Listen to Culture Gabfest No. 445 with Laura Miller, Willa Paskin, and June Thomas with the audio player below.
And join the lively conversation on the Culturefest Facebook page.
Go to slate.com/cultureplus to learn more about Slate Plus and join today.
This week on Slate Plus, Laura, Willa, and June discuss the books, films, and television they wish existed but don’t.
On this week’s Slate Culture Gabfest, our three guest hosts discuss Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast, starring Emma Watson, Kevin Kline, and Dan Stevens. The film has been a box-office smash, but how does it stack up against the 1991 animated version or the original fairy tale? Next, the gabbers address To Walk Invisible, a television drama about the Brontë sisters created by one of Britain’s greatest TV talents, Sally Wainwright. It’s a beautiful period piece—but is there too much Branwell? Finally, the hosts interview actress Alison Wright about her roles in The Americans and Feud and her Broadway debut in Sweat.
Links to some of the things we discussed this week:
- Beauty and the Beast
- Enchanted
- Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast from 1946
- “An Exclusively Gay Breakdown of Beauty and the Beast’s Would-Be Queer Moment” in Slate
- To Walk Invisible
- The Prisoner by Emily Brontë
- “ ‘They Had Issues’: Sally Wainwright and Tracy Chevalier Discuss the Brontës” by Paula Cocozza in the Guardian
- Victoria Wood’s Haworth Parsonage Guide
- Happy Valley
- Last Tango in Halifax
- Sweat
- The Americans
- Feud
- The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Endorsements
Willa: Interaction of Color by Josef Albers
Laura: Byzantium
June: Crownies
Outro: “Gaston” from Beauty and the Beast
You can email us at culturefest@slate.com.
This podcast was produced by Benjamin Frisch. Our intern is Daniel Schroeder.
Follow us on Twitter. And join the Culture Gabfest conversation on Facebook.