The Most Superb Owl in Movies or TV

February 6, 2025·1 hr 47 min·8 clips

Did an owl really kill a woman in The Staircase, or is this the wildest true crime theory ever?

1. Trial by Content, hosted by Dave Gonzalez, Joanna Robinson, and Neil Miller, debates the most superb on-screen owl across nine pop culture candidates. 2. Dave Gonzalez hosts and won the previous week's poll with Reservoir Dogs as best Sundance debut at 42%; Joanna Robinson is a film critic known for House of R; Neil Miller covers sports and culture. 3. The episode asks: which fictional or real on-screen owl best embodies Merriam-Webster's definition of superb — 'marked to the highest degree by grandeur, excellence, brilliance or competence'? 4. Joanna opens with a listener pick from Cheryl: the theoretical owl from The Staircase docuseries and HBO drama, which proposes an owl attacked the victim Katherine Peterson outside at night, driving her up the stairs before she fell. 5. The hosts debate whether the husband Michael Peterson or the owl is responsible for the death, with Joanna stating definitively 'her husband definitely killed her' while Dave defends the owl theory as a legitimately fascinating forensic alternative. 6. Neil introduces the Great Owl from Don Bluth's 1982 film The Secret of NIMH, voiced by John Carradine, arguing it achieves maximum 'impact per minute of screen time' in only four and a half minutes on screen. 7. The Great Owl advises the widowed field mouse Mrs. Brisby to 'move to the house to the lee of the stone,' which Neil says he has never forgotten, and does not eat her because owls only hunt at night. 8. Neil contextualizes Don Bluth's style as intentionally darker than Disney, having left the studio in the early 1980s over creative differences to make films like Land Before Time and All Dogs Go to Heaven that introduced dark themes to children. 9. Dave introduces Mr. Owl from the 1970s Tootsie Pop commercial, describing the owl's animation as 'serial killer'-adjacent with slowly opening eyes and slightly offset lids beneath a graduation cap. 10. The Tootsie Pop discussion expands into personal candy memories, with Neil confessing the owl is responsible for his lifelong inability to finish a lollipop without biting it, and Dave revealing he prefers the brown Tootsie Roll Pop flavor to the horror of his co-hosts. 11. Dave reads from the Tootsie Roll website's 'wild berry' line, which includes 'wild mango berry' and 'wild apple berry,' leading him to speculate AI generated the flavor names since mangoes are not berries. 12. Joanna nominates Wan Shi Tong, a spirit owl from Avatar: The Last Airbender voiced by Hector Elizondo, whose name means 'he who knows 10,000 things' and who guards a vast spirit library. 13. The hosts note that Wan Shi Tong's library episode in Avatar Season 2 is one of the series' best episodes, and the owl's reappearance in The Legend of Korra as a more comedic figure is also well-received. 14. Before the main debate, the hosts share superb moments from 2025: Joanna cites Chappell Roan winning a Grammy and delivering a speech about living wages for emerging artists while wearing a princess hat that fell off. 15. Neil highlights Ohio State winning the college football championship as an eighth seed and the Cleveland Cavaliers leading the NBA, plus DeepSeek's AI release debunking inflated U.S. AI valuations. 16. Dave shares a Reddit story about a Denver woman named Tawny who posted an offer to buy coffee for strangers, then showed up at the wrong location, prompting the Reddit community to direct her to the right coffee shop through live comments. 17. The show uses a 'Royale with Speed' format where each host presents three picks, listener-submitted picks are included among them, and the audience votes on a poll to determine the winner. 18. The tone is conversational, playful, and digressive, with hosts frequently going off on candy tangents or animated-rodent-crush confessions before returning to owl analysis. 19. Pop culture enthusiasts who enjoy irreverent debate formats and mix film criticism with absurdist humor will find this episode compelling. 20. Listeners seeking analytical deep-dives or practical information will likely find the candy digressions and format-explanation segments too slow.

As heard by us

A playful owl showdown that treats the bit with real conviction.

Trial by Content turns a ridiculous premise into a pointed pop-culture argument about which on-screen owl deserves the top spot. It spends its time on the owl spirit from Avatar: The Last Airbender, a huge, fearsome, knowledge-obsessed figure that shows up again in Legend of…

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a pop-culture debate that takes one giant, scary owl from Avatar: The Last Airbender very seriously.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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