https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WJSdpE-sJQ

https://youtu.be/WdsrTWKCGIw

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/26/arts/homecoming-julia-roberts-tv-podcast.html?action=click&module=Features&pgtype=Homepage

In ‘Homecoming,’ a Sound Experiment Becomes Something to See
Image

By Robert Ito

Oct. 26, 2018

UNIVERSAL CITY, Calif. — What do you see? If you’re listening to “Homecoming,” the cult hit podcast from Gimlet Media, the answer is nothing. A psychological thriller set largely inside a mysterious corporate facility somewhere in Florida, the podcast’s story is relayed strictly through sound, even more so than other fictional podcasts of late, or the cliffhanger-loving radio dramas that preceded them. Seemingly cobbled together from found recordings of phone calls and therapy sessions, there’s not even a narrator to tell you where you are, or when.

For the podcast’s creators, Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg, that meant everything depended on the characters. “You can’t hide behind cinematography or good-looking actors or costumes,” Bloomberg said. “You can’t have action sequences. You can’t have sex, really, in any kind of convincing or interesting way. The only thing you have is an engaging scene.”

So what did the “Homecoming” co-creators do when Hollywood came calling, hoping to transform their podcast into a full-blown TV series? In many ways, they took advantage of the (much) more robust budgets and cool new tools that premium TV series come with. But even with all this largess, they strove to retain the podcast’s intimate, even claustrophobic, feel.

On an afternoon last March, between takes here on the “Homecoming” set, the two described the transformation. For their secret facility, they constructed an enormous, two-story compound within a 36,000-square-foot soundstage, one of the largest here on the Universal Studios backlot. They enlisted Sam Esmail, the creator of the critically acclaimed dystopian thriller “Mr. Robot,” to direct. And then there’s Julia Roberts, in her first TV series, ever. “I don’t know how we got her,” Horowitz admitted.


The result is the Amazon Prime series “Homecoming,” which debuts Nov. 2 and has already been renewed for a second season. In the adaptation, Roberts plays Heidi Bergman, a caseworker charged with helping combat veterans readjust to civilian life. As a therapist at the Homecoming Transitional Support Center, Heidi becomes close to one of her patients, Walter Cruz (Stephan James), a veteran eager to get better, and butts heads with Colin Belfast (Bobby Cannavale), her condescending, insufferable boss. The series toggles between the present day and 2022, when Heidi is a waitress at a rundown seafood shack, with seemingly little memory of her past life or job.

Work on the TV adaptation began in earnest in December 2016, when Universal Cable Productions purchased the rights to the story and began sending out feelers for a director. Esmail, a fan of the podcast, which stars Catherine Keener (Heidi), Oscar Isaac (Walter) and David Schwimmer (Colin), initially balked at the idea of an adaptation, figuring why screw up an already good thing? After bingeing the show three times, however, Esmail began to see the possibilities, and not just because it shared many of the same themes — shadowy corporate machinations, creepy 24/7 surveillance — as his award-winning “Mr. Robot.” “It’s not like I read the script and said, well, it’s got an evil corporation and paranoia, I’m in,” he said.

He saw it more as a throwback to the character-based thrillers of Hitchcock and De Palma, and a month later, after pitching his vision to Horowitz and Bloomberg, he got the job. As it turned out, Roberts was also a big fan of the podcast (she binged the show, she said, while sorting thousands of Lego bricks in her younger son’s bedroom), and the two met over FaceTime to talk about the possibility of working together. Esmail was getting married in two weeks (to the “Shameless” star Emmy Rossum), so for the first 45 minutes, Roberts peppered him with questions about the wedding, while Esmail asked her about her kids. “We were like girlfriends,” Roberts said. “It was like we had gone to high school together.”

Roberts ultimately agreed to the project, with two conditions. “On the top of the list was that Sam had to direct all the episodes,” she said. “And I needed Micah and Eli to write all of the scripts before we started shooting.” (Esmail was originally planning to direct just the first two episodes, but a yearlong hiatus for “Mr. Robot” allowed him to fulfill Roberts’s request.)

As a condition of Roberts agreeing to sign on, she demanded that the podcast’s creators, Eli Horowitz, left, and Micah Bloomberg, write all the scripts before shooting began.CreditBrian Guido for The New York Times

With the cast and crew largely in place, Horowitz and Bloomberg began writing the show’s first season. “We had a huge advantage coming out of a podcast, because we felt that we had already tested this at an elemental, molecular level,” Bloomberg said.

For the podcast, the pair had created simple auditory cues to let the listener know where they were; the bubbling sounds of a fish tank inside Heidi’s office, for instance. The production designer Anastasia White, who works with Esmail on “Mr. Robot,” adapted the aquarium motif, coming up with everything from the compound’s muted green color scheme and fishbowl feel (the center’s cafeteria doubles as feeding station and surveillance area) to the school of silvery fish on the facility’s walls. “All this stuff is because we liked the sound of bubbles,” Horowitz said.

There’s something unsettling about the facility, as if some clueless corporate entity had taken over an abandoned office building, shoved all the old desks and chairs into spare rooms, and hired a design firm to convert the place into a supposedly restful rehab center. (That is indeed the site’s back story.) The vibe of the place is tropical and Florida, but with meds, and government creeps. “Pineapples are a recurring theme,” White said.

To differentiate between 2018 and 2022, Tod Campbell, the director of photography, alternated between a full-frame, sixteen : nine aspect ratio (when Heidi is still relatively lucid) to a more confined square box format (after Heidi has lost large chunks of her memory). For the phone conversations between Colin and Heidi, he shot the two in split screen, “facing away from each other, because they’re always at odds,” he said. “Or sometimes she’s small in the frame, sitting on a park bench, and he’s in close-up, his big face yelling at her.”

Plotwise, the series hews pretty closely to the original — there’s just a lot more of it. The creators added several characters that deepen our understanding of what’s going on behind the scenes (Alex Karpovsky, as the compound’s life skills coach and company rat) and in the corporate overlords’s heads (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, as Walter’s not-buying-it mom). Some scenes are simply more dramatic in the series, as events in the podcast that we only learn about later through surreptitious recordings are presented in real time.

Both creators struggled to keep the show from spinning out into some large-scale “genre, paranoid thriller,” Horowitz said. “The natural tendency is to go bigger, but the solution was really to go more human.”

They have found that working on the series has been both easier than the podcast (“you can actually show a sign, as opposed to figuring out a way for characters to reveal what the sign says,” Horowitz said), and less frenzied (65 days to shoot the 10-episode season, versus four days to record Season 1 of the podcast). And there are more folks helping out. As grips and assorted other crew members scurried by, the two craned their necks, looks of astonishment on their faces. “Look at all these people!,” Horowitz marveled.

But rabid fans of the podcast need not fret; the podcast will continue and the TV offshoot can be a complementary experience. “Part of the reason we deviated from the podcast was that I wanted people to be able to enjoy both without having to sacrifice one of them,” Esmail said. “I really wanted to treat the TV show as its own creature.”

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 28, 2018, on Page AR15 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Homecoming,’ Now Seen as Well as Heard. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvIo3UyuSA0

(Sam Esmail video interview in the link at bottom of the article)

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-features/homecoming-spoilers-esmail-interview-sepinwall-751399/


HOME>TV>TV FEATURES

NOVEMBER 5, 2018 12:00PM ET

‘Homecoming’: How Sam Esmail Made Fall TV’s Most Exciting Show
The boundary-pushing director offers behind-the-scenes insights into the Amazon thriller

by ALAN SEPINWALL

Amazon’s Homecoming — adapted from the popular podcast, starring Julia Roberts and directed by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail — debuted last week. As compelling as it was, it left certain questions to be discussed once the 10-episode season was done. Full spoilers coming up just as soon as I detach and reattach my reading glasses 27 times…

For someone who’d barely directed anything prior to Mr. Robot, Esmail has fast turned into one of television’s most interesting directors. There are times when his visual flourishes can draw attention away from the story. But more often than not, the off-kilter framing, continuous-take scenes and other devices help illuminate the characterizations rather than undercutting them.

That is particularly true of the visual signature he uses in Homecoming: presenting all the 2022 scenes where Heidi is a waitress in a vertical frame, with the left and right of the screen blacked out. At first, the technique, which resembles video someone took on their phone, just seems like a quick-and-dirty method to differentiate the future timeline from the one in the present, where Heidi is working with Walter at the Homecoming facility. Occasionally, it can even feel like a stunt undertaken for its own sake. Between Roberts’ hairstyle, the setting and the difference in characters (Shea Whigham’s investigator Thomas Carrasco only appears in the future scenes, for instance), there are enough clues to the timeframe without the black bars flanking the image (letterboxing at a 90-degree angle).

But then comes perhaps the best television shot of the year, late in the eighth episode, where Heidi finally regains her memories as she and her former boss, Bobby Cannvale’s Colin, separately tour the abandoned Homecoming offices:


Heidi remembers everything in ‘Homecoming.’


It is a watershed moment for Heidi, thrilling in its execution. Yes, the vertical frame helps differentiate one timeline from the other, but it’s also a symbol for how she had deliberately blocked off her memories of her time with Walter by eating the same drugged food as him in order to save him from being sent overseas for another combat tour. (Later, during the scene in the 2018 timeline where the memory-erasing meds kick in, that timeline’s horizontal frame shrinks into the now-familiar vertical one.)
Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with Esmail about the thinking and logistics behind the vertical frame in general, and that marvelous zoom/expanse in particular.

“We always start with the character and with her point of view,” he explained. “What is she going through, what is she experiencing? We lit it a little flatter, the colors are a little more de-saturated. Her world is more downtrodden, she’s defeated. But her memory is a big part of the show, and she doesn’t see the whole picture. She’s boxed in. And she’s also being cornered by Carrasco, and later by Colin. So we thought, ‘Let’s just literally put her in a box.’


“And when we went to episode eight,” he continued, “we thought, ‘Oh, this’ll be cool. We’ll just wipe out the screen, and now she’ll see the full picture.’ That was such a great way to represent that. I didn’t know what else we were going to do, other than, Julia’s just going to have act like these memories are floating back. So we were just going to wipe it out. I’ve seen that before. Xavier Dolan did that in Mommy. But there was something that felt wrong about that, too. It’s not like she’s seeing more of the picture; it’s that her world now feels bigger. That zolly (dolly zoom) idea came around when it got closer to actually shooting the scene.”

TV is a visual medium, but for a lot of its history — including the decades when most television sets came with an aspect ratio only a bit wider than what we see in the 2022 scenes here — the people making it rarely leaned on the pictures themselves to tell a story. Lately, that’s started to change, and Homecoming‘s two biggest emotional moments are told with pictures, not words: the frame expanding around Heidi’s face, and the shot of Heidi’s cutlery pushed slightly askew by Walter at the end of the finale, which establishes that on some deep mental level he can’t fully access, he remembers his time with Heidi at Homecoming.

As Esmail put it regarding the vertical framing, “We didn’t want it to be a gimmick. The audience doesn’t need a huge visual cue to recognize different timelines. We just thought it was the right way to represent Heidi’s journey.”


More thoughts and questions about the season, with commentary when possible from Esmail:


Instant chemistry lesson


Even more than Esmail’s visual sense, the creative success of Homecoming leans on the bond between Heidi and Walter, and the chemistry between Roberts and Stephan James. Large chunks of the series, particularly in the slow-burning early chapters, are just Heidi and Walter making small talk about road trips, the fake Titanic sequel (Titanic Rising) he and his buddies invented to prank another soldier, etc. These conversations are as essential for Heidi as they are for the show. She has to build a rapport with her client so he’ll be open with her as she monitors the effect the Geist company’s brain-altering chemicals are having on him. And the audience has to care enough about the relationship not only to keep watching until the plot really kicks in, but to be curious what’s become of Walter in 2022.

James was busy filming If Beale Street Could Talk when Homecoming was casting, so his first audition was done on tape. It was striking enough for Esmail to put him in a room with Roberts, and their connection was so obvious so quickly that the director scrapped plans to devote pre-production time to helping them get more comfortable with one another. What he first noticed between them is very apparent in the finished product.


What’s the story with Audrey?


Homecoming is an Esmail show, which means it’s required by law to have an atmospheric mid-credits scene in the finale. In this case, it’s a continuation of the earlier role reversal between Colin and his former assistant Audrey (Hong Chau, who’s had a busy fall between this show, BoJack Horseman and that one great episode of Forever). As soon as Colin finishes signing the paperwork that makes him the scapegoat for the Homecoming mess and leaves, Audrey’s smug demeanor vanishes. She looks worried, her fingers start to tremble and she rubs the contents of a vial labeled “Lab Use Only” on her wrists. Is this her using a less extreme version of the drugs that Heidi and Walter ingested, in order to alleviate her anxiety about recent events? Is it a different Geist creation altogether? And how much of this scene is set-up for the planned second season? Esmail’s not telling: “Spoiler-free zone. I can’t talk. But I will say this: She’s a great actress on the show.”


Esmail vs. autoplay


Another of the show’s visual signatures: the end credits play over a lingering, usually static shot of some innocuous activity: Carrasco goes through file boxes in the office basement, a corporate party happens around Colin as he contemplates the reason Heidi would call him four years after they last spoke, etc. None of these moments are necessary for the plot, but they contribute to the series’ paranoid atmosphere, lending the viewer a feeling of spying on the characters after they think the director has called cut.

When making the show, Esmail wasn’t sure how Amazon’s autoplay function would accommodate the idea, since it typically offers the option to jump to the next episode as soon as the closing credits begin. As it turns out, that option does pop up right away, but if you don’t manually click on it, you get a good 30 seconds of unsettling vibes before the next episode begins — just not as much time as Esmail and his collaborators may have intended. (You can, of course, opt out of autoplay, but that’s more effort than most people are willing to give in a binge.)


This is the Bad Place?


The Homecoming facility itself, which Esmail suggested was an example of a corporation trying to seem cool and failing, was a set built for the show. And some places, like the Geist corporate headquarters with its big atrium and staircase, were chosen to suit the vertical frame of the 2022 scenes. But a few other locations may have looked familiar to Peak TV viewers. Heidi’s apartment complex in Tampa was the same building that Transparent used as Shelly’s retirement community. And speaking of retirement communities, the one that Walter and Shrier stumble upon during their brief escape attempt was shot on the European city street on the Universal backlot — a.k.a. Michael’s neighborhood from The Good Place‘s first two seasons.

(For that matter, Heidi’s office, with its circular shape and wood paneling, resembles Dr. Melfi’s from The Sopranos, though it was built for this show.)


I can see clearly now


Esmail is one of those directors who loves to give his actors props to play with, as much to challenge them with an extra physical component as to help inform character. Heidi is constantly fiddling with her digital voice recorder and adjusting the items on her desk (which helps set up that great concluding moment at the diner), while Carrasco puts on and takes off his collapsible, magnetic reading glasses so many times during his investigation, the specs practically become his partner. Esmail, Whigham and the prop team spent a long time considering various pairs of glasses and loops before settling on that particular old-school combo.

(The 2022 scenes are decidedly low-tech in general. The creative team chose a four-year gap in part because technology wouldn’t look too different over that span. “The phone I have now pretty much looks like the one I had in 2014,” Esmail noted.)


Haven’t we met before?


In addition to Heidi and Colin’s reunion in the 2022 timeline — where he pretends to be a soldier with PTSD so he can get close to her (and sleep with her) while he figures out her angle — the series features a couple of real-life reunions. Cannavale worked on the most recent season of Mr. Robot, and as Esmail tells it, the actor approached him one day and began extolling the virtues of the Homecoming podcast. Esmail explained that he was actually adapting it for TV, Cannavale seemed surprised, and they moved on. A few days later, Cannavale approached him and suggested he would make a good Colin. When I proffered that this seems like a performer playing dumb to manipulate his way into a job, Esmail thought about it and admitted it was entirely possible Cannavale was gaslighting him.

Meanwhile, Heidi’s depressing 2018 boyfriend Russell is played by her old My Best Friend’s Wedding co-star Dermot Mulroney. Esmail is a big fan of the movie and sheepishly suggested Mulroney in an early meeting with Roberts after she had signed to play Heidi. “And she said, ‘Hold on, let me text him,'” he recalled. Between takes, he said, the two had the chemistry of siblings, with Mulroney calling Roberts “Jules” at all times.

It's from the creator of Mr. Robot. Got it.

Is it a good show though?

That's all I want to know.

https://www.thrillist.com/entertainment/nation/homecoming-ending-sam-esmail-interview


ENTERTAINMENT

'Homecoming' Director Sam Esmail Wants You to Sort Out That Ending for Yourself


By ESTHER ZUCKERMAN

Published On 11/02/2018

@ezwrites

There's a moment as the credits roll on the final episode of the first season of Amazon's Homecoming that's undeniably poignant. Even though it certainly provokes more questions than answers, it's less cynical than the rest of the series and, surprisingly, almost hopeful. Of course, if you stay tuned, the pessimism that seeps through the rest of this series from director Sam Esmail of Mr. Robot and writers Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg makes its way back in. But for a brief second, there's a respite.

Homecoming, based on the fictional podcast of the same name, brings Julia Roberts to TV as Heidi Bergman, who we first meet as a therapist working at Homecoming, a facility for returning soldiers with PTSD. The 10 episodes -- each around a half-hour long -- jump back and forth between 2018 when Heidi is working at the center and 2022 when the program is being investigated by a diligent Department of Defense cog (Shea Whigham). The aspect ratio shifts between the time periods, closing in during the future sequences; soon, it's evident that's not just a stylistic choice. Heidi, at that moment in time, doesn't remember everything that happened. There are holes. Homecoming's strategy of healing is to medicate the former soldiers with a plant-based drug that solves their trauma by ripping away their memories. This happens to Walter Cruz (Stephan James), a patient with whom Heidi has developed a kindly, flirtatious relationship. And when she discovers that he, now free of his pain, is being redeployed, she aims to save him and herself by ingesting the medication and doubling his dose.

After Heidi's own past begins to come back to her, she seeks out Walter, eventually finding him in a small California town. They meet in a café, and she doesn't let on she knows who he is. He doesn't either -- or does he? When he leaves, she looks down and sees a fork slightly askew. If he did indeed place it like that, it's a callback to a moment in her office during the previous episode when he adjusts a pen. If he didn't, it's a strange coincidence. But Esmail doesn't want to tell you what really happens. That's up for debate, and probably relevant to the in-the-works Season 2. He did speak to Thrillist about that moment -- and the post credits scene in which a character hovering on the sidelines gets her big moment.


Thrillist: The use of different aspect ratios stands out initially. But as the series goes on, you realize the shifts are about how we see memory. Can you talk about that a bit?


Esmail: Well, actually you kind of answered it in your question. Basically, when we started thinking about how to visualize the 2022 storyline, it always starts with our main character Heidi and her point of view and the fact that she doesn't remember everything. It kind of made sense to limit her scope and limit her world because she's not seeing the full picture. That's sort of why we did that box ratio. Also there's this weird claustrophobia and boxed-in feel that we put Heidi in by shooting that aspect ratio because she's being pursued by Carrasco and Colin later on. So, for all those reasons, and of course obviously in episode eight -- and we didn't know this at the time when we made this decision -- but as we progressed and made that decision, in that moment when Heidi does remember everything, for us as storytellers it paid off really well because that was such a great way to now tell the audience that Heidi's memories were now coming back.



T: And then you repeat that in the past timeline when it closes in.


Esmail: Where we show where she lost all her memories.


T: There are images that pop up throughout the series: geometric images, forks in the road, the vending machines. What was your thinking behind that?



Esmail: There are a couple things. One, the tone of the entire show has this sort of lingering effect. I think that helps a lot when you have these geometric images that also double as hypnotic images. You can't quite look away from it, and that's a lot of the reason why we do long takes, too. It almost feels like you're not blinking, that you're constantly leaning in.


Part of the reason we do rolling credits at the end over visuals is, it's not a bombastic moment -- it's a slow, hypnotic, almost meditative state we want to put the audience in. And then the other sort of side to all of that is, I had this idea thematically for the show that this is about the boxes we live in, the boxes we know we are in, and then we realize that box is actually in a bigger box. And that box is in a bigger box. We can keep pulling out and reframing what we thought we knew the more information that we got. That actually drove the aspect ratio conversation a lot because that's also kind of a box.

Even the way the show opens, where you start on a palm tree and then a goldfish comes out and then you pull out and you're in an office with an aquarium and then the office isn't really what it seems. Even in episode six, we push in on Heidi and Colin and they are in the Chinese restaurant, but the camera is outside looking through a window, which is another box. We constantly do that to put the audience in this position of, is this the world them and around us as a viewer, is it what it seems or is there something that's right around the corner that's going to change what we thought we understood?


T: The recurring images made me think of the final scene with Heidi and Walter, where it appears that he has moved a fork. I looked back to find the moment when he moves the pen in her office as they are discussing redeployment. Are those two moments connected?


Esmail: It's weird because this is one of those questions where it's not a spoiler because you've seen the show and obviously hopefully everyone who is reading this right now has seen the show, but it's a spoiler in the sense that I don't want to ruin anyone's experience. In a lot of ways, those two moments are connected, but the meaning of that depends on how you read that last scene and how you read what Walter is or is not trying to say to Heidi. I kind of want to leave it up to the imagination of the audience.


T: You don't have to say so, but do you have a read on that?


Esmail: Yes.



T: But you want to leave it up to the audience to debate. Why?


Esmail: You know, to me, I love endings that are not answers, are not the definitive conclusions. I'm always disappointed with that. I love endings that let you engage and let you get involved in how you want to feel. And I love people that come away with it with wildly different interpretations. That's sort of the beauty of storytelling is that you can inspire great conversation even if two people have walked away from the same thing. That's part of the reason why I love the way the ending is and I love that we're even having this conversation. The fact that there isn't a one word answer, to me that's a plus.

Hong Chau is amazing. When I saw her in the background of scenes, I kept waiting for her to do more, and then it happened in the post credits scene when her character, Audrey, turns the tables on Bobby Cannavale's Colin. Can you talk about casting that role?
Esmail: Look, I don't want to spoil anything for Season 2, but we knew that that character was going to play a critical role. I think at the time I had seen Downsizing. I think it had just come out, and I was blown away by her performance. I just thought there was something about her -- kind of the way you described it -- even though she's in the background and not foregrounded as much, you are going to pay attention to her. You are going to keep your eye on her. And that's exactly what we wanted to do with that character. So, we reached out to Hong and luckily for us she was into the character and into the show that she wanted to come on and do it.



T: How did you think about the story for television versus the original podcast?


Esmail: The sequence that probably convinced me that there is something here that could be a TV show that could stand out on its own separate from the podcast is in episode three when Shrier and Walter steal the van and escape the facility because Shrier has this theory that they're not really in Florida. So they take off and they find this odd little town and they think it's part of this military exercise. And lo and behold, you realize you are in Florida and that was just a retirement village.


In the podcast, that whole sequence is told to you by Walter to Heidi and he's laughing as he's saying it because he knows the ending. And so it really kind of ruined the suspense and tension of that sequence because you know the answer before you even are told story. It was kind of a Eureka moment where I realized, wow, we could film that we could actually kind of have some suspension of whether or not Shrier's theory is actually true. We can be connected with Walter and Shrier and also be on the ride with them and create this tension as we build up to the reveal that no, it's all for not, they really are in Florida. That's kind of the best example I can think of early on in the season where the podcast had to deviate, kind of do it in this way because it was the only way they could fit it in this format, but in television we could go in a more thriller suspenseful sequence.


T: How deep are you as you prep for season two into the backstory of the Geist corporation and what this plant-based drug that they are working with is?


Esmail: We're in the writers' room working all of it out and we're definitely knee deep in it. So, yeah, everything you're talking about in terms of the backstory of Geist and what's going on with the medication is all under construction in the writers' room as we speak.


T: Is that something you're inventing anew for the show?


Esmail: Again, I think we've deviated a lot from the podcast that it's kind of its own thing right now, the show.


T: The music of the show is so specific, but in that final scene you use the Iron & Wine song "The Trapeze Swinger." Why did you go for that?


Esmail: It's a big one and music is obviously so critical and so important to me. With a moment like that I wanted a song that felt like, a) it was real to the scene and real to the environment and would be playing in that diner, and then, b) is it going to hit me in the gut and in the heart at the end? Is it going to land that moment? Because I want music to be reflective of what's going on with our characters, especially with this moment with Heidi. The way you do it is you try a bunch of different songs. I think we were trying songs up until the day of the mix where we had to make our final call. That song, I think that was my first pick weeks prior. We threw it in there. Then we had music supervisors coming up with ideas and editors coming up with other ideas and then I canvassed out to other producers and even the writers came up with ideas. We just always did the Coke-Pepsi challenge. We put them up side by side and the Iron & Wine song just kept knocking them all down. We just go with our emotions and if it hits us in the gut, then we know we've got the right song.


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Esther Zuckerman is a senior entertainment writer at Thrillist. Follow her on Twitter @ezwrites.

curious... for those that have heard the podcast, is it just like the show? Just wondering if I should bother going back and listening to it.

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Homecoming was the first fictional story podcast I ever listened to and it was extremely captivating. I haven't watched the show yet but am excited to do so, since the podcast was excellent.

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Its clever the ways they use this show's roots as a podcast to its benefit, but it's also super rad how this show has just about everything I like about this second generation of auteur TV in it. Hyper focused, visually intoxicating, inspired casting, and super deft shifts in tone that don't at all feel jarring but rather keep the viewer on their toes and second guessing themselves.


Just starting episode five and I'd say these might be the most clever screenplays on TV this side of Saul.


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I loved it. Stephan James and Julia Roberts had amazing chemistry together. The acting was top notch from everyone. Including Shea Wigham and Bobby Cannavale. Also, Esmail directed the isht out of this show. The set design and cinematography were great.

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Last 3 things I watched:

The Changeling Season 1 (Apple+): C
OMITB Season 3 (Hulu): B-
Ahsoka Season 1 (Disney

Maniac did it too, to a lesser extent and IMO shows being too long is one of the biggest issues of the so-called peak TV era (I'm looking at you Ozark)

The one thing that confused me is that I read the show described as Sci-Fi before starting it, and I was kinda looking for that angle throughout (including watching the credit scenes)

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For the record, my teams:
MLB: Mets / Soccer: PSG
NCAA BB: Arizona / NCAA FB: Michigan
NBA: Spurs / NFL: Jets

just got into mr robot

definitely worth watching.

i dont know if it was on purpose or its just that im used to the hour long episodes but i kept thinking the episode was about to start when the credits would come on lol happened for at least the first 4 episodes.

creative and entertaining show. very well done.