As You Know

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?"

We look back at the show that launched a monster--Aaron Sorkin's dramedy Sports Night. It's also an excuse to talk about SportsCenter because that's still on somehow.

We get into the long, shambling mess of a franchise that was once the biggest hit in cable history. It's a show that experienced a 14 million viewer drop between its peak and its low point, yet has produced spinoff after spinoff as its networks cash cow. It's finally time to talk about The Walking Dead.

Did you know A&E had an eight-season docuseries about parking enforcement? Sadly, Matt did so we have to talk about it and its endless anticlimactic showdowns between people who hand out tickets for a living and the moderately irritated drivers they encounter. We also get started on a tournament to decide the best of the first 80 shows that we've covered on the pod.

We're back to our regularly scheduled programming with the strange legacy of The Muppet Show. From a bizarre valentine's special with Mia Farrow to a laser shootout with Roger Moore, we examine the Muppet legacy and the personhood of Kermit the Frog.