Tom Hanks

This week, Connor Ratliff, the actor and comedian whose Dead Eyes podcast — now two years old and 30 episodes deep — is built on the premise of once being ...

Now that the show has resolved its driving mystery, to keep going would be to stay at the party for a little too long. On the other hand, a lot of what Ratliff does is come to terms with how the impact of larger structures and the people within them are simply out of our hands. Speaking with Ratliff, Hanks is drawn out not just as an interviewee, but as a peer looking back at his life, discerning its patterns, and hoping to communicate some wisdom to a younger person. Not here: Ratliff engages Hanks with the full weight of his journey, thus pulling the man into a kind of collaborative processing of their shared experience of the entertainment world. It’s more or less the very same thing Marc Maron gleaned from his interview with Lorne Michaels. For years, there was an informal subplot lurking beneath WTF With Marc Maron that involved the comedian’s attempt to understand why he never made Saturday Night Live, a mystery that was finally resolved in 2015 when he successfully brought Michaels onto the show to extract some answers. There’s a compelling tension that has always stood out to me about Dead Eyes. On the one hand, the show evokes a fear I’ve long felt about moving through the world: What if something I said or did — whether directly or indirectly via a system I’m a part of — negatively affected someone else so deeply that it informs a formative part of their identity? The fact of the matter is that no answer, no matter the shape or depth, could ever be fully clarifying or satisfying, and the hope of our lives is to simply let such things be: This is the Lindelovian lesson. Of course, that doesn’t mean there’s no catharsis in finally getting what you’ve always wanted, and in Ratliff’s case, it’s the opportunity to directly be present and engaged with Hanks about everything that happened within his Band of Brothers experience and everything that’s happened to him after that provides long-sought release. It was never a given that Ratliff would ever get his man, and for a long while, Dead Eyes seemed like a show that could have simply continued in perpetuity. “Don’t for a minute think that someone else got in there.” We also learn that, perfectly understandably, Hanks doesn’t remember exactly why Ratliff lost out on the role. Ratliff’s Band of Brothers experience, now calcified into a foundational piece of his personal mythology, serves as a guiding framework for the whole enterprise, providing a layer of narrative context for each guest and conversation that turns out to be incredibly satisfying. Though propelled forward by the memory of a harsh early-career experience, Ratliff carries the podcast with tongue firmly in cheek and a more soulful goal in mind.