Hello, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest. Here We Made You Some Content Edition.

It's Wednesday, June 8th, 2021, and for this week's show, the HBO miniseries Mayor of East Town just wrapped up after seven

very suspenseful and twist-packed episodes. It achieved the rare feat of increasing its audience

with every episode. And it became that increasingly rare thing, a Sunday night show that everybody

talks about at the virtual water cooler that night and the next day. Now that it's over, we have

watched the whole thing. And we are going to discuss this strange combination of murder mystery, sociological study,

a character portrait. Marraveistown was a lot of things. Some of them worked, some of them didn't.

We'll discuss. Next, the director, actor, stand-up comedian, and one-time YouTube star,

Bo Burnham, has a new hour-and-a-half-long

special on Netflix called Inside. It's a record of a year spent in his home studio creating a

self-produced, self-written, self-edited artifact that is part concert, part high-concept parody,

and part confessional. It is, I think, one of the most complex and fascinating works of art

produced during the pandemic about the pandemic, we'll discuss.

And finally, Amazon's $8.5 billion acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio, including a part of its film library, represents a new stage in the merging of big tech and Hollywood.

We'll discuss with this week's guests, Slate Senior Editor Sam Adams, and Catherine Van Arindonk, who is a critic for Vulture and New York Magazine. Hi, Sam and Catherine. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thank you guys for coming on. I should say that this was, this week's show was a bit cobbled together because Steve and Julia had some last minute life interventions that kept them from being able to come on.

So I'm really happy that you guys were able to come in.

I think we have three really fun topics, and I can't wait to talk about them.

Mare Sheehan, played by Kate Winslet in Mayor of East Town, the new HBO mystery series created by Brad Inglesby.

Is a detective in the working class suburb of Philadelphia, fictional town, I believe, known as

East Town.

As we meet her at the start, she is somewhat slacking off on solving a crime that's become a

year old, a cold case that she now thinks is impossible to solve.

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