The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to Episode 706 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show, television has changed a lot over the last decade, but has it changed for the better or for the worse, or is it a mix? We’ll talk about TV as experienced by viewers and by writers like Craig working in the medium. Then we’ll answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s talk coffee. You just had some coffee.
Craig: Yes.
John: I would say if you think screenwriters have strong opinions about formatting, you should hear some of them complain about coffee.
Craig: I think he said the keyword there, which is complain. God, screenwriters complain a lot.
John: That’s all we do. We sit around and we complain. You can hear some of those complaints live at the Austin Film Festival.
Craig: Segue man.
John: Reminder that we’re going to be at the Austin Film Festival. A couple of things on the calendar here. Thursday, October 24th, is the opening night party that Highland Pro, my company, is hosting. Come see us there. Drew will be there.
Craig: Drew’s a big draw.
John: You can see Drew in person.
Craig: Yes. I think we will–
John: Pull him from behind the mic right up front there.
Craig: People, do they want to touch the hem of your garment?
Drew Marquardt: Everywhere I go.
[laughter]
John: The opening night party is at the bar at the Driskill. That’s a crowded space.
Craig: Now, the Driskill had become a non-participant because they basically kicked the whole place out. I wonder why. I wonder what happened.
John: I think there is-
Craig: Mayhem?
John: -money and mayhem. They may also have been doing remodeling. Driskill is also a cool old hotel that was a weird fit in terms of space.
Craig: Yes, it was, but that bar is bananas.
John: It’s great for hanging out, but is bananas.
Craig: It’s crazy.
John: Friday, we’re hosting a Highland keynote at 10:45. We’re starting off a new feature for Highland. Craig, you at that same time are working with Alec Berg to talk about?
Craig: Oh, yes. Alec Berg and I are returning to do a second chapter of a panel we did years ago, Everything Everyone Is Telling You About Screenwriting Is Wrong, in which we go through all the advice you’re given. For instance, write what you know. We explain why that’s just wrong.
It’s very freeing, I have to say. You come there and you get liberated because if you’re going and you’re going to be at these panels, you’re going to hear a lot of what you’re supposed to do. Then you come to our panel, and we set you free from all of it.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: You got to do none of that.
John: That night, Scriptnotes, 9:00 PM, Scriptnotes Live. We’re back in the big room, and we’ll have special guests. We’ll do a couple of things. We’ll have some giveaways of the Scriptnotes galley. You’ll be some of the first people on earth to read the Scriptnotes book.
Craig: I will have one and a half glasses of wine.
John: I will have a nap, which will be great.
Craig: Oh, that’s nice.
John: Saturday, we have a Scriptnotes Live three-page challenge at 4:45 PM. When we do the live three-page challenge, the best part is the people come up on stage and we actually get to talk to them about their script and why they wrote it, and what they’re doing. We’re probably a little bit nicer because the person is in the room.
Craig: So much. Although I try to not be. I really do.
John: I try to give them information that they need.
Craig: I’m personally nice, but I’m not going to hold back too much.
John: For the three-page challenge that’s live at Austin, it’s the normal link you submit your scripts, journalist.com/three-page, all spelled out. There’s a special tick box on there now saying, I will be in person at the Austin Film Festival. Tick that box if you’re going to be there, and then Drew will know to look through just those ones for the pool of entries for this.
Craig: You’ll probably get four or five.
Drew: Just a couple.
Craig: Just a couple.
Drew: Handful. You just have to pick two of three.
John: Two, yes.
Craig: Easy.
John: We’ll probably have a special guest up there reading through these with us.
Craig: We usually do.
John: We usually do. Someone smart and great.
Craig: Somebody smart.
John: Fantastic. Come join us at the Austin Film Festival if you get a chance to. We don’t come every year, but we come most years, and it’s a good fun time. This past week, I went and visited the Entertainment Community Fund, which is the organization that helped us out when we were doing money for assistance during the pandemic. Do you remember that?
Craig: Sure do.
John: I distributed those grants. They are one of the main charities in this town who help support artists, but also crew members, anyone working in the entertainment industry who’s going through tough times. One of the things I wanted to highlight here is if you are a person who is working in the industry, who is on the verge of losing your health insurance, they have a whole special program which is just helping out those people to get them into short-term or long-term insurance solutions. Your instinct will be to go onto COBRA, which is maybe not the right choice.
Craig: Very expensive.
John: Very expensive. Notice to anyone listening to this podcast who’s like, “Oh, I’m going to lose my insurance at the end of the month or whatever,” we’re going to put a link in the show notes to talk to these people first because-
Craig: Definitely.
John: They have no vested interest in anything other than helping you get on insurance policy that’ll get you through, whether that be COBRA California or something else. It’s a reminder that it exists out there as a resource.
Craig: COBRA, unfortunately, fortunately, lets you buy the insurance you’ve been getting for, I think it’s a year or a year and a half. That’s your choice, is buy the insurance you were getting. If you’re getting insurance through the Writers’ Guild, it’s-
John: Crazy expensive.
Craig: -very expensive to buy. You’re better off seeking help with something like that.
John: An actor friend of mine ended up talking to them and getting on COBRA California and getting on Medi-Cal. It was good. It wasn’t as good as a SAG insurance, but it saved his ass.
Craig: It’s insurance.
John: It’s insurance.
Craig: It’s insurance.
John: Right now, all our European listeners are like, “You poor Americans.”
Craig: Yes, but I have things to say as well about their systems, which I’ve experienced.
John: Some follow-up. Scriptnotes book, we have signed editions now. Right before we recorded this podcast, Craig heroically signed 500 of these bookplates.
Craig: That was heroic. I got to tell you, I know people out there claim to be heroes, first responders, and so forth-
John: Craig, you doubted yourself. It seemed like, “This is going to be an impossible task,” and then you just banged it out.
Craig: Isn’t that the story of my life, John?
John: It really is.
Craig: Isn’t that me in a nutshell, doing the impossible?
John: Thank you to–
Craig: I wrote my name a lot.
John: You did write your name a lot. You didn’t even write your name a lot. You made two swirls next to each other.
Craig: Two swirls. When I was a kid, I don’t know, but I practiced my signature. The reason my signature looks the way it does is because my dad’s signature was equally garbly bizarre. I wanted to be like my dad, so I made my own version. Then I would just practice it over and over. It wasn’t like I was practicing it because I thought I would be famous or anything. I was practicing it because it just seemed like an adult thing to master. It served me so well now.
John: That’s great. I have two signatures. I have my signature for signing checks, and I have my signature, which is for signing other people’s merch. They’re substantially different. My merch signature is much more like a Walt Disney signature.
Craig: Sorry, you sign checks?
John: I’ve had to sign checks in the past. I don’t sign checks now.
Craig: How long ago? Actually, in my mind, I’m like, “When was the last time I signed a check?”
John: I signed a “check” for the other company like a week ago for– We gave a prize to this pitch competition, and I had to sign a physical check.
Craig: Wow.
John: Wow. There was a concern about the check, so they actually checked my signature.
Craig: Of course, there was a concern about the check because-
John: Why does the check exist?
Craig: What is this? My kids won’t know what it is.
John: No. Crazy.
Craig: Won’t know what it is, like they haven’t been born yet. They don’t know what it is.
John: Your future children won’t know what this is.
Craig: They won’t know.
John: If you would like one of these signed editions, it’s at a place called Premiere Collectibles. We’ll put it in the show notes, but you can just google Premiere Collectibles. You can pre-order them now, and the sticker will be in there, and you get a signed copy of the book. If you’ve already pre-ordered and you don’t care about this, thank you for pre-ordering the book. We’ve got hundreds of people send through their receipts to Drew. Keep doing that.
Craig: That’s crazy.
John: If you pre-order, send it to Drew. As we were signing, we were on the Zoom, we had a bunch of people who had pre-ordered before. We’re sending out special stuff to these people, including links to little live, streamy things. How many people did we have on the stream today?
Craig: That’s a great question.
John: We ended up with 80 questions we didn’t get to.
Craig: I think I was so under the avalanche of questions that I didn’t even see how many we had. We had 500 people signed up for it. That’s awesome.
John: That’s really cool.
Craig: That would make us one of the most popular videos on YouTube. 500.
John: 500.
Craig: 500 people.
John: 500 distinct people.
Craig: Let me hit triple digits. It’s a big deal.
John: We have some follow-up here from Patrick. We asked in Episode 704 about whether any three-page challenges had become movies, and Patrick had an answer.
Craig: Oh, that’s a good question. My project, Destination Earth, was a three-page challenge in, I believe, 2014. While it hasn’t been turned into a movie, I made it into a feature-length audio drama, which was released in 2020. Later that year, we were lucky enough to win the Australian Podcast Award in the fiction category. I think every writer has those favorite projects that never go anywhere. I’m glad this one’s out in the world in a format that people can enjoy and doesn’t have to linger in my projects folder, never to see the light of day.
John: The projects folder.
Craig: Yes.
John: You can listen to it at destinationearthaudio.com. Patrick, that’s great that you got this made. I would say that I would be surprised if a lot of the three-page challenges became movies because people were sending them through as test flight things. We weren’t picking the things we thought were the best things ever written, things that would be-
Craig: Instructive.
John: -instructive to talk about.
Craig: Out of any grouping of scripts, very few of them are going to get made. Out of the blacklist scripts, very few of them get made.
John: Let’s talk about scripts that haven’t been made. Drew, talk to us about Weekend Read because you’re the person who puts together collections. What is in Weekend Read, the app for iOS right now?
Drew: I’m doing ghost stories this week.
John: All right.
Drew: We have A Nightmare on Elm Street, American Horror Story, Beetlejuice, Coco, Crimson Peak, Doctor Sleep, Ghosts, Ghostbusters, Ghosts, the show, Insidious, Paranormal, Poltergeist, The Conjuring, Haunting of Hill House, Sixth Sense, and What Lies Beneath.
Craig: Where’s Blithe Spirit?
Drew: You always find the one that I couldn’t find.
Craig: You couldn’t find Blithe Spirit?
Drew: The play version of it, the Noël Coward play.
Craig: That’s worth it.
Drew: It’s great. That’s actually probably still protected.
Craig: Yes, I guess so, because it’s still being performed.
Drew: Absolutely.
John: If you want to read any of these–
Craig: You always find the one.
John: I love that you bicker. You have your own energy here.
Craig: I immediately go right to the one that he’s angry about. I knew it. Spent a lot of time. Where’s Blithe Spirit? Damn you. We did a big deep dive on Ghost. Is that right?
John: Yes, we did.
Craig: That was fun.
John: It was good. If you want to read any of these scripts, they’re up now in Weekend Read for iOS. Just go to the App Store and download Weekend Read. We had more feedback from Saleem on clipboard managers.
Drew: “Love the show, but the advice John gave in a recent episode on clipboard managers is already out of date.”
Craig: Thanks a lot, Saleem. God.
Drew: “MacOS Tahoe, which came out a few days ago, includes built-in clipboard manager as part of Spotlight. Mackie may be more capable. I use the clipboard manager in Raycast, and it’s also more capable than Apple’s new included offering. For neophytes such as Craig and others online, the best advice for them may be just to use Apple’s new built-in solution rather than a third-party app.”
John: I had no idea that macOS 26 included a clipboard manager. I’ll give it a look. I’m really happy with Mackie, which is free. Saleem, you’re correct. The simplest solution is the one that most people are going to use, which is great.
Craig: Sure. The word Spotlight caused slight spinal shuddering because-
John: I use Spotlight for opening apps. It’s all command.
Craig: Don’t even do that.
John: I don’t even do that. If you want to open an app that’s not currently running, how do you open the app?
Craig: Almost certainly it’s in my dock.
John: Everything’s always in your dock.
Craig: The ones that I use, but if I need something that isn’t there that I don’t-
John: You go to the applications folder.
Craig: I just go to the applications folder. I have it in my Finder window. I pinned it on the left side, so if you just click, boom, there.
John: I will Spotlight it and just start typing.
Craig: I’m a big Finder fan.
John: Not a big Finder fan.
Craig: I love the Finder.
John: I’m not as opposed to it as some people are, but–
Craig: I know that I like it more than a lot of people, but what does blow my mind is sometimes they’ll say, “Okay, someone’s asked me how to do something.” God bless him, Tom Morello. Our D&D friend. As good as he is at playing guitar is how bad he is at just managing simple computer tasks.
John: It is so much fun to watch Craig Mazin be like Tom Morello’s tech support.
Craig: He will just hand me his iPad like, “Help me.”
John: Like he’s a three-year-old who wants to watch more Cocomelon.
Craig: Daddy? If he has his laptop, I’ll say, “All right, let’s go to your Finder. What is that?” People don’t know where it is, or what it is. These kids.
John: I miss my mom, but so much of my time with my mom was just really fundamental tech support. Oh my God. It’s like, “Ben was over, and he ruined my computer,” and I was like, “He literally moved a window one inch on your computer. That’s what he did.”
Craig: He ruined it.
John: He ruined it.
Craig: My wife will occasionally use the phrase, it’s broken. “My iPad’s broken.” It’s not broken. “Is it in pieces?” “Well, no, but it’s not doing what it’s supposed to.” She listens to this podcast, by the way. I’m going to hear about this.
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: I don’t care.
John: How dare you put her on a podcast?
Craig: You know what? I say a lot of nice things about her.
John: You do. You do say plenty of nice things.
Craig: I really do. I really say a lot of nice things about it.
John: Some of it is even recorded.
Craig: This isn’t even that bad.
John: No.
Craig: No. What is that? It’s broken. You mean it’s not working the way you want it to, or you don’t know how to use it? You’re broken.
John: Here’s the thing I’m trying to do, and I cannot get this to do it.
Craig: That’s a you’re broken thing. We need to fix you. The iPad is fine. Oh, she’s going to be so mad.
John: Let’s talk about television, then, instead of this issue.
Craig: Save my marriage.
[laughter]
John: This came up during a staff meeting, and Nima, who does our coding, said, “Is TV better now or is it just much worse?” Nima is fairly pessimistic. He thought it’s much, much worse. I wanted to talk through the ways that TV is better and worse now for both the viewer and for the person making television. Let’s start with the good news.
Craig: We’re comparing it to–
John: To 10 years ago. Let’s not do that. You have to pick a thing. Let’s say over the last 10 years.
Craig: 2015 to 2025.
John: Here are some things that I think is probably better as a viewer over the last 10 years. It’s much more global. The television we watched used to just be American television. Now we watch television from all over the world, including stuff with subtitles, things we would never be exposed to before. That’s great. That’s thanks to streaming. Cinematically, the way our shows look is much better than it was 10 years ago. Our standards for it, what we’re supposed to see, things just do look better. We’re spending more money on making things look great and sound great. I think we’re really focusing on the cinematic qualities of things.
This is halfway between for the viewer and for the creator. Prestige. I think we’re acknowledging that great TV is our greatest art form at this moment. While movies are still great, I think TV is really taking the dominance there. Over the last 10 years, I think there’s much better diversity and representation. We see more different kinds of people on screens than we did 10 years ago. We’re hearing more of their stories, and more of their stories are being told by the people who actually live those experiences rather than being beamed in by ordinary white guys.
This is going to be a pro and a con. We focused on quality over quantity. We’re doing fewer episodes of shows. Any individual episode of a series is probably better now than an individual episode of a series was 10 years ago, partly because there’s fewer of them. I see nods there. Anything more you’d say as a viewer experience that the things are better than 10 years ago?
Craig: They’re definitely better. That’s not to disparage the great, great shows that-
John: One hundred percent.
Craig: -were 10 years ago, amazing shows, but 10 years ago, we didn’t really even have the ability to do what we now consider to be the limited format. It was almost not a thing at all.
John: We had the mini-series, but–
Craig: Mini-series were typically– Well, the classic network mini-series was adapting a very popular novel. There were some prestigious ones like Roots or Shogun back in the ’80s, but mostly it was Sinatra by Kitty Kelley, The Life and Times of Sinatra. Over three nights, we’re going to explore Elvis. The rise of the 12-episode, 5-episode, just limited series in general. If you look at what limited series were prior to 2015, with rare exception, shows like Band of Brothers and so forth, it just wasn’t what it– Now, there are four, five, six great limited series every year, minimum.
John: Even more so than limited series, I would say that HBO always had the quality mark on what HBO was trying to do. I remember I went to an event with David Chase a couple of months back. I realized the Sopranos had many more episodes than he thought it did. I always thought it was like an eight-episode season, but no, no. It was a full season of a show, 12 or 15.
Craig: Something like that.
John: It was a sizable number. HBO set a very high standard, and people started reaching out for that standard, and that transformed things. You have to say, the arrival of Netflix, House of Cards, which was also aiming for that high standard, just set the bar.
Craig: Netflix is the good and bad news, I think, because Netflix opened up a fire hydrant and out came 4 million shows. That is the major difference between, I think, 10 years ago and now. Even though there’s been some contraction, still insane amount of television they make. I think that they make the same number of really good shows every year. That hasn’t changed. There’s a lot of quantity there. Their signal-to-noise ratio is not great, but that’s okay. That’s part of their deal. Whereas someplace like FX, for instance, still has an excellent signal-to-noise ratio.
Amazon’s been a really interesting one. Amazon, it’s not quite at Netflix level of volume. It’s not at HBO level of curation. They have made some huge bets on things, spent a lot of money. Some of them have worked out, some haven’t. What they do is they certainly support people. When they believe in something, boy, do they support it financially. Then there’s Apple. Apple’s the interesting one to watch. They had a very good year at the Emmys.
John: For sure.
Craig: The studio won everything.
John: Severance got tremendous attention as well.
Craig: Severance, it went from that show that a few people had seen and loved in Season 1 to much more of a cultural thing in Season 2. Apple was running shows, and they still run shows that I’m not sure anyone watches.
John: Expensive shows that it seems like nobody watches.
Craig: Right. That makes them an interesting patron of the arts.
John: My friend James loves the Apple show Acapulco, which I’ve watched an episode of. I was like, “I totally get it.”
Craig: There’s a show called Acapulco?
John: That just finished its fourth season.
Craig: No.
John: It is-
Craig: Are you serious?
John: It is a-
Craig: How do they– This is what Apple advertised.
John: It is a candy-colored, just delightful romp. I feel like nobody’s watched it, but it goes for four seasons.
Craig: Oh my God, this is incredible.
John: The lead actor’s incredible. Everyone in it’s really great.
Craig: I don’t want them to feel like– Apple does not advertise things. It’s not their fault or my fault that I didn’t know about this.
John: This ties into, let’s talk about, as a viewer, the things that are worse now than 10 years ago. There’s no shared cultural moments. There’s everyone–
Craig: They are coming back around.
John: Occasionally, there are some, but there are very few. I feel like the end of Summer I Turned Pretty, that was– The wrap-up of that felt like a shared cultural moment. The end of Severance, I felt like a shared cultural moment. A bunch of people were focusing on that thing, but the fact that you don’t even know that Acapulco is a show that ran for four years, 10 years ago, would be less likely.
Craig: Yes, because there are just so many fewer shows. Also, Apple is very specifically interesting to me in the way that they almost are like, “We don’t even want you to know we’re running the show.” Like See. See is a big show and we’re in it for a while. They’re just like, “Let’s not tell anyone.”
John: We have billboards here close to our house for Chief of War, but I don’t see anything beyond that in terms of the cultural conversation.
Craig: It’s a very interesting choice they make. I can’t quite make sense of it. I’m sure that Tim Apple right now is fuming and about to turn my iPhone off. The reason I point it out is just because I feel for the people that make television.
John: 100%.
Craig: I helped out on Mythic Quest for a bit, and I always felt like they were just so underserved by the marketing machine because I thought the show was wonderful. They make a lot of great stuff. Now, Amazon advertises the hell out of their things. They certainly are doing that part right. Netflix is their own advertising agency. The scary thing about Netflix is because they are subscribed to by everyone-
John: They just put some on the homescreen.
Craig: -whatever is on the home screen is advertising.
John: We’ve already talked about this, but ways the TV is worse now, the content glut. There’s just so much that it’s impossible to sift through it all.
Craig: There is so much.
John: You can never watch all the things you wanted to watch. Instead of 30 shows with 22 episodes a piece, we have 100 shows with eight-episode seasons.
Craig: If you just look at the amount of episodes-
John: The amount of episodes is–
Craig: Look, I think it’s better. For instance, Adolescence. That show is just simply– You don’t even hear about it 10 years ago. It’s not made. It is made. It just stays over there. Nobody watches it here. “Don’t understand their accents,” and now, we have so many wonderful things. Nima’s complaint is the complaint of somebody who’s getting old. That’s what’s happening there.
John: I think so.
Craig: You start to have nostalgic feelings when you hit your 30s, where you’re like, “It’s not as good as it was.” No, it’s just that you’re not living– Life is not this magical, glowing smorgasbord of 20-something-ness. That’s over.
John: Nima had two points here that I do want to try to articulate the way he said. He talked about a lack of curation and that HBO used to be the guarantee of quality. That was the seal. I would add to it that pilots were a really important filtering mechanism. The pilot process determined what shows actually made it to air. Now, because I think we’re going straight to series a lot more often, there’s a lot more series that probably shouldn’t have been made, or at least shouldn’t have been made the way that they were made, that are just happening. That curation aspect has changed.
Craig: Yes. I think HBO still curates the hell out of it because they really just have– They still act like a linear network even though they are more and more, of course, entirely a streaming entity. There’s one drama a week, one episode a week, and that means there’s five shows for the year. That’s it. They still curate pretty heavily, and that’s reflected in how things perform. FX, I think, curates pretty heavily. I can’t make sense of how the rest of them actually function. Either they’re all making a lot of money or they’re all losing a lot of money. Right?
John: Yes.
Craig: We’ll never know.
John: We’ll never find out, which is nuts. Nima’s final point was that shows are prioritizing what happens in the episode over what happens in the series. Nima’s point was that you used to talk about a show, it’s like, “Oh my, I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” You talk about, “I love the series as a whole,” but you weren’t so focused on what happened in this episode or that episode. Now with shorter seasons, all the emphasis is on that was one great episode or this was a mess of an episode. It happens in these short seasons, too, where it’s like, “Ugh, that was a clunker in the middle of that.”
Craig: Really, what he’s saying is if there’s eight episodes, six of them are great, one is fine, and one’s a clunker, that clunker is going to really stick out.
John: It does stand out.
Craig: When you do 22 episodes–
John: They were always clunker episodes.
Craig: Most of them were clunker episodes. They were disposable and didn’t matter. They were running ads throughout the middle of them.
John: Your enjoyment of the series was the enjoyment of the series and not the one hour of watching one show.
Craig: Sure. It’s just a different experience.
John: That is the difference.
Craig: It’s just different. What would you rather have? Would you rather watch Battlestar Galactica, 1982– Was that what it was?
John: Yes.
Craig: Or would you rather watch Andor now?
John: I’ll take Andor.
Craig: Andor. No offense to the original Battlestar Galactica, but how can you make– You can’t make 22 great episodes. That’s not a thing. It does become about the season. I think that that is what Nima is experiencing. He’s growing up. He’s going through early grouchy days. Soon, he will develop into full grouchiness. Then he’ll come back around to cool.
John: Because she’s listening to this show, I do want to single out Aline and Rachel as well for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which feels like it has the quality of a short season show, but they were shooting like 15 or so many episodes.
They were shooting a weekly series of the show, which is just crazy. I look at all these other streaming shows that only have to do eight episodes over the course of whatever, a show made for Apple or anything else. Yes, the production values can be higher, but what they’re actually achieving episode by episode, incredible.
Craig: Listen, I would love to work on a show, but it’s 15 episodes and all takes place at Tony’s house, and the bada-bing, oh my God, and the back room, and then it’s occasional.
John: Lets you know what sets you have? Craig, you would love to have sets, standing sets. It’s such a dream. Craig is crying now. He’s realizing what he’s done.
Craig: Just like every single time I write something, I’m like, “Then for what? For what?”
John: We’re going to shoot it for one day-
Craig: I’m just going to throw it out. We do.
John: We do.
Craig: That’s what we do.
John: Let’s talk about how, from a writing perspective, as a person who writes or creates shows or writes on shows, TV is better now than it was 10 years ago. Let’s compare 2025 to 2015. I would say short seasons are more survivable in terms of you have some time off, you have a little bit of a life. When I talk to people who work on the classic network shows, they would have a summer, sort of, but there was always-
Craig: A hiatus.
John: Yes, a hiatus. They were always just writing the same damn show. It was exhausting. We were doing a rewatch of a show that I really enjoy, a comedy, and I was talking to a friend about it. He’s like, “Oh, you know how awful that was behind the scenes?” No, I don’t want to know. Everyone was sleeping in their offices, and it was awful.
Craig: That’s not good.
John: That’s not good. I think there’s a little more survivability now, but we’re going to talk about the downside of that with short seasons.
Craig: I’m not sure. I don’t feel so survivable.
John: Streamers, I think, take wilder chances than networks ever did.
Craig: Oh, yes.
John: Which is great. You can play to a niche audience and be a hit.
Craig: Oh my God. The things that people do. That’s the big difference, really, and that’s why television– Feature films used to take big swings and then got so conservative that all they would make is a superhero movie. Now we’re dancing around and thrilled that they made a cool-ass vampire movie. We used to make vampire movies, even period piece. The original Dracula was a period piece. We’re like, “Look how– W’re doing it again.” No, that’s what movies should have been the whole time. Television used to be the same thing. Every episode of TV was about a cop-
John: Doctor.
Craig: Or a doctor. Now, my God.
John: Now you can make a show like Overcompensating and get a second season of Overcompensating, which is a show I freaking love, but it’s a niche audience, and love it.
Craig: Totally.
John: Now versus 10 years ago, you can spend more time per script. The machinery of production, the television is a beast that eats scripts. You have more time to work on things and sometimes write a whole season before you start shooting, which has pros and cons.
Craig: That sounds great. I wonder what that’s like.
John: Then you can plan things. You can have setups and payoffs that you actually know are going to work because you planned. I actually think everything was always written. Downsides to that, too, but some pros. I would say a pro is that we now develop things year-round. There used to be one season, you developed all the shows. If you didn’t have a show that was going, you’re screwed. You have to wait until the next season.
Craig: There is no television season. There’s no hiring season. The way the industry functions vis-à-vis writers, that’s a whole other deal. Just for the audience, I think if you put aside your nostalgic yearning and you discount the signal-to-noise and just look at what is the actual quantity of signal, it’s tremendous.
John: Just wrapping this up, ways the TV is worse now as a creator or a staff writer, the short season doesn’t mean you’re always looking for a job. If you’re a staff writer on a show that is a room that’s running for 15, 20 weeks, halfway through that time, you need to start looking for other jobs. That sucks.
Craig: In terms of creators, a lot is worse about this method, so much.
John: We’ve talked on a podcast a lot about how when you divide the writing process from the production process, it’s those creators who end up getting dragged through three years of a show and getting paid for one. It can be exhausting.
Craig: The way it’s disrupted the career. It’s just disrupted the career.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: It’s turned it into this strange–
John: So many writers are completely divorced from the production process and have no ability to basically run a show.
Craig: Which is– Poor feature writers have been dealing with that forever. Like, this is the way it goes. You’re constantly looking for that next job. There is no guarantee. There is no schedule. There is no machinery to support anything. There’s no promotion ladder. There’s nothing. That’s what it’s now become for everyone. In terms of the audience and how they experience TV, I think the part that’s worse is the recap industry.
John: Totally.
Craig: I think the recap industry is a little bit like sports betting. Sports betting diminishes your pure enjoyment of a sporting event. The recap industry turns, particularly the big shows into– It’s almost like it tabloidizes them and again, feeds into outrage and so forth. There’s just so much clickbait on so much of it. I don’t know. I understand why it’s out there. It’s free publicity.
John: Pamela Ribon, who’s been on the show a couple of times, talking about she came up as a TV recapper. She’d watch a show and have to recap it in real time. There was an aspect to it that was actually, it was a kind of celebration in a fandom that was so intoxicating. A chance for people to participate and enjoy the thing they just watched.
Craig: Yes, but also, who are recaps for? They’re for people that didn’t watch it. I feel like we’ve just cliffnoted things so that people can– We used to say, okay, the water cooler, come in on Monday. Hate or love, you get to come in on Monday and talk about it with your friends at work, and hate on it or love on it. Now, you can be like, “I don’t want to watch this again. There’s too much stuff to watch, or I’m going to do something else. I’m just going to read the recap, and then I’ll be like, “Oh, yes. So I heard.”
John: Let’s wrap up this segment on TV, better, worse, or mixed now, 10 years?
Craig: Better.
John: I think mostly better. I think the quality of things you can watch as a viewer are better. I think, from a viewing perspective, I’m probably happier watching TV now than I was 10 years ago. From a person working in television, is it better or worse? I think it’s mixed and probably a little worse. At the bottom of the ladder, I think there’s smaller rooms, meaning fewer jobs, meaning less opportunity to actually see how stuff is working.
Craig: I have nothing to compare it to. My television career has taken place within the last 10 years.
John: My television career started in 1873.
Craig: Do you know I was [crosstalk].
John: 2000, that was when I was doing my disastrous WB show. I would say that if I had no business running a show that was supposed to be a weekly show. That’s completely out of my depth.
Craig: Running a show is hard.
John: It’s really hard. It’s really also hard for a person who’s never been in a TV room.
Craig: Yes, or a room. Running a television show is hard.
John: It’s hard.
Craig: It’s really hard. I like that they have that show runner’s training program. I’m just not sure how you train somebody for this. I get what you can impart, but it’s a little bit like combat training.
John: It is.
Craig: You join the Marines, they teach you how to shoot, they teach you how to move, and then– [screams] Once those bullets are going by, I’m like, “Training?”
John: No plan survives contact with the enemy.
Craig: No. Training is experience, survival.
John: Let’s answer a question or two. I see one here from CW.
Craig: CW.
John: CW.
Craig: Nice.
Drew: CW writes, “I usually am hired for feature projects for screenplays during the development phase, as is the case for most of us, but a new project coming up has a director wanting me to accompany him during table reads with cast and also during principal photography. He states that as the writer, I’m more in sync with the story, and he’ll need my help to chime in during those pre-production and production moments. In my country, the writer is almost never asked or allowed to be on set or reads. We are paid for the written work and cycled out once that is done.
“My question is, how do you rate for these tasks? Have you done this before on your commissioned works, and do you charge with a day rate? While others have opined that it’s a nice perk to be even invited along to do so, as writers generally are not asked to contribute during those phases, I also am aware that these tasks do take time and effort, and since they’re related to story, do they not count as labor as well and therefore to be rated?”
John: It is labor. You’re there not as a friend, but you’re there to be doing work, to be helping out. This is not under the writer’s guild; this is someplace overseas. I think your best place to start is looking for anybody who’s done similar work and seeing if there’s any comp that makes sense for you. Look at what other people are being paid on the production, look in the crew, and make sure you’re charging something that feels like it’s worth your time because ultimately, you are the person who’s going to know whether this is worth your time or not worth your time.
Craig: In the US, when it is writer’s guild, there’s something called an all-services deal, and that’s what we would apply to this. You get paid an amount of money that would cover the time that you’re working on it, and we protect our minimums by basically looking at the weekly minimum, multiplying it by the amount of time, and that’s the floor for whatever you’re– The nice thing about the all-services deal is you don’t have to bill every week. They don’t have to constantly decide if you’re going to be employed or not. They have bought your time, and then everyone can relax. You can relax and you are free then to write as much or as little as you want or need.
There isn’t this constant– You know, like when you have– I don’t know. You’ve hired somebody to paint your house, and they’re like, “Those shingles are going to be more today and then, oh, I’m going to come back.” Just here, do it. Paint the house and stop asking me. It’s the nickel and dimming that just drives everybody crazy. There is some amount that is reasonable here.
I don’t know what country CW is from, but my guess is he or she has an attorney that negotiated their deal in the first place. That’s the person I would be talking to, and that’s the kind of deal that you’d want to make, especially because you are valuable to the director. It’s not going to be a lot of money, but I would also say that the experience is tremendously important, and as I’ve said many times, you do work well with this director. A director-writer combo is incredibly powerful.
John: Yes, it is.
Craig: That rising tide will lift your boat financially when it’s time for the next one if this movie were successful.
John: CW is saying that in their country, it’s not common for the writer to be around in all parts of the process.
Craig: Same here.
John: Normalize it. Just be the person who’s there. I will say that the movies where I have been more involved have turned out better, and I also think-
Craig: What?
John: I think actors feel excited that you’re there and are an additional person who can help them out. It’s been nice and so on. Go, I was obviously there for every frame shot, but on the Tim Burton movies, where I was in there through pre-production and getting people started, it’s just nice. It really helps things get figured out and solve some problems before they become problems. Set the example, and it sounds like you’re going to– Should have a good experience.
Craig: The director basically told you why it’s a good idea.
John: Yes, do it.
Drew: Dan writes, “I plan to turn my screenplay into an audio drama for Audible, complete with score, sound effects, and professional voice actors. Do you think this has the same merit as making a low-budget feature? I work in podcasting and know I can make the audio drama extremely high quality, and I want to follow the advice of trying to make something myself with friends and not wait around to break in. I have no aspirations toward directing and don’t want to take the time to raise funds for a film feature, especially considering the audio drama can be made right away.”
John: Does it have the same prestige as a film? No. It’s going to get a tiny fraction of the audience for many films. If you know how to do this and you actually really want to do this, you should absolutely do it. If you’re not doing this because you don’t know what else to do, but you’re doing it because you actually really want to do it, that you would listen to this thing yourself, great. I always caution people like, “Don’t do the thing that you yourself would not watch or listen to. You’re wasting your time.”
Craig: This person said they don’t want to direct?
Drew: They don’t want to direct, but they wrote it as a screenplay.
Craig: Who’s going to be directing these voice actors?
John: I feel like Dan maybe feels comfortable doing that, but doesn’t feel comfortable doing the onset blocking and all the other stuff.
Craig: Generally, no. Nobody listens to that. As long as you’re fine with that. It could be that one that people love, but–
John: I hope it is.
Craig: The value for me, first of all, would not spend a lot of money on it. The value would be to make me a better writer. I’ve made this. I’ve listened to it. I’ve experienced it. I’ve edited. That will make you a better writer.
John: I’ll also caution Dan, and Dan, I’m sure you’re aware of this, but audio drama is really hard. It’s a weird format because it’s like, what is this scene? Where are we? All the things you get for free in a visual medium are challenging to do in audio. Just make sure you’re-
Craig: Why have you invited me to this greasy spoon diner?
John: Make sure you’re really thinking through how you’re going to do it and you’re listening for great examples of how other people are doing it.
Craig: And how to not do it.
John: Avoid the bad things.
Craig: Avoid the things that are bad.
John: It is time for one cool thing. Craig, you got a spoiler because I already showed you my one cool thing, which is called Phantom Inc.
Craig: You got me to buy it before we even began recording.
John: Phantom Inc. is a game that we played here in the office last week. It is in the same space as Codenames or Decrypto, where you are in two different teams and you’re trying to get people on your team to guess this thing. There’s one clue-giver, and everyone else is trying to figure out what this is. The mechanic is really, really smart. The narrative idea is that there is a spirit who is trying to describe one object. The two different teams are both trying to describe the same object, but you’re writing one letter at a time. There’s questions that the team can ask. It plays really well. It’s so smart. Phantom Inc. is available everywhere, but we’ll put a link in the show notes to it.
Craig: Love it. You’ve got a game, I’ve got a game. This week, the game, The House of Tesla. This is not referring to anything involving Elon Musk.
John: You know what? I’ve got to say, though, it’s-
Craig: It’s triggering.
John: Yes, it’s triggering.
Craig: It’s triggering. The House of Tesla referring to the scientist, not the overpriced company.
John: This looks like a very classic Craig game.
Craig: It’s a very classic Craig game. It was released on Steam and is not yet out for iOS or Android, but eventually it will be. It’s by a company called Blue Brain Games. They made the House of Da Vinci games. The House of Da Vinci games themselves were barely derivative of the Room games by Fireproof Software. Is this what I would call an A-plus example of the genre? No, but is it well done? Mostly yes.
John: Great.
Craig: I think the visuals are great. The puzzles are very typical for this sort of thing, and the manipulation of objects is fun to do. I’m going to give them a little bit of a ding on the acting.
John: It’s just voice acting, or they’re performing, too?
Craig: They just needed to cast one good voice actor to play Tesla. The way he reads things, I’m fairly certain it’s a man and not AI, but it’s on the edge. It’s so weirdly dead. I don’t know. I’d be curious to see what the deal is there, but it’s not the actor’s fault if it is a human being. It’s theirs, it’s directing matters. Let’s face it, no one’s buying this game for the great voice acting. They’re there for the puzzles and the environment, and there’s some interesting mechanics in it. I think so far, so good on Steam. It’s delivering exactly what I expected it to. The House of Tesla by Blue Brain Games. Sorry for triggering you, John.
John: I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes has been produced by Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Oh no.
John: Welcome back, Drew. Edited by Matthew Chilelli, outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast.
We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear perfect for the holiday season. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. Make sure to get your Scriptnotes shirt before Austin Film Festival so we can identify, like, “Oh, you’re a Scriptnotes listener.” You’ll find show notes with links to all the–
Craig: Oh no, Roney. Scriptnotes listeners. [laughs]
John: You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Again, thank you to all our premium subscribers. You guys are the best. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered the book as well. That’s fantastic.
Craig: Put us to work this morning.
John: Absolutely.
Craig: Got to sign my name many times.
John: Pretty good stuff. If you want more information about the book, Scriptnotesbook.com is a place that has links out to all the different places where you can pre-order. We’ll probably also put on, if you want one of these special signed ones, to Premiere Collectibles, but we can also put a link on there for that. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on coffee. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun episode.
Craig: Thanks, John.
John: Thanks, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: Craig, before we started signing all these bookplates, we got you a cup of coffee, which is from our Keurig. How would you rate that coffee?
Craig: It’s not my favorite cup of coffee. Keurig, they’re like the Blue Brain Games of– It’s what I expected to get.
John: It’s drinkable, but not your [unintelligible 00:43:41].
Craig: It’s drinkable. I’m a black coffee drinker, so I’m comparing apples to apples. Nothing can’t say, oh, this blends so lovely with the oat foam. I’m just–
John: When did you start drinking coffee?
Craig: I know exactly when I started drinking coffee. This is a weird story, actually. I think I’ve talked about this before. When I was in high school and I knew I wanted to be a doctor, and I knew I was going to be pre-med in college, I did a summer internship between my junior and senior year with the Monmouth County Medical Examiner’s Office. Every day, I would go to the morgue at the hospital and assist with autopsies. It was early. I was 16. They let a 16-year-old assist with autopsies. It was a different time, but it was really early. It started early.
I was a teenager, and I’m not waking up early. Plus, it was the summer, so I was hanging out with my friends. When the alarm would go off at 7:00, I was like, “Oh my God.” I would get to the hospital and I was really bleary. There’s the first body already. It’s like, “I’ve got to cut open another body.” They had a coffee– It was morgue coffee. It is a Mr. Coffee, that marble glass pot.
John: That has never been cleaned.
Craig: Ever. They had styrofoam cups, those old, nasty styrofoam cups. They didn’t even have milk or sugar or anything because they were like, “Whatever, we do autopsies. No one’s got time for that.” I drank this horrible coffee out of a horrible styrofoam cup in a room with dead people. That, my friend, is how you grow some hair on your chest.
[laughter]
Craig: It was terrible, and it woke me up. That’s how I started each day.
John: Caffeine.
Craig: Then I would turn and go, “What do we got, boys?” “Crush injury.” “All right, here we go.” I was also smoking in the room. No, I wasn’t. I don’t know if it’d be great, but it’s like Quincy. You don’t know what Quincy is.
John: I don’t know Quincy at all.
Craig: You remember Quincy.
John: Quincy medical examiner, yes.
Craig: Quincy, Jack Klugman played a medical examiner in the-
John: Several times.
Craig: -’70s, and he was awesome.
John: My first coffee was in college at some point, so never in high school. I don’t think I ever had coffee. My mom always had coffee, and I tasted it, but I never willingly drank coffee. My friend George and I had driven from Des Moines to Chicago because we wanted to see Naked Lunch, which was only screening in Chicago. It was so effing cold, and George was like, “Let’s get coffee.” I’m like, “Sure.” There was a Starbucks. First time I’d ever seen a Starbucks.
Craig: No.
John: In Starbucks, I got something and probably a lot of milk in it.
Craig: Give me something.
John: Maybe I asked for a latte or a cappuccino or whatever it was, but that was my first time having coffee. It was good, but it didn’t enamor me to coffee. It wasn’t until I moved out to Los Angeles post-college that I started drinking coffee a little bit more regularly. At some point, I got a coffee maker and just started drinking coffee in the mornings, but that was the turning point.
Craig: You find your way to it. It’s just like nice cocaine. I’ve never used cocaine, but I feel like coffee’s like nice cocaine. Like cigarettes, I feel like more.
John: You’re not drinking coffee right now, but you grew up drinking it.
Craig: Yes.
John: When did you start coffee?
Craig: As a little child, like a two-year-old?
Drew: I think I was probably like seven or eight. Just sitting there with like a hot cup of coffee. Tennis lessons in the summer, I would get a blueberry bagel and a little coffee with a lot of cream and sugar.
Craig: Oh, so you had milk-
Drew: I had milk.
Craig: -with some coffee. You had coffee ice cream.
Drew: Basically. I do think iced coffee was probably the gateway for a lot of my generation.
John: I’m sure for the next generation because iced coffee was not a thing in our years.
Craig: Honestly, I say this as this grouchy black coffee drinker so much, and I’m like, “That’s not coffee. That’s something else. That’s coffee-flavored milk. That’s coffee-flavored something else.” What I do, actually, my standard order is not just pure, pure black, actually. Standard order is short Americano. What does that mean? Tiny, small? Why don’t they just call it small? Small americano, two or three shots, and one pump of mocha.
It’s not a lot. Just a tiny bit of sweetness and a little bit of chocolate to mellow out what can be sometimes a little bit of a bitter awakening. Most of that mocha never makes it into the coffee, by the way. It goes in and just drops to the bottom, so when I’m done, there’s a sludge at the bottom that I never touch. It’s just that little hint, but that’s every morning. Starbucks. I wish I didn’t like it so much, but I do.
John: We grew up at a time before Starbucks and before Peet’s. Before there was nice coffee or consistent coffee.
Craig: Just diner coffee.
John: Yes. Diner coffee is generally just awful.
Craig: Horrible.
John: We’ll go to IHOP, and IHOP has just notoriously the worst coffee.
Craig: Terrible.
John: It seems like it’ll be so simple to get good coffee.
Craig: It’s terrible. Also, if you get a cup of coffee there, I’ll deal with it. Fine. I’m halfway through it. Let’s say you are somebody that drinks coffee with milk. You’re halfway through it. They come by, and they’re like, “Let me freshen that up.” They fill the rest of it, and looking like, “Now I don’t know what this coffee is anymore. There’s no sensible portion to this.” It’s insane.
John: The math formula is for adding two liquids together.
Craig: It’s madness.
John: It’s madness.
Craig: It’s absolute madness. Then there’s that blue coffee cup in New York, the green-style coffee cup, that coffee is horrible. I do remember Mr. Coffee.
John: Oh, yes.
Craig: My parents had a Mr. Coffee, which Joe DiMaggio advertised.
John: That’s the glass carafe and plastic thing on top, and you put the paper filter in and load it in. The challenge with Mr. Coffee was, you can make a decent cup of coffee with Mr. Coffee, but you’re making three cups of coffee. If you only want one, you’re making too much. I had a little Mr. Coffee, but the math just doesn’t work right. It didn’t work right for making one.
Craig: When I wasn’t doing autopsies, I was working at a Wawa, which is our New Jersey, Pennsylvania-area convenience store chain. One of the things I had to do was, every seven hours, change the coffee out because we have those coffee pots. By the time you get to the end of that shift, it is just hot dirt.
John: Yes, hot dirt.
Craig: When people pour it, they would spill it, and it would sizzle and burn on the plate below it and stank.
John: Gross. Did those coffee pots ever get washed out?
Craig: [laughs] I’ve heard from a flight attendant that coffee pots on an airplane never get cleaned.
John: I’m not sure why you do need to wash them out. What’s in there?
Craig: I guess not. It’s just hot liquid, and then you’re going to rinse it out with more hot liquid to put the same hot liquid back in. If there were anything that could spoil inside of it, but coffee is just bean-flavored water. There’s definitely not a lot.
John: Until someone’s drunk from it or if there’s milk in there, that could do a thing.
Craig: You never put milk in the coffee pot.
John: No, not in the coffee pot.
Craig: Actually, it’s like a self-cleaning thing, like a dog’s mouth. It turns out that’s an urban myth, by the way. You explored that.
John: Urban myth. Filthy, filthy mouth.
Craig: They’re disgusting.
John: My current coffee situation is I do Aeropress coffee. Aeropress is you do one cup at a time. It’s a little bit of a hassle, but it’s pretty simple, and it’s very consistent. I’m weighing my 16 ounces of coffee on the scale, and it’s consistent. I know exactly what it’s going to taste like. I’m half-caf in the morning, and I’m just full-decaf after that. I can only have very little caffeine over the course of the day.
Craig: I cut myself off caffeine-wise, but I think 2:00 PM is my absolute limit. I thought about investing in– Really, what I drink is espresso. I’ll get an Americano just because the thing about espresso is it’s like, boom, gone, done, which I’ll do. Even Americanos made with espresso, I thought about investing in a really nice machine. The problem is it’s not as good as what they got at any coffee spot.
John: We had a JURA, which is the one where it grinds and it does it all itself. It’s okay, but it’s not great. Honestly, Aeropress is much better than that is.
Craig: I will say that in my– not the place we live in now, but our prior home had that Miele coffee thing built in, and that thing was incredible because it would really make complicated stuff. It was pretty cool.
John: Circling back the conversation around to the Keurig that we had, we call that machine Little Stew. Little Stew is good for just making that cup of coffee at a time. I will find that if we have people over for a game night or we’re eating desserts, it’s like, “Who wants coffee?” That’s much more handy than me trying to make individual things. We don’t have a Mr. Coffee anymore. We’re making coffee in that.
Craig: It’s a perfectly good way to go about it. Keurig, notoriously horrible for the environment.
John: Little plastic pots.
Craig: Yes. I’ve never had a cup of coffee from a Keurig that made me go, “Wow, good.” It’s always been like, “I need this liquid to put caffeine chemical in my brain.”
John: Instant coffee has actually gotten noticeably better over the years. You wouldn’t think so, but there’s many cases where instant coffee is much better than IHOP coffee. The good instant coffee.
Craig: Sure. I have this sense memory of my parents dinging a spoon inside of a mug, ding, ding, ding, because they put those older’s crystals in there. No, Sanka is for the elderly because they can’t have caffeine. Also, Sanka isn’t even coffee. What is Sanka? What comprises Sanka? I don’t even know.
John: Don’t know.
Craig: Let’s find out.
John: What is Sanka?
Craig: I feel like it’s made of mica chips and bone dust.
John: While we’re looking that up, I’m going to pull up the ad for High Point Coffee, which is the perfect way to end this segment. Let me see if I can find the video here. What is Sanka?
Craig: It says it is coffee. It’s just decaffeinated, but I don’t know. I always thought it was made of some other stuff. Oh, this is interesting. The name Sanka is a portmanteau of sans and ca for caffeine.
John: Sans ca.
Craig: Sans ca.
John: That feels like something you could be using in a puzzle at some point.
Craig: Absolutely. Sanka is nasty.
John: Let’s end this segment with the incredible Lauren Bacall and an ad for High Point Coffee.
Craig: Oh, no, it’s Lauren Bacall, not Katherine Hepburn. Different.
Lauren Bacall: It’s very nice.
Speaker 1: Thank you.
Lauren: One rehearsal, four actors, and 20 coffee cups.
Craig: Oh, I’ve seen this. It’s great. It’s amazing.
Lauren: Around here, we don’t like coffee. We love it. I look forward to my sixth cup as much as my first one. That’s because my coffee’s High Point decaffeinated. I don’t need caffeine. I’m active enough, thank you. That’s just one reason this coffee lover chooses High Point. Oh, that aroma’s wonderful. Just look at this deep, rich color. You know what really matters to coffee lovers? This. Deep and rich. Flavor this good has to be deep-brewed into a coffee.
Speaker 2: Try High Point. The coffee lover’s decaffeinated.
Lauren: Deep-brewed flavor. I think you’ll really go for it.
Craig: Lauren Bacall is from some spot in the ocean between New York and London.
John: Which is fantastic.
Craig: Incredible.
John: I love the Mid-Atlantic accent.
Craig: We had left that so far behind by this point. She doesn’t care.
John: Doesn’t care. The Trans-Atlantic accent.
Craig: She’s like, “I love my–“ That commercial’s made for drag queens to re-perform.
John: That’s what it is.
Craig: I love a cup of coffee.
John: As do I.
Craig: It’s my sixth cup. I’m like, oh, Jesus. Slow down.” It doesn’t matter. She’s going to be peeing constantly. “Where’s Ms. Bacall?” “10-1.” “How many cups of High Point did you give her?” “12.”
[laughter]
John: She’s now mostly High Point.
Craig: Also, 12 cups of High Point at some point will equal 4 cups. They’re still caffeinated. She’s like, “I love my High Point and this line of cocaine.”
John: That’s so good. Drew Craig, thanks much.
Craig: Thank you.
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