Introducing DC Studios Showcase: The Official Podcast

I now have a podcast (and a TV show?). Plus: What I watched in November.

November was a weird month. For the first time ever, I really believe this, I was totally sidelined by the time change. I was still in Virginia for the film festival, and spent the following Monday traveling back to Los Angeles; I was so wiped out that I went to bed at 10 pm (I’m usually falling asleep between midnight and 1 am). Then the next night was the election, and that wasn’t very fun; I was ready to go to sleep by 8 o’clock. And then so on. That whole week was kind of a blur, and while the results were not particularly unexpected for me, I really didn’t have anything to say here about anything at all.

And then the next week, I filmed a podcast.

I was approached back in June about auditioning to be a co-host of a podcast for DC Studios; the producers’ pitch was pairing a DC super fan with someone with a broader pop culture knowledge. I told them I loved Batman when I was a kid, know the general idea of the larger DC Universe, and agreed to submit a writing packet and a self-tape. Soon, my eventual co-host Frankey and I were doing a chemistry read over Zoom and got cast in the roles. And then, as corporate things go, we waited a bit for the project to get up and running (and in the meantime, we brought on a comic correspondent, Coy, to the mix).

I was really intimidated about going into production, about having to bring a lot of energy on camera the week after, well, another terrible thing had happened. But it soon felt like such a rush of excitement, to collaborate on segments and planning (one of the DC execs described it as being back in a writers room) and, perhaps most importantly, get to know my colleagues with whom I’d share screen time. We filmed a block of episodes in the next three days, and it was a whirlwind and so much fun. It turns out what I needed just at that moment was an immersion into another universe (and unlimited snacks). And although I did have a minor panic attack the night before the trailer dropped because I truly didn’t what to expect from DC fans and non-fans alike, the response has been extremely positive (even in the YouTube comments!) and James Gunn told us himself how much he loves it. (The moment in this process when I found out Gunn personally approved my casting… Phew, that was something.)

The show launched last week, and will be available to stream on Max every other Friday (it’s also on YouTube; if you just want to listen to it, it’s where all the other podcasts are). We have a full season ahead of us with a lot of fun stuff coming, so you should watch it! And keep those fingers crossed for a renewal!

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Are you reading my other newsletter, Considerations? It’s been a fun awards season gig which has kept me in that space while I branch out in other directions (like slowly becoming a DC Comics expert). You can sign up to get it every Tuesday, or you can read it as a column on Fridays here.

In other writing news, for THR I spoke with Lola Petticrew and Maxine Peake, the actors who played IRA volunteer and convicted terrorist Dolours Price on FX’s miniseries Say Nothing. I read Patrick Radden Keefe’s book about the Troubles in Northern Ireland (which I believe is one of the best nonfiction books ever written) in the summer of 2020, which was an incredibly interesting moment to think about the “right” way to fight for one’s civil rights; while it’s not a one-to-one comparison, there are a lot of lessons one can learn from the Troubles in the context of Palestine.

Petticrew, who plays Price as a young revolutionary, is a “ceasefire baby,” someone who came of age after the Troubles ended up still experienced the legacy of that traumatic period. I keep thinking about this from them in particular:

There’s a quote — I think it’s Martin McGuinness [a former IRA member and deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from 2007 to 2017], and I’m completely paraphrasing here, but he talks about the fact that he didn’t want to be a soldier. He didn’t want to go out to war, the war came to him and landed on his doorstep. And I feel like very much that is the territory that Dolours is in.

I’ve done a few interviews now, and some people have questioned whether or not [what Dolours did] was an act of feminism. And I don’t think it was an act of feminism by any means. Dolours was just a person in a situation who felt like they had no other choice. For people who joined the IRA or became more politically involved, the question of a united Ireland wasn’t even really at the forefront of their mind. It was about civil rights. People were treated as second-class citizens. They were occupied people. She felt like she had exhausted every other means to be able to have basic civil rights, to be able to have a future. I don’t think it was a grand revolutionary act, or she was trying to prove something, as much as it was tactical — that [she felt] this is what they needed to do in order to win a war against an occupying force.

I am working on my lists for my favorite things of the year, which I will likely get out sometime in the next two weeks, and you better believe Say Nothing will be on it. If you haven’t watched it on Hulu, you should!

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It’s The Ice Storm season.

November Film Log

Here’s the full list of 37 movies I watched last month. Bolded titles are recommended and re-watches are marked with asterisks.

11/2: A Real Pain* (Jesse Eisenberg, 2024)
11/3: The Room Next Door (Pedro Almodóvar, 2024)
11/4: My Old Ass (Megan Park, 2024)
11/5: The Substance* (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
11/5: Tea With the Dames* (Roger Mitchell, 2018)
11/6: Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story (Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, 2024)
11/7: Day of the Fight (Jack Huston, 2024)
11/7: Nosferatu (Robert Eggers, 2024)
11/8: Los Frikis (Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz, 2024)
11/8: Blink Twice (Zoë Kravitz, 2024)
11/9: Martha (R. J. Cutler, 2024)
11/12: Starlet* (Sean Baker, 2012)
11/13: My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock (Mark Cousins, 2024)
11/14: An American Werewolf in Paris* (Anthony Waller, 1997)
11/15: Tangerine* (Sean Baker, 2015)
11/16: Sid & Nancy* (Alex Cox, 1986)
11/18: Sing Sing (Greg Kwedar, 2024)
11/19: The Unknown Country (Morrisa Maltz, 2023)
11/19: Dahomey (Mati Diop, 2024)
11/20: The Wild Robot (Chris Sanders, 2024)
11/20: No Other Land (Rachel Szor, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal and Basel Adra, 2024)
11/21: Queer (Luca Guadagnino, 2024)
11/23: The Piano Lesson* (Malcolm Washington, 2024)
11/23: The World According to Allee Willis (Alexis Spraic, 2024)
11/25: Firebrand (Karim Aïnouz, 2024)
11/25: Sugarcane (Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, 2024)
11/26: Anora* (Sean Baker, 2024)
11/27: Cuckoo (Tilman Singer, 2024)
11/27: The Ice Storm* (Ang Lee, 1997)
11/27: Seeking Mavis Beacon (Jazmin Jones, 2024)
11/28: Heretic (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, 2024)
11/29: Blitz* (Steve McQueen, 2024)
11/29: The End (Joshua Oppenheimer, 2024)
11/29: Revenge (Coralie Fargeat, 2017)
11/29: Between the Temples* (Nathan Silver, 2024)
11/30: Witches (Elizabeth Sankey, 2024)
11/30: Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (Garret Price, 2024)