Since announcing her pivot to a solo career, Paramore’s Hayley Williams has been highly prolific. Williams has been releasing a new song on a near-weekly basis. The singer compiled five of her singles into the EP Petals For Armor I then shortly thereafter began promoting part two of the project. Williams’ latest track “Why We Ever” arrived last week and now her newly-released single “Dead Horse” arrives as the last track off Petals For Armor II.
Announcing the song’s release on Twitter, Williams wrote: “this one is a little different for me. im nervous. but im ready.” Still true to her sound, Williams tries her hand at a different hook. Rather than opening with instrumentals, Williams uses a sample of her voice saying: “It took me three days to send you this, but, uh, sorry. I was in a depression but I’m trying to come out of it now.” As her voice fades, a cheery beat arrives alongside honest lyricism about remaining in an unhealthy relationship for too long.
She said of the song in a statement:
“PFA II is the perfect interlude between where Petals began and where it’s going… Part III isn’t far behind. I needed these songs to help me get to a place where I could name my shame, take inventory of emotional scars, true friends, awful coping mechanisms, and discover what I desire for my life.
The latest single, ‘Dead Horse’, offers strength back to a younger, weaker version of myself. I feel like all of this needed to be said in order to embody the kind of woman I hope to be”
Just ahead of the song’s release, Williams addressed some of the criticism she’s been facing about the rapid release of singles. In a tongue-in-cheek video, Williams asked for men on the internet to give her “productive advice” on releasing a record to help her “after 15 or 16 years in the industry and five other albums.”
my album Petals For Armor drops – in full – May 8th
It’s odd, but even with The Fall Off on the horizon, one of the most anticipated J. Cole projects in recent months wasn’t the North Carolina rapper’s official album, but instead it was a mixtape created by DJ Critical Hype that promised to mash up some of Cole’s most beloved vocals with production from Virginia Beach hitmakers The Neptunes. Now, after months of teasing the mash-up project, Critical Hype’s In Search Of… Cole has arrived.
Clocking in at 30 tracks, In Search Of… Cole draws from all over both acts’ respective catalogs, from J. Cole’s first mixtape, The Come Up, all the way up to his most recent solo release, KOD, and incorporates fan-favorite freestyles, singles, and deep cuts, with songs like “Forbidden Fruit,” “Lights Please,” and “Love Yourz” set to classic Neptunes beats like “Let’s Get Blown,” “Come Close,” and “Hot Damn.”
The reason behind the crispiness of the blends is simple; Critical Hype was given unprecedented access to Cole’s original vocals after reaching out to Dreamville president Ibrahim Hamad. Critical Hype told Genius, “I thought it would be nice to give a different perspective of Cole’s style and flows over different production. Cole was pictured in the studio with Pharrell at the beginning of his career. They were supposed to work on something. I don’t know why it never came to fruition, but I thought it would be dope to hear Cole over some classic Neptunes beats.”
Episode 210 (season 2, episode 10) of The Sopranos originally aired on HBO on March 19th, 2000, when Julia Roberts was burning up the screen in Erin Brockovich and Vladimir Putin was just a week away from his first election. “Bust Out” saw Tony and his crew running a classic “bust-out scam” on Tony’s high school pal turned degenerate gambler, David Scatino, played by Terminator 2′s Robert Patrick. The plan involved the gang running up huge debts on Davey’s sporting goods store’s lines of credit with no intention of paying them back. It’s a smaller-scale version of the same basic business model currently employed, fully legally, by private equity companies.
Never listened before? Well, Matt even made a video trailer for this episode:
Almost 20 years and one month to the day since it first aired, Matt and Vince are joined by producer and TV personality Nando Vila (The Naked Truth, Happy Ending, The Young Turks) to discuss this episode in Pod Yourself A Gun 210. We provide the cultural context in The Wayback Machine, run through storylines in Bada-B Stories, translate slang with Stevie B in Gabba Vafongool, identify cultural reference points in It’s The 90s, and figure out who “Da Real Gangsta” is. Along the way, we discuss our favorite and least favorite scenes and try, desperately, unsuccessfully, to get Matt to stop saying “tiddies.” It’s fine, The Sopranos was an R-rated show, why shouldn’t our Sopranos rewatch podcast be an R-rated show?
As always, ours is the first and only Sopranos rewatching podcast on the internet and if you disagree with us you are wrong and a liar. Please leave us a five star review on iTunes because we love you. Email us at [email protected], leave us voicemails at 415 275 0030.
The prequel book to The Hunger Games series hasn’t even hit bookshelves yet, but that hasn’t stopped Lionsgate from officially moving forward with a film adaptation.
According to Deadline, Lionsgate has secured director Francis Lawrence, who helmed Catching Fire and both Mockingjay, Part 1 and Mockingjay, Part 2 in the hit franchise starring Jennifer Lawrence, Liam Hemsworth, and Josh Hutcherson. Producers Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson will also return, with a script by series newcomer Michael Arendt (Little Miss Sunshine).
While the original films focused on the revolution sparked by Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen, the prequel will center around the early years of Donald Sutherland’s fascist overlord, President Snow. But before that story hit theaters, it will first unfold in the prequel novel The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes written by Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins, who is looking forward to seeing her latest creation get the big-screen treatment.
“Lionsgate has always been the cinematic home of The Hunger Games, and I’m delighted to be returning to them with this new book,” said Collins. “From the beginning, they have treated the source material with great respect, honoring the thematic and narrative elements of the story, and assembling an incredible team both in front of and behind the camera. It’s such a pleasure to be reuniting with Nina, Francis, and Michael to adapt the novel to the screen, and having them share their remarkable talents, once again, with the world of Panem. I look forward to collaborating with them and all at Lionsgate as we bring The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to theaters worldwide.”
As of yet, there is no word on casting, and Hunger Games fans should probably temper their expectations on a release date happening in the near future as Hollywood continues to face a backlog of production shutdowns from the current health crisis.
Previously on the Best and Worst of Raw: Scott Heisel filled in for me so I could move across the country during a plague. I missed Sarah Logan getting stomped out of the promotion, a rematch from NXT TakeOver: War Games, and Jerry Lawler’s first draft jokes about Akira Tozawa’s culture and ethnicity.
One more thing: Hit those share buttons! Spread the word about the column on Facebook, Twitter and whatever else you use. Be sure to leave us a comment in our comment section below as well. I know we always ask this, and that this part is copy and pasted in every week, but we appreciate it every week. Up next is WWE: Donkey Kong, and we can’t wait.
And now, the Best and Worst of WWE Raw for April 20, 2020.
Best, Mostly: Drew McIntyre’s About To End This Faction’s Whole Career
Drew McIntyre will defend the WWE Championship against a former champion, Seth Rollins, in a Stamford Office Building Cafeteria Brawl or whatever at Money in the Bank. Between now and then he’s going to run through Zelina Vega’s entire faction of handsome narcissists, as Andrade, Austin Theory, and Angel Garza have become the Raw equivalent of the Artist’s Collective; a talented heel group loosely in charge of a secondary championship who lose to the more important characters every week, because they’re willing to keep showing up.
Last week, McIntyre pinned Andrade with a Brogue Claymore Kick so Rollins could “send a message” to the champion. This week, McIntyre pins Angel Garza with a Claymore Kick to send a message back. He also makes sure to beat up Andrade and Austin Theory during the match, Claymores Theory afterward, and gives Garza a second Claymore just because. Did you pick up on WWE’s subtle storytelling here? I hope none of them has a pet spider, McIntyre might drag it over to the ramp and crush it with some ring steps.
So, what’s next week? McIntyre vs. Austin Theory, with McIntyre also Claymore Kicking Andrade and Angel Garza? These three should team up with Sami Zayn, Cesaro, and Shinsuke Nakamura and start losing 6-on-1 handicap matches.
In an attempt to clarify how I’m feeling about this, I know the role of the most talented people in wrestling is often being a charismatic bad guy and feeding yourself to the dipshit hero on an assembly line, and that WWE’s an extremely Dipshit Hero-centric promotion. Hulk Hogan, John Cena, Roman Reigns, whoever. I get that the roster’s incredibly small due to running shows in an empty laser warehouse in the middle of a global pandemic, and understand the thought of putting a bunch of lower ranking heels who can work in matches against the new champ to make him look as cool and dominant as possible. It’s just that as a fan, I’ve never quite been able to find peace with the fact that being great at what you do is never as important as what you look like, or which role you can fill. It’s fine. Drew is cool, and it’s not like Vega’s team (which we’re calling “A to Z”) don’t all have 20 years of career ahead of them to stumble into something more creatively rewarding.
Five Under Four
This week’s show features five women’s matches, with all five either being under or right at four minutes long. That’s more of an observation than a critique.
Up first is Shayna Baszler turning Indi Hartwell into Indi Hartunwell with her Modified Seth Rollins Stomp to the arm. Baszler broke Sarah Logan’s arm last week, so she does the same to Indi here. Bonus points to Indi for briefly avoiding the stomp by, you know, moving her arm out of the way instead of keeping it bent at that specific angle. It only worked once, but it completely baffled Shayna there for a minute.
Shout-out to the lowest level NXT talent getting regular Raw and Smackdown gigs because they basically live in the parking lot. It’s gonna be weird as hell when arena shows resume and the roster normalizes again, and Brendon Vink stops being a main character.
I missed Nia Jax squashing Kairi Sane on last week’s show, so they were kind enough to do it again for me here. Here’s Nia lifting up the recently concussed Sane by the throat and throwing her short so she lands awkwardly on her hip and the back of her neck gets smashed under the bottom buckle. We all have fun here.
WWE
I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly why certain wrestlers can do dangerous stuff and get away with it but every single misstep Nia Jax takes gets turned into a “she hurts people” meme. As far as I can tell, it’s not that she “doesn’t know how to wrestle” or anything dramatic like that, because of course she does. I think it’s the fact that she never seems in control of what’s happening in the ring, and some combination of her physicality, timing, and overconfident in-ring character makes it legitimately look like she’s not taking care of her opponent. She’s just hurling them around or dropping them or punching them in the face in dangerous fashion because she’s *acting,* and the image of dominance and the performance are more important than the art of “hurting” your opponent without actually hurting them. There’s just too much of an, “oh no, something went wrong,” vibe in her matches, even when nothing’s going wrong.
Maybe it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy thing, like we did with Sin Cara. There were a few bad botches, so we started watching him wrestle looking for them, and everything that went wrong suddenly seemed hilarious and inevitable. Long story short, we probably need to give Nia Jax a break sometimes, but also it would help if she could not turn Kairi Sane’s brains into gruel. And when you hear Kairi screaming “I’M NOT SET” loud enough for US to hear it, you know NIA heard it, that’s just purposefully disregarding your dance partner’s well-being. It’s actual endangerment, beyond “laying it in” or being stiff or whatever. Why is Kairi stuck taking so much grief and punishment from people trying to get their shit in?
A quick supplemental Worst goes to Charly Caruso for asking Kairi Sane what she’s going to do about Nia’s “height advantage” during the match. She’s a hoss in a combat sport, Charly, you can say “height and weight advantage” without using it in a pejorative tone.
NXT Women’s Champion Charlotte Flair continues to wrestle on Monday nights despite being a Wednesday night champion, because … Charlotte Flair? Not like it matters when every show in the company’s being produced out of two buildings in the same Orlando suburb, but still. She eats Kayden Carter for breakfast and taps her out in about two and a half minutes. If Charlotte’s working her way through the entire NXT women’s division and starting from the bottom, I think Carter’s got one of the lowest OVRs. Congratulations, Aliyah, you’ve got next.
For a group that never did anything and broke up 12 months ago, WWE sure does keep talking about the Riott Squad. They talk about them like they were The Shield, and not a trio of loosely defined costumes that put together some backstage attacks and . They broke up off-screen because of the Draft, then all ended up on the same brand anyway. Ruby Riott got injured and returned to break up a group that’d already broken up, Liv Morgan took bubblebaths to “find herself” so she could be a problematic fifth wheel in a wrestling wedding and apparently nothing else, and Logan hugged deer corpses on Instagram, had a lengthy Main Event feud with Dana Brooke, and was also kind of a Viking? No shade to the performers themselves here, just the observation that WWE still loves saying the words “The Riott Squad” after not doing anything with them, breaking them up, and releasing one of them.
On a quick note of positivity, Liv and Ruby put together a pretty stellar finish here.
WWE
Definitely a sequence you wouldn’t have imagined Liv pulling off five years ago, so +1 for the visible improvement. Also, somebody at WWE realize Ruby Riott’s dope already.
The best match of the bunch is Bianca Belair, who goes here now, versus Santana Garrett. If you’ve never seen Santana before, think of her as the Pokémon evolution of Delilah Doom. They EVOLVE’d her using the same stone they that turned Seth Rollins into Elias, and Elias into Drew McIntyre. It’s enough of a straight-up win to help Belair look dominant, but competitive enough that she doesn’t look like one of those WWE Flavor of the Week characters who debut, go on a short winning streak, lose, and are forgotten forever.
Best: The B-Boy Stylings Of Byron Saxton
WWEWWE
Hilarious Worst: Watch Bobby Lashley Flip This Tire
That’s it. That’s the entire bit. Lashley flips a tire. Rusev wasn’t secretly hiding inside of it waiting to jump him or anything. Not exactly a memorable feat of strength when we’ve seen your co-workers can pick up cars, overturn jeeps, and flip ambulances.
Money In The Bank Qualifiers Of The Week
Austin Theory draws the short straw and ends up in a Money in the Bank qualifying match against Aleister Black. As you might’ve guessed, Theory gets in ten minutes of offense because he’s daddy’s special boy and then gets savagely kicked in the face. The best part is easily Zelina Vega shitting on Black on commentary, which is endearing when you remember they’re married and share custody of like a dozen smush-faced cats. Zelina should add Aleister to her group (because his name starts with A, like the rest of them) and he should suddenly become an egotistical pretty boy. “Narcissistic Satanist” might be a truly unique wrestling character. Imagine if Hulk Hogan and Kevin Sullivan were the same guy.
Apollo Crews qualifies to Climb The Corporate Ladder by defeating MVP, who I guess earned a chance to qualify by being gone for 10 years and then losing a couple of matches. MVP’s doing Crews a solid by putting him over, though, and I think someone like MVP could really do Crews a favor or thirty in a managerial role. Apollo Crews is never going to give you personality growth between “smiling” and “frowning,” but he’s a killer athlete and a good performer who could really use someone to put him into a marketable context. Whether that happens or not, I’m glad to see them trying to rehab him and actually do something with him, for once.
Buddy Murphy didn’t get the Aleister Black draw, but given their history together, he might’ve done better there than getting paired with Rey Mysterio. Rey still has that crazy special power where he can make you lie across the middle rope in a position you never, ever find yourself in in other matches, and if he hits you with the 619 — a dropkick that relies on the momentum of a rope swing instead of the force of his body and legs, which you’d think would hurt more — and lands on you with a 140-pound splash, you are FINISHED. He might as well pull out a bayonet and stab you in the heart.
As always, Murphy loses, but looks great while he does it. He and Mysterio have really good chemistry together, possibly because Mysterio has good-to-great chemistry with anyone who can bend at the waist and walk upright without falling down, and their 15 minutes was easily the best part of the show for me. I don’t know if there’s another role for Murphy besides “spectacularly good loser henchman,” but I hope we’re eventually able to find it. Dude is the jam.
Regardless, congratulations to Rey for smoking Bud on 4/20.
Also On This Episode
Ced-Ric The Entertainers gets a strong win against Actually Local Talent Shane Thorne and Brendan Vink, continuing Vink’s masterful utilization of his proximity to work during a global pandemic and little panties that barely fit him to become a series regular.
Cedric and Ricochet are a really fun team who can and will do mind-blowing things together in the ring, but they aren’t going to really matter until there are similar but differently motivated teams to feud with. The Rock ‘n’ Roll Express were great, but wouldn’t have mattered if they hadn’t gotten into a longstanding beef with the mirror universe versions of themselves, the Midnight Express. The Revival wouldn’t have been able to bring tag team wrestling back to NXT if they hadn’t had American Alpha and DIY to work with. If Cedric Alexander and Ricochet are the only team like this and the tag team division remains a Lazy Susan of placeholder champs without any real plan or purpose to hold them up, you’re going to run into the same problem you always do. The wrestlers are cool and popular, but become less cool and less popular the longer you keep them around without anything to do. Creative quarantine, so to speak.
Andrade wins a non-title match against Akira Tozawa, which is pretty good, but begs the question, “why did you use Tozawa here when he’s already booked in and busy with the Interim Cruiserweight Championship tournament on NXT?” You just had him win on Wednesday and declare that he “must keep winning.” So five days later you’ve got him losing in a completely unrelated thing? I mean, all right. I guess these are the same people who announced Drake Maverick for the cruiserweight tournament, released him, and still expected him to work. A lot of that going around.
Seth Rollins reports in from a throne he made out of a loveseat to accept Drew McIntyre’s challenge for Money in the Bank. Given how much he’s trying to look and act like Joseph Seed from Far Cry 5, I’m surprised he didn’t send Murphy and AOP out to shoot McIntyre with Bliss-tipped bullets and drag him back to the Crossfit bunker. It’s funny to imagine Becky Lynch standing there with an iPhone to film this, though. “Make sure you get the bottom of the painting in the shot, Bex, I need it to look like I’m the king of an antique store.”
Finally, in case you ever wanted to like the Viking Raiders or think they were cool again, here they are in the car together in matching clothes and prop helmets, looking like complete geeks in a Carpool Karaoke segment with self-aggrandizing chants instead of songs. They look like they’re driving to a LARP summer camp.
It’s hard to even joke about. You have to watch it for yourself. The obnoxious “VI-KING RAY-DERS!” chants are humiliating enough, the dialogue in-between them is socially grotesque. “We are VIKINGS …. ….. who LOVE to fight!” Not to mention “we worship Thor, and we’ll knock ’em to the floor,” or, “we are men with beards … who ALL should fear(ds)!” I kept hoping the nWo would pull up and run them off the road.
Maybe WWE was like, “you want to leave, Revival? We’ll show you what you’re missing out on. Who’s the toughest team in the tag team division? The Viking Raiders? Make them look like A.V. club dorks James Corden would have to politely ask to get the fuck out of his car. THAT’LL SHOW YOU.”
WWE
Congratulations, everybody. You turned War Machine into the guys from the Sonic commercials.
Best: Top 10 Comments Of The Week
cyniclone
Charly: “Ruby, you used to lead a group called the Riott Squad. My question is why do you think Sonya was trying so hard to get Mandy to date Dolph?”
The Real Birdman
I want Aliyah to beat Charlotte for the NXT title and chaos to ensue
MrOlliB
Is a fresh match up featuring Kairi Sane called Original Pirate Material?
mandrew
As someone that grew up on a farm, I can tell you Bobby that those larger low compression tires have a smaller sidewall, so even though they are larger overall, they have less mass. Also, can you just shove Lana in one and roll her down a hill? Thanks.
Mr. Bliss
All these ladders at ringside, you’d swear Rey has a custody hearing today.
troi
Lawler is wearing the cover of an MS-DOS chess game as a shirt
King of Smark Style
There’s social distancing and then there’s Lashley and Lana bits offered to us as entertainment.
I read about this in an Orwell novel.
AddMayne
Raw tonight:
LUNI_TUNZ
Lashley: “Man, I miss Sarah Logan. Anyway, I’m going to flip a tire.”
AshBlue
Creative writing the Bobby Lashley tire segment on 4/20:
GIPHY
WWE
And that does it for another episode of The Best and Worst of Depressing Quarantine Raw. As always, you can help us out tremendously right now by sharing the column on social media, as well as dropping down into our comments section to let us know what you thought of the show. I can make more Byron Saxton dancing GIFs if I have to.
Join us next week for more Brendan Vink and Kayden Carter as more and more of the show’s actual stars stay home. And we’re only 19 days until WWE presents ELEVATOR ACTION pay-per-view, and Daniel Bryan having a monster truck battle against Aleister Black on the roof of Titan Towers. I think that’s what’s happening. Anyway, thanks again, and see you then!
The latest attempt at getting the XFL off the ground ended sooner than the previous version of the league. Of course, this was due in major part to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the league to suspend its season, lay off a number of employees, and ultimately saw its parent company declare bankruptcy after only a handful of games.
One of the league’s former executives isn’t happy about how things went down, and as a result, he’s taking Vince McMahon to court. According to Daniel Kaplan of The Athletic, a federal lawsuit filed in Connecticut last week indicates that XFL commissioner Oliver Luck will sue McMahon for wrongful termination.
Luck’s complaint is heavily redacted to protect confidential contract information. But what it does say is, “Despite fulfilling his obligations as Commissioner and CEO since May 30, 2018, Mr. Luck was wrongfully terminated by Alpha Entertainment LLC (“Alpha”), an affiliate of Defendant, on April 9, 2020. Thus, Alpha has repudiated Mr. Luck’s employment agreement. Mr. Luck brings this action for breach of contract and declaratory judgment against McMahon.”
The lawsuit notes Alpha through bankruptcy court has filed to have the court reject “Certain Executive Contracts.” The XFL filed for Chapter 11 on April 13.
Luck, a longtime sports executive and a former quarterback for the Houston Oilers, joined the league in 2018 and was told that the league was going to be a more serious endeavor than its first go around in 2001. It cost McMahon a pretty penny to secure his services, as Luck’s deal reportedly included $20 million in guaranteed money. In the complaint, Luck’s attorneys allege that he “wholly disputes and rejects the allegations set forth in the Termination Letter and contends they are pretextual and devoid of merit.”
A member of the group that represents McMahon provided a statement to ESPN about Luck’s lawsuit, saying that “Oliver Luck’s services as Commissioner and CEO of The XFL were terminated by a letter sent to him on Apr. 9, 2020 which explained the reasons for the termination. As to the lawsuit he filed, his allegations will be disputed and the position of Mr. McMahon will be set forth in our response to his lawsuit.”
In the context of pop culture history, widespread social media use is a relatively new phenomenon, so there are still some wrinkles to iron out. For example, nowadays, celebrities often face lawsuits for posting photos of themselves, photos they did not take and/or to which they do not own the rights. Jennifer Lopez is the latest music star to find herself in legal hot water over this sort of situation, as she is facing a $150,000 lawsuit over an Instagram post.
E! News reports New York photographer Steve Sands suing Lopez and her production company Nuyorican Productions for copyright infringement over a photo of Lopez that she originally posted on June 22, 2017. Court documents read, “Defendants did not license the Photograph from Plaintiff for its Website, nor did Defendants have Plaintiff’s permission or consent to publish the Photograph on its Website.” They documents go on to claim the photographer is “entitled to statutory damages up to $150,000 per work infringed.”
The suit was filed in Manhattan federal court by lawyer Richard Liebowitz, and he told E!, “This is an example of celebrities using photographers photographs without permission to brand themselves on social media. The number of likes the photograph receives coupled with their number of social media followers is a tool to commercialize their posts.”
Neither Lopez nor her team have yet to respond to the lawsuit. Whatever the case, love don’t cost a thing, but this Instagram post might.
The talking toilet episode began as a nightmare. “I have these recurring anxiety dreams where I’m out in public at a party or a similar event and I slowly realize that the only toilet available to use is in the middle of the room in full view of everyone,” Bob’s Burgers writer/producer Wendy Molyneux told us. Not one to waste a bad dream, she took it to her sister and writing partner Lizzie Molyneux, saying, “is there something about a toilet being in a place that’s unexpected? And that was just the nugget.”
From that nugget came the 2013 Bob’s Burgers episode, “O.T.: The Outside Toilet,” one of the series’ most memorable installments. An homage to Steven Spielberg’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, “O.T.” squeezes everything Bob’s Burgers does well into 22-minutes, balancing silliness with warmth via the story of a central character’s unexpected friendship with an expensive (and unexpectedly companionable) stolen commode. The 15th episode of the series’ third season, “O.T.” arrived as Bob’s Burgers was hitting its stride.
After debuting to mixed reviews as part of FOX’s Sunday line-up of animated shows in the winter of 2011 and at first, facing an uncertain future, the show had picked up a following that grew only more devoted thanks to third-season episodes like “Bob Fires the Kids” (in which Tina, Gene, and Louise Belcher, the children of burger shop owners Bob and Linda Belcher, unwittingly begin working for a cannabis farm) and “Broadcast Wagstaff School News” (in which Tina investigates a “serial pooper”).
Even amidst these, “O.T.: The Outside Toilet” managed to stand out. It’s the sort of joke-packed, endlessly quotable, yet emotionally substantive episode that can turn casual viewers into dedicated fans. The episode probably couldn’t have happened earlier in the run.
“As we all got to know each other more and we all got to record more and more and as the writers got to know us and the characters, it [turned into a] richer and richer show,” comedian Eugene Mirman, who voices Gene Belcher, says. It certainly couldn’t have happened in the earliest conception of the show, which imagined the Belcher family to be cannibals, a detail creator Loren Bouchard dropped early in the development process.
“Do you really want it to be cannibals every week?,” Mirman remembers FOX asking Bouchard, to which he replied, “Actually, I think I don’t.”
Mirman had collaborated with Bouchard before, providing voices for the animated series Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist (on which Bouchard served as a writer and producer), Home Movies (which Bouchard co-created with Brendon Small) and Lucy, Daughter of the Devil (created by Bouchard). Like the rest of the core voice cast, he became involved with the series early in the process. His comedic persona, and that of co-stars H. Jon Benjamin (Bob), John Roberts (Linda), Dan Mintz (Tina), and Kristen Schaal (Louise) helped shape the personalities of the Belcher family.
“With each of the characters, there was how they envisioned it and then the personality we brought to it,” Mirman says. “I brought a sort of exuberance and weird references. I think Gene isn’t as much what I was like as a kid as much as what I’d be like if I was a kid now.”
The Molyneuxs knew they wanted to join the team before an episode had even aired. Wendy had been working in television for a while, including a stint on future Bob’s Burgers recurring guest star Megan Mullally’s talk show, The Megan Mullally Show. Eight years older than Lizzie, she encouraged her sister to become a writer after Lizzie earned a positive response after pitching a project while interning at a film production company during her senior year in college. (“I was just like, ‘Uh… okay, sure,’” Lizzie remembers.) Before long, they became a team, mostly writing movies that never got made. That changed when they saw a presentation about Bob’s Burgers and landed an interview for the show.
“We got this interview for Bob’s Burgers and we loved the presentation so much that it was like in Notting Hill when Hugh Grant meets Julia Roberts and is like ‘There’s no way I’m going to wind up with this person. They’re a movie star,’” Wendy says. “It was our Julia Roberts. We were like, ‘No way is this show going to choose us because we love it too much already.’ And then we got hired and we were like, ‘Oh shit.’”
By season three, that “oh shit” feeling had faded and the Molyneuxs were deeply ensconced in the series. That didn’t mean they didn’t have to pitch their ideas. Recalling the third season, Wendy says, “I remember we pitched like five or six ideas because that’s how you would start the season each year, [you’d] go in and pitch to Loren and at the time Jim Dauterive [who developed the show with Bouchard]. So, Loren goes, ‘Well. I think we have to do the toilet one.’ So, that was it.”
By this point, a notion born of bad dreams had become a fleshed-out idea. But it took a while to get there.
“[At first] it was more like just a toilet,” Wendy says. “Maybe somebody just decides to start peeing and pooping out in the woods somewhere. Then from there, we discovered… Neither of us owns one of these very fancy toilets but we saw videos of these toilets and then we’re like, ‘Oh, what if they found a toilet that could talk back?’ And I think at that point is when we were like, ‘That’s a friend for Gene.’”
“I think it was sort of that the idea of a toilet you could interact with was really fun,” Lizzie continues. “And it played into that type of movie: E.T. or The Iron Giant or even Stand by Me. Just the idea of the kids going out into the woods and finding something special and feeling attached to it and having this adventure on their own without Bob and Linda being involved.”
Instead of his parents, Gene drove the action. The Belchers’ middle child, Gene had always been a reliably funny character but had less often served as the emotional heart of the show.
“If you look at the pilot,” Wendy says, “Gene was peppered in, but it was very focused on him kind of making noise with the keyboard and all of that stuff. I don’t know if in the pilot we were as focused on Gene’s wants and needs and who Gene is deep down.” Other episodes had changed that, but none had emphasized the middle Belcher child’s complexity quite like “O.T.”
“I think Gene is so okay with himself, but he’s also not always surrounded by friends,” Wendy says. “The Belcher kids are each other’s best friends. So finding what other kids they’re interested in has been kind of a journey. And for Gene it was sort of, oh Gene gets a little upset with himself at the beginning and finds a friend to nurture. But the friend happens to be a toilet. If they’re going to go outside of their sibling group, it has to be for someone special. In this case, the someone special is a toilet. It’s finding what did the toilet answer in Gene that made this so obviously a Gene episode.”
At a certain point, it became obvious that only Jon Hamm could provide the voice of the toilet. The Bob’s Burgers staff already wanted to have Hamm guest on the show, but only if they could find the right part.
“We knew that one of our staff members is quite close with Jon Hamm personally,” Wendy recalls. “And so we were always thinking, ‘What could we have Jon Hamm do on the show?’ Whenever one of us has a friend who’s a name actor, or we hear that someone who is a name likes the show, we all are aware. Our antennae are up [but] we don’t want to be weird and do stunt casting, because we don’t do that.”
Hence, the toilet.
“It felt like, okay, this is the part,” Wendy says. “If you did the math on it, Don Draper is the opposite of a toilet. So it was like, yes, he must play a toilet. This is the only answer for how we use Jon Hamm on this show.”
But before Gene could form a relationship with a Hamm-voiced toilet, the Molyneuxs had to create a need for that bond.
“The episode opens with them having flour babies at school and Gene messes his up and it points out to himself that he’s not good at taking care of things,” Lizzie says. “With every episode, we do with Bob’s, there’s always that emotional angle we’re looking for. It was fun to discover that vulnerable side of Gene. As Wendy was saying, he was comic relief in a lot of episodes, and it was fun to see that side of him. And what is the thing that Gene’s going to fall in love with and want to take care of? The joke is that it’s a toilet. But it was fun to see him have this relationship with it. When we were breaking the story […] we ended up with [the question of] of ‘How can we get him attached to it in a real way that’s more than just, oh, he likes the toilet?’”
Rewatching E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial provided the inspiration, leading the Molyneuxs to develop a parental relationship between boy and toilet. “We think of our toilets as our children,” Wendy says. She’s joking, but that doesn’t make the ties between Gene and toilet any less weirdly moving as Gene first bonds with the toilet by filling it with water when needed (complimented on his nurturing skills, Gene replies, “He’s just a really good toilet”) then fights to keep the toilet out of the clutches of the thief trying to retrieve him (voiced by Neil Flynn, Wendy’s improv teacher prior to taking central roles on Scrubs and The Middle). Along the way, the episode keeps finding one inventive variation after another on the idea of a talking toilet. From Hamm delivering jokes in a soothing baritone (“Knock knock” “Who’s there?” “Botany” “Botany who?” “Botany good toilets lately?”) to the limits of a voice recognition system that mistakes the phrase “easy money” for a request to play the music of Eddie Money.
As the episode progresses, Gene’s story expands to include first his siblings then the supporting cast of local kids, as Bob and Linda enjoy a date night courtesy of the newfound respect Bob found after putting on a fancy suit loaned to him by their mortician neighbor Mort (Andy Kindler). The Molyneuxs recall this B-story as the contribution of writer Kit Boss, later to work on series like The Tick and iZombie. (“He’s the one that got away,” Wendy says. “We all love Kit Boss. Can this whole interview just be us asking Kit Boss to come back to Bob’s Burgers?”) But it’s the relationship between Gene and the toilet that drives the episode. It’s a relationship that partly developed in-person. Though Hamm, having worked under the weather, later had to re-record his lines, he did the initial recording in New York with Mirman.
“It was fun getting to record with him and play around,” Mirman says. He speaks warmly of the process even when it doesn’t involve talking toilets, saying, “We record all this different stuff. We do what’s written, the writers throw out lines, Loren throws outlines, we improvise. And then they take what works best and make the episode. There’s a joy to it.”
By episode’s end, the toilet is on its way to being restored to its rightful owner, but not before Gene has a chance to bid it a proper farewell. From there, life returns to normal for the Belchers, and Gene resumes being the awkward, funny boy filled with the same oft-misplaced confidence that he was before.
“The thing that’s interesting with cartoons is, it’s all as if the whole world takes place within the same year,” Mirman says, “And so you stay the same but you become a richer and richer character with a bigger and bigger history.”
Sometimes that bigger, richer history involves learning to love a toilet with the ability to play the 1977 Eddie Money hit “Baby Hold On,” whether you want it to or not.
Few visuals evoke a feeling of victory like a New York City ticker-tape parade. For more than a century, New York parades have lifted the spirits both the city and the nation, honoring individual triumphs and celebrating the end of national trials.
Though we are far from out of the woods right now, this pandemic will eventually come to an end. A vaccine will be created or an effective treatment will be found, and we will be able to enjoy gathering with our fellow humans again. And when that happens, NYC will hold a victory parade like no other, and it will befittingly honor the heroes on the front line of this crisis—our healthcare workers.
Mayor Bill de Blasio wrote on Twitter:
“I can’t tell you when we’ll be able to host cultural events and parades again. But I can tell you WHO our first parade will be for:
When the time is right, New York City will honor our health care workers and first responders with a ticker tape parade up the Canyon of Heroes.”
De Blasio told reporters in a press briefing:
“The day is coming when we will overcome this disease. The day is coming when I’m going to be able to tell you we can gather again. The day is coming when I’m going to be able to tell you in fact we will be having the concerts and the street fairs and the parades again. When that day comes that we can restart the vibrant, beautiful life of the city again, the first thing we will do is we will have a ticker tape parade on the Canyon of Heroes for our health care workers and our first responders.”
New York city has held more than 200 parades since 1886 on the stretch of Broadway known as the Canyon of Heroes. From successful space missions to sports championships to soldiers returning from war, ticker-tape parades have rallied the masses to celebrate the best of us. And right now, the best of us are risking their lives to save ours.
“We will honor those who saved us,” said de Blasio. “The first thing we will do before we think about anything else is we will take a time, as only New York City can do, to throw the biggest, best parade to honor these heroes,” de Blasio said Tuesday. “I think this will be the greatest of all the parades, because this one will speak to the rebirth of New York City.”
It’s hard to picture that day right now, as New York City fights its way through the peak of the pandemic. The stories from doctors and nurses in the city are a harrowing reminder of why mitigation measures are so important, and why we can’t hold things like parades or parties until we can ensure the public’s safety.
But we all need some hope to hold onto as we stare into an uncertain future. The image of day when we can not only gather together in large numbers, but can honor our front liners the way they deserve to be honored, is a glorious thing to keep tucked away as we continue
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(@yelyahwilliams) April 20, 2020
to the arm. Baszler broke Sarah Logan’s arm last week, so she does the same to Indi here. Bonus points to Indi for briefly avoiding the stomp by, you know, moving her arm out of the way instead of keeping it bent at that specific angle. It only worked once, but it completely baffled Shayna there for a minute. 
