It’s Not TV. It’s a Sh*tshow.
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 18 August 2022
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, the streaming wars have come for us all. The Daily Beast’s Allegra Frank sits down with Inkoo Kang of The Washington Post to talk about what happened at HBO and where gender fits into it all. HBO Max recently canceled the nearly done Batgirl, and has been quietly removing content from its streaming service as it prepares to merge with Discovery+. Allegra and Inkoo talk about how streaming services reducing their content offering likely spells trouble for non-white, non-male voices.
In Slate Plus, is Batman feminist?
Recommendations:
Allegra: Never Have I Ever on Netflix
Inkoo: The Harley Quinn series on HBO Max
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth with editorial oversight by Shannon Palus, Alicia Montgomery and Daisy Rosario.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening ad-free on Amazon Music. |
| 0:17.1 | Welcome to The Waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism, and this week, The Batman. |
| 0:23.8 | The Batman. |
| 0:26.0 | Every episode, you get a new pair of women to talk about the thing that we can't get off our minds. |
| 0:31.3 | And today you've got me, Allegra Frank, a deputy editor for The Daily Beast's Obsessed. |
| 0:37.3 | And me, Ingu Kang, TV critic for The Washington Post. |
| 0:42.6 | Ingu and I are here to talk about the Batman, among other things. We're here to talk about |
| 0:49.3 | Batman, Batgirl, and Warner Brothers, where they currently live, or they did in the case of Batgirl. |
| 0:57.5 | Recent news was HBO Max canceling the release of the Batgirl movie. |
| 1:02.4 | The movie was already shot, and now it's being shelved, which is very, very rare. |
| 1:08.5 | And it generated a lot of questions on both what is happening to the platform, |
| 1:13.1 | but also what this means for content featuring women and other marginalized identities |
| 1:18.2 | in a traditionally pretty white male genre. And I have done some reporting on this. |
| 1:26.1 | I wrote a piece for obsessed about it. And I've spent a ton of time thinking about HBO Max and Warner Brothers and Batman and the DC universe and men in different kinds of ways. I won't get into that. |
| 1:42.3 | Ingu, why do you want to talk about this? This is a topic that I can't |
| 1:47.5 | stop thinking about because now after these years-long discussions about what is television, |
| 1:54.9 | what are the streaming wars, why are we seeing so much content? Now we are sort of forced to reckon a little bit with sort of the gendered nature of the streaming wars. |
| 2:06.6 | And, you know, in their essence, the streaming wars are about these giant multinational corporations, |
| 2:12.6 | sort of going at it like Godzilla versus King Kong, and you're like, |
| 2:16.2 | I guess it will be like the collateral |
| 2:17.7 | damage. But from an audience standpoint, they're also really a struggle over what our |
| 2:24.7 | mass culture is going to look like, who gets the opportunities to tell their stories, which |
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