Welcome listeners to episode 73 of Know Your Enemy. I'm Matt Sipman your podcast co-host and I'm here as always with my great friend Sam at their bell. Hey, Sam, I'm Matt. How are you doing today?

I'm good as we were just saying both of us are coughing a little in the spring release of pollen. That's right. Well, we have a great episode to share with listeners. It's a little different, you know, we've had some pretty heavy serious episodes recently, both topically and real meat and potatoes.

You know your enemy stuff. This is an equally great episode, but one that was just a little more fun, I thought, and a little more about stuff happening now. Yeah.

And so we had on two of our friends who are both playwrights, turn TV writers, Will Arbery and Dorothy Fortenberry. Will is a writer for succession and Dorothy is a writer for the new Apple TV plus show Extrapolations.

And so we thought, why not get them all behind mics and talk to them and see what happens? Yeah, exactly. And it turned out great. I mean, the idea was sort of like, how do you write about politics, about like contemporary intense political issues for television.

We will know Will Arbery from an episode we did several years ago now on his amazing play. Here was the fourth turning, which is about sort of young conservatives having a long conversation about God and politics.

And Dorothy listeners will know from two episodes we had with her one, which was about suburban mothers and politics. That was during the 2020 election run. Yes, it was.

We also had her on for a wonderful episode. We did about climate change and climate grief with another friend of the show. My friend, Dan Cherel, maybe a year ago, but this episode we're talking about TV. Yes. And we do ask Dorothy to mention a little bit about her show at the start since it's brand new.

It's a show set in the future and about climate change. I mean, basically the world has not done what it needs to have done basically now to avoid the future we see in this show. And it's just it's an interesting look at the future again with climate change in mind.

And the show that Will writes for is succession, which I suspect a lot of our listeners are watching. I mean, we're obsessed with it. And that comes through in the show and for listeners who are really into the show, you're going to get some cool details behind the scenes on how they thought about putting together the past few seasons and this season in particular.

But for listeners who do not watch succession, I can give you the briefest summary of what that show is about. It's basically a version of the Murdoch family. They own basically a version of Fox News, as well as a multi billion dollar conglomerate that's family owned and the sort of plot of the show is about the children of the Rupert Murdoch figure Logan Roy,

vying to succeed him as the head of the company. And that's four seasons of television now that's just about that problem, the problem of succession.

But I hope that even for listeners who don't watch succession, they'll get a lot out of this episode because we're talking about kind of the challenge of writing these sorts of characters, conservative characters, billionaires, people engaged in some kind of political struggle, political controversy for contemporary TV audiences. And I think it's really fascinating.

Well, there's one other thing to mention about this at the end of the conversation. We do ask both Dorothy will about the WGA strike, the writer's guild strike that now is happening. And I think when we recorded this with them, Sam, it had been authorized but hadn't actually began yet.

Yeah, that's right. We recorded actually appropriately enough on May Day, on May 1st. And then I think that night, you know, midnight was when the writers went on strike.

And so for listeners who are interested in labor politics, you're going to get a little bit of an inside look on what the stakes of that strike are, what it's like to be a TV writer today.

And both of them had really fascinating things to say about the stakes of that contest.

Yes, indeed. Well, we should get to it. But before we do, here's a few housekeeping items. As always, we're grateful to our partners at Descent.

Descent, they sponsor the podcast. One thing they do for us is if you subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com slash know your enemy for $10 a month, you not only get all of our bonus episodes, but you also get a free digital subscription to descent.

And so if you get that soon, you will be able to read my piece on the January 6 report in the spring issue.

Yeah. And you should consider doing that. And of course, for $5 a month, if you subscribe to our Patreon, you get all of our great bonus episodes.

You got to subscribe. Come on. You got to.

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