Loading summary
Transcript37 lines
- [00:05]
A
Hey, I'm Alan Sepinwall. I'm a TV critic.
- [00:07]
B
I'm Kathryn Vanarindonk. I am also a TV critic.
- [00:10]
A
We are friends and neighbors and we love to talk about TV with each other.
- [00:13]
B
And now we are going to talk about it with you.
- [00:16]
A
And every week we're gonna try to answer an important question.
- [00:19]
B
Is the TV good, Alan, Why are we worth listening to about television?
- [00:25]
A
Because we're awesome. No, no. We've both been covering television a really long time now. We have sort of a very deep knowled knowledge base of it. We have very strong opinions about it. I've been doing it longer than you have. I'm older than you are, and I sort of know everything from basically the beginning of tv. Right now I'm working on a biography about Rod Serling, the creator of the Twilight Zone. So I can go really far back. I've written a lot over the years, especially about TV of the 90s and the 2000s, your Sopranos, your Breaking Bads, all of that. So I got a pretty good knowledge base. And you watch a much more varied slate of current tv. So I think between the two of us, we have a lot of different things covered here. And we can talk about new things and we can talk about old things, which is part of what we're going to try to do here. And we're going to try to expose each other to our areas of interest. And so you're going to have me watch stuff that you're into that I would not necessarily watch and vice versa.
- [01:18]
B
Yeah. This man has no idea how Casa Amor works on Love Island. And I think we all need to be excited about the moment when he gets to discover that.
- [01:28]
A
Wait, so there's an island, but there's also a Casa Amor?
- [01:31]
B
Yeah, it's like the Tailies on Lost, except they all have to have sex with each other.
- [01:37]
A
So how this is going to work, we will drop episodes every Monday. They're going to be about an hour long. We will, every week we will talk about something new. Whether that's reviewing a new show, whether that's talking about the return of an old show that we like, whether that's someone did a really notable finale, whether something big happened in the world of tv, whether something going to talk about something like that in a minute. Suddenly, like without warning, Hulu had a new episode of the Bear Up. So we'll give you a couple minutes on that before we say goodbye to this teaser. So that's going to be one half of every episode? Roughly.
- [02:08]
B
Roughly. The other Half of the episode. And again, I don't want to be too prescriptive about the halves we're going to sort of feel our way through, but we are hoping that we can then use the frightening number of hours that we have pickled our brains with decades and decades of television in order to give a little bit more context about whatever the new thing is. Or we just have an old show that we feel like talking about for no reason. For instance, our first episode, we are going to be talking about the new Apple TV show, Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, which is a moment Mom Bad Mom, Mom Angry Mom, Overwhelmed Comedy. Moms Do Crime, Moms Do Crime Show. And then to sort of give a little bit more context for that, we're going to be talking about the very good asterisk show Weeds, which is one of the really important forerunners in Mom's Gone Crime. So, yeah, so that, that is what we are going to be talking about, our first full length episode, which comes out in a week.
- [03:23]
A
Some other things we're going to talk about in early episodes, we'll be talking about Star City, which is the For All Mankind spin off. We're going to talk about Vampire Lestat. I'm very glad that I have this excuse to catch up on the first two seasons when it was called Interview with the Vampire. We'll get into House of the Dragon, as Catherine warned we. She will be attempting to explain Love island to me. And in the same episode we're also going to talk about the constant, the most romantic episode of Lost. Because it's love on an island. You know, why not?
- [03:50]
B
Why not?
- [03:50]
A
And it'll be things like that. And, you know, and some weeks the new segment will be longer than the older segment and vice versa. Occasionally we may even do three segments. We might go crazy.
- [04:01]
B
Yeah. Yes, Alan, why is this podcast called this?
- [04:06]
A
Okay, so in the fall of 1997, the ABC television network, in a season in which they were about to give us Darman Greg and two guys, a girl in a pizza place, but also shows that nobody remembers, like Teen Angel, Time Cop, and two different shows called Prey and Push, both of which I reviewed and I could not tell you which was which, they had a. They had a marketing campaign for the season called TV is Good. And the phrase would appear in black Comic Sans, I believe, on a yellow background. And it was supposed to be very cheerful and somewhat ironic. And everyone made fun of it at the time. And I always liked it because, you know, doing what we do for a living, we have to believe TV is good. Because if you didn't, you would absolutely do something else because this would drive you crazy. And so we're reclaiming it right now. We think TV is good. Not all TV is good. And not everything we talk about in this podcast is going to be. We're going to try as much as possible, especially when we talk about older things, to talk about the stuff that we love. But if there's a really high profile show coming up and it's not great, we're gonna say that.
- [05:11]
B
Yeah, I mean, I, I think it is also, and I hope any of you who are listening to this podcast who are familiar with, with maybe more specifically my work than, Than how Alan often approaches his criticism. I, I enjoy having many definitions of good. Um, and some of those definitions are what I think other people might call bad. I am very open both to the idea includes things that are pleasurable in ways that I, that I would have a hard time calling artistic accomplishments. I also think the experience of watching good TV means really enjoying terrible things sometimes. So there will be a broad range of.
- [06:02]
A
There absolutely will be. We do not judge what it is that other people love on tv. We will try not to judge what each other loves on tv, but, you
- [06:09]
B
know, no promises there. Okay, fine, fine.
- [06:14]
A
All right, so as I said, we don't want to keep this too long, but like, just. We woke up. We're recording this on the Friday before you're seeing this. And a couple days ago, just at noon, randomly, there was a new episode of the Bear. Or maybe it was something called Gary. This, this part in and of itself is confusing, but it's. John Bernthal and even Moss Bacharach wrote an episode of the show that was directed by its creator, Christopher Storer. It's a prequel episode about Mikey and Richie going on a road trip from Chicago to Gary, Indiana. What is this, Catherine? What happened?
- [06:46]
B
Well, I think the first thing to note is that this episode is not part of a season. And so it is a standalone installment of the Bear, but it ends with
- [06:58]
A
a cliffhanger that the final season's gonna have to deal with. We won't spoil what it is, but the last scene of the episode is leading into presumably the final season of the Bear.
- [07:06]
B
Yes, it is an. It is a. Almost entirely a flashback episode and it is being released. It was released right before what we have now been for sure confirmed is the final season of the Bear. And so what this is, is a penultimate flashback episode. No, no, I liked the episode. I found it pretty self congratulatory.
- [07:30]
A
Like I'M just happy to watch those two guys act. I feel like it's not. I don't feel like we learned a ton about them. Except there's this one thing that where Mikey, towards the very end of the story, says something to Richie that really recontextualizes their relationship and the way that Richie kind of talks about him in the present day. But mostly, I just. I was happy to watch the guys. It's long. If. If this episode existed within a season, I think it would have driven me crazy, but as, like, its own, you know, amuse bush or something. Although it's not really that small, but as its own thing. Almost two months before we get the last batch of episodes. I was. I was okay with it.
- [08:07]
B
I was okay with it, too. The problem with the kind of flashback episode in the position that it is, which is, like, right before the ending. We're gonna give you a little bit of what came earlier of this show is that, like so many of these episodes, it is answering a question I did not have. Like, there was no part of me watching the bear that was like, gee, I wonder what it was like when Mikey was alive and Richie was his friend. Like, I can picture that very, very well, based on the show that I have. And so there's not a ton of information that we get. Not even from an information standpoint. Shows do not exist just to give us information. But there is not a lot of, like, understanding of these characters that I feel like I have that is new from the show.
- [08:54]
A
I would agree with that. But. Okay, we're. This teaser is already, like, twice as long as we wanted it to be.
- [08:59]
B
Fine, Fine.
- [08:59]
A
But we can promise you that actual episodes will be an hour because we've already recorded the first one, and that's an hour. So I can say that with confidence. All right, Catherine, was the TV good this week?
- [09:12]
B
You know, it was mixed, but I have optimism for the future.
- [09:17]
A
Okay, good. If we have done this right, you should be able to subscribe to TV is Good. Wherever you get your podcasts, you can Watch us on YouTube at TV is Goodpod and follow us on all the socials on TV is Goodpod.
- [09:29]
B
We are gonna be launching a Patreon sometime in the next month. We are gonna be doing bonus episodes. They're gonna be deeper dives on some things. We're gonna do DVD kind of commentaries on things. That's@patreon.com tvisgood and we're gonna have more details about that in the next few
- [09:45]
A
weeks when we're not podcasting we're also writers. You can find me@whatsalan watching.com and you can find katherineulture.com I'm on bluesky at
- [09:53]
B
Cave and Aaron and Instagram at Cave
- [09:56]
A
and Aaron Donk I'm on Blue Sky, Instagram and threads at seppinwall and on Facebook @alencepinwall.
- [10:03]
B
Obviously this is a teaser. We are gonna have a lot more coming, but what is gonna be really helpful is the process of rate reviewing and subscribing this podcast. We really hate the algorithm and the only way that that we can beat the algorithm is with real people interacting with the stuff we make. We want to thank Joe Kennedy for our theme music and Kate Bergener for our artwork and Riley Routh for editing.
- [10:24]
A
And thank you for listening.