Welcome to today's episode, the podcast, where we discuss the most recent installment of a different series every show.

December 1st is here.

How many Oscars do you think you can name in a row?

Oh, I can't.

I mean, my best shot is probably back in the early 2010s.

So you can do presidents, but you can't do Oscars.

Starting in 2010, go ahead.

Oh, I don't even remember what you got in 2010.

Oh, was it Inception?

I know that that was nominated.

I don't think Inception won.

It didn't win?

I don't think King's Speech won in 2010, I think.

Cool.

And then 2011 was the artist.

And then 2012.

Oh, I know, 2013.

It was 12 Years of Slave.

2012 was Argo.

2014 would have been.

Yeah, see, that's right.

14 Years of Slave.

They just won up from there.

Yeah, no, so the artist won in 2011.

Yes.

No, it didn't.

It won for 2011, but it won in 2012.

Because they always did the year.

Yeah, but it came out in 2011.

Right.

I never actually saw the artist.

You you did.

Yeah, I think I saw it in like January of 2012.

It was about like an actor that ends up losing relevance, but the woman that he meets at the very beginning of the film who's an aspiring actress, she becomes really big.

It's black and white.

Is it a silent film?

Yeah, for a majority of it.

So it's kind of like, yeah, that transition between the 20s and the 30s, uh, city lights, you know, with uh Charlie Chapman and Sunset Boulevard-ish.

And uh yeah, it's funny because that takes place way later than this show does, and they have no other correlation.

This, the artist, I why did they name it something that's already got an identity?

Is my first guess.

Because that's the first thing that pops up.

The film is the first thing that pops up when you search it.

But this takes place in the Gilded Age, right?

And then the Gilded Age, I was I learned from when we did the podcast to the Gilded Age, was earlier.

Like it was in the late tw uh 20th century.

Sorry, the way late 19th century, but like the 1880s and the 1890s.

And this is 1906.

A lot of the reviews were saying that this takes place during the Gilded Age.

I know that the artist's film took place in the periods.

For sure, but it's kind of like a period piece in the way that Dickinson is, the uh the Haley Steinwell the Yeah, the Apple series.

They mix in modern elements to it and also the great, like something like that.

Right.

Where they're just changing stuff up.

It's also an upstairs-downstairs scenario.

It's just a lot of chaos between a rocky couple, and the couple is uh played by Mandy Patinkin.

He just celebrated his birthday yesterday.

Do you want to guess how old he is?

Uh he's like 72, isn't he?

73.

Okay.

Oh, well, I guess I looked it up when he was 72.

And then who's the other star in this?

Uh Janet McTear.

Yes, and we saw her uh most recently, I think in um Mobland.

Like she was the villain there, but she's more famous from Ozark.

Like, I feel like her career really hit a resurgence around Ozark.

Yes, very much so.

Okay, so the Marion and Norman, they they make reference to almost the uh Citizen Kane thing where they have a giant table and that's their first scene together, is that they're just kind of fighting over it.

Do they separate throughout time like Citizen Kane?

Where you are closer?

Of course not.

They're not gonna spend that much.

This is this is a cheap show.

Like it's on a a network I've never heard of.

That's just called Network.

The network, yeah.

What's up with that?

Okay, so Aaron Rappaport, he's actually the one that created the street.

Right, I thought it said Adam Rappaport at first, who was like famously disgraced, I think, for for like his bone appetite app or something like that.

So, like Aaron Rappaport, different guy, but he created both the network and also the show that the created the app and he also created the show.

He directed, he's he did the screenplay and he created.

Yeah, that's a lot of work.

Yeah, and he his first uh film that I did, his directorial debut was in 2009.

I'm really interested to see it because the poster looks creepy, but it's an action crime uh film and it is one of the first ever feature-length films to be shot all in one take.

And then I think he wrote two films afterwards.

In 2009?

Yeah.

I feel like a lot of films were doing that.

That's what Wikipedia.

No, not like the aesthetic of one take, like actually shot in one take.

I wonder if this guy just comes for money.

Like that's why he's able to just like, you know what?

I'm not only just gonna make my own TV show, but I'm gonna fish out and make a whole entire platform for it.

Well, he did end up writing two films later on called Syrup, starring Amber Heard and The Chase starring Frank Gorillo, 2013 and 2017.

Those were theatrically released.

I think I remember some of those, yeah.

Oh, okay, so you might have even seen it.

Yeah, they didn't get great reviews, but then he worked on a lot of commercials, but really his biggest project was the Green Veil.

Did you hear anything about this TV show?

Maybe.

It starred John Liguazamo, and it was the network's first original show that came out in 2024.

But the interesting thing was they shot it earlier, like 2020 to 2021.

Then this film festival called Tribeca Fest, he debuted the first two episodes, expecting streamers.

I think it's just a Tribeca Film Festival, but they like consolidated down to Tribeca Fest.

Probably.

But he expected streamers to come up to him and be like, hey, because John Liguizamo, but no one did.

And then he was like, you know what?

I'm going to launch my own uh network or my own app.

So he didn't take a hint that maybe the thing wasn't that good.

Well, you can I mean the the thing is is that uh it's already been renewed for season two.

What has?

Uh the green the green veil with John Liguizamo.

He's the one who renews it.

Yes, but in the first hundred days, it got over a million users.

Right.

And it is, it is made me curious because I haven't heard of this new network and it's and it's just there.

And so I click on to the artist and you watch an episode of it, there's tons of ads, but it it reminds me a lot of like when Hulu was getting its feet out from over there.

Yeah, that's that's fair because Aaron Rappaport, he said that it's all about quality over quantity.

He wants to declutter the streaming experience.

Hence the for original programming, they're only releasing two series at a time, uh, four times a year.

So only eight series.

Right, and they're in batches.

So like this is supposed to have three episodes now and then three episodes near Christmas, and then that's it.

Yeah.

So they released three episodes on Thanksgiving and Christmas of the holidays, but it's interesting too because they said that dramas on Tuesdays, comedies on Thursdays, this is a murder mystery, though.

Right?

Well, she goes out of her way, the wife does, at the very beginning to give us narration and say it's not an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

Like Mandy Betinkin, we know will die, but really it's about, as she put it, put it, a story of rebirth.

And even in the title, like postcard that it puts up there, it says an allegory of a prostitute.

Now, we haven't seen any prostitutes.

The uh Mandy Petinkin character, Norman, is having sort of an affair that's hinted at with Lilith, who is this ballerina that they kind of have uh around.

They're really rich.

And so they kind of have, like, yeah, the downstairs people kind of just serving them all the time.

Um, but it's also uh up to interpretation whether or not Norman actually has money or if he's just buying everything on credit right now.

Like this was an interesting time.

Yes, it's the roaring, or actually it's not the roaring twenties, it's 1906.

1907 is when there's a huge stock market crash.

Right.

And a lot of this episode was him like thinking about investing in Thomas Edison's new project, which was moving pictures, but with sound.

So that was way ahead of its game.

Um, I think it was called like the kinetophone or something like that.

They do a fun little like um uh slapstick thing where he gets stuck in it while he's checking it out.

I saw one scene of that and it was that scene.

Right.

But like if he does choose to invest, he's going to lose a lot of money because everybody knows that that was like the market crash before the 1920s.

Before the Great Depression.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Before the 1929 crash.

Do you see Thomas Edison in this episode?

Right.

He's the one name drop that you see.

You hear a lot of name drops.

There's Edison, there's Ford, there's the Rockefellers, there's Carnegie.

They even mention Ulyssius S.

Grant.

Um, and so yeah, but Tom Edison is played by Hank Azaria.

And uh he had a relationship with Marion, who is Norman's wife again.

And so she is spending her entire like second half of the episode trying to get Norman not to invest in Edison's stuff because she knows that hates Edison.

Well, she also knows that he's probably going to lose money if he does so.

No, no, no, no, no.

She doesn't give really give a crap about her husband either.

Like they sleep in separate beds, they're arguing all the time.

She she boxes for fun.

Like she just she's a fighter.

And like at one point, Lilith, who again he might be having sex with, just turns to him and says, You might want to fuck her at some point.

Like, just make her a little bit happier.

Um, and and so it's an interesting dynamic show.

They chose to do both narration and also like uh a writing card that told us when it was.

So like it was double narrated.

Right.

So my my question is is you said that it was Marianne that narrates the TV series, right?

Right.

It's her interpretation of her husband's death.

Would you say that Norman is still the main character?

No, he's he's a he's the secondary main character.

We see, like, yeah, he's he's the one who hires the artist.

The artist is played by Danny Houston, and the artist is blind, but he's like acclaimed, and he's this French guy, and he's right.

Yeah.

Um, but like the whole point is that everybody thinks he might be a killer, he's a strange dude.

His ride gets kind of like it it his wagon breaks down on the way there.

And so the person who's driving him there jumps out and tries to wave down another car, but like there's a bunch of flappers in the car.

So like a naked lady, and they just run that guy over.

And so that guy's screaming on the side of the road while the artist has to walk all night to the property.

And then once he finds out that he's not going to be paid with cash, he says, I'm gonna live here from now on until you guys pay me what I'm due.

Why is it Danny Huston, even when it's comedies, yeah, yeah.

Uh, even in the naked gun, he's always uh playing the villain.

Right, he didn't have that scar that he had in the naked gun that he was able to remove.

Right.

Is he like a Rasputin type?

I mean, that's kind of what he sounds like.

Uh he's eccentric, and uh like Mandy Petengins' character sentence, as Norman says, he's just French.

Like everything that you have a problem with him is he's just French.

So by the end of the episode, you have Edison who wants uh who wants to have Norman investing in his uh kinetophone, and you have the wife trying to stop it.

You have Lilith having a freak out because she's being told by the wife that she's never gonna go to Paris, that Norman is messing with her, and that like her talent may be there, but it's gonna get zapped while she's there, that she's lost um any chances that she might have to have a career.

And so everybody's screaming at everybody.

And at one point, Norman wheels around and tries to punch his wife in the face and misses and hits Edison, knocks out Hank's area.

And then that's when the I think the French guy, the artist, uh just walks, walks in from upstairs and says, Where's my room?

And then they show him to his room.

And that's kind of where you leave it for the first time.

It sounds like there's no likable characters because you're saying Norman's trying to hit his wife.

You've already said that Marianne doesn't really care about Norman.

And then Edgar Degas, who said that it's kind of unclear if he's the villain or not, but he's already done some weird things.

You're looking at it completely the wrong way.

This show is just for fun and like everybody's having a blast.

So, like Mandy Patinkin, last year he had to do Death and Other Details, where he's supposed playing a classic detective on a boat, and he's stuck in kind of the like normal sphere of what he has.

This it frees everybody up to like kind of just act like a crazy character.

I 100% believe that because Mandy Patinkin originally turned down the role thinking that the script was too dark, but Aaron Rappaport came to him and was like, You're you have to look at it as more of a comedy, and then he decided to do it.

And then, like Patty Lapone, you haven't talked about her really.

Yeah, because she's not really in it either.

She's not in it yet.

Yeah, Patty Lapone's not in it, Zachary Quinto's not in it, Clark Greg's really not in it.

But someone who is in it, who's not even mentioned here, is Paul Sparks.

Paul Sparks, we've already seen a couple times just this year.

He was in the lowdown, he was in the better sister, and he actually plays the doctor who takes care of the guy who gets run over.

Um, and and and and he's having sex with this other dude as soon as as he the the guy with the broken leg comes in, and uh and and and he tells the guy with the broken leg what you may be seeing right now, you're probably delirious, you don't know what you're talking about, but he's just having sex with some random guy.

How focus is this TV show?

And then the next scene we see with them, he's cutting off the and this is 19 uh oh six, so it's not like civil war times we've still got 50 years difference, and he's cutting off the guy's leg, like with a saw, like just amputating the guy's leg again.

Did they give him anything to like go under or like any type of you don't see the scene surrounding it, you just see him doing it, and then they cut around back to like everything else, and it's just big chaos.

So, do you follow stories or characters more?

Uh both.

Like, I don't I don't know how to say that.

Like again, everybody has their own little thing going on, but overall it's just about their rocky marriage.

Again, like for Mary Ann or Mary Ann, she's learning how to box for some reason.

Like that just it they keep cutting her to her and her coach teaching her how to box.

So you don't even get to the murder this episode, is it?

Of course not, it's the first episode.

Yeah, but there's only six episodes.

I think I'll probably wait until the sixth episode to show who kills him.

It's a murder mystery where we know going in someone's gonna be murdering him, but it's really not even about that.

Like, what does allegory of a prostitute mean?

Like, what is the allegory?

Where is it?

So you just uh I'm trying to like see what the central theme is.

You basically what you're saying is it follows the the Rocky marriage of these two, but that it's a comedy that everyone's having fun of.

I remember when it came out, but I don't think I ever saw it.

Right.

It's kind of got the same tone uh methodology as that.

Uh, in a looser way, you could also say uh another period, but like obviously a little bit more serious than that story.

But the the frivolousness of certain storylines and how I just felt like they were included.

You could have told me most of these were improvised almost, as long as it got them to a point where everybody was at each other's necks.

And in the end, you have Norman punching uh Thomas Edison in the face.

Well, the characters were almost improvised as well.

Like Patty Lapone, I know that you said she hasn't shown up in the series yet, but just when Aaron Rappaport was talking to her about it, he begged for a meeting.

Those were his words.

And then she was like, Okay, well, I guess I would want to play a character like this, and then he just added characters, uh, multiple of them, in the show that were just people, what people basically wanted to play.

They're in Rhode Island right now, and it's in the middle of kind of nowhere where it takes a while to get there.

That's why the guy needed to get his leg chopped off.

They didn't really have a hospital nearby.

So any visitor, and that's also how it's like uh a young doctor's notebook, he was in the middle of Russia, uh, and no one ever, and the only people we ever saw were people who visited him, and that was very rarely.

So um, in that circumstance, you can just have a bunch of weird characters popping in.

That's why I expect in the future episodes you'd have Zachary Quinto and uh who else?

Um Clark Greg.

Clark Craig popping in and saying, Howdy, you know, and and one of them, as it goes on, is clearly going to have such a beef that it and it'll probably turn out to be like Mandy Potinkin's own fault.

Like he might end up killing himself.

Who knows?

When you said that Norman, do they show his body or does uh Marianne just say that?

In a flash forward, you sort of see it while she's writing her diary.

Because the diary, I think, is taking place in the future, and and it's and it's talking about or it could be like a mix of the two.

They really don't have a rule set that they're trying to follow.

So, what are the what are the pros for the TV show?

Well, that's kind of all of them.

It's like you are jumping into something where it's less about traditional television, more about the improvised moments.

You're hearing names like Edison and Rockefeller being thrown around, and you kind of see what you want to see where the adventure takes you with Amandy Potinkin.

He's going full Mandy Potinken in it.

So if you enjoy him, you'll enjoy this.

He's probably as far away from homeland as his.

No, actually, he's pretty curmudgey in that and curmogeny in this.

So it is similar to that more than I would say death and other details.

Oh, because I was because yeah, reading about it, I was expecting him to be.

He was in a box in Death and Other Details.

He had to act like a professional there.

He doesn't have to act, he can act like a human being, a flawed, flawed, rich human being here.

Just no restrictions.

I mean, does the mansion, I imagine it would at least look good, right?

It just looks like at home.

I mean, it well, it's in Rhode Island, so it's not like they were saying they were on some English estate somewhere.

Well, they actually shot in Connecticut, but the reason I asked is because they shot at a real life mansion, 124-year history.

They show a lot more of the outside of the mansion where the downstairs people are living in tents.

So they don't even live in the actual house.

I'm surprised because like a lot of what I was reading was that uh they were supposed to shoot it at like two separate places, but a week before production, that was pulled.

And then they were given five days to shoot at the mansion, like it was it was five days before production where they find found the mansion to shoot at, and then they closed it down for six weeks.

But a lot of the rooms are supposed to have art, and I thought that was.

Yeah, most of the scenes were interior shots.

So like you were just talking about rooms, which could be a set, it could be a mansion, but like you wouldn't know it just by watching.

I thought you were talking about exterior stuff.

Oh no, but yeah, usually when they do like down an abbey, you have all these like Westminster Abbey and all these other places.

Right.

And a lot of people like you were kind of talking about earlier, like running up and down stairs.

These vast expan well, less about the interior again, but like the vast expanses of the outdoors.

So what would you give then the show out of 10?

Oh, um out of 10, I'm going to give it a six because Oh, it's six, so it passes.

It'll pass because I'm not used to seeing like we didn't get too many shows like this.

It reminds me of like a throwback of like an acorn series back in the day, uh, a young doctor's notebook, like the type that come around every so often, and then like in a few years, someone will mention it and you'll be like, I actually did see that show.

Like a Brit Box TV series.

I saw places uh compare it to Knives Out, but I'm pretty sure that's just because it has a mansion and it's kind of a murder mystery, even though you haven't gotten to it yet.

The yeah, I I think that the biggest flaw right now is just that the relationship, it doesn't have the vibe of say everybody loves Raymond, where you have uh the two, they're bantering together, and you can see maybe they'll get there, but like, yeah, they she almost plays it like Jane Lynch.

And in in what though?

Her just her crabbiness, you know, like that's her, and Mandy Batinkin is trying to be like closer to her, and she's just like putting up a front, but at the same time, he's cheating on her, so it makes sense.

It's just it's an interesting dynamic.

The relationship reminds me uh between Endeavor Content and the network of like Mike Flanagan and Chris Stuckman with Shelby Oaks, because Endeavor Content, you definitely know.

I wish that they uh produced Endeavor, but they've done TV shows and they did world distribution for this of Severance, Killing Eve, The Night Manager, Tokyo Vice, Wolf Like Me.

You know what I got from it?

It's so I got it.

It's where the British series usually get remade by American series and we Americanize them.

Yes.

This is a series that was never a British series, but it's like, how can we have an American series that looks like a British series?

And that's what we tried to do here.

And I think they were successful.

I this does feel like it's a British series, but that all the cast or for the majority of the cast members are American.

There you go.

LA Times said that they could see why Rappaport might have trouble landing the series elsewhere.

It's very old-fashioned, but seems to me the perfect realization of the creator's idea, and there is something in that.

So I think that, like you were kind of talking about before, this is just supposed to be for fun.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

Uh, that's it then.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you on the next episode.

Hope you enjoyed this one.

Bye.

Bye.