At one point while recapping a recent episode of HBO’s House of the Dragon, the hosts of The Midnight Boys—The Ringer’s freewheeling, nerd-centric podcast—started talking about incest. As Game of Thrones fans know, the practice is distressingly common among the noble families of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy universe. And now House Velaryon—an aristocratic clan that, unlike most in Westeros, is Black—was engaging in it too.
Van Lathan, who hosts the podcast with Jomi Adeniran, Charles Holmes, and Steve Ahlman, saw this twist as a feint toward equity.
“They wanted Black incest on this show to draw us into their fucking pit. They wanted it. They just didn’t have enough Black characters on the show to even have incest, you know? They didn’t even have it before,” he said. “But now that they got ’em…”
“Do you count this as a form of inclusion, though?” asked Ahlman, the only Midnight Boys cohost who isn’t Black.
“Depends on how you look at it. There’s some white shit that we don’t want to be included in,” Lathan replied. “Incest. We don’t need representation in incest!… If inclusion means I gotta fuck my auntie, I don’t want to do it.”
There are almost countless podcasts—some owned by major media outlets, some run by hobbyists—that recap TV shows and dissect movie trailers. What sets The Midnight Boys apart is how it views culture through a specific lens: one that’s fan-driven, funny, and unapologetically Black. The show’s hosts cover their subjects with both humor and a deeper level of analysis, treating a fresh episode of House of the Dragon the way The New York Review of Books might treat a new novel. Its loose structure allows for a wealth of tangents, touching on everything from whether HBO shows have the right amount of nudity to the hosts’ personal lives. And audiences are responding to its unique approach: For the Midnight Boys episode recapping the season three premiere of House of the Dragon, listeners on Spotify increased by more than 70% and consumption hours went up by more than 115%.
Not all those listeners are Black. But the show provides an invaluable window into Black nerd culture, a critical mass that’s grown substantially over the past several years. “What they’re doing to make the community more accessible, especially making Black people in the community more accessible, is incredible,” says Frankey Smith, a popular nerd commentator who goes by Fantastic Frankey. “They’re almost making us cool in a way.”
“In the beginning of the podcast, people used to get mad at us for going on tangents, and now that is a part of the DNA of what we do,” Holmes tells me during an hour-long interview with all four hosts. “We’re talking about nerd culture, but we’re also giving you a vantage point of, like, nerds have lives. We’re not just talking about loving Spider-Man—we’re talking about loving him as adults, as kids, as teenagers.”
