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Mike Greenberg has done nearly every job at ESPN. But his latest project is as the host of a show you might not expect to see “Greeny” in. Bettor Days with Mike Greenberg, a series co-produced by Greenberg that premiered its second season last week on ESPN+, reenacts the dramatic stories of extraordinary gambling snafus. The eight-episode run is told across many sports and cities and spans the spectrum from heart-warming to zany as it takes sports fans inside the wild world of sports betting.

“The show is really not about gambling as much as it’s about gamblers and all the fascinating things that people do when they are in the midst of gambling,” Greenberg told Uproxx.

For someone who is usually seen at the desk of ESPN’s top radio and TV shows, focusing in on a shorter, narrative series is a unique turn for Greenberg, become one of ESPN’s highest-profile hosts since leaving Mike & Mike. The series gave him an opportunity to find stories in a part of sports that most fans are still getting attuned to.

“It’s a person who’s in the middle of a drama, bordering on a crisis, so those are fascinating stories to tell,” Greenberg said.

The host of Get Up! and his own radio show, Greeny, in addition to Bettor Days, took some time last week to discuss the show and his career with Uproxx.

What was it like doing this second season of Bettor Days and if there’s story you would highlight for sports fans who want to get a taste of what the show is like, which one was most striking to you?

The first question is easy. The second season was much easier to do because I had a much better understanding from a hosting perspective of what we were going for. When we created it originally, any time something is just an idea, you never really know exactly how it’s going to work. You can make a series of educated guesses, but one of my favorite expressions is you can never really get anything right until you’ve first gotten it at least a little bit wrong.

So I think when we shot the first four episodes having never put one together, because we shot them all in two days, I was just trying to figure out how to best serve the role of the host and the narrator of that show. Having been able to now see the four and how they came together and be part of that, it was much easier to host it. I realized I really am just the narrator of a story. That’s what I am. Not literally, but figuratively. We are telling a story and I am just facilitating the telling of that story.

As far as the memorable ones from season two, we shot eight episodes in two days. Each story has its own really wonderful charm. What I can tell you is one of them resulted in a law being changed, and another of them was about a guy who, unbeknownst to him, has a winning ticket on a bet in Vegas. He throws it away because he doesn’t realize it’s a winning ticket due to a variety of circumstances, and a total stranger chases him down to return it to him so that he has a winning ticket. In the gambling milieu, who knows what (viewers’) visions of the people are, but there are quite a few heartwarming, really wonderful stories that come from these bets being placed as well.

Have you personally ever been the betting type? Do you have any unfortunate bad beat stories?

Don’t we all. I grew up and my father loved horse racing. I grew up going to the horse track. My father loved harness racing, so we would go to Yonkers and we would go to Roosevelt and every now and then the Meadowlands, and we would watch harness racing, the trotters and the pacers. And I loved it. And that’s how I learned about gambling. That sport basically is gambling for most people.

Like anyone, I would place a bet and get some action on football when I was in college, that sort of thing. I dabbled in it, but I was not heavily into it. I love a casino and I would play blackjack and craps and all that stuff anytime. But when I got into our business, I thought that at that time, it just would not be appropriate for me to be gambling on sports. Nobody ever told me that, it just felt wrong.

So I didn’t do it forever, but now that so much of that is changing and not only that it’s legal now in a number of places, but people’s perception of it has changed so greatly. I think there was always a feeling because of the illegality of it that there was something very shady about gambling. As people continue to move away from that mindset, it becomes an incredibly important part not only of sports but also our industry.

You mentioned how long you’ve been in this business, and that encapsulates quite a bit of change in how betting is involved in the consumption and coverage of sports. I wonder what you make of that change over time and if you thought we would get to this place and if it feels like you thought it would feel when we got here, and what it’s like to be finally talking about some of these things out in the open?

You’re 100 percent correct. That was an enormous change and it happened in the blink of an eye. I can’t give you an exact date but I can tell you that as recently as probably three or four years ago, on an average show that I hosted on the network, and for 18 years that show (Mike & Mike) was four hours long, we would not make a single reference to gambling. I would not reference a point spread, I would not reference an over-under. It doesn’t mean I never would, but the overwhelming majority of shows, they would not be referenced at all.

Now, and it feels like a blink of an eye that this change took place, that’s one of the first areas of subject matter that we touch on, on shows like Get Up! and SportsCenter. Everything we do, one of the considerations is we know that’s what our audience wants to know, and our job ultimately is the audience has a menu and we’re trying to serve the dish that they want on their TV screens. They want that information, so one of the very first considerations we make in almost any story we are going to cover is what are the gambling implications, and those are front and center in the presentation of every show. There is not a single day that goes by now where there is not at least some reference to or consideration of gambling that is given in the subject matter of a show that I do.

I’m curious now that you have been away from Mike & Mike for a few years, I would imagine that change takes years to get used to. You must come across things that are different (about leaving) than you might have thought. Did you ever have a sense coming off that show that you may not have made the right choice? Was there ever doubt about that?

Actually there was not. Everything in life has its place and its time. You’re never guaranteed that anything will succeed. I’ll give you the best example that I can offer you. In 2007, something like that, I got the opportunity to host a game show called Duel on ABC. And I am a game show junkie, I grew up loving game shows. I hosted the show and I loved it. I loved the experience and I loved all the people I met. I loved having had the opportunity to do it.

And the show wasn’t anywhere near the success we hoped it would be, or really at all. It didn’t do especially well and it didn’t last. But as I was saying the other day, I never think about that as having been a failure, and I never for one second regret having done it. In life, you’re not guaranteed of things.

When we launched Get Up!, whether it was immediately the greatest show of all time or the worst show of all time, or like most things, somewhere in between, I never for one second thought, ‘this was a mistake.’ Even if we had only lasted six months and gotten canceled, I guess you could say it didn’t succeed, but I would never have taken that as a failure. You try things sometimes, and if they don’t work, you try something else.

We had an extraordinary run on Mike & Mike. It was exceptional. And then we moved onto something new, and I’m delighted things have worked out as well as they have, including Get Up!, which I worked really, really hard on. But if they hadn’t, then that’s life, and you keep trying until you find something that does.

ESPN is a network full of debate shows, why have we never seen Mike Greenberg cast on a head-to-head sports talk show?

I guess Mike & Mike was somewhat of a debate show, when we disagreed, we would go at it. We never faked that. But you have to know your strengths. My role at ESPN is to be a host. I am a host, and being a host is a little bit of a different skill set, and I think my best role is to facilitate interesting discussion, and the interesting nature of that discussion can take a lot of different forms. Sometimes that’s analysis, sometimes it’s humor, sometimes it’s in debate, but that is really what I do best, and how I can best be in service to the people who pay me, is to bring the best out of other people.

The reality is if I tried to be Stephen A. Smith — Stephen A is a friend of mine for 15 years, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for him — and if I tried to be him, I would not be able to do it. I know well that that’s not what I do well.

Something I think our readers would be interested in from your perspective is who is someone else around the sports media landscape, whether it is a teammate of yours at ESPN or someone doing your job elsewhere that you think is doing a great job right now?

Oh my goodness, there’s so many people. I have long said that my idol in the industry is Bob Costas. Someone once called me a poor man’s Bob Costas and I told them that was the greatest compliment anyone had ever paid me in my entire life. I think he’s as good as anyone who’s ever done it.

I could start rattling off names of people who I think are exceptional, but just at our place, in different areas, Stephen A. is singular and is exceptionally good at what he does, I think Rece Davis is exceptional at what he does, I think Doris Burke is exceptional at what she does, and then any number of other people looking at other networks. Mike Tirico is a longstanding friend of mine and I think he is as talented as anybody we have in the industry.

It goes on and on. Much more than just being a person who is in the industry, I am a viewer and a listener, and there are any number of people who I think are terrific. That’s just a very small list of them.

Billie Eilish’s 2019 debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? was a major hit, topping the charts in multiple countries for multiple weeks. That’s a tough act to follow, but so far, she’s doing it with her latest, Happier Than Ever. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart, then followed it up with a second week on top. Now, the album’s No. 1 run continues: On the Billboard 200 chart dated August 28, Happier Than Ever is once again on top for a third week.

With its third week at No. 1, Happier Than Ever ties the chart-topping reign of When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, which spent three non-consecutive weeks on top, on the charts dated April 13, May 4, June 8, 2019. Happier Than Ever is just the second album of 2021 to spend its first three weeks at No. 1, after Morgan Wallen’s Dangerous: The Double Album. It’s the first album by a woman to do so since Taylor Swift’s Folklore spent its first six weeks at No. 1 in 2020.

Elsewhere on the chart, Doja Cat’s Planet Her rose from No. 5 to 2, its previous high mark. As for this week’s highest debut, that honor belongs to Dan And Shay’s Good Things, which debuted at No. 6.

Keeping up with new music can be exhausting, even impossible. From the weekly album releases to standalone singles dropping on a daily basis, the amount of music is so vast it’s easy for something to slip through the cracks. Even following along with the Uproxx recommendations on a daily basis can be a lot to ask, so every Monday we’re offering up this rundown of the best new music this week.

This week saw Lorde’s long-awaited return and the omnipresent Young Thug making an appearance. Yeah, it was a great week for new music. Check out the highlights below.

For more music recommendations, check out our Listen To This section, as well as our Indie Mixtape and Pop Life newsletters.

Lorde — “Big Star”

Lorde takes her time between albums, but after four years, Solar Power is here. Aside from singles like the title track and “Stoned At The Nail Salon,” the release is led by highlights like the subtle-but-moving “Big Star,” an emotional ode to Lorde’s late dog, Pearl.

Young Thug — “Tick Tock”

After some collaborative projects in recent days, Thug is back to taking center stage, as he did last week with “Tick Tock.” The rapper embraces a new song on the track, putting his spin on some modern trends by delivering a track with heavy pop and rock influences.

Ed Sheeran — “Visiting Hours”

Back in March, Ed Sheeran made an appearance at the funeral of Australian music industry icon Michael Gudinski and sang a new song he wrote for his late friend, “Visiting Hours.” He broke down into tears at the end of the song, and he brings much of that emotion to the studio version of the track, which he dropped last week. Sheeran wasn’t alone on that recording, as he was joined by a couple of Gudinski’s other friends, Kylie Minogue and Jimmy Barnes.

DVSN and Ty Dolla Sign — “Memories”

Ty Dolla Sign and DVSN had two of last year’s better R&B albums, so the two coming together on a project ought to be something special. Well, we’ll get the chance to find out if that’s the case, as they’re indeed making a joint album. They shared a look at it last week with “Memories,” of which Uproxx’s Aaron Williams effused, “Do you want extensive talkbox use? Check. A classic R&B sample (Silk’s 1992 hit ‘Freak Me’) courtesy of Nineteen85? Check. Were you looking to see glittery halters adorning the denizens of a grown-and-sexy club party in the video, a la millennial-era videos from the likes of Maxwell, Usher, Tyrese, and others? Yep, DVSN and Ty give you that, too.”

Skrillex, Justin Bieber, and Don Toliver — “Don’t Go”

Skrillex hasn’t dropped an album since 2015, but that doesn’t mean he’s been doing nothing. He drops new stuff from time to time, including some high profile collaborations, the latest being the Justin Bieber- and Don Toliver-featuring cut “Don’t Go.” Uproxx’s Wongo Okon notes that on the track, Bieber and Toliver “go back and forth with verses that plead for their lover’s continued presence over feel-good production from Skrillex and Harv.”

James Blake — “Life Is Not The Same”

Blake is towards the start of the promotional cycle of his album Friends That Break Your Heart, and he continued it last week with the eerie and yearning “Life Is Not The Same.” Blake says the track is about being content with yourself: “The song is about finding peace with who you are and where you’re at regardless of how well other people seem to be doing. Comparison really is the thief of joy.”

Deafheaven — “Shellstar”

Deafheaven in 2021 isn’t the same band (in terms of sound) that you remember, as they’re going with a less hardcore sound these days. Their new album, Infinite Granite, is more shoegaze and post-rock than it is hardcore, and singer George Clarke has embraced the cleaner side of his vocals. The album kicks off with the dreamy and epic “Shellstar” and stays the delightfully atmospheric course from there.

Phoebe Bridgers — “Kyoto (Bartees Strange Remix)”

Of his “Kyoto” remix, Bartees Strange said, “I wanted to find a way to make this song hit in a completely different way, but still retain some of the big and small moments that make the song special to me.” The way he did that was basically turn his “remix” into a cover, which is more of a soaring indie-rock epic than the original.

Remi Wolf — “Grumpy Old Man”

Wolf is a pop up-and-comer to keep an eye on, and there’s about to be plenty to watch, as their album Juno is dropping this fall. She dropped a pair of new songs last week, “Grumpy Old Man” and “Quiet On Set,” which, as Uproxx’s Carolyn Droke put it, offer “a preview of the gritty and funk-forward sound expected from her debut effort.”

Jaden — “Summer”

We’re in the thick of summer, and Jaden went ahead and dropped a theme song for the season, which is of course titled “Summer.” Jaden’s take on the warm season is a relaxed one, perfect for driving around with the windows down on a chill weekend.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

After a summer in which he was removed from many major festivals, DaBaby finally hit the stage for the first time since his Rolling Loud set at New York’s Hot 97 Summer Jam. Among the many questions for fans watching the set, the foremost was whether or not he’d address the controversial comments that got him removed from so many other festivals’ lineups.

He did. While the Summer Jam set opened with a montage of video clips including the ones that offended so many, DaBaby also addressed his mistake and its backlash, thanking Hot 97 for being “willing to stick they neck out on the line” by keeping him on its lineup. He said that the station “allowed me to share my gift, share my blessing with y’all out here live on this stage amongst all the chaos and all the backlash. So hats off to y’all for that.”

“They accepted my sincerity and all my apologies when I said I never, ever meant to offend anybody or say anything to make anybody feel any type of way live on that stage a few weeks ago,” he continued. “Hot 97 was also willing to stick they neck out on the line, willing to go against all odds with everything going on out here in the world — they still allowed me to come right here on this stage and utilize their platform. They helped the world move forward and become a better place and not dismiss people off mistakes made like we ain’t human.”

Many questioned the sincerity of his apologies, as at least two were delivered in a defiant tone that some saw as doubling down on the comments, rather than backing away from them. He said his fans “don’t have HIV/AIDS” because they’re not “nasty” or “junkies,” and released the video for “Giving What It’s Supposed To Give,” noting the parallels between his awkward Rolling Loud speech and parts of the video, which he’d shot beforehand. Some listeners will probably still question his sincerity after Summer Jam as well, considering how he introduced the song “Cry Baby”:

“Other than the people that truly offended,” he said, “I feel like the rest of y’all motherf*ckers being cry babies.”

To see DaBaby’s original offending comments click here.

You know Julianne Nicholson. At least, you at least know her roles well. She’s appeared on addictive procedural and soapy primetime TV, including roles in the Law and Order franchise and even Ally McBeal. More relevantly for our purposes here, you know her from several HBO prestige dramas. There’s her role in Boardwalk Empire and an upcoming Lakers-focused series coming up, but then there are a few recent parts, in which she’s portrayed characters who have (arguably) done the most suffering within vast ensemble casts. I’m talking about The Outsider (in which she portrayed a wife of a prominent El Cuco victim, played by Jason Bateman, and the person who arguably had the most reason to be angry in the entire show) and Mare of Easttown, in which she played Lori, who lost her entire family as a result of one murder that ripped through a small town with Kate Winslet’s title character on the case.

Nicholson’s now sitting in Emmy Nomination Zone for her raw yet measured portrayal of a mother who made an unfathomably difficult choice. It’s really only the latest in a series of difficult roles for her, which could qualify Julianne as even more of an ubiquitous prestige TV face than Scoot McNairy. (At least Julianne can claim a better wig game, even if Scoot crushes the mustache title.) Seriously though, Julianne went through the emotional paces for Mare, and she was gracious enough to talk with us about how she kept a difficult role in perspective, as well as how she loves those cheesesteaks.

Congrats on the Emmy nomination. I imagine it will be a weird year with the ceremony outdoors.

Thank you so much. Is it? I have no news, and it should be outdoors, and I hope it is!

First off, I need to know how much you got to enjoy Philly food while shooting this show. You didn’t get to dig in onscreen as much as Kate did, with the hoagie.

Yes! I did have one scene where we were sitting around the TV with Mare and Helen and John and Lori, and there was pizza and chips. I was eating chips and dip for the scene, and it was good for the first couple of takes, and then I was like oh my god, salt overload. I could barely open my eyes the next morning from all the sodium I ingested. But I did enjoy, well, I was a little more of a cheesesteak gal. I had a few of those!

Philly has great tastes, but I didn’t know if you guys got to indulge much.

Yeah, yeah! Pre-pandemic, I had great pizza, the cheesesteaks. I had a lot of great food there.

Last night, I happened to look back on I, Tonya, and wow, that’s some wig magic.

I know! That wig was everything for that role, it’s true.

You’re wearing a wig in Mare, another one of your HBO entries. I remember watching the The Outsider and thinking, “My gosh, her character puts up with so much.” The same goes for Mare.

[Laughs] First of all, after doing Mare, I made the conscious decision of “maybe I’ll do another role or two where the character doesn’t suffer grief.” You know, just as a palate cleanser. I think the story and what the character’s experiencing gets inside of me a little bit? But I don’t have to take it on too much anymore, and I’m able to (for the most part) leave work at work and be myself at home when I’m with my family, cooking dinner.

And having a much more pleasant life, I imagine.

Yes, I’m happy to say that I do all the suffering on TV and have room for just joy and peace in my life.

The Outsider, of course, was a Stephen King adaptation, and King showed himself on Twitter to be a very big Mare fan. He accurately predicted the killer. What was it like to see people get so worked up about this show?

It was a huge thrill to see how invested people became in the show and in the characters and wanting to know what was coming. I’m not on Twitter, actually, but friends would send me some [tweets] to see. One of the best ones was from the week after Mare finished, the first Sunday that it wasn’t on. And they wondered, “I wonder what Mare’s doing tonight.” I thought that wrapped it up beautifully.

How much of the script did you get to see before shooting… did you know the identity of the killer?

Before I agreed to do this show, and when it was a conversation, I read the first six episodes. And then I kept being told that a lot happens for Lori in Episode 7, and as far as I remember, I took them at their word and then was given Episode 7 after I signed on to do it. So I definitely knew the whole story before we started filming.

And how on earth does one prepare for that kitchen scene?

I mean, it’s hard to prepare for a scene like that because a lot of it, well, it was performed as written, in terms of movement, making tea. I don’t think that it was written that I turned away, but you just take what was on the page and make it present for how that’s feeling in the moment. For me, the preparation actually happens minutes before the cameras are rolling. Because I can’t prepare the night before for a scene like that, or a month before. That’s largely, and luckily in my case, imagination, and access to what you think that might feel like.

As tragic as that scene was, it also felt like a celebration of a beautiful friendship between two women.

I thought so, too. And even “hopeful” might be too strong a word, but at least they were coming back together. They’ll have that love in their lives again, you know, that friendship and history.

With the Delco accent work, that got a lot of attention. The producers almost decided not to do the accents, but y’all did them, thank goodness.

Well, the writer, Brad Ingelsby, who created the show is from Delco. He’s from that part of the world, so I think an accent goes a huge way towards bringing a certain part of the country to life. We had a great dialect coach [Susanne Sulby], and she would check in with Brad, and she had a number of versions of that accent. She would record different people, and not everyone’s accent’s the same. You could sort-of listen to the different versions that she had, and [laugh] it sounds like a choose-your-own-adventure, and then I heard one that made sense to me, where it wasn’t too strong, but it was still present. We ran that by Brad, and he said, “Great.” It was challenging, but every night with Susanne, we would go over the next day’s work, and she was always on set.

Lori’s decision in this series was rough. Did you struggle with what she did?

Well, honestly, it wasn’t that much of a struggle because I agree that she didn’t necessarily make the right decisions, but I can relate to a mother wanting to protect her child at all costs or what she thinks is protecting her child at the moment. Because in hindsight, the best thing happened for Ryan. For his life, to have it come to light have to deal with consequences because I think his life would be much harder if that was a secret that he had to carry.

For sure, that would have wrecked him forever.

But I feel like it’s definitely morally dubious, whether she did the right thing or not. I’m sure legally she didn’t, but as a mother, I got it. Protect the kid, keep him safe, nobody knows.

Of course, you’ve been a part of so many ensemble casts, but this one was ragingly good. Can we talk about how great Jean Smart is?

Yes, Jean Smart’s the coolest. She’s just so down to earth, very funny, such a pro, but also brings a lightness and a humor to everything she touches. I love her, and I’m a giant Jean Smart fan.

Jean can be so funny and serious at the same time. You talked about how you were going to do something more lighthearted. You have Separation Anxiety coming up.

Yes, I optioned the book, and now we get to make it into a series, starring and producing. It’s a great book, by Laura Bigman. It’s about a woman having, I guess in easy terms it’s a midlife crisis. Her teenage son doesn’t want anything to do with her. Her marriage is on the rocks. She’s not where she hoped that she would be in her career, and she winds up, sort-of by accident, putting her dog in a sling, and that becomes her security blanket. It’s very funny, and it’s very heartwarming and touches on real issues of just getting older and being a person.

We’ve got time for one more question. If you could give Lori a more lighthearted life, where would you want her to be?

I would just love to see her on a beach in Hawaii, with her kids, just splashing in the waves, and everyone’s made it. She’s sipping a mai tai and reading a good book in the shade.

‘Mare of Easttown’ is currently streaming on HBO Max.

Production on season three of Succession was delayed due to the pandemic, but production resumed last November, and now HBO has revealed when one of television’s best shows will be back. “October,” the show’s official Twitter account tweeted on Monday, along with an image of Logan Roy looking majestic and wondering which one of his kids he should emotionally neglect today. (The answer: all of them.)

The previously-revealed plot synopsis for season three reads, “Ambushed by his rebellious son Kendall at the end of season two, Logan Roy begins season three in a perilous position, scrambling to secure familial, political, and financial alliances. Tensions rise as a bitter corporate battle threatens to turn into a family civil war.”

In other Succession news, the New Yorker profiled creator Jesse Armstrong, who apparently makes up phrases — or “Britishisms” — that he thinks already exist. “Jesse has a very particular kind of phraseology for the way people speak—even particular obscenities or analogies. The characters will use a kind of dialogue that makes me think, I’ve never really heard somebody speak that way. But it feels real, and not like a TV writer writing a line of what feels like dialogue,” writer Will Tracy said. “It turns out they are just Jesse-isms. Like, he’ll say, ‘Tom is completely freaking out — he’s completely sh*t his whack.’ I said, ‘Is that a British thing?’ Jesse said yeah, but Tony [Roche] and Georgia [Pritchett] and Jon [Brown] said no. Jesse thought that it was a thing.”

The wait for new Succession is making me sh*t my whack.

(Via the New Yorker)

Taylor Swift has hundreds of millions of followers across her various social media platforms, and now she’s ready to broaden her reach: Swift is officially on TikTok and she shared her first post today.

In the video, Swift lip syncs to Dave’s Swift-referencing song “Screwface Capital,” specifically the lyrics, “Six-figure discussions, dinners in public / My linen all tailored / My outstanding payments swift like Taylor.” All the while, Swift works through multiple shots of herself, stylized (both in terms of her look and of video editing) like her recent releases: Folklore, Evermore, Fearless (Taylor’s Version), and Red (Taylor’s Version).

Swift captioned her post, “Lots going on at the moment: Red (my version) vinyl is up for presale on my site and oh I’m on tiktok now let the games begin [smiling cat emoji] #SwiftTok.”

Naturally, Swift is quickly gaining an audience on the platform. As of this post, the video was posted about 45 minutes ago, and Swift has racked up about 125,000 followers so far.

When Swift announced Red (Taylor’s Version) earlier this summer, she said in a statement, “I’ve always said that the world is a different place for the heartbroken. It moves on a different axis, at a different speed. Time skips backwards and forwards fleetingly. The heartbroken might go through thousands of micro-emotions a day trying to figure out how to get through it without picking up the phone to hear that old familiar voice. In the land of heartbreak, moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion are intricately woven together with grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness. Imagining your future might always take you on a detour back to the past. And this is all to say, that the next album I’ll be releasing is my version of Red.”

As the dust settled over Mike Richards‘ hosting gig going down in flames, Jeopardy! champion Matt Amodio had a much better weekend as fans of the quiz show helped him out with Twitter’s notoriously opaque verification process. On Saturday, Amodio, who has been racking up wins with his unorthodox play style, asked for help in getting his account verified now that he’s becoming a known quantity in the Jeopardy! arena.

“Does anybody know how to make Twitter’s ‘blue check’ process go slower?,” he tweeted. “I’m worried mine will be done before #Jeopardy Season 3,141,592 airs, and there’s just no point rushing these things.”

Despite causing a controversy in the Jeopardy! world for his habit of using “what’s” in every answer, which the show has confirmed is permitted by the rules, fans rallied to Amodio’s cause and begin pinging Twitter to get the current champ verified.

As stated before, Twitter’s verification process is frustratingly vague, so it was a major surprise when the fans’ requests actually worked. By the next day, Amodio was verified, and he joked up about the experience in a follow-up tweet.

“I’m not sure I’ve learned the right lesson from this whole sequence of events, but thanks!” Amodio wrote to his fans.

Unfortunately, Jeopardy! fans are going to be waiting a little while longer to see Amodio dominate his opponents. New episodes just started filming last week, and they’re not expected to air until mid-September when the show’s Season 38 starts. However, that was the situation before Richards stepped down, which may or may not cause a delay as producers scramble to find a fill-in host.

(Via Matt Amodio on Twitter)

Arguably the most perfect piece of media ever created, Tetris is one of those games where it can be handed to anyone and they’ll immediately understand what’s going on. Different shaped blocks fall down. Line them up and erase blocks. Erase a lot at once for a high score. If it reaches the top then you lose. Boom, it’s that simple.

It’s what makes the game one of the most important titles in history. Of course, with simplicity comes an opportunity to create something new and that’s what the team working on Tetris Beat is attempting to do.

“One of the jumping off points for sure was a quote from Alexey [Pajitnov] who stated ‘playing Tetris is a very specific rhythmic visual pleasure for me. Tetris is a song, which you sing and sing inside yourself, and can’t stop.” Lawrence Clark of N3TWORK told UPROXX. “And this, this was definitely directional for music, visuals, gameplay, the marriage of everything, that makes the iconic Tetris gameplay so wonderful and fresh to this day”

Tetris Beat is taking that quote from Pajitnov, the creator of Tetris, and bringing it to its natural next step: A rhythm game. Some might argue that Tetris has always been a game about rhythm, but Tetris Beat is taking that a step beyond. Everything from placement, to rotations, to when the matches occur is meant to be matched to the rhythm of each song. Think something like Crypt of the NecroDancer, but instead, it’s Tetris. Of course, players will be able to see that rhythmic style throughout the game as they play it. Not only in how the game plays, but in the overall art style.

Flashing lights, bright colors, and reverberations along to the beat can all be physically seen as players are dropping and matching. These fit a theme that also happens to match perfectly with the EDM/Hip Hop scene. Something about those genres of music lends itself to a game like Tetris Beat perfectly and it’s no surprise that the soundtrack is expected to follow that path. Even better, it’s going to be more than the typical Top 40.

“We definitely reached out to our current Tetris community and looked at players that play on mobile devices and we asked them if they wanted to play Tetris to the beat of the music and it was a resounding yes.” Kathee Chimowitz of N3TWORK told UPROXX. “We then asked what genres would you like to play to or listen to the most? And the top three were pop, hip-hop, and EDM.

“Today women and non-binary producers in dance music is severely underrepresented. And so we have the pleasure to bring artists with incredible diverse talent to Tetris Beat and to Tetris,” Chimowitz continued. “So with our music supervisor David Stephenson Fisher’s hand, we were able to have Alison Wonderland, Cinthie, Octo Octa, Eris Drew, and Dru Flecha, in the game and cover genres from Scandinavian Pop to Latin American hip-hop.”

As the team behind Tetris Beat searched the world for artists to contribute to the soundtrack, one of the names they landed on was Rob “GARZA” Garza. The EDM producer said the opportunity to be a part of a game with so much history was too intriguing to pass up.

“As a kid, I loved playing Tetris and it’s something… I have a ten-year-old son, and we played it as well.” Rob GARZA told UPROXX. “And [they] were telling me about the project and you know, I’m always up for doing a lot of different types of work. So I was kind of excited to jump in and do something.”

The song GARZA created for Tetris Beat is a really fun EDM beat that will have most players bopping their head along to it as they drop in tiles. The exact feeling that the Tetris Beat team wanted to create with their soundtrack. It’s exciting and vibrant but nothing too overwhelming, which is important in a rhythm game.

“My creative process is just, you know, just sit down with a bunch of instruments and synthesizers that I love and just kind of start ripping and coming up with ideas,” GARZA said. “And, you know, I want to just make something that was very mystical sounding kind of, you know, had this idea of like flying saucers and mushrooms and things happening and they sort of gave me a creative way to play around. So I wanted something that also sounds a bit otherworldly, but also, you know, has some cultural context is from a lot of different places.”

It would have been really easy for Tetris Beat to be a game where players just played rhythm-based Tetris to whatever song is in their Apple Music library. But that wouldn’t have fit what makes Tetris cool. The style of Tetris Beat, alongside the pop, hip-hop, and EDM music they’ve chosen meshes far better together. With artists like GARZA understanding this, and making music that matched that theming, the team of Tetris Beat has created a truly unique soundtrack. One that is diverse, inclusive, and fitting of the Tetris name. Tetris should be cool and Tetris Beat looks cool.

Want a sample of the kind of music that will be in Tetris Beat? Get an exclusive look at GARZA’s Mystification right here on Uproxx! You can of course find the full song on Apple Music or within Tetris Beat itself.

Is Idiocracy a great movie? Watching it from start to finish, then and now, it feels like a movie that never quite came together. It feels flawed, unfinished, missing something in some ineffable way, and yet: I don’t think there’s another film that I’ve thought about as often and as consistently since it came out. The same way I Think You Should Leave memes almost transcended the original sketches as cultural commentary, it’s rare to go a full day online without hearing someone reference Idiocracy. In an updated Idiocracy, Idiocracy characters would constantly quote Idiocracy.

The film, written by Beavis & Butthead creator Mike Judge and Tropic Thunder co-writer Etan Cohen, imagines a world 500 years into the future, when civilization has all but collapsed because humanity has become irretrievably stupid. It illustrates how this happened with a voice-of-God narrator and a comparative case study: the high IQ yuppie couple who sensibly wait and wait to have kids until they can’t anymore on one side, and the trailer trash meatheads (really no other way to describe them) with the giant brood of neglected children and Maury Povich-esque sex life who keeps procreating at an alarming rate on the other.

Thus Idiocracy is fairly “problematic” right out of the gate, feeling like a less overtly racist version of presentations eugenicists were probably giving in the early 20th century. Yet it has the inescapable ring of basic emotional truth to it, and in any case leads into a fairly devastating satire of contemporary capitalist society.

Even as a specific indictment of W Bush-era DUMB TOUGH GUY XTREME SPORTS culture, Idiocracy remains distinctly prescient 15 years later. Every time I need tech support from a multinational corporation and they route me to a chatbot that tells me that they’re sorry to hear that I’ve been having trouble with my internet and that they know how frustrating that can be (who doesn’t love an AI bot that can feign empathy?) I imagine the dull-eyed Costco greeters from Idiocracy, deadpanning “Welcome to Costco, I love you” at every person who walks into the store. Every time I hear a bad advertising pun, I think about the time-lapse of Fuddrucker’s slowly evolving, from Fuddrucker’s to Futtbucker’s to Buttfucker’s. Every time a politician acts like they’re cutting a pro wrestling promo, I think of the “House of Representin’.” Virtually every Trump speech reminded me of Idiocracy‘s President Camacho (Trump had even been in WWE matches!), but even before that there was disgraced former Missouri Governor Eric Greitans shooting a belt-fed machine gun in a campaign ad.

According to Mike Judge, Idiocracy even predicted Crocs.

The wardrobe had to be something that’s not around now. It had to be created for a lot of extras, and so you know our wardrobe person was looking for ways to make the budget work. And Crocs were not out in the world yet. They were just a small startup at the time. We shot in 2004, so no one was wearing Crocs. And she showed me these things, and I thought, ‘Oh those are great, just stupid plastic shoes.’ And I said to her, ‘But you actually bought these, you can order these. What if by the time the movie comes out, these things are everywhere, and it doesn’t look like we’re set in the future?’ And she said, ‘Oh no, that’s never going to happen.’ And sure enough, by the time it comes out two years later, everyone is wearing Crocs.

In Idiocracy‘s future, Carl’s Jr.’s slogan is “Fuck you, I’m eating.” When Luke Wilson’s unfrozen 21st century average guy grabs a magazine in the doctor’s office, the masthead reads “Hot Naked Chicks & World Reports.” In arguably his finest role, Justin Long, playing “Dr. Lexus,” greets Wilson, his new patient (whose comparatively erudite speech sounds “pompous and effeminate” to the future folk, according to the narrator) with “How’s it hang, ése?”

Dr. Lexus proceeds to deliver his unforgettable diagnosis: “I don’t wanna sound like a dick or nothing, but it says on your chart you’re fucked up. You talk like a f*g, and your shit’s all ret*rded.”

So yes, there are quite a few racial, sexual, and clinical slurs in Idiocracy that probably wouldn’t fly in a movie today, but mostly they feel accurate to a society being depicted as dangerously stupid. (The way Idiocracy seems to equate hip hop culture with stupidity is much more uncomfortable than the un-PC verbiage). For the record, Mike Judge has said in interviews that the language in the film was directly inspired by a childhood incident in which some of his schoolmates called him a f*g after he got all the answers right on a math quiz. Judge, remember, was a physics major, whose early, unfulfilling jobs in science and engineering inspired Office Space (he also played bass in “Shamu’s Blues Band” at SeaWorld in the eighties, but that’s another story).

Middle school bullies in 2021 might be less likely to put their antagonism in the same terms, just like corporate advertising has mostly gone in the opposite direction, now trying to imitate a pedantic gender studies professor rather than a drunk frat guy at Buffalo Wild Wings. Yet the spirit of shallow, depersonalized corporate pandering, to a fundamentally petty and credulous populace, remains the same.

Idiocracy is an anomaly in this way, a film that feels somehow both dated and relevant. It’s easy to say that 15 years later, but the truth is, Idiocracy was always an anomaly. It was filmed in 2004, bumped from its original release in August 2005, and by August 2006 was reported “shelved indefinitely.” It was ultimately released September 1st, 2006 in just seven cities, on 130 screens, with “zero marketing for the movie — no trailers, posters, television spots or even press kits for media outlets.” This per the Austin American-Statesman, which quotes a Fox executive calling this “an executive decision.”

It was long rumored that this “executive decision” had something to do with Idiocracy making fun of Fox News, and a long list of companies that did or might advertise with them. As Terry Crews, who played President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in the film, told GQ in 2018, “The rumor was is that because we used real corporations in our comedy — I mean Starbucks was giving hand jobs — and these companies gave us their name thinking they were going to get pumped up […] there were a lot of people who were backing out. But it was too late. And so Fox, which owned the movie, decided we are going to release this in as few theaters as legally possible. So it got a release in probably three theaters over one weekend and it was sucked out into the vortex.”

This is the version of the story that serves Idiocracy, that its take-no-prisoners approach simply ruffled too many feathers. And there’s probably a kernel of truth to it. But for his part, Judge offered a simpler explanation to the NY Times in 2017: that the film just tested poorly with audiences. The studio figured it might end up making them a ton of money on DVD like Office Space had. The early blogosphere was already screaming at Fox throughout this process, and yet despite it all, AintItCoolNews’s paraphrased review from an anonymous insider at the time still remains essentially true: “I’ve heard it’s crazy-insane funny, and I’ve heard it is very flawed, even hard to sit through.”

As brilliant as Idiocracy is in concept, the special effects are notably cheap — either because the studio didn’t want to pay for them or because Judge went for a Monty Python-esque look that didn’t entirely pan out — the pacing is off, and it has the unmistakable feel of a series of hilarious post-it notes sort of haphazardly strung together.

I don’t know if that’s a failure of filmmaking or simply the nature of the concept: it’s hard to delve too far, too long into a world as depressing and terrifyingly real as Idiocracy‘s. The opening shot, of a 60s-era mural depicting humanity’s glorious future, of elevated trains, flying cars, and houses in the clouds, juxtaposed with the depressing concrete amusement park where it’s painted — a giant hamster wheel for humans designed by corporation, essentially — remains as devastating as ever.

This is a film, after all, whose “happy ending” consists of the 21st-century average guy living happily ever after with a prostitute wife in a ruined 26th century surrounded by trash mountains and hooting morons. That it’s maybe a little “too real” is maybe why, then and now, Idiocracy is a movie that’s more fun to describe than it is to watch; almost as hard to sit through as it is to forget.

Perhaps the ultimate testament to Idiocracy as a cultural touchstone is the fact that even the exec describing how he botched the initial release (from the same NY Times piece in 2017) sounds like a cut scene from Idiocracy:

As we took a seat in the back of the Commissary, a restaurant on the Sony Pictures Studios lot, Mike Judge pointed out a man seated two booths away. It was Tom Rothman, the chairman of Sony Pictures and former head of Fox’s film division […]

As if on cue, Rothman approached our table, wearing glasses and a pinkish Oxford, carrying an antique lacrosse stick with a tennis ball in the basket, cradling it back and forth as he talked. He was with a friend named Lars Tiffany, who was wearing a Virginia Lacrosse shirt and, as a matter of fact, had recently been installed as the head coach of men’s lacrosse at the University of Virginia, and had taken his team to the studio to meet Rothman. “This is Mike Judge himself,” Rothman said to Tiffany. Then Judge introduced me to Rothman, explaining that I was from The Times: “Be careful what you say.”

“You’re doing a profile of Mike?” Rothman asked, beaming with excitement, which seemed to be his default mode. “You can’t possibly do a profile of Mike without talking to me! About his [expletive] movie career! Goddamn right! ‘Office Space’! ‘Office Space’ and ‘Idiocracy’!”

“O.K., so lemme just say, I’ll give you the simple answer: ‘Office Space’ is to his credit, and ‘Idiocracy’ is entirely my fault.” He turned to Judge. “Right?”

“I agree,” Judge said.

“He was [expletive] ahead of his time. As always. As always.”

“I should’ve made it 10 years later and set in the present.”

Rothman turned to me. “He had it. You’re gonna see it. How absolutely. Terri-fy-ingly. Prescient it is.” He was picking up momentum. “Right now? ‘Idiocracy’? One of the great documentaries of our era!” he said, physically punctuating his point in such a way that he managed to thump a diner sitting behind him with the lacrosse stick.

Idiocracy was never the movie we wanted. It was the movie we deserved.