In the PoMoCon spirit, here’s some middlebrow art for Christmas: My podcast with Pete Spiliakos on Lethal Weapon, the most famous buddy cop action comedy, the attempt to pair the heroic man & the suburban, middle-class, family man—more of the action, less of the comedy to begin with; the series descended to broader & broader comedy until it almost became a sit-com later.
Partly, it transformed because it was enormously successful: The first movie, in 1987, cost ~$15M to make & grossed eight times as much, $120M. The sequel, in 1989, was twice as successful again… Mel Gibson got the second of his famous action franchises, after Mad Max. Only Stallone had achieved that with Rocky & Rambo. Schwarzenegger has the Terminator, of course, & Bruce Willis Die Hard… Pete & I go back to the first Lethal Weapon story to show what it was all about before all this success, why people cared so much to begin with—two men devoted to justice even if it might kill them.