Culture Gabfest: Glen Powell Does The Running Man Edition

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4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you’ve got a cultural question or topic you’d like our hosts to tackle, now is your chance because we’re preparing for our annual call-in show! Call and leave us a message with your cultural query at: 347-201-2397 On this week’s show, Julia, Dana, Steve are off to the dystopian races with Edgar Wright’s adaptation of The Running Man. Based on a novel by Stephen King and starring movie-star-to-be Glenn Powell, the film is chockfull of adrenaline and stylish wit but does it overcome its own authoritarian bleakness? They discuss with Slate’s own Sam Adams. Next, they take a look at the oft-forgotten presidency and assassination of James A. Garfield in the Netflix limited series Death By Lightning, starring Michael Shannon, Matthew Macfadyen, and a whole lot of period accurate beards. Finally, they look to the heavens with the loftily ambitious, operatic, and polyglottal new album LUX by Rosalía. In an exclusive bonus episode for Slate Plus subscribers, they continue their recap series and get into the twists and turns of the fourth episode of Pluribus. Endorsements Dana: The 17th century nun and poet (a very Rosalía-like divine feminine) Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and particularly the poem "The Ripcord of Love" as translated by Ada Límon. Steve: Joyce Carol Oates’s iconic, lacerating subtweet for the ages—illustrated beautifully on Literary Hub—as well as the prolific author's essay about the novel We Have Always Lived In the Castle in The New York Review of Books. (Steve welcomes listener recommendations for their favorite Oates's novel.) Julia: The Alpine Men's Snow Boot from Xero, for when the Los Angeles Almanac predicts rain. Email us your thoughts at [email protected]. Podcast production by Benjamin Frisch. Production assistance by Daniel Hirsch. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Julia Turner, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Glenn Powell does the Running Man edition.
0:16.3	It's Wednesday, November 19th, and on today's show, we're talking about the running man.
0:21.1	Edgar writes, propulsive new reimagining of the dystopian classic about a game show where
0:25.9	contestants are running for their lives. Then, Death by Lightning, Netflix Historical
0:31.0	Limited series about President Garfield's assassination. It stars Michael Shannon, Matthew McFagin,
0:36.7	Nick Offerman, and so, so much facial hair.
0:40.1	And finally, Rosalia's much-heralded new album, Lux, her first full-length project since Motammi,
0:46.0	which is somehow monastic and maximalist all at once we shall discuss. We've got Dana here today.
0:53.1	Welcome, Dana. Hello, hello. And we've also got Steve McHath. Welcome, Steve. Hey, hey. Let's do it. All right, for logistical reasons, Dana Stevens can't speak about our first topic, The Running Man, a new film from Edgar Wright, and we're going to be joined by Sam Adams to discuss. Hello, Sam.
1:11.3	Hello, Julia. Thanks for having me. Always great to have you on. Okay, so just some table setting
1:16.5	before we dive in, before The Running Man was a brand new Edgar Wright film starring Glenn Powell,
1:22.0	still striving to be the movie star. We all know he can become. It was a Stephen King novel that became a bombastic 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film. But this version stars Glenn Powell. He is a supposedly underprivileged citizen with a rage problem who's been blacklisted from employment because of his tendency to advocate for workers' rights.
1:48.2	And he's got a sick kid.
1:50.2	And so he turns in desperation to the network, a company that has a big Netflix colored N logo that hovers atop various buildings and seems to run the government,
2:04.3	the wildly unequal state in which they all live, and a series of game shows, the most
2:11.4	vicious of which is The Running Man, which is essentially a Hunger Games type show where all
2:17.4	of society watches to see if you will
2:20.3	survive 30 days or die with both game show hunters and the rest of the populace incentivized
2:26.6	to turn you in, hunt you down, and actually literally kill you. I suppose it might be more accurate
2:32.7	to say that The Hunger Games is a running
2:34.4	man style game show, but we can get into the chronology of such things later. Before we
2:41.5	dive in, I want to listen to a clip. There are various clips from the trailer, which might
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