Culture Gabfest: Can Tim Robinson Save Friendship Edition

Slate Culture

Slate Podcasts

Arts, Tv & Film, Music

4.4 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2025

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week’s show, Dana and Julia are joined by guest host Isaac Butler to go through the A24, bromance looking glass to discuss Friendship, the surreal cringe comedy starring I Think You Should Leave’s Tim Robinson and the always friend-crushable Paul Rudd. Next, they share their thoughts on Final Thoughts: Jerry Springer, the new podcast by Prologue Projects and Leon Neyfakh about the improbable and complex story of the infamous talk-show host and one-time progressive politician. Finally, they circle the drain of cultural apocalypse vis-a-vis a conversation on a recent Atlantic piece by Spencer Kornhaber about the possible decline of nothing less than Western culture itself. In an exclusive Slate Plus Bonus Episode about a recent essay by Issac in Slate, Dana and Julia find out how he went from thinking the actor Tom Hardy was a grunting, incomprehensible B-list Brando to a delightful, albeit weird, screen star. Want more Culture Gabfest? Subscribe to Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of the Culture Gabfest show page. Or, visit slate.com/cultureplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest can Tim Robinson save friendship edition.
0:16.8	It's Wednesday, May 21st, 2025, and this week we'll be discussing, first off, Friendship,
0:21.8	the new film from first-time feature film director Andrew DeYoung that co-stars Paul Rudd and the sketch comedian Tim Robinson,
0:29.1	best known for his Netflix sketch show, I Think You Should Leave.
0:32.7	Next, we'll talk about a new podcast that traces the path of Jerry Springer from progressive local TV
0:37.6	newscaster to the host of an infamously sensationalist daytime TV talk show that may,
0:43.1	and this podcast makes the case pretty convincingly, have invented reality TV.
0:47.9	And finally, we'll discuss an article by Spencer Cornhaber in The Atlantic that talks about
0:52.4	the decline of culture, are we or are we not in
0:54.8	the midst of an apocalyptic spiral into a cultureless void we will discuss? I'm joined today by
1:01.8	Julia Turner, who's a fellow at the Annenberg School of Journalism in Los Angeles. Hey, Julia.
1:06.0	Hello. It would be bad news for us, a culture podcast, if culture has ended.
1:12.6	I'm going to need a calendar on this doom spiral thing so I can get another job.
1:15.7	We're just got to keep ourselves honest.
1:18.3	Bear in mind, we have a vested interest in there continuing to be culture.
1:22.3	Or pretending there is anyway.
1:24.7	Also joining me circling the drain today is Isaac Butler. One of our podcast nearest and
1:31.0	dearest friends. He's the author of The Great Book, The Method, and also the upcoming book,
1:35.1	The Perfect Moment. Actually, because it's opposite to our discussion today, Isaac, tell me the
1:39.4	subtitle and the basic gist of the perfect moment, your upcoming book. Yeah. so the perfect moment in which Jerry Springer has two cameos is the religious right, American art, and the end of the 20th century.
1:51.4	And it documents what we sort of call now the first culture wars, although culture wars are as old as this nation itself, which is a period of time in which American culture was kind of used as an
2:01.6	organizing tool by the radical right and the religious right and how the art world attempted
	...

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