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Speaker A: I’m Stephen Metcalf and this is the Slate Culture Gabfest, the drama surrounding the Drama edition. It’s Wednesday, April 8, 2026. On today’s show, the drama stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson as a couple who get engaged only to have the bride to be reveal her deepest, darkest secret the week before the cerem. It’s written and directed by Christopher Borgli, a Norwegian filmmaker whose dream scenario we discussed a few years ago. And then Taylor Sheridan is the creator of such hits as Yellowstone and Landman. Now he gives us the Madison. It stars Michelle Pfeiffer is a matriarch determined to move her spoiled and overly cityfied family to Montana to honor the memory of her late husband. Stars Kurt Russell as that husband. He appears copiously in flashbacks. He’s a fully formed, fully presented character within the context of the show in these flashbacks. And Bo Garrett and various others star in it. And finally, Good dog. He’s such a good dog. I’m sorry. Anyway, any excuse to talk about dogs, but this is a particularly good one. A New Yorker article titled How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour. Dana, I’m correct that your dog is technically a doodle.

Speaker B: Yep. In fact, we’ll get into this in the segment. But part of my initial resistance to reading this article was is this going to be an anti doodle article? And the answer is complex. But I will not have any dissing of doodles on this show.

Speaker A: Me neither. The love of my life was my late great labradoodle, Felix. Anyway, I’m joined today by Julia Turner. Now, I don’t know if I have your titles right. Are you a founder, CEO and editor in chief? Are you all of those?

Speaker C: No. What are you the co founder and editor in chief?

Speaker A: Okay, co founder and editor in chief of LA material. Why don’t you describe it? But it’s like a kind of wonderful. I’ve been reading it. It’s a wonderful publication. Out of la. You’re exploring for profit models for journalism in order to put journalism itself on a lasting footing. But you’re also starting in a community and of a community. And so far it’s just terrifically well written and edited and curated. I’ve been enjoying it even though I’m not an Angelina.

Speaker C: Thank you. Steve, you sent me a sweet note about one of our newsletters last week, which was very heartening. Yeah. The basic idea is what if you took all weeklies and city magazines from their heyday and launched them for this moment and borrowed the kind of business model of like Puck or the Bulwark or any of these outlets that are newsletter and podcast forward. And we’ve got an amazing team of journalists and we’re having a ton of fun. So, yeah, if you are at all Angelino adjacent or curious about the future of media, please subscribe to LA material. And if you’re not, but you’ve got people in la, which surely you do, please send them our way.

Speaker A: Dana Stevens is the film critic for Slate. Hey, Dana.

Speaker B: Hey. No fancy new job title for me. Just slogging on in the minds of film criticism.

Speaker A: Can I say something sincere, though? I read your review of the drama because I was so flummoxed by the movie. You are so f****** good at your job. Oh. I mean, really. It was just a beautifully written, beautifully executed, beautifully delivered review about a kind of confounding movie, which we’ll get into, but it just was clarifying without being like, without telling me what or how to think about it, so.

Speaker B: Oh, good boy. Anyway, good boy, Steve. My woolly tail is wagging. That’s very, very nice to hear.

Speaker A: All right. The Norwegian writer director Christopher Borgli gave us Dream Scenario starring Nic Cage a few years ago. Borgli now returns with the drama. It stars Zendaya and Robert Pattinson is a pair of very, very nicely turned out culture workers in what is supposed to be Cambridge, Massachusetts. And I kind of have it in my notes to upspeak that sentence because I cannot wait to hear Julia weigh in on the verisimilitude here of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which.

Speaker C: You mean Cambridge, York City?

Speaker A: Exactly.

Speaker C: I mean, I don’t know exactly where they shot it, but not Cambridge.

Speaker A: Yeah, it was like a weird superimposition of Cambridge, England and Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a kind of nowhere as well. But anyway, we’ll get into it. There’s the meet cute, they fall in love, they get engaged, then in the immediate run up to the wedding, they get stuck playing a parlor game in which you confess the worst thing you’ve ever done. And last comes Zendaya’s character, Emma, who admits to. We have decided, even though this comes about I don’t know what, 20 minutes into the movie and functions as a premise, the movie’s been heavily marketed that it’s a spoiler to talk about it. So I guess we’re going to honor that and honor your ability to go in like we did and see it cold. We will talk about that twist in our bonus segment. We will otherwise keep it off the table in Our main segment. The important thing to know now is that this throws the marriage to be on the rocks while turning a rom com into. I don’t even know what to call it. Look, Dark Comm or an Altcom or something. It also stars Alana Haim and Mamadou Aceh. We’re going to do a clip from the trailer. That one seemed to capture something about the movie best. So let’s have a listen.

Speaker C: Propulsive, even.

Speaker B: All right, so before we got married, we did this thing where we said the worst thing we’ve ever done.

Speaker A: I’ll tell mine if we all do it. Promise.

Speaker C: What did you do?

Speaker A: This doll.

Speaker B: Beer bottles and p***.

Speaker A: You left in Ergonom.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker C: What’s the worst thing I’ve ever done?

Speaker A: Ice.

Speaker C: Okay, I.

Speaker B: Are you serious?

Speaker C: I’m sorry, I’m. Order maneuvers.

Speaker A: Emma. What the f*** am I. Dana, let me start with you. If I recall our conversation about Dream Scenario, we felt maybe it rode its high concept, which was, you know, a man played by Nic Cage begins to appear in other people’s dreams, like a little hard at the expense of the movie as like a story or what have you. I think that this could be a criticism applied to this movie. Maybe some people felt it worked independent of the high concept or within the confines of the high concept, an interesting movie and story was told. What do you think of this?

Speaker B: I like Dream Scenario better than this movie. But that is not saying a lot because the further I get from having watched the drama and written about it last week, I really feel strong aversion to the drama. But I’m glad we’re talking about it. It’s a movie that offers lots to talk about. In a way, it’s a good date movie. Even if both members of the date dislike the movie. You would have some talking fodder afterwards. But it does resemble Dream Scenario and as I argue in my review on Slate, in some way resembles a certain archetype of the A24 movie. Not every A24 movie, but it seems like that studio, which is one of the few. You guys talked about this on the show a week when I was gone. One of the few currently operating movie studios that has its own very strong brand, right? That you talk about that element of a movie and people know what you mean. There’s a certain brand of a 24 movie. And Ari Aster, who is a producer on this movie, makes movies like this, I think. And Dream Scenario was like this as well. And I think, to me, if I had legs, I’d kick you the Rose Byrne vehicle from last year had this feeling where the concept outstretched, the execution of the concept, right? And there’s like a big shocking idea, sometimes a twist, as in this movie, and sometimes just, you know, a really brutal premise, right? Putting a character like Beau in Beau is Afraid, the Joaquin Phoenix character, into some extreme situation and watching themselves get out of it. And then the ideas sort of fall apart in the last half because the writing is just not up to the height of the concept. And I think this movie is very much a supreme example of that kind of movie. Like, what is this movie actually about? And is the way that it is both a drama, as the title somewhat jokingly implies, and a satire and a romantic comedy and a sort of parody of romantic comedies. To what extent do those things work together to create an exciting genre hybrid? And to what extent do they all just sort of fall apart in the last act? And I think this movie falls apart before the last act, but in the process of doing so, it does succeed at some of the tasks it sets out for itself, including making the viewer confused and uncomfortable and destabilized. I think that’s what part of Christopher Berghley seems to be setting out to do, to destabilize the viewer. But what’s the value of that destabilization? What are we coming out of the movie thinking about, learning, about remembering, do we want this couple to stay together or not? I mean, I realize that that can be an ambivalent question and there doesn’t have to be just one answer, but to me it was really hard to enter into the. Just the simple premise of this movie without knowing are we laughing at these characters and mocking their bourgeois pretensions, or are we rooting for them? And I’m not sure the movie ever decides about that. But before I bounce it back to you all, I will say that there are things to appreciate about this movie, including just watching Robert Pattinson and Zendaya, both of them very much movie stars. I don’t think that their characters, as written, especially hers, give them a ton to work with, but they’re both not. Not only extremely good looking and charismatic, but I think they, they do have a good chemistry. They as, as well as they can sort of muck their way through the ambivalences and confusions of the screenplay, and they never cease to be interesting to watch. Especially Pattinson, who is just such a. Such a bizarre man, just an actor who could have gone a very different road down a very different road in his career and instead has chosen, I have to say very consistently to do weird, hard, interesting things that require him to do a lot more than be hunky.

Speaker C: I didn’t hate watching it. It’s not too long. Both of these performers are great. And actually the supporting performers are all really interesting too. Like, the actors are all compelling to watch. But I share your question of, like, what is the. I mean, I think the point is, right, it’s asking questions about, like, what. What is the nature of closeness? What is the nature of closeness with the partner? What is the possibility of moral change? What is the extent of forgiveness and understanding? But despite the fact that these two very excellent actors are playing our primary characters and imbue them with a sense of reality. So you do care about that as you’re following the movie. They’re both kind of cardboard cutouts somehow. There’s a paper doll quality to the characterization of the two leads, even if the acting has all the nuance and charisma of Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. And I agree that both of them make themselves kind of unappealing and unattractive here in ways that are compelling to watch for. Do such glossy thoroughbreds of attractiveness. You know, like, Pattinson is such a sniveling, conniving little ship brain. His character is so unappealing. And then Zendaya is sort of more appealing. But we learn about her horrible past and we don’t. I mean, you made this point, Dana. We don’t really. I think the movie is. I think the generous interpretation is that the movie is suggesting that she herself has not really reckoned with this dark secret. That it’s not that she has done a lot of therapy and really understands what happened. It’s that she stuffed it down into a box and then it kind of sprung out like a horrible Jack in the box right before her wedding. And so part of what makes it hard for them all to reckon with it is that she herself hasn’t really looked it in the face in a while either. But it’s this funny combo of these people seems so real and interesting because the actors are so good and they seem totally like contrivances in a high concept plot at the same time. And I have not been thinking for weeks since this movie, since I saw this movie about it. It has more like dissolved on my tongue and left no taste. You know, like I was entertained during, was like, I don’t know if that amounts to much. And then now I’m sort of trying to remember what I saw Thursday night.

Speaker A: I. I really quite dislike this Movie. I admire it for being under two hours and almost nothing else about it. I, I, I, the, it was, it was the promise unfulfilled that I think left me so frustrated because it raises two really interesting questions, which is what is it like to marry someone? Because however well you know them in the present tense, you don’t really, how can you possibly know who they were when they were 14 or 15 or you know, their sort of deep and buried self in all of us that was the, the, the, the infant, the child, the adolescent that in order to become an adult, you in a healthy way incorporate into your adult, in a self aware way, you incorporate into your adult self. But all of us bury to some degree. And yet marriage is like you’re sort of proposing the idea of a second self to accompany you through the span, in theory of the rest of your life. And you can’t know who that person’s going to be in 30 or 40 years. Right? So if death, till death do us part has any sort of substantive meaning, you’re marrying a room full of strangers. And it’s an extraordinary leap of faith. And I think people in the run up to their wedding, to the extent they panic and many people don’t, but it’s perfectly ordinary to panic and think that you’re about to marry someone you can’t know enough about or don’t know enough about and suddenly they feel estranged from you. And some people go through it and some people don’t. And then I think that there’s a second really interesting question which is vis a vis the first. Are you the worst thing that you’ve ever done? To what extent can you dissociate healthily or unhealthily from your past and become a new person? And I had several problems with the movie. I found it just hard to watch on the moment by moment basis because the movie seems aesthetically committed to a sort of staccato and yet also inchoate style of speaking. Like the characters aren’t capable of self awareness and communications to others in a self aware way, which helps sustain the premise. Right. You alluded to this in your, you know, very beautifully done review, which is that they just don’t, they don’t have an ordinary conversation once the revelation has happened. If they do, it’s not depicted on screen. That would probably determine which direction they’re going to go in. And to me, the dialogue and the way the two spoke to one another, yes, they’re extraordinary looking human beings and I, I admire the work that they’ve both done. But it’s like watching this movie is like watching bad sex. Very often these two people don’t seem to know each other and they don’t seem capable of sustaining a wavelength which is very much an Ari Oster affect, as you say. He’s a producer on this movie. And I just can’t stand movies that have that baked into them. You know, like people are self aware, they’re intelligent, they talk to other people. They form themselves in relation to others. They. They aren’t these. They aren’t sort of half buried in themselves and incapable of like. What kind of creature is this character, Charlie? Robert Pattinson? He’s sort of half buried inside himself. His voice seems stuck like a hunk of meat halfway down his throat. He doesn’t seem to be able to fully emerge from himself and present himself to others in an ordinary way. Is this a stand in for the filmmaker? I mean, I just. It makes no sense to me. So in sum, for me, this movie didn’t work at all. I found it exasperating in the extreme. But, Dana, it’s fair to say that it produces like enormous genre confusions along the way. I mean, I was surrounded. I was in a completely full movie theater. And there was a contingent. I would say, like a third of the house loved this movie and was like, really alive to it and like laughing and like they were getting a joke that I wasn’t getting. I didn’t. I think there was one laugh on a Robert Pattinson pulls a face at one moment is hilariously funny, and I laughed out loud. The rest of it I was like, I don’t perceive this as a comedy of any kind. Darker.

Speaker B: Yeah, there was a lot of laughter in the press screening I was at too. And I was glad people were enjoying the movie. But similarly, I sort of. I didn’t respond to it as a comic event, but I understand that it was full of jokes. They were to me, not really fully formed jokes with actual punchlines, but to me it was just. It was. It ended up being just a juvenile provocation on the part of the filmmaker.

Speaker C: It’s funny. I feel like you. Your guys dislike is stronger than mine. Like, you’re inspiring in me an impulse to defend it. And maybe we can talk about it a little bit more in our Slate plus segment. Like, I don’t think the movie is completely uncurious about either the very American subject of the twist or the dynamics of their relationship. I think there’s just something arch and removed about how it’s presenting the whole situation that makes it feel a little bit like an exercise rather than a harrowing examination of, you know, human humanness. But we’ll see. Maybe I’ll. Maybe I’ll mount a rousing defense in Bliss.

Speaker A: All right, the movie is the drama. It’s in theaters now. We were not captivated, but we found a lot to talk about, which maybe is a reason to go check it out yourself and. And see what you think. It’s a curious mix. All right, moving on.

Speaker B: It’s the time in our show where we talk about business. This week, we have only one piece of business, which is to tell you about our Slate plus episode. This week, we’re going to do one of our classic formats, a spoiler special named after the dearly beloved, dearly departed Slate podcast. One of the Slate plus segments in which we take apart a movie as if we were walking out of it with our friends having just seen it, not having to tiptoe around the twist, which, in the case of this week’s movie, the drama is really important. I mean, arguably, it’s not even a twist. It’s the founding premise of the movie, without which I think you can’t really have a full, meaningful analysis of the movie. So we decided to save that for our Slate plus subscribers. All right, moving on.

Speaker A: Taylor Sheridan is the creator of such mega hits as Yellowstone and Landmind. He’s made a lot of hay and a lot of coin, exploiting stereotypes about the differences between red and blue states. Nowhere is this more on display than in his new show, the Madison. It stars Michelle Pfeiffer as a wealthy Manhattan matriarch. She’s rich, beautiful, and idyllically married. Her beloved husband, played by Kurt Russell, dies in a plane accident in his beloved Montana. The matriarch Pfeiffer and her family go west to bury him in the land that he so cherished. And once there, she, the Pfeiffer character, decides to stay. I mean, the show kind of writes itself, by which I mean, I do think ChatGPT generated a lot of the writing for this show. But Rebecca Onion’s piece about this show, she is the Slate’s Taylor Sheridan whisperer. She’s just terrific on his product. But like the ooey gooey sunsets and nuzzling horses and blonde princesses being shown how to survive in baby country by earthy he men. Meanwhile, New York City is portrayed as Gamora meets Kipriani. Oh, dear. These. What will ever become of these big city neurotics in big sky country if you don’t Know. I don’t know what to say. Anyway, let’s listen to a clip. The family seated for a family dinner on Montana, having been told that the meat they’re eating is steak, when in fact it isn’t. Let’s. Let’s have a listen.

Speaker B: It’s elk.

Speaker C: Oak. Like the deer?

Speaker B: No, no, not a deer.

Speaker C: The big deer.

Speaker B: No, it’s a different species.

Speaker C: It’s kind of like grits in polenta according to your logic. It has big horns and hooves and it was roaming around freely until your brother in law shot it. That’s what I’m eating. I’m not sure that they have hooves. Did you know?

Speaker A: No.

Speaker C: You knew.

Speaker B: I can f****** tell.

Speaker C: You knew and you cooked it and you were just gonna let me eat it?

Speaker B: I.

Speaker C: I think it’s really good, Mom.

Speaker B: What do you think is gonna happen to all the food in this house? Paige? It’s gonna get eaten or it’s gonna rot. I didn’t kill the thing. Your uncle will never kill another one. I suppose we could throw it all away and then it’s nourishing some raccoon or worms or I guess. Or it can nourish us, which is what it’s doing.

Speaker A: It can nourish us. Julia, were you nourished?

Speaker C: So you guys, I have to give a little preamble here. Somehow I have escaped watching a single minute of Taylor Sheridan until I watched the pilot of the Madison. And I think this guy’s onto something. I totally enjoyed this show as a vehicle for Michelle Pfeiffer to just like act the s*** out of every scene as a kind of like, you know, Montana vista strewn excuse to just revive a primetime adult soap opera. And I’m all in. I really enjoyed it. It’s ridiculous. I mean the. The like characterizations are so absurd. The, you know, literally our first moment in Manhattan, we see a girl dressed like a, you know, all pink version of Cher Horowitz get clocked in the face.

Speaker B: Because I mean, Julia, she was walking in the village. What do you expect? Just. Just crazy stuff. The danger out there downtown.

Speaker C: No, I love. I love how like, you know how much the show gets wrong about the city. In a later episode there’s a conversation between Michelle Pfeiffer and Kurt Russell where he’s told he has to leave his beloved Montana to get home for the Met Gala on Saturday. Everybody knows the Met Gala is on Monday. So whatever attention to detail is lavished on which flies need to be flung at different seasons in order to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The river runs through it. It’s not similarly deployed in an actual understanding of New York City. But Michelle Pfeiffer is fabulous in this, and I had so much fun watching it spoil my fun.

Speaker B: I mean, unlike you, Jul, Steve and I just recently saw and talked about a lot of Taylor Sheridan because we did the Landman, in fact, with Rebecca Onion on the show. And so I almost felt like, is it too soon to turn back to Taylor Sheridan? But he is. Although obviously he’s still working with the palette that he will always work with. The Golden Hour Montana shots taken by drones. By the way, can I just say that my least favorite thing about this show is the constant establishing shots of Montana. Like, each episode would be one third shorter if there weren’t so g****** many drone shots of beautiful Golden Hour rivers.

Speaker C: It’s so beautiful. It made me want to go to Montana. It actually gave me a feeling. I have a policy of, like, never looking at travel magazines because I don’t like to see images of places I haven’t been that I might go to because I would rather be surprised by what they look like. And I had that, probably because of all the drone shots. I had the feeling of like, oh, this guy’s f****** wrecking Montana for me. Like, I don’t want to see this much of it before I go there.

Speaker B: It’s just. It’s a very appeal countryside that they’re in. But to me, there was something about the way it was presented that was. I mean, it’s the polar opposite of the way New York is presented, is this, you know, horrific hellhole. Every single moment that’s shot on the ranch in Montana has to be this idyllic. I mean, it’s constantly golden hour. So there’s this funny moment when two characters are standing in the bathed golden light talking about a meetup later that day. And the guy says, okay, so I’ll be back at 4pm and I’m thinking, like, but it’s already 6:30pm because it’s the only time it ever is in this sunset Montana land. There is no other biorhythm. I would completely agree that Michelle Pfeiffer is the reason to watch. And as we established, Steve, I think in our Landman conversation, Taylor Sheridan has this strange sort of dark magic where you can be almost repulsed. Like, I actually felt quite insulted by some of the ways that not just New York, but, you know, urban living in general was presented. Like, if you start to scratch the surface of the way he treats cities, the place where 80% of the American population Lives. It’s really, really insulting to cities, right? I mean, the idea, for example, that after the girl, the daughter, is knocked down in the street by this mugger in broad daylight, no one helps her. And there’s a whole shot about her saying, you know, sort of bloody and like turning to strangers, in fact, who we. We’ve all lived in New York, right? If somebody stumbles and falls down in the street, much less is mugged, they’re immediately surrounded by people helping them. That’s part of what’s great about living in a dense city. And anyway, I think some of the stuff about cities is so red state coded that it really kind of made my flesh crawl. But once you’ve absorbed that that’s just part of the Taylor Sheridan deal, that there’s going to be this city dissing, you know, folded into every episode. What he really wants to focus on is the grief of Michelle Pfeiffer’s character and how the death of the Kurt Russell character changes their family and how it changes their relationship to the land. And all of that is strangely addictive in a very soap opera style way. And by soap opera, I don’t even just mean the melodrama. I mean the way that you could sort of drop in at any point and you’ll understand all the relationships because they’re very simple and archetypal and in some ways very silly. But you keep on wanting to watch the next episode. I have to say, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong. Steve, were you happy to turn it off after a few.

Speaker A: I think one has to do, regardless of what one thinks about any Taylor Sheridan show, one has to honor or pay some kind of respect to is dark magic. Because this was where our Landman discussion went. Like Rebecca Onion and I completely agreed that the like red state in that one, more like fossil fuel agitprop is just like at points, like genuinely vile. And the gender relations are, are, you know, borderline.

Speaker B: Yeah, Landman is way more misogynistic than this show.

Speaker A: And yet we both.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And yet we both were. It’s like utterly captivating television. I mean, he’s just an unbelievably good, old fashioned, almost network style creator, content creator. And. But one thing I will say is that at the center of that show of Landmen is Billy Bob Thornton. And you just wait for the next time his, you know, sort of flinty wisdom drops from his mouth and you get this sort of blue state frisson of like when men were men and they knew how to speak their minds. And set everyone straight or whatever. And you don’t love yourself for it. But it’s, it was, it’s very gripping television. Like I watched, I started it because eight different people from my life who otherwise don’t venn diagram into a single type of viewer or taste profile all recommended it independently of one another. It’s just very, very good, compelling tv. This show I don’t find as compelling and therefore the agit prop starts to drive me slightly crazy. I mean, Dana, you really, really nailed it. I mean the show, the show effectively almost completely lost me when the New Yorkers just walk by indifferently. To this person who’s just been violently assaul is preposterous. And then it’s followed up with something equally like really grotesque, which is this idea that this young princess, this rich kid princess, has been so incubated in the blue state frou Frou private school system that she cannot identify the race of her attacker to a black police officer who’s in a car with a white police officer. And they, and they, they understand what’s going on and ask the question four different ways and she just refuses to do. It is taking place within an imaginary, as the academics say, that has been created by the right wing in this country. Right. It like is a caricature that has been created and relentlessly propagandized by the people who are literally at this moment ruining our world. And it forces me in the position of being exactly the like, you know, blue state eunuch, know it all, who tells everyone what to say and think. And like, I f****** resent that. And I’ll tell you, I do think that this is at moments entirely captivating schmaltz grief p***, schmaltzy, you know, kind of weirdly compelling tv. And I think by the. I actually did watch all three available episodes and by the end of the third I was like, God d*** you, Taylor Sheridan. God d*** you. You did it to me f****** again. I’m probably gonna watch more of this. But I will say one thing. I would give this show a total free pass on its Fox News adjacency if there were an intertitle at the beginning of every movie, every episode that said that every single citizen of Montana gets net $4,000 back from the federal government on a per capita basis. And New York, this horrible Gamora that is inauthentic and needs to be anathematized as the death of the human spirit is one of the major states sending that money to Montana. Like I think the mythicizing is not harmless. And it’s. I can’t imagine an intelligent viewer watching it and not at least being aware of that.

Speaker C: I guess I just. I don’t know. I feel like every show is from somebody’s perspective and not every show needs to do everything. And, like, to me, in fact, the broadness and the, like, total unrecognizability of New York in it, from the people being a******* on the street to the Met gala, hypothetically being on a Saturday, which you’re just like, okay, so this is like a completely invented specter of a city rather than an actual city. Is silly and, you know, maybe pernicious if you. If you’re counting on the show to interpret your whole world. But things that help it not seem. The things that attract me to it are. Michelle Pfeiffer is just so good in it. And then the show is about. It is patiently about a bunch of s*** that people don’t make shows about anymore, which is like a good marriage. Like, she really. She and her partner had this good marriage, and then she loses him. And then she’s full of regret about her lack of curiosity about this other element of his life. And I f****** buy it. All of it. They’re both delightful to watch on screen. And then her. The children. I’m. The jury’s out for me on the children. I’m halfway through the second episode, and so. But I think even though they are sort of archetypal, and there’s the brat, and then there’s the older. The stoic older sister who’s been through some s***, and so maybe she has a little more wisdom. And then there’s the intriguing son in law who I feel like is a real. I don’t know where he’s gonna land, but he’s. He. He comes off as a pill, but maybe. Maybe the mountains are gonna change him and turn him into a real man. But I don’t know, it’s like, families love grief, regret. It’s like, great if this is what gets that kind of show made. Great if this is what gives Michelle Pfeiffer, like, just a ton of great stuff to do on screen. And I think the fact that the show takes her seriously and her. You know, there are some scenes in New York where it’s painted like a hellhole, but also we’re in her perspective and she’s very comfortable in her life there and she enjoys her, you know, basalt soaking tub, and she has lunch at a lot of nice restaurants and seems fine.

Speaker B: Yeah. Julia having come off just recently seeing A lot of episodes of Landman, which I think we all agreed in talking about it with Rebecca Onion Steve, that whatever that show had going for it, it was not. It did not lie with the female characters at all. In fact, I remember specifically saying, wow, every scene between two men is really well written. And every scene between a man and a woman or two women is really, really sexist. And I will say that this show, simply by putting Michelle Pfeiffer’s character in the lead and making the main problems of the show be her problems that she’s trying to solve, gets around that problem because she’s a fantastic actress. Her character, especially as the show goes on, is really well written and much more complex than she first comes off to be in the pilot. Right. Where you’re sort of seeing her at her most shallow before she starts to discover the things that the land will teach her. The daughters, arguably, are sort of, you know, stereotypes of New York rich b******. And I think the thing about the show that makes me angriest is that their attitude is made synonymous with being a person from a city. You know, I remember saying out loud while watching it to my partner, like, don’t blame the fact that you’re a. See you next Tuesday on the existence of urban spaces. You know.

Speaker A: Yeah. And that’s. That’s a serious flaw with the show because they want both to depict the foregone marriage as idyllic, like a marital utopia, and they want the kids to be f***** up and spoiled, so they displace that from the parenting onto the city of New York and then generalize from there. And the one thing I would say is Julia. Point taken. Like, TV shows do not need to represent my worldview. I like Landman Landman’s really strong tv, I think, like proselytizing for fossil fuels. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And in this show, setting up a dichotomy between utter, total rural authenticity and utter, total urban inauthenticity is a political act. And it’s happening in a world in which the fact that Montana has as many senators as the state of New York, you know, isn’t. It resonates in a particular way. It plays into a prejudice that is, like, really consciously. Right. It’s not an incidental part of the show. It plays into a grotesque prejudice which is currently ruining the f****** country. And it’s a. I mean, I don’t.

Speaker C: No, I. I’m not asking you.

Speaker B: And I.

Speaker C: But I also found watching it, it’s like a. More watching Fox News you’re like, what? What’s wrong with everybody? Why would anybody watch this? Watching this, you’re like, oh, I see why people fall down this hole.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: Can I just also say that both Landman, in the few episodes I watched of it and within the first, I believe, three episodes of this show, there’s a scene of an urban woman seeing a snake in a country setting and screaming. This seems to be a primal scene that Terrell show Daniel Sheridan has to reenact.

Speaker C: What could it possibly represent about manhood and nature, Dana? What indeed. And. Or the garden and. Or evil. My dissertation. Well, I’ll be sending it along in a few months.

Speaker A: I think we can end it there. All right. I think the theme here is d*** you, Taylor Sheridan, you’ve done it again. The show is the Madison. It’s on Paramount. All right. Well, John Seabrook of the New Yorker, long time and deservedly admired staff writer for the New Yorker, has a piece about the labradoodle, how it became the breed du jour. Let me quote from it. Even if you aren’t one of the 56 million American households with the dog and the family, and I Love this stat, 95% of dog owners consider their pet to be a family member. I was certainly one of those. You’ve probably seen a doodle. Neither ladies nor tramps. First generation doodles are intentionally bred crosses between two AKC recognized breeds, one of which is always a poodle. In the last three decades, Labradoodles, which are Labrador poodles, Bernadoodles, which are Bernese mountain dog poodles, and perhaps most common, and of all common of all, golden doodles, golden retriever poodles, among many other variants of so called quote unquote designer dogs, have taken over public spaces across the Godlift. Taken over public spaces.

Speaker B: We’re back to dangerous, dangerous New York City imagery. The dog parks.

Speaker A: Exactly. In red states and blue states, on the coasts and in the heartland. On one thing we all agree with Dana Stevens. The doodle is, I don’t know, is a very popular breed everywhere in America. You have a doodle? I had until sadly, about a year and a half ago, I had a doodle. The beloved Felix. You and I are both partisans of the doodle. What did you make of John Sebers?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, like I said up at the top of the show, my fear in starting to read this was, is this going to be some sort of anti doodle screed? Because actually, it’s a bit late to the game. I remember there being a wave of anti doodle discourse a few years ago. I think it was possibly, you know, as a result of them topping some numeric chart of the sort that he cites about, you know, how these kinds of hybrid breeds, like non breeds, but mixes of very specific designer dogs, basically, right, have become this subject of mockery by especially and understandably those who care at all about the breed of their dog or the characteristics of their dog. People who have rescues who, you know, go and get whatever mutt they can find at the pound. And I think the real meat of this article is, is essentially a critique of, of breeds themselves. You know, especially the sort of AKC approved classic breed system which as Seabrook gets into, is very related to the English class system and you know, sort of the, the fashion of creating new breeds in the 19th century among dog people and hunters and so forth in England. He kind of does a genealogy of that brings us to the present day where dog ownership is sort of divided between those who seek out specific characteristics in the dog that they’re about to adopt at all, whether in AKC purebred form or one of these newfangled designer dogs and those who prioritize what someone he interviews calls sort of the emotional side of dog adoption. I’m getting a foster, I’m getting a rescue, you know, I’m going to the pound and seeing what dog needs a home and taking that dog home. And as he describes it, sort of the real ethical divide among owners that you meet at the dog park would be that one and not sort of which breed you have. I will say, speaking for myself, and this is where when I opened the article thinking this is going to be anti doodle, which it turned out not to be. In fact, Seabrook himself owns a dog that’s one of these doodle mixes, a golden doodle, I believe. I know that when we were adopting our dog, or she was just a puppy when we got her, but there were very specific factors that went into why we chose to get a doodle mix, which at the time, maybe we were being blinded by the trendiness of the designer dog movement or something, but all of these things seemed very legitimate. My husband is allergic to pets, cats and dogs. So we wanted to find a non shedding breed. We wanted a certain size and weight of a dog so that, you know, it was something we could handle in an apartment and pick up and carry when needed, et cetera. So smaller. And we had a child, a small child at the time. My daughter was about to turn five. So we really tried to find A rescue dog. And almost everyone would have some sort of notation. Everyone that fell under this non shedding category would have some notation on the rescue site that said, we don’t know how this dog is around kids, so we recommend older children or no children or, you know, sort of temperament questions that you are hard to answer when you don’t know a dog’s background. So for that reason, we decided to get a puppy, a non shedding puppy. And, and as Seabrook also points out in the article, these doodle mixes are the most adorable dogs in the world and they’re very hard to resist online. So as he does and as he describes doing in the article, we researched until we found a small breeder and went and got our puppy there. And it was a great experience. She was a very ethical breeder and lovely person. And, you know, whatever amount of money we spent which may have seemed exorbitant at the time has been long forgotten in the 15 years of incredible fun and joy and love that we’ve had with our teddy bear, who is a cockapoo. I don’t think I mentioned exactly what breed mix she is, but she’s a cocker spaniel poodle mix. Maybe we’ll put a picture of her on the show page so others can coo, as everyone does every time she walks down the street.

Speaker C: Dana’s finally figured out how we’re gonna blow our numbers into the stratosphere. Just puppy photos.

Speaker B: Well, in fact, I just recently looked up the address of this breeder that we got our dog from 15 years ago, because I want to write her and send her a picture and say, hey, that dog you sold us who was the daughter of your own pet is still alive and well. And thank you so much for the great dog.

Speaker C: Oh, I love that story of your pup. And I love, you know, I grew up with a standard poodle for the allergy reasons, and I think my family’s at a phase where we’re contemplating getting a dog in a couple of years. Although my husband’s favorite way to tease me during this moment of launching this company is like, maybe we should get a dog today. Like, we are not getting a f****** dog today. But, you know, I’d love, I’d love to get one before my boys go off to college, which is a, you know, six years down the road. But that’s not infinite. And so anyway, we’re starting to think about what kind of dog we might get. So I read all this with interest. My main point about this piece is piece is a journalistic one. There was a fantastic piece in Bloomberg about the rise of the golden doodle last summer. It ran in August. And I get it that the New Yorker is the New Yorker and they can just pronounce olympianly on whatever they want whenever they want. And that once you’ve assigned John Seabrook a piece, you don’t pull them off of it just because Bloomberg did something. But like, like the Bloomberg piece is great. I just want to shout out Bloomberg for having gotten to this topic first and apologize to Bloomberg for having decided to talk about it once the New Yorker, you know, rolled its August way around to the subject. Like there is very little in the Seabrook piece that’s not in the Bloomberg piece earlier and tighter and pretty f****** great.

Speaker A: I mean I’d begin by saying that in terms of pr, the PR angle of it, calling them poos and doodles probably prejudices it, you know, from the jump. I mean it just is so precious sounding that you can kind of almost, you know, contrast any breed, and certainly a genuinely mixed breed, a mutt against it and make it seem like a more authentic form of dog. I just think it’s always fascinating reading about dogs. I mean just recently there’s been more research building on older research about how far back how culturally co evolved human beings are and dogs that, that, that thanks to some fossil evidence and, and carbon dating we now know that there were domesticated or domesticated probably isn’t the right word, but, but there were dogs, there were effectively not wolves. You know, this new thing in the world thousands and thousands of years before we thought there were. And the evidence is that in order to become distinctively human, you have to be able to occupy a fixed piece of land. And you occupy that fixed piece of land before you do agriculture. You actually heard livestock, that sheep herding maybe is the oldest of these activities if I’m not mistaken. And therefore in order to keep wolves at bay, you need this pseudo wolf, this kind of domesticated wolf. And so that we’re just kind of a pro, like we’re as H*** sapiens we’re like kind of co created along with domesticated dogs, which kind of does account for this instinctive love the two species have for one another. So it’s not sheer sentimentality that makes you think of a dog as a family member. They kind of share in the being of the settled place as a full on member. And then secondly, I love the idea that the breeds themselves were initially functional, right? That you, a dachshund was to go after badgers or Something or to go down a certain kind of badger hole in a effectively menacing way and come back with a, with a badger. But, and that over time, of course, what happens is we culturally evolve beyond those purposes and we have these legacy breeds that are highly distinct. One of the things I thought was interesting in the piece was this. I think it was presented mostly as an aside that the idea that there’s any kind of consistent relationship between a breed and a temperament is, is kind of not true. That’s kind of myth. That was interesting because I don’t, I don’t know that I quite believe that. I mean, one of the reasons the Labradoodle was as, as I understand it, the original doodle was that, you know, these two dogs, right? And the distinctive thing about a poodle is they’re incredibly, incredibly smart dogs. And as very smart dogs, they’re hyper aware and therefore somewhat neurotic and tending towards high strung and fussy. And then you’ve got this dopey, lovely, genial, not very bright, but temperamentally wonderful breed, the Labrador. And that if you combine them and get lucky, you get a highly intelligent but very chill dog. And as the owner of a labradoodle who felt his dog was very chill and like empathetically smart dog, that strikes me as true. But maybe it’s just entirely a projection, a human projection. But Dana, I mean, I think there’s, you know, I’ve, I’ve lost my dog. I’m contemplating getting another one. All the ins and outs of that, including just, you know, whether it suits my current lifestyle and can I really replace the beloved Felix. But also if I do it, I’m going to be faced with a far more self aware choice as someone who had a dog, about whether to go to the pound, about whether to get a breed, if so, what breed, you know, and I understand that that is kind of a huge ethical divide, right? Like to rescue a creature that is otherwise utterly forsaken and might be destroyed versus going to, you know, someone who’s creating new animals in order to make a profit. Like that is a fundamental difference. So where, like you’re not going to be faced with this choice anytime soon, God willing. But I’m just curious, having read this piece, did it modify your views on this?

Speaker B: Yeah, and even just over the course of, you know, having our dog, I think my views on it have somewhat modified in a different situation where, you know, we didn’t have a small child in the house, which we won’t. I mean, the allergy will still be There. But yeah, I would probably would choose to try to go down the rescue route rather than buy a dog. And that’s something that this, this article doesn’t quite open up. That I think is a much is the question that underlies something like, you know, what breeds are in fashion and what does that mean? Is that the mere fact that the breed system exists in the way that it does is, I mean, as I mentioned, up top is a kind of relic of the British aristocracy. And something about breeds themselves is kind of creepy. I mean, it’s this human invented world where we’ve taken wolves and inbred them and refined them to the point where, you know, they have all these characteristics that we’ve bred them for, but as a result many of them suffer health problems and, and then as you say, there’s a neglect of dogs that don’t have these specific qualities and characteristics that we’ve bred for. So that, I mean, if you sort of let dogs go and just all interbreed, you know, I think it’s been sort of determined via, I don’t know, various computer programs that every dog would sort of turn into a tan colored mutt. You know, they would all have a sort of converge on a similar kind of type. The way that like a, a street dog looks, you know, like a feral dog sort of looks in, in places where pet dogs aren’t, aren’t really the thing. And that would be a strange world because it is fun to go to meet the breed shows and it is fun to go, you know, to Prospect park during off leash hours and see the wonderful parade of dog diversity that we’ve created. But there’s a real violence to it too. And I’m not sure that this article really gets at that. I mean it’s, it’s sort of, it’s dealing with the kind of surface conflicts among this kind of dog person and that kind of dog person and, and whether AKC purebred dogs are unethical. But getting into the very question of whether, I mean, if to really get at the root of it, whether even pet ownership itself, at least in an urban setting, has a, has an element of ethno ethical questionability. I don’t know. The article doesn’t want to go to those places, but I, as a dog owner have certainly gone to those places over the past decade and a half.

Speaker C: I mean, that’s the thing. Everyone has strong feelings about dogs. Everyone’s feelings are informed by the dogs they’ve known and loved, you know, and everyone contains multitudes and Contradictions. I did like that in Seabrook’s piece, he’s sort of suggesting that the fondness for doodles is like an American, even though they’re not an American invention, necessarily. Like, the passion for them here is sort of an anti aristocratic American impulse, that it’s sort of trying to give you the predictability of knowing what you’re getting, rather than just getting a rescue at random with a set of cross breeding that allows some of the genetic problems with the classic breeds to disperse and the concept, possibly illusory, of hybrid vigor, which I also learned about from the piece.

Speaker B: So, I mean, I will say, Steve, that our poodle mix is not especially smart nor especially nice, but we still love her more than anything.

Speaker C: You got the other end of the other quadrant of the. What is it? Pun diagram. Punnett Square. That’s what it is.

Speaker A: All right. The Seabrook piece is terrific. It’s. It’s called How Doodles Became the Dog du Jour by the wonderful veteran New Yorker writer John Supra. Check it out. All right, now is the moment in our podcast when we endorse Dana Stevens. What do you have?

Speaker B: I try to steer away from just bald nepotism in my endorsements, but I am making an exception this week because we happen to be recording on the very day that is the pub date of the latest book of my darling partner. He is a children’s book author and illustrator. As we’ve talked about before on the show, he publishes under a pseudonym, which is actually sort of more a Persona. It’s based on a nickname I created for him long ago, but his name as a writer illustrator is Rowboat Watkins. And Robot Watkins has a new book out today, a new children’s picture book that I’m holding up now for you to see in the zoom window that’s called Moustache Moustache. And it’s just hitting shelves in children’s bookstores and bookstores everywhere and online, of course. Moustache. Moustache is, I would say, maybe the most unhinged and sort of essentially rowboat book that Rowboat has yet done in that it’s just based on a series of sketches of mustaches that he started to draw. And everything he had appeared where in his notebooks, where he just scribbles ideas. He started drawing mustaches on everything, including, like, TV sets and telephone poles and making this whole world that was inundated with mustaches and that was not intended as a book at first, but ended up evolving into this very silly and crazy rhyming Children’s book. I’ll read a little bit of it just to give you a sense of the rhyme. And you should know that the main characters are a mouse and a moose, both of whom sport enormous mustaches. It begins, moustache, moose stache. How do you do? Stache, house stache, shoe stache, cow stache, coo. Stache. The coo being a bird. And each illustration, as you’ll see, is creatures that not only wear mustaches, but live in houses topped by enormous mustaches. Then it starts to go crazy. Duck stashes, cluck stashes stuck inside, truck stashes, ooh la la, frock stashes, grandfather clock stashes, and on and on. So in addition to the mouse and the moose, you get characters like parachuting root vegetables and shrimp flying a peppermint airplane. And you are just fully inside the imagination of a very odd man with whom I spend my days. So if you have a kid who’s of picture book age, or if you just as I know Julia Turner does love a well done children’s picture book, please look for Moustache Moustache on a shelf near you.

Speaker C: I may be the world’s biggest robot Watkins fan. I think we have all of his books, so we will have to get this one. And we really give rude cakes to almost everybody that we know who has a baby still. And I will say, I am just not a backward looking person. I don’t do regret and I don’t do nostalgia. It’s just not my nature. And I’ve never been like, oh, it’s the last time. I’m gonna change a diaper. It’s the last time, blahdy blah. But my daughter is like, I’m reading chapter books to her. She’s, she’s, it’s. We’re like starting to thin her shelves. Like, she doesn’t want to read each peach pear plum anymore. She wants, like, you know, they now make babysitters club graphic novels, you’ll be delighted to know. And she’s really enjoying those. So I feel like the organic role of picture books in my home is beginning to recede. And it’s making me sad because I love them. They’re just like poems at the same time. It’s really, I think, one of our greatest forms of art. So what a delightful banner day for there to be a new rowboat in the world. I will check it out.

Speaker A: All right, Julia, what do you have?

Speaker C: I am recommending a book called the Wanderers by Daniela Gerson, and it’s a memoir it’s memoir and reportage. It’s written by an old friend of mine who’s a terrific immigration reporter and journalist and now professor of journalism. And it’s based on a. A kind of fantastical fact in her life, which is that she met her now wife at a picnic in Los Angeles. And over the course of their getting to know each other, they realized that they were both descendants of Polish survivors of the Holocaust who departed from opposite sides of the street or a square in the same tiny Polish town. And that they had had two parallel but different arduous journeys of escape. Actually going east to Gulags and then kind of winding back around to Europe with Daniela’s family arriving in the United States and her wife’s family arriving in Israel. And then eventually they found each other in the United States. And so this project was embarked upon before the war in Ukraine and before the kind of increasing instability of our world across the last few years. But it’s just an incredible, incredible fact and a really amazing idea, I think, to go pursue it and think through this personal history. And then I think also what Daniela tracks down is a really interesting arc for a lot of Polish Jews that is understudied and under understood. And my children are also the descendants of different Polish Jews from a different town. They’re not also from the exact same towns, but it’s, it starts, it’s. The book is very arresting, what I’ve read of it so far, and I’m really excited to dive into the whole thing. So the book is called the Wanderers, A story of Exile, Survival and Unexpected love in the Shadow of World War II by Daniela Gerson.

Speaker A: That sounds amazing. I cannot wait to get that.

Speaker C: It’s very cool.

Speaker A: So sort of one and a half endorsements. I got into a habit of reading a volume of the Ferrante Neapolitan, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Cycle. During my like, whatever, it was week or two week or ten day vacation in Maine every summer, and I kind of got stuck only because of a truncated vacation about midway, I think, through book three. And I finally went back to it. I was in between things and was like, it’s time. I mean, I couldn’t love or admire Ferrante and those books more. So it was never a question of like, will I go back? It was just like, when and I finally did it. And God d***, book three. I mean, you guys have read these?

Speaker B: Yeah, I read all four.

Speaker A: Not all of them.

Speaker C: I think I’ve read the first two. I didn’t ever finish them. Wow.

Speaker B: I can’t imagine not finishing those books. I remember reading I reading them on a trip, too, and it was practically all I wanted to do. Like, don’t. Sightsee, don’t. I don’t care. I want the plane trip to last longer so I can keep reading this book.

Speaker A: And I will say that. I mean, I. It’s not so simple as it gets better and better and better, but it is like, I think the wallop gets harder and harder and harder the further into adult womanhood she gets. And in three, they’re just like. And the political issues surrounding the characters are just absolutely to the fore. I mean, it’s just a period in the 60s and 70s when there’s red brigades and student protests and the way she’s able to weave love and enmity and rivalry and the political moment and history into a very, very integrated, like, organically integrated narrative. It’s an astonishing achievement. And I have to say, for a man to read it, that, you know, it’s revelatory in a way that’s. I wish I had encountered it earlier in my life. I’ll just put it that way. I mean, it’s just. It’s crazy. But that’s not even really my endorsement. My endorsement is. I mean, I just think if you haven’t read it, you should read it. So it is one of my endorsements. My other endorsement is the Dan, are you a fan of the singer Ron Sexmith?

Speaker B: I don’t think.

Speaker A: I know he’s still going, but if I had to guess, he was probably. I think he had a moment maybe in the late 80s. He’s kind of an alt singer, songwriter type. He’s got a very unusual discrepancy between his look and his voice in that he’s got a beautiful, tender, lilting, very melodic singing voice. And he’s kind of a big, shambling physical presence in a way. And he always does. To my mind, he deserved to be bigger than he was. And to wit, he does this thing. And let me see, this was eight years ago, but I think he may even still be doing it. And he just calls it Ron. And he does a cover song. And I don’t know whether he was doing like one a day or whether he was doing it through Covid. I should drill down on that. But the important thing is that he just does these wonderful cover songs, this sort of somewhat captivating but also unprepossessing looking man with an acoustic guitar. And they don’t get a ton of views. But I’ve happened to discover one this morning because Dylan had that weird phase in the 80s where he made two very good albums, but they just never became iconic like the very late Dylan or the early and mid Dylan. They’re sort of this in between land where Infidels and Empire Burlesque were very admired. And the songwriting is very strong and Mark Knopfler plays guitar on them for whatever that’s worth, I think quite beautifully. But. And he. Ron Sexmas covers the song Tight Connection to My Heart, which had an MTV moment back in the day and I always thought was really superior mid period Dylan. And because Sexmith is such a melodist and a natural melodist, like when he sings, a melody really surfaces, whereas of course when Dylan sings that can happen, but doesn’t necessarily. And that song in particular always struck me as having bewitching melodic possibilities that were there. It was like weirdly catchy. But Dylan in that kind of speak, singing, nasal speak, singing, especially at that phase, didn’t, didn’t really exploit that aspect of the song. It’s really pretty. It’s. I, I mean, pretty in a meaningful sense. And I’ll. We’ll. We’ll link to it and I would love it if people discovered it. Anyway, Ron Sexmith, he sings Tight Connection to my heart on YouTube and we’ll link to it. Dana, thank you so much.

Speaker B: It was a pleasure.

Speaker A: It was a pleasure, Julia, A real pleasure. And thank you.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker A: You’ll find links to some of the things we talked about today at our show page. That’s slate.com culture fest and you can email us@culturefestlate.com our introductory music is by the composer Nicholas Britel. Our production assistant is Daniel Hirsch. Our producer is Benjamin Frisch. For Dana Stevens and Julia Turner. Thank you so much for joining us. We will see you soon.