The Prestige TV Podcast - 'Swarm' Review

Episode Date: March 23, 2023

Charles Holmes and Van Lathan give their thoughts on the new Amazon Prime series 'Swarm' co-created by Donald Glover and Janine Nabers and featuring a tour deforce performance by Dominique Fishback. Hosts: Charles Holmes and Van Lathan Producer: Sasha Ashall Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Erica Ramirez, founder of Ili and hosts of What About Your Friends? A brand new show on The Ringer Podcast Network dedicated to the many lives of friendship and how it's portrayed in pop culture. Every Wednesday on the Ringer dish feed, I'll be talking with my best friend, Stephen Othello, and your favorites from within the ringer and beyond about friendships on TV and movies, pop culture, and our real lives. So join me every Wednesday on the Ringer dish feed where we try to answer the question TLCS back in the day, what about your friends. Welcome to the prestige TV podcast, a show where you better not ask who our favorite artist is. I'm Charles Holmes. He's Van Lathen. Together we're known as the Midnight Boys.

And we're back, people, to talk about Swarm, the new Amazon series co-created by Janine Neighbors and Donald Glover. Van, my man. How are you feeling? This was a series that put me in a mood. I'm in a little bit of a dark place. if I'm going to be honest with you. So with all love and respect to the amazing creatives behind this, Janine Neighbors, who you and I came to know and appreciate while we were covering Atlanta on the Prestige TV podcast.

One of the MPs of Atlanta, some of the funny stuff. Fantastic. God damn it. So great. Donald Glover and Steven Glover, everybody over there. I don't know what I'm supposed to think. I'll just be honest with you. it was incredibly difficult to watch.

I had tremendous anxiety throughout my entire time watching Swarm. It wasn't enjoyable and it seemed meaningless. Dog, don't, don't put too much seasoning. We got to ease the listeners in. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Damn, you're already going at motherfuckers next, dog. Yeah, okay, cool.

You know, I don't know, man. Let's go. Okay, let's ease them in. Let's ease them in. I came in too hot. All right. So for those that don't know, Swarm follows the story of Dre,

played by Dominique Fishback, who was a stand for a Beyonce-like fictional musician called Nijja. After Dre's sister, Marissa commits suicide, Dre goes on a cross-country killing spree as she takes vengeance on anyone who dares to disrespect Nizja. All seven episodes of the series dropped on Amazon last week. So Van and I are going to do a non-spoiler discussion for the first couple of minutes of the pod. Then after we're going to get deep into spoiler land.

Van, you've already kind of told me. Well, let's get into a little bit. You called me very, very distraught yesterday. Yeah. I could tell you we're going through it. I could tell you were a little bit anxious. I finished like the final episode a couple hours ago. I finally understood where you were at, man.

I left it feeling very conflicted. And I just, maybe before we talk about Swarm, let's back up and talk about our relationship to Stan culture. Because I think both of us love music. And before I was talking about TV and movies mostly, I was a music journalist. So I want to know from you first. How do you feel about stand culture?

I abhorred stands of any kind. Same. I get it. I get it. I understand why people feel so connected to artists or art or something like that. I get it. But I think my thing is that how irrational everything becomes is very, very harmful to me. How, you know, fandom can become somebody's identity is harmful. And also something else is

brewing with the stand culture. It's the unknown, unrealized closet stands. Jay-Z doesn't have a stand name, right? He doesn't have like the diamonds. The hovitos? The hovitos.

He doesn't have that. But he has that type of stand. He has the type of stand that Hove could do no wrong. It doesn't matter. But they turned on Colin Kaepernick for Jay-Z. That to me is when the stand stuff starts to get a little, not even a little, like a lot fucked up, when it starts to warp and distort your sense of reality.

And what makes sense to you Monday, doesn't make sense to you Thursday, because some $25 to $30 million a month person that you've never met before changes their mind? It's just really scary to me. So do you think also that we are in a different maybe sphere? And what I meant by that is like before I was a music journalist, before I started meeting celebrities, could not do any wrong. Kanye, thug, future, name it.

Like these artists loved them. I was that person. And then when you get in the rooms and you meet these people, you're like, what the fuck was I doing? Like it's, and you, you worked at TMZ. You know these people's lives. It's like you're like, I've met them. I hear all of the ugly shit.

Do you think also part of our relationship to stand culture? Because as a music journalist, one of my first pieces for Rolling Stone was interviewing the barbs. Like I had a barb tell me over the phone. Like, yeah, I'd kill for Nikki. Like, they are dead fucking serious. And it's like it's so, that's so fucking terrifying, bro. Think about that. That's really terrifying.

And it's sad. And it represents so much. much more, which is one of the things that this show gets right, it represents so much more than just our proximity to celebrity or the way we ingest music or movies

or whatever. It tells you so much more about the crumbling dysfunctional brand of human connection that we are endeavoring into. You know what I mean? So it's like I've loved stars.

I've loved stars. And I've lost. I mean, one of the stars you love the most hurt you the most, very publicly. Yeah. But even before then,

I realized that this is a dude who has ups and downs and goes through things. Am I going to just blanklyly defend somebody that jumps on stage and rob somebody else at their moment? No, I'm going to be like, hey, it's not the end of the world. But, yeah, he probably,

probably shouldn't have done that. You know, all of these people, I want you to line up the idols of my childhood. Line them all up. Bill Cosby. Done. Michael Jackson. Done.

Michael Jackson. Like that. I want you to relax. Like, you know, like, all of these people have taken such major hits. Not all of them. You know, guys like Eddie Murphy took some hits and came back. But when you look at, I don't know, I'm not comparing anything that Eddie has done to Bill Cosby or allegations to any of these other people.

What I'm saying is that these lives and these people are complicated, right? All of these people have had such magnificent issues as human beings and as stars that, whereas they really warrant your fanship, they don't warrant your loyalty, your fealty, or any of that stuff. So no, I don't like it. I fucking hate it. I mean, I think also the other thing I realized very quickly writing about music, interview and musicians, I'm like, motherfuckers lie.

And I think that's the difference between what you, like, listening, especially to a musician, you're like, man, they really thought about these lyrics. They stand on this. Jay-Z, he's really, like, he's making all of his decisions for the good of the black community, blah, blah, blah. Kanye really believes everything he's saying. I'm like, no, niggas lie all the time, bro. What are we talking about?

Man, look. Look, man, I've been through it. I listen to title on my. my phone right now. I'm not listening to Title No War. I'm trying to get acclimated to Apple music and it's hard because I've been listening to the title for a long time, right? But let me tell you why I'm going to Apple Music. Whenever I want to share music with people and put links to music that I like up, I put a title link up and motherfuckers come back to me like, hey, yo, we don't have that shit. I don't know what you're doing. And I love Title. When I tell you I love

title, title knows me. Me and my title have a relationship. But, you know, I started trying Apple music and I was, you know, I was thinking, like, why am I loyal to title now? Like, Hove told us to buy, to get title, and he convicted us. He said, get title. Apple is white. Spotify is white. All of these other places are white and, like, go to some black-owned shit. And I'm like, yes.

And it was the same thing. It's like, I'm not picking on Jay-Z. I'm just saying, this is what happens when you allow influence to point you in a direction. a specific direction. This is in my 30s, so I'm a grown, grown man. The Dusei, right? Don't drink Hennessy. Like, Bernard Arnaud owns Tennessee.

Drink Duce. I own it. I'm around here. Walking around drinking Duce and Coke, listening to the title. And then what happened? He sold it. He sells that shit to a white man. So what happens now? Like, it was never, in my mind, It was never really about that.

I don't have no problem with them selling it. Like zero problem. Get money. Make a $500 million. What? Let's sell it. But don't tell me to do it because it's black. And then you go sell it.

You know what I'm saying? It's like, so do I still do it? Is it, you know what I'm saying? So, and this is with everything. Go see it because it's black, man. I remember these movies I haven't seen in theaters. But they're black. I just buy a ticket.

Buy a ticket, a sport. So what I'm saying is, and that's something different that we should do, by the way. But what I'm saying is, like, I've seen enough now. Forget about TMZ to know that that type of connection says more about the fan than it does about the artist. And I think that is what Swarm is about. The thing that I think is interesting about it is watching it. It felt like a spiritual successor to Atlanta season three. the more out there episodes

where like sometimes we were like I don't fully know what y'all are saying but I'm a vibe with you because I respect you. Watching Swarm did you have that kind of push and pull with it where some episodes I loved in other episodes I'm like

hey y'all man you're going to have to bring out the Wikipedia entry because I'm not really understanding where you're all going. None of it made sense to me. All right, you got to have

be a little bit. I'm not... Let me say this real quick. Let me say this real quick. I'm joking. I'm joking. Swarm is incredibly well-made, well-acted, and it's definitely not boring. You're not going to kick yourself for having watched Swarm.

But, yeah, no. You watch it and you're... There's somebody that's in the midst of a psychotic break, or not actually in the midst of a psychotic break, the more we learn, the more we know that she's always been crazy. You know, and it has to do with... Not that she's always been crazy, but let's say we learned throughout the series

that Dre's main character has gone through the system, has gone through very, very abhorrent things in her life, and to your point, this is... This season of TV is the break. Wrong. I used some ablest language there,

and I was wrong for it. However, she tried to kill somebody at a slumber party back in the day. We learned, we talked to the girl back in the day, and she was on trying to murk people out when she was like 12 or 13. Can I just say the most genius, like long joke of this whole thing? Is that she calls it spilling the milk.

And then when the white girl shows up and you realize that was the girl she stabbed, I was like, this is the funniest shit I've ever seen. But I wanted to also, before we kind of get into the plot of the show, what do you think are the challenges of creating a, season of television around an artist like Beyonce and the Beehive. Because I was, when I was watching this, I'm like,

why the Beehive? Because as much as we like to think that they are this ravenous, just like going to attack you type of fan base, I don't think the Beehive is like the Barbes. And like the

beehive at this point is filled with like people who are like in their 30s and 40s. Like if we be real, you know? And that was when I was watching this. I'm like, as crazy as I felt like the beehive was at their peak, it ain't been that way for a while now, at least a decade. The beehive, they're like postgraduate barbs. Perfect, yes.

You know what I mean? They're like postgraduate barbs. They're, you know, they beehive on their or they're in between meetings and stuff. They got kids. They got families. They got jobs now. It's like, I mean, I guess the barbs do also. I'm sure they do.

Look. I love that so many people feel connected to these artists. I think I do, but obviously it goes too far. It becomes toxic and dangerous, and it can be something that really spills over to some really intense and insane bullying. I remember that song Chun Lee came out and I didn't really fuck with that song.

All I said was I don't really fuck with it. I'll never speak on her again. Because it's not worth it. The opinion becomes not worth it. You know, like the opinion, Twitter is the town square. we all talk about our opinions. Like, you know, my mother's not going to be a gorilla the entire day

because of my opinion on the song. I'm not going to do it. What's interested about this show is that it takes the idea of being upset, triggered, or distraught because someone doesn't like your favorite artist. And it examines it in a very specific way by making Dre's reaction so intense and so violent.

So it's one of the things the show does get right for me is it, you say you don't like Naja, Dre kills you. Dre goes so far and it's so obviously

fucked up what she does that it makes you start to wonder if any reaction at all to that makes you just like her. So it's like

You walk past somebody You bump them on the shoulder They turn around They punch the shit out of you That reaction That reaction is so So severe That it cast

That person in the same corral With somebody that goes Yo man watch where the fuck you're going It makes you think that they're closer Than the person who just Just kind of goes Oh my bad, just lets it go.

Yeah. It puts them in the same kind of. And so the deeper and deeper and deeper you get into this show, the more you kind of start to think, you know, anytime somebody has any feeling or gets mad at all, it makes you think that they're not that far away from her. I mean, the thing that I think the show actually does very brilliantly is that watching the show is how I feel when, like,

you'll tweet something about like some artists, thinking nothing of it. You'll just be like, hey, I ain't fucking with the weekend's new music. And then five seconds later, motherfuckers is like, your mom should have boarded you

in her fucking stomach. You're the fucking worst. I'm gonna kill you. I'm gonna find your address. Blah, blah, blah. And you're like, bro, what? Like, who the fuck are you? That feeling of people being so mad.

Like, you have insulted them is wild. And I think that that is actually how modern fandom, especially music fandom feels, where I don't know about you, half the time I don't even talk about music anymore if it's not with my friends. Because I'm like, I don't want to deal with it. I don't want to deal with Taylor stands,

Barb's weekend, Drake, none of them. I don't care. You feel me? I don't even want to deal with people. Like, I love Burner Boy. Burner Boy is my favorite artist, right? But if I tweet that I really dig Burner Boy, the whole day it's Burner Boy.

Berno-boy related content on my Twitter. I tweeted damn, burner boys is the best. Then it was Burner Boy is the best. And then I didn't know that there was a war between the Burner Boy stands and the Whiz Kid stands. And it's going back and forth. I'm like, this is not what I wanted.

I'm not talking about it anymore. So, from here on out, Venn and I are spoiling all seven episodes. So if you haven't watched yet, go watch Swarm. Then come back to hear us talk about it. Are you looking for support in your weight management journey? ZetBound.

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if you're nursing, pregnant, plan to be, or taking birth control pills. Taking Zepbound with a sulfonal urea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and worsen kidney problems. Talk to your doctor. Call 1-800-545-99-9 or visit zepbounds.lily.com. Van, I think what makes this show actually very, very difficult to discuss in terms of like, I think both of us were very lukewarm on the show is that in the center of it, you have a tour to force performance by Dominique Fishback. She's always amazing. Yeah.

Where when I was watching her, I'm just like, even if I don't like this show, she is acting her fucking ass off. Yeah, she's always great. She's a fantastic performer. So what did you think of like her in the central role? She is very unsettling. I thought she was great. And I also thought that it was a testament to the amount of creative freedom she was probably given to perform here. They really, really took the handcuffs off and allowed her to just be as over the top as she wanted to be, it seems like.

Now, in the hands of a lesser artist, that could be seen as very, you could lose something in the business. performance in that. You could become a little bit cartoonish, which we do bump up against that at times. But for the most part, she keeps it within the realm of human understanding, which is, you know, just about how good she is. I thought she's really incredibly well-paced, well-measured.

She vacillates from emotion to motion pretty easily. It's a great performance, bar not. I mean, what she does with her body? Because, like, Drey doesn't, she's not the most eloquent person. in the show. So so much of her acting is coming through her eyes, her body language, how she doesn't look anybody directly in the face. She flinches when people touch her. I thought it was a beautiful performance. But the reason I think that we're here is that very, very quickly, this show went from me being worried, like two or three weeks ago. I'm like, Donald Glover has a new show

that he co-created coming out and nobody's talking about it to over the weekend. It was like discourse, discourse, discourse. People are still talking about it, which is wild to me because we're about to be in succession land. So the first type of discourse I wanted to talk to about is in the first episode, we begin with a sex scene between Chloe Bailey and Damson Edress. Twitter made this seem like this was going to be like this belonged on porn hub. I was just like, what the fuck had they done?

And then when I like booted up the TV show and it was like 10 seconds, I was like, have we fucking lost our minds? So what is like, can we please describe to the audience? Why do we think that this sex scene has become such a front topic of conversation? Things have just changed. You know, I think number one, it has to do with Chloe. You know, I had a friend of mine. I talked about this on Higher Learning.

I had a friend of mine hit me up and say, oh, my God, Chloe's yams were yamming in this scene. with damson. How old is your friend? He's my same age. He's 42. Yeah, you got to tell him to come down. I was like, I was like, hey, bro, relax a little bit. He was like what?

He's like, bro, y'all act like that girl, 19, 18, she's 24. He's right. Chloe is a grown woman, as grown as woman can be. And that means that her sexuality is all hers. She owns her sexuality. Okay. And it also means that, you know, there's nothing wrong. with saying, hey, Chloe's yams are sufficient.

There's nothing wrong with that. Okay? Not at all. Okay? However, however, for me personally, my personal taste was if you're a 42-year-old guy, okay? And we've kind of seen them come up through the YouTube situations and the do-it-do-it's and all of that stuff. I'd say chill.

That's what I would say. However, look, I just feel like overall the conversation around, sex scenes is changing. You know, Sasha, the disc golf empress, she was talking to us earlier, she was saying that this, the producer of this podcast, was telling us that maybe there's a conversation about whether or not we should have sex scenes at all.

That's what they say. These are kids that never watch Jason's lyric growing up. They don't understand how basic instinct is a different movie if the love scenes aren't in there. Fatal Attraction is a different movie if the love scenes aren't in there. Sometimes you need to show the love scene in these films. I don't know if you necessarily needed it here. That's a question that you could ask.

But I don't know. It's not that big a deal. It lasts five seconds. She is thick. Move on. All right. Here's the thing. Like, have we gotten as a society a little bit too Puritan?

In that... Yes. In like, the way that we talk about this where I'm just like, like, I hate to break it to you guys. people eat, people shit, and people fuck. That's part of life. And TV shows are in general. Movies, music are about existence and what it means to be human. And I think that, like, I was seeing a lot of conversations that were running the gamut.

Like, we went from Colby Bailey to people arguing that Holly Berry is white passing. That's how far that conversation went. Here's my issue, though. I don't know. I didn't understand that. Well, what did that have to do with Chloe Bailey? Because they were saying that, you know, No, Holly Berry.

I think the quote was something to the effect of Holly got her first Oscar from Backshott. So y'all need to chill on Chloe. And then somebody quote tweeted that. It would be like, yo, Holly Berry ain't even black. She white passing. And everybody's like, fuck you. And then it went there. But I wanted to ask you, Van, there were a lot of people talking about, well, you know,

Chloe is a role model and this is going to hurt her career. And she should think about what this says to black women and blah, blah, blah. I saw people discussing, hey, should there be sex scenes at all? And it should only be there if it moves the plot forward? And part of me is I'm like, should it? I actually think that as long as the actors, the writers, the directors involved, are all being respectful, everybody's being heard. There's intimacy coordinators.

Sex scenes can be good. They can not do anything for the plot. They can move the plot forward. They can be goofy. They can be whatever. It's art. Like it doesn't sometimes in a movie. people are just eating because it's a beautiful scene and that is what the director wanted to show on screen.

We're getting to this point where I'm like, every sex scene does not need to be litigated as like it didn't move the plot forward. So fuck this and fuck this whole show. Everybody who made this is a demon. It seems very reductive. All right. And this is the last thing I'm going to say about this. So yeah, a sex scene, like I said, and those other movies can move the plot forward. Movies can be erotic thrillers, which means that they're essentially about.

sex, movies can be dramas that are essentially about sex. So you have to show the sex scenes. Also, if you want, you can put a sex scene in a movie just because your two lead actors are hot. I mean, most of rom-coms is basically... And you know

that people want to see them engaged in sexual stuff to get their juices flowing. Nothing wrong with it. Some people, we've always had this conversation when Monsters Ball came out and Billy Bob Thornton and Halliberry

went for it. People I was there. How crazy was it? It was the same thing. People accuse Hallie Barry of all causes. It was the same thing. It's just that now we have a much better sort of perch

to watch people clutch their pearls from. Chloe has grown. I haven't listened to her. She said that it was interesting for her to do the scene because she hasn't had that many partners and all of that. I even feel bad that she had to say that.

Because to me, in that statement, and I'm not criticizing this statement, I'm just making an observation there was, hey, you know, I did this. I'm not a hoe. So it's kind of not my thing. But yeah, I did the same.

Nah, it's whatever. It's not that big of a deal. But, of course, we have to make it into one. So the next thing I wanted to talk to you about Swarm is that it has something, it has a framing device, which is essentially, and I was actually surprised that the show went this route, in a similar vein of poker face, this is basically like a new monster of the week,

but instead of monsters, it is like a new victim of the week. We're growing on a road trip, essentially where Drey is going across the country, killing anybody who says anything against Nijia in her quest to meet this celebrity. Was that a successful choice to you, Van? Because what it did to me is it was a little destabilizing because instead of getting to

fall in love with anybody in the show and get connected to anybody in the show, it's basically the only thing that's grounding us is Drey to what we've talked about is not very talkative, very disturbing. So there's not very much for you to sink your teeth into in terms of like at least feeling for anybody,

if that makes sense. The show doesn't have protagonist. An antagonist. Any sort of comic really. The show doesn't have a message. The show doesn't have a point. The show has a statement. And that's fine.

Sometimes you do things just to make a statement. But in that, there are not very many times where we are rooting for Dre. Actually, I'd never root it for. I think maybe I empathize with her when she found her sister dead. But other than that,

she kills the people that try to help her. She kills the people that love her. She kills the people that are, like, accidentally bad. She kills the people that are purposefully bad, and she kills the people that are good. There's no compass, there's no reason, there's no nothing. There's just stuff, just stuff happening. And they keep up in the ante of how peculiar this stuff can get.

You know, it keeps getting weirder and more. There's a whole, the Billy Island episode, which is essentially some sort of commentary on the next scene cult. Yeah. It was oddly compelling, but not for any real reason. You know, and it kind of makes Swarm forgettable. It's like it's, it's spectacle on screen that you're, that you really, but, and it's like, and the whole time I was watching it, I felt bad, which maybe is the point. But see, I disagree. I do think that there is, there is a protagonist. There is a message. Okay, who's the protagonist of Swarm? Oh, I think the protagonist is, um, is Dre.

Really? Yeah, I think because I want to read you a quote from Janine neighbor. She gave it to Hollywood reporter. She said, quote, I look at this like, why do white guys get to do all of this? Why do white guys get to have all the fun in terms of the Tony Sopranos and the breaking bad people? That space of psychological breakdown and violence to get something that you absolutely need, which is what drives the series, has always been reserved toward the psychology of white American men. So if you look at it through that framework, poorly done. No, no.

I think Swarm is a story about a. black female serial killer, whose one goal in her quest to meet, like her one goal is, I need to meet Nysia, I need to meet Nysia. And on her way to that, she is basically meeting out vengeance to anybody who either A gets in her way

or B says anything about her idol. Now, we can have a discussion about, is that the type of protagonist that can sustain a seven-episode series? I don't think so. Is that something that is easy, to watch, I don't think. Does the point get muddled? Yes. But I do think that the message, like what Swarm is about, is about interrogating what happens when you live your life and have this

parisocial relationship with an idea. Nysia is no longer a person in the same way that Beyonce or Riano or Jay or any of these people, when you're a stand, they become a symbol. They become something that gets you through your day. They help you through things that, that maybe your family or friends can't. I think that's compelling as an idea, but as a show, very, very quickly to your point, I was not, I wasn't rooting for anyone. I was just like, this is really hard to watch.

So I compare this show to the show you on Netflix, which I don't understand why people watch that. Oh, I don't watch that shit. Not just serial killer shit. I'm not. Yeah, I don't understand why people watch that. I don't understand why people watch that show. Even like Hannibal Lecter only kills bad people.

Hannibal Lecter said in Hannibal, he's like, I prefer to eat the rude. And Hannibal Lecter lives in a world, right, where so many of the people are pretentious, career-driven, stuck up and exploiting others, that they're mostly fucked up. And so it looks almost as if when you watch Silence of the Lambs or you watch Hannibal, you watch Red Dragon, it's. seems as if in those movies that humanity is cannibalizing itself through Hannibal Lecter because these are all people that don't really have feelings and stuff. If it's the guy who took care of him or the guy who was the warden of the insane asylum who didn't care about the people there at all or if it was Gary Olman's character in Hannibal, it seemed that Hannibal represented something within us.

We wish that somebody would essentially eat the rich. And it seemed like that's what Hannibal Lecter was doing. Clary Starling represented something pure, right? It represented something that to us was sort of unsullied. So it was easy to root for. And he liked her. And even in the Hannibal movie, he gets close to eating her face and then he doesn't. Because if he eats her, he eats us, right?

So there's a separation. And sometimes they do that in movies and they do that to bail the audience out. And sometimes it's hack, but it kind of makes you connect with shit, not just Clarice, but a little bit with Hannibal Lecter. All right, I move on to Tony and them. Both those guys have families, right? The U-S show is just about bullshit to me. And Kalika-Waises I tell her all the time, I don't fuck with that.

I think it's stupid to watch somebody who falls in love and then kills the person that he's in love with. I don't understand why women like it or I don't understand why people like it. I think it has a lot to do with Penn. but like I don't get the show, right? But like in the case of Soprano and Heisenberg and Walter White, look at the situation. Sopranos family is in trouble just basically because of who he is. Like half the show is him freaking out about whether or not A.J. is going to get into college.

Half the show is so relatable. It's almost mundane. Now, I think that's the thing. Tony, if you watch, because I rewatched it, Tony is what's so compelling about him is that even in the beginning of the show, He's in the midst of trying to change, and it's so fucking hard for him. It's hard for him to sit there being at therapy. This is quite literally a thing that is about to get him killed.

And I think that that is what I didn't like about Swarm as much as that, like, there is a humanity to Tony's problem in that, like, he knows he's evil, but he's trying. Yeah. And so what I'm saying is that, like, he, even if he, Tony Soprano by the end is one of the worst characters in the history of television. I mean, like, just one of the worst people ever. Yeah.

Everybody that's around him is in trouble or he kills them, right? Like, just one of the worst characters. But you watch it gradually happen and you see the reasons that that he goes further and further and further and further. And every once in a while, he does something that by the standards of his world

kind of makes sense. Like, Ralphie kills the girl. Tony beats up Ralphie. So you think there's somewhere in there as a person, right? Somewhere inside of the ducks. Even with the ducks very early on, it shows you that there's something there that humanizes him.

And I think with Dre, we never really get, we get glimpses of it. She's like the Terminator. I'm serious. It's like, it's bruh, like Walter White had cancer and he was trying to do this to leave money for

his family. There's like a, there's a North Star. It doesn't excuse everything that he did because at the end, he just like Tony Soprano's like I like this but she's like the Terminator brus she's like literally like okay so what's his name's character cheated on her

and her sister killed herself okay so you can understand that there's some ambiguity there to killing him after just everybody getting killed like everybody getting killed they getting killed it's mindless it's kind of brainless it's by the way I felt like more care should have been taken to the character because she is a black woman,

or maybe you could argue that less character should be taken. Let me push back on this. I want to ask you this. Now, do you think part of this, because Janine Neighbors has talked about this, where can you name me another show that centers a black female serial killer? Another show that centers a black female serial killer?

That is about a black female serial killer. Basketball wives? No, I'm just joking. Ha! You don't kill you. I can't think of one. I really can't think of one. Is there one?

I don't think so. That's what I think is the point, is that when they were created my with Octavius. I can't, I feel like there's a big one that I'm missing, but I can't think of one. You're right. There are movies and shows about black women who kill people, but a serial killer, this is, it's probably not the first time, but it is uncharted territory. This is something that drew Donald Glover and Janine neighbors to this story. And I want to ask you and maybe push back a little bit, do you think, do you think, as a black audience because we do not get to see this. We do not get to see very many TV shows

created by black people. We especially don't get to see many television shows created by black women with black women in the writers room, all of this stuff, that we have a desire to see ourselves in the best light possible, where we always, like, we want things that are empowering or we want to see our black women and black men as he, And when we see the more despicable side of humanity, we're like, yo, what is this? Like, why would you do this? Yeah, and that's an unfair, that's an unfair bar for the creators. But I'll tell you this, though, I think for me, with anyone, but especially for black people,

I just don't want it to be for nothing, you know? I just don't want it to be for nothing. And I will, let me, let me put you like this. And let me admit a blind spot here. Seriously. So O'Dong and Minnesota Society. But you watch O'Donog. Love O'Don.

And they don't really tell you how fucked up O'Dong's life has been. You understand why O'Dong is the way that he is. Yeah. Like, you get it. All right. You understand it. Why he is the way that he is. And for some reason, it doesn't come off as Drey comes off in this movie.

They actually give you more context for why Drey is the way she is in this movie than they do O'Dong and Miss society. And still the character feels emptier to me. And maybe that is to your book. point a legit and relevant challenge on the way we view and consume black women in these roles. But I think overall for me, so I can admit that there's probably a steeper cliff or a steeper higher wall that they're climbing, should I say. But particularly here, if I'm going to be subjected to this much brutality, if I'm going to be subjected to this, like, this was painful to watch.

if I'm going to be subjected to this, you kind of want a reason why. It's almost like funny games. If you guys ever saw funny games directed by a guy named Michael Hanky, there's a German version and there's an American version. In the American version, Michael Pitt and them, they happen upon these couple at the house,

and they just start fucking over them. They're going to kill them, whatever. It's Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. There's a point in the movie where, I've talked about this before, there's a point in the movie where Naomi Watts gets away, she grabs the gun,

and she kills the kidnapper and they're about to escape. Then Michael Pitt's character pits up the remote. I'm ruining funny games for you guys right now. I'm spoiling him. He picks up the television remote and he rewinds the movie. Like, he doesn't have powers

and he just rewinds the movie. The movie rewinds. And before she can get to the gun, he grabs it and he hits her. Hanky's point is right there, you should have stopped watching the movie because these people are going to die. There's nothing that you can do about it.

and now you're just watching it unfold. So the fact that you're there and opting into all of this violence for the time that this movie is going on actually says more about you than it does about the film. If Swarm is trying to do that, then they should have paid it off a little bit better

and made that a little bit more apparent because I came away going, why did I have to watch all this nastiness? It wasn't in any way, for me, and maybe it is because she was a young black lady with a really fresh face that was doing it. It was hard to watch. And it felt, it made me feel bad.

So I mean, the other thing that while I was watching it, that, like, I was kind of trying to interrogate is like, do you think that the show did enough to show us who Nisha was? And what I mean by that is that I don't necessarily want to give any credit to Stan culture. But Stan culture is just not created in a vacuum. the best way I could describe it is like I remember when Beyonce came out with her most recent album and that first song when she was talking about like who's going to break my soul all that shit

quit your job all that stuff I got why it was happening we were about to hit a recession if we're not already in one it was post pandemic whatever and I was like Beyonce knows what she's doing Beyonce is a billionaire what the fuck is this

and then when her tickets go on sale and regular folks as you were saying, who's going to break my soul, couldn't get tickets. I was just like, no, this is the shit that, like, I actually wish this show would have interrogated, which is just like, Beyonce has a role in this. Jay-Z has a role in this. These artists have a role in this. It is a relationship is two ways.

It's not just fan to artists. It's artist to fan. And I think because Donald Glover is a musician himself, and I was reading interviews where, outside of two people, almost everybody who was in the writer's room, has met Beyonce. Donald Glover hangs out with Beyonce, but Leo Obama was in the writer's room. These are people who are like at a certain level.

Part of me was like, they almost pulled their punches on the celebrities a little bit and made it seem like Nysia as an artist doesn't also have a role in creating these type of parissocial relationships. You know what I mean? Well, I don't know if she does. You think Beyonce has a role in the Beehive? Maybe.

That's an interesting. See, that's an, hold on. See, that would be interesting. We don't see her face until like the last episode or whatever. Like we don't really get a sense of that would be to sort of ask that question or debate that in some way would be interesting. But we kind of don't get that. Like, Nige is a character. Also, what I was going to say is like, I'm not saying Beyonce.

I want to be. Beyonce is not responsible for what human she doesn't know does. But think about it. What does Nikki do on Twitter? What has she been known to do? Nikki feeds it. Yeah. Like, she'll set the barbs on you.

Like, that is like, she will send them. Taylor Swift, what does Taylor Swift do when she's in a beef with other female pop stars or other or other women in the industry? What do her fans do? Her fans gang up on people. What has the beehive do? Like, they go under people's Instagram, leaving B messages. I'm not saying that the artist is responsible, but I am saying that, like, because an artist creates this mystique around them. Like a Beyonce creates a mystique.

She is something that almost you aspire to, but you can never reach. We talk about her like she's perfect. She doesn't necessarily let you into her life. So she doesn't feel. She almost feels like a goddess. I understand what you're saying. And sometimes I do think how much good could artists do if they were just like, hey, y'all, you have to realize that there's a healthy way to be a fan.

Like, let's have a conversation about treating people nicely. Like, please don't attack people. And I'm like, some people like, she has done that, but I'm like, yo, that easy, things get like this because there is a financial component to having Stan Army. There's a financial component to having your fans defend you when people talk about you. When it comes time to sell tickets, when it comes time to like, hey, I want to be at Coachella, look at all my followers and look at them under my comments. There's a financial component to this. And part of me was like, you needed somebody who was a little bit removed from the celebrity. celebrity world to be like, hey, how does, like, Nysia feeds into this.

Huh. So we're looking at that and we're, we're understanding that. What do you feel about the show makes you ask that question? Because I felt watching the show, it was because we only got to see Nysia through Drey's eye, which is like, it is an artistic choice. That is the choice that they made. and I get why you would make that on the page. But I think what happens is that because they're like,

we are only going to show Nysha through the eyes of her Stan army, it almost does what we do in real life, which is Rob an artist like Beyonce of her humanity. Beyonce is not perfect. Like, Beyonce is not a goddess. Beyonce has problems. She has marital problems. She has familial problems.

She's just like any of us. She just happens to be very talented in a, bunch of different areas. And I think that if there was even a beat where Nisha gets bitten, we don't know how Nisha feels about getting bit. Right. So by the time she gets bit, I'm like, why should I care? Like, I was actually more interested in being like, how does this artist feel about this?

Like, why? I don't know. Like, am I totally at like off the mark? No, I don't think. No, I think, look, to me, this is kind of what you talk about. when you talk about the show overall. And perhaps here we missed an opportunity, and let me name this.

And perhaps we missed an opportunity here to have a black female voice on this podcast with something that's created by a black woman and stars a black woman. Perhaps we missed an opportunity here. Perhaps there's a glitch in our crow-magnant male, dumb brains that is not connected. right here. Perhaps as a man, one of my blind spots is asking me is demanding a tradeoff

in the same way that I felt like I got a tradeoff with Tony Soprano and Walter White. Perhaps I can't even see what the tradeoff here is because it doesn't emotionally resonate with me the way some of those other things that I've been taught to prioritize, like having a family and And essentially what everything that was said earlier can be distilled down to is the fact that these men were fathers and that excuses them for everything that they did. And in this situation, we have somebody who had a very close relationship with her sister who really relied on her sister for everything. And the show continues to come back to that over and over again. So there isn't a tip to humanize her through a loving relationship that she shared with somebody in her family, right? I do think that that would have been something better had Chloe not died, had that character not, her sister, Marissa, had her sister not died, and this essentially being a seven-episode cope of being a serial killer.

But still, though, with me naming everything that I just said, and understanding why, and maybe understanding in a way, but maybe not understanding. in a way, the sort of rage and connection that black ladies feel. You know, the Beehive is mostly black women, from what I understand. You never know. It's always like a picture of Beyonce from that. Black women, but you know, LGBTQ community.

Yeah, of course, of course. And maybe there's a glitch in the connection here for me, 42-year-old black guy to the show based upon that. Having said all of that, I watched the show for large portions of it, like,

The Paris Jackson pops up in the show as the dancer. I thought that was a very interesting character. She was by far the nicest person to her at the strip club, but the fact that she was inauthentic made her totally unrelatable. She thought she was black. She's acting like she's Halsey. She got all these. The rest of the ladies seemed realer than her, so you liked them more.

I'm sorry, but they weren't laughing. You weren't laughing when, like, she kills the girl. And then she goes to who was Halsey? That shit was hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. You know, just Halsey catching strays. A lot of people caught strays in this show as well.

I mean, oh, wait. So can I ask you this? We've been negative. Like, what do you think was the most successful episode of this then? Ah, the, it's so weird. Probably the Billy Alice episode. The Billy Irish episode was hilarious. Yeah.

But that was really, really good. That was actually, to be honest with you, that was almost watching a museum. That was like watching like a Picasso. Not exact, I don't, I didn't think it was exactly beautiful, but I still couldn't take my eyes off of it. Just everything that was happening, that's the one point that it felt like,

it felt like a trove of Cairns attacking a black lady in the wild. And she overcame it. So I was with her in that episode, actually. So that, that's actually what I was thinking, where it was just like, that was when I was like, I don't think we should root for serial killers, but that was the moment I was searching for where I was just like,

even if I know Dre's not doing the right thing, the way that she's being treated in that moment makes me want to root for her. I want her to escape. I want her to get out of this. I feel for her because Dre at that moment is in a very vulnerable position and these very liberal,

white women are taking advantage of that. And I'm just like, oh no, this is actually. what I wanted more of the show, where it's like, I don't just want her killing bad people, but I do want a sense of like, what's the deeper thing here? Like, what is a motivating factor besides I love Nizja

and also my sister just died? Yeah. You know, as a black character, as she, you know, Dre ends up, she uses sex as a weapon. You know what I mean? She really, there's nothing,

it's almost liberating in how, terrible a person they make her. So I only have two more questions for you before we wrap up. I have to ask you this because this is another length of the discourse. Recently, there was a Dominique Fishback article on a vulture, and Donald Glover

was a secondary. He gave some quotes and he said quote, Glover said they purposely did not talk to Fishback about her character's backstory. I kept telling her you're not regular people. You don't have to find the humanity in your character. That's the audience's job. He said he told Fishback, think of it more like an animal and less like

a person. Jesus. Then he went on to say actors in general, they don't want to get layered performances, and I don't think Dre is that layered. I want her performance to be brutal. It's a raw thing. It reminds me of how I have a fear with dogs, because I'm like, you're not looking at me in the eye. I don't know what you're capable of.

People online have taken that as another example of what they say, Donald Glover hates black women. This is a discourse that has been going on for a very long time. Hearing that quote, watching the TV show, how do you feel, man?

I have to ask you as a podcast. So, I don't know whether or not Donald Glover hates black women. I can tell you that I think that there's one scene in Atlanta, and I talk to you guys all that I talk about it all the time. That is a clear indictment of black women. And I'm floored every time I come by the scene, that there wasn't a bigger deal made of it. What's the scene?

The scene where they are at the Drake Party, and there's a white girl with a, black guy, and there is an unhinged, feral black woman that attacks her, and the white woman coolly and calmly dismantles this lady about the interracial relationship. And it might as well have been Donald talking to her. The scene is as offensive a scene to me as I've seen on television, coming from a black creative, you know, I don't have any problem with anybody's interracial dating. I don't give a fuck about that.

You know what I mean? It is what it is. And I do think that we are way to up in people's bedrooms about who they love and who they, you know, it is what it is. At the same time, you know, there are realities that exist in society where people feel, particularly some black ladies feel that to hire up the social ladder that black men go, the less desirable they become. And that's a conversation that we owe them, okay? but it was handled with such a little nuance in the scene and everything in Atlanta was handled with

this overwhelming sense of nuance that it was interesting. The other thing, that was handled really with no nuance and the amazing Tyler Perry episode was handled with very little nuance. He let you know just exactly what he thinks about Tyler Perry

and it seems very purposeful. For this statement, within context to what he was talking about, It makes sense. That's exactly where the character comes off. The character doesn't seem like a human. The character seems more like an animal.

It reacts like an animal. I have a beautiful Bernadoodle and Bozeman. You can tell he has emotions, but they're all tied to instinct. There's a reason why your dog squeezes the ball. And it's not because he loves the ball so much. He squeezes the ball because the ball reminds him of a small rodent that his wolf ancestors killed. So when a dog squeezes a squeaky toy, the screeches from the squeaky toy are actually the shrieks of a small animal.

Think about that. Fact. So there are reasons, but they're more instinct. And that's how he wrote it. And the animalization of a black lady, of course that's going to make some black women feel uncomfortable. The word dog was used. I don't think that he... this is that I think in our

desire to keep a certain type of narrative running what we're actually doing is like taking away some of the power that like Janine Neighbors is a co-creator of this show she is a showrunner of this show where it's like I think that like hey that quote does not does not read well I get what he's trying to say it's not what I would say

but I also like one thing in this whole discourse I'm just like hey guys like even though like Donald Glover's name is on this. There are so many other black women who are not only writing on this or directing or starring in it that I'm just like, hey, we can also have a nuanced conversation without it making it seem like Donald Glover is this autore with final say-so and there were other creatives in the room as well. And that's where sometimes I think in our rush to be mad at Donald Glover again, I'm just like,

guys, there's other people on this show. can we like, we could talk about them. You know what I mean? No, it's true. It's true. You know, I'm interested to what, but Beyonce didn't think about this whole thing? Supposedly, Beyonce, Janine Neighbors was saying that, like,

because the interesting thing, too, is that the show starts with those title cards, like, this isn't fictional. Da-da-da-da-da. Legally, that has to go through legal. That has to go through Amazon legal. Most of the stuff that's happening, the Beyonce figure getting bitten, running up on stage. are actual things that happen.

So I think Beyonce, at least Janine, it was like, I think she actually saw the show because there's a lot of stuff that you have to sign off on, which is interesting. But my last question for you is... Can I ask you a question real quick? Yeah. The part at the end is

Dre is imagining that, right? Or is that really happened? So that was my last question for you to end it. So what's interesting about this show is that the Penn Ultimate episode is like a true crime mockument. where we have this black police officer,

a black detective who was the only one who is kind of realizing like we have a black serial killer on her hands, and I think she's a black woman. And what is interesting is, is in that sixth episode, they kind of tell you what happens to Dre. Dre is arrested in Atlanta. And she says at the end of the episode,

I hope that she doesn't post mail by the time I get there. I need to ask questions. And then in the title cards, showed a picture there and it didn't look like Dre, though. It looked like somebody else. I thought that she had that wrong. But go ahead, though. So what I think, how I read it, was that they were like bleeping out Nij's name, right?

And they were, I think what they were actually doing is they were using stand-ins potentially to like fuck with our perception to make it seem like what's going on here. But in the final episode, where is Trey? Trey is in Atlanta. What happens? She runs on stage. She has cut off all of her hair. She's at least presenting more masculine. She's dating a woman.

She's discovering her sexuality. What I think is actually happening in the show is that the show tells you what happens in that sixth episode. Dre gets arrested and goes to jail. The seventh episode is almost like a euphoric experience where when she runs up on stage, this is everything that she could have dreamed of. And if you notice, that's not just Nijja's face. It is also Chloe's face superimposed on it. So she's having this euphoric experience of like when she meets Nysia,

it's almost this spiritual connection like she's meeting her sister, Marissa, again. How does that track? Do I sound insane. You sound insane. Go back. Literally go back and watch. No, no, actually, you don't sound insane. It sounds like it makes sense, but the whole thing is insane.

I'm about to take a Xanax. I have anxiety because it's just. I'll just be honest with you. Look, hats off to the creatives here as relates to Swarm. It really, really is an interesting watch and it asks some, does it,

there's some questions that you can, that can be derived from it. But for me, I think the ideas are more interesting than the show that we got, is how I've left it, where I'm just like, you guys ponder some stuff, that's very interesting. The show

that we got out of it just was not my cup of tea. I'll just leave it at that. It wasn't my cup of tea, but it was a very strong cup of tea. They tried. They did one for the census. I can see why other people dig it, you know? But yeah, for me, this was a tough one.

This was a tough one. It's good talking to you about it, though. Yo, thank you so much to our producer, Sasha, for listening to us talk about a very divisive show, Swarm. And guys, we're going to be back on the prestige TV feed soon. And if you miss Van and I, check us out on the Ring of Verse feed. Midnight Boys out every single Wednesday.

Booboo! See y'all later.