South Park vs Trump

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Hello, and welcome to this episode of The Restors Entertainment with me, Marina Hyde.

And me, Richard Osman.

Hello, Marina.

You sound like, and you look like, you're a long way away.

I'm very far away and underwater, Richard.

I am in Cefalonia, so we are parted, which you know I hate.

Is that Cefalonia the nightclub in Croydon?

Yes, it is.

That's the one, which is why it's underwater.

No,

I'm in the Greek island of Catalonia

and I'm missing you, but it is beautiful here.

Oh my God, it is so beautiful.

It's lovely.

But listen, it's not going to stop us talking about entertainment, is it?

No, it's not.

No, it's not, Richard.

We are in a maelstrom right now.

We're going to talk today, definitely, about, well,

what we were originally talking about was a sort of paramount deal going through and finally Trump's giving approval to the deal and then the unbelievable South Park episode and the fallout from that and the fallout from all the different angles of things that have been done to appease Trump in the Paramount deal.

So that's one subject which has got many angles.

We're also going to talk about Adam Sandler, how he became the most bankable entertainment star in the world,

basically on the back of Happy Gilmore 2, which there's very few people in the world who are bigger fans of Happy Gilmore 1.

I will give you my review of Happy Gilmore 2 later.

And we're going to talk about Grow a Garden, which you may or may not have heard of, but which is an unbelievably successful game on the Roblox platform.

And it's a sort of funny story and it's fascinating.

And we can talk about that as well.

And you're going to explain to me exactly what Roblox is as well, because I've heard of it many times, yet to live through it.

But we're going to begin by talking about South Park, Trump, the Paramount Deal.

Possibly one of the most famous and controversial episodes of any TV show ever dropped this week, which is South Park's first episode of their new season,

in which a number of things

happen that directly relate to Donald Trump.

It has been super massive.

If you haven't watched it,

it's on Paramount Plus in the UK, but people seem to have watched it in other places.

But it has caused an absolute sensation.

calls into question a number of things, the cancellation of Stephen Colbert, CBS's capitulation and paying off Donald Trump for a court case, and also sort of the future of satire.

So, shall we try and unpick all of those knots?

Let's.

I mean, we must say that the episode, unlike so many highly anticipated things, did not disappoint.

Yes, it is.

Whatever your view of it, it is certainly a piece of television that

is quite something.

Very brief background explainer.

Paramount has been seeking to be sold by its kind of legacy owner, Sherry Redstone, and they've been trying to push this deal through for a long time to sell it to David Ellison, the sort of, you know, 40-ish-year-old kid of billionaire Larry Ellison.

And if that sounds like the sort of person you might turn up in a South Park episode, I definitely wouldn't rule it out now.

Anyway, Paramount owns various different things, part of which is CBS.

And so you might remember that lawsuit that Trump had against CBS News, which was a bullshit lawsuit, sorry to say.

But CBS completely caved on that and they paid him $16 million.

And he apparently, he has stated that he's also getting $20 million

worth of free ad air time in the form of PSAs, public service announcements.

Remember PSA, because we're going to come back to that one.

Stephen Colbert, The Late Show, has been canned.

It's literally the late show now, isn't it?

Yeah.

It quite literally is.

Now, that show's been going for decades, obviously, originally started by David Letterman.

Late night is in a lot of trouble um in terms of viewership it doesn't make what it made anymore but obviously the timing is somewhat suspicious coming so close to them desperately trying to get this deal through the fcc

which is run by a little trump minion called brendan carr and colbert himself on his show after um cbs has settled that a 60 million dollar lawsuit he called it a big fat bribe on the show yeah and very soon afterwards was cancelled.

There are arguments either way as to whether it was an indirect response to it.

And we will discuss that.

But certainly that's what happens.

So you think, okay, no one else surely inside that umbrella of companies is going to take on Trump.

Step up, Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

Yeah, Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who are the creators of South Park.

This is an extra, this is a sort of unrivalled property on American TV in that it's been going for 28 years with the original creators.

And I suppose you could say something like SNL, maybe Saturday Night Live, is that sort of an idea.

But basically, there aren't shows like this that the same people keep making, and it's very, very, very successful.

So try and imagine the two deals happening.

They also have a deal, which was one of the craziest deals ever given to talent in history, which is Matt Stone and Trey Parker were given

50% digital rights to their shows of revenues about 15 minutes before, like the whole of TV went digital.

But anyway, and then people were saying, well, there was a point, this negotiation has been going on for ages because they have an overall deal

which is to produce their show.

And then they also have this very, very special carve-out that you don't see anyone else get, which is they get 50% of streaming rights.

And that deal was up for renewal.

Yes, so they had signed it with Warner Brothers, I think, for a huge amount of money for the streaming to go on HBO.

Yeah, it aired on Max, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And so, yeah, it's up for negotiation this year.

I wonder if you could tell our lovely listeners how much Matt Stone and Trey Parker sold the next five years of streaming rights for.

Well, first of all, they issued a statement not that long ago.

So it was a very, very fractious deal, this whole thing, because the new owners, David Ellison, is coming in and he said, well, we don't want to just make a 10-year deal with these guys.

We don't, you know, we have to be able to have some say in this.

And Matt Stone went out and put a statement out and said, the deal is fucking up South Park.

So they they had to then put a break on whether they were going to release the new season and when that was going to come until the deal was done.

Okay, the deal that they have just done, in fact, the day before whatever the South Park episode came out, which we're definitely going to come to because that was quite something.

They take 275 million per year for a five-year deal.

And then the streaming rights have been sold for 1.5 billion, which, as I say, thanks to one of the all-time amazing deals for creators, they get 50% of so it's about a bit more than two and a half billion for the next five years that they're going to split between each other in order to make their brilliant and very rude show one imagines they've been paid two and a half billion by this company they'll start towing the company line i would have thought the first episode of the new season will be some sort of maybe a sort of a beautiful biopic about David Edison and what a wonderful man he is.

But no, they chose to do something very, very different.

Yeah, it's interesting because honestly, as late as last year, in September, they were saying, oh, we're not even going to be on air during the election, the US election.

We're completely sort of done satirizing Trump.

They said, I don't know what more we could possibly say about Trump.

Matt Stone said, well, they do now because the episode that aired last Wednesday explicitly featured Trump.

In previous seasons, if you watch it, I watch it, Mr.

Garrison had functioned as a kind of Trump avatar.

So it wasn't Trump, but you knew that it was really Trump

within the sort of world of the show.

Anyway, the episode is called Sermon on the Apostrophe Mount.

So it's basically about Paramount.

It's incredible to think that absolutely every single person involved in that deal and Trump and like the whole world just got absolutely, it's like a biggest screw you possible to all of them.

So it was sort of about religion in schools.

And obviously they use that as a jumping off point, as they always do to go to other places.

The Trump stuff, you saw him in bed with Satan.

He was very much the original Saddam character that they used to do.

You know, he looked exactly like that, except he had Trump's exact head sort of, you know, in their kind of cutout animation put on top.

But I did tell you to remember PSAs.

There was a lot about Trump's tiny penis and so on through all the way through.

And then it ended with a PSA.

Now, this was not the kind of comic book cartoon version of South Park.

This was an AI deep fake of Trump.

It was a PSA stumbling, like shedding all his clothes naked through the desert.

It was incredibly good, this AI.

By the way,

it's an amazing deep fake.

We all love AI now.

Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who obviously have quite a lot of money, I've discussed, bought a deep fake company at the end of 2022.

I don't know what else they've been using it for, but you know, if this is the only thing they do with it, well done.

It was something to behold.

Anyway, and then the episode ended with that incredible deep fake of Trump talking to his own minuscule penis.

Matt Stone was on stage at Comic-Con like a couple of, or a day after or something.

And he said, oh my God, we had like four days in rooms with actual grown-ups arguing about that penis.

And the way we eventually got it through is they put these little eyes on the penis.

So they said it was a character.

I don't know how that gets you through Paramount Standards and Propriety or whatever it is.

But anyway, it's apparently enough.

They did exactly the same thing on Last of the Summer Wine, didn't they?

Same plot device.

Anyway, they were editing this thing right up to the last minute after, you know, getting their multi-billion deal.

I also love that Sherry Redstone had the episode described to her by executives.

Obviously with Sherry with a hanky to her nose, you know, can't bear to watch it.

Don't worry, love, it's only 20 20 minutes.

But anyway, she couldn't get through it.

And what happened with Trump's White House?

Did they, A, just rise above it?

You don't have to acknowledge this stuff.

Or did they respond by saying they did what they in fact did?

They said the show, this was unfunny.

The show hasn't been relevant for 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate bid for attention.

I mean, listen, I always give 2.6 billion to people who nobody cares about and nobody watches and have no relevance.

Of course, you know, they're probably richer than him now.

I mean, you know, formerly.

Not what he says he's got.

The interesting thing here is, of course, Trump sues everybody.

That's his first line of defense against things.

Trey Parker and Matt Stone are sort of trying to lure him into suing them because that is a court case that they would absolutely love,

presumably.

Yes.

And I mean, there are certain people who shouldn't, you know, who are in litigation and it's going to be tricky for them.

You know, Murdoch is, Repert Murdoch is being sued by Trump.

It basically snarls up all your business deals.

If you're a company and there's anything you want to do, if you're in litigation with Trump, it's very, very difficult.

And this is basically what happened with the whole, you know, with the umbrella company of Paramount.

And so obviously people at CBS News are very, very

angry about the suing and all of that sort of thing and the caving to his lawsuit, which, as I say, was a rubbish lawsuit.

And they came in for attack.

You know, there were these incredibly cowed and craven CBS 60 Minutes anchors on that South Park episode.

So they really have like just scattergun attacked everybody.

But yes, I think they would love him to sue and they will continue to push.

And who knows?

I mean, Larry Ellison's kid, David Ellison, as I say, really did sound like a guy that you might have in a South Park episode.

But Matt Stone originally said, oh, no, no, we're not going to have him in.

He seems like a really nice guy.

I've met him a few times.

We're not going to, I mean, again, they also said they weren't going to satirize Trump anymore.

So clearly, I wouldn't set too much store by that.

But it's very interesting now because there is this sense in the US that Trump can just get all these things cancelled, whether or not it's true that Colbert was cancelled to push this deal through, that they settled a lawsuit with Trump to push this deal through.

These guys don't care at all.

In fact, they would love nothing more than to have, I mean, it's the best content for a show possible.

You would, you'd be watching it every week.

And other people are feeling they have to pull back or, you know, I see Jon Stewart, who's also

on Comedy Central, saying, oh, well, you know, I think I'm safe for now, but really having a go at them for cancelling Colbert.

Comedy Central also owned by Paramount or the Paramount Skydance Corporation.

And so South Park is, as I say, such an unusual thing in American culture.

And there are people who...

It's quite misunderstood by certain people.

You know, the left has been complaining about South Park for a a long time because they felt like it was, you know, it's offensive.

Not anymore.

They're not.

Now they're not complaining.

No, now they're not complaining.

And, you know, anyone who describes them as centrists is, I don't know, centrists is like a sort of like, I don't know, it's about neoliberal.

It's one of those words that people use and they don't really know what it means.

They just want to say that they don't like that person.

I definitely don't think, if you know anything about them, that Matt Stone and Trey Parker are a centrist at all.

I mean, you know, they're basically, they're probably natural Republicans.

They're definitely libertarians, but they don't really care about offending anybody.

And they definitely would love to be embroiled in a lawsuit with Trump.

It's quite hard to see where it goes from here in a way that's not like incredibly embarrassing to Paramount all the time because now everyone's watching this show.

And by the way, the reason they got all that money is because South Park is, in terms of the things that are really popular on streaming,

obviously you've got things like Friends, which are the most popular, but South Park's really not far behind.

And there is so much content, you know, there's 27 series or whatever it is.

Teenagers love, I mean, you know, my kids love South Park.

They find it absolutely hilarious.

And they love the back catalogue, but they love the new episodes.

And these are people who were obviously not even, like, were not born halfway through its kind of season run so far.

Plus, unlike friends,

These guys are making at least five years of new episodes.

So it's a very, very valuable property.

And only the kind of serial awful management of Paramount had given them all these rights.

I mean, don't forget that you still can't show Yellowstone

on Paramount Plus because all the Taylor Sheridan shows are Paramount's biggest shows.

It's such a sort of basket case of a company that you can show some of the spin-offs and you can show Tulsa King and you can show Linus and Mayor of Kingstown and all the other shows and Landman.

But lots of the Yellowstone things you can still only watch on NBC because

their two sort of biggest money spinners were on other platforms.

Can I raise one point and one question?

The point is a fascinating thing about South Park, which makes it different to all other those big long running animation shows which take a long time to do South Park is incredibly quick turnaround.

The way they animate it, it's computer animation and a version of cutout animation, which means it's more like a Saturday Night Live because it has a weekly schedule.

They start writing the previous week and deliver it within six days, which is why they're able to do topical things and topical episodes unlike saturday night live it is funny and why next week's south park is going to be particularly interesting because next week's south park will be all about this week's south park or knowing the south park people they'll do something completely different but it is in their uh wheelhouse to be able to make it all about this week's south park so that's

what's always sort of set that South Park apart from everything is it's the two of them occasionally they'll have script editors and writers and things.

They do most of the voices themselves.

They do most of the production themselves.

They turn it around super quickly.

So it's incredibly reactive.

My question to you is: there was an awful lot of gnashing of teeth when Colbert was taken off air and they said this is capitulation.

Why would

Paramount Skydance

agree for this episode to go out if they were in the business of capitulating to Trump?

So does it put the Colbert cancellation in an entirely different light?

Well, within the world of the South Park Sassad, not really.

They clearly think that they're capitulating on all sorts of things.

To me, the Colbert cancellation is inevitable.

And all of late night is in...

I mean, no one actually really watches late night.

Yes, they watch the viral stuff, they watch the clips, they watch all the things, and they still have that kind of presence in American culture via that thing.

But the idea that they watch late night and sit down to watch it isn't what it used to be.

And it's still incredibly expensive, like to make.

It is incredibly expensive.

The salaries, the staff, everything,

it has a legacy price for a 21st century audience.

And that doesn't matter.

I couldn't agree more.

And I have long believed, I just remember a lot, God, I can't remember when I read this book, but it was maybe about like eight, eight years ago.

It's a great book about Letterman by a guy called Jason Zinnemann, who's the New York Times.

He wrote about comedy for the New York Times.

And it's so interesting.

You know, in those years when Letterman, and those guys bestrode those huge, big late-night shows, people all across the spectrum tuned into those.

And

everybody, the political spectrum I'm talking about, now they are completely siloed kind of in, you know, anti-Trump, Democrat, sort of pro-Democrat shows.

And as a result, like half the people don't even watch and aren't even aware of them and think that they are kind of you know, liberal, for want of a better word, liberal stooges.

I do think the interesting thing about South Park is that Trump's normal thing of saying, oh, this is just the illiberal elite attacking me, etc., etc.

I don't think anybody thinks the guys who write South Park are liberal elite.

I mean, you just don't think that.

And anybody who has ever watched it, no matter what political persuasion they are, doesn't think that those guys are liberal elite because they spend a huge amount of time taking the piss out of woke and all of those sorts of things.

It's very hard to name a satirist or a satirical show which has laid a hand on Trump at any point, you know, has done something that

cut through.

Exactly.

It sort of feels like the first time.

Tom Lehrer, the wonderful lyricist who sadly passed away at the weekend, he gave up satire.

He said, the world scared me so much I got to the point I felt like I was a citizen of Pompeii being asked to say something funny about lava.

And

that feels like what the last 10 years has been.

Listen, this will be swept away, I'm sure, by something else.

But it feels like the first thing to lay a glove on that regime, perhaps.

Yeah, and it doesn't change anything.

And as you said, you know, like that great old Peter Cook line about the cabarets

in Weimar, Germany, that did so much to stop the rise of Hitler.

Okay, we know it doesn't stop things.

Having said that, I find it so embarrassing that they actually issued a statement.

Once you've watched the episode, you think, I would simply not acknowledge that this thing existed.

And now it's like, I mean, everyone's got to go and have a look for it now.

And

the micropunis character, all of it is coming back i i yes i definitely think and he's so obviously hurt by it they don't care you can't say that they're irrelevant no one cares about them they've just done a massive massive deal that as i say probably makes them richer than trump you know real money not the money he claims to have i do think in terms of

allowing them to do that sometimes people will have like one licensed area of their company which is used as a sort of fig leaf for all the other capitulations that they make and i don't see what else they can do with that first of all they need the money listen the company was sold for just over 8 billion.

And they've just done a $2.5 billion deal for this thing.

Okay.

So that's how worth it it is to that company.

So what are they really going to do?

You've just bought this thing.

What are you going to do next?

I mean, you're going to say, no, Taylor Sheridan, you can't, we don't want any of your shows either.

They have to like these people.

It will be interesting to see how that talent relationship continues.

It will be very interesting.

Certainly next week's episode is going to be fascinating because they're literally writing it right now.

Fun to imagine what they're going to write it about.

If you want to watch that, if you haven't seen it already, it does on Paramount Plus over here.

I seem to talk to an awful lot of people who've seen it, who I don't believe are subscribers to Paramount Plus.

So it seems to have been shared via various other places, but Paramount Plus is the official home of it in the UK.

I mean, it'd be amazing to discover what the actual broadcast ratings for that were because so many people were saying, I've got to watch South Park tonight.

It's a point, you know, it was appointment to view.

And I think a lot of people will have actually just watched it live on Wednesday night before it went onto streaming.

Shall we go for an advert break?

I think we should.

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Welcome back, everyone.

Marina from the Chaos Chaos of South Park's Trump episode to the gentility of Grow a Garden, which has become an enormous success on Roblox.

Can you talk me through what any of those words mean?

I'm quite close to the Grower Garden phenomenon, Richard.

I have three Grower Garden players in my family.

That's two of the kids and your husband.

And yes, I can tell you quite a lot about, okay, Grow a Garden and how big it is.

It's interesting.

It's It's on the Roblox platform, which is a platform that has free games on it.

And

anyone can sort of create them.

They're pretty lo-fi, but

they have millions and millions and millions of people playing all the time.

And different games become kind of really big and then fade away.

And some are kind of behemoths that kind of keep going.

If you've never been on it, they're mostly sort of younger players, but although lots of adults play them, they're very low-tech, weirdly,

but it's massive.

And it's interesting that we led with a story about a company that's just been sold for 8 billion.

Roblox is currently, its market cap is like 80 billion or something.

So we're offering perhaps we're doing these the wrong way around.

Anyway, but a lot of people, their sale price, their share price, sorry, went up about 21% in recent weeks.

And there is some suggestion that a huge amount of that is due to the popularity of one game on it, Grower Garden, which is currently the most popular game on Roblox.

Can I, before we do the statistics, let me tell you what a grower garden is.

Yes, please.

As I said, if you're not used to the, what I would call the Roblox aesthetic, it's very lo-fi.

You essentially get an empty plot.

It looks like sort of, you know, it's kind of looks sub-Minecraft.

You get an empty plot of farmland.

So can I just say, this is on a computer?

It's on a computer.

Yes, Richard.

It's on a computer.

Now it makes a lot more sense to me.

I was really worried about land values.

Yeah, you get an empty plot of land, farmland.

You start with something like 20 shekels, which is the currency, and you need to buy some seeds and then you need to plant seeds and tend to your garden and wait for them to grow into lovely plants.

You can acquire exotic pets

and you can sell stuff.

You can go to the seed shop to buy more things.

You can go to the gear shop.

You can sell your wares.

And, you know, it's sort of quite calming.

and relaxing in lots of ways.

Although, of course, there are some users who found kind of ways around this to make it less pleasant plant wars plant wars i feel like i've played games like this before like sim city had like a like a sim farm version and things like that well there was farmville wasn't there and um start stardew valley so there's it's it sits in those that kind of tradition and anyway let me just blind you with some of the statistics first because not last weekend where they actually did have a new update um they have an update every saturday the previous saturday july the 19th they had 22 million concurrent users for that update, which is by far a platform record, as I say, on this already unbelievably successful platform.

It beats things like...

Even Fortnite, I think Fortnite's record was 16 million or something like that.

And that was, you know, culturally one of the biggest things in the world.

It's got 22 million concurrent users.

Yeah, there was a May update where they had...

more concurrent users than all the top 100 Steam games combined.

Every game on the Roblox platform is created by somebody.

And actually, this one is quite interesting.

It only came out in March, by the way.

And it's amazing how these games kind of sweep to absolute prominence.

This kind of viral thing where, and I'll talk to you about at the end about what I think is coming after this one.

And the creator was a guy called BMW Lux, but he...

Is that his real name?

Yes, I think it is on his birth certificate.

I'm not sure in which order.

Could be Lux BMW.

Mr.

and Mrs.

Lux.

Daughter of BMW.

And anyway, whoever that creator was, he or she sold it in April when it had about a thousand concurrent users to a New Zealand guy called Jansen Madsen, whose handle is Jandle.

Jandle is his handle.

Jandle's his handle.

And

so now he has it and he's got it in a sort of joint venture with a studio called Splitting Point.

And you have to, you know, you have to do all the patches and the updates and all of that.

And the whole point about games on Roblox is that you have to find a way to keep updating them or they become sort of old hat or no one cares anymore or people find their ways around them or or they find different bits of source code and they can deal, you know, they can ruin them.

So there is actually a lot of pressure if you run a game like this, but he's very unusual, this creator.

He comes into the game and you can, which doesn't really happen with other creators.

This is like my children play a huge amount of Roblox and they have done, you know, for a long time and they've all, they've been all the big games that have gone through Roblox, sort of Brookhaven, Adopt Me, I don't know, Dress to Impress.

There's lots of these games, Jailbreak.

They've played all of these.

Brookhaven, Adopt Me, Dress to Impress, Jailbreak, jailbreak all the big ones yeah yeah these these are huge by the way these are such huge parts of my life so i find it hilarious that you don't actually even know what i'm talking about but okay but as i say they're all different like lo-fi things but he comes into the game jandle and he can you know he can pick out individual individual users and give them things but the clever thing he's done is that he has these kind of timed updates.

So you all have to be there.

And it's not like you have to spend money.

Robux is the currency of the platform.

You don't have to spend money.

But these kind of in-game items are available during these limited time updates.

So there's like a half an hour time on a Saturday where, so if you want to get those mega, mega user numbers, which is he's obviously achieved and it's become the most sort of biggest thing in the history of the platform, he's created these event moments.

And the one that we've just had, we're recording this on a Monday, the one that happened on Saturday, Travis Kelsey had come and has done a huge collaboration and he gave all the players something.

And, you know, my children were so impressed.

Like, they know who Travis Kelsey Kelsey is it's a real celebrity it's not like a gaming celebrity which is you know a gaming celebrity it's not the same thing and they just thought oh this never happens in roblox you know this is really unusual and so it's extraordinary how successful this game has become Travis Kelsey also turns up on uh on Happy Gilmore too but we're going to get to that we'll get to that

but wasn't the original BMW Lux supposedly 16 years old yeah I mean Jandle doesn't look a whole lot older I've got to tell you I've seen lots and lots of tick tock No, not at all.

I mean, he wanted to go to college and he wanted to get enough money, Jandal, to go to college and study marketing, apparently.

But I think he's probably, I think it's sort of booked like 150 million in sales, which is via Roblox purchases within the first three months of actually existing.

I mean, that's every single, every single parent.

listening to this and I know Roblox is absolutely huge and the kids play it forever and ever and you know that's I get it it keeps them quiet but they were then now they must be going how come you didn't make a billion dollars?

You go, surely you could have grow a garden.

It's only some carrots and some strawberries.

It's so basic and it's so sweet.

It's like, oh, I want to grow a sugar apple, you know, a special

elder strawberry.

I mean, it really is quite adorable.

It's very interesting.

And there's, I once, you know, you can see these incredible data visualizations of.

the games that surge on roblox.

And, you know, there were things like, as I say,

Brookhaven or Blox Fruits or any of those things.

And suddenly they just become this dominant thing.

It's interesting, and it's quite hard to sort of understand the world and the mindset and the sort of gen alpha of it all.

But the next bit,

I can see that the next big game that, as my children would put it, is really starting to cook is Steel a Brain Rot.

Sorry.

It's called Steel a Brain Rot.

Now,

I don't know if we'll deal with Brain Rot in just a second.

That's all already a play on Grow a Garden.

And Steeler Brain Rot is a...

You have to acquire Brain Rots.

Do you know what brain rots are?

Take a guess as to whether I know what they are.

Okay, you don't know what they are.

Okay, brain rots are a kind of a form of sort of gen alpha Pokémon, these kind of cutesy little animal-something hybrids that are sort of ridiculous and that you've got to kind of collect.

And it started with Italian brain rot, which were these kind of AI-generated.

Oh, I know this.

I know Italian.

You know this.

You know this.

But Italian brain rot was earlier this year.

So it's like in the before the flood times.

I mean, like, who cares?

You know?

and they're like tralalero tralalali this the shark who was wearing the trainers i mean it's kind of ridiculous in the you know ballerina cappuccino all these ones anyway and so steal a brain rot the premise

the premise of this game is obviously grow a garden is very wholesome and very sweet and blah blah blah but steal a brain rot already a sort of play on the title is a is a sort of alley but you're you're the game is you have to acquire brain rot and store them in a base which you have to defend against all the other people who want to steal them off you and you kind of get some it's absolutely brutal you get some weapons and all it is is a sort of aisle between people's kind of fortresses where these brain rots are being kidnapped and stolen and taken away and um yeah it's

and baseball battered I guess it's the obverse of grow a garden um and um kids you can see kids having sort of meltdown there's all these viral videos of kids having meltdowns about it because I suppose it sounds a little bit like grow a garden and they've got their brain rots, which they're really proud of.

And there are loads of adults do play Roblox, I should say.

And they're just going in and stealing all these kids' brain rots.

But it's not compulsory, right?

No, it's not about nobody has to do it, Richard, but they do do it.

This game is going massive now.

So it's so interesting.

The games, you know, the game that becomes really big and then the game that's a kind of reaction to it.

And I was saying to my kids,

is this like a satire on Grower Garden?

And they're like, yeah, a bit, but it's sort of like a joke about life and it's just like

okay not a joke about life

a joke about life yeah steal a brain rot is a is a just a joke about the pointlessness of existence i think but it's sort of it's very very interesting to watch this platform which is as i say you know, worth 10 times what Paramount, something we've obsessed about all week, all year, is actually worth and is a huge, huge deal.

And it's just, again, is very nimble and reactive and is constantly coming up with these new things that suddenly go viral.

And millions and millions and millions of people are playing them at once.

If millions and millions and millions of people were watching one Netflix thing at once, we would never stop talking about it.

We're going to talk a bit about how many people we think might watch, you know, might have watched Happy Gilmore and it's opening weekend on Netflix, but it will not be there were 22 million people watching it at once.

There's just no, it just doesn't happen like that.

But it brings us back to the thing we talk about sometimes where the decline of terrestrial TV and people say, no, you've got got to appeal more to kids.

It's crazy.

You've stopped appealing to kids.

And you know, you can get this audience back.

It cannot be overemphasized that we cannot get that audience back because for something like Grower Garden, it's more fun.

It is more fun than pretty much anything you could put on TV, you know, because it's TV that you play instead of TV that you watch.

It's a completely different language.

How could you put, I mean, me even trying to explain, me trying to pitch the idea of steal a brain rock to you is so absurd.

It's just like a sort of collection of vibes vibes and memes and, you know, reactions to the moment.

And it happens.

And maybe in two weeks, it will be the biggest thing.

And maybe it won't be anymore because something that's a reaction to that will have come along.

And also because it comes from a subsystem, which is very, very, very cheap to create something like that.

At any given time, thousands and thousands of people are creating it.

And one of them comes out of the top and you cannot predict which it's going to be and it becomes absolutely massive and it becomes organic and people add to it.

And that's not something you've traditionally been able to do in television it it comes from nowhere it's almost it's it's like punk yeah you're right and it's something i wanted to something that made me think about you just what you just said made me think about the the gamification of absolutely everything as we say they accept that like whatever i would be planning otherwise than doing on a saturday i've got to be here for this thing because you've just got to be there and it's fun and everyone's there and talking about it or whatever and the we've talked about gamification of all different types of things, but it seems silly when we've had million quiz shows and phone-ins and all of that, but television isn't really a place where you can have gamification, as it were.

You can't grind and build stuff up and all the sort of things that feel just an intrinsic part of the dynamics of that generation and what they expect in everything.

You know, you got to work, you got to stay, you've got to do all this stuff, and then you get enough points and then you get bigger.

And how could television be like that?

I can't picture it.

Maybe you can.

Weirdly, there's

a question I want to answer on our Q ⁇ A on Thursday, which is about there's there's a French game show where you can build up huge, huge, huge amounts of money over a number of years.

It's about as close as you can get.

But it's genuinely at the start of this, I didn't think I would be comparing grow a garden to punk, but there we are.

Has it, can I ask on behalf of parents everywhere, has it made your children more interested in actual gardening?

No, it's really,

when I said to one of my children, what do you like about it?

And she said, I mean, it would just take so long and be such a hassle to do this in real life.

True, though, isn't it?

Okay.

Yeah.

And I'd have to wait ages.

I was like, it seems like you're having to wait quite long for your sugar apples anyway.

And she was like, yeah, but it's like a day.

You know, it's not an unalloyed joy, is it?

There's one thing I read about it, which is you can sync it up to your local weather.

So the weather outside can be the weather.

That's cool.

Yes, there's lots of stuff like that.

And it does, as I say, it's, you know, it's occasionally these things are used by kind of malign actors to kind of build up lots and lots of money.

And then they sell those things on eBay or El Dorado or other platforms where people will actually pay real life money for stuff that's been built up in game or for a profile that's been built up in game.

But in general, it remains a place of quite bucolic lo-fi charm.

Yeah, that's one of those things about games.

There is some real joy to them.

And there are some beautiful kind of very slow lo-fi games that do promote.

People looking after each other, people are looking after themselves, people working hard.

And this feels like one of them.

Right.

But in the same way

we worry that violent video games will make our kids violent I think there's no evidence that gardening video games make our kids garden so maybe there's something no but I do think they set the right circumstances for steel a brain rot to then come into existence so it's a push and pull Richard God I didn't say so many sentences in the last 20 minutes I've never heard before Absolute gibberish, isn't it?

I'm so sorry if it's remained gibberish for old, but hopefully you're slightly enlightened.

But anyway, it's a huge, and actually have a look at it.

You You don't have to play it yourself, but you can watch videos if you just want to have a look, watch videos on YouTube of people playing it.

And you'll think, ah, okay, so that's that thing then.

Marina, if I stop playing that, that's the end of this podcast because I would get so obsessed with it.

Well, you have that tendency, don't you?

Why you can no longer do fantasy football?

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

Shall we talk about something that feels more traditional and has sentences, I would understand, which is the rise and rise of Adam Sandler.

Yes.

Lots of people have signed big deals this week, but he signed a $275 million deal with Netflix.

He's Netflix's most bankable movie star.

That's for sure.

He writes, produces, he's got his own production company, stars in these things as well.

Habby Gilmore too is out this weekend.

It's been an enormous success.

And I just wondered if we could talk about what is it that has made Adam Sandler the king of Netflix.

Well, it's really interesting.

And it's such a story of what happened to stardom and who realised it first and who didn't.

If you look at those big stars, I suppose, the big comedy stars of the 90s, early noughties, and you got Jim Carrey, Will Farrell, Adam Sander, Seth Roger.

I mean, you know, all those people, all the Jar Duppetter crews.

Adam Sander had started as a sort of stand-up and then he got SNL.

He'd done happy for Gilmore, but he got his break in a Sony movie when Chris Farley died.

That was Big Daddy.

He became...

a sort of bought and paid for Sony star.

And a bit like Will Smith, it's very interesting.

Both those two were the two people that Sony, Sony Pictures, really kind of bet their studio on.

He's so interesting as emblematic of what happened to Stardom.

So they got paid in that old movie world $20 million against 20% of the movie's gross receipts, whichever was higher.

It's wild when you look at those numbers.

Okay.

A lot of this, by the way, we know from the Sony hack.

Remember when the North Koreans, actually, because of the South Park movie, hacked Sony.

So much we know about all of this from the Sony hack when North Koreans hacked Sony Pictures, and we got the emails of all sorts of people, but principally in terms of interest from Amy Pascal, who was a big executive and who looked after people like Will Smith and Adam Sander.

Now, Sony executives used to joke that Will and Adam bought their houses because they made so much money for the company.

There was a point where they accounted for 23% of Sony Pictures profits and they got all this stuff.

You know, like the basketball court on the lot was called Happy Madison Square Gardens.

They always had use of the corporate jets.

Sometimes Will Smith's entourage was so big, he needed two.

But there's, and what was great about Wilts, about Adam Sandler particularly, is that he's so prolific.

He's, he makes a lot of movies.

He wants to make a lot of movies.

But by the time it got to

Jack and Jill, I think, which he played

a man and his own twin sister, and that was in 2011, and it was just really cringe, and it didn't make any money.

Holds the world record for the most ever Razzies, the Golden Mastery Awards.

Yeah, won 10 10 Razzies.

Well, the next one he did was called That's My Boy.

And that was, you know, like a classic sort of like one of those real late stage studio things, which was a comedy that cost $70 million and shouldn't cost anything like that.

It was all for the talent costs.

And that lost a load of money.

People or some people were beginning to realize, it's actually been realized this incredibly slowly in Hollywood, but that talent doesn't drive the theatrical business, the cinemas business any longer.

It is IP and it's brands.

People don't turn out or

were starting not to turn out because Adam Sandler was in it.

So in a way, although no one and still many people have not acknowledged this, A-list stars as an idea sort of collapsed.

And at that point, in 2014, Ted Sarandos, co-CEO of Netflix, comes along and he does, they don't...

They do not see in Adam Sandler a washed up star that no one actually really cares about.

They think, they look at their data and they think, oh, wow, all those people who used to go out in their teens and early 20s to watch Adam Sander movies in the movie theaters in the cinemas they've all got kids so they don't go out very much anymore they're all they all sit at home and they watch him like hell on our surface they watch so much Adam Sander he is brilliant for us we should do a deal with him so he sees the writing on the wall Adam Sander and signs this

yeah he was he was smart as well he was smart enough to put his ego aside because at that time it was very different and Netflix was smaller and movies were still bigger and he was one of the first people to really

really get that this was a great deal for him as well as a great deal for Netflix yeah and he so he did the first their their first ever multi-movie deal and all those things we've come to know about Netflix which is that they want a lot they want a lot of whatever the thing they're buying is so whether that's like shows with massive libraries that they can stream and they people keep going back because there's 20 series of it He's the perfect Netflix star, which is very, very prolific.

He wants to make a lot of movies.

He's not particularly demanding.

The humor is really quite basic and therefore doesn't feel like it can't be put in different territories.

It doesn't feel like it's so sort of like highbrow and uniquely suited to I think

it's got every man quality for sure.

Well, yeah, I mean, that's his screen persona, isn't it?

He's like a sort of schlab who's a failure and he has to somehow pull it out of the bag to impress his friends.

But he's a kind of, yeah, an overgrown man-child, really, in almost everything.

But he did so well that, yeah, as you say, the next deal that he's done is a four-movie deal or something, which is for $275 million.

He's extremely interesting as someone who, as you say,

worked out the way that wind was blowing.

I would say, when I'm thinking of Happy Gilmore 2, I understand that it wasn't made by Universal, who made Happy Gilmore 1, and so therefore it wasn't in theatres and it's a Netflix thing and they make a big deal and that's the part of his deal with them.

This would have performed very well in cinemas, and there's not that many comedies they put in cinemas.

I think it, I think so.

You would have, and you make a lot of money doing it that way.

And then you could have put it straight onto, you know, in a month or six weeks, you could have put it onto the servers.

It also might not have done because it would have been made by Universal, and there might have been different restrictions on it, and the budget might have been less.

And, you know, because Happy Gilmore, it was huge, but it wasn't, you know, it's not top gun.

So Happy Gilmore 2 is a good thing.

But it's a cult thing.

And over the years,

it comes that thing where it accrues more fans because it's been constantly available on these services.

But cult things are perfect for Netflix.

Cult things are less perfect for cinema release, I think.

Anyway, I watched it.

He's tell me because I did it.

I will watch it.

So Adam Sandler does have this everyman persona.

You know, he studied at

Tish,

you know, and NYC.

He studied under David Mammet.

He's a super bright guy.

Every time he's in like a, what people would call a proper film, an uncut gems or punched drunk love, he's a terrific actor.

He's obviously a very, very smart guy.

He's a terrific writer as well.

But he does this sort of thing so well.

So Murder Mystery and Murder Mystery 2 were his biggest hits for Netflix.

And I suspect

this will join them in the Pantheon.

I loved it.

I loved it.

I love the original Happy Gilmore.

This is so packed with cameos, which normally is the sign of this is going to be an absolute disaster.

Like every golfer in the world is in it.

Rory McElroy is in it.

Scotty Scheffler is in it, who's the world's number one golfer.

And by the way, turns out a great actor.

There is nothing that Scotty Scheffler can't do.

What?

Rory also.

Rory's a lovely presence.

Scotty Scheffler, actually, a pretty good comic actor.

Is Bryson DeSchambau in it?

Bryson DeShambeau is in it.

Brooks Kepka is in it.

Jack Nickfaus is in it.

Nick Faldo is in it.

Looking like he's had a makeover.

I'll tell you who else is a great actor is Bad Bunny, who plays Adam Sandler as Caddy.

He is so funny in this film.

He's so great in this film.

It's full of stuff.

Travis Kelsey is in it.

Eminem is in it.

He turns up.

Do you know the original film at all?

The guy who shouts at

the end of the day.

The guy who shouts at Jackass all the time.

Eminem plays the son of the man who shouts at jackass

and is very, very funny.

There's lots of kids of various...

people from the original film shooter mcgavan is back and i thought it's a really really really funny film.

It's unreconstructed.

It's all of those things.

But it's got a huge heart.

It's got a proper plot.

Haley Joel Osmond plays the baddie, the kid from sixth cents.

I loved it.

And I think what Adam Sandler's done throughout his career, he's shown himself to be an impressive businessman.

But most of all, he's a great writer, writes a lot of his scripts with Tim Hurley here.

He's also in this movie, has a great payoff line in this movie.

I just thought it's exactly what Netflix is for, which is his two hours just absolutely entertained from start to finish.

Oh, I'll tell you who's brilliant in it.

John Daly, the golfer.

He is really great in it.

I would say John Daly and Bad Bunny compete with each other to be the

best celebrity cameo and that was with Scotty Scheffler a pretty close third.

It's incredible how people who've worked with him, first of all, he's very, very loyal to his friends in terms of casting.

So all, you know, so many of his movies have the same people in.

But they all are so.

I remember reading one profile, maybe a New York Times thing or New Yorker thing, and you couldn't move for people who wanted to help the writer just and be really, you know, be really, really nice about Adam Sander because they say he's so loyal.

So, you had obviously Ted Saranda saying, he's so loyal.

You had Drew Barrymore saying, just anything you want if you need anything more, anything for Adam.

So, you just write, you know, ring me to the right, the person doing the profile.

All of these people absolutely love him.

You couldn't really, I mean, you can find lots of people who've got bad words to say about his movies because they think they're crude and basic and whatever, but you can't find people who've got too many bad things to say about him who've worked with him.

It's sort of incredible, the role call of people who are like, anything I could do to help.

Yeah, I love he's he talks about the casting of Eminem in this thing.

And he said, everyone, all the way through the script, everyone's going, you should get Eminem to do this.

It'd be really, really good part for Eminem.

And he was like, oh, I don't want to bother him.

You know, he's in Detroit.

He's doing this thing.

Everyone, you've got to ask Eminem.

He's like, oh, but Eminem's really busy.

And he said, in the end, he he picked up the phone and asked Eminem.

And Eminem went, Yeah, of course, I'll be in a happy film once you are you mad.

Uh, he was the first choice for uh Wonka,

Adam Sandler, the Johnny Depp Wonka.

Sorry, I was imagining Eminem as Wonka, which was oh no, not Eminem.

That's very different.

That's an alternative take, isn't it?

Listen, it rhymes with a lot.

Yeah,

and you know, maybe in the future, in a future version of it, they're always trying to make them darker and grittier.

Don't forget.

Do you have any recommendations this week, Marina?

I do have a recommendation.

I have a book that I've absolutely just finished and I absolutely loved.

It's called Diana World by Edward White, and it's about the sort of obsession, it's the best thing I've ever read about Princess Diana, and I've read all of it, including her own books.

I mean, it's quite, it's, it's quite sort of highbrow, but it just manages to synthesize all the trash and all the treasure and all the sort of royal mythology and talk about like what she meant.

It's not a biography at all.

It's like a sort of, it's a a sort of biography of the obsession with her.

It's really fascinating.

I really loved it.

As I say,

it's quite a high valve, but it's brilliantly done.

Every single thing from the different tabloid reporters all the way through the mediums, all the people she, you know, the colonics, the whole lot of it.

And then right back to all the kind of ancestral stuff.

It's all fascinating.

Anyway, I really like that.

So that's Diana World by Edward White.

And I will recommend, we've had the nieces and nephew here all week.

So we've watched, for example, K-pop demon hunters about six times, which is very enjoyable.

But a YouTube series I loved

by these two guys called the Map Men.

And they essentially, they do like great YouTube videos.

And it's things like, why is the United States of America the only thing that's allowed to call itself America?

Where did that come from?

Despite the fact it wasn't sort of discovered by Americo Vespucci, how did that happen?

It does loads of things about why the English counties, the size and shape and names they are educational, smart, funny.

So if you've got kids at home and you want something to stick them in front of that actually is going to entertain them and if they like that sort of thing anyway, the Math Men, I've been enjoying them all week.

Oh my God, that sounds that I'm getting right into that, let me tell you.

All right.

Well, on that note, we will be back, as always, with a for our question and answers episode on Thursday.

This week, there's no bonus episode for our members due to Kefalonia and various technical issues we've been having.

But I have a special treat for all of our members.

I have 10 pairs of tickets to give away for the Thursday Murder Club premiere.

It's going to be in Leicester Square.

All the stars will be there.

We've got Sir Ben Kingsley, Piers Brosnan and Helen Mirren, see the Emery.

David Tennant is in it.

Lots of huge names in it.

I'll be there.

My mum will be there.

Marina, I'm very much hoping you'll be there as well.

So I think it'll be a a fun evening.

So if you are a member, look out for the newsletter.

If you're not a member, feel free to join.

There will be other places to get those tickets to that premiere.

Oh, it's so exciting.

On that note, see you on Thursday.

See you on Thursday.

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It's David Ulishoga from Journey Through Time.

Here's that clip that we mentioned earlier.

If you look at all of the accounts of the fire at this point, as we get to the end of Sunday the second, the first day, this fire is not behaving in any way the way fires traditionally did in London.

And there are some people people who've argued that it was becoming a firestorm, that the heat and the wind and the movement of air caused by the fire was feeding it, was becoming self-sustaining, as it were.

John Evelyn, who's a great writer and a diarist of this moment, talks about the sound of the fire.

He said it was like thousands of chariots driving over cobblestones.

There are descriptions in Peps and elsewhere of this great arc of fire in the sky.

I mean, imagine that everything around you is colored by the flames, yellows and oranges, and above you is this thick black smoke.

This is a city you know, these are streets you walk, this is a place that's deeply familiar to you, and it looks completely otherworldly.

It looks like another, like a sort of landscape you've never seen before.

People describe the fire almost as if it's supernatural.

If you want to hear the full episode, listen to Journey Through Time, wherever you get your podcasts.