The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.
ITEM NUMBER ONE – This is a love story
It’s a little weird to think about how long It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has been on the air. The first episode aired in August 2005. We are coming up on 20 years of these maniacs on our televisions. A child born the day it premiered will be able to vote in the next election. That’s crazy to me. It’s one thing when cartoons do this (Simpsons, South Park, etc.) because animated characters do not age and recording voiceovers require much less time than actually going to set and getting into wardrobe and filming every scene in every location. But to do this with live-action for almost two decades is… it’s wild.
It also gives them the opportunity to pay off lonnnnng-simmering jokes, which the show did in glorious fashion in the third episode of this season, which aired last Wednesday. And I’ll get to that. But first, a brief trip back in time…
The year is 2009. The Hangover is burning up movie theaters. Beyoncé is singing about single ladies. The Philadelphia Phillies are coming off of a World Series victory, led by second baseman Chase Utley. Always Sunny ran with this in a classic bit where Mac writes a letter to Utley, his favorite player. Here, look.
The text of the letter is important because it is very funny, so let’s go ahead and blockquote it.
Dear Chase, I feel like I can call you Chase because you and me are so much alike. I would love to meet you someday, it would be great to have a catch. I know I can’t throw as fast as you but I think you would be impressed with my speed. I love your hair. You run fast.
Did you have a good relationship with your father? Me neither. These are all things we can talk about and more. I know you have not been getting my letters because I know you would write back if you did, and I hope you write back this time and we get to be good friends. I am sure our relationship would be a real ‘home run.’
Great stuff. Wonderful bit. A classic moment in television comedy.
A few years pass…
The year is now 2013. Miley Cyrus is swinging around on a wrecking ball. Everyone is doing the “I’m the captain now” thing from Captain Phillips. And the Philadelphia Phillies use their little fan mail segment to have some fun.
This, to be clear, is Chase Utley answering Mac’s letter. These words are important, too. Another blockquote.
Dear Mac, I feel like I can call you Mac because you called me Chase. ‘Sorry it took me five years to write back but I am really busy playing a lot of baseball for the Phillies. Thank you for the compliment on my hair. It is my fourth favorite thing after baseball, running fast, and my dad.
I’m sorry your dad doesn’t like you. Maybe you could try being a better son. Meeting you and having a game of catch sounds like a lot of fun but like I said I am really busy playing a lot of baseball for the Phillies.
Great stuff. Another wonderful bit.
A few more years pass…
The year is 2019. Horses are being taken to the old town road. Leonardo DiCaprio is pointing at his television in Quentin Tarantino movies. And Rob McElhenney, who plays Mac, has been invited to catch the first pitch at a Phillies game. Thrown by Chase Utley. They are having a catch.
It’s all happening. Here, look.
And it would be fine if that was where it ended. If the journey came to a close after a full decade with a crowd of South Philly lunatics shouting all around them. That would have been both nice and fitting and fun.
But.
Then Always Sunny came back for its 16th season earlier this month. And in the third episode of that season, well…
Yes. Chase Utley appeared on the show. As himself. With Mac this time. (He actually appeared in an episode back in 2010, too, but Mac was stranded in the woods and never got to meet him, which was also very good.) And Mac repeatedly referred to him as “Mr. Utley,” which was really kind of perfect. Also kind of perfect: Mac held up his phone and played the real fan mail video Chase filmed over a decade ago, just to smash reality and fiction together a little further.
The actual plot here isn’t even that important. I mean, it is, and I strongly recommend you watch the show if only because life is stressful and you deserve nice things, but this one plays even without the specifics, which, for the record, involve curses and monkey paws and all of the other madness that makes this show so good. But yeah, the real story here can be summed up in three bullet points:
- The show paid off a bit that had been brewing for almost 15 damn years
- This made me so happy that I’m still sitting here smiling about it over a week after it aired
- Go Phillies
Oh, also, it gave me this GIF, which I really do enjoy.
I am so proud of everyone involved in making this one happen.
ITEM NUMBER TWO – Apparently my favorite genre of show is “Kaley Cuoco uses binoculars”
Do you guys remember The Flight Attendant? I hope so. That was a fun show. Kaley Cuoco played a boozy party girl who got tangled up in a murder mystery and kind of hallucinated a lot of things, including at one point a giant stuffed teddy bear that was wearing sunglasses and tending bar at an airport lounge. She spent a surprising amount of time looking at things through binoculars. Rosie Perez was in the show and her character went on one of the more chaotic journeys in television history. I wrote about this all a while ago but let’s just copy and paste the Rosie bullet points here…
- She opens the season living in hiding in Iceland with a black market tuna smuggler played by Margaret Cho
- She picks a bunch of mushrooms from a forest, which we later see her mashing up into a fine dust/paste
- You guessed it, they are poisonous hallucinogenic mushrooms
- She is running around dosing people with them to keep her secret and/or investigate other secrets
- Her cover gets blown and she comes back to America using the pseudonym “Hildegard Bouffant”
- She goes hunting for a lockbox she hid in her friend’s strip club, but the friend sold the contents of the room to some strange lady, so Rosie and her stripper friend track her down to a weird trailer in the woods and, yup, you guessed it again, dose the woman with mushroom paste and steal back the lockbox while the woman has a full-on mental collapse on the woods
Which was and is a delight. And something I am pleased to be able to bring up again today thanks to the new Peacock series Based on a True Story, in which Kaley Cuoco plays a scattered real estate agent who is pregnant and in a stale marriage and decides that she and her husband should do a podcast with a charming serial killer. It’s a lot. I’m enjoying it so far as I creep my way through it. But that’s not the point. The point is…
BINOCULARS
AGAIN
KALEY CUOCO LOVES USING BINOCULARS IN WEIRD LITTLE MURDER SHOWS
This is now officially something I am monitoring. I do not know why I am like this. I’m sorry. Kind of.
ITEM NUMBER THREE – Vin Diesel fascinates me
Okay. This is a video Vin Diesel posted on Instagram this week. It’s him and Sung Kang — who plays Han in the Fast & Furious franchise, as if I needed to tell you that — chilling in some luxurious outdoor location with torches around them and Vin is saying… no. Let’s just go ahead and use Vin’s own words here.
“The conversation never stops. 5 am, Cayman Islands. And the world would never realize that we’re here dissecting the mythology of Fast, going over it. Going over all of the feedback from our incredible fans and how much we’re just enjoying being in this creative dojo.
“So much inspiration and time to reflect. And to talk and work out [Fast X: Part 2] and to double check all the aspects that need to be hit, and this kind of scary path that we’re going on for Part 2 for Fast X. We’re done with our press tour and now we have time to go back to building and that’s so much fun. We take it seriously because we know how important it is to all of you.”
A few notes:
- “Creative dojo” is just incredible
- I really do think Vin is under the impression the Fast & Furious movies are a cinematic endeavor on par with the Godfather trilogy
- I like to imagine Sung Kang just wanted to chill and have fun in the Cayman Islands but then Vin told him it was actually a work trip and he got very, very sad
Again, the man fascinates me. I imagine he’s exhausting to hang out with but I will gladly read anything anyone else writes after hanging out with him. That seems like a fair compromise on my part.
ITEM NUMBER FOUR – I have been thinking about this all week
Putting this here just because it has resulted in the creation of a visual that has not left my brain for a few days. It might never leave. It’s too early to tell. It all started when Trent Reznor — yes, the one you are thinking of — said this…
“I heard my daughter, who’s six, singing Dua Lipa the other day. She’s so into it, and it was so cool. Like, this is her music, you know? This is her thing… It really reminded me that the art of writing a well-crafted song. I teared up listening to a Dua Lipa track the other day because it was just a really well-done piece of music, you know? It was clever. It felt good. It’s difficult!”
… and then hopped into the comments of a Stereogum Instagram post about it to clarify exactly which song he was talking about.
Reznor himself responded, commenting, “it was Levitating. Her execution was spot on and when she got to the ‘sugarboo’ line it broke me.”
Okay, here’s what I need you to do…
Picture a sunny Saturday afternoon. You’re walking out of the grocery store, pushing your cart, with bags of groceries piled high and a long baguette sticking out of one of them like you’re a cartoon character who just went to the market. You hear the muffled sounds of a song playing from inside a car, just the thumping of the bass at first, but then… as you get closer… ahhh, yes, you recognize that song. It’s “Levitating” by Dua Lipa. And as you keep moving through the parking lot toward your car, you realize it’s coming from another parking spot in your row. And as you walk by this car, the one bumping a contagious and peppy dance song about young love, which I choose to believe is a jet black SUV, you peek inside the driver’s side window and you see former Nine Inch Nails leading singer Trent Reznor sitting there. By himself. In the car. With the windows rolled up.
And he is
Crying
His
Eyes
Out.
You see why this has been stuck in my head all week now, yes? And it’s probably stuck in yours now, too, right?
Well, I am sorry and/or you are welcome.
ITEM NUMBER FIVE – Honestly, this sounds like a better movie than Avengers
There’s a new Marvel show out called Secret Invasion. It’s got Emilia Clarke and Samuel L. Jackson and… actually, that is the extent of my knowledge about the show Secret Invasion. I only really mention it because I wanted an excuse to share this quote Samuel L. Jackson gave on the press tour about how wild Marvel gets over spoilers. So… yeah. Let’s post the quote!
“I remember when we got ready to do Avengers, someone printed out a copy of my Avengers script that had my watermark on it, and put it online for sale. I was shooting in Canada and Marvel came to Canada. It had been printed in the production office… They found out who it was, dude quit, left the country. They set up a fake buy for the script, dude didn’t show up. It was crazy.”
I’m going to be honest with you. And I’m going to say right up front that I am not a huge comic book guy so my opinion on all of this is colored by that. But…
Yeah. I really think I would rather watch a movie about someone stealing the tightly-guarded script to a massive comic book movie and then navigating the underworld with it while a massive media conglomerate engages in subterfuge to stop him than I would the actual comic book movie the script is for.
That would be fun. A little script heist. Please, for the love of God, someone consider this. Let Shane Black or Danny McBride write it. Let Ryan Gosling steal the script. Get Chris Tucker in there as the studio’s security expert. Have Zendaya play the star of the fake movie the script is for and get her tangled up in it all somehow. These are good ideas. To me. Which is what matters here. Because I am the one typing this paragraph.
Thank you.
READER MAIL
If you have questions about television, movies, food, local news, weather, or whatever you want, shoot them to me on Twitter or at [email protected] (put “RUNDOWN” in the subject line). I am the first writer to ever answer reader mail in a column. Do not look up this last part.
From Paul:
I saw a sign the other day, one of those ones that tells you various weight guidelines for things, like a scale, but the numbers had been erased and so it just said this:
MAX
MINIMUMAnd that, thanks to you, caused me to immediately think of a real guy named “Max Minimum.” I picture him with two days of stubble and a cigar and a jaw that makes it look like he chews on rocks all day. This is your brand.
Two notes here:
- I am so happy right now
- I just kind of whisper-shouted “GET ME MAX MINIMUM” into my empty living room
This was a good email.
AND NOW, THE NEWS
To Utah!
National park rangers are trying to figure out who stole reptile track fossils dating back at least 200 million years from land at Capitol Reef National Park, and they credit an astute social media follower for noticing the previously undetected theft.
FOSSIL HEIST
“A visitor commented on (the post) and said they had noticed something was missing from that trackway,” she told KSL.com on Wednesday. “It came from a visitor who is a paleontologist and was familiar with the site.”
After sifting through photos and paleontological records, park officials determined it was taken within the 2017-2018 timeframe..
Okay, just to be clear, I love this guy. Sitting around his house looking at pictures of bones, piecing together a mystery in his kitchen. Imagine how thrilling this must have been for him when he realized what was happening. When he looked at various pictures from various dates and noticed the fossil was missing. Sprinting into his bedroom to tell his wife — whose name is either Sharon or Linda in this scenario — with his laptop in his hands and wildfire in his eyes.
Good for him.
Park officials are hoping someone may have information about the theft or knows who currently has the fossils. They are offering up to a $1,000 reward for information that leads to the prosecution of the responsible party.
I choose to believe this is one of those situations where the person who stole the fossil didn’t ever try to resell it and just has it behind a trick wall in his office so he can admire it while sipping wine after dinner. I hope his cleaning lady uncovers it while dusting and reports him and I hope she uses the $1000 reward to buy herself a nice little spa weekend.
I would watch this movie tonight. Right after the script heist one I suggested earlier. We can make it a franchise. Starring an investigator named Max Minimum. Look at us out here connecting dots on a Friday. We’re doing great.