A new year, a new start for the Hollywood Prospectus Podcast! Or, at least, a new microphone for me. Otherwise it was business as usual as Chris Ryan and I reminisced over how we spent our winter vacation: reading mystery novels (including Len Deighton’s Game, Set, Match trilogy and Dashiell Hammett’s super trill Red Harvest) and almost dying together by falling from the upper decks of Brooklyn’s new Barclays Center.

But the biggest topic left over from 2012 was Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (11:30). After being goaded into seeing the film over the weekend by our producer, David Jacoby, I was primed to djargue about morality, responsibility, and a certain director’s Aussie accent, but we soon circled back to another favorite from last year, Zero Dark Thirty (28:00), and the limitations of revenge. We wrapped up with a look ahead to January TV (36:15), including the arrival of Patton Oswalt on Justified and the continued unhappiness of Chris’s no. 1 gal Lady Edith on Downton Abbey. Is it a spoiler if I confess that we’re happy to be back?