The Ringer
- Thread starter Cellar-Door
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We’re now closing in on two months since the last new episode of 60 Songs That Explain the 90s. Did i miss an announcement? Thought the hiatus was only going to be a few weeks.
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Yeah just came to post. Very cool for her.
View: https://twitter.com/seanfennessey/status/1581676424791961604?s=46&t=WkaA8niToWHaIhxdvTYJtw
View: https://twitter.com/seanfennessey/status/1581676424791961604?s=46&t=WkaA8niToWHaIhxdvTYJtw
I keep thinking the most recent episode of 60 Songs That Explain the '90s can't be beat. But Harvilla just keeps topping himself.
I might not be the biggest Pantera fan on the planet, but the episode on "Walk" could very well be autobiographical for me. Guitar magazines, minimum wage, Big Muffs, heartbroken drives, and ECW.
Run, don't walk.
I might not be the biggest Pantera fan on the planet, but the episode on "Walk" could very well be autobiographical for me. Guitar magazines, minimum wage, Big Muffs, heartbroken drives, and ECW.
Run, don't walk.
I listened to The Big Picture episode on Wakanda Forever after seeing the movie this morning, and Sean Fennessey, who had mixed feelings about the film, pitched his idea of a possible better version of the sequel which was essentially repeating the plot of the first movie. Van Lathan was part of the pod, and I was really hoping he'd point that out, but either that point eluded him, or he was being a kind guest.
View: https://twitter.com/SheaSerrano/status/1594770570331185152
Shea is leaving the ringer. Not totally surprised since he's been transitioning to more and more creative fiction writing and his last pod ended.
Shea is leaving the ringer. Not totally surprised since he's been transitioning to more and more creative fiction writing and his last pod ended.
Shea is no loss. He isn't great on podcasts. And this was telegraphed months ago because he hasn't done much for the Ringer at all.
I do like Shea though and I hope all the projects he's working on crush it. He's actually a human being and not an overrated, thin skinned baby like Jason C.
I do like Shea though and I hope all the projects he's working on crush it. He's actually a human being and not an overrated, thin skinned baby like Jason C.
Ryan also got a deal. I guess he is moving on? Article doesn't say he officially left.
View: https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1595095751318798336
The Ringer’s Ryen Russillo Eyes Scripted TV Move As He Strikes New Podcast Deal & Signs With UTA
View: https://twitter.com/DEADLINE/status/1595095751318798336
The Ringer’s Ryen Russillo Eyes Scripted TV Move As He Strikes New Podcast Deal & Signs With UTA
Ryen has had a self-deprecating shtick on the podcasts with Bill and others where he starts "As a writer..." which I think is to make fun of the fact he's only known for radio and pods and has written a lot for prospective TV projects but has never had a script picked up.
Nice, thanks. That part of the page didn't load for me.
Will be interesting to see if one of his projects actually makes it and where it ends up. The big question is, will this cut into his workout schedule?
I’m glad I don’t know more about soccer because with what little I know Simmons and Cerutti talking about it was awful. We should run prongs based on Simmons experience watching girls teenagers play? We should ignore positions and just do what you do in basketball and play your best five offensive players “and let them figure it out”? We shouldn’t have a third keeper? Plus I’m highly dubious of anyone claiming-as those two did-thst about half of the national team is trash who have no business being on the squad
Bill's inattentiveness to what he's watching and willingness to comment on things he clearly doesn't understand is essentially his brand. This past week he did a recap pod on the most recent episodes of The White Lotus in which he missed the fact that the person the Jack character was having sex with at the episode's close was his supposed uncle Quentin (Tom Hollander). That reveal was the whole point of the scene, and a massively significant whiff for someone who took on the task of discussing the show. He had been doing the pod series with Joanna Robinson, but they brought in Mallory Rubin to join them for this one, and I'm half convinced it was so Joanna had someone knowledgeable to play off while the two of them explained what happened in the episode to Bill.
I enjoyed him throwing out "prongs" like it was actual soccer terminology. Chris Ryan's, "when you say 'prongs'....you just mean....two strikers?" had me laughing out loud. Bill's certainty that Walker Zimmerman was terrible and Carter-Vickers needed to start every game going forward was bad, especially after either Chris or Steve had just explained the tactical reason for CCV's inclusion against Iran.
We have reached peak Bill Simmons gambling talk. First off, he claims that he's gotten murdered gambling this year because he's done TOO much research. Too much DVOA, too much analysis, not enough vibes. Because there is always a reason he loses at gambling, it has nothing to do with the fact that it's random and very difficult and very few actually win at gambling. There is an answer and Simmons found it. And it's vibes.
And then in "Million" Dollar Picks, Simmons is down many millions so far this year because he's a bad gambler and, also, because he's done too much work on making his picks and doing work is bad. So now he puts down 4.5 million dollars on "million" dollar picks. So now it's multi million dollar picks.
If you run a bit and just keep ratcheting up the dollars when you're down a ton, I guess you'll win eventually. It could be in 2026, but you can't lose if you just keep tripling your bets when you're down.
I wish it were peak gambling talk, but I am doubtful since it now permeates everything Bill talks about. I'm so sick of any sentence that starts "On fanduel . . ." It's the worst. I take perverse pleasure in Bill and his amen chorus, Let's Go Schrager, getting pantsed on their picks each week (except the Thanksgiving Pats-Vikings game).
The Fanduel commercials are amazing. The legalese at the end of every ad is like 90 seconds. Thank heavens for the skip button.
For as dorky and pathetic as I think Simmons and his gambling schtick is, at least he hasn't completely sold out to FanDuel or one of the other betting sites* and is their celebrity mouthpiece, ala Portnoy.
* At least I don't think that he has. I haven't listened to his podcast in quite some time and I usually only follow him through Johnmd20's rants here and Simmons' Tweets.
It's basically the same thing in my opinion. Barstool only promotes their sportsbook for obvious reasons, but I think FanDuel has some exclusivity deal with the Ringer so you only hear about FanDuel on any of their podcasts. It's all Spotify's decision at this point anyways, he just got his bag from the Swedes instead of the casinos
Gotcha. Makes sense. I didn't know that FD and the Ringer had a deal.It's basically the same thing in my opinion. Barstool only promotes their sportsbook for obvious reasons, but I think FanDuel has some exclusivity deal with the Ringer so you only hear about FanDuel on any of their podcasts. It's all Spotify's decision at this point anyways, he just got his bag from the Swedes instead of the casinos
They have a huge deal. FD advertises on all the football podcasts, the NFL Ringer Show, Rusillo, and the Fantasy Football Podcast. Those are the ones I listen to. They probably advertise on the other sports podcasts, too.
So they are in DEEP with FD. It's a lot of ads.
He's going for the old Martingale strategy? Bold strategy Bill, let's see how it works out.
I mean... Martingale will always workout, until you run out of money to keep it going.
Have you listened to KOC's read on the Mismatch podcast? They speed up the part that starts "Gambling problem? Call . . ." It's both hilarious and appalling.
I take back my criticism of his soccer talk; he explained to Sal today that we just need to get a striker like Mbappe. Knowing nothing about soccer I totally agree-that guy Mbappe looks pretty good and would be an asset!
The Ringer pod on the latest episode (6) of The White Lotus was a tough listen. At times Joanna sounded like a mother trying to help her child work through a difficult reading assignment while discussing the episode with Bill. Thank goodness they're bringing Mallory in for the finale. Joanna and Mallory can have an intelligent discussion about the episode and the series, and Bill can chime in with his half-assed views and they can either try to make sense of them or try to have fun with them.
Simmons is regressing at an unbelievably rapid rate. He’s just not using his brain ever, a casualty of not writing anymore, and he’s also surrounded by yes men all day, so he doesn’t even realize it.
Even his podcast has the time 6 guests/sycophants every week, so it’s nothing that challenges him. Even the Rewatchables is getting stale, except for when he took a month off.
I know some posters think Simmons guests are his friends etc but they really do make some fun of him on other pods--on the watch yesterday Greenwald made a comment to Ryan about how it must be annoying to CR for everyone to become a soccer expert every four years and CR responded with something like "yeah, Bill shows off his technical acumen that he gets from watching his kids". I assume the various ringer employees like bIll well enough and he seems like a pretty nice guy and an absolutely fantastic boss* but they do not treat him as a peer in discussing culture or even sports aside from basketball, but rather the talent who you've got make look good regardless of the fool things he says.
* some union issues excluded of course. But I think a CR or Mallory absolutely must adore the creative freedom they generally have.
No question they do, and Chris and Andy do poke fun at the boss a lot ("Kaya, turn on the Tik Tok camera."). It's understandable that Bill, given the number of pods he does and his other duties in the company, doesn't have the time to watch and rewatch and give the sort of close attention to these shows that obsessives like Joanna and Mallory do. But he should be smart enough to recognize that, and either raise his game if he's going to do a pod with one of them, or just join them as the third wheel if he doesn't have the time or the will to make that sort of effort. He can keep it breezy while the other two do the detailed work that they enjoy doing, and it would be a better experience for all of them, and a better listen for the audience.
I think you’re being too charitable. You watch White Lotus. Do you believe it was hard to see that Joe was fucking Quentin? I don’t believe Simmons pays as close attention as he thinks he does.
I like Bill more than most but him doing a White Lotus recap is almost performance art at this point. He’s the exact type of person this show is making fun of. Plus he misses a TON of stuff. I still listen because Joanna is great but it was way better when they had Mallory on to provide extra context from someone who pays attention. Bill is the one who said it took him like 10 times seeing The Town to realize Affleck was covering up Renner’s Fighting Irish tattoo.
And The Town pod was years ago.
Trust me, Bill has regressed massively on every podcast he does now. He isn't using his brain anymore and it shows. You can only wing it for so long before it becomes hacky and tired.
The chasm between Ryan, Fennessy, and Rusillo and Simmons is gaping. Bill doesn't even have a surface level understanding of 90% of the things he talks about. He's just riffing. There is no surface.
His biggest offense isn't that he doesn't pay close attention to what he's watching, it's that he doesn't listen to the person he's podding with. If he has something he wants to mention, and the other person points it out first, he'll go on soon after to bring it up as if it wasn't just said.
It's very often a monologue, like he's Ron Burgundy reading from a teleprompter.
It's very often a monologue, like he's Ron Burgundy reading from a teleprompter.
I think it’s both.
johnmd has brought up most of my issues with Simmons (it’s funny I remember when he was saying I was too negative and that Simmons was still great and now he’s saying the same things I was saying back then)
My biggest issue with Simmons is just how much of a hypocrite he is now. He takes shots at “hot take artists” (he had a crack about how Zach Lowe was “Bristolized” since he did an MVP podcast) and acts like he’s more thoughtful and above that type of stuff….and that’s literally his entire persona at this point!
I've long believed that Bill's idea of listening is "recognizing the point when another person stops talking so you can begin talking".
This series provides a couple of examples. He said they don't know how much money Tanya (Coolidge) has. Joanna was nice enough not to bring up that she mentioned a couple of pod episodes ago that Portia told Albie that Tanya's dad had left her a half a billion dollars.
He talked about how they missed the Daphne showing the picture of her blond haired, blue-eyed child to Harper, clearly insinuating that the kid was her trainer's, not Cameron's. But do you know who mentioned it in passing on the previous pod? Mallory! She did not miss that point, because I have no doubt that in addition to the screener with the VFX missing that was missing the picture, she rewatched the completed episode at least once on HBOMax.
Didn't, in that same podcast, Bill reveal who his All-NBA teams were at this point in the season? As if that were somehow different than Lowe doing an NBA podcast?
Especially if you're already listening on increased speed (1.25 for me) because at that point it's barely understandable anymore. Still takes longer than the actual ad though...
It’s almost like they’re actually friends and give each other good-natured shit. This thread’s insistence of rifts between Simmons and [insert person he’s worked with for several years] is really weird. So far he apparently hates Chris Ryan, Wesley Morris, Zach Lowe, Ryen Russillo, Andy Greenwald, and I’m sure a few others I’m missing.
The Andy Greenwald digs are funny but definitely good natured. I think it started when Bill jokingly asked if Chris Ryan was still doing his podcast and since then Andy takes funny digs at Bill on the Watch. I liked when he was talking about streaming losing money and he joked he put all his money into streaming and million dollar picks and is struggling to feed his family now
It's not that he hates them, it's that most of the folks you're mentioning are his employees (and not necessarily this friends) and they are just rolling their eyes at him and doing their best not to disagree with him too much. Which is also kind of their job because the ringer model of podcasts is "a bunch of cool friends talking about stuff you like".
I do think Simmons kind of hates Greenwald which is frankly par for the course here--most of the folks on this thread think Greenwald is a pretentious and annoying asshole and I'm 98 percent sure Greenwald thinks Simmons is a philistine. I brought up the Wesley Morris thing and the point isn't that Simmons hates Wesley, it's that Simmons didn't like Wesley as a podcast guest because Wesley was kind of taking over the pods and not following the format.
It comes across like projection to me. People here still listen to Bill all the time but constantly complain about what a dope he is, so they project that the people who Bill podcasts with must also think he is a bit of a dope.
I think it’s probably partially right (he is a dope) but the level that they think about it or care is overstated. A lot of my friends are morons but I still like them and talk to them and make fun of them
2 of the 5 I listed are not Ringer employees (unsure where Greenwald sits exactly) and Russillo isn’t exactly a “fall in line with authority” type and often pushes back on Simmons, so that’s a tenuous use of “most”.
This makes sense and where I fall. You don’t get the chemistry that Bill and Chris Ryan have if there’s a contentious relationship.
Exactly. I still enjoy listening to him when he's paired with Chris or Sean or Sal, people who can recognize his flaws and fill in and occasionally poke fun at them. (Like Chris joking on the Man on Fire pod that it was odd that Bill, master of name butchering, was teasing his wife about her mispronunciation of Laura Linney's name.) I take most of the criticisms here as mostly good-natured, with some irritation when he fails to recognize how his limitations can hold back someone who isn't as used to working with him, like the recent pods with Joanna, who I think is great at discussing pop culture, but does so at a level that he can't match, and that hurts the pod.