Comedian Russell Brand would probably bristle at being described as a comedian. It’s not that he’s not funny, or doesn’t occasionally perform stand-up. It’s more that in the years since he’s achieved fame, he’s become just as notable for his wonderfully unhinged performances in a number of films, as well as for writing books that sensitively and thoughtfully probe questions about himself, our society, and existence itself. The latest of these is Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions, and it cont...
Oct 25, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 35
Todd loves few TV shows more than BoJack Horseman, Netflix's weird animated comedy about a sad horse. Its recently completed fourth season, which delved into the histories of many of the characters and talked about the roots of trauma and depression, just might be the best the series has ever done. To understand why the season was so potent, creator and showrunner Raphael Bob-Waksberg, production designer and producer Lisa Hanawalt, and supervising director Mike Hollingsworth joined Todd to talk...
Oct 18, 2017•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 34
One of Todd’s favorite actors for elucidating, perfectly, what makes one performance work where another doesn’t is Griffin Newman, who plays Arthur, the moth-man sidekick on Amazon’s The Tick. Newman also co-hosts the podcast Blank Check With Griffin and David, where his discussion of acting frequently helps explain things like why one of the hardest characters to play is someone who’s unfailingly good and decent (because the psychology can be harder to tap into) and why Newman so reveres Philip...
Oct 11, 2017•55 min•Season 1Ep. 33
Fans of ABC’s Modern Family, which just entered its ninth season, know Eric Stonestreet as Cameron Tucker, the role for which he’s won two Emmys. The neurotic but good-natured Cam was half of one of TV’s first major married gay couples, and over the course of the show’s run, Cam and his husband, Mitch, have settled into the sort of farcical bliss we might wish on all sitcom couples. But the road to Modern Family wasn’t always guaranteed for Stonestreet. He estimates in this interview that he was...
Oct 04, 2017•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 32
Tom Perrotta’s books have become one of our most consistently enjoyable dissections of a very specific sort of America — upper-class, wryly comic, and white. Even when his books dig into a world where something very much like the Rapture has happened (as in The Leftovers), they take place long enough after the catastrophic event for things to be reverting to the status quo. That makes him terrific at picking apart the foibles of our modern world, and it’s also made him a frequent target for Holl...
Sep 27, 2017•59 min•Season 1Ep. 31
For a large number of people, just seeing the name "Ken Burns" is mark enough of quality. Whether Burns is producing or directing, his long, multi-part documentaries have been PBS mainstays since the 1980s. His breakthrough film, The Civil War, released in 1990, announced him as one of the best-known, most beloved documentarians in America, and he's since chronicled just about every corner of American history through a variety of lenses, including the much loved projects Baseball, The National P...
Sep 20, 2017•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Even if you're the least pop culture–aware person in the world, you know who Nancy Cartwright is. You just might not know why you know. In the late '80s, Cartwright, a voice actor, went on an audition for the role of an 8-year-old girl in a series of brief animated shorts that would air in the middle of Fox's sketch comedy The Tracey Ullman Show. She didn't particularly want that part, but she sparked to something in the girl's older brother, a rascal named Bart Simpson. The Simpson family would...
Sep 13, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 29
If you have been watching TV — like, at all — since the 1990s, you've probably seen (and loved) Kellie Martin in something. After beginning her career as a child in the '80s, she landed the role of Becca on the critically acclaimed family drama Life Goes On, a role that would eventually earn her an Emmy nomination. But her career is far more than that one role. She was part of one of the most terrifying moments in ER history. She worked with Lucille Ball. She was a voice in The Goofy Movie, for ...
Sep 06, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Few of 2017's new TV shows have hit with the impact of Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, which went from "they're making a TV show out of _that_" territory to 13 Emmy nominations (including Drama Series) in what seemed like record time. Taken from the book by Margaret Atwood, the series depicts a dystopian society, built from the ruins of the United States, where women have no legal rights and where fertile women (also known as "handmaids") are held as slaves by powerful men and ritually raped once a ...
Aug 30, 2017•1 hr 13 min•Season 1Ep. 27
After more than 20 years building her stage and screen resume, Ann Dowd has become a star thanks to her roles as Patti Levin on The Leftovers and the menacing yet maternal Aunt Lydia on The Handmaid’s Tale. Her characters are a product of the fractured worlds around them, but she manages to imbue them with depth and dimensionality that suggests their tragic origins. They’re villains, but ones who feel just as human as the protagonists they play against. With season two of The Handmaid’s Tale con...
Aug 23, 2017•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Director Destin Daniel Cretton made 2013's Short Term 12, one of Todd's favorite movies of the 2010s. For his follow-up film, he reteamed with that film's star, Brie Larson, and adapted the beloved memoir The Glass Castle. The film follows the story of journalist Jeanette Walls, whose childhood years were spent living in extreme poverty, thanks to parents who went way, way off the grid, checking on her at many points throughout her life (including her young adulthood, when she tried to put her p...
Aug 16, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 25
By many standards, PBS has had a pretty great 2010s. Downton Abbey was its biggest hit since The Civil War (which aired way back in 1990), Mitt Romney lost the 2012 election (and thus could never follow through on his threats against the broadcaster), and the network has gone from the 15th most watched to the 6th. But all of that fails to account for a budget released by the Trump administration that would cut the federal funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting completely. The budget ...
Aug 09, 2017•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Janesville, Wisconsin, was one of the towns hardest hit by the economic collapse of the late 2000s. When the local GM plant closed, thousands of jobs that supported the entire city evaporated, leaving residents struggling to stay above water. That’s where journalist Amy Goldstein began following their story. The Washington Post reporter started profiling various residents of the town, following them over the course of several years as their fortunes shifted and changed, and as one Janesville spl...
Aug 02, 2017•55 min•Season 1Ep. 23
What Michaela Watkins does in Casual, Hulu's dramedy about self-involved Los Angelenos, is low-key remarkable. Her character, Valerie, is outwardly pulled together and the smartest woman in the room. But inwardly, she's falling apart, constantly dragged down in spirals of her own narcissism and self doubt. Watkins's trick is that she makes this both relatable and weirdly sympathetic. You can hate Valerie -- and many devoted Casual viewers do -- but you can never quite escape all the ways she's j...
Jul 26, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 22
A Ghost Story is that most unusual thing -- a tiny movie that seems to encompass the entire universe. Made for a modest budget, the movie shows what happens to a young couple when the husband dies. It starts as a standard romance -- then somehow comes to skip across all of space and time. Director David Lowery (who also made the Pete's Dragon remake) joins Todd to talk about the movie's genesis, why we think of ghosts as sheets with eyeholes, and how he bounces between big Hollywood and smaller ...
Jul 19, 2017•51 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Academy-Award winning documentarian Errol Morris is one of Todd's favorite filmmakers ever, not to mention a world-class investigator and interviewer who's managed everything from getting Robert McNamara to admit he could have easily been branded a war criminal to getting an innocent man freed from death row. He joins Todd to talk about his new movie, his love of photography, and the true-crime boom he kinda kicked off. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Jul 12, 2017•48 min•Season 1Ep. 20
It's a special edition of I Think You're Interesting as Todd is joined by David Sims of The Atlantic and Alison Willmore of Buzzfeed to pick the top summer movies of the 2000s. Each critic picks their five favorites, and then the arguing begins. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Jul 05, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Maz Jobrani comes by his love of political humor honestly. He studied political science in graduate school, before deciding to pursue his dreams of comedy instead. This week, Maz joins Todd to talk about figuring out how to make Trump supporters laugh as a liberal comedian, learning to own his political interests on stage, and avoiding typecasting as a Persian-American taking acting roles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
Jun 28, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Alan Sepinwall's blog What's Alan Watching launched in 2005, when he was working as a TV critic at Newark newspaper The Star-Ledger. The site would take the TV episode recap, something popularized on sites like Television Without Pity, and turn it into a place for almost instant analysis of readers' favorite shows. He's since moved on to Hitfix and Uproxx and has written two books, each on some of the greatest shows ever made. He joins Todd to talk about why he favors strong episodes to full sea...
Jun 21, 2017•46 min•Season 1Ep. 17
No matter your thoughts on Fear the Walking Dead, the zombie show spinoff now entering its third season on AMC, it's hard to argue with the show's cast, which is filled with great actors from top to bottom. Recently, three of those actors -- Kim Dickens, Colman Domingo, and Frank Dillane -- joined Todd to talk about whether they prefer playing zombie fights or big conversations, shooting the series in Mexico, and what they've learned over three years on one of the biggest shows on TV. Learn more...
Jun 14, 2017•56 min•Season 1Ep. 16
The first TV show Damon Lindelof co-created was Lost, ABC's seismic, game-changing series about mysterious islands and the plane crash survivors who love them. Hence, his 2014 follow-up series, HBO's The Leftovers, was hotly anticipated. What TV fans got was at once a more mature work and perhaps an even stranger one, set in world where 2 percent of the population has disappeared and seemingly everybody left behind is losing their minds. In the wake of The Leftovers' series finale, Damon joins T...
Jun 07, 2017•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields have spent five years at the helm of The Americans, the '80s-set spy series which many (Todd included) would call TV's best drama. And somewhat fittingly for a show about an arranged marriage made for business purposes, the two were pushed together in the early days of the show, when Weisberg (the show's creator) needed a steady hand to help him learn the ropes of running a big TV show. Usually, these sorts of creative marriages collapse quickly, but Weisberg and Fie...
May 31, 2017•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Alan Yang's series, Master of None, might be the best TV show of 2017. Yang, who co-created the series with its star, Aziz Ansari, also worked on all seven seasons of the beloved NBC sitcom Parks & Recreation, as well as the first season of The Good Place. But the free-wheeling, deeply empathetic Master of None is where he's had greatest opportunity to shine. He joins Todd to talk about the second season, why he loves New York after growing up in California, and what that final shot means. L...
May 24, 2017•1 hr 15 min•Season 1Ep. 13
Ane Crabtree has worked on so many of TV's best shows -- Rectify, Masters of Sex, Westworld, and Hulu's new The Handmaid's Tale to name just a few. And though you've seen her work every week on those shows, you might not have known it. She's the costume designer, responsible for bringing these wildly different worlds -- stretched across time and space (and sometimes reality itself) -- to life entirely via their clothes. In this week's episode, Todd and Ane talk about designing those haunting Han...
May 17, 2017•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Chris Parnell's long comedy career has taken him through a surprising number of venerable comedy institutions. He started out in the improv troupe The Groundlings. He was a major player on Saturday Night Live for years, appearing in some of the show's best sketches. And after SNL, he played the batty Dr. Spaceman on 30 Rock, as well as appearing in almost every other one of your favorite 21st century sitcoms. At present, he's a major part of the voice casts for FXX's Archer and adult swim's Rick...
May 10, 2017•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 11
Ezra Klein isn't just the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Vox (the site that produces this podcast, in case you were unaware). He's a major fan of superhero comics and the films based on them. For this week's episode, Todd sat down with his boss to discuss why he loves comics, how he avoids Twitter, and what he got wrong when he started Vox three years ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices...
May 03, 2017•1 hr 7 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Since it debuted in early 2016, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee has become one of the most vital voices in late-night television. The show's trenchant but hilarious dissection of an America merrily flying off the rails has proved to be a proud heir to the legacy of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Todd talks with Ashley Nicole Black, Allana Harkin, and Mike Rubens, three of the show's correspondents, about redoing the show in the wake of the election, interviewing Trump supporters, and whether th...
Apr 26, 2017•45 min•Season 1Ep. 9
Richard Kelly's first feature film, Donnie Darko, was nearly lost to the ages when it debuted in October 2001. The Patriot Act had just been passed, and it was not a time when the American moviegoing public was ready to watch a film that featured plane engines falling from the sky. But over the next several years, the movie went on to become perhaps the definitive cult film of its era. Kelly's follow-up films, Southland Tales and The Box, struggled to achieve the same level of cult success (thou...
Apr 19, 2017•58 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Phil LaMarr is one of the entertainment industry's premier voice actors, having worked on an intimidatingly large number of projects over his career. But he's perhaps best known for two roles: Hermes on Futurama and Jack on Samurai Jack. After a lengthy hiatus (the last original episode aired in 2004), LaMarr returned as Jack in the series' newest season, which is currently running Saturdays on adult swim. Phil joins Todd to talk about how to play a character who's aged mentally but not physical...
Apr 12, 2017•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 7
When it debuted, Better Call Saul, AMC's Breaking Bad prequel about the early years of unscrupulous lawyer Saul Goodman, drew most of its attention for its ties to its parent series, one of the greatest TV dramas of all time. But over its first two years and now in its third, Better Call Saul has carved out its own space as a weird, funky hybrid of legal dramedy and dark crime tale. Lots of its success is thanks to this week's guest, Rhea Seehorn, who plays Kim, a woman who dragged herself up by...
Apr 05, 2017•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 6
