Messing with Mr. Inbetween

I was pretty stoked to not only cover Mr. Inbetween, one of my favorite-ever crime shows, on the Watch with Jen podcast, but for the opportunity to interview creator and star Scott Ryan. Such a personally gratifying thing to be a part of. Big thanks to Jen Johans for having me on. The episode starts off as a conversation about Mr. Inbetween with Jen, Rob Belushi and me before we're joined for the interview by Blake Howard.

I wrote about my enthusiasm for Mr. Inbetween on this blog three years ago during its third and final season on F/X (streaming on Hulu) and now that it's finished, I'm even more enthusiastic about it. The final episodes really played out the themes incredibly richly and just, y'know, stuck the landing the way you're always hoping the great things do. Think I've watched the whole show through five or six times by now and it keeps revealing layers and themes I'd somehow missed before. 

It's not only one of the funniest and most heart-breaking shows I've ever seen, but I'm hard-pressed to think of an example of gnarlier TV violence. Gorier? Okay. Grosser? Yeah, of course, but violence that can turn your stomach with its cold, brutal bluntness and lack of affectation and style? I'm drawing a blank. Yet, it's still a show I would recommend to normal folks. You don't have to be a basement crazy noirhead to dig it. 

Anyway, I'm still recommending Mr. Inbetween to people who've somehow not even heard of it two years after this interview. Trust me, you're gonna love it.

For anybody interested, I put together a Letterboxd list of the films I watched in preparation for the episode which included all the Blue Tongue films I could get ahold of, the short films of Nash Edgerton (who directed every episode of Mr. Inbetween) and other Australian crime films featuring cast members, and especially films directed by cast members (I think Ryan and Edgerton enjoyed casting directors as actors and really abusing them onscreen).  I revisited Ryan's own The Magician a couple of times and of course Benoît Poelvoorde, Rémy Belvaux, and André Bonzel's Man Bites Dog which Mr. Inbetween owes a lot to. Most of Edgerton's shorts can be found on youtube and a few of them are on Hulu as well.