Month: August 2020

I was excited when PGA Tour 2K21 was announced, but also a touch skeptical. I haven’t owned a golf video game since the last year of EA’s Tiger Woods PGA Tour title, in part because there was a monotony to golf gaming — and an ease to playing them — that made it hard to want to go back to them over and over.

Golf is a sport that is, inherently, frustrating and imperfect. You return to the golf course because of moments of brilliance the stick in your head, making you believe that maybe you could replicate the good shots more often than the bad. But no matter what, the perfect round of golf is impossible and there is no final form to your golf game. Golf is a journey, a constant quest to be better, as evidenced by the likes of Tiger Woods constantly tinkering with their swing in hopes of finding something more to unlock in their game, even at the pinnacle of the sport. That’s a hard thing to capture in a video game.

There is a fine line between making a golf game that becomes no fun because you shoot in the 50s every round, and a golf game that’s no fun because it is impossible. A middle ground is hard to achieve, but I’m pleased to report that PGA Tour 2K21 does just that through its extensive difficulty settings that allow you to make the game right for you. You can tinker with the settings to find a way to make the game challenging, but not impossible; scoreable, but not so easy it feels like cheating.

My first advice to anyone picking up the game is to spend a good bit of time in the training mode, practicing your swing tempo and, most especially, getting a feel on the greens. I rushed through the training section and hustled my way to the career mode, assuming that I’ve played plenty of golf games in the past and this one will come to me quickly.

Wrong.

I missed the cut on my first three efforts at Korn Ferry Tour Q School on “Pro” difficulty (the fourth hardest of six possible presets, with plenty of customization available on top of that). My swing tempo was not consistent, leading to a number of hooks and slices off the tee, and my putting was truly a disaster. The putting mechanics in the game are extremely delicate and the first few rounds, if you decide to start on too hard of a difficulty, will lead you to occasionally blast a putt so far past the hole that you end up off the green. It’s incredibly frustrating, but as you play more your right thumb will steadily get better at gently pulling back on the joystick and then striking through at the right time to hit the correct power.

Reading putts is like every other golf game you’ve ever played, with a grid on the green and dashes moving at different speeds showing you how much slope the green has, both side to side and up or downhill. That was intuitive for me, but everything else about this game took some learning since I have never played on The Golf Club engine and I wish I’d spent more time on the virtual range dialing all of that in. After dropping back to “Pro-Am” to make life easier while I figured out my swing and putt timing, I was able to make it through Q School and onto the Korn Ferry Tour (which is like the PGA Tour’s version of AAA baseball).

I rolled through the Korn Ferry Tour season and earned my PGA Tour card, but swiftly realized that I had swung too far to the easy side and the game was quickly becoming not fun, so I returned to “Pro” mode. It’s there that I still reside, in the midst of my first PGA Tour season and have found the sweet spot, for now, where I still have my arduous rounds in the 70s, but when I play well, I’m capable of winning tournaments. There are still loose swings and bad putts and times where I get incredibly frustrated, but that’s golf and it is genuinely impressive how well they capture that essence.

This isn’t to say it’s a perfect simulation of real world golf, and I do have some gripes about some things. Distance is a real problem that I hope they find a way to tinker with, particularly when you end up on some of these longer PGA Tour courses in the 7,700 yard range. There are no attributes in the game, so you don’t get better at things as you go. You can add to your distance with certain clubs if you’re willing to sacrifice on forgiveness and swing plane (which dictates how perfect your joystick motion has to be to keep things straight), and while that’s understandable, the base distances just seem off. Your driver goes about 270 yards, with a 3-wood that goes 230 and a 5-wood that goes 210. I am a 5-handicap golfer in the real world, so I’m solid but far from a PGA Tour pro. I carry a 4-iron 210 without trouble and my 3-wood carries 250-plus.

I understand not wanting to make the game into a pitch-and-putt where you hit it 350 off of the tee, but I think they dialed things back too much in the interests of keeping it from being an arcade game. You could add 10-15 yards to each club and still keep that same realism, while not forcing me to launch fairway woods into half of the par 3s on Tour, when no Tour pro is pulling more than 5-iron in real life.

My other main gameplay gripe is how it is impossible to hit anything long out of the rough. Again, their heart is in the right place to make things realistic and not let you just hit whatever out of the rough with no penalty, but every course’s rough in the game plays like a U.S. Open at Bethpage Black. The longest club you can hit out of heavy rough is an iron, and your 4-iron will only carry about 145-150 yards. I have no doubts that making the rough play like real rough is an impossible task, but this is a swing too far in the direction of making it difficult. I can promise you, you can take a full cut with a long iron or hybrid out of the rough at TPC Sawgrass and still advance it pretty close to your normal distance.

Still, even with those complaints, the gameplay is terrific. The reality of the importance of swing tempo and the shot shaping/angle of attack controlling spin (rather than a spin button while the ball’s in the air) makes for a really fun experience that, once you really get a hang of it, allows you to play a lot of different shot types and make the ball do what you want.

Now, as for presentation, it stumbles in some of the same ways many sports video games do. Despite their best efforts, the commentary can often be redundant and offered little in the way of enhancing the game for me. I highly suggest that once you reach the Tour you go to settings and turn off the live updates because they happen way too often and, to me anyway, were obnoxious. I don’t play sports games because I want them to look like a sports television broadcast, I want them to feel like I’m playing the sport. They achieve the latter with the gameplay, but I don’t get why so many games get so caught up on the former. Make the game look good and play good and please spare me trying to make it some viewing experience by showing me what other players are doing on the course. I really don’t need fake highlights from other golfers.

The career mode arc is fine. They do a great job with the 15 courses they scanned into the game as well as the created courses that fill out the 30-event season. The rivalries have done little for me thus far, as the first few I’ve just rolled through and there’s no interaction with the challenges, you just have to beat them in tournaments in different areas. The same goes for the sponsor challenges. They’re a nice additional benchmark to occasionally think about while you’re playing, but I personally don’t care too much about getting more gear for my MyPlayer, so a lot of the apparel sponsors aren’t super appealing to me.

Beyond the career mode, the star of the game for me thus far is the Course Designer. It is a fully immersive experience that gives you the keys to create a golf course from scratch or, if you’d like, from templates. As someone who played high school golf at a mediocre home course, we would often talk about how we’d change things if we ever had lots of money and resources to redesign it. So, when I got this game, one of my primary goals was try to recreate Honey Creek Golf Club in Conyers, Georgia, but in my vision.

To build a course from scratch takes a lot of time — it was, like, 8 hours total I think and even then I wasn’t going very crazy with things — but it is, without a doubt, the thing that’ll keep me coming back to the game to create different courses and try out different designs. I had a few difficulties, like I couldn’t get it to add rough in places I wanted (I had no problems adding fairway or beefing up greens, just rough), and that might’ve just been a me problem. Also adding water features takes a lot of effort at first as you have to raise and lower the land where you want a pond or creek, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes easier. Overall the designer was terrific and the options for adjusting slopes, customizing the landscape, and adding objects, bunkers, and trees are very extensive.

I was highly impressed with PGA Tour 2K21, even with some of its flaws, and think it’s a terrific re-entry by the Tour to the gaming space — and that’s without really being able to dive into the flagship mode of The Golf Club games and join or start an online society with friends (or random people from the golf community). The career mode isn’t the most dynamic or immersive and there’s room for improvement, but the gameplay and course designer make it not just a worthwhile game to go out and get but something you’ll want to keep coming back to, because just like real golf, there will always be another level to try to master.

The Office reached a new level of popularity when it was added to Netflix, but if you’ve only watched the workplace sitcom on the streaming service, you’re missing out.

Office Ladies podcast hosts Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey recently discussed the season three episode “Traveling Salesman” (featuring the introduction of the term “Schruted”), although, as they discovered, they didn’t watch the same “Traveling Salesman”: the Netflix cut is different from the version included on the DVDs and what aired on NBC. “Angela and I were so confused, because we were trying to outline this episode and there were all these scenes that Angela was talking about that I remembered shooting…but that weren’t in the version I was watching,” Fischer said, via Mashable. Basically, “Traveling Salesman” and the following episode “The Return” aired on January 11 and January 18, 2011, but NBC combined them into an hour-long episode when they were re-aired as a “newpeat” months later in March, as part of sweeps week.

Kinsey broke down what you won’t see on Netflix, including a touching scene where Pam tells Angela that she won $100 from an art contest (a sixth grade elementary school art contest, but still!). “Jenna, we have one of those classic over-the-partition Angela and Pam scenes. And she tells Angela, and Angela has all this good favor in her heart towards Pam right now, you know?” she explained. “They’ve gone and got coffee, they’ve bonded. And so Angela goes, ‘Congratulations’ and then she says, ‘I really like having these little moments with you.’” The bond between the co-workers is quickly broken, however, when Pam declines Angela’s offer to take home a kitten. “[Angela] instantly goes back to just being this cold, snarky person to Pam. That’s it. Their friendship’s over,” Kinsey said. “It was so fleeting.”

Also fleeting: the number of days before The Office moves from Netflix to Peacock. The constant maneuvering of shows and movies between streaming services is, along with the bonus scenes, yet another reason why you shouldn’t give up on physical media. You never know when The Office might end up on Quibi in seven-minute chunks. Not ideal.

Another difference between Netflix vs. DVDs: “Traveling Salesman” on Netflix begins with Michael and Harvey, his talking computer, but on the DVD, the cold open is relegated to the deleted scenes. You know who sucks more than Jim? Whoever decided to leave out Harvey.

(Via Mashable)

Ah, the power of social media. It can make overnight stars of just about anyone with some gumption and a WiFi connection — which is exactly what happened to Georgia teacher Audrianna Williams earlier this week when her rap video welcoming students of Monroe Comprehensive High School to the instrumental from Jack Harlow’s hit song “What’s Poppin” went viral. Williams uploaded the video to Instagram along with fellow Monroe educator Callie Evans, it quickly garnered over 300,000 views and jumped to Twitter, where users expressed admiration for the teachers’ lyrical skills.

Even Jack Harlow himself was impressed and surprised the teachers during an appearance on Good Morning America today, telling them that they “made my song better” and “killed it.” Harlow shared how committed instructors had made an impact in his life and then surprised the teachers with a gift: Gift cards worth $1,000 toward whatever the two wanted. “I grew up with teachers that had a huge influence on me my whole life,” Harlow said. “What y’all provide to society is invaluable. I can’t thank you enough for doing the job you guys do, so just as a small token of my appreciation I wanted to give both of you two thousand dollar gift cards to treat yourselves to whatever you want. I really appreciate y’all doing what you do.”

Evans and Williams say that they’ve collaborated on multiple videos over the years, coming up with the idea four years ago. They have produced an end-of-the-school-year rap for each year since then. And while there are those who would love to see the teachers pursue music full-time, it appears that they are focusing on the upcoming school year, saying, “This video was created to calm the fears and nerves of all involved and encourage them to strive for excellence this school term regardless of the online instructional model that we are in.”

Watch the video and the teachers’ encounter with Jack Harlow above.

Jack Harlow is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

It was reported recently that Britney Spears told a court that she is “strongly opposed” to having her father, Jamie Spears, be her sole conservator (as he has been) and requested that her situation “be changed substantially in order to reflect the major changes in her current lifestyle and her stated wishes.” It appears, however, that Spears’ wish has not been granted.

Reuters reports that Spears asked for her care manager to replace her father as sole conservator, but a court document reveals that her father will retain control over Spears’ business and personal affairs until at least February 2021.

Spears’ father recently declared #FreeBritney “a joke,” saying, “All these conspiracy theorists don’t know anything. The world don’t have a clue. It’s up to the court of California to decide what’s best for my daughter. It’s no one else’s business. […] People are being stalked and targeted with death threats. It’s horrible. We don’t want those kinds of fans. I love my daughter. I love all my kids. But this is our business. It’s private.”

Yesterday, meanwhile, Spears received a message of support from the ACLU, who tweeted, “People with disabilities have a right to lead self-directed lives and retain their civil rights. If Britney Spears wants to regain her civil liberties and get out of her conservatorship, we are here to help her.”

Read our recent recap of the #FreeBritney situation here.

Is Bright Eyes a band or a nom de plume for Conor Oberst? The band members insist it’s the former, especially in light of Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was, their first album in nine years. In interviews promoting the reunion album, Oberst and his bandmates Mike Mogis and Nate Walcott have made sure to assert, time and again, that this is their most collaborative effort yet. You sense that, perhaps, they’re protesting too much. Because, no matter what, Bright Eyes will likely always be viewed through the lens of Oberst’s life and point of view.

Consider it the burden of being one of the most intensely loved and scrutinized singer-songwriters of the last 25 years. For the most die-hard Conor-ologists, the past five years have offered plenty of raw data to hash out and psychoanalyze. The 2014 rape accusation, later retracted, kicked off an extended period of personal problems for Oberst that also include health issues, the end of his marriage, and the death of his brother. Understandably, he has largely retreated to the comfort of bands, which has put him in close proximity to trusted friends and confidants and also lessened the pressure on him to serve as the focal point. Before reuniting Bright Eyes, he recorded a different reunion album, 2015’s Payola, with his aughts-era political punk band Desaparacidos, and formed Better Oblivion Community Center with Phoebe Bridgers, putting out a self-titled record in 2019. (In BOCC, Oberst arguably wasn’t even the biggest star, at least for millennial and zoomer audiences.)

Generally, those bands allowed Oberst to work inside of a leaner-than-usual operation, with lower stakes both personal and artistic. Contrast that with 2016’s Ruminations, his best album of this period, an unsparing and brutally austere acoustic work that laid his pain and anger bare. Compared with the tuneful indie pop of the BOCC album, Ruminations is a grueling howl of despair that digs deeper than any of his other recent records, while also dramatically paring back the grandiose arrangements he’s come to favor in his post-I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning work. (Oberst eventually released an album of greatly elaborated versions of the Ruminations material, 2017’s Salutations, that greatly dulled their original impact.)

On Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was, Oberst — in collaboration with Mogis and Walcott, as we’re required to duly note — is back to working on a huge canvas. Whereas Ruminations was unrelentingly spare, these songs are overstuffed with Walcott’s signature orchestral flourishes and a bevy of Mogis’ instrumental overdubs. Meanwhile Oberst is once again drawn to many of his pet themes: the suffocation of fame, the certainty of apocalypse (be it universal or his own personal demise), his desire to mature and achieve wisdom while also being wary of aging and the accompanying decay. (He sings in one of the album’s best songs, the self-explanatory “Forced Convalescence,” about “catastrophizing” turning 40. Though, really, he has also catastrophized every other age.)

All the while, a lingering question persists: Why did Bright Eyes come back? Did this album really need to exist? These are crucial riddles that Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was never quite resolves.

For the average Conor Oberst fan — the person who assumes that Oberst alone is synonymous with Bright Eyes — having this specific vehicle for his songs no longer really matters beyond the nostalgic power of the brand. But for Oberst himself, the idea to reunite his famous project seems to have been borne out of a spontaneous sentimental (and drunken) impulse. According to Billboard, Oberst brought it up while at a Christmas party with Walcott in 2017, after which “they immediately huddled in a bathroom to FaceTime Mogis, which they now recall with laughter due to how ‘festive’ they were.” Since the reunion was pursued in secret, they could proceed at their own pace, without any of the external pressure that might normally be part of a Bright Eyes album.

You can hear the time that was spent imagining these expansive soundscapes. Songs like “Just Once In The World” — a spiky waltz that unfolds with layers upon layers of guitars, drums, and strings — or the self-aware film-score sweep of “Stairwell Song” are lush sonic worlds upon themselves. But it still has the shape of a “typical” Bright Eyes record, right down to the spoken-word interlude that inevitably opens the album. Aesthetically, it feels like the album that might have followed 2007’s cult-obsessed country-rock fantasia Cassadaga had Bright Eyes reconsidered putting out 2011’s maligned (though sort of underrated) The People’s Key. Like Cassadaga, Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was unfolds as a series of epic Americana mini-symphonies, each one more grand and big-sounding than the last.

All that’s missing, unfortunately, is the most essential ingredient — the do-or-die tension that distinguishes the best of Bright Eyes, as well as Oberst on his own. This band’s greatest albums have an operatic, almost hysterical quality that pushes them to the brink of collapse. It is the opposite of low-stakes music — they are performed as if the room the band is playing in might fall into the Earth at any moment. Obviously, that kind of heightened emotional pitch is harder to replicate in middle age. It’s not even all that preferable once you’ve exited those ill-advised drama-hunting years in your teens and 20s. But Ruminations showed that Oberst could walk that tightrope in a more muted kind of way, as a grounded but no less haunted grown-up. On that album, his resigned sigh registered with the intensity of a scream.

There are no such moments on Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was. As impressive as is it as a production and (again) as a collaboration of musicians who each bring a unique set of skills to the table, it all feels a little remote. Songs come and go, usually at a stately pace, and as the record unfolds over 14 tracks — at least four too many — it all begins to fade into a samey, torturously mid-tempo, bombastic haze. Because the necessary conviction just isn’t there, the album never achieves the cathartic excess of an album like Lifted or even Cassadaga. It merely feels bloated.

If all art is ultimately a self-indulgent exercise, then Oberst was certainly justified in reuniting with his old friends Walcott and Mogis and making music that rekindled their bonds and soothed his troubled soul. For the listener, however, Down In The Weeds, Where The World Once Was is an initially frustrating, and then dull experience. Hopefully, it was better as a studio hang than it is as an album.

Frank Ocean very much does things at his own pace. Endless and Blonded came within a day of each other, four years after Channel Orange. Now, though, he may have something else in the works, and his collaborator is waiting on him to get it finished.

The New York Times‘ Kyle Buchanan spoke with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino for a yet-to-be-published interview, but he offered a preview of it on Twitter yesterday. He tweeted that the director said he and Ocean worked together on a “secret project,” and that he continued, “We were collaborating on a music video that never happened. I use the Times to launch an appeal to Frank: Frank, let’s do that video. Come on.”

In response to his tweet, a Twitter user asked Buchanan if Guadagnino had any updates on his feature film adaptation of Bob Dylan’s 1975 album Blood On The Tracks, which was announced back in 2018. It appears that project will no longer be happening, or at least Guadagnino isn’t working on it any longer, as Buchanan noted, “He wasn’t able to get the budget he wanted for it.”

Ocean has expressed his appreciation of Call Me By Your Name on multiple occasions, including when he spoke with its star, Timothée Chalamet.

Earlier this week, Cobra Kai star and original The Karate Kid star Ralph Macchio offered us insight into the one significant question that hasn’t been answered yet. While I hope that the show will eventually reconcile that issue with time, people can catch up on the first two seasons when the show arrives on Netflix (August 28) with a Season 3 to come. One of the show’s creators, Josh Heald, recently spoke up about production not being delayed at all due to Covid-19, so hopefully, we’ll see a release date from Netflix soon.

In the meantime, Heald has spoken with Comic Book Resource about how Season 3 (which has a lot to clean up) will work to be “bigger and exciting and take it to the next level” for Johnny Lawrence’s students and Daniel LaRusso’s budding Miyagi-do 2.0. Heald reveals that the series wants to show more complex fight choreography as the students improve, but he also feels that it’s necessary to keep things consistent with the show’s existing emotional tone. It’s easy to see why he’s looking at The Matrix (that the trilogy used kung fu and not karate is beside the point) as an example of why dropping character and plot focus (in favor of building the craziest action scenes possible) is something that Cobra Kai doesn’t want to do:

“[We] always want to stay true to why we love this story in the first place, which is the characters. So sometimes, we don’t want to go too far where it becomes The Matrix and feels like a different thing but it is the balance between really focusing on the story while thinking about those ways to make it bigger.”

It’s a wise approach, given that all the fights in Cobra Kai (and The Karate Kid) are emotionally grounded. The stakes are about the people involved and their rivalries and the settling of old beefs, not necessarily the fight moves themselves. Well, other than that crane kick, but we could debate that all day. What matters is that Heald is stressing that the “heightened stakes” of The Karate Kid II are what have most recently inspired Cobra Kai production, and he is promising “fireworks” to come, “but it’s not something that feels different, necessarily.”

Further, Macchio revealed to us that the show will lean even more heavily into the teen rivalry of Miguel and Robby as their senseis continue to guide them and (possibly) make amends for the past. Season 3 certainly won’t be a dull affair, that’s for sure.

(Via CBR)

Maybe, just maybe, the final line of the first John Wick movie should have been, “I’m thinking I’m back … and I’m bringing Bill and Ted with me.”

So it all started a decade ago… actually, scratch that. It actually all started in the late 1980s when Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson wrote Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A movie about two earnest, spaced-out high school students traveling through time that cost next to nothing, starred two actors (Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves) who certainly wouldn’t be described as “famous” at the time – that went on to gross over $40 million dollars, which seemed kind of impossible. (Also, if you happened to be a kid at the time, this movie seemed like the biggest thing in the world.) A sequel would follow in 1991 that would do about the same type of numbers, followed by an animated series, then that was it.

Now let’s go back 10 years, right when everyone started realizing IP was king at the box office, so Solomon and Matheson wrote a script on spec and it was flatly rejected by the studio because they had their own idea for Bill and Ted – and it didn’t involve Reeves or Winter, both at one point were being replaced by Instagram stars. But then John Wick happened, which reasserted Reeves as an international box office action star and all of a sudden Reeves returning as Ted seemed like a pretty good idea. Plus, an online campaign for a third movie – which finds Bill and Ted battling their future selves over the song that will unite the world – caught fire and, now, 29 years since the last movie, Bill and Ted are back. Ahead, Solomon and Matheson explain just how that happened.

When I spoke to Alex Winter a couple of weeks ago, I asked if there was a moment he thought this would never happen and he said, “Oh, yeah.”

Ed Solomon: Yeah, we’re both laughing out loud. There was only one moment where I actually thought, “This is actually happening,” and that was when Dean said action on the first day of production. I swear to you, I did not believe it until then because we kept getting so close. It’s like we kept coming to the altar and they’d say, “You may now kiss the bride,” and you pull up the veil, and it’s just a skeleton that dissolves into dust and we’re back to square one. We had a couple of days a couple of weeks before we started shooting where we lost financing, and we had to scramble. We lost our third investor, who was the biggest investor. And our two other investors, who were individuals, stepped up and really helped us out. If it wasn’t for them, there would be no movie. But yeah, we fought, and fought, and fought, and fought to get this thing made. It was very stressful.

I guess my follow-up to that is, why? Alex Winter, a renowned director, and you’ve got one of the biggest action stars in the world wanting to make a third movie for this popular piece of IP.

Chris Matheson: Yeah, they were kind of culty movies. They weren’t gigantic yet. They both did well, but they weren’t enormously successful. And I think internationally, they weren’t particularly successful because comedy typically doesn’t travel that well. So, there was that. They just didn’t look at it as being super valuable. Also, we were wanting to deal with themes that pertain to failure and loss and mortality. And that’s a heavy lift for a comedy.

Alex also said a studio wanted to replace he and Keanu with Instagram stars.

Matheson: I believe that was true for a while, yeah.

Wait. Really? Actually Instagram stars?!

Solomon: Yeah, teenagers.

Matheson: Go back and reboot it, get a couple of young guys to restart it was the idea.

Solomon: When we first wrote this, we wrote it on spec with Alex and Keanu as our partners. And I would say there was a certain amount of, I guess in hindsight, hubris because we thought it’s a no-brainer. But when we turned it into the studio that actually owned the underlying material, it was met with kind of a resounding silence, partly because they had another movie in mind that they’d already had written. But we were, of course, not aware of it, that I believe involved young Bill and Ted. It was like a reboot of new Bill and Ted who time traveled with a cell phone. I didn’t read the script, so I don’t know anything about it. That was our initial hurdle. The second hurdle was what Chris said: Because the first movie, it was a culty hit. It wasn’t a giant mega-hit and it didn’t have a big foreign release, so there weren’t numbers to support it. So, it took the power of social media and the voices of the fans to rise up enough to let the powers that be know, “Oh wait, maybe there are people interested in seeing this, and maybe people have discovered this movie over the last three decades, so maybe there is a market.” Thank God, because we fought forever to get it made.

So you were fighting against another script you never read. Did you guys have power to stop that? Because how do you fight against a studio that’s already got this reboot in mind?

Solomon: You don’t. We couldn’t. They could do whatever they want.

So you had no veto in this?

Solomon: We didn’t. Yeah, our very first deal was for a movie that we’d ever made. I think if there was a chance for them to extract our own children from us to give to them during that deal, we probably gave it to them. Honestly, it was the worst deal you could ever make, and we had no power going forward in any way. The only power we had was the power of persuasion, and that didn’t work for a long time. Then, finally, it did work, but it took forever.

Matheson: To the degree that we had power, it was our relationship with Alex and Keanu because I think that they felt that if there was going to be another Bill & Ted, they wanted it to be written by us, so that did give us a little bit.

They’ve got another script ready. They’re ready with their Instagram stars. It’s just remarkable that you got that turned around and now this version exists…

Solomon: That is where the power of the fans came in. And that’s also where, thankfully, John Wick and Keanu’s international presence grew and the fans spoke to such a level that the powers that be, the people who finance this stuff, finally heard it and went, “Oh, maybe we should do it this way.”

So, John Wick is, at least partially, a reason for this?

Matheson: I think it’s a big reason. Yeah, the playing field changed after that came out because at that point, given the Keanuaissance, it’s called, and this not being a very expensive movie, why would you not want to have Keanu play Ted again? Just from a business standpoint, it seemed kind of obvious.

It’s interesting each movie has a different director. Do you two have any say in that?

Solomon: We didn’t have anything to do with the director change in Bogus Journey. It wasn’t in our power. I don’t know why they replaced Stephen Herek. We thought Stephen did a great job and he was a lovely guy to work with, so I have no idea why he didn’t do the second movie, but he was replaced. Again, out of our control. In hindsight, you know what? I think it’s kind of cool that each movie has a slightly different signature, partially due to where Chris and I were as writers at the time they were written, and also partially due to the directors. This movie, we put Dean Parisot on before we got it made. I had known Dean for a long time, and Chris and I both felt like Dean is the perfect guy for this. Not just his absurd sense of humor, but also, he’s lived life and he is like Bill and Ted. He’s had ups and downs on professional and personal level, and he’s a really nice guy and a big-hearted guy. And he knows a lot about music, so on this one, we brought Dean on.

Matheson: I accept that it’s possible that Steve wasn’t replaced, that Steve stepped off.

Solomon: He might’ve. I actually don’t know. That’d be a good question to ask him.

‘Bill and Ted Face the Music’ will be available via VOD on August 28th. You can contact Mike Ryan directly on Twitter.

Kanye West has been active on Twitter in recent days, usually in the form of a quick daily burst of tweets. In one of those from the past few days, he shared a seemingly handmade poster that features a “Kanye 2020 Vision” logo tiled with photos of various faces, all of which appears to be held together with staples. Two of the people featured on the poster are Vogue editor Anna Wintour and actress Kirsten Dunst. Dunst caught wind of the poster, and it left her with questions.

These days, Dunst mostly uses her Twitter for sharing links to songs and videos, but she took a break from her regularly scheduled programming to address the Kanye situation, writing in response to the poster, “What’s the message here, and why am I apart of it? [shrugging emoji].”

Dunst hasn’t offered a public endorsement of any of the presidential candidates against whom Kanye is running, but she threw her support behind Bernie Sanders in March, before he dropped out of the presidential race in April. She said in a statement at the time, “All his life, Bernie Sanders has had the courage to speak the truth, even when no one else would. He stands up for people — all people. Right now we need his courage and conviction to bring justice to this country, to the environment and to the world. It is my honor to join my voice with his, and with the voices of the millions of hardworking people who know a better world is possible and are ready to fight for it. Together we will win.”

Okay, let’s tick off all the reasons Apple TV’s new comedy Ted Lasso should not have worked, just to get it out of the way:

• It is a television show based on a short-lived advertising campaign
• The advertising campaign, while legitimately funny in bursts, centered on a thinly-drawn character with a silly name
• It leaned into a series of riffs on a “football and soccer are different” subject that has been covered many times
• Turning this into a full-length television series without falling into the “dumb American from flyover country doesn’t understand simple concepts” trap seems borderline impossible

That’s is a lot of booby traps for one television show to avoid. On paper, your skepticism is justified. And yet!

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to report that Ted Lasso — the first three episodes of which are available now, with new ones dropping on Fridays — is good. Very good. Almost unreasonably good, given the condescending bullet points above. In hindsight, it should not have been this surprising. It comes from Bill Lawrence, creator of Scrubs and Cougar Town and producer of many good shows. It stars Jason Sudeikis, a very likable and charming man who should have been given a few cracks at a sitcom lead by now. None of my shock at the show’s quality has anything to do with them. It mostly stems from my own failure of imagination. This is on me. I can and will do better.

Let’s back up, though. Let’s hit the facts. The character of Ted Lasso originated in little ads to promote the NBC Sports acquisition of the rights to English Premier League soccer. Again, they were fun in concentrated small doses. Here, look.

The version of Ted Lasso who shows up in the series is a little different. He’s not quite as oblivious. He’s eager to learn. He’s an incredibly sweet man who tries to establish a connection with everyone he meets and effect change through sheer force of personality, kind of like if Leslie Knope had a mustache and 80 percent less frantic energy and 200 percent more opinions about the Cover 2 defense. There’s also some necessary world-building that takes place early on to provide an answer to the otherwise perplexing “Why did a football coach take a job coaching soccer in England?” and “Why would an English soccer team hire an American football coach?” questions. The latter has a fun dash of the Major League “let’s sabotage this thing” vibe to it, with a twist for the reason. The former involves a one-sided phone conversation with his wife that is kind of devastating and a solid piece for Sudeikis’s future Emmy submission. There is depth here.

There are also, as you might suspect, other characters. Phil Dunster and Brett Goldstein play members of the team named Jamie and Roy, respectively, polar opposites, one a spoiled phenom with a golden leg, the other a grouchy aging star with a glorious bath mat of chest hair. Hannah Waddingham plays the team’s intimidating, biscuit-loving owner. Juno Temple plays Jamie’s girlfriend, Keeley, a model and paparazzi darling who is part muse, part amateur psychologist. Nick Mohammed plays Nathan, a low-level team staffer and punching bag who Ted turns into the team’s tactical mastermind. All of them start out skeptical of Ted Lasso. All of them can’t help but be hopelessly charmed by him. Kind of like the audience watching the show at home.

A lot of this has to do with Sudeikis, who appears to be having a blast. It’s a tough needle to thread, playing an almost relentlessly upbeat character surrounded by cranky figures who start out expecting and/or hoping to see him fail. That can get exhausting if it’s too saccharine and far-fetched if it works too easily. Sudeikis pulls it off with a kind of laid back, calming pleasantness, with Ted gently scraping away at people’s tough exteriors to get to their mushy centers. (As the season progresses, we start to find out why each of the other characters is prickly, largely thanks to Ted’s personal touch.) And pulling it off is a double triumph here because he’s writing and producing as well as acting. There’s a lot of weight on his shoulders in all of this, and he carries it well. The biggest takeaway isn’t so much that Sudeikis is a burgeoning sitcom king as much as it is that he probably should have been one already.

The whole thing somehow ends up running parallel and perpendicular to another good sports-adjacent show, Brockmire. Like Brockmire, it started as a short, one-note comedy bit — the Brockmire character first appeared in a Funny or Die sketch — and grows and grows into something deeply funny and heartfelt. Unlike Brockmire, the main character is a well-adjusted sweetheart who cultivates positive relationships with the people around him instead of a narcotics-Hoovering trainwreck who has to constantly fight his natural impulse to blow up his entire life every morning. (Also unlike Brockmire, Ted Lasso can dance, as Sudeikis breaks out his old “What’s Up With That?” shuffle early on, a performance that leaps immediately to number two on my Dance-Related Moments In Bill Lawrence Shows Power Rankings, just behind the Turk dancing to “Poison” on Scrubs. This is extremely high praise.) Brockmire ran four seasons and became one of the best shows on television in that period. Ted Lasso was just picked up for a second season after a promising start. I would be very happy with at least two more.

Let’s close this out by being fair. I opened up this discussion with snotty bullet points about why the show shouldn’t have worked. Here are some bulletproof points about why it does:

• Funny
• Sweet
• Makes you feel good
• Made by talented people who clearly thought a lot about making it work
• Main character is named “Ted Lasso”
• I know I used the silly name thing as a reason why it shouldn’t have worked but, I’m sorry, I love it
• Mustache
• Dancing

A formula for success if I ever saw one.