Why ‘Harley Quinn’ Is The Perfect Show To Binge On #BatmanDay

The best superhero show on TV is also a celebration of Batman’s supporting cast.

In an expected development, we got word yesterday that Warner Media was shifting all of DC Universe’s scripted content (shows, movies, etc.) and porting it over to HBO Max. DC Universe isn’t shutting down, it’s rather being rebranded as DC Universe Infinite as a comics-only platform. In other news, the best show on DC Universe, and honestly one of the best comedies on any TV/streaming platform at the moment, Harley Quinn, was renewed for a third season. The third batch of 13 episodes will debut on HBO Max. If you haven’t seen this bonkers bananas animated series, well, there’s no better way to celebrate #BatmanDay than to give it a go. Not only is it an artistic triumph, it’s a glorious celebration of Batman’s supporting characters.

As the title implies, this is Harley Quinn’s showcase, although Poison Ivy is enough of a co-star that the show could have been called “Harley and Ivy,” especially in season two. The show concerns the former Arkham shrink turned Joker sidekick (and squeeze) who tries to establish her own identity as a Gotham criminal. That’s the same set-up as Cathy Yan and Christina Hodson’s terrific Birds of Prey feature film (also available on HBO Max) which debuted to strong reviews but weak box office early this year. If Birds of Prey played like a Guy Ritchie gangster flick on cocaine, Harley Quinn, created by Justin Halpern, Patrick Schumacker and Dean Lorey, is closer to a conventional sitcom. one which relishes the inherent humor in fantastical content being presented as mundane.

Freed from the burden of comics-faithful continuity or cinematic universe interconnectivity, Harley Quinn uses familiar (and not-so-familiar) characters and settings within the DC universe to turn our expectations on their heads while offering unique interpretations of well-established characters. Harley (Kaley Cuoco) and Ivy (Lake Bell) are pretty much as you’d expect them to be, and they anchor this gallery of weirdos in recognizable human melodrama. Alongside them we get a burned-out and emotionally needy Jim Gordon (Chris Meloni), a Clayface (Alan Tudyk) that runs with the whole “he used to be an actor” bit, a relentlessly optimistic and cheerful King Shark (Ron Funches), an above-it-all Catwoman (Sanaa Lathan) and an endearingly dumb Bane (James Adomian, in an affectionate spoof of Tom Hardy’s Dark Knight Rises voice).

The specificity offered for each one of these ultraviolent idiots is a joy to behold. It’s the character work, more than the gleefully TV-MA violence and vulgarity, that makes it sing. And if I may, as a Jewish American viewer, I appreciate how unapologetically Jewish the show happens to be. Harley is a rare Jewish lead in a major American TV show, at least some of the characters in her world (Wayne Knight’s Penguin, Jason Alexander’s Sy Borgman, etc.) have character traits and plots rooted in their Judaism. The second episode, which is the one that hooked me, takes place at a Bar Mitzvah for Penguin’s nephew, and Sy himself is a bemusing New York/New Jersey Jew (I’ll confess, the reference to “Jewish lightning” made me laugh).

The show has come under fire for these jokes, never mind that two of the three creators (Halpern and Schumacker) are Jewish and the lead character is a Jewish supervillain/anti-hero. Not only is this stuff arguably within the bounds of good-hearted self-depreciation, again cultural specificity is what we say we want when it comes to inclusive representation, but the show itself is a classic Jewish journey of internal conflict and internal guilt. While Harley and Ivy both have to respectively deal with external obstacles, the core journey is her attempting to redefine herself sans Joker and figure out who she is and what she wants absent the expectations placed upon her by herself and those around her. If you liked American Pickle or Wish I Was Here…

It’s fitting that Batman is voiced by Diedrich Bader. The terrific Batman: The Brave and the Bold was a glorious celebration of the Batman mythos in all of its forms, from the darkest crime stories to the lightest Scooby-Doo team-ups. Harley Quinn argues that Batman’s supporting cast, in both quantity and quality, isn’t just unrivaled in modern comic books but unrivaled by almost any pop culture entertainment save for maybe The Simpsons. No, not every character featured on this show originated in the Batman comics or TV shows (King Shark, for example, was a Superboy baddie), but the ability for the Batman franchise to adapt and assimilate in order to accommodate even the likes of (offhand) Gotham, Harley Quinn and Batwoman remains key to its pop culture longevity.

The show has plenty of other joys to discover, including Giancarlo Esposito as Lex Luthor (the season one episode concerning Harley’s possible induction into the Legion of Doom is my favorite of the series), Jacob Tremblay playing Damien Wayne as every bit the obnoxious little sh** that we all know he is and Michael Ironside reprising his Superman: The Animated Series performance as Darkseid. And yes, Batman and the Joker do get their moments to “shine,” including some truly shocking character development for Tudyk’s Mr. J and a Batman-centric episode that subtly comments on the macho individualism inherent in too much of the fanbase. And, yes, if you’ve seen any of the season three promo materials, you know here Harley and Ivy’s friendship eventually leads.

For all these reasons, and more, Harley Quinn makes an ideal #BatmanDay binge. Not only is it the best superhero show on TV at the moment, it is an ironically fitting tribute to the Batman franchise by virtue of showing how little it necessarily needs Batman in a starring role and frankly how much the Dark Knight needs his supporting cast in order to thrive. That squares with the character’s core conundrum, that the “lone Dark Knight Detective” has built himself a large surrogate family. Yes, I still believe that DC and Warner Bros. rely too much on the Batman IP as a commercial crutch when it comes to the overall DC universe. But the character sells, and its further exploitation is what gave us Batman: The Animated Series which in turn gave us Arleen Sorkin’s delightfully distinctive Harley Quinn.