The Point Radio: Stephanie Miller Makes Filth Work
From radio talk show host to stand up comic to being the author of Amazon’s #1 most pre-ordered book, Stephanie Miller is many things. She talks with us about the current political scene (duh), why radio died and how the most important tool in her arsenal is (as she puts it) “filth”. Plus Grant Bowler gives us great detail on the new season of DEFIANCE and where his character is headed this season on the SyFy series.
We’re back in a couple of days that visit to the set of TYRANT and a look at SyFy’s new series, KILLJOYS. Follow us on Twitter now here.
Transcript
The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Raub. Radio Talk Show host Stephanie Miller is funny and filthy and that's what works for her. We'll talk about that and why her book is number one already on Amazon. Plus Defiance is back for season three on Sci-Fi and series star Grant Buller gives us a look well ahead to what's going to be the best season yet. Let's get to The Point.
This is The Point. The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio. Stephanie Miller is a lot of things. A stand up comic, a political commentator and of course host of the Stephanie Miller Show, a progressive talk radio program from Los Angeles and syndicated all over the world. Politics are no stranger to her. In fact, her dad was even on the presidential ticket once. But I was curious as to how from that she migrated into radio and comedy. You know, like most people in radio, pretty much all my dreams have died. So I wanted to be Carol Burnett. That's what I thought.
And then radio, I don't know for you, was kind of an accident for me. I just when I was right out of college, I started doing, you know, voices and ridiculous comedy bits like, you know, with the Morning Drive show in Buffalo where I was from. And one thing kind of led to another, as they say. And like I say, so I never really the political part sort of came later. And I guess it's just in my blood. What can I say? I never really intended to get into political radio. And yet here I am. Stephanie's latest projects is her new book, soon to be released on Amazon, getting a lot of buzz already.
And I was curious as to where the idea for that came from. You know, Mike, I think the theme that we're hitting on is pretty much everything in my life is an accident. So more luck than brains, let's just say. But yeah, the tour, the sexy liberal tour was really kind of a fluke to it. Just a couple of comedian guy friends that were on the show said, hey, we should go, you know, we end up giving like money to progressive causes all around the country. But we I think it was to go help the workers and Madison is how we started.
And, you know, before we knew it, Mike, we were selling out the Pantages from the Chicago theater and, you know, the Beacon Theater in New York. And, you know, the CD became number one. And so obviously the book was always in the works. And it's just actually because of the tour, it was a bit delayed. But, you know, I'm happy to say we just announced it last week and it went the first day. It's the number one political humor book in the country on USA in the USA.
So I I've been a little sort of startled because, as you know, when you mention radio, we have such a smaller microphone, obviously, on the progressive side. But you know how it is. We're all in different medium these days. We're on a serious exam. I'm on some stations. I'm on the I heart app. I'm on the tune in app. I'm on progressive voices. And so obviously one way or another, you know, we must be reaching people because I was sort of shocked.
I have I mean, I'm self published. I have no publicist. And I thought it was a fluke when someone called and said, you have the number one book. It went to number one the first day. So, you know, I've been just shocked and delighted, really. So what's the book about?
Well, you know, my main point, like, if you've listened, is generally always to be funny. You know, I certainly have a point of view and I have a specific point of view coming from a very Republican family. You know, as you know, my guess, my dad ran for vice president with Barry Goldwater in 1964. So my first chapter is abandoned by wolves raised by Republicans. And so it's sort of, you know, obviously a biographical take on how where I came from and how I became what I am and why my mother is still so mortified by me.
But there is there is quite an entertaining thing about my mom's bird that masturbates to Fox News in the first chapter. So I will give you a teaser there. As we head toward 2016, the political landscape, needless to say, is just a little bit crowded with a lot of people all trying to head to the White House. I talked to Stephanie about her cut on the race so far. Oh, Mike, I think as as you and I can both imagine, obviously, we are in the wake of, I think, almost to a Donald Trump announcement.
So now you know things are going to get serious because because every carnival needs its Barker. Yeah, it is incredible. I mean, it looks to me like there's going to be perhaps 20 candidates on the Republican side. I mean, the debates are just hilarious. I guess there's going to be a regular one and then like a kids table or something.
I'm not sure how that's going to work. But I mean, honestly, if you look at any poll, Mike, I mean, Hillary Hillary is just crushing everybody. I mean, I you know, so it'll be interesting to see how that pans out on the Republican side because I don't think they have a front runner. You know, everything Bernie Sanders polls higher than anybody on the Republican side. You know, he's at 15 percent.
They're all at somewhere, you know, 11, 12, 13, 14 percent of the highest seen. Stephanie may have her roots in old school radio, but she's also embraced new platforms to get her show her, including podcasts and streaming as well. Yeah, I mean, Mike, I think you're right. They always say content is king. And I think technology is changing, particularly for younger people.
When I speak at graduations, I always say when they ask how you can get in radio, I say, well, you can't. There's no more room for good luck. I'm not the most hopeful graduation speaker. I'm like, even in my life, I found somewhere when God shut the door somewhere else, he shut the window to and you're screwed. But anyway, kids, good luck.
That's I think you're more seriously, you're right. The key is innovating. You do have to innovate. You know, we have the podcast was born out of desperation, out of trying to monetize because we're on so fewer stations than the right wingers. So, yeah, absolutely.
Like, I think it's that's the key is how to monetize and because most kids don't listen the right they they listen on their smartphones. So that's why we're on apps, you know, we're on progressive voices or I heart, you know. So, yeah, I am hopeful in that regard in that, you know, somehow I'm managing to keep this little this little train going. 70s book sexy liberal can be pre-ordered right now on Amazon. And you can find out how to listen to Stephanie in your area by simply going to the website Stephanie Miller dot com.
Let's jump right into it. Here's the very latest in pop culture. Get ready for Batman Day round two. Last year, DC held the event in honor of the 75th anniversary of the dark night. This year they're doing it again coming up on Saturday, September 26 with events planted comic book shops, bookstores, schools, libraries and other retail partners.
If you have a comic store or know someone who does and they'd like to sign up for the event, they can do so at the DC website. It's all in anticipation of the release of Batman, the Dark Knight Returns, a deluxe edition hardcover that hits stores on the 23rd of September. It's a mini that 70s show reunion Ashton Kutcher and Danny Masterson are teaming up for a new series called the ranch, which will be on Netflix. It involves a semi-professional football star who comes back home to help his brother run the Colorado family ranch. The show has been given a straight to series 20 episode order and will premiere on Netflix in 2016.
Another show that's going straight to series is American Gods based on the novel by Neil Gaiman. Stars gave the budget and the green light to the show as well. Michael Green and Brian Fuller are both attached. They'll right end show run the series as well. Neil Gaiman will executive produce and production will begin as soon as casting gets underway. Fans of the early years of Batman get a couple of treats toward the end of the year with two new collections coming out.
Both centering on some of the work of author Bill Finger by the way. Catman a celebration of 75 years is a 400 page hardcover that has the early stories by Finger as well as stuff by Ed Brubaker, Denny O'Neill and more. And then on top of that almost literally is the Batman Golden Age omnibus. An almost 800 page hardcover with some of the early Batman stories from Detective Comics and the first seven issues of his regular title as well. That'll retail for just about $75. Both will be available in time for the holiday season in comic stores in November.
Z2 Comics also known as Zip Comics, a place to put up that new Harvey P. Carr graphic novel not that long ago, are now entering the comic field with regular titles that will appear toward the end of the year. The three titles include Welcome to Showside, which is a kid's title, Carver of Paris Story, which is an homage of the Hugo Pratt, Courtauld Maltese property done by Chris Hunt, who said to be a protege of Paul Pope and Alan's son of Hellcock as well. All three titles turn up in comic stores later this year.
The point, the point. While graphic novel sales not necessarily as big a jump as comic sales were for the month of May in comic stores. In fact, they were pretty much flat when compared to where they were in May of last year. Still some interesting trends to talk about, including the fact that there are five different publishers represented in the top ten, much different than it is for the comic list. The top ten best-selling graphic novels for the month of May in comic stores begin at number ten with Saga volume one.
The Valiant at number nine. At number eight, Deadpool volume eight, all good things. And number seven, Legend of Zelda, A Link to the Past. Saga again this time volume four comes in at number six, Marvel Civil War comes in at number five. Southern Bastards, volume two, Gridiron is the number four best-selling title. And number three, Red Queen's volume two, second best-selling graphic novel of the month, Knightners from Marvel.
And the number one best-seller goes to DC, Batman Earth One, volume two. Best-selling graphic novel in comic stores from May this year. The sci-fi series Defiance is already into its third season. We sat down with star Grant Bowler to talk about not only where his character is headed, but what's ahead for the show as well. We've obviously established Defiance as not only an incredibly dangerous place to live, which very heavily features in that first double episode is talked about.
But also the town that's always been on the verge of disaster or boom or collapse. It really reminds me of California and the gold brush in some ways Defiance. My character's arc this season is A-fabulous. I'm really, really happy and grateful for what Kevin's given me to do this year because he's much more about a story arc that's going on for him in season three than he is about chasing around other people's story arcs, which is what by and large he was doing in one and two.
So, you know, Defiance, as you said, when we set out at the beginning of season three, is a shell of what it was. Basically, when Arisa set off the Terraformers and destroyed New York, a new element was created called Newland Night. Newland Night is a rock that's so hard that no earth created machinery can penetrate it. So Defiance now sits on this cap, this impenetrable cap, which means the town can't get it to Newland Night, which means that they can't power themselves. And a byproduct of that, of course, is Nolan and Arisa are trapped under the Newland Night in old St. Louis, so they're kind of stuck.
So that's our backstory going in. I know most of you, if not all of you, have seen that first double episode. So that's our starting point and the reason why they've been trapped in that sleeper pod for so long. This season is very much about getting the town back on its feet, but as always, very much about the town's survival. I think the town in season three, thanks to Ramtak, is in more peril and actually comes under more direct attack and direct fire than it ever has before.
Defiance actually gets successfully infiltrated in season three by an enemy force and directly assaulted. So it's a much more perilous place to live. It's on its last legs. There's no energy. There's lines for food. There are very little goods being sold. If you look closely in the first few episodes, you see that the market's now moved inside the need one. There's no outdoor markets anymore because there's so little to be gained and traded. So Defiance is a much sadder place. A bit Soviet Russia circa 1960s.
And, you know, and Defiance, sorry, Nolan, Amanda and some very strange bedfellows are going to have to come together in order to put the place back on its feet. Grant said there's some pretty cool stuff coming up. This season's been fantastic for Nolan. You know, he's vulnerable for a start. And I've really enjoyed that. He's falling down this season. You know, he has some challenges and he comes apart at the seams a couple of times.
We've always dealt with a Nolan that's so pragmatic, so forward facing that, you know, he just tends to swallow his blood. There's a great old expression, swallow your blood, old boxing expression. I think it comes from, you know, those great 1930s heavyweight champs. But yeah, he's always kind of been very much about that, you know, swallowing his blood and moving on. And this season, it catches up with him. This season, he doesn't have another step in him.
And that's been great to play. It's been great to see in the character too, because it really grounds him and humanizes him for me. And the other big development for Nolan this season is through that vulnerability, through that, you know, not being able to cope with everything. And through his own challenges this season, his relationship with the rest of changes. And that is just on song this season. I can't say how happy I am to have done this season with Stephanie. The relationship's fantastic. It's always been my favorite part of the show.
And it's become so much more full because she's now in a position where she's picking him back up, where she's supporting him, where she's trying to figure out what's going on with him. And these two are having an adult father-daughter relationship where it's really complex and it requires compassion on both fronts, you know, and requires a lot of patience and understanding from both of them. And they get sorely challenged. Their entire history, all of his memories about her and bringing her up are directly challenged in this season.
And he finds out that the way he parented her or what he thought was the way he parented her wasn't even close to her experience of what went on. So, yeah, it's wonderful in those ways. There's also some new additions to the cast this year. We've got three major new players. We have Ram Tuck, who we meet in the opening stanza. He's a warlord, if you like, for the Botanist Collective.
And, you know, Arisa destroyed the Earth Republic, who were the balancing force to the Botanist Collective. And our big threat in season three initially is that this military force of alien-based races was moving north from South America. So Ram Tuck is the advanced guard of that Botanist Collective, and he's brutal. And all he wants to do is raise defiance, burn it to the ground, and kill every single human being in it. So he's our first player.
And Lee, who played him, did an amazing job, Lee Turgerson. He did an amazing job of playing him with an enormous amount of flair and humor. And he's a genuinely frightening character. Then we come to the other two major new arrivals, who are the Omek. Now, we established in season one that there were seven races of Botans.
We only saw six of them. And in season two, we saw the Galani, which we thought was the last race of aliens. And they were an energy-based life form. So that's why we hadn't seen them before. And at the beginning of season three, we discovered that there is an eighth race that predated all of the other races called the Omek.
And the reason we never heard about them before was that the Botans, the aliens who came to work, you know, saying that they just wanted to emigrate and they were peaceful, had deliberately left this race behind. They'd sabotaged their ships. They'd destroyed their means of escape and their arcs. And they'd left them behind to die.
And it's basically the Botan's shame and guilt that means that humans have never heard of this race before. And in our very first double episode, the Omek arrived, a father and daughter, Tefkin and Kinzie, played by Nicole Galicia and Conrad Coates. And they arrived right at the beginning. They don't seem to have a problem with humans, but boy, have they got payback to deliver to the aliens.
So after three seasons of playing Nolan, what has Grant learned from his character? And has he taken any of that into his personal life? That's a great question. You know, it's a question I'll probably best answer in five years time, life being what it is. But it's taught me to be a better father to make daughter in a strange way.
That would probably be the biggest thing. Playing that role and that twisted, crazy father-daughter relationship is so amazing. It always brings me back to I have to look at my relationship with my kids. I have to look at my relationship with my daughter in order to find material, if you like, to mine, to play the scenes. And so I'm constantly turning over my relationship with my children in my head and my relationship with my daughter in particular.
And examining my own strengths and weaknesses there, where I'm like him, where I'm unlike him, what I do well, what I don't do well. I don't know if I would have done that much examination in the way I have, in the objective way I have, had I not been playing Nolan. So that's probably the first biggest thing. And the second thing is, has been leading a cast and kind of having to be on deck in a production like Defiance, which is extremely complex and large, pretty much every shoot day. And try some of the best of my ability to lead from the front.
That's been a growth curve for me. And something I've really loved, something I really, really, really have enjoyed and has been really fulfilling for me personally. Defiance has the roots of science fiction, but the look of a Western. And like Grant says, that's what seems to work. I think our story is sci-fi, but our archetypes are Western.
So we tell these incredibly technological stories. We tell these pure science fiction stories about art tech and artificial intelligence and faster than light travel and everything else like that. But we have a mayor, a law keeper, a doc, and our archetypes within that town. Even the fact that it is a small town, isolated in a wilderness, all those memes, if you like, all those overriding archetypes are Western themed. So I think that's where that comes from.
And I think you never get quite – you can never get too far away from it when, you know, my guy is the law keeper and the doc is the doc and the mayor is the mayor. But having said that, there's an ease to archetypes that I think allows us to shorthand a lot of stuff story-wise, which means that we can get into the meat of what we're trying to do story-wise much more quickly. And I think that's where genre really is strong, you know, where it's very, very useful, is you can assume a lot of things based on the genre as an audience and get into a story faster without having to establish so much.
Catch up on everything Defiance right now at Sci-Fi.com, and there are new episodes every Friday, only on Sci-Fi. And this is it for the podcast right now. Want to know what's coming up? Well, there's a lot. We're less than three weeks away from Comic Con 2, and you don't want to miss any of that.
The place to find us is always at GetThePointRadio.com, plus ComicMix.com, MichaelDavisWorld.com, and in the iTunes podcast directory as well. On Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, we're under The Point Radio, of course, and we'll see you back here in a few days. Thank you.
