Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, James Bond's Sexistential Retreat Edition.

It's Wednesday, April 1st, 2026, and this week we will be discussing the second season of

Jury Duty, a prime video series that finds a way to reimagine the premise of the first season

in which, how do you explain this? A single real person is planted amidst a group of comic

actors who use their improvisational skills to pull off the illusion that this plant is in the

middle of an evolving real-life situation.

In the first season, that situation was a bunch of fake people and one real person on jury duty

in an increasingly weird trial.

This time around, the plant is a new employee at an extremely messed up small business.

Next, we'll talk about Bate, another show from Amazon Prime.

We are not in the pocket of Big Bezos, just sort of shook down that way this week.

Speak for yourself.

And Bate stars Riz Ahmed as a struggling British Pakistani actor whose career

finally seems on the verge of taking off when he's considered for the role of the next

James Bond.

And finally, the Swedish songstress Robin is back with her first new album in eight years, Sexistential. She's 46 years old. She's a single mother, but she's still horny, and she's still packing them onto the dance floor. We will discuss. Joining me this week is Slate's own culture writer Nadira Goff. Hey, Nadira. Hi, thanks for having me. Always great to have you.

And joining us for the first time as co-host, I think long ago you were on once as a guest for one

segment. I was in short pants. I was playing hoop and stick outside and you asked me up to the studio. Yeah. Pepperidge Farm remembers. It's Richard Lawson. Richard Lawson is a film critic. He's the co-host of the new, exciting, new podcast, Critical Darlings, which is a sort of spin-off of Blank Check, blank check podcast. And you are also Richard the proprietor of the Premier Party newsletter. Yep, Premier Party.com, reviews, essays, award stuff, all that, all the stuff I used to do at my old job now on my own.

Great.

Dancing on my, writing on my own. Newslettering on my own. I'm thrilled to be here. Very, very nice to have you. Richard, I know we have some blank check listeners here, and I have been a guest on their show many times and love it. Can you tell us a bit in the context of blank check, what is critical darlings? So, yeah, we started at the beginning of 2026, we were covering the best picture nominees, kind of movie by movie, essentially.

A lot of, most of those titles were not things that Blank Check was able to cover on their podcast because they weren't, you know, the work of a particular filmmaker.

So me and my co-host, Alison Mulmore, we had a great time doing that. Also, with, we share a producer, Ben Frisch. Yay, Ben Frisch. Behind the glass right now as we speak. Yeah. So once awards season wrapped up, we said, okay, well, how can we kind of somewhat morph the show into something else? And now we're going to do basically a new release movie a

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