Disney: Canary in the Showbiz Coal Mine

Welcome back to across a movie aisle presented by Bulwark. Plus, I am your host, Sunny Bunch, Culture editor of the Bulwark, and I’m joined as always by Alissa Rosenberg of the Washington Post of Peter Sooderman, of Reason Magazine, Melissa Peacher. How are you today? I’m maintaining.

I am happy to be talking about movies with friends.

First, stop in controversies and controversies. Whether Disney. Analysts spend a lot of time thinking about Disney and what its CEO, Bob Biker, are up to. Since Disney has its fingers in so many different pies. Right?

You have the the theatrical business, which has had a soft summer after the underperformance of the late Indiana Jones movie, and the live action, the little mermaid, and the animated elemental, and it’s got the streaming business. Which, you know, continues to lose money is kind of stagnant in the US and is shedding numerical users, but they’re low revenue users from India. So it’s it’s, you know, hard to say how that’s going. There are also the cruises in the theme parks. The latter of which provide, kind of a fascinating paradox, really, the whole industry as a whole, they’re generating more money, but they’re attracting fewer visitors, in a way that’s troubling to people inside the company, and regular visitors who have loved the parks for generations.

The real trick here is linear TV. And what we’re talking about when we’re talking linear TV is really sports. We’re talking sports Ron DeSantis in modern times means two things. Number one, rights deals, that is acquiring the ability to air games on TV and thus earn revenue from advertisements on them and also the affiliate fees that you get from ESPN by, getting those on cable and satellite stations. And gambling deals that is acquiring the ability to siphon cash from the addicts who pour money into wagers on the games you are airing on the TV.

Linear TV is a weird asset, and that everyone agrees it’s a near terminal decline, and yet everyone also understands it generates tons of cash. Unless you can’t really offload it without badly upsetting your balance books. All of this gets to a broader problem underlying the Disney products right now, and it’s this. And it’s it’s a problem that we can talk about in, regard to a lot of the industry right now. There’s a very real weakness on the creative Let’s be blunt.

The two biggest properties at star, Disney of Star Wars and Marvel are in a very clear rut. Interest is declining audiences are tuning out. Indiana Ana Jones clearly tapped out. The live action remakes of their animated classics are doing okay, but where does the next generation of remakes come if they can’t make new animated classics. Right?

I it this is where Disney has a real problem. It’s a lack of originality in Canto probably the only thing to really move the needle for them since Frozen came out a decade ago. Alyssa, can you inspire new generations of park goers and Disney plus streaming purchasers and kids who just wanna be entertained and love the products and all that with one original hit every ten years.

I don’t think so. I mean, You know, I I speak as the parent of a kid who is not terribly interested in pop culture yet, but I think it’s telling that the hit that she associates most, but Disney is Bluey, which is an Australian import, was, I think, not a show that, you know, people particularly saw coming as a huge hit is not something that necessarily lends itself into hugely expensive theme park experiences. Like, there’s definitely little cute stuff that you could do with it, but she does not associate Disney with, like, the core Disney products. Right? I mean, she’s watched some of the movies.

She likes them, fine. But Bluey is the thing that is sort of the brand for her And

And tellingly, though, they don’t actually own Bluey. They they they don’t even own it. That’s a that’s owned by an Australian company. I mean, they could probably buy it if they want it, but they they don’t actually only underlying rights there.

Yeah. Wait. That’s Sonny’s plan to save Disney is they should just buy Bluey.

They should buy they should buy bluey and cocoa melon. That would do more for them than just about anything else they could do.

And then have bluey land?

Yes. You would Peter, have you watched Bluey? No. I feel like the latest Bluey convert is my colleague, the, you know, incredibly venerable intelligence reporter and spy novelist David Ignatius. So I feel like we should really do an episode where we force Peter to watch Bluey at some point.

No. This is too far.

The episodes are eight minutes long, Peter. You would survive just fine.

My attention span isn’t that long.

But Blue not something that emerged from Disney’s internal or creative processes, and I think part of what is worrisome is not only, you know, the content is not inspiring, but all of the reporting that we’re reading about sort of the internal creative processes is not that exciting. Right? I mean, Pete Doctor has taken over at Pixar and clearly the movies that they are making reflect his cerebral abstract interest in ways that often make for, you know, pretty good movies, but not necessarily ones that are going to be total world conquering hits. In the way that Toy Story or the Incredibles were. You know, I think Kathleen Kennedy’s tenure at Lucasfilm has not worked.

At least on the feature film side. You know, I think the mandalorian, what, you know, has been a hit, but they have really overdone the you have to watch the show to see this important thing happen. You know, we watched Andor and liked it a lot, but, you know, I am about as hardcore Star Wars fan as you can get, and I have not touched the book of Boba fett or Ashoka.

And then Shoka’s not out yet.

See, I don’t even know when the new Star Wars show is out yet.

I It’s debuting the same day as the first Republican primary debate. So you get to pick your fighter?

Well, I know what I will be forced to watch in my household. I love my husband and his job. But I don’t look forward to it. Yes. Star Wars.

Clearly. No.

It’s a double feature in my house.

Yes. And then, I mean, I think Kevin Fieg’s reign at Marvel was considered sort of a guarantee of quality for a while. But the homogeneity has really hurt them there as their quality control and stuff, like visual effects has declined. And so I think it’s hard to look at the Disney creative and say that there is a part of this that working great and is carrying along everything else. And that’s depressing.

Right? I mean, we were all kids of the Disney Golden Age to a certain extent. And you know, we were preteens and teen movie goers at a time when Pixar were just kept knocking it out of the park. And so to be alive at a time when Disney just seems befuddled by making mass entertainment is very strange.

Yeah. I mean, Peter, you you’re the one who, who forwarded the story on to us. And I think it is an interesting one. And I I, like, it’s one of these things where you look at it and you you can look at all of the business stuff. I mean, I ran through all the business stuff there.

And there are lots there are myriad business issues, dilemmas, contradictions. But the real thing that matters is you make hits and none of that matters. And they’re just not making hits right now.

Yeah. So I was thinking about this throughout the day, and it struck me thinking back through the the last decade or two of Disney’s success in many ways up at least up through, I don’t know, twenty fifteen twenty twenty. Right? Sometime in the late teens, like, you know, but, they had a really strong run with Marvel, even with the Star Wars movies that I think we can all agree didn’t really work. Like, the first one was actually a giant at And the ones that that underperformed, yeah, they did underperform, but there’s still a lot of money coming in.

A bunch of this started with the acquisitions of Marvel and Lucas film, then there was at the same time, there were some expansions in the parks, and then also, a bunch of stuff that that they did to sell movies in China. You think about Bob Eiger’s run. Bob Eiger’s run was genius from a business perspective. He bought undervalued properties. He figured out that people would pay more for parks and ways to extract more money from people, within the parks them.

Right? Both in terms of expanding their offerings. Right? The parks were much bigger and had more new stuff, but also in terms of pricing mechanisms, in terms of just features. Bob Eiger really got the business part of it.

He also figured out where to put money in terms of the properties that already existed. So let’s make beauty and the beast again. Let’s make the lion king again. Let’s take this stuff that has already worked and put more money there because that stuff has not been fully exploited. Great business sense.

Really? Like, he he made Disney an absolute crap ton of money and made it the behemoth that it was and it is because it looks shaky because it has come down from that position that we’re talking about it today. But what you can’t do is identify basically any time where Bob Eiger has been responsible for a good creative decision. Or a series of good creative decisions. Now not that there weren’t good movies or good park lands or any good rides that came out of his his his tenure.

But it was all stuff that, like, to the extent that there was good creative, it was somebody else doing it. And most of what he did was was just figure out let’s look at these assets and figure out how to market and sell them in a way that’s smarter and more effective than we have before.

Which is sort of the whole story of Hollywood now. Right? It’s like we are looking for preexisting assets.

He he looked everything as an asset that could be exploited. Now you have to do that to run an entertainment business because what you have are assets. And you have to sell them. And somehow or another, you have to take the the things that people created, whether it’s a frog puppet or, you know, a kid with a laser sword or, you know, a guy with a star on his blue mask that in a weird shield that, like, flies back to him every time he throws it. Whatever it is, somebody invented some crazy story and some crazy character, you have to figure out how to take that and sell it.

That is the job of the executive. The same time, you also have to foster a system in which new good creative ideas can be developed and sold. And that’s what Iger I don’t it’s not really obvious that he ever did that. Even when he was at his peak, even when he was at his most success full. And what Disney needs now is somebody to foster a creative environment because if you read the Bloomberg story that that sparked this off by Lucas Shah, that came out last night or over the weekend.

The thing that that story says and that other people have reported is that what Iger wants Disney to be is three core businesses. Studios, parks, and streaming. And what all of those businesses rely on is good creative product. You can’t have a theme park without a product that people wanna, especially at Disney Park, whether it’s not mostly about the speed of the rides. Like, people have to wanna come to to be in Avatar land or whatever.

You can’t have, you know, like a a thriving studio film business unless you have movies that people wanna go see. You can’t have a streaming service, especially a Disney style streaming service without a bunch of properties that are continuing to produce stuff that people actually wanna watch and engage with. And Eiger has sold the stuff that Disney already had very well, but he hasn’t developed a new stuff. And I I think he Did he just forget about it? Did he not value new stuff there, enough for the long term business?

I don’t know the answer to that, but just thinking about his career, it’s it’s a brilliant sort of business case study of how to take a big entertainment corporation and make a ton of money off of it for fifteen years. And it’s It’s also a case study in how to not have a plan for fifty years.

Yeah. Certainly his incredibly boneheaded comments about the guilds suggests that he has not prioritized the role of sort of original creative in his thinking.

Yeah. I mean, I look, and there’s there’s all sorts of other kind of important things that have happened in the time period that we’re we’re discussing here. I mean, the the exit of John Lasseter from Pixar was a big, deal in terms of creative. And, you know, we could talk about what’s going on at Star Wars and and whether or not that property misses George Lucas more than anyone kind of thought that property would miss George Lucas. But, yeah, I mean, like Eiger’s Eiger’s job is not to be there greenlighting individual pictures.

Right? That’s not really what he should be doing. That’s I agree with

that, but his job is also to hire people who can do the good creative work

who — Yes. —

and who have a have a strong track record of it. And when they don’t, and and when that track record is, like, here’s five years and you haven’t done any his job is to fire them, find some new people. And, like, like, if you’re not consistently producing that stuff, then it’s not working. And what he has done is prioritizing people who are good at exploiting the existing creative rather than prioritize new stuff that didn’t exist twenty years

Yeah. The one thing I disagree with you slightly on Peter is the idea that you need new stuff constantly on Disney Plus for it to be a hit. I don’t think that’s actually true. I think it is It is the only streaming system, perhaps, set up to be a repository of stuff that kids watch. And, yeah, you need you need some new content there to keep the kids interested more or less.

But, like, they will watch things over and over and over again. I mean, Alyssa’s not joking about Bluey. My kids have watched every episode of Bluey thirty times each. You know, I I exaggerate, but only slightly.

And it’s also I mean, it feels on brand with Disney. It’s legitimately sort of good and creative. It’s got, you know, the sort of Pixar like, you’ve got the kid main characters, but the adult characters feel sort of engaging and exciting. I mean, it’s, it’s very on brand. It’s just that Disney didn’t create it.

Yeah. Alright. So what do we think? Is it a controversy or a controversy that Disney has yet to purchase Bluey? And make Bluey land, Disney Disney World’s Magic Kingdom.

No. I I I isn’t it, I mean, look, is it a controversy you’re an entrepreneur that the Disney is stuck in the creative doldrums, Peter.

Yeah. It definitely is Disney ruled the roost in Hollywood for so long. The fact that they seem to be stumbling now is Certainly controversial. Alyssa.

Yeah. It’s I mean, it’s controversial in the sense that, you know, Disney was in to a certain extent, like, the Ozimandius of the industry for a long time. It was the company that could do no wrong, the, you know, the combination of Marvel and Star Wars Ron DeSantis, and you know, twentieth Century Fox seemed really brilliant until it didn’t.

It’s a controversy. It’s just the way of the world. Disney was, you know, generating fifty percent of the box office one point a few years back. There’s no way they could have kept that going. Audiences were gonna get tired of it.

And sure enough, it turns out that what we needed was less Star Wars and more atomic bombs. And, Barbie Doll movies. That’s what the people wanted. Yeah. Who could have known that?

Who could have known that? Alright. On The bonus episode this week, we’re gonna be discussing the Barbie culture wars speaking of Barbie. Is it a feminist manifesto or is it a secretly conservative ode to motherhood? Why not both?

Or neither? I don’t know. Make sure to swing my Bulwark plus on Friday for that. We got a we got a whole bunch of thoughts there. And now on to the main event Bull Circle.

The six episode mini series from Stephen Soderberg and Ed Solomon on Maxx. Ram through July. Ramned through the two episodes a week, three weeks through July. Since the end of July was pretty packed with good stuff, Again, atomic bombs, Barbie Doll movies. We figured we’d hold off until this week to talk about the show.

Okay. So full circle. Very complicated. I don’t want to explain it all here for spoiler reasons, though. I think we’ll we’ll get to the spoilers in a little bit.

If you haven’t watched the show yet, you probably should watch it. Before we talk about it entirely, because I don’t think we can talk about why some of it works and some of it doesn’t work without getting into spoiler territory. But, this neither here’s your chance. If you don’t want if you want no spoilers, turn it off now, what I’m about to explain is basically the first episodes worth of setup. Okay?

We’re good. Alright. In one corner, you have the Brown McClesker families. Right? You got Sam and Derek Brown.

They’re played by Claire Danes at Timothy Olafonte. Respectively. They run the Celebrity Chef Empire of Jeff McCluster, who’s played by Dennis Quade. He’s kind of a clueless, but kindhearted Emerald Legasse type figure. The Browns have a son, Jared, and at the end of the first episode, he has been kidnapped supposedly, apparently, by a gang of Gianese criminals.

The Guini’s criminals are headed by Savitry Mahabir, who’s played by CCH pounder, and her right hand man, Garman Harry, who’s played by Faldat Sharma. I’m I’m butchering all of these. I’m sure. I’m sorry. The Mahabeers are running an elaborate insurance scam involving the murdering of bums on whom they have taken out life insurance policies, those murders are committed by youths like Louis and Xavier played by Gerald Jones and Shay Cole I respectably, who are illegally brought to America by the Mahabeers.

These murders are being investigated by Mel Harmony, who’s played by Zazzy Beats, a US postal inspector, whose boss, Manny Broward, played by Jim Gaffigan, has been hiding the fact that she failed a psych evaluation. That’s the basic setup here. In the in the show’s opening minutes, Myhebir’s son is killed. That leads her to believe that the family has been cursed and that lifting the curse will require the kidnapping and ransoming and possibly murder of Jared Brown. The six episodes of full circle detailed the legal and personal betrayals that led to these families becoming intertwined with each other so, incredibly complexly.

There are three separate ways to look at this project, I think. The first is on the level of acting, and I love every actor in this. All the font is great as the slightly skeezy dad. Dain’s as great as the slightly crazed mom. Quade is great as the slightly goofy grandpa.

Love it. Love it all. The Mahabir side is a little bit trickier in that the accents threw me a bit, but CCH pounder is always amazing to watch. And I loved Charma, who plays Garman Harry again. I think he’s a revelation.

I can’t wait to see other stuff he’s in. Zazzy Beats was saddled with a pretty tough role here in she has to be very annoying and a little mentally off while still coming across as the most competent person in the room at any given time. I didn’t love her character. Exactly. But I think she does a great job with it.

I think it I think she is, again, she’s she’s great. She has been wonderful and all sorts of stuff. She’s very good here. You could also look at this as a visual story. That’s another way to look at this TV show, this mini series.

And I love that, Stephen Soderberg, who directs the episodes, kind of moves between quick handheld stuff and more composed, calm moments. He’s using digital film slash video, whatever whatever he is using, captures the actual lighting of, you know, like high ceiling to New York City apartments, or the darkness of parks, that sort of thing really, really well. I love the look of this this show. This kind of, quasi naturalistic look. And then there’s the plot.

And the plot is, look, I think everything comes together at the end, more or less, the title full circle refers to the magical nature of the circle. The the circle, the actual shape the circle to the Guinness gangsters, and the concept of a story, you know, coming full circle. But I couldn’t I I wouldn’t swear entirely that it comes together because there are a handful of plot elements that I still don’t I wouldn’t say that I entirely understand. Exactly what was going on. Most of them having to do with the business scam that is kind of at the heart of the proceedings, which I haven’t even really talked about in that, that little intro there.

You’ll, you’ll you’ll find out more about that as we talk here. I’m sure. How the McCuskers made the money that launched the Celebrity Chef Empire still kind of escapes me. It alludes me. That said, found the whole thing entrancing and slightly hypnotizing.

It comes loose, I think, if you start tugging at the seams. But in the moment, While you’re watching it, it all feels pretty tight. I don’t know, Peter. What did you make a full circle?

It’s an interesting, if not entirely successful production. But in that, it’s sort of quintessentially Soderberghian. Right? This is where I, like, I love Stephen Soderbergh, even when I don’t love his, his work. And this is a a show that I don’t totally love.

And yet, I’m glad I watched it because Steven Soderbergh’s stuff is always worth watching. So the thing that you that you pointed out is just how interesting this show looks, how novel it looks. It looks like New York looks to your eyes. Except it doesn’t just look like somebody shouted on an iPhone. It looks like somehow or another somebody took the way that walking around contemporary New York looks and made, you know, a movie out of it, made something artful out of it.

And this this is a a genuinely difficult task to take a very naturalistic lighting scheme to take a a relatively naturally certainly the sets are extremely naturalistic and and they’ve been built like to look a particular way, but there’s a lot of exteriors here. Right? And you just sort of see what walking around or driving around New York in twenty twenty three, I guess it was probably shot in twenty twenty two, actually looks like. And that’s so rare. Like, when you see did you guys see the, the Nicole Kidman, husband murder show with Hugh Grant on HBO two years ago or something like that.

Also shot New York, a bunch of exteriors, a bunch of interiors in the apartments. It’s kind of an interesting looking show. It doesn’t look fake exactly, but it looked quite stylized, quite overdone. Right? Like every every shot, every scene, every set that they’re on, whether it’s an exterior or, you know, a built interior, it’s always designed to make a point about what’s going on in this scene and about these characters.

And Sonneberg takes stuff that is less manipulated and less obviously sort of set up it in a schema and makes make something really fascinating to look at out of it. And so I just love watching, his, watching his his Bulwark and looking at this sort of photography operating on this level. The acting is also mostly very good. I think, I was maybe a little less taken with Zazzy beats than you were, though it, again, it’s a difficult role. But you’re right.

Like the real problem with this is the script, and it’s not that the script is bad. It’s that it’s it’s overly elaborate while also not having enough underneath to back up its elaborateness. This is a series in which you’re sort of thrown into the middle of things. And there’s just not enough. There are not enough moments, especially for such a naturalistic show.

There are not enough moments in which we just see the characters kind of living out their lives and get a sense them before they start being involved in all of the murder mystery intrigue. And for a series that does such a good job of locating you in a specific place. New York after the pandemic. And for a series that does such a good job of, like, delivering the feel of that place, it doesn’t It doesn’t have this sense of being lived in in terms of the characters actually interacting with the real world. You get little bits of it here and there.

As as he beats his character and her her partner who she’s having trouble with at an art gallery, that sort of thing, you know, Claire Daines at her office, her workplace, delivering a, you know, setting up a a little bit of a, some sort of conference with journalists for her father. But you don’t get these kind of natural moments of people just interacting in their own sort of daily life that you need for a show like this to work because you need to care about these characters outside of the plot. And the show never gave me a reason to care about these characters outside of the plot. And then the plot was the plot was, like you said, I’m not quite sure I could tell you exactly how it all worked or how it came together, and it definitely seems to depend a lot on revenue, from a real estate scheme that the we learned at the end produced a condo that was never finished. So where were the profits or the revenue from?

Like, it doesn’t like, the final shot of the show is Oh, this whole thing has been about a condo. Right? And okay. Yeah. I get it.

It’s all about real estate because that’s what class really is in New York. It’s about real estate. But How were the rich people making money off of a condo that didn’t get finished? That’s what I don’t understand.

Yeah. This is the sort of thing that feels like it kind of either needed to be ten episodes or twelve episodes or like two hours and fifteen minutes. This is either, you know, I don’t know, like Michael Clayton style thing that you do in a in a feature and all of the all of the extended sequences involving casino, credit, limits, and, you know, the the in the bum killing insurances, all of that gets reduced to like one scene. In this two hour fifty. Or, again, you do a, you do a, like, twelve hour mini series and you you really go through it and get it all done.

I don’t know. Alyssa Could you explain to me the apartment complex in Guyana that doesn’t exist and how that created the chef Jeff empire?

How did everyone get rich off of that?

We’re getting a shrug.

Have lost a lot of money.

We’ve got shrugs and arms in the air.

Yeah. The plot concludes in a way that provide sort of visual emotional satisfaction, but know that makes no narrative sense whatsoever. And I actually think a lot of this series functions that way. It’s in a weird way. It feels like Soderbergh is experimenting with the extent to which excellence in one area of a production can make up for deficits in another.

Right? Like, take the treatment of you know, what CCH pounder’s character, what Savitry Mahabir refers to as Obia. It’s sort of a West Indian, you know, creoleized religion, that is at the basis of the ritual that she’s trying to perform. You know, the show never really floor is like what the ritual is supposed to do, how it’s supposed to work, but pounder just sells the whole thing. There is no, essentially, no plot.

Development around sort of the specific nature of the magic that’s being performed or how anyone thinks it’s supposed to work or why everyone is going along with it. But CCH pounder just sells you on absolute belief in what is happening. Right? And so her performance alone just fills in this kind of empty space in the script. You know, and I agree with you that location work is kind of amazing.

I actually looked the location manager, Malcolm Alston, who it turns out has worked on succession and west side story and passing, and Mozart in the jungle and the wizard of lies, and show me Hero, an unbreakable, Cammy Schmidt, and the Nick, all of which are, you know, productions that are to some degree about New York. Right? And the show has a really impeccable sense of where each character would live. Right? I mean, you know, the Brown’s apartment has you know, all of the architectural touches that you would expect in people of their sort of age and wealth in class.

It has the wallpaper sort of inset sitting area in the kitchen. It’s got, you know, sort of the tasteful art uncle Jean lives in this sort of smaller cramped townhouse with this little back garden and the great architectural surprise of the show, of course, is one that pays off in the plot. When it turns out the garment’s Harryian house, he bought in part because it has a bootleggers escape route in it. Right? And so You know, I mean, we don’t talk very much about people who do, you know, location work or set decoration on this podcast, but Alston clearly has an eye and sort of a social register for New York that I think really contributes to this production.

And, you know, Image and Lee, who does the set decoration and, you know, has worked on the Marvelist, Mrs. Maisel, if Bill Street could talk, vinyl, You know, a bunch of other stuff that’s set in New York inside Lewis Davis also has a great eye for these sort of class on culture based details, like the New York Giants pillow on Uncle Jean’s couch. Right? And I am glad you mentioned that, Peter, because so much of what works about this is vibes. Right?

It’s, you know, knowing exactly how Claire Dane’s character would dress. It’s knowing what hip New York hotel lobbies look like in the sort of understated like the whole stealth wealth thing.

I loved the fact that the the super fancy suite that Claire Dane’s husband checks into after he gets kicked out is actually a little bit physically smaller than the much less fancy suite that they keep the kid in Right out, like, out probably towards JFK would be my guess, though. I’m not exactly sure where that is. And it’s just, like, it’s such a perfect contrast that it’s not like the show is ever like, oh, we’re gonna do a match cut from one to the other, like, make a big point. It’s just like, it’s there. They’re kinda in the same episode, and you can see this is what a sweet look looks like on one side of the the tracks, and this is what a suite looks like on the other side of the tracks.

Yeah. Look, the plot makes no sense, and I can’t justify it. I mean, The show actually squanders its big reveal to a certain extent, which is that chef Jeff has been spending all the time playing chess with a guy who’s, like, essentially been working a long game revenge scheme on him, and it goes wrong. Right? I mean, if this were twelve episodes long, it might have turned out to be a masterpiece.

As it is, I think it’s I found it to be a pleasurable confection. That’s sort of missed opportunity. I mean, I like za I like Zazie Beats a lot, and I kind of enjoyed her female psycho here. You know, she’s very much playing a male character in certain ways. Right?

I mean, or a character who’s given a lot of masculine traits Right? Like, she’s the difficult cop who, you know, kind of pushes up against boundaries and thinks she’s smarter than everyone in the room. And is sort of getting away with stuff until she can’t and yet still manages to deliver justice because her heart’s sort of in the right place. And it was interesting. I read a couple of reviews of this about how hurt unlikeability was kind of a flaw on the production.

And I didn’t really find it to be that way. I sort of wish that Claire Dan’s character had ended up being a little bit more super villainous? I don’t know. It would have

I think I think you’re right that it is explicitly like this is a woman playing, like, the male cop There’s like kind of a dick and, you know, mentally maybe not quite all there. And as a result, is punished for it, right? Because, you know, woman in a man’s world all that. And I think she makes it work because I think she’s very good, but I I can also I can also see why people would be very annoyed by the character because the character is intentionally annoying. Yeah.

And not just not just in how she behaves, but like the some of the very specific ticks that, that Zessie Pete puts into the character, like the kind of like, mush mouth, way she talks sometimes or the, I don’t know, just like her her her whole vibe.

Very sort of deliberately mannered thing she does in, in, you know, questioning people that’s clearly meant to sort of set people on edge. I also kind of I enjoyed Timothy Old fan playing, like, kind of a annoying beta here.

I don’t think he actually gives the best performance, but my favorite character is Dennis Quade as chef Jeff who, like, is kind of set up the whole time you expect them to be there to be some sort of turn where it you know, he is, like, actually the secret mastermind pulling all this off. And he’s just kind of, like, a lovable dunce the whole time. And he’s basically, like, guy Fieri, but, like, a little little more mellow is very funny to me.

I don’t know. It’s also interesting how nice the show ultimately is to the casino.

So this is what I’m talking about. When I’m talking about, like, that is unnecessary and makes no sense. They probably spend thirty minutes kind of trying to get us to a point where they we understand how c c eight founder learned that, Dennis Quade had a money, a source of money through the casino when, like, literally this could have been one line of dialogue in a movie where they’re like, you have a you have a restaurant in the, very nice casino here. Use your connections there to get some money for this kidnapping plot. Like, it doesn’t have to be a whole thing.

Yeah. But then we lose the incredibly funny scene where the casino guy who’s wired does an incredibly bad job of being wired.

Yeah. He’s gonna get made Also, that whole bit where he’s talking to his bosses, and he’s like, wait, I’m not getting paid. Right? Like, again, Soderbergh just has this great He has an appreciation for the fact that not everyone is smart. Right?

His his character, like, there’s a there’s a range of intelligences in his movies, which is always like, makes them more interesting because that’s sort of how the world is. He also he frequently will switch up expectations about which character is gonna be the villain. Right? And so you as as Sonny said, that happens with Dennis Quade’s character, but it also happens with the casino management, which turns out to be like, basically just honorable people who, you know, are trying to track down this money, see what’s going on, help out a guy who they’re they’re doing business with, and they’ve got one idiot who was doing some stuff that was illegal, but also didn’t really even understand what he was doing. And again, you can see some of this probably comes from the fact that Steven Soderbergh spent like a decade shooting movies in casinos doing the oceans films.

It probably just has like a like a a basically like, oh, these people are actually pretty decent and competent sense of them because he worked with them closely for a bunch of different movies.

Yeah. And I mean, I do enjoy that, like, Jim Gaffigan’s character turns out to be healed. You know, it’s it’s much less than the sum of its parts. Right?

Moment to moment, it’s great. Moment to moment, everything it is entertaining. I I love Jim Gaffigan in this. I thought Jim Gaffigan was very good in this. And the the way his character is kinda built up and the reveal of his relationship with Sam, and and Gina, and all that.

I, like, I thought that was all really well done. It just it just is in service of something that doesn’t entirely make sense to me. But maybe maybe I just wasn’t maybe I wasn’t, I feel like I was paying a lot of attention. I wasn’t I wasn’t drinking while I was watching I feel like I should have been able to follow this better better than I ended up.

I also do think it’s extremely funny that there’s this whole sort of urgency around packing the kid who was supposed to be kidnapped off to upstate New York, and you’re, like, convinced that something terrible is gonna find him up there. And know they just need to get him out of the way for five episodes. So, like, you

know to be not there. He just for reasons a plot needed to not be there.

Yeah. Well, it’s it’s the rare case of this show just sort of like packing some people off. I also think the young actors who played the Guy and these kids who get caught up in this were quite good. Get out just, you know, really open expressive faces. People, you know, you really feel the sort of fear and improvisation.

And I was genuinely surprised by the last minute turn where Shavir murders Garman Harry and, like, gets his friends out and is sort of leaves himself there in the swamp. I thought that was affecting and tragic in a way that none of the rest of the show quite landed.

Alright. So what do we think? Thumbs up or thumbs down on full circle, Peter.

It doesn’t totally work, but I’m gonna give this a thumbs up because unlike many things that I have watched for this podcast, I’m glad that I watched this, and I think it is worth watching. Alyssa.

Yeah. Thumbs up. I even though I didn’t think it was great, I’m sort of eager to watch it again with closer eye for plot detail. It is enjoyable, if not necessarily good. And sometimes that’s an insult, but here it’s Like, totally fine.

Yeah. I I I liked it a lot. I probably liked it a little bit less than no sudden move or Kimmy, which are the other, two two things that Soderbergh has done for Both

of those are much better than this. Yeah.

For for HBO Max slash Max, but, I do I I did like this Again, I I watched the whole thing in, two nights. I just I I tore right through it. So I I was clearly quite into it. And, as you say, Elisa, now that I know how it all winds up, I kinda wanna go back and watch it again and just be like, okay, what what did I what did I clearly miss here? Clearly have made a mistake.

How have I failed this piece of art? Alright. That is it for this week’s show. Make sure to head over to Bulwark Plus for our phone to episode on Friday. Tell your friends, from a friend is basically the only way to grow podcast audiences.

If you don’t grow, we’ll die. If you did not love today’s episode, please complain to me on Twitter at SunnyBunch. I’ll convince you that it is in fact best show in your podcast feed. See you guys next week.