If you’re someone who’s been watching Harley Quinn, one of the best animated TV shows of all time, with your Max subscription for a while now, then you’re well familiar how raunchy and R-rated this DC TV show can get. And yet, there are some areas that are off limits for the Harley Quinn creative team, which is arguably best demonstrated by how back in 2021, co-creators and then-showrunners Justin Halpern and Patrick Schumacker revealed how they weren’t allowed to include an oral sex scene between Batman and Catwoman. Three years later, Halpern and Schumacker have revealed more details about this Harley Quinn moment that was shot down.
As part of an Inverse piece discussing romantic and sexual-related controversies involving Batman in the comics and other media, Justin Halpern discussed the commotion that emerged after he and Patrick Schumacker shared that DC forbade showing a scene where Batman was going down on Catwoman back in Harley Quinn Season 3. Now we finally have some context for why they wanted it in the show, with Harpern saying:
We wanted a cold open. We thought it’d be funny to just start on Catwoman [laying down], but you’re not really sure what’s going on…We wanted this idea that he’s not doing it for her. He doesn’t understand her, and he can’t sexually connect with her because he can’t emotionally connect with her.
As you can see, Halpern and Schumacker didn’t want to include this oral sex scene purely for shock value; it was meant to be commentary on Batman’s emotional unavailability with Catwoman. This makes sense from a narrative perspective, but it wasn’t enough to sway DC, with the powers-that-be telling Halpern and Schumacker, “You can’t do that. You absolutely cannot do that.” According to Halpern, this boils down to consumer sales, with the writer saying that “it’s hard to sell a toy if Batman is also going down on someone.”
So instead, the Harley Quinn team showed Batman giving Catwoman a foot massage, which also did an adequate job of showing the former’s trouble connecting with the latter. And yet, given how much attention the scrapped oral sex scene got on social media once it was shared with the public, Justin Halpern mused in his interview that this topic became “a bigger deal than it probably would have” if the scene itself had simply been included. Ironically, the 2021 reveal of the oral sex scene came when Halpern was talking about how accommodating DC had been with letting the Harley Quinn talent explore risqué and vulgar material.
Now that we’ve looked back on Harley Quinn’s past, remember that the Metropolis-set Season 5 is expected to premiere on the 2024 TV schedule sometime next month. You can also check out the spinoff Kite Man: Hell Yeah!, which finished airing its first season on Max last month and features guest appearances from Haley Cuoco’s Harley and Lake Bell’s Poison Ivy in the first episode.
