Apple put the trans rights-focused season premiere of The Problem With Jon Stewart online for free
The episode includes Stewart's hard-hitting interview with Arkansas attorney general Leslie Rutledge
If you’ve seen one video clip online this weekend…Well, if you’ve seen one clip, it was probably those shots of Nathan Fielder looking like he wants to murder the Jumbotron guy at last night’s Mets game.
But if you’ve seen two clips online this weekend, the second was likely this excerpt from an interview that Jon Stewart did with Arkansas attorney general Leslie Rutledge, for the second season of his Apple TV+ show The Problem With Jon Stewart.
It is, honestly, the kind of thing we’ve been hoping to see from Problem ever since its first season debuted back in September 2021: Stewart at his best, calmly disassembling every false justification that Rutledge presents for her backing of laws that cut off trans Arkansas kids from access to gender-affirming healthcare. He cites facts and figures, pushes back on empty buzzwords, and just generally forces her to say the quiet parts loud. It’s a clear example of Stewart using his platform, and his privilege, to force Rutledge to face the statements that the trans people hurt by her policies have been making for years, in a way that brings some of that Apple-backed visibility to the issues, and the lies so frequently told about them.
Apple—clearly sensing a moment—already widely disseminated a beefy chunk of the interview online this weekend. But it’s also made sure that the entire episode—titled “The War Over Gender”—is available, for free, to anybody with an Apple account, regardless of whether you have an Apple TV+ subscription or not. That includes the additional conversations that Stewart had with parents of trans kids, trans attorney Chase Strangio, and an endocrinologist to lay out the facts and realities of trans life in America—as well as the moment where Stewart called out his own tendency, readily apparent in old Daily Show clips, of using trans people as an easy and reductive punchline. (No reconsiderations or re-evaluations of his full-throated defense of his old pal Dave Chappelle, though.)
It is, if nothing else, a good litmus test to see whether Stewart’s particular brand of TV journalism is a fit for you in 2022—or at least enough of one to justify an Apple TV+ subscription if you don’t already have one.
[via Digg]