Hello, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Heathcliff, it's me, Kathy edition.

It's Wednesday, February 18, 2026, and this week we'll be, first off, Wuthering Heights, the new,

very loose and very lustful adaptation of the 1847 Emily Bronte novel that's written and directed

by the love-her-or-hate-her filmmaker behind Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, Emerald Fennell.

Next, we'll discuss Love Story, a new nine-part limited series on FX about the tabloid romance,

the brief marriage, and the tragically short lives of John F. Kennedy Jr. and his wife, Carolyn

Bissette Kennedy. This show is produced by Ryan Murphy, who's made a career out of creating

reenactments of real-life scandals for TV. We will talk about how this latest venture stacks up to past Murphy joints like The People v. O.J. Simpson, feud, and American Horror Story, to name a few.

And finally, it's time to start the music. It's time to light the lights because the Muppet show is back, or at least teasing the idea that it may be back, with a single half-hour-long episode that many are regarding as a

stealth pilot for a relaunch of the beloved variety series. This installment features Sabrina

Carpenter as its human celebrity guest. We'll discuss. Joining me this week from Los Angeles is

LA Times Film Critic and co-host of the classic film podcast Unspooled, Amy Nicholson. Hey, Amy.

Hi. Very, very nice to have you. I'm especially excited to have you on this particular week because I really want to hear what you think about our movie and really loved what you wrote about Wuthering Heights. We'll get into that.

Also, joining us this week. He's a columnist for the New York Times opinion page.

He has a podcast about political thrillers of the 90s called Unclear and Present Danger. He is a maven of social media and he's everywhere online. But to me, he will always be a former Slater at heart. It's Jamel Bowie. Welcome, Jamel. Thank you for having me. Always a pleasure. Yeah, I was saying before we got started taping that both times you guys have filled in recently, you were filling in for me.

So I was absent and didn't get to talk to you and jealously listened to those episodes, and I'm really happy to get to have you this week.

When Emily Bronte's sole published novel came out in 1847, it was denounced by many critics at the time in the kind of morally judgmental language common to Victorian literary criticism.

This book, which unlike her sister Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, was not a runaway bestseller, was denounced as, quote, a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors, as wild, confused, disjointed and improbable,

and as a strange and inartistic production. And yet, as another contemporary critic wrote,

in spite of the disgusting coarseness of much of the dialogue and the improbabilities of much of the

plot, we are spellbound. This intergenerational saga about two feuding families on the remote Moors of Yorkshire

has been adapted something like 32 times for the big and small screen. In fact, this week, the critic Bilga

...