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- [00:04]
A
I'm Alan Sepinwall. I'm a TV critic.
- [00:07]
B
I'm Kathryn VanArendonk. I am also a TV critic.
- [00:09]
A
We are friends and neighbors and we love to talk about TV with each other.
- [00:13]
B
And now we are gonna talk about it with you.
- [00:15]
A
That's right. This is the TV is Good podcast. And every week I ask you if the TV is good, but once a
- [00:21]
B
month I don't have to because once a month we do a Patreon and we talk about the TV that we have already decided. And you, our lovely Patreon listeners, have help helped us decide to talk about because we already know that we like it. And so we can devote an entire deep dive to it. And let me tell you, so far, I have had a real problem with our Patreon choices.
- [00:48]
A
Hey, hey, hey, be nice to the Patreon people. We love them.
- [00:52]
B
They're paying for this every time they pick a thing and then I watch the episode from it and then I'm like, oh, no, I need to re watch this whole show now. And it's like, it's really frankly disruptive. Like, I don't have time. So if you guys could start picking some bad ones. Don't do that, because the good TV makes me happy. But it is a sincere issue.
- [01:14]
A
Yeah, I'm worried because, like, obviously we can ultimately control what goes into the poll, but, like, if people just start. Start trolling us with bad suggestions, it's. It's going to be a problem. Speaking of, where are you and your husband right now? With the Americans.
- [01:30]
B
We are about. We had to pause for a while because we did a vacation and then he is gone at a conference. So our pace has slowed. But we are now several episodes into season two. And let me tell you, Paige starting to poke around at some things.
- [01:51]
A
Oh, no.
- [01:51]
B
Feel like Paige may have cottoned on to some situations. And I also feel like in the episode that we watched last night where she has lied and then gone to visit their aunt Helen, and then Matthew Reese comes home and he's like, you do not lie to me ever. And I just. And I, as I am not a parent of a 16 year old, but as a parent of a 12 year old, I was like, this is gonna backfire on you, my man.
- [02:18]
A
As a parent of a 16 year old, I can just tell you right now, get ready. All right. But more importantly, before we move on to the actual subject of the day, you told me a very important detail about another family member of yours who was inspired by the Patreon to start Watching the Americans.
- [02:35]
B
Yes. My father, who had never seen the Americans, I'm not sure if he and my mom are both watching it. I know he is. He discovered that the library has all the DVDs, and so he is checking those out. And he is very concerned about Martha. He is about as far in as we are the last I checked. And he was like, I'm mostly. I'm mostly just worried about what's going on with Martha. And I was like. He was texting me about the Americans and he. And I. He was like, I started season two. And I was like, oh, that means you bet. Mail robot. That's so great. And he was like, oh, yeah, we had one of those. And I said, what? And he said, yeah. So my father worked at pharmaceutical companies, and he worked at a company called Up John in the 70s and 80s, and apparently he's like, yeah, we had a. We had one of those robots. You would have, like, little samples in it, and then it would, like, deliver the samples between the labs. And so it would like, come up to your lab door and then you just have to go and get the little samples out and close it. And I was like, what the hell are you talking about? And he was like, yeah, Then it would go to the elevator and somebody would have to press the elevator button to load it into the elevator so that it could go to the next. I don't know how it knew when to get out of the elevator or, like, how to know what floor to get off on. I was boggled. I could not believe. He has known a celebrity my entire life. Wow. Never told me about it.
- [04:12]
A
It's like, it's the stuff you discover. You just. When you're a kid, you're maybe not as curious about your parents past as you should be. And then, like, you just. You got to make sure you get those questions in before it's too late.
- [04:24]
B
So, yes, I'm glad you've learned families about male robot.
- [04:30]
A
All right, we could very easily go down a whole male robot.
- [04:34]
B
Yeah.
- [04:34]
A
Robot rabbit hole. I don't want to do that.
- [04:37]
B
No.
- [04:38]
A
There's too much to talk about with this episode, so we're going to skip any other preamble or housekeeping for the poll. This time, we chose four things. We chose last month's runner up, the Surf Dracula problem, where TV shows take a whole season to reveal their premise. The Atlanta episode where paperboy is trying very hard to get a haircut and has to do all sorts of stupid things to appease his barber. The Station 11 episode with all the babies and our winner, Axis Mundi. The season two premiere of the Leftovers.
- [05:09]
B
We talked a lot about which. Which episode we should put of the Leftovers onto the poll. And I can tell you right now that many episodes were considered, and we would be happy to put other Leftovers episodes on the poll in the future. Part of the issue was that we wanted to make sure to include at least a little Nora. And this episode has some of her. And you can get into. We can talk about Carrie Coon and how incredible she is. But the other thing that we sort of were drawn to about this particular one, obviously it has this remarkable and bizarre and unusual opening scene. But the bigger idea is of a show that first outgrows its source material, as this one did. The first season of the Leftovers, which is a show created by Damon Lindelof, is based on the Tom Parotta novel of the same title. And the first season, although there are changes, is related, heavily related to that original novel. And then they get to the end, and then it's like, well, what do we do with this world? And they have a complete, completely different. This opportunity to just go anywhere they want with these characters that they have created. And there have been shows that do this in the past, and often it works pretty badly. There are other successes as well, but. But the. The need to either look at something that's not working and reinvent yourself, or it's run past the original conception of what a show would be, and then you have to figure out how to keep going. Or in this case, you have the source material, and then you have used up all the source material, and then you're sort of operating out on a limb of your own devising. All of these things are. I mean, the Leftovers is one of the most interesting and successful examples of that phenomenon.
- [07:20]
A
And we've had some bad ones. We had Big Little Lies, which, again, the first season told the whole story of the book.
- [07:25]
B
And I have a list in here of potential shows we should mention. And it says Big Little Lies, open parentheses, derogatory.
- [07:32]
A
Yes. You have several derogatories. There's another one next to the Night Manager. You did not put one next to the Handmaid's Tale where it fit. That's another.
- [07:40]
B
Handmaid's is a complex example. Is a complex example, yes. I think it's in part because Night Manager and Big Little Lies are both so. Exec. Execrable. Ex. Cr. Execrable. Bad. They're so terr. Both of those second seasons, like, truly the Night Manager second season was one of the bet. One of the more painful slogs I have experienced in the last several months. And I say one of because unfortunately, I've had to review several shows for Vulture in the last couple weeks that have really led me to question my life choices. However, in both cases, Night Manager and Big Little Lies get. Have a lovely first season. Night Manager is based on a book. Big Little Lies is not. I don't know. Yes, it is.
- [08:29]
A
A Little Lies is based on a book. It tells the whole story of the book.
- [08:32]
B
And then they were like, oh, it was successful. And they come back and they're like, we don't know what we're doing. Let's just flounder around for a while. It's terrible. In both cases, Handmaids is a more complicated situation. One, because Atwood is very involved sort of throughout the process of like how. Like checking in with these characters and where they're going. Atwood then also writes her own sequel novel, the Testaments, which becomes. So although I have mixed at best feelings about the long, long run of Handmaids, it's not quite as clear as those other two.
- [09:09]
A
Fair enough. So this is. I would say that this is by far the most successful creatively example of it, not financially, because nobody watched this goddamn show. And that's always very sad. And. But, like, what are some other instances, you think, where either they were able to move beyond the source material or to reinvent themselves? Because that's. That's the interesting thing about the leftovers, and we'll get into background on it in a second. But it's not just that they went beyond the book. It's that in many ways it's an entirely new show with some of the same characters and many of the same themes, but in so many ways it feels different. And just looking at your list, one of the ones I really agree with is Halt and Catch Fire, which did not have source material to begin with. But when you got from season one to season two, it made a slight perspective shift, which is it was a show with, in theory, four leads, two men, two women. But the first season was predominantly focused on the men, and season two pushed the two women to the forefront. And suddenly it was like the show took a quantum leap. And that's no disrespect to either your beloved Lee pace or Scoot McNairy. There was just something about the two female characters that turned out to be the secret sauce that made everything better.
- [10:19]
B
Yeah. Yes. Halt and Catch Fire is, of course, the first one that I thought of as that is a show that means a great deal to both of us. But I was also thinking about a show like the Magicians, which is on Siffy. And Yes. And I those are novels by Lev Grossman that I really, really love. And the show is I also really loved the show. And it is a completely different it starts in the beginning, where it sort of feels like it has to do a lot of the beats and general closer to the tone of those books, which are like a cynical Harry Potter situation. Narnia, Harry Potter, if they were older
- [11:05]
A
and having lots of sex.
- [11:06]
B
Lots and lots of sex. And by sort of midway through season one. But then definitely for the several.