Culture Gabfest - The Creator of Derry Girls Is Back Edition
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3.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2026
⏱️ 61 minutes
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Summary
The original trio Steve, Dana, and Julia convene for a right cracker of a Gabfest as they discuss How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, the new comedic mystery from Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee. In the Netflix series, three longtime Belfast friends must revisit their childhood trauma to unravel the mystery of a fourth friend’s disappearance— raucous Northern Irish hijinks ensue.
Next, they step into the unhinged dystopian Los Angeles of Gore Verbinski’s new film Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. In it a beleaguered time traveler played by Sam Rockwell must visit the same Norm’s diner 117 times to save the world from the menace of A.I..
Finally, they welcome Slate senior writer Christina Cauterucci to unpack her recent piece “My Gun and Me” about her unlikely journey towards gun ownership during Trump 2.0—and how she’s not alone in doing so in her left-leaning, queer community.
In an exclusive bonus episode for Slate Plus subscribers, they determine if there are indeed no comfortable reading positions, as a recent Slate essay by Luke Winkie attests.
Endorsements
Dana: The latest Today in Tabs entry from Rusty Foster "A.I. Isn't People."
Julia: In lieu of an endorsement, a gripe: the much-hyped New York Times two-player word game Crossplay is just Scrabble! (If only there were a German word for this specific form of disappointment...)
Steve: Rereading J.D. Salinger with some distance from one’s own adolescence— particularly Franny and Zooey and the short story "For Esmé—with Love and Squalor." And for a good critical reassessment, read Janet Malcolm's New York Review of Books essay "Justice to J.D. Salinger."
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Podcast production by Benjamin Frisch. Production assistance by Daniel Hirsch.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Stephen McHaff, and this is the Slate Culture Gapfest. |
| 0:13.3 | The creator of Dairy Girls is Back edition. |
| 0:16.1 | It's Wednesday, February 25th, 2006. |
| 0:19.7 | On today's show, the writer and showrunner Lisa McGee, she of the legendary |
| 0:23.3 | sitcom Dairy Girls, one of my probably top five all-time shows, returns with How to Get to Heaven |
| 0:29.7 | from Belfast. It's a comedy thriller about a group of three nearly middle-aged friends who share a |
| 0:35.0 | terrible secret from their adolescence, one that is haunting them |
| 0:38.0 | anew thanks to the death of a fourth and long estranged friend. And then good luck, |
| 0:43.7 | have fun, don't die, is the new feature film from director Gore Verbinsky. Best known, Dana, |
| 0:48.7 | am I correct for having directed three of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies? Yeah, I would say that's probably his biggest claim to fame. But he is also a director who's done a lot of other big blockbusters, including Rango, the animated movie that won an Oscar. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And who now, as one of the reviews we read of this new movie said, has been in director's jail, quote unquote, for 10 years, which essentially just means, you know, because he had a couple flops, he was not able to get the big budgets to make the kind |
| 1:15.5 | of movies that he wanted. So this is kind of his return to indie filmmaking. Anyway, his new one |
| 1:20.5 | stars the ever-beloble Sam Rockwell as a time traveler from an AI ravaged future, who has returned |
| 1:26.7 | to warn us against the tech while |
| 1:28.1 | also leading a band of randos on what is a likely suicide mission in order to interrupt a key |
| 1:33.1 | moment in the technology's evolution. In addition to Rockwell, the movie stars Haley Lou Richardson |
| 1:38.2 | and Juno Temple. And finally, is it time for the left and the LGBTQ community in particular to go hard against |
| 1:46.5 | stereotype and its own worldview and ethics and moral universe and by guns? We talked to Slate's |
| 1:54.6 | own Christina Katarucci, an improbable gun owner herself, who weighs the dilemmas of protecting |
| 1:59.0 | yourself in an age of authoritarian takeover |
| 2:01.2 | in a really, really well-done slate piece. Joining me first is Julia Turner of the Annenberg School of |
| 2:08.8 | Journalism at USC, where she's a fellow. Julia, hey. Hello, hello. Hey, I guess you don't have |
| 2:16.4 | 21 inches of snow in your backyard, do you? |
... |
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