Fresh Air - Miss America ‘68, women’s lib, and the politics of beauty

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

Historian Micki McElya’s book, ‘Liberation Summer,’ revisits September 1968, when three groups of women converged on the Atlantic City boardwalk: feminists protesting the Miss America Pageant, contestants in the first-ever Miss Black America Pageant, and women defending Miss America herself. McElya argues the collision that day created a politics of beauty that runs through the rise of the religious right, the #MeToo era, all the way to today. She spoke with Tonya Mosley. Also, TV critic David Bianculli reviews HBO’s ‘Big Bang’ spin-off,  ‘Stuart Fails to Save the Universe.’ Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter Follow us on Instagram Subscribe to our YouTube channel Check out the Fresh Air ArchivesSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and curated playlists of archive interviews. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tani Mosley. There was a time when the Miss America pageant was the biggest show in America. Tens of millions of people gathered around their televisions every September, and for years it was the highest-rated broadcast in the country. Today, the Miss America pageant has become more like a relic. It doesn't even air on television anymore. But back in September of 1968, Miss America was a symbol of what a woman should be and the target of a burgeoning women's liberation movement. That year, one of the most iconic moments in American history took place, feminists on the Atlantic City boardwalk setting fire to their bras. There's just one problem. The braw burning never actually happened. My guest today, historian Mickey McLeay writes in her new book, Liberation Summer, that the braburning was a creation of the newspapers invented before the protest even began. And that detail matters because it meant the women's liberation movement was defined by a caricature before it could define itself.

The real story, she says, is bigger than the myth. That same afternoon, three groups of women took a stand, feminist protesters, contestants of the first ever misplice. Black America pageant, and the women who came to defend Miss America herself. McIllier argues the fight that started that day never ended, that beauty in America has always been a fight over power once she traces through the rise of the religious right, the Me Too era, and what commentators now call Mar-a-Lago face, the strikingly uniform look of the women in President Trump's orbit. Mickey McElay is a professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Her previous

book, The Politics of Morning, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Mickey McIlley, welcome to fresh air. Oh, thank you for having me. And thank you so much for this book. And I actually want to start with that remarkable detail from your book about this myth, that these throngs of women were throwing their bras into like a bin that was on fire on the Atlantic City boardwalk. When you write, it was actually born in a newsroom days before the protest.

Tell us how the press created The Brabner. The figure of the braburning feminist becomes a character in newspapers in the days leading up to the Miss America pageant protest. As the protest has been circulating through the press and as women's liberationists are using those stories to try to get more women to come to Atlantic City and protest the pageant. It is a comment, sort of a throwaway comment from one activist who says, you know, Maybe we could even burn our bras. But that is never something that actually takes place. It gets seized in that moment as the figure for headlines in syndicated stories across the country. So it isn't just in the New York Press, which is where these women are and where these stories originate.

But UPI, the AP, all of these papers run versions of this story and local, new York. newspaper copy setters and copywriters do headlines that say bras are burning, will be burning at the Miss America pageant. And so by the time they get there, they are already bra burners when in fact they throw bras into the freedom garbage can. Right. And they don't set them on fire. But that detail just becomes kind of like the mark of that moment. It's the first version of history that then goes down in history. So take us to the protest. Can you tell us the three factions of women who were confronting one another adjacent to the boardwalk and on the boardwalk on that night in 1968? The first group of women are women's liberationists who were there to challenge the pageant in its objectification of women, in its relationship to militarism, its promotion of the war in Vietnam, and in the exploitative consumer frameworks in which Miss Americas were trapped and were put to for advertising. The second group of people who were doing an entirely different pageant to challenge the racism of the Miss America organization

and the exclusions of the beauty ideal that was represented there was the Miss Black America pageant. This was the first time that pageant was held, and it was held two blocks away in Atlantic City to make a good. exactly that point. The third group of women were pageant contestants from earlier pageants and pageant fans who challenged women's liberation's representation of the pageant as being exploitation as being negative and challenged the vision of womanhood that the women's liberationist represented. I want you to take us back because we're in such a different world today in the way that we think about pageants and we watch pageants, but help us understand what Miss America meant to the country in 1968. What was the story it was selling? The Miss America pageant first happens in 1921 in Atlantic

City. And it's originally designed as a vehicle for extending the summer season for an extra week beyond Labor Day weekend and as a way to keep crowds coming. So it's interesting. to think about it as originally, it's a marketing device, and it's a marketing device that is selling women in swimsuits and the access to women's bodies. The original ones were much larger. They involved beach parades. There was a man who played King Neptune. He arrived on a boat that was covered with women and shells. Total spectacle, yeah. It is. It is complete. It's enormous. And it actually gets really big over those first few years until the end of the 1920s when it seems to have, it has both been

protested by different groups in the country but has lost its luster for the large hotel interests that have been supporting it. But as you move through the 1930s, the 1940s during the Great Depression, it is largely reduced. It doesn't happen for a couple of years. But it really becomes the Miss America pageant that we understand today in the 1940s in the post-World War II moment. And Atlantic City itself is crucial both to mobilizing for war and then for the demobilization that occurs later because those large hotels, an enormous convention center, provide the institutional structures for processing enormous numbers of men. In the aftermath, they provide hotel rooms. for injured troops and for men dealing with really significant injuries from their war service to

sort of transition into their lives back home. And so really it sounds like it was almost an act of patriotism and to bring the spirits up of Americans and war heroes as they came back. Oh, absolutely. And a space that had been so identified with that, there's, There's a story in a nationally circulated magazine around the time that says, now it's not just Miss America that's on the boardwalk, but Mr. America is there too, commenting on the fact that the city is now overrun with new inductees into the service. But in that moment, the sort of military patriotism, those associations that will then be so cemented and so powerful by the 1960s are really. coalescing in ways that the pageant had been popular. It had been the subject of films. It had been

the subject of scandals. People have seen the pageant all over the country because in the 20s it's being shown in newsreels before feature films. Or they're listening to it live on the radio. But by the 1940s, it really gets this association of this is representative of the United States. And it is these beautiful, young, white women that best identify not so much the subject of the United States, but the objects to be fought over, judged, to be inspired by, but less so subjects of their own lives in those moments. And that becomes a real struggle, I think, within the pageant, particularly as at the same time the scholarship feature becomes a big part of it. Right, because a big part of it is the women are receiving scholarships. It's for scholarship money, the winner. 1968 in particular, it's one of the most documented years in American history,

but that's one of the things I find really interesting about your book, because it's so comprehensive that, I mean, you're really telling the foundational story of the women's liberation movement, second wave feminism, but you're telling us, you're taking us from the past, to the moment to then the future. And I was very curious about why you felt like you had to do that versus focusing in on the meaning of that particular time period. Did you feel like you couldn't really tell that story without telling everything else? Absolutely.

There's so much there and there are so many people there. Because also you tell someone I'm working on 1968 and I think probably one of their first responses is really. Do we really need more? And what I hope people understand from this book is that there is so much more history there that needs to be told. And that it's history that will transform how we think of the period. And so what I've done by putting these three pieces together is just take in that light that we shine on 68, that we shine on the 68 presidential race, right? because this is very much a political history. And that if you just shift that beam just a little bit,

there is this cast of women from various political positions, from various places in the country who have central roles in making this moment, who so often aren't included because of things like, here's the standard chronology, there was a burnt bra, aren't these pictures great, you know, hilarity, a Miss America pageant, but it really does a disservice. Here's a thing about that protest that, among other things, has real teeth. So these women came to Atlantic City, these protesters, these activists, armed with the language

of the black freedom struggle, fires declaring slavery exists, they're chanting about liberation. And they take in much of that vocabulary from black people without ever really seeing the black women standing right there. And that is not a footnote, although it has been for several decades. That's kind of the crack in the foundation of the whole movement, the one that never really got repaired. Really, even to this day, when did you realize this story was about that fracture? Yeah, absolutely. And in In 2009, I read a book by the sociologist Maxine Leeds Craig, and the book's title is, Ain't I a Beauty Queen?

And it was about black beauty culture, about connections between black pageantry and activism. And the introduction to that book starts with the two protests that happen against the Miss America pageant that weekend in Atlantic City. Now, by that time, I had been a professor of history. I had been a professor of women, gender, race, and sexuality for four years. I worked on this in graduate school. I was teaching lectures about the Miss America pageant and this protest, right? I was using it as a way to get at all of these things and also to try to challenge the suggestion that this was somehow superficial. I had never heard of the Miss Black America pageant.

You didn't. I don't think I have ever had a moment of greater despair, doubt in my abilities as a historian. I am someone who has spent my career writing about the ramifications of representations of slavery or the misrepresentations of slavery over time and the effect that has on our politics. I include among my specialties, African American history, African American women's history in particular. and I was learning that that protest happened the same day for the first time in 2009. Someone else with a long relationship to this world is President Donald Trump. And you write that it's no coincidence that his path to the presidency actually ran through beauty pageants. And it starts on that same boardwalk where this book begins, where this protest begins.

Take us back to Atlantic City in the 1980s. A lot of us know this history, but it has been erased from our memory because there's just been so much that has happened since then with President Trump. But how did his involvement begin? His involvement with the pageant begins as he starts his casino ownership in Atlantic City. In the early 1980s, Donald Trump starts developing casinos and becomes a real fixture of the culture there, but particularly pageant culture, particularly the mis-emorture. particularly the Miss America pageant. He attends every year. He is very visible in terms of the publicity.

He will go on to be a judge in the Miss America pageant before then in the early 90s he purchases the Miss Universe pageant group that includes the Miss USA pageant. And the Miss USA as well. And the Miss Teen USA pageant. That was for a long time the primary sort of four cultural. prevalence the primary competitor to the Miss America pageant. Can you tell us very quickly the distinctions, though, between Miss America and Miss USA? Because there are differences. I've always thought of them differently.

Oh, they're absolutely different. And the Miss USA pageant is the product of Miss America challenging both the pageant and the general culture in 1921. 150, Yolanda Betbezi said she was an opera singer. That was her talent. And she said she would not appear in public in a swimsuit after the pageant. That there was no reason why she should be in a swimsuit talking to reporters and that she wasn't a body. She was an opera singer and a talented person. The pageant stood by this because it fit the vision. of respectability and the kind of woman they wanted to represent the Miss America crown, this investment in, she's a college student, she's a number of things, and she's also beautiful, but she's not only beautiful. And Catalina Swimsuits, which was one of the original sponsors of the pageant pulled out because if they weren't going to appear in swimsuits, if they weren't going to appear in Catalina swimsuits, then this wasn't, it wasn't a good investment for them.

They started their own pageant, which was the Miss USA pageant. So it is, it spins out of that moment. And then the Miss USA pageant generally was more about body looks, that there was a different aesthetic that was more, even more overtly, that overtly walked the line of sort of more eroticized than the Miss America pageant. One contestant story became infamous. It was talked about during the 2016 election, and that is Alicia Machado. She was Miss Universe 1996, and that was his first year as the owner, and remind us what he did to her. So after Machado won the Miss Universe pageant, she put on some weight, was not the size.

As she was representing Miss Universe, was not the size she had been during competition, which raises a lot of issues around trying to prepare one's body for a competition, and then what happens when you're not spending all of your time preparing? and the health issues that are connected there. And it became a central focus for Donald Trump and his organization. They wanted her to lose weight. They bought exercise equipment and forced her to use it in front of photographers. He was on her constantly and then started talking about how she was, and this came up in

2016, that she was a problem. She was resistant. So it's interesting how in that in that story. And you're saying it pretty respectfully, but he did not say it that respectfully. I mean, he used, you know, I mean, like really terrible language to describe her. And he used terrible language to describe her. He also used language that was charactering her as a Latina that, that, that, that, suggested that, you know, domestic work was what she should be doing. So fundamentally sort of both suggesting that that domestic work is minimal, not valuable, and somehow ugly, but also suggesting that she wasn't fit to be Miss Universe and that she wasn't a fit representative. And his treatment was humiliating. It was it was a public. systematic humiliation and one that he, of course, was never apologetic for and doubled down on in 2016 when it came up.

Let's take a short break. Our guest today is historian Mickey McElye. We'll be right back after a short break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is fresh air. My guest today is historian Mickey McAulay. Her new book, Liberation Summer, revisit September 1968. when three groups of women converged on the Atlantic City boardwalk, feminists protesting the Miss America pageant, contestants in the first ever Miss Black America pageant, and women defending Miss America herself. McAulier argues the collision that day created a politics of beauty that runs through the rise of the religious right,

the Me Too era, and all the way to today. She's a professor of history at the University of Connecticut, and her previous book, The Politics of Morning, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. I think what's so fascinating in particular as you break down these individual characters and their roles and leading up to this liberation summer and what goes on to happen

is the line between the politics of beauty and what we're seeing today with the Trump administration. And I think that knowing all of this history in understanding that Trump, he stepped into this world in the late 80s, early 90s, and taking it farther back. What were surprises to you when you see that it almost looks like a straight line? It almost seems inevitable that we would be here. I would argue that it is that in 1968, in this moment when these three different forces, These three different forces who are all women come together in that geographic spot on the Atlantic City Boardwalk and come together around the Miss America pageant.

What is set off there is a politics of beauty where beauty is both highlighted as the terrain of power and female beauty is the currency of American politics. politics. And in 1968, you have women's liberationists challenging that objectification. You have Miss Black America pageant, the organizers of the pageant and the contestants. But you have the Miss Black America pageant arguing that to be objectified as beautiful in a white supremacist society is itself a kind of privilege and that the struggle over beauty isn't about rejecting the pageant but that to highlight black women's beauty

is politically crucial and then you have the counter-protesters who literally are holding signs with Nixon for president buttons saying the only thing wrong with Miss America is that she's beautiful and that she is our idea.

deal. And that sets off a political conversation that also saturates reactions to women's liberation, that this is the moment that the new right and the Christian right are coalescing and coming together around these issues. And women are using beauty as both their political power, as their currency, and they're challenging the limitations, right? So beauty isn't just, it isn't just this set of oppressive beauty standards. It is the terrain of politics itself. Okay, let's talk about the Black, Miss Black America pageant. That historic night, 1968, while feminists were at those barricades and the cameras were locked on convention hall. Another radical thing was happening in Atlantic City just a few blocks away at the Ritz Carlton,

and that one didn't start until midnight. Tell us what you learned specifically, not just about the Miss Black America pageant, but what it was responding to. So the Miss America pageant had never had a black finalist by 1968. It would not have a black finalist walk the stage in the nationally televised pageant until 1970. And the Miss Black America pageant was,

directly focused on challenging that exclusion, but highlighting that exclusion as the product of white supremacist beauty standards that did not include black women and that that exclusion was both central to white supremacist power structures, but also central to black people's understandings of their own value in society. I think one of the things that I learned while doing this research was the tension that's present in the organizers. It becomes mistakenly called an NACP pageant. This is a huge point of controversy within the NDACP, and it is something that the national organization disavows the following year. It makes very clear we are not running a beauty pageant. Because I think the thing that is so upsetting to many in the NAACP is it appears to be,

to them, a separatist pageant, that it is not about integrating the Miss America pageant, but that it is about highlighting black separatism, black is beautiful, and creating a completely distinct pageant. And that to them feels highly antithetical. And a real, of a very, you know, a betrayal in many ways to the NAACP's mission. I wanted to note that it started at midnight because that was a deliberate choice so that reporters could drop by after the white pageant ended. And the woman who won that year, the Miss Black America pageant, Sandra Williams, she wasn't even crown until like three in the morning so that the reporters could come and actually

cover it. But you write about this moment that happened some years. years before, 1955, this particular detail stopped me cold. The Miss America telecast debuts, there she is, the song and Bert Parks is singing Your Ideal just days after the open casket funeral of Emmett Till. Yes. And you say, there's nothing coincidental about those two events sitting side by side in American life. Can you say more about what you mean? You have the debut of There She Is Miss America. There she is your ideal. At the opening, listeners heard the lyrics. Many may be familiar with the lyrics. It's one of those things that sort of lodged in certain generations' minds because it was such a central facet of the culture, even if you weren't a pageant fan. And those lyrics say, look upon your ideal. Here is our queen of. beauty. Here is the perfect American girl. But it is entirely an encouragement to look,

to desire, to assess. The joke was that Miss America wasn't really Miss America until this man, Burt Park said, there she is. There is your ideal. That song debuts. You have a national television event that is about look at these white women, look at these women in swimsuits, look at these representations, all-white representations of beauty. And just before that, you've had a teenage boy who has been tortured and murdered for looking at a white woman, for supposedly whistling at a white woman. for expressing some kind of desire for a white woman. So take us to 1983.

Probably one of the strangest spectacles yet. Vanessa Williams, the first black woman crowned Miss America. And President Ronald Reagan himself dials her up and says, what a wonderful thing she is for the nation. You know, just to take us back to that time, He is the man who invented the welfare queen. He congratulated this beauty queen. And what was the significance of her crown beyond her being the first?

What was the crown actually doing for America? And specifically having Vanessa Williams be its queen. When Vanessa Williams wins in 1983, she's in a pageant that has a number of black contestants. And so partially you have all this talk that maybe this is the year a black woman will win. So you have this kind of these women being sort of singled out, but also in some ways I feel like that press sort of minimized some of the individual work that these women are doing. And when Vanessa Williams performs, Susette Charles is the first runner up to Miss America, also an African American contestant. And she becomes, when Vanessa Williams is forced to resign, she becomes Miss America. Right. And to remind people 10 months into her reign, Pint House publishes nude photos of Vanessa Williams.

and they had been taken years earlier, published without her consent. They were rushed to print to cash in on her being Miss America. And the pageant at the time does not defend her. They go on just a few years ago to give a public apology, but at the time, this whole thing devours her. And I'm curious what you think. What does that moment reveal about this larger story that you're telling? Immediately it suggests how tenuous.

that power claimed through that moment of integrating the pageant can be and how quick. One really has to wonder if it were not the first Black Miss America who was confronting this situation, would the pageant have been so quick to fully reject her? I was around five or six years old when this happened, but I distinctly remember and it only comes from me meditating on it from reading this, that after that happened with Vanessa Williams, I remember thinking I felt so sorry for her. I felt so scared, but I also remember feeling like, oh, I have to be excellent. I can't have, I can't make any mistakes in this lifetime. It wasn't a conscious thought. It was just a feeling of understanding that, oh, like, things can turn very quickly. A mistake can ruin your life. That's just a

side note. No, and it, but it that, and isn't that sort of, isn't that in some ways the whole horrific point, right? That this, this is a moment of disciplining everyone to understand that, yeah, you can't, you can't make one wrong move. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is historian Mickey McLehle. We're talking about her new book, Liberation Summer, the real story of the 1968 Miss America protest and how the myth of the brawburners came to define and distort the women's movement for more than half a century. We'll be back after a break. This is fresh air. Today I am talking with Mickey McLehye, historian and author of Liberation Summer, the moment that changed the women's movement and the future of American politics.

Okay, I want to go back one last time to that boardwalk and 1968 to the third group of women, which we have been sort of talking about throughout the hour, and they showed up at the barricades with their own signs. Miss America is still our ideal. And one was a former Miss Green Bay wearing a Nixon badge. Can you briefly tell me about this small contingent of women and why does your book take them so seriously at the time? because they weren't talked about as much as they were talked about the protesters themselves, the activists. Yeah, partially I think it's important to think about just what compels these young women to go out there and challenge the women's liberationists, right?

They want to speak back. They make their own signs. And one of them, the one who is wearing the Nixon for president button while she does this is Terry Ann Muson, who will go on herself later to be a misdemeanor. America in the early 1970s will visit the Nixon White House and actually be very representative in Republican politics later in the 1970s. Partially what drives them to go out there is they feel attacked as individual women. They feel attacked by women's liberationists who are challenging their femininity, their right to be women in the way that they want to be women. It's something that resonates significantly with the kind of discourses of grievance that so much drive our politics today.

What is also crucial is that the Mewson will go on to be one of the leading faces of the Christian broadcast network. She is a very, very visible in the religious right and very visible in evangelical politics. But also, it's that moment of reaction that is a part of this beauty politics that develops. I think it's very important to think of Donald Trump as just as much a product of this politics as the various women, particularly the women who are in his cabinet, right? This is a political formation that is driving American politics, not just the place of women in it. And this isn't just circumstantial, that this is a historical development that had started in 1968 and is very much ongoing. And that we're seeing sort of, I mean, it's kind of, it's fascinating to watch the movements of these things.

And I wonder, I think we may be seeing a new age of prominence for the Miss America pageant. That's interesting because, I mean, Gretchen Carlson, who went on to then run the Miss America pageant herself, I felt like she might be the entire book in a single life because she, Miss America, she was Miss America in 1989. She was mocked for her looks back then, seen as kind of the intellectual Miss America because she had gone to Stanford. Then she became a Fox News cultural warrior. She opposed the term feminism for years. She sues Roger Ailes for sexual harassment. Help Sparks Me Too. And then ends up running the Miss America pageant herself. I'm wondering when you say that you see a resurgence of it, you know, it doesn't even run on television anymore. It has such a smaller audience. So what gives you the indication that there may be a resurgence? I mean, one of the things that that I think is, is fascinating, is this September 6th, the next Miss America will be crowned in West Palm Beach, Florida.

It will be crowned at a convention center that is less than six miles away from Mar-a-Lago. So the move by the Miss America pageant organization to go there and to go there with the help of other major fundraisers highlights the ways in which, that they are leaning in to the politics of beauty and power that we see. But if you want to watch live the crowning this year, you have to get a live stream from a subscription service that is dedicated just to pageants. But as we see the consolidation of media, as we look at what happened with Paramount, as we think about what network television. As we think about what network television looks like in this particular moment and what it might look like, I wouldn't be surprised to see the pageant make its way back. Mickey McIllier, thank you so much for your scholarship and for this book.

Thank you so much for having me. Mickey McIllier's new book is Liberation Summer, the moment that changed the women's movement and the future of American politics. After a short break, TV critic David B. and Cooley, reviews, Stewart fails to save the universe, a new Big Bang Theory spinoff series on HBO Max. This is Fresh Air. The Big Bang Theory, the CBS sitcom about a gang of lovable nerds, ended in 2019 after a 12-year run. But it's lived on thanks to a successful pair of prequels. Young Sheldon, which looks at one character's childhood, lasted seven seasons on CBS. And to

spin-off of that sitcom, George and Mandy's first marriage is still running after two years on the same network. And now, HBO Max presents a new Big Bang spinoff. But it's a sequel, not a prequel. It's called Stewart Fails to Save the Universe. And our TV critic David B. and Cooley thinks it's terrific. Here's his review. Chuck Laurie and Bill Prady, creators of the Big Bang Theory, have teamed with Zach Penn, a writer on the Avengers movie, to concoct a new ten-part HBO Macs series, which continues to follow a quartet of characters from that long-running sitcom. Not the main characters, such as Sheldon and Leonard, but some of the peripheral ones. Specifically, Stuart, who ran the local comic book store, Denise, who became Stewart's girlfriend in the final season of the Big Bang Theory, and two awkward brainy misfits.

Bert, the large, lunky geologist, and Barry Kripke, a scientist with an oversized ego and a pronounced speech impediment. These are supporting characters, but the Big Bang theory always did great by its supporting characters and cast, giving them more prominence and substance as years went by. And now, these four Big Bang supporting characters are thrown into a whole new universe, literally. Stewart fails to save the universe has no laugh track and plays like an action-adventure series, but it's relentlessly inventively funny. co-creator Zach Penn also co-wrote Free Guy, the Ryan Reynolds movie about a background player in a video game who steps into the narrative spotlight.

And this new series is a lot like that and just as playful. Many, if not most, comic book movies and TV shows these days are dark and brooding, but not this one. Here's how it starts. The setting is a post-apocalyptic Pasadena. Stewart, played by Kevin Sussman, is still trying to be. trying to run his comic book store, which is funny right there. Bert, played by Brian Possein, is about to purchase a rare comic book, bartering for it with canned vegetables and cat food,

when another steward, from another universe, shows up out of nowhere to give himself some news. Leonard Hofstad or Sheldon Cooper, Howard Wallowice. Remember them? Yeah, real nerds. Hot kettle. Sure. Fair enough.

Anyway, they invented some kind of quantum entanglement. thing, and you were there when it malfunctioned. Both of us are just him. Doesn't matter. It matters to me. The point is, it altered reality. None of this is supposed to be. And by none of this, you mean... None of it!

The alternate Stewart gives the Comic Store Stewart a universe traversing device and a quest, to save the universe as we know it, or as he knew it. The Comic Store Stewart sets off with his friends to do just that, but spoiler alert, it doesn't go well. Actually, that's not much of a spoiler since the title of the show is Stuart fails to save the universe.

The first new world they visit, in fact, may be worse. Stuart, Bert, and Denise, played by Lauren Lapkis, have been captured by an evil overlord and summoned before him. When they're taken to him, they realize he's Barry Kripke, played by John Ross Bowie, who somehow is in charge. Stewart summons the nerve to ask how. With all due respect my liege, how is it that you're the grand... Cowief. Caliph of South Pasadena? I suppose we have time for a little backstory.

I apologize. You guys have heard this before. When everything went screwy and civilization, as we know it collapsed, a vacuum of leadership was created here at the university. And as we all know... Nature reporters a vacuum? Why do? So, I see you.

power, got all the food, the guns, and the girls. Yeah, end of backstory. The writers and directors of Stewart Fails to Save the Universe taken anything goes approach that works beautifully. Every opening credit sequence is different and even includes its own spoilers. The theme music is by Danny Elfman, and every episode visits a new multiverse. One is devoid of greed or possessiveness, while in another, my favorite, the people have cow-like digestive systems go to restaurants to eat grass and swallow their own cud. I dare you to tell me you've seen that on TV before. Many of these alternate universes are populated by familiar faces from the Big Bang Theory

and even from Laurie's two and a half men. The producers have asked that critics reveal no names, but everyone who pops up in these 10 episodes is a delight, like a hidden Easter egg come to life. And some appear as more than one alternate character. What could be more enjoyable? How about this? Other actors and celebrities show up too, presumably recognizing this for the giddy adventure it is. Stuart fails to save the universe ends with an ingeniously concocted finale. But even so, in this or some other universe, HBO Max ought to keep it going. David B.

Cooley reviewed, Stewart Fails to Save the Universe, now streaming on HBO Max. The hit series hacks broke the record for the most Emmy nominations for a comedy in a single year with its fifth and final season. Next time on Fresh Air,

Jean Smart talks about the evolution of her character, Deborah Vance, from a power-hungry fame-chasing comedian to a woman finally finding peace inside herself. Smart also talks about her direct connection to the Salem Witch Trials. I hope you can join us. To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews,

follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. You can also watch some of our interviews on our YouTube page, This is Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorak. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our engineer today is Adam Stanishefsky. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Boldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challoner, Susan Yacundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler.

Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Teresa Madden directed today's show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.