Bro. I like the glasses.
That's a good minute.
I like the glasses, I said.
Jesus Christ, give me a second.
You can really tell he's going to seminary.
Where does that place Henry Jefferson, who's number two?
See number two?
Because me, Hey, they can only be one number one and one number two. I life made Jefferson number two long before I come along.
I suppose that the Puerto Ricans are number.
Three, then well no, not necessarily shouting it that little girl. Your porto Vecans could be four, your draction, your change could be three.
Welcome to the first glob culture of twenty twenty six.
I am John putt Or. It's in New York, in Washington, d C.
Jonah Goldberg Him, Jonah'm John, Hello John Jonah. I just want to introduce everybody to your new angle, the new Jonah Goldberg glop angle. You were used to having a little window over Jonah's shoulder, his basement window, and now he's just turned the camera around and we have this beautiful bookcase very much mirroring my bookcase behind me. So Jonah and your bookcase, welcome to twenty twenty six.
Thank you. I didn't I was not aware that any glop there were glop viewers. Do we actually put this video out anywhere?
I don't know now that I think about it.
No, So you guys don't know what a thrilling change this is.
This is like Charlie.
This is like the fact that one of the biggest stars in radio was a ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. He was a ventriloquist on the radio.
That's how good his material was.
By the way, it really was good material. He was hilarious and it was very interesting. But he was a ventriloquist on the radio.
And of course, speaking here, all ventriloquists insane. And that the the the dummy sat at Thanksgiving table and he moved the room. He loved the dummy more that he loved his own daughter, Candice Bergen.
Who wrote a very good memoir about being Charlie McCarthy's sister.
My I can say that I can tell the story now because.
About mime on radio, because I would really like to hear.
That loocause both I think both the both the people involved are dead.
Uh.
Cannis Bergen died, right, did she?
No?
I guess maybe not?
No, No, I don't think she's dead.
But okay, well, but she does the gloss.
She won't hear about it from it won't be like she's dead.
She one year for the Emmys, Kirsty Alley was up and kind of felt that she deserved it. We sort of sugar too. She had a really great season. She's done some great stuff. And so was cannis Bergen for Murphy Brown. So Christy Alley for Cheers Murphy Brown, Cantisburg for Verney Brown and uh. Kursey grew up in Kansas, in the kind of rural Kansas, and her dad owned a giant lumber yard, and which when she lost her auter a Emmy party, I think a few people would want and and she stood up a chance. hYP I
don't think she was drunk. I don't think she didn't drink. And but she's outragyou his eyes want to say too, we ought to make toast. I want to say that cannis Bergen's father had one little wooden puppet. My father owned a whole freaking lumber yard.
See, this was the thing. She of course made one of the great probably that's Rob Long, of course.
Speaking here from Prince to New Jersey, she did make one of the great award speeches sort of when she did win, when she thanked her now long ex husband that was she's of course no longer with us, but she divorced him not that long after. But when she said that she wanted to thank her husband, Parker Stevenson for giving her the big one all these years, a memorable forty years later that she said that.
And then at the Emmy party he arrived, not the Emmy party, sorry, the Premiere party, which happened after the Emmys in September. He arrived. We've had it at Chasin's. He came in. It was a kind of a joke. He came into the room late carrying a big inflatable number one. He said, Oh, Kirsty, you left this in the car.
Good it's good material.
See one of the hardy boys on the Hardy Boys.
He was indeed one of the hardy boys with uh was it Sean Cassidy?
Sean Cassidy that sound that sounds right? Yeah?
Yeah, yeah.
We're three old.
Guys, three old guys talking as usual about being old.
But you know what, now we can make it a point like things were. We could actually literally say with an all truth. You know what, things made more sense back then.
That that is totally true. So here here is my last five days just for your understanding. And this will maybe be of interest to Jonah's ideological tracking. So, of course, the horrible thing happens where Renee Good is shot in Minneapolis,
obviously a terrible tragedy of errors for all concerned. My initial impulse watching the film is that the officer in question was justified and the shooting the car was turned toward him, and he already told she was costplaying she should get out of the car, and you know, and having like two days of being yelled at for having bad opinions and my yelling back at people for them having bad opinions and all this, and then like last night I watched for the seventy five thousandth time, like
one of the videos, and I did have this moment of the things made more sense back to and where I was like, you know, why are these ice agents? Why do they look like they're about to go into Flujah? Like you know, you know, I because I was so caught up in the it's not fair, fair, you know, they're murderers. And then in Minneapolis is going to go up again like George Floyd and having that fun.
And then I just did have the this.
Is really like where these are federal laws, Like what's wrong with a nice uniform? They could just wear like a uniform that's aid ice on it without a mask, and like I'm looking like they're a swat team. You know, They're just immigration and Customs enforcement officers.
They're not Delta.
They're not the Delta force that was my journey over the where And then I'm like, you know, things don't make more sense than they.
Used to do.
Maybe maybe it's justified because they are people are dosing people, and they're they're wearing masks so that their faces don't get facial ide recognition, and then people don't come to their house to kill them.
I don't know.
But nonetheless, what the hell is what I'm saying?
See, I am to keep this on pop culture rather than getting into a contentious gold dress versus blue dress kind of fight about the rachaman that was the shooting. The analogy I keep using is like this is like Fred Thompson in Hunter Road October where he's standing up on the crow's nest of the ship saying this is going to get out of hand and people are going to die. Right.
Yeah, I.
Think the shooting was legally justifiable, which does not mean it was the best procedure. Right. I think it was out of policy, but he was not. He's not a murderer and she is not a domestic terrorist.
Right.
But when when you have the rhetoric from both sides, and I don't think it's equal, but when you have the rhetoric from both sides being so outlandish, you're gonna get more of this, right, just the law of large numbers is just gonna get more of this. And it's a Baptist and bootleggers kind of situation right where the
Trump administration wants more resistance. They love talking about how they are so against it, but they want more hysteria, more crisis, more sort of reasons to invoke Alien whatever Act and all that kind of stuff they want. They're really pissed that Antifa isn't doing a bigger job, a better job of like provoking them, and there are a
bunch of people who want to provoke them. And it's like Normans who just want to have like nice uniforms on people like we got we got nothing here because it's just it's it's cultivated freaking craziness.
Rob as our resident clergyman, could do provide words of comfort and wisdom, evoking the greatest and noblest of sentiments of human nature.
But if you can, but if you can keep it up with the waterfront kind of language, the doc worker language you're using at the beginning, that would be gay.
But I don't mind. I'm not ashamed of that language.
I'm a priest.
We say to h at the beginning of every episcopal ceremony, to say, the college for purity. You know, we say to God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, from whom no secrets are hid, so like he already knows that he's this language. I was asked to do just that yesterday speaking Johns'd like to make Someone said, what do you What could you possibly say about all this?
And I will say, I have no idea except that I think Joan is right that we live in oily rags, dry garage country right now and seems to be walking around light and matches and including the president of the Commander in Chief, which seems very strange to me. This, all of this beats destroys my general theory of life, which is that people just kind of want to these kind of want to try the temperature down all the time that were exhausted. And I kind of feel like,
I don't think that America is exhausted. I think America is just rare to go and.
Is it America.
That's of course the ultimate difficult question to answer is does the ordinary workaday America wants to be living in this hothouse lunatic asylum. I assume the answer is no, but I have no confidence.
I agree. I thought the answers are too. I hope the answers still know and we're just living in a strange amplification time. I would just say, like, since you mentioned the clergy, there's a guy who does this great subsett called graphs about religion, and he does he didn't want a couple months ago, and it basically he just does a lot of meta analysis of Pew data and Nielsen data and sort of like big study cultural study data, and he be came a really interesting look the different
to the political outlook. Disparity between people in the pews and people in the pulpit is immense in the mainland in the mainline Protestant churches, people in pews are like sixty five percent identify as Republican or independent, and basically the independent thing is I'm a Republican. I don't want to say I am. Yeah, that's what it always is, right, And like seven percent identify as demert the piscical churches, it's even more lopsided, like seven percent in the pulpit
are Republicans. And so even the idea of going to your church to try to make sense of something like this, which is a big thing that people are struggling with, in a lot of ways, it's fraught with another layer of partisanship, which is like, I don't want you to go and tell me that I'm an evil person because I voted for Trump, or that I'm an evil I voted for co or whatever it is.
You should talk to Russell Moore at some point. Russell has these stories because you know, a lot of pastors and preatrisens have called him for advice, and starting about five six years ago, he started hearing from a whole bunch of people who you know, the past, the clergy, you are trying to keep the and this is mostly Southern Baptist, right, but the clergure you are trying to
keep politics out of the church. And but they all have these stories about how they would give their sermon and then someone would come up to them and say, you know, I wish you could keep that wokeness stuff out of here, you know, and all that left wing stuff. And he's like, what are you talking about? You talk about turning the other cheek. Yeah, and he's like, you do know that's like scripture.
Right, Yeah, there's like there's a lot of stuff like Turga welcome the stranger as what so there all this is this is all the struggle, right, This is all stuff that's food for struggle and should be in in the in the pulpit instead. I mean there are people who feel that way. There are people feel the other way.
It's what's strange about it to me is that, like, uh, the there's a way to tet to to complain if you're in a church a piscical jeordgy what you call the bishop that you basically you call the headmaster, and you're like a Korean mom calling the teacher to say, give my kid a better grade. And that I think people are resorting to and I'm not sure where they're resorting to it on which side, but this is one of is weird things where like, well, the problem ultimately
is this is that. And I think it's the problem that the liberal media, which I think we could all agree here exists that that there, that's their problem, which is that they made everything political for so long that if you once you sit in the pulp in the in the pews, that you hear the preacher talk about the Paris Climate Accords as like, oh my god, what a great tragedy. We didn't you know, or you know, internet or whatever, there's a web neutrality, like it's just
it's hard enough to see it everywhere. And if you do talk about web neutrality and Paris Climate Accords from the pulpit, you you know, you're not gonna have that much leverage left when you want to talk about what I think was a pretty shameful shooting in Minnesota.
So if we defall to our comfort zone, which is ridiculous popular culture.
No, No, let's look from years ago.
Yeah, I'm talking about screams America.
The question is what would TJ. Hooker have done?
And this is I think I'm not joking when I say, I think America thinks that what police officers are supposed to do in a situation where a car is driving at them is jump up and grab onto the window windshield and ride on the car while the car is driving, and the guy is going, get off my windshield, man, and then T. J. Hooker's like, I'm gonna take you
in like that. That is, we live in a world in which we've spent fifty years watching nonsense depictions of cops and chases and cars in which nothing that actually happens in the real world happens in these depictions, because of course, car chases are always in movies about how a car smashes into another car and then guess what, it can still drive eighty miles an hour as opposed to your car, which is, if your car hits a.
Like a speed bump, it gets.
A flat tire, but you need to pull over and wait for triple A, you know. Whereas in the Lethal Weapon movies they jump off a half finished ramp off the LA Freeway.
Forty yeah, none of those bad guys are irritating committedly irritating lesbian mom who are protesting the bad guys are.
Like evil the South Africans.
Yeah, people, right, they're.
Just camantic community. Joss Alan leath a weapon too.
There was during the little window where all all criminals were South African.
Right, just one correction, you know, okay, on the t J Hooker thing, that was much more of an Adrian's mad move.
Yes, oh, t J was on the side, was on the side going jump onto that car.
Adrian's med something like that.
Yeah, my fer was wearing like a bathing suit. She happened to be staying there in her bathing suit instead of her the world.
She was wearing a child's halloween cop of a cop favorite.
Here.
Here's okay, here this is you asked t J Hooker, TG Hooker. This is the TJ Hooker, Uh parable there was an episode of t Hooker. I don't recall this is this.
About Tijuana or okay, should never minding.
The story the plot, but let's just stipulate bad guy, very bad guy. Uh.
T J.
Hooker finally caught him up, caught him and he was kind of a little weasel kind of character, and he finally caught him. But he was truly evil, committed murder of some terrible kind. And Hooker is holding him is screaming at him, holding him. Resist the rest, Please, Beggy, you resist your rest and he doesn't do it. And that, I think is how it works in te j Hooker Land, that the cop admittedly wants to do something but is
incredibly restrained. In Teach Hooker Land. In Jack Webland, had she had she wanted to, she would have run over the cop.
So well, I've been recent I think I mentioned this a couple of months ago. I I sometimes will tune into Colombo because I'll see it while channel surfing. Yeah, and and I was thinking about it again because I was telling Pod before we started. I've been watching Foyle's War and they do something similar from time to time.
I'm fascinated by these scenes. It's in Colombo. I think it's probably an Ironside and a few others, but where there's the confrontation at the end, right, oh, just one more thing, right, And Colombo gets the murderer not to not only confess right because they figured out the crime right, and but also that this person who committed various heinous murders is alone in a room with a dude that could definitely kill or beat in a fight, and they
have nothing to lose, right. I mean, it's like it's I'm gonna go to the chair or spend a life in prison, or I'll kill Colombo. And it never occurs to one of them to like, hey, you know, I'm already up for a murder one beef. Why not give it a try.
It never occurs to Jack to take off his ascot and unbutton his Neghbrew jacket.
But of course, but of course, of course, all that those killers are all whimps. That's the secret of They're always coming up with some sophisticated poisoning or like have a thing where they're never in the room because there, of course feet intellectuals and upper class geniuses, and they can't beat Colombo to death. He's like the working class.
When it comes Bush comes to shove, he could probably waal, you know, we could kick Richard Kylee's ass or you know, wouldn't stand a chance against Colombo because you know, he's while he's mister, you know, the head of a corporation.
Columbo's like a street cop, right, and who knows what's in the raincoat.
He could have a he could have a walther in there in the raincoat to protect himself.
And one in one of these carnival owners curb stomp Shaggy. I mean, come on, okay.
Now, fair enough, damn fair enough.
They're too busy pulling off the mask and then trying to get the glue off their hand when they pull off the mask and say I would have gotten away with it. Well, although you know Scooby again, Scooby very very loyal to Shaggy.
I mean, Scooby is a great day like Scooby. What happens if Scooby gets mad?
It's still an animal.
I know, we gets scared and his teeth chatter and everything like that. But if Shaggy were really threatened.
So it'll be awesome. Like you know how they're making all these horror movies of a Betty Boop or whatever because they're out of copyright. We just have to wait another thirty years for some really dark Scooby doo.
Yes, Scooby, Scooby is actually a pit bull and like you know, yeah.
Or just Scoo porn. I wonder if redd It has that Oh my god, s Goooby, I have prompt AI prompt, all right, I'll share one more anecdote.
There's an Internet rule. It's like rule forty eight or something like that that says, if you can imagine a porn, it already exists.
If you can imagine a porn and it doesn't exist, it can exist with a few prompts into a porn generator that you probably already subscribe to. I mean you specifically you, Jonah probably. We We did a show years ago and it was a two hander with Bob Newhart.
And leading porn generators.
Ye right, it's a one hand.
Yeah. Uh, I'm trying you guys hard into the theatrical showbis jargon and uh we leave on the other side of it.
And I'm pretty sure too hander is theatrical show bite jargon for porn industry. But anyway, one, I'm saying that, Yeah, if you can imagine.
It, John, if you pay a little bit more, you get a two hander. Anyway, So we uh, we were briefly uh uh. Peter Falals, who played Columbo, his agent called out the head of the studio to say, look, I've read the script. It's great, Peter wants to do it. And the head of the studio had been at Universal ran Universal for a long time and knew Peter fought very well from Colombo and from some subsequent things. And
he called us in and we love Peter Paul. Peter Folk is amazing, he'd be great, called us in and sadus you know he's he's in the in laws, one of the j and sat. We had a bit formal meeting like you were, which you rarely had. You just dropped into the office. I needed you to com in at two thirty because I got to call this guy
back at three thirty. And he spent the entire hour explaining how awful it's going to be for us to work with Peter Falk's here, he is, how incredibly insane he is, that you're you're going to be up all night and he's going to look at all the cuts. That's how he who he is. And as long as you know that, I'm telling you he'd be great in the show. But I'm telling you this, and and he's worth also, I'm telling you, and I will, he said, I will put this in writing too. You can never
call me to complain. I told you.
This is the head of the studio, or this is the chairman of the chairman.
Okay, yes, right, okay, well carry all right, Well you know, but we still want to explore it. We have a meeting with Well, you're not gonna have a meeting with him till you you tell you you you make him an offer, and then you know. So we said, we went back to the age, said, listen, were really interested in Peter. We just kind of want to talk a little bit more about how it all works out. Can we have a meeting? And then A said, yeah, I know what you're talking about because you work with you.
I know you because carry the guy name was Rand the studio is carry my cluggage and then you work over carry out and so then so then he said, well, I'm going to send you his his his his, his financial and procedural proposal, which is a phrase we never heard. And we get this messenger comes and delivers to us into the studio, this like very thick document of what his absolutely non negotiable demands are, which includes every TV
cliche from the nineteen seventies. He basically didn't know we were in a comedy in front of an audience, so he said, and the show will end with a freeze frame on me, laughing with executive producer Peter Falk.
It was.
It was fantastic madness from a guy who was like, well, when I do a TV show, here's what happens. And this is gonna TV show, so here's what's gonna happen. He you know, uh needs to say. We didn't go with Peter. We went with another great actor, Judd Hirsh, which was a delight and incredibly fun and funny and completely bananas in a wonderful way. But like Peter hawk'shrop, am I the only one? And I think I am. But you guys, I know you guys are not on TikTok right, not right?
I mean my kids send me them, but I don't.
Yeah, okay, on TikTok and and I wrote about this in commented briefly but it actually I should have read a whole column about it because it's really fascinating and it is a real thing. There are short multi part dramas, usually serialized dramas. They are the worst pieces of crap in your life. The writing is not AI would do better. They sound like they are translated from the Turkish and I'm not kidding some of them are.
I think they are literally translated from Chinese.
Like some of them are shot in the Far Valley in La.
Yeah.
Every now and then you'll see an actor that you thought, wait, I think I read that woman like thirty years ago. They are actually a way, they are making money and there's a business here. But if you ever wanted to see anything, I mean, you know, we and I we all send each other like stupid clips from YouTube, from old billy crappy TV shows because they're hilarious. This is another level. This is stuff that's so bad no one will ever no one will ever think it's funny bad.
It's just weirdly shot and over the top. But they spend three cents and you could tell they spend three cents on it. And I fear, like everything else, the crappy version of what we thought was already crappy but fun, it's going to be the reality, not just in show business but in politics and everything else.
So I went the step of subscribing to one of these services on my iPad. It's called Real Shorts. Yeah, that's what I'm and so it's out of China. It's some kind of Chinese product. And what they have is it's essentially a movie that has been cut into sixty two to seventy two segments of a minute to two each, and they promote them on TikTok by putting a couple out and then you have to subscribe to see the rest of it.
And they're so dumb. They're all like, yeah, the CEO is coming to the gala, the chairman is coming, and we're going to and there's always like this weird that you murdered my daughter, give all your assets. All that's written with's crazy stuff. It can never really happen.
Yeah, no, it's not even that. It's also it's also like a woman and another woman. Yeah, she's the secretary and the other woman is the boss, and she's like, I am the boss, and then she will slap the other woman across the face and say, now you will bring me your shoes.
You know. It's like because it all does.
Literally translated from Chinese.
Well, there's a guy that's an American guy doing it, and I think he's doing so he's his quality slightly better. But what's about it is that the the the evil is so bald, is so like unrestrained. It's like, yeah, nothing, you're gonna be in the gutter. You don't belong in this gallon looking the way you do this is where it school. One one woman gives another somebody a credit card. He looks, just go to by god, this credit card. Why the bank he issues this to this its most
prestigious customers. With his credit card. Yeah, with his credit card, you could do whatever you want.
Anyway, it is these things are and so yeah. So there is an interesting debate going on if you want, if you listen to industry podcasts, everyone in the entertainment, as Rob writes about in the upcoming issue of Commentary and others like, there is a sense of apocalypse that every modality that has run the American entertainment industry is eighteen months away from complete collapse. That's not to say there won't be an entertainment industry. There will, and it
will continue. And the more people want to be entertained by more stuff on screens than ever before. The only reliable driver of entertainment at the moment is sports. So sports, any sports league is making unbelievable bank, including sports that don't particularly rate like baseball, and the and the NBA are getting home and Cornhall cornhole could be there could be a competitive cornhole league anyway.
It goes on.
I mean, I probably spent all weekend, well watching Cornhole.
Yeah, I mean so yes, So there's a sense of apocalypse and so people. I was listening to this podcast with Jeff Sigansky, who ran CBS and is now an investor and was very very very intelligent, and he he was saying basically that cable is now television. Streaming is now cable. So what is going to be streaming? In other words, what's the thing now that everyone's gonna want that they never had before? And he said there are two things. One is free streaming, which is to be Pluto,
the services, which is just TV. Now that is like you watch TV and there are commercial on that. My money's on that.
But yeah, okay.
But so in other words, the third forty year experiment of making you pay for things you can get for free is now flipping on its head, and now you're gonna get everything free again with ads like none of this ever happened. You're just gonna watch it on your computer screen instead of on a television. But you might be able to watch it on television because you can
watch an app on your television. Or there are gonna be these new cheaper forms of media produced that the real shorts thing you're talking about is probably like it's like the garbage that it's like it's like community theater, and they'll figure out how to up it so that it's more like Broadway over time.
I think the hope is and I talked about HBO because there's the guy. He wants to talk about it like it. Their hope is that it somehow gets to be the quality of say a the old show Small Wonder.
That would be like that is the revolutionary change, that's right. And so you remember when streaming, when streaming shows first started and streaming movies first started, it was like these are terrible, right except for House of Cards. Like then House of Cards came on. They spent two hundred million dollars on House of Cards and it was it was pretty good. So then we were like off to the races.
But like streaming shows were some version of this and was like I'll never do a stream you know how shocking, like the only people who ever do streaming shows or ya da da da da. And when Adam Sandler made the deal to make movies for Netflix ten to eleven years ago, was like, Adam Sandler, this just proves that Adam Sandler's finished.
He can't get a movie office.
His career is over, and he's made a billion dollars through Netflix, making movies on Netflix when comedies died.
At the cinema. And so.
But it's interesting because I'm telling you my wife's in the business. Rob's in a bit like the sense that five years from now, everything that we understand to be the way entertainment has structured. All this stuff. You're hearing fights about the Warner Brothers Paramount merger or whether Netflix is going to buy Warner Brothers. It's all narsch Kite, it's all deck chairs on the Titanic. Something new is going to replace all of this, and it's coming faster
than anybody realizes. And the great joke is Hollywood like gave birth to the new California, and now it's one hundred years later and nothing is being made in California. Rob Lowe makes a game show called The Floor Game Show, the cheapest thing on television because of union deals, and it's union deals and the cost of doing anything in Hollywood.
Yeah, they're gonna fly everybody to Ireland.
Yeah, yeah, to film the Floor.
Yeah.
It's actually everything upside down because it used to be that the word The last thing you want to do is fly anybody, because that was the most expensive thing. And now of course it's it's been flipped, and there are a whole bunch of reasons for that. I'm not quite sure that it's not entirely the unions and those deals.
It's other stuff too. But what's bizarre to me and interesting to me is that like when I was like, remember when things was streamingly started, and like, look, this is the early like two thousand and six, thousand and eight, right around the first big strike or the first big strike of the twenty first century, and I spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley its meeting a lot of people, and they were like very excited about how the internet was going to change the way you know,
people watch TV and along with bringing us all together as a as a brotherhood of man. And I remember thinking like that could that could easily happen and they were allen disrupting this, disrupting that. I remember having conversation
a venture capitalist friend of mine. Here's like, why do you when you're if you're gonna do a pilot, why don't you go to everyone involved and just get them to take you raise a little bit of money and get everybody to have a stake in the upside, right, and then you're all like, then if then goes that you can make you all make money, why don't you do that? Like, then you could then you keep your what eye you could be you could keep fifteen, twenty
thirty percent and I already get thirty percent. He says, yeah, but I mean this way, you'd get thirty percent, and you you could other people could get what they're already paying me in an astronomical amount of money plus giving me thirty percent. It's like, why would.
I just take the thirty percent?
Yeah? And his response was, oh, you guys, Oh you're you're you're in for it. You're sense at all. And it's true, it doesn't make any sense, but it is. Those are exactly the deals that Netflix is making. And when when Silicon Valley moved down to Hollywood, it's not like Hollywood changed, Silicon Valley changed. Like when Netflix is buying a studio that it doesn't need to buy for no reason, for zero reason, do you know that the allure of show business is too great? It doesn't many sense?
But there.
Okay, so Joan, you and I have a disagree. So there's a movie. There are two movies this year, very controversial in many ways. I think are the like the last movie in other words, like there are movies that were exciting to me in ways that movies haven't been in a long time. They're big, they have big canvases, they're beautifully cast, brilliantly said. They're long, they're involving, they're melodramatic, they're rich, kind of thing that made me love movies in the first place.
I like them.
You don't like them, But I do think that there's something very interesting that they represent the end of something and not the beginning. They're not a model for the future. They are the last gasp of a past that's one battle after another, which will likely win the Oscar for Best Picture and Marty Supreme, which will likely win Timothy
Shallomy the Oscar for Best Actor. Do you agree with me that there is something, given that you are a moviegoer as I am, that there's something different about them in the scale, the ambition, the way they are made, that hearkens back to some golden age in some weird way. And then of course you look at it and you say, well, there's no This is not anything anyone's ever going to do again, because nothing can ever make enough money at the box office to justify the budgets that these things cost.
Yes, and look up, there are things about both movies that I think are very well done, right. I mean, I think Shallomy probably deserves the Oscar right, but uh, you're right, first of all, just they feel like they're shot on film, you know. I mean, I don't mean that they're shot on film in the technical sense. They have that look. They have a cinematic vibe to them that does feel like a throwback, you know, sort of like they almost DePalma's cinematographer or whatever, you know, like
that kind of feel the way. I agree with that, and I agree that both movies, particularly Marty Supreme, hold your attention, which is something these days. I will cut to the chase and simply say my my overarching problem with both of them is that I didn't like any of the characters like as people like, like Marty is a just a is a schmuck right now, I know he's supposed to be a schmuck, right, and and Leon DiCaprio and one about after another, he's a loser, and
he's supposed to be a loser. But I also like, I don't want to put on my John podorit's hat here.
But like I feel like at this moment in the plight of American jewry, to make a movie that was so redolent of pushy jew uh sort of obnoxiousness, is was just it was a it was a choice, you know, and it made me on Like watching Marty Supreme felt like in some ways, you know, one of my favorite German words is is fem shaman, which is the feeling of being embarrassed for somebody else in like all eight seasons of the Office are based on that feeling, right we just oh my god, I can't even look kind
of feeling. Yeah, that's how I felt about this, Like, you know, sort of semi iconic are supposed to be iconic American jew for two hours in the movies, and I was like, is this really the time that we need to like do this?
But wait, so Timothy shall Make plays a Jewish guy.
Yeah, yeah, so.
How it feels like jew face to me?
He is Jewish?
Really, yeah, He's halochically Jewish. His mother is Jewish.
Okay, he just is this pure PRETENTI okay.
Well, you know Jews are very can be very pretentious. I assure you that we you know you, you goam, do not have the corner on pretentiousness. I will defend it as follows versus a movie, we'll deal with the Jewish thing. I am almost of the opinion, though I understand the idea that it's a dislikable character, which I don't mind, because you know, the anti hero is a
figure anything, you know, Tony Spratt, whatever. This is a movie that is a sports movie, a gangster movie, a kidnapping movie, a dog movie, a com a romantic comedy, a comedy about adultery, a crazy family story, a.
Shootout, a this that rich guy.
Screwing other people, theater in the nineteen fifty Everything in this movie. It's like, I almost have the if you don't like this, you don't like movies, because it moves like a freight train. It does forty things at once. They are all quite brilliantly rendered and talk about like the end of an end of career, like this is the last gasp. The guy who did the production design.
This movie set in nineteen fifty two, so and it goes from Brooklyn to Manhattan, to Tokyo to Britain to Staten Island, and it the art direction, the incredible verisimilitude.
I agree, that's all wonderful. I agree with.
It was done by a man named Jack Fisk, who is eighty years old and was the production designer on bad Lands, Terence Alex's.
First movie fifty four years ago.
And did Days of Heaven. And like he's actually he's Sissy's basics husband. He is one of the greatest art directors who ever lived, and like this is his almost like culminating masterpiece of work. And he was one of these seventies new cinema geniuses. And here he is with this quite young director, Josh Saftie, who I think is forty and you know, making this movie. And Safti said something really interesting, which I thought, So, this is a movie huge cat, very big panoramic cast, goes to a
lot of different settings. Safti was obsessed with making sure that the faces of the people that were seen on screen look like they existed in nineteen fifty two, because he said, when I see a period movie and I see someone, I look at them and I say, oh, that's a guy who could like be on the Lower East Side today and not in nineteen fifty two.
Takes me out.
I'm done, Like my suspension of disbelief is shot. And the care with which all of that is done. And he does this crazy casting like the big the famous thing is that he cast Kevin O'Leary of Shark Tank as the as the villain, someone who's never acted before, who is sensationally good.
I wanted to dislike him, but I couldn't.
And George Garvin, the Iceman basketball player of the eighties as the guy who owns the ping Pong parlor in Midtown and there's like all over the place. Like the casting is remarkable.
So it's funny as a side note it because it reminds me of conversation you and I had where I was watching, you know, twenty minutes of Godfather for the twelfth billionth time, and I texted you to say, you know, one of the most remarkable things about this is that it's full of ugly people. Yeah, and like the the girls that Sonny is boffing, you know at the wedding whatever is is not a looker, and all that kind of stuff and the people and it was and you pointed out
that it's this casting agent who did it all. But like that thing about looking like you belong in that period is a real thing, Like you know there.
But Diane Kete, that's an interesting thing about Diane Keaton and the god Diane Keaton, the cutest woman in America in nineteen seventy two, whom Coppola deliberately planes up. She's given a bridge to make her teeth stick out a little bit. She's got a really ugly hairdoo like the same year she was in Sleeper, like Enchanting. He knew the whole point of Ka was that she was He wanted her because she was like this waspy New England girl. But she wasn't supposed to be some alluring sex goddess.
She was like a prim example of something that he could have had if he hadn't gone gangster. But he got to keep her anyway.
If he had.
Another question, you guys text each other.
It's Ashley Tisdale here we have it. Do you know about the Ashley Tisdale story? Oh my god, do you know about this? Ashley Tisdale, who was a teenage actress, was in high school musical and stuff, like that wrote this piece for The New York magazine about being uh kind of ostracized by her mommy group and how horrible this experience was.
Why would she.
Well, here's the thing. She says, she doesn't know why she was ostracized.
Just to connect, you're saying I'm Ashley Tisdale in this.
I'm saying you're feeling like Ashley Tisdale. But I now can explain to you why you either are Ashley Tisdale or not. Either you're Ashley Tisdale because in fact, your texting is so awful and you're such a terrible person that we are right to ostracize you and keep you out of our out of our group chat. Because that's what Hillary Duff's husband said in response to Ashley Tisdale's piece, that they all hated her because she was hateful and
they didn't do anything to her. They just like put her off to one side because she was the poisoned person. Either that's you or it's not you. And you have to understand that we we text each other because we're embarrassed.
Yeah by what, Yeah, that's true.
We're embarrassed.
You're a very You're much higher and are You're just jealous of me.
That's it. I told her, that's what I'm saying. I'm not a lot of it has to do with Channel eleven in New York City.
In nineteen seventy nine, and you didn't live here then.
Now I have to reveal to Jonah that John and I text each other too, which means that John spends twenty six hours a day somehow what weird youtubes and thinking about Channel eleven. And I feel like this is one of the things that happens that it happens before the intervention where the friends gather and say, well, I know he's late because he was with you, like he goes with me, Oh my god, he's got he's clearly got a problem.
So I knew that. I mean, like, like, if you listen to the commentary podcast, there's a significant portion of sentences from John that begin as I was texting with so and so and it wasn't me, and it wasn't you. I think John is just texting all the time.
I you know, I don't really understand why I'm the bad guy.
How did I get to be the bad You interpreted that as a bad guy?
Would I would just say that my.
Life is so bizarrely discontinuous that this is what happened to me yesterday morning. Somebody texts me yesterday morning at eight am, a friend of mine who grew up in New Orleans, to say, there's this absolutely horrible story. A synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi was set on fire. Two tours were certified. This is a place I've been dozens of times because I grew up nearby and have gone to barn bamtz is there? Why isn't the media covering the story?
What is going on? Why is there no coverage of this? This is a shool that was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan in the fifties and set on fire. What's going on now? We're not talking about it? So I say, okay, let's see what I can do. I tweet it out and say why is anybody covering? And that my first I've been tweeting for fifteen years. This is like the first tweet I've ever done that genuinely went viral, like it was retweeted I think by now close to ten
thousand times. It was commented on three or four thousand times, and by the middle of the day it had become a very big news story. And this is one of the few things I've ever been proud of on social media that I must have brought it to the attention of people in the know, who then started spreading it, and then news organizations started covering it. As this is going on, I just happened to be on Instagram and
somebody serves up a Broadway Memories. One of the Instagram feeds I follow has a clip from how to Succeed in Business Without really Trying, Robert Morse doing the eleven o'clock number Brotherhood of Man. And in the middle of all this, as this most serious thing is going on, I write a tweet that says, Okay, I've decided, fifty years of going to the theater paying enormous attention, Brotherhood of Man is the best eleven o'clock number.
A lot of people would say.
It's Roses turn from Gypsy or sit Downiel rocking the boat, but I'd say it's Brotherhood of Man.
That's who I am. I am a psychotic.
I am like tweeting about Jackson, Mississippi and Brotherhood of Man in the same half hour. There is something wrong with me. I'm willing to accept it. I think you guys should be willing to accept it.
So I don't know if it's my only viral tweet, but it's the only major viral tweet I've had in the last few years, certainly like in the last three or four years. And I think, I look the other day because it came up on my feet again. It's been viewed like eight million times or something like that. And you know what it was. It was me watching Morning ca bold news stuff flipping around and I got
I've been upset. I was. I used to be obsessed with the Travago pitch man with the big teeth, and I'd be like, is anybody else freaked out by the Chrovago guy, particularly his teeth? And that was it. That was a whole tweet. And I did not know that this dude who has a certain like mentos the fresh maker vibe, right, he feels like he's just not quite American adjacent kind of thing. Turns out he's like the world's most famous football soccer coach and he's like the
coach of Manchester United or something like that. And it went crazy viral, particularly among Europeans. But oh, look at these dumb Americans who think this guy who thinks whatever his name is I still don't remember is is just a pitch guy for Travago or whatever. And I still it's the It's the only thing I've ever tweeted where I really get mercilessly mocked that I do not mind in the slightest and I don't push back on it. I just think it's funny anyway.
I wear it like a badge of honors.
Sir, your booze mean nothing, for I've seen what you cheer.
In nineteen ninety four, nineteen ninety five, No like nineteen ninety eight. I'm sorry.
Rudy Giuliani announced as part of his second term efforts that he was defunding and closing the city run The City of New York had a television station, Channel twenty five WNYE that was paid for by the City of New York, and Rudy said, I'm closing it down, or we're not going to do this anymore. Didn't really happen, kind of still went on anyway. So I wrote a piece in favor of this decision for The New York Post. Because I am opposed to government support for telement for arts, right,
I don't do not belie. You know, I'm against the Corporation for Public broad Casting. I'm against PBS, I'm against NPR like don't I don't Constitutionally, I don't think these things should exist. I don't think that taxpayer money should be used to support the speech of others. And and you know, this is like a very this is a very absolutist about this. And in the course of writing this piece, I said, and I don't even know who
even watches this channel. All I see on if I turn it on is some weird Chinese show for kids with a monkey, and like a guy in a monkey outfit and he's talking to people, and it's in Chinese, and the subtitles are very unclear, and I don't even know what the hell this thing is, like something like that basically, so it shouldn't even be there, because that's all it's airing at some show with a monkey. And then the post gets five hundred letters which are like,
you idiot, this is the monkey King. This is like the Lord of the Rings of China or like you know, or like the you know, the Don Quixote of China.
It's like the most.
Important myth of all Chinese culture and you are so stupid you don't even know it and all of that, and I don't know. I sort of felt embarrassed that I know. But on the other hand, it really was like a stupid show with a guy in terrible monkey you know, like a monkey costume, and did not need to be on public television.
So I don't know what by the City of New.
York, like Rob probably doesn't do. You know, there's a certain let's put it this way, quality beats quantity, but there's a certain quality to quantity that all its own. John and I write a lot and have written a lot, so I don't know if you have one, but like, what was the most surprised I'll go first, what was the most surprising backlash you got for something you wrote? Mine was I mailed in a column this fifteen year
yars ago. Now on how because I discovered this amazing statistic and people can look it up right, Feral cats or outdoor cats or just the combination of them kill hundreds of millions, if not billions upon billions of birds in America every year. I mean, just the numbers are staggering, And like the thing I hit on was like in Minnesota alone. The estimate was like four hundred million birds
a year die from it. And I did this thing, you know, and with a jokey title called like first kill all the cats or something like that, and I wrote about people started writing me the most vicious hate mail of about Okay, are you going to clean up
my car when the birds shit on it? I mean like they just covered the entire water front of possible objections to it, And editors were like, we need you to write something addressing this because the backlash is just like through the roof and and like so to this day, like I'm like, I am more scared of pissing off supporters of feral cats than I am about, you know, pissing off MAGA or or or the resistance side or
any political constituency. Because it was just the sheer vitual I'm coming to your house and I'm going to kill you.
You know.
It was like so much of that kind of stuff. But you wouldn't expect cat lovers, yeah exactly from from not even indoor cat lovers be.
Like lonely sixty year old women pulling up their superw forester. You know. Yeah.
Anyway, so so do you have one, or maybe it's a maybe it's a version of a television like a pro show.
You. Yeah, look, I I want to I I wish everybody well. I hope everybody. I'm not. I'm not. I don't write any hate columns the way Jonah does. Yeah, I'm like, you know, I try to, you know, bring people together. I guess there's so much division now. I uh, we got a lot of stuff. You get a lot of letters when you do a TV show, And my favorite one was the first series We ever did. I mean, I have told you the story already and we The
joke was a simple joke. It's a bunch of guys sitting around talking about when when it is you're going to settle down, When you're gonna settle down, And one guy who's kind of the jerk of the of the group says, listen, you know it's okay when you're our age. Now, you you see a lot of women, you date, you know, you go out, you you get you know, you play
the field. That's okay. But there comes a point in your life when you are ready to uh make a commitment and you're ready to settle down and you're ready to start the next phase of your life and you're ready to find that thing called love, and that is when you fly to the Philippines and you buy yourself
a wife. This was early nineties, big joke, laugh everything, and like the show premieres nine months later, it's six months later and we get and then so that episode promotes like I don't know, within a year, right, and we get an angry letter from the anti Asian American Hate something, you know, Guy Aoki was the guy's name. He used to run this, you know group, pressure group, outraged that we had done this mail order bride's thing.
And it was like three paragraphs. Would you have said, well, when you want to fly to Tel Aviv and you'll put some shekels down? Would you have said all the things that would you have said? This is just the same thing, And then it winds up. It's it's a it's a big wrap up paragraphs And for your information, the Philippines outlawed male order brides in the early nineteen nineties. Our show premier in nineteen ninety three, Like we missed the window by six months. But that's the angriest that's
the one I remember. That was like the one we talked to Ad laughed about.
All right, pod before you go, just because that reminds me and I won't all forget go ahead. I've now heard Jacob frye, we're not getting back to Minnesota, right. But Jacob fry the mayor of Minneapolis. He I've heard him do it two or three times now, including this morning on NPR where he'll say, and he's been saying it for the last few days. We have a low crime city. I mean, so far this year, we've only
had two shootings. We're recording this on January twelve. It's like I remember Ron Brown when he was on he was on Meet the Press in the early Clinton administration and he had some terrible you know, it's some scam about taxes evasion or something like that, and Tim Russert interviewed him and he said, so are you going to come clean about all this? And Ron Brown said, Tim, I paid those taxes last year. And he was recording like on January three, and he had paid them on
December twenty eighth or something like that. Anyway, I'm sorry, go on.
No, but I had I had instructive experiences in like mass responses as a young journalist that were that were valuable.
So my first job was as a researcher.
At Time magazine. And Time magazine at the time had four million readers. And my sisters actually had worked at Newsweek a couple of years earlier and had start in the letters department. And these magazines were so popular and so paid attention to that they literally had departments to read the mail, four or five people working in them to read the mail and to answer some of the letters, particularly if they had objections, factual objections or you know,
question something that was wrong in the magazine. And so I knew about what they did, and I knew that there were egalized on this. And I was the researcher on a little story about a giant dam that was being built on the border. This is this is how you know, like it's almost like a joke that there was actually a story about this in Time magazine. A giant dam was being built on the border of Brazil and Paraguay and it was like the third biggest dam
in the world. Still got a story, a forty line, one column story, and so one of the details that it was it's this size, fifty thousand people are working on it. They're pouring two hundred zillion, you know, cubic meters of cement. Da da da da da. And it was published and we got five thousand letters because it's not cement. Cement is the origin product when you turn it into something that is used to make a dam. It is concrete. And it wasn't one letter, and it
wasn't five letters, it was five thousand letters. And so you know, I didn't know this, and nobody toe and so now don't get off the heads, right, and that.
There are people in because you know this is who times read.
You know, people are like, oh my god, he said cement when he meant concrete.
I mean, what kind of idiot is that?
But it shows you something very important about what happened when you write about or talk about highly technical things that you do this and people who care, really care and really don't like it for sure when you make mistakes. And the other thing happened two or three years later where I wrote a review of Top Gun and I said that a tragedy occurs to Goose's best friend, his tailgunner,
Goot to Maverick's best friend, his tailgunner, Goose. And again this was in either the Washington Times or an Insight, not particularly highly read publications, hundreds and hundreds of letters.
He's not a tailgunner. He's a weapons opera. I can't remember what his title was, but that I was I had shown unbelievable offense to our military, to its standard, to the history of warfare, and to everything good and true and beautiful by referring to him him as a tail gunner when he was actually a secondary weapons optional military specialist.
Or something like that. And again I did not object or I did not feel like I was being you know, overwhelmed by social media hostility, because of course whoever said this was correct and I was wrong, and so I.
Should be able to admit that. But again it mattered. Think there are things that matter to people, that really matter to people. And when I watch a movie or a TV show about a newspaper or a magazine that features preposterous and you know, falsities about how the newspaper is done on a daily basis or something like that, and I'm like, Oh, couldn't they hire somebody like just to do a little I had this with nobody likes this.
The Netflix show about the interfaith couple with a rabbi and they get they got the Jewish stuff all wrong. And I'm like, couldn't they hire someone like this is the oldest religion in the world. Like find somebody who can tell you what a rabbi would wear, you know, or something like that.
And so that was valuable.
That's not like something where I got, you know, rained down upon that I feel was on you know, was was was unjust.
So it's funny. I like because I came of age writing, you know, I did some freelance stuff in the nineteen nineties, but you know, with NRO, I was just blogging every single day, and I would start to acquire you know, you probably remember I had my my Air Power guy and my Middle East guy right now, these guys who would like take me under their wing and say, n that's not quite right. Here's you know whatever. And it became essentially intellectual technical sources. And it was great for me.
But like it's one of these things that like you only start to know it's one of the things that the experience actually matters, because you'll get young writers who's say, going to write about this, and like, because you've been attacked with people with torches because you wrote something thirty you can say, now, make sure you don't say this right, you know, or keep in mind that the you know that people take the debate about seat belts on school
buses crazy seriously, which is a fact in fact true. Like, start offering your opinions about whether school buses should have seat belts and you'll get a lot of interesting mail.
I was having dinner in Santa Monica a million years ago, and I don't know, somebody came up to me. I guess they recognized you from something i'd done. Said are you Are you Rob Long? And I said yes, I just want to tell you we are huge. He was out the business center he's at with one of his employees. We are huge, huge fans of Jonah Goldberg. Really that's great.
Well I'll tell him was yeah, we watched where we spent all George Town on the corner and I forget what he goes I when guy said I'm kind of Joanah's real estate guy, and then the other well, actually I'm his real estate guy.
Okay, but can I give you a Can I give a cautionary tale about the guy? About that guy?
So, also on the corner, our old friend Jim Garrity had a guy whom we called Obi Wan Kenobi. Remember this, and so this was when Jim wanted to talk about the real inner workings of Republican politics. He would say, I just got a call from my source, obi Wan Kenobi, and I call him Obi Wan Kenobi, and he's forgotten more about Republican policies I've ever known. And here's his analysis of what's going on. Here's why Romney is going to win, Here's why you know Jim Carter is going
to win in New Jersey. Who knows it, doesn't matter what the thing was. But he was very learned and sounded great and all of this, and was often really very very wrong, very wrong. And when Obi Wan Kenobi died, Jim revealed.
Who Obi Wan Kenobi was.
And he was my old boss from the White House, Tony Dolan, the head of speech writing under Reagan, whom I loved. He was a lovable fun quite a brilliant reporter, baracterly good speech writer, complete lunatic, I mean, and everybody who knows him will tell you this, Like he was a complete lunatic, lovable, talented off his rocker, and like, yeah, he knew a lot of stuff, but you would never
in a million. And so Jim, I think, in innocence thought looked at Tony's credits and life and everything like that and thought, my god, he's like, you know, he's really a wise man. And the problem was that I knew him.
Once I found this out, I was like, I felt a little.
Sorry for Jim because like you just had to take anything that Tony ever said right with a roughly like a Santa Monica beach is worth grain of salt, Like.
That's fair, but like like that's like my airpower guy was like a thirty years right, you know, guy who I.
Trust your airpower.
I just say that sometimes even there, you gotta be sure. And of course you were. You were using him as a backstop. And Jim didn't say he was right or wrong.
He was just providing Tony inside analysis.
But we've all had this experience. I'm sure everyone has. If you you you read an article in the newspaper about something that you.
Know, a subject or an event where you were in the room or you know exactly what happened, and the account is basically wrong, and you think, though, does this mean that everything else is wrong or somewhat not accurate.
And the answer to that question is yes, which is always yes, always yes.
It's Crichton has a very famous great essay on this about like Feller faster whatever it is, but like it's this thing about how anytime you know about a subject, Yeah, at least one or two things just wildly wrong in the article.
We used to have this. We should imitate old writers in the room. You would, you know, complain, you know, you bump into them and write a school meetings. I wrote sixty two, mister Rand's I can't get a meeting? Would you ever hire any older writers? I? You know, we know what a button is, nobody knows what a
button is, all that stuff. And uh, not only have I become one, but I remember once finding meeting a very old writer who's very distinguished writer in New York and and having lunch with him and and he and and this is way a group working a place, and he'd actually said something very close to me, like, you know, what's what's crazy to me is I wrote sixty two somethings I can't get a meeting. My agent tells me
I can't get a meeting. It's like, really, who's your agent, and he mentioned somebody who I thought at that point I was pretty sure had been deceased for years. And then after lunch then these two younger women came and sat with me and they said, oh, so you know this guy again, because you know, he's really helping us because he's a you know, he knows everybody. So we've written this pilot and we're working on something and he's he's going to help us get this pilot read and made.
And I was like, oh, great, I said, is he also building a time machine, because that's what you're gonna Oh I didn't say that. I thought that, yeah it is. Well, sometimes you know the great guy, but like you know, time moves on for all of us, the Reaper comes for all of us.
Whatever. So I think I've come to the end.
Although actually, just a quick shout out today, I just saw on the twitters from that Danny Duraney account that we all find today fifty five years ago all the Family premiere. So that and we don't need to talk about Rob Reiner really because that's just too much of a downer to end on.
But I fifty five years ago fifty arguably the most important show in the history of television, well one of them. If you if you have to make a list of.
Ten, I just I just made that sound.
But if you think about it, like hey here close rob off the top rope and defensive.
Actually, I think about if you think about a show that changed everything about television after its premiere, All in the Family was probably that show more than any other show that it introduced an entirely new framework for how to have success in television with a contemporary story that actually touched on real world themes that was not what the sitcom was like or anything in television.
Was like.
Good Punky Browser story.
Punky Brewster then took that into the orphan realm.
Yeah. The actor who played Punky Brewster's named so let moon Fry. She was like, you don't know it is a Punky Brewster was a young girl, and she was during a period where all these like orphans and urchins were being adopted by older creepily by older men, older rich men, and she was one of them. The Different
Strokes was a version all that stuff. By the way, I saw a great different Strokes mean, which was the entire cast at Different Strokes, But they had they had airbrushed one side of their face kind of paralyzed in different ways. It was combat bane and all the entire act cast of different strokes as if they just had
a stroke. Yeah, uh, pretty good. But so so then years later, you know, this is like it was on And then a friend of mine we were having lunchins with towards so many other people, and some made a punky Breucher joke and one of the guys said, hey, listen, I uh, i'm I had a great meeting with so Lay. She's coming back. She wants to a show. I had a great meet with Soilay last week. Let me tell you a punky brewster. And then he does that thing that men do to show that she's you know, got
a rack, and we kind of stopped talking. I mean, because you got to use that, right, You got to use that. Everybody would be thinking that, right, you got to use that like, oh dear lord, oh dear lord. Yeah. I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready. I didn't want to eat and show business that much.
Yeah, that whole genre just to and and just to conclude with the was if you think about it, the creepiness of the adopted or Orphans shows family affair, Bill and mister French living in the house with Sissy, Buffy and Jody, Like, what the hell was going on there? Where were the social workers making sure that there was nothing untoward going on there?
Yeah, it's it's it's it's the liberaci liberaci phase where you're like, nobody noticed something weird.
Yeah, it's like, uh, mister French does not seem to have an interest in adult ladies.
At least Bill.
Pretended to date or there was always a plot where he was dating someone.
But yeah, so very strange.
I do wonder like, is it possible, you know, look, there's always a time lag where Hollywood picks up stuff that is derivative of people's lived experience from ten or fifteen years earlier. I wonder if like there were a bunch of people who grew up during World War you know, around World War Two who lost parents and there were a lot more sort of mainstream kind.
Of like I live with my uncle.
Yeah, or if in experiences like like kind of like percolated through in a way that seemed really.
Absolutely that has to be true. In other words, like that you were out of the goodness of your heart, you brought children into your home. That was something praiseworthy and nobody should gainsay it.
And but there's there's something dirty about it. I mean, I mean the cliche New York rich, New York bachelor uncle can only mean one thing. And I think what happens in TV they're like, well, yeah, but he's like yeah, he's got he lives with an English guy who helps him out, who serves him. But it's perfectly normal. You
just keep saying it's perfect, it's fine. It's like, yeah, Conrad Bain is a rich widower and he adopts two the little black boys, and they they call him dead and they run to his limo and he opened the limo door and they run to it, like yeah, it's prefetly fine, it's perfectly fine and well altered. It view just lighting it a slightly different way, so you charge through it. You charged through it.
Like then there is don't even get me started on Bruce Wayne and his ward.
Oh well you can't even let's not start with the ward. But I did want to I'll conclude on this, which is one of the most I didn't know that it happened at the time because I wasn't watching sitcoms the whatever. So it turns out there was this episode of Fresh Prince of bel Air. Okay at the whatever that moment was, so there was a fresh Prince of bel Air and of course Will Smith is the Fresh Prince of bel Air. Huge hit, right. He's again sort of a opted by
this rich families from Philadelphia. It comes out to his Reledi's living there in this house and there's an episode about how his father, his deadbeat dad played by Ben Vereen, shows up and at the end of the which I only saw it like six months ago, and at the end of this episode, you know, he's got the hearty
guy who is his adoptive father. And they turns out that Ben Vereen, his dad, has showed up to try to get money out of the father, out of the adoptive father, and he and Will Smith have a confrontation. Will Smith says, get the hell out of here. I don't ever want to see you again, and then he turns to his adoptive father and bursts into tears and says, why didn't he love me? Why didn't he love me? And that he sobs. His adoptive father grabs him, holds him.
That's the end of the episode.
Yeah, like so that was some weird thing where whoever made Fresh Prince of bel Air was like maybe or Will Smith said, I want to show I can cry on camera. I don't know what happened, but it's sort of like this, WHOA hold up a little bit there, you know, like that's a that's a that's a little close for comfort, you know with a show about a rich.
But that's the thing. What you don't know because you're watching it thirty years later, is that that could have been on a very special Fresh Prince.
Yeah, there you go, the ultimate Usually the very special ones were where they're getting molested by somebody.
But yes, well you remember the one with different strokes where the guy tries to molest Arnold and his friend. You know who the molester was. It was played by mister Carlson from w k rp Oh, Gordon Jump. Yeah it hit hard.
Yeah, all right, well we have to gott Scott, We're gonna has to go. We've we've we've come around to the most salacious and depressing ending that we could possibly achieve.
Although Gordon Jump, you gotta admit kind of hot, right, Okay, Bailey or.
Or Bailey Bailey not not Jennifer.
Yeah, I gotta go with Bailey.
I'm also a Meranda over Ginger guy, but that's me me too, all right.
Well I think that's that's that's what that's cannon at this point.
Yeah, okay.
Also that's the leat moon Fry.
Oh see you guys.
Wait wait wait, centering, breath, centering, cleansing breath. All right, now start