From (Amazon, MGM+)

0:01 Voyage. Welcome to watch this tonight. I'm your host, Dan Bettimore. I'm a producer, writer of film and television and now a podcast producer. And despite having every streaming service, I never know what to watch. So anytime I watch something good, I talk about it on this show. This way, you'll never have the same problem I do. I watched this tonight. There's always something good to watch. Let's get started today on the show, we are talking about the TV series from Now. This is a show that multiple people have told me to watch for a long time. My buddy Omar listening to the show, has told me to watch this. Our friend James Jefferson, aka Brother of Doom, has told me to watch this.

0:56 And the reason I haven't watched it is because it's on MGM Plus. Now if you don't have MGM Plus, if you're not familiar with MGM Plus, it's it's, you know, another streaming service. The reason that I finally watched it, and you might have seen this in the episode description, is that they've made the first season available on Amazon. So right now, if you have Amazon Prime, you can go on Amazon Prime and watch the entire first season of this show, from which I suspect honestly will be the way that most people will discover it because not a lot of people have MGM plus. It's just a tricky thing, right when you when you've had so many different streaming services. Even if you hear there's a great show, You're like, do I really want to add like a seventh streaming service? At that point, I might as well. You're paying the same as you would for cable. So when MGM previously was called Epics, it was the best program channel that no one was watching. They had to get Shorty show that was so good. I interviewed the creator on my previous show, That show is excellent. They had a Ben Kingsley show frommer correctly that was really critically claimed.

1:57 They had a bunch of shows that were supposed to be great, but it was just you know, did they have Patriot I can't remember. They had a bunch of shows that were that were you know, considered good. And they have a show coming up actually they announced recently with Michael Chicklist that I'm excited about. So, you know, MGM plus I feel like is going to continue to be the best program channel that maybe not enough people are watching. And look maybe that'll change with from So yeah, shout out to our guy James for letting me know that season one was now available on Amazon, because that's the reason I watched it, And honestly, the show is as good as advertised. Let me just describe to you the conceit of the show, which is really what they give you in the first pretty much the first act. So we're in this town and clearly everyone is supposed to be inside before it gets dark. There's a guy who gets drunk, does not go home at his house. His wife is like pissed off that he's not there. His daughter goes upstairs to her I think it was upstairs, man, it's even creepier if it's upstairs. She goes to her room and there's like a knock at the window and it's her grandmother, and she sort of like I think, opens a curtain or something, and the grandmother's like, hi, sweetheart, you know I really I missed you so much, and looks so beautiful and just normal stuff that a normal grandmother would say. There's nothing that she is saying that is overtly menacing by any interpretation, right,

3:28 It totally looks like this is just this little girl's grandmother who is just misses her and wants to see her, and she's like, you know, hey, could you open the window. I missed you so much. I just want to see you. And the little girl opens the window and the mom's like ah no. And then and this is not a spoiler, I mean, this is the essential the first, you know whatever. Ten minutes the show, they are disemboweled. And when I say disemboweled, it's not left open to imagination. You see it. They are disemboweled, and our star, Harold Parnelt, the Great Harold Parrinoelt, is so upset that he makes the dad look at the bodies, which honestly, at that point a kind of mercy would be just killing him, and he clearly debates doing it.

4:10 He has this gun out like he's considering killing this guy. But the part of it that is so effective is that it just imagined, like imagine yourself. Imagine you're at home, right and it's nighttime and there's a knock on your door and it's either a person that you know or just a person with that sounds reasonable. That nothing they're saying sounds crazy. It's just a reasonable person, like imagine like, for example, your home, it's you know, late at night, but not that late. Maybe it's like eight o'clock at night or something. You get a knock on your door and so he's like, hey, my car broke down. You know, I just you know, my phone's out of battery. I was just hoping to use your phone like something like that. And you open the door and then they disembowel you. That's essentially what's going on here. So this is a town where monsters come out at night. It's impossible not to think about Lost when you watch it. You know, Harold Parnelt from Lost, Every time I look at him, I just think of him screaming Walt Walt What. Jack Bender, who directed the pilot, also was a director directed a lot of episodes of Lost. Creating a worthy success or to Lost has been this ongoing thing with TV really ever since Lost went off the air. You think about shows like, for example, flash Forward, that was a big show. They've made a big to do about that, And there were a buch shows that sort of trying to copy Lost but couldn't do it. Had a great pilot episode maybe, but then couldn't keep it going. I was hoping eighteen ninety nine would be that show, but then Netflix canceled it. What's very lost esque about this show, especially if you know how Lost ends, is that there's a sense of how long have these people been trapped here? Like what's

5:43 going on? Like a kind of a magical realism to it. In the pilot, we see how do you get trapped in this town? Right? How do you get diverted into this town? And we see a family they're driving an RV. There's a big tree blocking the road and crows circling around, and it's creepy, and they're diverted off the highway onto surface streets and then end up in the town. And it is later implied early in the second episode. And this is a very very minor spoiler. It won't really affect your injury of the show, but I kind of need to tell you because I think it adds to the like, oh shit, creepiness of it. That tree has been there for years. We don't know how many years, but definitely years plural. And basically, if you're imagine you're driving there's a tree blocking the road, you get off the highway, you go to some you know you're driving through some small town in the middle of nowhere, and then you try to drive out of that town, drive straight, and you just end up back in the town. This idea is so smart.

6:39 I've read a bunch of stuff that has a similar concept, where it's like people trapped in some area, and there's an easy temptation to have it be way more big and way more kind of overtly magical, how you're trapped in there. But here they just drive and then suddenly they're back there. Right, it's essentially just driving in circles. Do you think of Chamelan had old recently where people would try to escape the beach and they would like like have a stroke, essentially like when they walk through a certain area and then they just couldn't leave for that reason. I think the simplicity of this is even better than that. So I love that there's you know, there ends up being an accident with the RV that they're driving and need help. It kind of goes from there. But I just I think this idea is so original, And I'm going to talk about something. There's a couple of small things that happened in episode two that again are not significant supporters at all. And the reason I'm going to tell you them is because I feel like you need to know to like fully understand what is so cool and also so creepy about this story. So imagine you live in this town and you know when it gets dark, there's monsters that are going to knock on the door and they can make themselves appear I guess, like anybody, right. So we see an episode two a situation where people in the town don't make it back inside before dark, and they're trying to be let in, and the people who are inside a house are reluctant to let them in, understandably because they don't know if now those people are actually monsters where they're really who they say they

8:09 are. So it's such a simple device, but there's a lot of different ways you can kind of play with it. And we hear a story from an older lady in the house about her personal history of the monsters that I don't want to like spoil completely, but I just want to tell you it. Really. That's when it made me think about Stephen King, And you know Stephen King, because there's been so many adaptations of his work and he's so prolific. It's kind of easy to take him for granted, but when he's at his best, Stephen King excels at grounding us in reality and also presenting to us like true horror, like really pure evil and not in like a mustachio trolling way and like almost like in a really more in a human way. We find out what happened that this lady's sister, and just her describing it is so scary and so herbing. Um, and you know we we we also get some some teases of stuff going on with the characters that suggests future plots. Um. One character in particular, certain things that he's drawing are very creepy and tying into the title sequence potentially. And um again, I won't spoil it, but all I'll say is that anytime a character is described as kind of creepy but harmless, as we learned from Blackbird and Apple Plus watch Out, take that seriously. So yeah, from is really good. It's really good. Um it is. Uh Look, I mean I don't know what to say. I know they have a second season.

9:39 I think that's airing right now. I guess maybe again MGM, plus shit, I don't know we're gonna we're gonna start Robbing Banks just so we can watch all these shows. But um, you know another thing you can do is you probably can buy it on Amazon. There's a season past thing you can usually get where you can watch, um, just that particular show. But yeah, I mean this show is is quite good U And in a way it almost feels like like if you blink, like you think, like, did Stephen King write this? It was just like an old steaming King book. But it's not. It's it's I think it's just an original creation and it's it's very unique. It really is one of those things. It almost feels like an instant classic. The cleverness of it, the creepiness of it, the quality of the acting and the writing. You know, I'm I'm relatively early into it, and I already know that like I'm gonna have to finish the first season on Amazon. I'm probably gonna buy the second season either on Amazon or get MGM plus. Like I like it that much.

10:33 So everyone who's been telling me to watch the show, you were right. It's really good, you know, and I am very excited to see where it goes. So if there's a you know, sometimes I give like a lukewarm recommendation you know or or it's like, oh, if you're the right mood, if you like any of the things that I've described, if you like Lost, if you like Stephen King, if you like horror, if you like shows that have like sort of a mythology and a mystery that you have to puzzle out, this is good. You should watch it. And I'd love to hear what you think. So it's on Amazon now, so way more accessible, I think, to a wider audience, and maybe that will create more interest in season two. And if so, I think it's well deserved. So yeah, I encourage you to check out from on Amazon or MGM plus if you have it. That is the show for today.

11:24 I want to thank you so much for listening. Thanks everybody who has written reviews of the show, who's given it a radio and Apple podcast, that's the best way to support the podcast. You can always reach me at Dan ad voyagemedia dot com, bet on more Dan on Twitter, Watch This Tonight on Instagram, Watch This Night podcast on TikTok, or you can join our Facebook group. Watch This Tonight on Facebook until next time by four