Hi, I'm Dana Stevens, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Lord of the Sheep Edition.

It's Wednesday, May 13th, 2026, and this week we're going to be talking about first the sheep detectives. This is a new

family-friendly but not just for kids movie that stars Hugh Jackman as George, a tender-hearted

shepherd and a quaint English hamlet. When George turns up dead near the sheep meadow one morning,

which is not a spoiler because it's in the early setup of the movie's plot, his ovine friends

come together to solve the mystery

of who among the town's ample supply of suspects might have done him in.

Next, we'll talk about Lord of the Flies, a new limited series on Netflix that's based

on the classic 1954 novel by William Golding and created by Jack Thorne, who was also a co-creator

of last year's Emmy-winning Adolescence.

I would say, Steve, that Adolescence was possibly the best TV show we talked about on the podcast all year last year.

I mean, off the top of my head, it wasn't second to any other show, I think.

Yeah.

And certainly there was no other show like it.

Yes, it was, and its impact was lasting. Like adolescence, this

Lord of the Fly's adaptation is interested in exploring toxic masculinity and the socialization

of young boys. The show manages to retain the book's period setting while making those issues

feel shockingly contemporary. Finally, Dwight Garner, the longtime book critic for the New York Times,

longtime friend of this podcast, recently published an article that was not a book review,

but a sort of call to arms for the survival of book criticism itself.

It's a great piece. It brings up a lot of questions beyond the publishing industry.

He gets into AI. He gets into the rise of the internet, the fracturing

...