As You Know

We could not find the British cop show Heartbeat, so we pivoted to discuss Travis's favorite comedy of all time: Curb Your Enthusiasm. We get into the ups and downs of a show that ran for a quarter of a century while staying mostly the same, the inherent confusion of having some celebrities play themselves while others play fictional characters, and the genius of ending your show the same way you ended the previous one in spite of all the haters.

Last time out we covered a show that became a beloved action franchise, but how about a beloved action franchise spawning a TV show? The short-lived Sarah Connor Chronicles ask the big questions: What if there was a hot Terminator (please ignore T3)? Or a Scottish accented one? Are these changes enough to make it better than all of the 21st Century sequels? This episode also has Ian and Travis getting in the weeds on the state of modern television, because why not.

To modern audiences it's Tom Cruise's big action franchise, but for us it's time look at Mission: Impossible's '60s TV origins, and all that entails: Espionage! Cool dead drops! Anti-Communism! Brownface! Apologies for the janky audio in this one, there was a file issue so we had to use the backup.

We all know that Cleveland rocks, but does The Drew Carey Show? Especially episodes that don't involve Cleveland Rocks? We took a closer look at one of our favorite "after school basic cable syndication" shows to see how it holds up. This one's for everyone in Solon, Parma, Lakewood, etc.

We're taking it back to our millennial childhoods with Yu-Gi-Oh!, a show where nothing much happens except for card games represented by holograms. We recorded this right after the Luka Doncic trade so there's a lot of basketball talk too.

Duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh-nuh, duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh-nuh, duh-nuh-nuh-nuh-NUH-nuh-NUH, DUH-NUH

Put on your fedora and eat a sandwich loaded with a jar of jalapenos, because it's time to talk Fringe, the cult X-Files knockoff with a mad scientist, a cow, Pacey from Dawson's Creek and more.

Finally, 130-odd episodes into this podcast, we're talking about the twisted mind of Ryan Murphy. We've picked the terrible show that launched a career of other terrible shows, Nip/Tuck, which dives into the world of plastic surgery with sledgehammer subtlety. We're talking cartel pedophile fratricide. We're talking outrageously poorly aged trans plotlines. Serial killers are involved. This man is a demon.

Coming at the crest of a wave of unasked for TV adaptations of movies, it's TNT's Snowpiercer, based on the Bong Joon-Ho movie which itself is based on the French comic about class war on a train that circumnavigates a frozen Earth. The guy from Clipping/Hamilton is here. Jennifer Connelly is here. There's a polycule train car. You get the idea.

Everybody lies, and therefore everybody deserves to be berated and tortured by a lunatic. It's the world of House, M.D.! What if Sherlock Holmes called you an idiot while shoving objects up your ass? And also introduced you to the trip-hop stylings of Massive Attack? Apparently that makes for a huge hit!

This week we're contributing to gifted kid discourse as we discuss Malcolm in the Middle, a sitcom that broke conventions and seemed to actually get the working class. Also we have a digression about the Harlem Globetrotters.

Hug it out, because this week we're talking about the most 2004 show ever made, Entourage. Everybody you know from high school who only talks about crypto now was into this show. Are we?

This week we're getting into the ultimate neurodivergent detective show, the highly acclaimed USA series Monk! It's a charming and whimsical delight with a weirdly grim ending and boatloads of Guys.

This week we are looking at some nihilistic Gen X nonsense in the form of Celebrity Deathmatch, a show that has certainly never attempted to be clever, pleasant to watch, or arguably even funny. Truly a product of its era in a way that few shows can ever claim. Also a lot of side talk about EA College Football 25.

We're back in the shonen anime well to discuss recent NFL player favorite Hunter x Hunter, a show where millions of people apply to like...hunt for stuff. It's hard to really explain.

Middle America, you have a lot to answer for. We're looking into the dreaded spinoff of the Big Bang Theory, a prequel about the life of famous annoying asshole Sheldon Cooper before the events of the show. It's sort of like The Wonder Years but more focused on bad representations of autism.

This week on the show where we review shows we're reviewing Review, the show within a show except that it's actually the whole show. Please rate us 5 stars but don't destroy your life like Forrest.

At this point it is the podcast's stance that FX is the best network, further cemented by the recently departed indigenous comedy-drama Reservation Dogs. The most purely good show we've watched in a while!

It's real I Love the 80s Vibes in here as we cover Knight Rider, a shockingly entertaining show about the car that the most annoying guys of the modern age think that they have.

what if no belly button????

Let's remember some Z-Fighters. We honor the late Akira Toriyama as we get into his most famous creation, Dragon Ball Z. Stephen doesn't know/remember anything from watching it as a kid so this is mostly a lot of proper nouns. But you'll love it because Goku is there.

For the first time in 99 episodes, we're going to Ireland, as Stephen tries to explain and understand the success of cult favorite web-series-turned-TV-show Hardy Bucks.

Travis has selected his favorite show of the 2020s, the sadly departed comedy docuseries How To With John Wilson. Join us as we discuss sad Spring Break parties, mail thievery, and men doing various bizarre things to their genitals among many other examinations of the human condition.

We're trekking up to Canada for the recently wrapped cult favorite Letterkenny, a show that is basically a joke machine with occasional plot.

We've finally broken the seal on what Matt would call "internet videos," entering the world of streaming with Ted Lasso, the most unnecessarily discussed show of the last decade.

Do you remember when The Rock was young?

The international tour takes us to Rome for Paolo Sorrentino's bizarre HBO dual miniseries, The Young Pope and The New Pope. On the surface it's the tale of Jude Law as a sexy but conservative American pope and John Malkovich as his more liberal British successor, but in reality it's one of the strangest shows to air on American television.

It's time for Teen Nick once again as we learn about the goopiest show in the history of a network famous for covering people in slime. It's The Secret World of Alex Mack, a kids' superhero show with weirdly adult anti-corporate themes and also the first screen appearance of Jessica Alba.

Ring in the new year with the show thought to have killed feminism: Ally McBeal. You know about the hallucinated dancing baby, but what about the hallucinated fet play Clintons?

The international series takes us to France for...anime? Ian has chosen Code Lyoko, a truly baffling show from the end of our childhoods, half of which takes place in a digital world with hideous CGI animation where our large-headed heroes fight a malevolent AI. Andeveryonetalkslikethis.

Sometimes you want to go where everybody lives in a purgatorial state

Put on your fedoras and your stupidest looking sunglasses, because it's time to talk about The Blacklist, a show about the Hannibal Lecter of vaguely defined international crimes charming FBI agents for a decade before going all Johnny Knoxville on us.

It's Nordic noir time as we cross The Bridge (Bron/Broen), the oft-remade Swedish-Danish crime series that starts with halves of two bodies placed on the border of the two nations. Prepare for a lot of gray and some thoughts about what we would do if we were trapped in a car that was rigged with explosives.

This week we're covering one of the most singular shows of the century, Atlanta. It's a program that went from slice of life comedy to art horror to a series of short films about race and ended with Thick Judge Judy. So there's a lot to talk about.

Get stoned and listen to this episode at 1:30 in the morning because we're talking about an [adult swim] program for the first time--Squidbillies. Mostly we talk about other stuff though because this was 22 total minutes of television. So a huge chunk of this is about Kermit the Frog.

Ian's international tour takes us to South Korea, where the historical/medical drama 대장금 (Dae Jang Geum), a.k.a. Jewel in the Palace, was a massive hit and helped kickstart Korea's entertainment industry explosion internationally.

We forgot to ask anyone who's actually watched Star Trek to join us for our first Star Trek series. We watched three hours of Jean-Luc Picard and company dealing with the machinations of Q, and we got really hung up on there being a species called "betazoid."

That Is Them

We're finally talking House of Cards! The original one that is. Before Frank Underwood, there was Francis Urquhart, the malicious fourth wall breaker at the heart of three miniseries (or one could say, three seasons of television) trying to bend parliament to his will. Listen to three dumb Americans try to understand British political systems together.

It's our 100th episode spectacular! We're returning to our show's genesis with our most beloved series, Friday Night Lights. How do we use our format to cover a show that we know everything about? Mostly by reciting every insane thing that ever happened on it.

How to talk about a show that's so ingrained in American culture that we feel like we already know everything is about it? Find out as we dive into the shockingly short lived original Scooby series.

Matt's such an asshole for this.

Remember when one of today's most outrageous right wing cranks had enough clout to get his primary work made into a TV series? And also tried to sell health burritos? No? Well, now you do.

One last nice time before we go into the toilet for a couple of weeks. It's Justified, the show that perfectly threads the needle between dumb entertainment and prestige. We dive into some of the coolest dialogue in TV history and the weird alternative pathways that Timothy Olyphant's career could have taken instead.

We had a delightful time with the original TV adaptation of Sabrina, which somehow worked as a family sitcom with some deeply frightening implications, an all-time favorite puppet, and the return of Penn and Teller to our program.

We finally get to cover a Starz original and a Bryan Fuller show in the same episode! It's the ambitious, semi-acclaimed, complete commercial failure that is the television adaptation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which somehow ended in the year 2021.

Early Edition + questionable American Christianity + boomers' understanding of Facebook = surprisingly tolerable if bizarre CBS show. Please don't make us listen to any more Rag'n'Bone Man though.

It's time to discuss a sitcom that boldly asks new questions: How are men and women different? Do teens listen to their parents? Are hackneyed columnists worth taking creative inspiration from? What do you do if the star of your show dies after the first season?

A new contender for worst reality show we've covered emerges. It's time to remember one of the ultimate 2000s reality programs, in which Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie learn to live in rural America. Somehow this leads to blackface.

Masters May continues/ends with the decidedly anthology series Masters of Horror. We get two episodes by decidedly non-masterful directors rather than Carpenter, Dante, Argento, etc., but they do allow us to talk about the main horror themes of the mid-2000s: torture porn and Japanese ghosts.

We return to the warm embrace of Showtime with its sort-of-prestige but totally memory-holed series, Masters of Sex. The show that dares to ask, "what if Mad Men had worse writers but more dildos?"