The following contains spoilers for Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine's Day Special.
Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine's Day Special not only serves to slake the thirst of fans still waiting for Harley Quinn season 4 on HBO Max. It's also the final project of the series from now-former showrunners Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern. They'll hand off those duties for the next season, so they wanted to make a real bang of an exit. It's certainly easy to say they probably accomplished that.
The Harley Quinn Valentine's Day special certainly made an impact, which made many fans of the series feel satisfied. After a lot of uncertainty in the DC Universe, viewers needed something stable and comforting to cleanse their palates and what better subject than the grotesquely commercialized day of love? But it turns out this wasn't necessarily the holiday Schumacker and Halpern had initially wanted to focus on. They had a few ideas.
"We've been wanting to do a Harley holiday special for a long time," Schumacker explained in an interview with Variety. "We were like, 'What hasn't been done? Should we do a Hanukkah special?' And I'd still love to do that. But HBO Max's schedule and the desire to put something on in between seasons necessitated a Valentine's-centric episode." Perhaps serendipity made things turn out this way, given the almost universally positive reaction to the special. A fitting sendoff before the duo hands off Harley Quinn season 4 to new showrunner Sarah Peters.
"We wanted to do something super gonzo, crazy — what would a rom-com be like with this crazy ensemble of characters?" Schumacker continued. "We batted around ideas like an anthology-type thing in the spirit of Valentine's Day or Love, Actually, where you're focusing on different pairings and maybe they come together at the end." Things turned out well in that regard, with regular cutaways to couples explaining how they met, including Hawkman and Hawkgirl, played by Quinta Brunson and Tyler James Williams from the beloved Abbott Elementary, on which Schumacker and Halpern also serve as showrunners.
"The first three seasons, I felt like we got to say a lot of the things that we wanted to say," Halpern added, describing how they wanted to end things before leaving Harley Quinn to the new DC slate. "So it was like, every dumb joke that we had hadn't figured out a way to fit into the first three seasons. If you've seen the first three seasons, there's a lot of dumb jokes in there, so you might be thinking, what was left? Specifically, the scene where Bane is working with a dominatrix. We just threw in everything we could — if you're gonna do a special, you gotta make it special!"
Aside from exploring the excellent romance between Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, the Harley Quinn Valentine's Day special did a lot to make plenty of people happy. From the outgoing showrunners to the viewers, it seems everybody is satisfied with how things turned out. This includes the characters, though some more than others. Best of luck to Schumacker and Halpern going forward and all the optimism for Peters as the new head of Harley Quinn.
Harley Quinn: A Very Problematic Valentine's Day Special is available to stream on HBO Max, as are the first 3 seasons of Harley Quinn.
Source: Variety