I need support staff to clear the room.

Stand up and walk now!

Hello and welcome to a very special episode of The Watch.

My name is Chris Ryan.

I'm going to be joined in a second by Andy Greenwald.

And what you've got here is a bonus episode, which we do not do very often.

But this is a special occasion because it's the collection of our Summer of Duff podcast.

What the hell is Summer of Duff?

Andy and I have spent the last two weeks and really like the past year,

immersing ourselves in the fiction of Laryon McMurray and specifically in the story The Novel.

Loan Sum Duff.

Loan Sum Duff came out in 1985 and when the Pulitzer Prize,

it is considered one of the great novels about the American West.

And it is really beautiful story of friendship.

It's a story about restlessness.

It's a story about fathers and sons.

And it's a story about this country in a lot of ways.

But it's really just like a very well told tale about two Texas Rangers,

ex-Texas Rangers, leading a cattle drive from Texas to Montana.

Andy and I broke down our conversation to match the action that happens

in the four episodes of the mini series adaptation of Loan Sum Duff,

which aired on CBS in 1989 and starred Tommy Lee Jones and Robert DuVall

...