After last episode's delightful diversion, we have arrived at the season seven playoffs. This week, Matthew, Dan, and Tim are all keen to become the winner of the Chronic Town division, but only ONE can do so, and advance to the season finale. In round one, we'll look at famous non-fiction books that have been adapted into scripted Hollywood movies, before going in the television wayback machine to mashup famous shows' pilot episodes that aired on the same day. And of course, it all comes down to the lightning round.

NOTES

⚠️ Inline notes below may be truncated due to podcast feed character limits. Full notes are always on the episode page.

🥁 Major General Stanley from Pirates of Penzance was widely seen as a parody of British Field Marshal Garnet Wolseley, 1st Viscount Wolseley.

🚀 The various versions of Captain Christopher Pike really very rather different.

🍁 Want to watch The Fall? Too bad. It doesn’t stream anywhere.

🪖 According to the people who should know, Charlie Wilson’s War actually downplayed the extent to which Wilson helped the mujahadeen fight the Soviets.

🥸 The Dana Carvey Master of Disguise was… not well regarded.

🌡 The Death Valley scorebreak: Death Valley, like Wellington Paranormal, but not, you know, funny.

🥖 Chalamet is in about 20 minutes of The French Dispatch, in the segment "Revisions to a Manifesto."

🚚 By the end of its run, Ice Road Truckers weren’t driving on ice, or to diamond mines, but they were in the pilot!

🧑‍🍳 Restaurant: Impossible with Robert Irvine premiered in 2011, and somehow has 19 seasons so far.

✳️ Community bounced around to Yahoo!, somehow, where it cost the company a shocking amount of money.

🤷‍♂️ The Tom Wolfe scorebreak: Tom Wolfe – No, there’s nothing creepy about a septuagenarian dandy hanging around sorority girls for I am Charlotte Simmons. Why would you even think that?

🌱 Tom Waits has some great lines in Ironweed.

🎻 Shamisens are really cool instruments.

🪅 Viva Variety was real strange.

🕸 You can find out all about Dan Moren’s books and other online activities at his homepage

🐦 Dan’s Twitter is on Twitter.

🎙 Dan is on loads of shows over on the Incomparable Network.

⚙️ Dan also hosts a rapid-fire discussion of tech topics on the Clockwise podcast

🎸 Tim is encouraging everyone to go see live performances! You can also find Tim’s music and photography on his website

🐭 Tim has also blogs about Disney World