Kate Kane (acted by Ruby Rose) is a moneyed liberal with profound “daddy issues” and a supermodel’s mug. We’re told her dream is to work for her father’s Gotham security agency, “The Crows,” and because Jacob Kane is too protective to allow his daughter to be a Crow, she goes into a deep depression and is transformed into an icy postpunk avatar that looks like a cross between a mall-punk and depressed Rachel Maddow.
“But first, I had to convince my dad I was ready,” she tells us, as she returns to Gotham to gain the approval of her father. You’re the “female Bruce Wayne,” Jacob Kane tells her daughter, who never protests the indignity of being framed as a less convincing female version of a one-percenter playboy. We’re also told that Batman is an “outdated tradition,” which Kate decides is her destiny when Batman goes missing for three years. The decision to become the CEO of an “outdated tradition” is, dare I say it, a conservative one.
Rachel Maddow is the voice of radio host Vesper Fairchild, who plays loosely with the facts by describing Batwoman as a “curvier and sexier” Batman, when actress Ruby is practically heroin chic. Antiseptically modeled after Rooney Mara’s grittier and more gutter punk Lisbeth Salander, Rose is tattooed, wears a leather jacket and rides a black motorcycle, but unlike Mara’s shocking transformation in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Rose’s Kate Kane feels inauthentic and as emotionally vacant as Ivan Drago as the The Punisher.
While Rose has said she suffers from childhood trauma, she lacks the Stanislavskian skills to inject them into her personality. But she’s aesthetically correct—too correct. In fact, she’s as polished as a teen idol, rather than a tough street-urchin or rugged survivalist. Ruby Rose looks like a Hot Topic mannequin in her freshly pressed Ramones t-shirt and designer leather jacket that’s as unworn as her boots.
The only thing organic about Ruby Rose is her diet.
Rose’s personality is as frigid as a Soviet geologist studying glacial ice, which makes her incapable of translating emotion into a moving camera. She’s a gorgeous model that’s suited for glossy magazine shoots in Vogue and GQ that capture the sharp contours of her face and those big kryptonite-colored eyes, but never sizzles enough to radiate through the motion picture camera. Even when she’s stylishly designed like a postmodern Marlene Dietrich, Rose cannot command the camera with the sort of gamine mischievousness expected of a queer icon. There is no music in her voice and while a damp personality can be overcome with damaged sex appeal and elusive otherworldliness (see Kristen Stewart in Twilight), Rose suffers from having the kind of chiseled beauty that’s unrelatable and distant. She is the perfect assassin or YSL model who never speaks a word, but she is dreadfully ill-suited to be a relatable role model as she’s as emotionally diverse as an icepick.
But she’s got the resume. Kate is gay and vegan (so is Rose); Kate suffers from childhood trauma (check, Rose), but rather than being a tough broad who refuses to be defined by her sexuality or the cisgender men in her life, she’s a gay stereotype: an emotionally dizzy rebel who fails to gain the acceptance of her father, and eventually falls in love with someone who is too handcuffed to the patriarchy to be openly gay.
Along with her “daddy issues,” this an overused trope, where the more brazen gay lead can’t convince a timid gay supporting actor to run away with them. We’ve seen this story in practically every teen drama in the past three decades, and showrunner Caroline Dries (executive producer, Vampire Diaries) has failed the audience by recycling it the way Disney recycles its own IP.
Kate Kane, presumably a feminist, lacks any self-determination and governance over her own future, which has been determined by the actions of two men: her overprotective dad, and Batman, her cousin, whose grappling hook fails to rescue Kate’s mother and sister inside a crashed car that dangles off a bridge. Like cousin Bruce, the trauma of watching her loved ones die is how Kate is pushed towards vigilantism.
She’s not only trapped in the shadow of the bat; she is a prisoner of a culture governed by unimaginative marketing professionals who believe superheroes ought to be used as slick political billboards, rather than vehicles for fantasy fulfillment or artistic exploration. It’s a new kind of studio exploitation in the era of #MeToo, where blogger headlines have replaced the ferocious and feisty dialogue of femme fatales like Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman and Sharon Stone’s unapologetically sexy sociopath in Basic Instinct. 
With the sexually dominant and voluptuous heroine (or villainous b*tch in Basic Instinct) now banished from Hollywood’s more “SJW” productions, we’ve been gifted with dreary characters that have no command over their identity or sexual powers. In editing the male gaze into tastelessly microwavable feminist tropes, Hollywood has managed to produce an artistic typo: lefty-feminist heroines who’ve been polished and edited into buzzwordy marketing campaigns that are completely allergic to the sort of brutally individualistic feminism that fueled Sigourney Weaver’s flamethrower in 1979’s Alien.
Rose doesn’t look like a combat-ready athlete, either, which suggests CW wanted a pop star, not a martial artist; not the sinewy gender-neutral pugnacity of Demi Moore in G.I. Jane, who trained like a Navy SEAL for the role, who was not interested in being a poster girl for women’s rights, and yet I cannot think of a more empowering visual than Demi Moore doing single-handed pushups with a shaved head.
In a tragically shortsighted attempt to stay true to the source material, CW’s Batwoman refuses to move beyond unrealistic superhero costumes — which would work if this show had any sense of humor, which it does not. “It will be [perfect], when it [batsuit] fits a woman,” as eyeballs of millions collectively rolled behind their skulls.
Her vain desire to add flaming-red hair extensions to her suit continues in the tradition of superheroines designed to look like BDSM porn stars, which Rose defends with a line written in the framework of a Tumblr meme: “I’m not about to let a man take credit for a woman’s work.” This is a confusing statement, as it’s written as a feminist comment on workplace equality, but transforms Batwoman into a grabby double agent of the patriarchy.
The show’s aesthetic is a mirror reflection of the austere and rigid acting of its lead. Fox’s Gotham looked like a cartoonish goth nightmare blended with Victorian architecture and snappy glamour of ‘30s gangster films. Gotham was showy and animated camp, with theatrical production design that wrapped itself around its characters like an amusement park ride dressed in the decadent art deco of Cedric Gibbons. CW has reintroduced Gotham as a decaying Soviet republic, where the filming locations (Vancouver and Chicago) are made to look like brutalist rebukes of the completely flamboyant aesthetic of Gotham.
Related: <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/woke-batwoman-endorsed-by-critics-trashed-by-audience">Woke ‘Batwoman’ Endorsed By Critics, Shredded By Audience</a>
Art Tavana is an arts and culture critic based in Los Angeles. He is a former columnist at L.A. Weekly and Playboy.

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Why ‘Batwoman’ Fails Feminism

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In 2011, The Hollywood Reporter referred to Lorne Michaels as the “all-powerful Oz” of NBC late-night. Michaels is the unimpeachable Executive Producer of The Tonight Show, which averages about two to three million viewers per night, and the majordomo of Saturday Night Live, which can pull in between five to eight million viewers. 
With a growing digital audience, there’s no telling how many pinned eyeballs are at the mercy of Lorne Michaels. When accounting for total audience size of The Tonight Show, SNL, and their respective subscribers on YouTube, you discover that Lorne Michaels has the reach of a media tycoon like Rupert Murdoch. Let that sink in, and then reflect on the fact that Michaels has a monopoly over sketch comedy on network television; a genre of comedy that now dispenses political propaganda with the same irresponsible gusto as the cable news.
In the same way that Jon Stewart used real broadcast journalists to help The Daily Show with fact-checking and research, it seems Lorne Michaels has staffed SNL with writers who have a duel function as liberal activists and satirists. SNL’s ideologically uniform writing room is the product of a monocultural view of politics and the arts.
This is not how SNL has traditionally disseminated sketch comedy, but we’re no longer in the age of “rebels with sweaters,” when the philosophy of SNL was to attack the establishment, not to act as its surrogate.
In 1975, Lorne Michaels was a bratty and caustic maestro of a form of sketch comedy that seemed as beautifully nihilistic as the mind of Richard Pryor. Lorne Michaels stopped being that person when The Daily Show proved that partisan political satire is a ratings draw. Since the presidency of Barack Obama, SNL has essentially abandoned their tradition of being the anti-establishment comedy troupe in favor of pandering to their audience of monied liberals.
The cause of this shift is complicated, but The Daily Show seems to have blurred the lines between satire and the cable news in such a way that satire became more effective at political propaganda than the cable news. Vanity Fair once suggested that Tina Fey’s SNL parody of Sarah Palin “possibly helped derail Palin’s bid and put Barack Obama and Joe Biden in office.” Several studies have supported this theory, which is why you should expect almost every pre-credits cold-open in 2020 to focus on Trump, Pence, or the GOP.
This is only funny if you&#8217;re a Democrat.
SNL is what happens when the Sex Pistols become the faces of an environmentally conscious credit card company. SNL is now an antiseptic to the sort of beautifully raunchy and fully liberated comedy that exists in the clubs and the Netflix specials of Dave Chapelle and Bill Burr. As comedy becomes increasingly polarized between woke and anti-woke comics, SNL has not yet been able to adjust their recruitment efforts or comedic identity. Studio 8H is defined by a neutered and mimetic view of satire — informed almost entirely by mainstream media tropes that rely on the view that every platform must be used to resist the GOP; escapism and any notion of a “fairness doctrine” in their writing room is as passé as the notion that a late-night host should be a host, as opposed to an activist. This is why Jay Leno is the last late-night host — this is also why Leno will never host today’s version of SNL.
The problem isn’t that SNL is anti-conservative; the problem is that there is no alternative for Americans who view SNL as either political propaganda or the empty political satire of New York elites that even the far-left view as lazy limousine liberals. I am not arguing that SNL should be more conservative or hire more conservative comedians — I am arguing that SNL shouldn’t be the Standard Oil of sketch comedy. Lorne Michaels shouldn’t be able to singlehandedly crystallize how late-night viewers view Justice Kavanaugh, for example.
Any challenge to Michaels’ supremacy over sketch comedy has failed miserably. MADtv (which launched as an opportunity to recruit the audience that had abandoned SNL) never had the promotional support of Fox and appealed to a cult audience; In Living Color couldn&#8217;t find a balance with Fox executives; The Dana Carvey Show failed because it was staffed by misanthropes and stoners, and The Dave Chappelle Show collapsed because Chappelle isn’t Lorne Michaels.
SNL is successful precisely because Lorne Michaels offers the perfect balance of soulless corporate executive and comedy writer. The reason we may never have a legitimate threat to SNL is that funny people generally aren’t as gifted at political maneuvering as Michaels — whom we can picture lunching with Hillary Clinton. And Lorne Michaels has no peer; ABC, CBS, and Fox do not have an equivalent to him. The only threat to his cultural supremacy is time. “There is not competition for Saturday Night Live,” NBC executive Dick Ebersol once said, “except sleep.”
The liberal bias of SNL exists because Michaels is savvy enough to know that the suits at NBC want SNL to validate their worldview and funding efforts, not to challenge it. SNL rarely mocked President Obama’s arrogance because they viewed him as a sacred cow. He was a protected property. When they do mock Democrats such as AOC and Hillary Clinton, they never humiliate them with the same degree of spite they use to absolutely destroy Sarah Palin, Trump, and Kellyanne Conway. There’s always a wink-wink and degree of respect when Kate McKinnon parodies Hillary Clinton as an unrelatable Devil Wears Prada executive, as opposed to revealing much uglier facets of her political persona.
When you place political boundaries around satirists, you remove their ability to indiscriminately play with language, stereotypes, and tropes. Generally speaking, a good joke “kills” and a bad one “dies,” but on SNL, a good joke is whatever the mainstream media can use to advance their discourse on Monday morning. At least that’s what it feels like for most Americans.
Conservatives and leftists may want to redirect their frustration away from SNL’s corporate liberal bias, and towards entrepreneurial efforts to fund, produce, and promote alternatives to SNL that produce sketch comedy that is at least willing to staff its writers room with as many ideologically diverse as racially diverse voices who can sack the antiquated empire of a  74-year-old Canadian who now functions as the William Randolph Hearst of late-night.
Art Tavana is an arts and culture critic based in Los Angeles. He is a former columnist at L.A. Weekly and Playboy.

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Art Tavana

Why ‘Batwoman’ Fails Feminism

Why Is There No Alternative To Lorne Michaels’ Late-Night Autocracy?