I Think You're Interesting

Few actors have had as surprising a past few years as Mahershala Ali. Known for his parts on TV shows like The 4400 and House of Cards and in movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the Hunger Games films, Ali went from steadily working actor to legitimate star with his 2016 role in Moonlight. He’s only in the film’s first half-hour, playing Juan, a drug dealer who can tell that a sensitive young boy needs a space to just be himself, but he’s magnetic and warm, caring and thoughtful, in a role Hollywood rarely allows to have much care and thought. Ali won an Oscar for Supporting Actor, and from there, he’s charted an eclectic, fascinating past couple of years. He’s getting Oscar buzz again for his Golden Globe-nominated role in Green Book, and he voices a pivotal character in the highly acclaimed Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Then in January, he’ll be playing the lead character in the long-awaited third season of True Detective. The role, originally written for a white actor, spoke to Ali, and he convinced showrunner Nic Pizzolatto to reconceive the part so he could play it. Ali joined Todd to chat about his remarkable rise to stardom, taking the role in True Detective, and what he thinks art can do to help heal society in the 2010s. And stick around after Todd and Ali’s conversation for some of our favorite I Think You’re Interesting moments from over the years!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Michael Schur is one of the most adept minds in TV comedy. From his early days producing the Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon-era Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live, to his work as one of the key writers on The Office, he charted a career that touched some of the best TV comedy of the 2000s. But in the 2010s, he’s become perhaps the principal figure in network TV comedy, with his shows Parks and Recreation and The Good Place. (He’s also co-creator of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, though his fellow co-creator Dan Goor is the showrunner on that series.) Parks was a tribute to the idea of a kinder, more loving America, just barely holding off a dark and horrifying one, while The Good Place is the only show in TV archives that balances advanced lessons in ethics and philosophy with elaborate jokes about shrimp. That’s what made Todd want to talk with Schur not just about his shows, but about his overall philosophy of comedy. They delve into questions of what makes a good comedic premise, what makes a good character relationship to build a comedy around, and what the best comedic actors have in common. And maybe they’ll even answer that age-old question: Why is it so much easier to set a successful sitcom in a bar than it is to set one in a restaurant? Notes from our sponsors: LEGO: In today's show you heard advertising content from The LEGO Store. With LEGO, every gift has a story. Start your story today at https://LEGO.build/Vox-Ship  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've talked to Todd at all, you know how much he enjoys Christmas music. And, sure, he enjoys the stuff that gets overplayed year after year, but he gets why you're sick of it. Finding good music often means going a little off the beaten path. That's why Todd talked to PJ Morton, a musician who's recorded with Stevie Wonder and was a member of Maroon 5, and who has his own successful, Grammy-nominated solo career. He asked Morton both about his new Christmas album (Christmas with PJ Morton) and to pick his five favorite Christmas albums of all time. Morton's choices are great, not so hyper-obscure as to be impossible to find but also not overplayed to death (save for Mariah Carey, but you gotta have Mariah Carey on a list like this). And along the way, he and Todd chat about why these songs endure, what it means to put your own spins on them, and what it's like to sing songs about snowy white Christmases when you grew up in New Orleans. Notes from our sponsors:LEGO: In today's show you heard advertising content from The LEGO Store. With LEGO, every gift has a story. Start your story today at https://LEGO.build/Vox-Pop  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Chris Gethard Show might have been Todd’s favorite talk show of the decade, a weird, tossed-off calamity that emerged every week like an odd magic trick. It made the trip from New York public access TV to more traditional networks. And then earlier this year, it ended, as its network, TruTV, and comedian Gethard opted not to continue with it. It ended up being the most weirdly appropriate promotion for Gethard’s new book imaginable. Lose Well, published in October, is a self-help book with a twist, a tome that is meant to help people figure out not how to avoid losing but how to lean into it, how to learn from it, how to change thanks to it. It compiles the stories Gethard has collected over a long career peppered with high-profile failures (and, yes, some high-profile successes), mixed with his signature blend of earnest, sincere humor. And here’s the paragraph where we’d put some of the stuff Gethard and Todd talk about in this episode, but honestly, it’s one of Todd’s favorite interviews he’s ever done, and he couldn’t narrow it down. So just listen to it already.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode originally ran in November of 2017. It’s almost Thanksgiving, which means home chefs all around the United States (Todd among them) are trying to find a way to hew to tradition without turning their plates into a giant pile of indistinguishable starches. In this Thanksgiving Spectacular, we’ve invited Samin Nosrat to join us and offer her hints and tips for a successful Thanksgiving meal. Samin’s book, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, is one of the best cookbooks Todd’s ever read, and the information it provides about how the four elements in the title interact to make delicious food will help any chef — no matter how experienced — cook even better food. But it can also help brighten up that Thanksgiving plate, and Samin offered Todd advice on making tastier turkey, zingier mashed potatoes, and sharper Thanksgiving salads. She also stuck around to talk about writing a cookbook, devouring delicious food she didn’t cook, and enjoying the perfect vegan holiday season. Pull a chair up to the table and dig in.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Karina Longworth’s Hollywood history podcast, You Must Remember This, is one of the most essential shows out there for movie fans. Each week, Longworth dives into a story from the film industry’s past, revealing the truth behind legends, the hidden stories that weren’t reported at the time, and the often corrupt systems Hollywood has always been built upon. Long a terrific film critic, Longworth turned what was initially an extreme DIY operation into one of the top film podcasts. Now Longworth has brought her fascination with old Hollywood to her brand new book, Seduction. It's simultaneously the story of producer, aviator, and tycoon Howard Hughes and the many women he slept with (and often ruined the careers of). The book subverts Hughes’s playboy image, questioning just what the effect of his cruelty could be on the women he strung along — and often kept imprisoned later in his life. Longworth joins Todd this week to talk about the legacy of Hughes in Hollywood, what draws her to the stories of old Hollywood, and why it’s important to talk about how the film industry has always treated women to understand how that can be changed today.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Diablo Cody's career took off into the stratosphere when her very first produced script — 2007's quirky comedy Juno — led to a massive box office hit that also won her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Since Juno, she's written numerous movies, including the cult favorite horror flick Jennifer's Body, the moody comedy Young Adult (one of Todd's favorite movies of the decade), and this year's twisty comedy Tully, which stars Charlize Theron as a mother of three who hires a night nanny to just get some sleep already, only to find there's more to the picture. Cody is one of our most incisive writers when it comes to gender and class, and the ways those two things intersect and diverge, especially when you're a woman who can't quite seem to make ends meet. She's also prolific in the world of television (she created the Showtime series The United States of Tara). And her very first musical, an adaptation of the Alanis Morissette album Jagged Little Pill, debuted over the summer and will soon be making its way to Broadway. Cody joins Todd to talk about the inspiration for Tully, just how many hits were on Jagged Little Pill, and what reality shows she's watching on Netflix.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine you're a time traveler whose time machine has functioned somewhere in Earth's past — after humans have evolved but before they've, say, invented language or agriculture or any of the other pillars civilization was built upon. How might you try to kickstart that process with all these hominids you keep meeting? And how would you avoid rebuilding civilization with all of the flaws of our current world? That question is the basis of Ryan North's new book How to Invent Everything, a hugely enjoyable book that really does come close to achieving what's promised in the title. (You'll even learn how to invent a computer using a river!) North is probably best known to this point as the writer of comics like Adventure Time and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, as well as the creator and writer of Dinosaur Comics, a webcomic that has run since 2003 using the exact same clip art (of dinosaurs, of course) in all six panels for 15 years. Todd and North talk about the foundations of society, what you learn writing a comic whose art doesn't change from day to day, and why the best meals are sometimes those you can never have again. Then: Todd is joined by astronauts Mae Jemison and Leland Melvin to talk about leaving behind Earth's orbit — and how we just might find humanity's future on our next-door neighbor Mars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With Halloween right around the corner, we felt it's as timely as ever to revisit this episode from earlier this year. Sometimes, the scariest thing is what you don’t see onscreen. It’s a lesson taken to heart by the folks behind two of the best horror projects of the first half of 2018 — the AMC miniseries The Terror and the gigantic hit movie A Quiet Place. In this special horror showcase episode, Todd talks to Soo Hugh and David Kajganich, the showrunners and head writers of The Terror; and then with Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, the sound designers of A Quiet Place. All four talk about how to build horror unconventionally — The Terror by starting from a real, historical event that didn’t actually involve supernatural interference (though the TV show adds a fearsome creature to chow down on stranded sailors) and A Quiet Place by stripping out almost all spoken dialogue. It’s a great time for horror, and Soo, David, Erik, and Ethan bring unique perspectives to what’s made the genre boom so much and where it might be headed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Yeardley Smith is one of the most famous women on Earth — though you might not know it if you just bumped into her somewhere, at least until she said something. See, Smith is the voice of Lisa Simpson, the precocious 8-year-old middle child of the Simpson family and the center of some of the show’s very best episodes. (“Lisa’s Substitute”! Sob!) But Smith is more than the famous kid she’s played for more than 30 years now. She’s starred in numerous films and other TV shows, including the infamous Herman’s Head (sadly, she wasn't one of the people inside Herman’s head) and the Oscar-winning film As Good as It Gets. She’s even made shoes. But it’s her most recent project that might seem most outside her wheelhouse. It’s a true crime podcast that examines crimes from the point-of-view of the people who solved them, then sends Smith and her co-host Zibby Allen to cover around the country looking into these crimes. It’s an engaging and thoughtful look at how crimes can rock tiny little towns where everybody knows everybody. Smith joins Todd this week to talk about the national fascination with true crime, her wide-ranging slate of interests, and, yes, Lisa Simpson. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Few TV shows are better than AMC's Better Call Saul. But if you told that to someone in 2015, when the show debuted, they might look at you askance. Yes, the show was a spinoff from Breaking Bad, one of the most acclaimed TV shows ever made, but it was still a spinoff, a format with an oft-indistinguished legacy. It was so easy to see how this series could have gone wrong. Instead, the show's writers, led by co-creators Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould, have turned Better Call Saul into a sad funhouse mirror of Breaking Bad, a show about a man who desperately kept trying to do the right thing but couldn't escape all of the people who suspected he would just do the wrong thing instead — or, for that matter, his own weakness for ethical shortcuts. Now four seasons in, Better Call Saul has traced the descent of would-be do-gooder Jimmy McGill into the sleazy, skeezy Saul Goodman in painstaking detail, but in a way that still feels distinct from Breaking Bad. So this week, in the wake of the terrific fourth season finale, Gould, now the show's sole showrunner, joins Todd to talk about the early days of crafting the show, why comedic actors are so good at drama, and why Jimmy made the choices he did in the fourth season finale. If you're not caught up, the first two-thirds of this podcast are spoiler-free — and we'll be sure to let you know before the spoilers kick in. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The circus! At one time, it was one of the country’s most reliable forms of mass entertainment, crisscrossing American backroads to perform for people all over the nation. Everything from the circus train to the people who put up the big tent made its way into American legend. But the American circus isn’t in great shape anymore. The treatment (or mistreatment) of animals tarnished the image of the once-venerable Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus, which closed down in 2017 after it became economically unsustainable. And yet you can’t quite keep the circus down. There are tons of smaller shows making their mark across the country, and the new PBS documentary, The Circus, details both the history of the American circus and where it might be headed in the future. Joining Todd today are circus historian Dominique Jando and former ringmaster Johnathan Lee Iverson to talk about the circus’s past, present — and possible future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is a rebroadcast of an episode from 2017, but with BoJack Horseman's fifth season recently debuting, we thought it was a great time to revisit it. 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 about not just season four but also the show's evolution and where it might be headed next.  They talked about balancing different kinds of jokes, making sure the audience understands the subtext, and building dramatic stakes when so much of what's happening is about the characters' emotions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jon Batiste makes some of TV’s best music, night in and night out. As bandleader of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the multi-instrumentalist comes up with perfect tunes to introduce guests, to complement Colbert’s jokes, and to keep the audience hyped up. (Many of the tunes fitting that last category are Batiste originals, performed by him and his band, Stay Human.) But Batiste’s career stretches beyond late-night TV. He started out making music at a very young age in his hometown of Kenner, Louisiana, and since then, he’s recorded a whole album in and around the New York subway system, performed all over the world, and appeared semi-regularly on HBO’s series Treme. His newest album, Hollywood Africans, is a combination of Batiste originals and terrific covers of iconic songs that he’s put his own spin on. (Wait until you hear what he does with “What a Wonderful World”!) Batiste joins Todd this week to talk about choosing which classic songs he wanted to put his spin on, his day-to-day life at the Late Show, and why he loves McDonald’s. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're focusing on TV scene stealers this week, as we head into a new fall season. These two performers take some of the best shows on TV and make them even better, sidling into any given scene and swiping it right out from under everybody else with a perfect one-liner or pratfall. First, we're talking with D'Arcy Carden of NBC's The Good Place and HBO's Barry. Her work as Janet (and Janet's evil twin, Bad Janet) on The Good Place is some of the funniest stuff you'll see on TV. As what amounts to a computer program running off the raw power of the universe and living in the afterlife, Janet is someone who can make cacti materialize as if from nowhere, who can vomit pennies, who can evolve slowly but surely into something almost godlike, all without breaking a sweat. And Carden's work as the character is all sunny chipperness and goofy fun. She's so good Todd listed her as creating one of his favorite performances of 2017 in an earlier podcast. Next up is Natasha Rothwell of HBO's Insecure. The series, about a group of women in their early 30s, charts the tumultuous process of becoming an adult and having to figure things out. But Kelli, the character Rothwell plays, is exactly the sort of friend who's pretty sure she already has it figured out, and she's not ashamed to tell you just what she thinks of whatever decision you just made. Rothwell is also involved in the writing process on Insecure, figuring out what's going to happen with all of the characters on the show, which makes her role in the series even more intriguing. Both women join Todd in this week's episode to talk about why they love what they do, how they got their big breaks, and why working in sketch comedy helped prepare them for some of TV's best shows. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Nielsen ratings might not have as much power as they once held, but they still can decide the fate of your favorite TV show. If nobody's watching, it could be canceled. That's always been true. But what's also always been true is that the Nielsen data-gathering procedure is a little opaque and hard to understand. Don't worry, though, because we've got your back. This week, Todd and guest Joe Adalian, of New York Magazine's Vulture, take you through how the Nielsens work, how they decide which viewers to count for their statistical sample, and just how much networks still pay attention to their ratings in an era when all viewership has plummeted. (The answer is less than they used to but still more than you'd probably want them to if your favorite show has poor ratings.) Joe will also take you through the world of streaming services and how their refusal to release viewership numbers is and isn't changing the TV game, and he'll pull out some of his favorite ratings tidbits. Joe is one of the sharpest analysts of the industry, so if you just want to understand how the TV business works, this interview is a great place to start. And if you think you already know, you almost certainly don't know as much as Joe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Steve James is one of the best documentary filmmakers to ever have lived. His movies examine the fault lines that underlie American society, often (but not always) those of race and class, and how those who have power often attempt to maximize the amount they wield over those who do not. His seminal 1994 film Hoop Dreams, one of the greatest movies ever made, served as a kind of calling card for his interests going forward. He was going to tell stories about what it means to grow up and to live in a country that takes certain social strata for granted. But Hoop Dreams also marked James as a filmmaker of real ambition. The film took almost eight years to make, and it required shooting 250 hours of footage. That ambition has been further realized in the new 10-part documentary America to Me, now airing on the Starz network. James and his crew trace one year in the life of a racially diverse high school in the Chicago suburbs, and along the way, they reveal some of the underlying hypocrisies in white progressivism, as well as a story of how racial inequities in education can perpetuate themselves even in a school that lauds itself for its commitment to social justice. James joins the show this week to talk about making America to Me, about his many wonderful other films, and about making movies tackling issues of race as a white filmmaker. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The new coming-of-age comedy Eighth Grade is one of the surprise success stories of the summer, turning a tiny story of a 13-year-old girl’s last week in the titular grade into a much larger tale of the universally awkward and cringeworthy experience of being an adolescent just trying to figure shit out. Its hero, young Kayla (played by the remarkable Elsie Fisher), deals with trying to launch her YouTube channel, with a crush that goes nowhere, and with her feelings of inadequacy when compared to more popular girls or older teens. So here’s the part where we point out that it’s somewhat remarkable the film is the product of a man, writer-director Bo Burnham, who makes his feature film directorial debut with Eighth Grade. Burnham launched his career as a teenager making funny videos on YouTube, but he’s gone on to be a hugely successful standup comedian, a director of standup specials, and an actor in numerous great movies and TV shows. But Eighth Grade marks him as an unusually empathetic and humanist director — and as perhaps the first filmmaker to really grapple with the internet not as a blessing or a scourge but as a simple fact of life. So Todd had Burnham on the show to talk about how to put the internet onscreen, what other movies get wrong about technology, and why he chose to make his first movie about a teen girl. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The new movie BlacKkKlansman is careful to let you know very early on that, yes, its story is a true one, with a few embellishments for film. And it likely does so because said story — a black man goes undercover and becomes a trusted confidant of people in the Ku Klux Klan, including David Duke himself — would be written off as preposterous if it occurred in a fictional context. But, no, that man really existed. His name was Ron Stallworth, and as an officer with the Colorado Springs Police Department, he really did talk on the phone with local Klansmen and with Duke. And with the help of his white partner, he was able to infiltrate the organization and work to bring some of its local members down. It’s a great story that is made all the better by virtue of being true, and in both Stallworth’s book about the experience and in Lee’s film, the story becomes a way to look at both the ridiculousness and the poisonousness of American racism. Stallworth joins Todd this week to talk about seeing his life become a film, being a black police officer, and what was most changed for the movie. Then: stick around for a chat with writer-director Desiree Akhavan on her new film The Miseducation of Cameron Post, a beautiful coming-of-age story set at a fundamentalist Christian-run gay conversion therapy retreat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s a reason TV critics and reporters call FX Networks president and CEO John Landgraf the “mayor of television” — and it’s not just because that’s kind of a funny title to give to somebody. Of all the executives in the TV game right now, Landgraf has a reputation as the most thoughtful about the past, present, and future of television, and his semiannual addresses to TV journalists have coined the term “Peak TV” and first raised the issue of Netflix not measuring its viewership. In this week’s episode, Landgraf joins Todd to talk about where TV is now and where it’s headed, as part of our series of conversations with the most important and insightful executives in the TV industry. He’ll also discuss which show on another network he most enjoys and what he worries the medium is losing from switching over to the binge model. Then: Todd is joined by actor Jonathan Pryce (of Game of Thrones fame) to discuss his new movie The Wife and a long, storied career, filled with notable firsts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Adora Crellin is a difficult woman to love. The monstrously suffocating mother of Camille, the protagonist of HBO's terrific murder mystery miniseries Sharp Objects, Adora keeps finding ways to undercut her damaged daughters and to visit the deep-seated trauma in her soul upon the women who should be able to rely on her most. So just imagine playing Adora and how that might seep into your soul. Fortunately, we've got Patricia Clarkson, one of America's finest actors for portraying difficult, damaged mothers (who seem to pass along those qualities to their difficult, damaged daughters), in the role. She finds notes in Adora most actors wouldn't even look for. It's spellbinding work, among the best work in the esteemed actor's career, and she's been nominated for every award you can think of. Clarkson joined Todd this week to talk about knowing which moms are the right ones to play, what Sharp Objects gets right about the South, and which of her roles people most notice her for. And after that conversation, stick around for a chat about the state of the TV industry with PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The riotously funny, incredibly inventive new movie Sorry to Bother You has become one of the summer’s most acclaimed films, as well as an unlikely hit in arthouses. The movie’s tale of a young man named Cassius Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield), who takes a job in a call center, drifts wildly from genre to genre, sometimes seeming like a comedy, sometimes like a call to political action, and sometimes like a near-future science fiction movie. But uniting all these ideas is a commitment to forthrightly leftist politics, and director Boots Riley dropped by the show to talk with Todd not just about making the movie but about how he wants to use it to explore ideas about unions, about political organization, and about building a movement. We follow that up with a chat with Jonah Levy and Matt Silva, the makeup artists behind the movie Uncle Drew, who turned a bunch of NBA legends into their older selves. They talked to Todd about the basics of movie makeup and their favorite movie makeup designs of all time. I Think You're Interesting has been nominated for this year's People's Choice Podcast Awards! Cast your vote for I Think You're Interesting free before Tuesday, July 31st at podcastawards.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Neko Case’s nearly 20-year career has been marked by some of the best songs of that time frame, chronicles of a country and world that often seem to be plunging into chaos but always manage to just avoid doing so. Her solo albums, including the brand new Hell-On, have been a major part of that, but so has her work as a vocalist with the indie-pop group the New Pornographers and as part of a trio of singer-songwriter superstars with K.D. Lang and Laura Veirs. Case’s songs don’t always provide easy explanations or answers. They’re about what it means to find yourself caught between what you need and what the world needs, or between the expectations others have of you and the expectations you carry for yourself.  Case joined Todd in the studio this week to talk about crafting her career across those nearly two decades, the notion of writing timeless songs in a world that keeps rushing forward, and the idea of building a place within the music industry where women can feel supported. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Believe it or not, the summer entertainment season is half over. Fall TV will be firing up in just a few short weeks, and the summer movies of 2018 have just about run out. (Mission: Impossible — Fallout is the only big release still coming.) That makes it a great time to check in on some of the biggest pop culture items of the summer, in this special episode with two different segments. First, Salon's Melanie McFarland and Vanity Fair’s Sonia Saraiya join Todd to talk about the second season of Hulu's The Handmaid’s Tale, which all of them liked until they found certain elements of its ending deeply polarizing. They’ll talk about the baffling moments of the finale, the show’s depiction of racial issues, and where they think it might be going in season three. Then, Vox's Karen Han and The Undefeated's Soraya Nadia McDonald join Todd to talk about the summer’s biggest movies, from blockbusters to smaller films you might have missed. If you’re looking for something to see at the multiplex this weekend, this is a must-listen, so check it out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Call the APM Reports production In the Dark a “true crime" podcast, and everybody involved in it will bristle, just a bit. Yes, it starts from the place of exploring crimes that really happened. But it’s not interested in exploring the crimes so much as it is the injustice of the American justice system. So my apologies for calling In the Dark a true-crime podcast, when it’s so much more than that. But every week, when I listen to it, I’m reminded that the form could be so much more than it has been.  With each new season, In the Dark digs deeper and deeper into the ways that the American justice system lets down the people it’s supposed to be protecting. Its recently concluded second season centered on the case of Curtis Flowers, who was tried six times for the same spree killing, his convictions consistently overturned due to prosecutorial misconduct. The season was a master class, exploring everything from the failures of prosecutors to racial bias in jury selection. This week, In the Dark’s producer, host, and head reporter Madeleine Baran joined me to talk about the second season of the show, as well as how the best true-crime … er … criminal justice podcast gets made. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Gosford Park. Moonrise Kingdom. The original cast of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. These might seem like wildly different projects, but they have one man in common: actor Bob Balaban. Balaban is one of the consummate “hey, it’s that guy!” actors. His name might not immediately ring a bell (unless you, like me, love to keep track of all the great character actors), but the second you see his face or just hear his voice, you’ll instantly know who he is. He’s been working steadily on stage and screen for 50 years, and he’s also written and directed his own projects. (Heck, Gosford Park emerged from an idea he had.) If you love good movies and television, you’ve become well acquainted with Bob Balaban. His newest project is Condor, a spy thriller on the DirecTV Audience Network. Balaban is exactly the sort of person you wouldn’t expect to pop up in a series so high-octane. It's all the more delightful that he’s there, seeming like the quiet, sensible one amid all the foot chases and action sequences. He joins Todd to talk about his long, illustrious career, and just why it was time to finally play a spy. Show notes: The actor Balaban is talking about in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is Anton Wolbrook. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hari Kondabolu identified a problem. His self-hosted, self-produced 2017 documentary, The Problem With Apu, which aired on TruTV, discusses how The Simpsons character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon created a caricature of South Asians and perpetuated a stereotype that hung over South Asian kids like Hari and followed them into adulthood. The documentary isn’t a call for Apu to be removed from the show or fired into the sun or anything like that. No, it’s an earnest discussion of how these types of stereotypes can still hurt people. But The Problem with Apu has come to define Hari’s work in a way that is both deserved — it’s a really good little documentary — and maybe a little unfair. See, Hari is also a tremendously funny stand-up comedian, someone who tells jokes about racism and the divisiveness of American politics, all the while making you laugh at the way many of us have only built up those divides. In his new Netflix special Warn Your Relatives, Hari jokes about race, homophobia, the Trump administration, and the time he got heckled by fellow comedian Tracy Morgan. So Todd was thrilled to be joined in the studio by Hari, who discussed telling jokes about Donald Trump, telling jokes about his mom, and, yes, telling the truth about Apu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does Aisha Tyler sleep? That’s a question you might reasonably ask after looking at her IMDb page for a moment or two. She’s a regular on two TV shows — FXX’s Archer and CBS’s Criminal Minds — while also hosting Unapologetic, a new talk show for AMC. And that’s in addition to all the other one-off hosting gigs she takes on. And yet she’s always fresh, funny, and on point. Tyler got her start as a standup comic in the late '90s, at a time when, she says, black women were often pigeonholed into a certain style of comedy while she was much more comfortable making jokes about her love of all things geeky. She followed that up with a hosting gig on Talk Soup, and from there, her career took off and continues to fly high. So Aisha joins Todd in the studio this week to talk about her career, her time in standup comedy, and playing Lana Kane on Archer for nine whole seasons. It’s the longest she’s played a single character, she says — unless you count all that time she spent playing Aisha Tyler. And after this interview, we think maybe we do. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Another TV season is over. You might not have noticed its end, thanks to the way TV never goes away any more, but technically, the TV season wraps at the end of May. So it seemed like a good time to get some of the best TV showrunners together and ask them how they create great standout TV, when there's way too much of it. Salim Akil of Black Lightning (CW), Aline Brosh McKenna of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend' (CW) and Tanya Saracho of Vida (Starz) join Todd for a lively discussion about this era in TV. Topics include producing good TV on a budget, telling stories about communities traditionally underrepresented in fiction, and finding a way to stand out amid all that clutter. If you're a TV fan, or just curious about what it means to work in television when there are nearly 500 scripted series, you'll love this discussion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've listened to this show ever, or read anything Todd has ever written, then you know The Americans is one of his favorite shows of the past several years. Last night, it ended. For this special episode of the show, Todd is joined by star Matthew Rhys (who plays Philip) and writers Joe Weisberg and Joel Fields, who run the series, to talk about the series' incredible final season and its even more remarkable finale. There are spoilers if you haven't watched the entire series, but also lots of talk about finding the series' voice and the whole, wild six-season ride. And, if nothing else, if you've never heard Rhys's real, Welsh accent, well, you're in for a treat. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometimes, the scariest thing is what you don’t see onscreen. It’s a lesson taken to heart by the folks behind two of the best horror projects of the first half of 2018 — the AMC miniseries The Terror and the gigantic hit movie A Quiet Place. In this special horror showcase episode, Todd talks to Soo Hugh and David Kajganich, the showrunners and head writers of The Terror; and then with Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, the sound designers of A Quiet Place. All four talk about how to build horror unconventionally — The Terror by starting from a real, historical event that didn’t actually involve supernatural interference (though the TV show adds a fearsome creature to chow down on stranded sailors) and A Quiet Place by stripping out almost all spoken dialogue. It’s a great time for horror, and Soo, David, Erik, and Ethan bring unique perspectives to what’s made the genre boom so much and where it might be headed. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer Nell Scovell has worked for some of the best, most popular TV shows of the past 30 years. She wrote for David Letterman. She wrote for The Simpsons. She created the '90s show Sabrina the Teenage Witch. She wrote on NCIS. And at too many of those jobs, she was the only woman working in the writers’ room, countering Hollywood’s endless boys’ club. Scovell’s new memoir, Just the Funny Parts, is an excellent chronicle of her time in the TV trenches, as well as the times she’s branched out into writing books (she co-authored the massive bestseller Lean In with Sheryl Sandberg) and writing jokes for President Obama. Above all else, the book makes the argument that having more diversity in Hollywood writers' rooms will make movies and TV shows funnier.  Scovell joins Todd for a frank and funny conversation about all those famous shows she’s worked on, her push for better representation of women behind the scenes in Hollywood, and her best Simpsons memories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“This shit should not be cheesy,” Sera Gamble says. She’s talking about the visual effects and production design on the terrific Syfy fantasy series The Magicians, which just completed its third season, a cinch to make Todd’s top 10 of the year. While the show is one of TV’s most inventive, it has a fraction of the budget of something like Game of Thrones, which makes finding interesting ways to present otherworldly scenarios without breaking the bank a creative challenge. Fortunately, Gamble is up to the task. Her work on the long-running CW series Supernatural won her fans, thanks to her affinity for deeply creepy but deeply affecting monsters. And The Magicians, while a fantasy show, is one of TV’s most thoughtful shows about mental illness and the tough choices you have to make in your 20s when you’re still trying to figure out just who you are. Gamble joins Todd for the first installment of a series of episodes with writers Todd loves. They talk about producing great fantasy TV on a budget, what makes a great monster and how The Magicians became an unlikely but timely show about women's anger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week on I Think You’re Interesting, we’re trying something different, by dissecting two of the biggest pop culture stories of the spring. First, Vox culture writer Alex Abad-Santos joins Todd to talk about the fallout from Avengers: Infinity War. The conversation is full of spoilers, particularly when it comes to the film’s controversial ending, which some love and some hate. If you haven't seen the movie and want to avoid spoilers skip ahead to 24:29 to hear Todd's conversation about the Roseanne revival with Vox culture writer Caroline Framke and Vox deputy culture editor Genevieve Koski. After being off the air for more than 20 years, Roseanne debuted with huge ratings and solid reviews but the show has quickly become better known for its star’s politics. As one of the most famous Trump supporters in the entertainment industry, has Roseanne the actress overwhelmed Roseanne the show? Todd, Caroline and Genevieve tackle that question and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Even if you haven’t seen 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick’s mind-melting 1968 science fiction epic, you probably know at least something about it. It’s one of those movies, like Star Wars or Citizen Kane, that has become so thoroughly dissolved into our pop culture that you’ll have heard of the villainous computer HAL or know the famed music cue (Richard Strauss' “Also sprach Zarathustra”) that plays over its most indelible images. But how were those moments created? The story of 2001 is the story of an almost obsessive attention to detail, of a budget that almost completely destroyed the film’s studio, of an initial wave of terrible reviews that might have killed a lesser movie. At every step of the way along its production process (and even after its release), 2001 is a fascinating example of big-time moviemaking gone right. This week, Todd is joined first by Vox film critic Alissa Wilkinson to talk about 2001’s long legacy, then by author Michael Benson, whose book Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece is the definitive account of the making of the film, to talk about how this titanic achievement came to be. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Designing Women, Frasier, 24, Fargo, Legion, some of the best TV shows of the past 30-plus years have one terrific actress in common: Jean Smart. Tall, striking, and bold, Smart has carved out a path in Hollywood that involves never doing the same thing twice — to the degree that her immediate follow-up to the sitcom Designing Women was a role as serial killer Aileen Wuornos in a made-for-TV movie. Smart is currently one of FX’s Noah Hawley players, bouncing between the TV producer’s Fargo (where she played an unlikely Midwestern crime boss in 1979) to his X-Men series Legion (where she plays the head of a secret program investigating mutants). Just watching Hawley write for Smart makes clear how versatile she is. He keeps tossing new challenges her way, and she keeps landing them with precision.  But, needless to say, there are plenty of actresses who haven’t managed to build nearly 40-year careers. What’s unique about Smart is how she seems to never stop working, even as she’s never content to be pigeonholed into a “Jean Smart role” (whatever that would mean). She joins Todd this week to talk about building such a long career, her memories of Designing Women, and her attempts to understand just what’s happening on Legion. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the most sympathetic, compelling portraits of motherhood on television centers on a performance by a man. On FX's Baskets, which recently completed its third season, comedian Louie Anderson plays Christine Baskets, mother of twins Chip and Dale (both played by Zach Galifianakis), and he describes the experience not as trying to put on a character but, instead, as channeling his own mother, Ora, a South Dakota native who spent most of her life in the Twin Cities area in Minnesota. When he steps out of his trailer, Louie says, it's as if he opens up a conduit to his mother (who has passed away), wherever she might be. He's also used his fond memories of his mother to write a new book, Hey Mom: Stories for My Mother, But You Can Read Them Too, in which he reminisces about how she protected him from a dangerous, abusive situation during his childhood and prepared him for his long career in comedy, which has included highly acclaimed standup work, the 1990s animated series Life With Louie, and a gig hosting Family Feud. His standup is notable for pivoting between gently poking fun at himself (usually via his vast roster of self-directed fat jokes) and telling more emotionally risky stories about his life growing up with his large family. Louie joins Todd this week to talk about learning to play his mother, wondering just what was in her chocolate frosting recipe, and what it takes to tell a good fat joke that's not needlessly cruel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lady Bird was one of the surprise hits of 2017, with its bittersweet, deeply funny depiction of teen girl adolescence. And that got Todd to thinking: Why is it so rare to see good movies about teen girls coming of age? To answer that question, he brought in Kay Cannon, director of the new comedy Blockers, a very funny gross-out raunchfest, which just so happens to be about teen girls figuring out their sexuality while their parents wrestle with the sexist double standards we apply to young women in that very situation. (We assure you it’s a comedy.) Kay also wrote the screenplay for Pitch Perfect and was part of the writers' rooms on both 30 Rock and New Girl. Kay joined Todd to talk about making Blockers, but also to run down her five favorite teen girl movies of all time. (And, yes, one of them is Lady Bird.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Few TV heavyweights have done as much to tell thoughtful, moving stories about teenagers as Jason Katims. While he was a young playwright, Katims broke into the television industry as a staff writer for My So-Called Life — ground zero for realistic depictions of adolescence on TV — then quickly went on to work on any number of iconic teen shows, culminating in his five-season stint as the showrunner of the gorgeous small-town drama Friday Night Lights, following football players in a Texas town. Katims has, of course, written about non-teenagers too. For six seasons, his Parenthood told thoughtful stories about people struggling with very mundane, very real problems. (It was great.) But he’s gone back to high school with his latest series, Rise. The NBC drama follows teenagers involved with a drama program in a dying Pennsylvania steel town.  Todd has been hoping to talk to Katims for years now, which made this discussion all the better. Katims touches on the differences between high school football coaches and high school drama directors, the lessons he learned from the legendary creator and producers of My So-Called Life, and how he learned to be judicious in using Friday Night Lights’ most famous catchphrase. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do you write a joke for the president of the United States? How do you come up with something that will seem perfectly cutting but not too cruel, silly but not stupid? How do you not denigrate the highest office in the land with — sniff — comedy? Those were all questions David Litt, a speechwriter for President Obama and one of the folks most instrumental to Obama’s comedy monologues at the White House Correspondents Dinner, had to face when he worked in the White House. And after he left, he wrote his memoir Thanks, Obama: My Hopey, Changey White House Years, a whole book about his time working for the president, complete with lots of advice on how to write jokes for the president. Todd talks with Litt this week about the strengths and limitations of political comedy, the joke he wrote for Obama that he’s most proud of, and the similarities between working at the White House and his new gig at Funny or Die. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you don't hear the words "Bill Nye" and automatically fill in, mentally, "the Science Guy" (ideally with the exact right tune and rhythm from his old theme song), then you probably weren't alive during the 1990s, when Nye's series (Bill Nye the Science Guy, naturally) became a hit with kids, parents, and teachers throughout the country. A former engineer and stand-up comedian, Nye's ability to blend introductions to scientific concepts with goofy humor made him a favorite. Since that show left the air in 1998, Nye has become an evangelist for the joys of understanding the way the world works. Yet even as he's worked to continue educating everybody about science, science has become more of a hot-button issue than ever before, leaving Nye in the middle of political debates over climate change. Hence his new Netflix series, Bill Nye Saves the World, now in its second season.  It's a talk show, sort of, but it's also a series filled with scientific demonstrations, reported segments, and comedy bits. It's like a variety show where everything revolves around science somehow. Nye joined Todd to talk about his evolution from engineer to entertainer, how he's felt landing at the center of political debates, and what engineering has in common with making a TV show. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Comedy Central’s Corporate is a deep, dark dive into American corporate life that is one of the most promising new comedies to debut in years. Set in the nondescript but completely soulless corporation Hampton DeVille, Corporate finds dark yet incredibly funny humor in the concept of just trying to survive within the sorts of corporate structures many of us work in every single day. The series was co-created by Matt Ingebretson and Jake Weisman (with series director Pat Bishop), and Ingebretson and Weisman also star. That’s notable because before Corporate, the two were mostly known for making and starring in web videos. They mark just the latest example of online talent crossing over into the television mainstream (if you can call Corporate “mainstream”). As the series prepares to air the last two episodes of its first season (it’s already been renewed for a second), Ingebretson and Weisman join Todd to talk about how to make a funny comedy with visual flair, why the horrors of corporate life are great fodder for a TV show, and what’s funny about the fact that we’re all going to die. (Trust us; it’s funny!) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Todd loves the Oscars, so this week's episode features not just one but two Oscar nominees from this year's crop. First, Todd talks with Vox film critic Alissa Wilkinson about the year's biggest prizes.   Then he's joined by Julian Slater, the Oscar-nominated sound designer and sound editor of the action-musical Baby Driver. Julian tells Todd all about crafting the sonic world of one of 2017's most ambitious aural experiments, then he explains the difference between the Sound Mixing and Sound Editing Oscars' categories.   The episode concludes with a discussion with I, Tonya editor Tatiana Riegel who joins from Berlin to explain why editors are so important to the filmmaking process. She also talks about balancing the many complicated tones of one of the year's most tonally adventurous movies. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've seen Marvel's new movie Black Panther, you know that one of the best things about it is its use of costumes and sets not just to create the fictional world of Wakanda, but also to tell little stories about its history and culture in every single frame. Just looking at this movie, which opened to the second-biggest four-day box office in film history, is half the fun.  That's why for the first episode in a post-Black Panther world, we wanted to talk to Ruth Carter, the designer of the movie's costumes, from that sleek superhero suit, to the Dora Milaje's battle gowns, to the plethora of other costumes that tell you, at a glance, which part of Wakanda certain characters are from. And that's to say nothing of the moments of high fashion, when T'Challa and his allies step out onto exciting spy missions. Though Black Panther is Carter's biggest movie yet, she's been designing costumes since the 1980s, having designed the costumes for almost every one of Spike Lee's films and received two Oscar nominations for her work on Lee's Malcolm X and Steven Spielberg's Amistad. Carter joins Todd to talk about telling the story of Wakanda through clothing, collaborating with great directors, and why every superhero movie is dependent on one workshop in Europe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though 20 percent of the American population has some form of disability, just 2 percent of working actors represent that population on screen and stage. Is it any wonder so many roles for those with disabilities are played by actors without them? And is it any wonder that this discrepancy is causing more and more controversy and discussion? That's what makes the new Sundance Now series This Close so interesting. It's the first show in American television history to be created and showrun by two deaf writers, and those creators, Josh Feldman and Shoshannah Stern, also star as Michael and Kate, two best friends whose co-dependent relationship sometimes keeps them from building healthy relationships with other people (or, on the flip side, helps keep them from being burned by genuinely unhealthy relationships).  The show is a fascinating little slice-of-life dramedy, but it's also an insightful look at what it means to be deaf in America, and the many different forms of experience within that community. It's the best kind of TV show, one that tells you a new story you maybe haven't heard quite this way. Feldman and Stern joined Todd to talk about their show, along with the series' director, Andrew Ahn. But they also talked about what non-deaf writers get wrong about the deaf experience and why it's so important for those with disabilities to tell their own stories. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Few fantasy series of the past 10 years have had the reach of Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, beginning with The Magicians in 2009, continuing with The Magician King in 2011, and concluding with The Magician's Land in 2014. The books, which attempted to blend the fantastical elements of books like Harry Potter and the Narnia series, garnered warm reviews (including from Todd), then were quickly scooped up to be turned into a TV series before the books had even completed the publication process. The process of adaptation took many years and several false starts, but the (excellent) TV show version of The Magicians finally debuted in December 2015 on Syfy, and it has gone on to forge its own identity — similar to the books but also separate from them. That made it a great time to talk to Grossman, whose books are probably more visible than ever but who also has to deal with readers who come to his books knowing the characters better for their TV versions, who have slightly different personalities and sometimes even different names. Grossman and Todd talk about learning to stop worrying and love your TV adaptation, his happiness that his books were all published before the TV show began, and his ideas for how to build a compelling fictional world, whether fantastical or realistic. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

"I have people that are not Latino arguing with me about what we’re like," Justina Machado says about two-thirds of the way through her chat with Todd. The actress, who joins ITYI to talk about the latest season of her Netflix sitcom One Day at a Time, has been giving superlative performances for two decades now, with a career that encompasses everything from the live episode of ER to an Arsenio Hall sitcom to the classic HBO drama Six Feet Under. But it's One Day at a Time that has given Machado a part that lets her show off all she's capable of. In any given episode, she might play the highs of being a hugely accomplished working mom, or the crippling lows of depression and PTSD. She gets to deliver wisecracks that bring instant laughter and long monologues that will wring tears. She gets to do anything and everything and a little bit of what's in between. That's why Todd wanted to have her on, but their conversation very quickly ranged from talking about One Day at a Time to talking about women of color finding work in Hollywood, while trying to avoid taking roles that are simple stereotypes, as well as what Machado has learned from getting to work with Rita Moreno (a pioneer when it comes to Latina actresses) on One Day at a Time. And lest you think that sounds too heavy, know that every answer Machado gives is punctuated by her amazing laugh — one of the best in show business. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Blue Planet II is one of the most stunning visual achievements of the year. The new BBC America nature documentary takes viewers deep beneath the waves to observe strange creatures and the delicate balance that keeps the world's largest habitat in harmony.  The miniseries is also a huge sonic accomplishment in representing the sounds of the sea. Crackling icebergs, creatures scuttling along the seafloor, and water washing along — they all contribute to a show that sounds like nothing else. Much of that is thanks to the music, composed by the team of Jacob Shea, David Fleming, and Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer. The series' musical themes evoke the undulation of the waves and the beauty of the undersea habitat. What Zimmer describes as the ocean's "epic" quality is evident throughout. Zimmer, Shea, and Fleming joined Todd this week to talk about writing the series' music, and after that conversation, he talks with series producers Orla Doherty, Mark Brownlow, and James Honeyborne about how the series captured some of the most dazzling images of the ocean ever put on film. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Awards season is once again upon us. We’ll soon know which films and performances have been nominated for the Oscars, and the Golden Globes are receding into the past. But let’s talk about what’s really important: Which performances from 2017 did our panel of critics like most? Todd is joined by Vox film critic Alissa Wilkinson and Buzzfeed’s Alison Willmore to discuss their favorites. The list (across film and television) is wide-ranging, from Star Wars: The Last Jedi to the little-seen Chilean film A Fantastic Woman. Along the way, the three talk about how hard it can be to describe a great performance, whether Adam Driver breaks the new Star Wars movies, and who gave the best performance in Get Out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Phil Rosenthal is one of Todd’s favorite people within the TV industry to talk to, because he loves making television — whether he’s writing it or starring in it. He's probably best known for creating the Emmy-winning series Everybody Loves Raymond, starring Ray Romano. The show ran for nine seasons, winning the Emmy for Best Comedy Series twice, and it has gone on to a healthy life in reruns. Rosenthal spent several years after Raymond left the air creating new sitcom pilots, translating Raymond for the Russian audience (which he covered in the very funny documentary Exporting Raymond), and trying to get his dream project off the ground. Now, not only is that dream project happening, but it’s in its second season on Netflix. Somebody Feed Phil follows Rosenthal as he travels the world’s great cities, looking for their most delicious dishes, whether it's incredibly spicy soup in Bangkok or an unexpectedly tasty taco (made from “a part of the cow” rarely eaten in America, Rosenthal says) in Mexico City. He joins Todd this week to talk about his show, why not having a poker face is great for making a food show, and which comedies he loves on TV right now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's a very special episode of I Think You're Interesting, as guest host and Vox culture writer Caroline Framke asks Todd all the questions you asked about criticism, great TV, and life itself. Along the way, they'll discuss whether Todd can possibly watch TV just for fun anymore, what it's like working with an editor, and what his favorite TV show of all time is. Stick around for Todd's answers to the same questions he asks his guests in other episodes! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices