Think about the books, the movies, the stories that you have loved the absolute most, the stuff that is straight up affected you,

where you watch it and you think about it and you wrestle with it and maybe you come back to it later,

I promise you that whatever you're picturing right now is the kind of storytelling that is loaded with thematic material.

Subtext, things that you have to grapple with and really reflect on.

You think about the legendary stories of the last hundred years,

your Chronicles of Narnia, your Lord of the Rings stuff, the big trilogies and

quadrulogies and octologies that have come and gone in movie theaters.

You think about the long-form TV shows that people have really latched onto, like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or even the BBC Sherlock program which was excellent.

All of these things are trying to do more than just amuse you with violence and gratuitous stuff and vaudeville level good guy, bad guy, drama.

It's nuanced and it's thoughtful.

And as you get connected with these stories,

you start to see these little patterns emerge.

We're like, yeah, you know, whoever is writing this series,

they really care about this stuff.

I watched the Americans, what was that on FX? I don't know. It was a Cold War show set in the 1980s

where these Soviet spies are in the United States and they're carrying out all kinds of like

James Bond, 007 missions, except it's against Americans

and it's unsettling and powerful,

but you could tell a ways in.

They're really intrigued by this whole idea

of the willful state-driven atheism of communism

versus the occasional sugary sacrin lightweight popular Christianity of Americanism and they really teased out

...