emerald Fennell did with Wuthering Heights and make something different that is your own. And are you kind of saying they have a, like they're just, they're like, they're like the, the bad adaptation that's just a bunch of, you know, Easter eggs from the video game, but isn't really much of a story, isn't much of a plot. Like it doesn't, you know, it's just there to sort of deliver fan service. Is this kind of healthcare worker fan
- [19:15]
A
service to your point? And I, I think the answer to that is no. But to buttress your point, Peter, is all the press material or all the writing and there was a great piece on the Pit in the New York Times Magazine magazine, and it was laudatory and it didn't get to most of the issues we talked about, but it is clear that Noah Wiley, who is not just the star in the executive producer, but for Noah Wiley's the impetus to essentially do a version of ER where his character is now older. And then as Sonny laid out the Crichton estate, which is hilarious to call it the Crichton estate, it seems to be his unbelievably rich widow and Crichton's son, who Crichton never met because the widow was pregnant when he was alive. And then the son was born. She just said, no, no, no. And then some smart lawyer said, well, you know, Michael Crrichton doesn't own doctor stories anyway.
- [20:07]
B
But just a doctor drama. It's just. It's just a random doctor drama. It's not even in the same city. Come on.
- [20:12]
A
That's right. Different cold weather cities where the football team's character is based on grit. And that's it for today's show. Corey War produces the Gist. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list. Ben Astaire is our booking producer, and Jeff Craig runs our Socials. Michelle Pesca oversees it all benevolently. And thanks for listening.