Death and grief in 'Succession'; plus, privacy and the abortion pill
BRITTANY LUSE, HOST:
Hi, everyone. You're listening to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR. I'm Brittany Luse. Abortion was all over the headlines this week and for good reason. On Friday, April 8, two judges - one in Texas and one in Washington state - issued conflicting rulings around mifepristone, also known as the abortion pill. The FDA approved the drug more than 20 years ago.
KHIARA BRIDGES: The ruling from Judge Kacsmaryk out of a federal district court in Texas purports to stay the FDA's approval of mifepristone.
LUSE: That's UC Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges.
BRIDGES: At the same time, a federal district judge in Washington state issued a ruling that required the FDA to make mifepristone available in 18 jurisdictions that had challenged restrictions on the use of mifepristone. So that's why these rulings are diametrically opposed to one another.
LUSE: But here's the thing.
BRIDGES: Although Judge Kacsmaryk is in Texas and although Judge Rice is in Washington, they're federal district courts. So this isn't actually a matter of state law at all. This is about federal law.
LUSE: The Department of Justice almost immediately appealed the Texas ruling. And since then, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that mifepristone will remain available but with new restrictions.
What's so remarkable about this Texas ruling, and what pathways does it create for expanding abortion bans across the country?
BRIDGES: It's unprecedented. I'm unaware of any instance in which one judge revoked FDA approval. We're sort of in, like, a lot of legal uncertainty about what happens next.
LUSE: Khiara made headlines in 2022 after she spoke out against the passing of Dobbs v. Jackson, which ruled that the United States Constitution does not guarantee a right to abortion. But today, Khiara joins us to talk about how this new ruling ties back to the Dobbs decision.
BRIDGES: And what Judge Kacsmaryk's ruling simply does is to build on the uncertainty that the Dobbs decision established.
LUSE: And she invites us to think more deeply about how this issue divides us.
BRIDGES: As somebody who believes that abortion rights are essential to human dignity and talking to somebody who believes that, you know, abortion is murder, I think that we can find a common ground.
LUSE: That's coming up.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: Khiara, welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE.
BRIDGES: Thank you. It's so good to be here talking with you.
LUSE: So happy to have you here. Let's just jump right into it. Let's lay some things out. In the wake of Dobbs, how has abortion medication become such a key battleground? What does medication abortion provide that surgical abortion doesn't?
BRIDGES: Right. Well, so one thing about the pre-Roe era was that criminal abortion laws targeted the provider. So when you had abortion clinics, in order to make sure that nobody in a state - for example, Texas - could get an abortion in Texas, you just had to make sure that you criminalized all of the physicians who would provide abortions in the state of Texas. What the advent of mifepristone and misoprostol do is make it so that it's harder for a state that is interested in making abortions unavailable to get to the person who would perform the abortion. All you have to do is take a pill - right? - like, literally in the privacy of your own home. And so if the provider of that pill is out of state, then how can Texas get to you if it's interested in criminalizing, you know, abortions in the state?
And so that's why when Dobbs happened, everybody was like, you know, the sky is falling. But actually, there's a piece of the sky that's still up there, and the piece of the sky that had not yet fallen was the fact that we have medication abortion now. But at least people still have access to a means to terminate a pregnancy that don't rely upon going to a physical location, but rather accessing a pill that can be mailed to an individual from literally anywhere in the world.
LUSE: That's a really, really, really fascinating point. You made just such an interesting delineation between someone - like, an abortion seeker and maybe somebody practitioning (ph)...
BRIDGES: Yeah, yeah.
LUSE: ...You know, such as, like, a health care provider or something like that, that they're seen differently in the eyes of the law. But talk to me more about abortion's legal framing.
BRIDGES: Yeah. So starting back at least 50 years ago, the Supreme Court started interpreting the 14th Amendment's due process clause to protect a right to privacy. And the idea at the time was that there are certain areas of life that are kind of so essential to human dignity that it's repugnant to civilized governments to attempt to regulate those avenues of life. And so the Supreme Court started developing this jurisprudence that said that it's kind of essential to human dignity for a person to decide whether they become pregnant in the first instance. It's kind of essential to human dignity to decide whether a person will give birth to the fetus that they're gestating.
And then the Supreme Court developed subsequent jurisprudence that it's kind of essential to human dignity to allow a person to have consensual sex with an adult without facing criminal penalties, even when that adult is a person of the same sex, right? So we had a right to be free from criminal punishment for same-sex sex with a consenting adult. And then we had - you know, within that sort of rubric of privacy, we also now have the right to marry somebody of the same sex - right? - because it's...
LUSE: Right, right.
BRIDGES: ...It kind of denies human dignity to deny a person the ability to marry the person they love - right? - simply because that person is of the same sex. So this jurisprudence has developed under the rhetoric of privacy.
LUSE: I wonder, thinking back to this recent ruling in Texas around abortion medication, what about the Texas judge's rationale could threaten other rights that fall under that category of privacy?
BRIDGES: And let me just be clear. It's not Judge Kacsmaryk's ruling that jeopardizes other privacy rights. Rather, it is Dobbs that jeopardizes other privacy rights. And what Judge Kacsmaryk is doing is simply building on the foundation that Dobbs established. Dobbs said that the right to privacy that has existed, specifically the right to terminate a pre-viability pregnancy - that is protected under the right of privacy. The Supreme Court said, nah, that doesn't exist anymore. When we said that 50 years ago, we were egregiously wrong. The proper interpretation of the Constitution is to say the Constitution does not protect any right to terminate a pre-viability pregnancy. And so that raises the question, OK, so what other interpretations vis-a-vis the right to privacy did the Supreme Court get wrong? All of these rights were jeopardized with the Dobbs decision.
LUSE: So, I mean, to that point, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, there were so many different reactions. But there's one that I kept seeing over and over again that gave me pause. People who lived in, you know, so-called blue states or cities often have this air of, you know, thank God I'm not in the South. Or, you know, some people who see abortion access as a key human right - right? - they might even dismiss the South altogether as backwards because they felt like even if abortion access is lost in one area of the country, it's not going to be lost for me. It's a sentiment I hear in New York often enough, right? I wonder, have you heard this sentiment yourself? And what would you say in response to someone who believes that kind of thing?
BRIDGES: Yeah. So I live in California, and one of the first things that our governor did, Gavin Newsom - one of the first things that he said was, like, California is going to be a reproductive justice haven, right? We're going to be, like, an abortion safe state.
LUSE: Right, right.
BRIDGES: There's been this sense that it's kind of red versus blue, right? And not only are we safe in blue states, but also blue states can help folks in red states access the procedures and the health care that they need. And what Judge Kacsmaryk's ruling does is remind us that we live in an entire nation, right? Like, federalism is a thing. There's certainly different state laws. But it's important to understand that folks who believe that abortion is murder, it's illogical to think that they would be satisfied simply with permitting murders to happen in some states and not happen in other states, right? If you believe that a fetus is a tiny little baby and you believe that abortion is the termination of that fetus' life, you wouldn't sleep. Like, you know, your job wouldn't be done.
LUSE: You would feel like - you're saying that somebody with those beliefs would want to follow this project of national abortion ban all the way through.
BRIDGES: Absolutely. Dobbs was just the first step. Dobbs said that states can now criminalize abortion if they want to. The next step is to require states to criminalize abortion in order to save fetal life. So Kacsmaryk's ruling is consistent with saying that the United States is a nation that finds the termination of fetal life abhorrent and in no jurisdiction in the United States will it be legal to terminate a pregnancy without criminal consequences. So removing mifepristone from the market furthers this project of making abortion inaccessible to everybody in the U.S.
LUSE: You mentioned that, like, we need to remember that we're, like, a whole country. Why is it important to see the struggles of people who are in these two disparate categories - right? - Southern and rural, maybe Northern and urban, perhaps red-blue? Why is this something that affects everybody or should matter to everybody?
BRIDGES: Yeah. I think it's lack of imagination to see how all of the things that we're witnessing within, like, just the last two years are linked. Abortion is sort of framed as an issue of, like, a feminist issue, like, a women's issue. And the attacks on trans people are sort of concerned as, like, an LGBTQ issue, and then the attacks on critical race theory is kind of understood as a racial justice issue. If we see the thread that connects them, we'll see that racial justice is connected to freedom from sexism and misogyny, which is connected to freedom from transphobia and cisnormativity. And I think it's a valuable project to see how all of those things are linked. I think that we're engaged in this moment where, specifically, the Republican party is interested in a project of restoring a world that used to exist, and this was a world that they think used to exist. It's this project of restoring this imagined past that would be harmful to pretty much everybody who's not a cis white man without any disabilities and with some degree of class privilege.
LUSE: I have one last question. We speak to all of America on this show, right? There's going to be people listening who believe that abortion is a human right. And there are going to be people listening who don't think that.
BRIDGES: Right.
LUSE: I imagine that you spend a lot of time in your line of work talking with people from both camps. But I wonder, what do you say about this moment to people who want to expand abortion bans?
BRIDGES: As somebody who believes that abortion rights are essential to human dignity and talking to somebody who believes that, you know, abortion is murder, I think that we might save babies by ensuring that pregnant folks and new parents have the things that they need in order to ensure that their babies are healthy, like clean water, housing, like health care, clothes, formula or the ability to breastfeed, right? Like, that'll do babies some good, right? We can find a common ground, and that common ground would be in investigating other ways that we can ensure that fetuses are healthy, that babies are healthy and that the people who are creating these lives have what they need to competently and beautifully and wonderfully support the lives that they've created.
LUSE: Well, Khiara, thank you so much for coming on the show today - this week - to talk about this. This is something I know that's been on a lot of people's minds, and I feel so lucky that we got to hear from you on this.
BRIDGES: Thank you for having me. It's always a joy to be here.
LUSE: That was UC Berkeley law professor Khiara Bridges. Since Khiara and I spoke earlier this week, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would ban most abortions in the state of Florida after six weeks of pregnancy, a point at which many people do not even know they're pregnant. Most abortions are now banned outright in 13 states. For continuing coverage on abortion legislation, head to npr.org or tune in to your local NPR station.
Coming up, we're talking about something a bit lighter - "Succession." I'm joined by NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour host Linda Holmes to talk about that bombshell episode. And later on, we play a little game called Who's Your Daddy? Stay tuned.
(SOUNDBITE OF FLEVANS' "FLICKER")
LUSE: OK. So last Sunday night, one phone call was heard around the world.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SUCCESSION")
MATTHEW MACFADYEN: (As Tom Wambsgans) Hey, Roman.
KIERAN CULKIN: (As Roman Roy) Yeah.
MACFADYEN: (As Tom Wambsgans) Hey. Your dad is very sick. He's very, very sick.
CULKIN: (As Roman Roy) What?
LUSE: I'm talking, of course, about HBO's "Succession."
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SUCCESSION")
CULKIN: (As Roman Roy) It's Tom - is - apparently Dad's sick. What do you mean he's sick? Like, sick like...
JEREMY STRONG: (As Kendall Roy) What's going on?
CULKIN: (As Roman Roy) Tom? Tom, are you still there?
STRONG: (As Kendall Roy) Is he OK?
LUSE: And for those of you who have been hiding under a rock, I am about to talk about what happened in that episode, so do with that information what you will. But this phone call was the basis for what I think was one of the greatest episodes of television I've ever seen. For context, "Succession" is about a billionaire father, his four kids and who will succeed him as the head of his company when he dies. Well, this past Sunday, the father, Logan Roy, died. And what's extraordinary is that you don't see the death. You hear about it through a long real-time phone call with his kids.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SUCCESSION")
CULKIN: (As Roman Roy) You're a good man. You're a good dad. You're a very good dad. You did a good job. No, I don't - I'm sorry, I don't know how to do that. You can - I can't. Your turn.
LUSE: For fans of the show, it was shocking and devastating. And for me, it subverted everything I expect to see when a main character passes away. And that is also true for Linda Holmes from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Linda and I are getting into what happened and why this episode of "Succession" mirrors how we experience death in the real world.
Ooh, Linda.
LINDA HOLMES, BYLINE: Brittany.
LUSE: Welcome to IT'S BEEN A MINUTE. I'm so excited to have you here to talk about this today.
HOLMES: I'm so excited, too.
LUSE: So, Linda, I think for many people, the quick way to describe what happened in this episode is like, WTF? Logan's dead (laughter).
HOLMES: Yes, exactly. No more kisses from daddy.
LUSE: No more kisses from daddy, which I think, for those of us who strive for emotional health, probably a good thing. But for the Roy children who are still very much caught up in this intense, emotional family dynamic that is just so unhealthy, it's hitting them really hard. I have to say, like, the show has kind of teased health issues for him since the very first episode, like...
HOLMES: Yes.
LUSE: ...Throughout the entire run of the series.
HOLMES: Yes.
LUSE: And still, to me and to many other viewers, this death felt surprising. How do you think they managed to pull that off?
HOLMES: I think they tried very hard to make the death an extraordinary event that happens on an ordinary day and in an ordinary way, which is you get a cellphone call with bad service. And that is how they began to get this information. And so the death wasn't tipped in the same way that deaths are often tipped. I'm sure that you, like me, have frequently watched a movie or television show and said to yourself, that guy's dead.
LUSE: Oh, yeah.
HOLMES: That guy is so dead.
LUSE: Yes.
HOLMES: You know, and it's like, the minute somebody starts to say, like, I'm really looking forward, after this mission, to getting back to my family, here's a picture of my kids...
LUSE: Never going to see them again.
HOLMES: ...It's like, you are extremely dead. You're the deadest dead that's ever deaded (ph). And I think that this didn't - you know, they didn't give Logan a lot of really interesting last words. Kind of the last time you saw this incredibly - I'm not afraid to say this - iconic character, the last time you see him, he's stomping up to his plane, the same as always. And then you just never see him again. And it's just not the way TV deaths usually work.
LUSE: No, you're absolutely right. And because of that, I think it caught so many viewers off-guard. And I think for me, the thing that felt so much like a departure is that we don't see the death happening. The viewers, like the Roy children, don't get to have a last conversation with Logan or see the death happen. It's all off-screen. How does "Succession" go against this expectation of a visible death, and why does that feel so different?
HOLMES: Well, I think because you don't see Logan die, you really are put in the position that they are in. You experience that death as they do. And I think that what "Succession" does that is different is they've held back all season things that you don't see, things that you just experience through finding out about them or having someone talk about them. I think it gets at how frustrating and incomplete and unresolved most deaths are and how unresolved the relationships usually are.
LUSE: I mean, he is perhaps the most hateable person on "Succession," which is a show full of literally only hateable characters.
HOLMES: Yes.
LUSE: And yet people cried watching the episode, including, you know, a couple people on our team. One of our producers said that the reason he cried was because of the, you know, I love you, but I can't forgive you moment.
HOLMES: Yes.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "SUCCESSION")
STRONG: (As Kendall Roy) I love you, Dad. I can't forgive you. Yeah. But I - it's OK. And I love you.
LUSE: It's so related, I think, to what it's like to grieve someone that you love but also hate or also, at the very least, have a difficult relationship with. For a show about a family that is not at all relatable to normal people - these are mean, mean, evil, billionaire, fail children - you know, not the life that most of us are living - what makes this episode feel so universal, that it touched people in such an emotional way?
HOLMES: People can't relate, in most cases, to the death of your father who is a monomaniacal billionaire, right? But they can relate to having very complicated relationships with people who die, and you don't get a chance to really resolve them. You do love them. You do miss them when they're gone, and yet you can't honestly say that you had a good or happy relationship with them. So the complexity is familiar and relatable, even if the specifics aren't.
I think the other thing that made it very touching to people was process. They showed a process of notification and coming to accept that someone had died. You know, I thought a lot about one of my friends who died, and I got a very just unexpected, out-of-nowhere phone call on - in the middle of a Saturday from someone that I don't know very well. And I kind of thought, why is this person calling me on a Saturday? What is this about?
LUSE: Right.
HOLMES: And you pick up the phone, and it's the last thing you think they're going to say. It is just the last thing you think you're going to hear. And I think that process of the phone call out of nowhere that is the last thing you think you're going to hear is relatable regardless of the relationship. And so I think that choppy phone call where you're trying to get the information, you're trying to figure out what happened, you're trying to understand - and in some ways, it doesn't matter how the person came to die, but it's intensely important to try to figure out what the person's telling you. So I think that that process is something that you sometimes don't see on TV in terms of the real-time acceptance of news that someone has died.
LUSE: I think about when my grandfather passed away 20 years ago. You know, we knew that he had been sick. We had gone down to visit him a few months prior. But, you know, there was a call, you know, that came, I think, in the morning or the afternoon. And then everything was different.
HOLMES: You're suddenly in a completely different world. And you saw that with the Roy family on "Succession" - is that all of a sudden, they're trying to figure out, oh, my gosh, we have to figure out what we're doing about this wedding. What are we doing about telling everybody? What are we doing about announcing it, because we have to worry about the company? You know, what order are we telling people in? You know, who's going to try to keep it away from the press? And, you know, just - you know, as you said, I think a lot of times, all of a sudden, you find yourself in a completely different - it feels like a completely different world all of a sudden.
LUSE: You know, so many shows I watch now, I'll be introduced to a character, like you mentioned, in minute two, and I know that minute 38, they're going to die, right? Or even, like, shows like "Game Of Thrones" where many people showed up every single week because they wanted to see who was going to die this week or...
HOLMES: Right. And basically, like, every time people said, oh, this was an amazing episode of "Game Of Thrones," it meant someone died in some spectacular and probably super gross way.
LUSE: Exactly. Or even shows, you know, that might handle death a little bit more sensitively, at least emotionally, like "The Last Of Us" - right? - they're prone to the same thing. You have some sense that the character that you're going to meet is about to die or you see them, you know, kick the bucket in a very spectacular fashion, right? I wonder, are there other shows besides "Succession" that you can think of that utilize an off-screen death well, or portray death in a more realistic manner, as it seems unfolded, you know, with this most recent episode of "Succession"?
HOLMES: It's interesting because when I think about the shows where they've done big off-screen deaths or ones that have been communicated in a similar way, they are of a lot of different types, right? The first one that came to mind when I was thinking about this was Marshall's father on "How I Met Your Mother." And his father died, and Lily came - his wife came and told him that his father had died, and that notification that his father had died is one of the show's, I think, most touching moments. And it's exactly for the same reason - that his wife has the task of telling him that his father has died. And it comes out of nowhere for him. He's not expecting it. It's not something they've been anticipating.
And to tell you the truth, Brittany, you can go all the way back to "Sesame Street" telling Big Bird that Mr. Hooper died because it happens off-screen...
LUSE: Right.
HOLMES: ...Because it was the actor. And frequently, the ones where it's the actor are ones where it takes place off-screen - Nicholas Colasanto on "Cheers" and things like that.
LUSE: Right.
HOLMES: And sometimes those are very effective and extra sad because you get that sense that it wasn't planned and choreographed in the same way. It really puts the emphasis on the coming to terms process rather than just the dying itself.
LUSE: Well...
HOLMES: Weren't expecting to talk about Big Bird, were you, Brittany?
LUSE: I was not expecting to talk about Big Bird today. Well, I mean, you have my full agreement. I think the episode itself was a stunning piece of writing and acting. And thank you so much for coming to talk with me about it. But on the topic of TV dads, Linda, would you mind sticking around for a little game?
HOLMES: Oh, always. Always.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: OK. So we are going to play a special game called Who's Your Daddy?
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: In honor of Logan Roy - rest in peace - we're going to be talking TV dads. OK, so this is how the game is going to work. I'm going to give you three TV dads and three scenarios, and you have to pick who you'd want to stand in as a dad in each. And each dad you choose gets a point. So you can choose one dad as many times as you want, OK?
HOLMES: Oh, I see. I see.
LUSE: Yes. So our dads of the day are Homer Simpson, famous cartoon dad...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE SIMPSONS")
DAN CASTELLANETA: (As Homer Simpson) Son, a woman is a lot like a refrigerator.
LUSE: ...Tony Soprano, famous mobster dad...
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE SOPRANOS")
JAMES GANDOLFINI: (As Tony Soprano) There's an old Italian saying. You f*** up once. You lose two teeth.
LUSE: ...And Joel from "The Last Of Us" - zombie-killing former contractor dad.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LAST OF US")
PEDRO PASCAL: (As Joel) You get your homework done - fractions.
LUSE: All right. Are you ready to play, Linda?
HOLMES: I am.
LUSE: OK. All right. All right. Scenario No. 1 - you are buying your first car and you need help negotiating with the salesperson on your monthly payment. Which dad are you calling up for help and why?
HOLMES: OK, if Homer does the negotiation, I'm going to wind up paying twice as much as the guy wanted to charge me originally.
LUSE: (Laughter).
HOLMES: If Tony handles the negotiation, the guy is going to end up dead.
LUSE: Fair.
HOLMES: And if Joel handles the negotiation, he's going to wind up spiriting me away to a different car dealership entirely...
LUSE: (Laughter).
HOLMES: ...To get a totally different car because getting this car is not safe. I think, given these choices, in the hopes of a more protective man of few words who would perhaps trust me to do my own negotiating unless it was absolutely necessary for him to step in, I'm going to take Joel.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE LAST OF US")
PASCAL: (As Joel) Thank you.
LUSE: Me, myself, personally, I would have taken Tony.
HOLMES: I mean, it makes sense.
LUSE: I am a stickler for a deal. So, you know, there you go. First scenario. After this scenario, right now, we've got Joel from "The Last Of Us" at one point, everybody else, zilch. OK. Are you ready for scenario number two?
HOLMES: I am.
LUSE: All right. OK. You're showing up at the block party and you have the opportunity to grill alongside one of these dads. Which dad would you want as your co-grill master? Do you want Joel from "The Last Of Us," do you want Tony Soprano, or do you want Homer Simpson?
HOLMES: I don't think I would want to - I have an aversion to grilling around Tony Soprano just because...
LUSE: Wow.
HOLMES: I know.
LUSE: Why (laughter)?
HOLMES: This is, like, the most - I feel like I'm eschewing Tony Soprano for no good reason except that he's an unrepentant murderer. But I think that...
LUSE: Good reason.
HOLMES: In some ways, Homer loves nothing better than food. And I feel like maybe to share a grilling experience with Homer Simpson would be the most interesting, even though I might not actually eat the resulting food.
LUSE: (Laughter).
HOLMES: But I think going to a block party with Homer would probably be highly entertaining.
LUSE: (Laughter) So it's all experiential for you, not necessarily culinary?
HOLMES: It's all experiential. I know how to grill a hot dog. You know what I mean?
LUSE: Yeah. Yeah.
HOLMES: I don't want to follow around a mafioso and worry that he's going to get in a fight. And I don't want to bring a raggedy apocalypse survivor around 'cause I don't know what he's going to tell people about what we've been doing. We've been going around doing various dangerous things. I don't want him to talk about all the terrible things that we've seen. So I think what I'm ultimately going to do is I'm going to take Homer to the block party, because he might embarrass me. He might embarrass himself. But if there's good food around, he's going to make sure that I don't miss it.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE SIMPSONS")
CASTELLANETA: (As Homer Simpson) Woohoo.
LUSE: That's fair. And also, too, he's, like, a beer guy. And I feel like beer, cookout...
HOLMES: Yeah.
LUSE: ...I feel like that kind of goes - he's kind of like a...
HOLMES: He's going to be in his element.
LUSE: He's going to be in his element. He's a chill guy. OK. Fair enough. All right. So so far, we have one point for Joel, one point for Homer. Going into our third scenario - you are showing up late at the house past curfew. Which dad would you want waiting for you in the living room with a single lamp lit - Homer, Tony, Joel?
HOLMES: Well, this has to be Homer, because Tony is going to murder either me or someone else. Joel is going to have been traumatized by worrying about what might happen to me because he has seen so many terrible things. He's truly going to be awake thinking, I was afraid that you got eaten by space monsters. And that's going to be very stressful for him. I don't want to do that to him. I definitely don't want to deal with Tony Soprano. So I'm going to go with Homer, who I think is barely going to remember that I even had a curfew and is probably going to be so concerned about something else entirely having nothing to do with me that he might originally start yelling at me, but I will be able to distract him by, like, throwing a ball of aluminum foil in the air.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE SIMPSONS")
CASTELLANETA: (As Homer Simpson) Woohoo.
LUSE: All right. Well, based on this, our final score - one for Joel from "The Last Of Us" and two for Homer Simpson of "The Simpsons." Based on this, the best TV dad, our daddy of the day, is Homer Simpson. There we go.
HOLMES: Yeah. I think if you compare him to a mafia guy and traumatized apocalypse survivor, then I'm not that surprised. Like, you know, that's a pretty chill dad, relatively speaking, even if completely incompetent.
LUSE: (Laughter). Well, chill dads for the win. Well, I think we've all learned a lot today.
(LAUGHTER)
LUSE: Linda, thank you so, so much for coming on IT'S BEEN A MINUTE today and talking to me about Logan Roy and a host of other TV dads that we all know and love, possibly fear.
HOLMES: Thank you, Brittany. Anytime.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
LUSE: That was Linda Holmes, host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. This episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE was produced by...
BARTON GIRDWOOD, BYLINE: Barton Girdwood.
ALEXIS WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Alexis Williams.
LIAM MCBAIN, BYLINE: Liam McBain.
COREY ANTONIO ROSE, BYLINE: Corey Antonio Rose.
LUSE: It was produced and edited by...
JESSICA MENDOZA, BYLINE: Jessica Mendoza.
LUSE: Our intern is...
JAMAL MICHEL, BYLINE: Jamal Michel.
LUSE: It was edited by...
JESSICA PLACZEK, BYLINE: Jessica Placzek.
LUSE: Engineering support came from...
ALEX DREWENSKUS, BYLINE: Alex Drewenskus.
LUSE: Our executive producer is...
VERALYN WILLIAMS, BYLINE: Veralyn Williams.
LUSE: Our VP of programming is...
YOLANDA SANGWENI, BYLINE: Yolanda Sangweni.
LUSE: Our senior VP of programming is...
ANYA GRUNDMANN, BYLINE: Anya Grundmann.
LUSE: All right. That's our show for today. I'm Brittany Luse. See you next week for another episode of IT'S BEEN A MINUTE from NPR.
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