What do you do when your TV show goes viral for a bizarre and silly reason, then stays the talk of social media for basically two straight days? If you’re Harley Quinn executive producer Justin Halpern, you just kind of shrug and suggest everyone should be watching the show. It’s probably the best reply he could have come up with for the whole discourse, unless he was to just come out and tweet “Ladies and gentlemen…The Aristocrats!” But that would probably go over some heads anyway, so this works pretty well for the situation he finds himself in.
If you missed it, Halpern recently did an interview in which he suggested that doing a show about supervillains came with fewer creative restrictions than doing a show about heroes. As a for-instance, he offered an anecdote from Harley Quinn‘s production, where somebody at DC reportedly objected to a proposed sequence in an episode that would have depicted Batman performing cunnilingus on Catwoman.
“A perfect example of that is in this third season of Harley [when] we had a moment where Batman was going down on Catwoman,” Halpen told Variety. “And DC was like, ‘You can’t do that. You absolutely cannot do that.’ They’re like, ‘Heroes don’t do that.’ So, we said, ‘Are you saying heroes are just selfish lovers?’ They were like, ‘No, it’s that we sell consumer toys for heroes. It’s hard to sell a toy if Batman is also going down on someone.’”
Unsurprisingly, social media had a field day with this claim, with Batman, Harley Quinn, or Adam West trending almost non-stop for two days.
West, who played Batman in the live-action series in 1966, trended on Twitter because of an anecdote he repeated several times over the years, which resurfaced once Batman’s sex life became a hot topic of conversation. According to West’s memoir — and in a story he would repeat or reiterate numerus times in interviews — he and co-star Frank Gorshin were once invited to a party, and when they arrived, they discovered that it was in fact an orgy.
“So I immediately went into the Batman character, and Frank went into the Riddler character, because we were getting the big giggles,” West told Blastr in 2014. “It was so funny to us, what we walked into. And we were kicked out. We were expelled from the orgy.”
You can see Halpern’s tweet below.
So uhhhh watch Harley Quinn on HBO Max?
— Justin Halpern (@justin_halpern) June 15, 2021
This is not the first time Batman’s sex life has become the subject of public debate. The perennial (often joking) questions about the nature of his relationship with Robin, his young sidekick, reached a fever pitch in 1954, when the book Seduction of the Innocent nearly destroyed the comics industry by insisting that violence, sexual deviance, and left-leaning politics were pervasive in the pages of the comics.
Much later, a sexual relationship between Batman and Batgirl in an R-rated movie adaptation of Batman: The Killing Joke got fans up in arms. Most recently, Batman: Damned (from The Killing Joke screenwriter Brian Azzarello) depicted a backlit shot of a nude Batman in which his penis was clearly visible.
The first two seasons of Harley Quinn are available to stream now. Harley Quinn season 3 is expected to debut in winter 2021.