Pop Culture Happy Hour
NPR
Get obsessed with us. Four days a week, Pop Culture Happy Hour serves you recommendations and commentary on the buzziest movies, TV, music, books, videogames and more. Join arts journalists Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon, Stephen Thompson, and Aisha Harris - plus a rotating cast of guest pop culture aficionados. The Happy Hour team leaves room at the table for exploring a range of reactions and opinions on every bit of the pop universe. From lowbrow to highbrow to the stuff in between, they take it all with a shot of cheer.
Make your happy hour even happier with Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus! Your subscription supports the podcast and unlocks a sponsor-free feed. Learn more at plus.npr.org/happyhour
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Washington, DC
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NPR
Description:
Get obsessed with us. Four days a week, Pop Culture Happy Hour serves you recommendations and commentary on the buzziest movies, TV, music, books, videogames and more. Join arts journalists Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon, Stephen Thompson, and Aisha Harris - plus a rotating cast of guest pop culture aficionados. The Happy Hour team leaves room at the table for exploring a range of reactions and opinions on every bit of the pop universe. From lowbrow to highbrow to the stuff in between, they take it all with a shot of cheer. Make your happy hour even happier with Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus! Your subscription supports the podcast and unlocks a sponsor-free feed. Learn more at plus.npr.org/happyhour
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English
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Episodes
Charli xcx, The Moment And What’s Making Us Happy
2/6/2026
Remember Brat Summer? Charli xcx has turned the aftermath of her mainstream success into a movie called The Moment. It’s a hyperpop faux documentary commenting upon the intense response to her album, Brat, and Charli’s fickle relationship with stardom. Can Charli keep the Brat momentum going? Does she even want to? The film also features Alexander Skarsgård, Hailey Benton Gates, and Kylie Jenner.
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Duration:00:25:07
Wonder Man
2/4/2026
Marvel’s new Disney+ series Wonder Man is a sensible buddy comedy where Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays a down-on-his-luck actor (with incredible superpowers) trying to make it in Hollywood, and Ben Kingsley plays his new friend with a dark past. Safe to say it’s not what most Marvel fans are expecting – and that’s a good thing.
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Duration:00:18:19
2026 Sundance Film Festival: Best Movies
2/3/2026
We watched a ton of movies and we’re recommending some of the best things we saw at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. This includes a thrilling adventure starring Ethan Hawke, a quiet romance with Chris Pine, and quite possibly the best documentary we’ll see all year.
For a complete list of the movies we loved at Sundance, Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd
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Duration:00:16:54
2026 Grammys Recap
2/2/2026
This year’s Grammy Awards featured historic wins for Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar, performances from Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber, and occasional chaos. And it was a night of speeches that reflected this moment in America.
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Duration:00:27:46
Send Help and What’s Making Us Happy
1/30/2026
In the new comic horror film Send Help, Rachel McAdams finds out the answer to the age-old hypothetical, “what if you were stranded on a desert island?” — except she’s stuck there with her terrible boss (Dylan O’Brien). The dynamic between them shifts and shifts again as they try to survive long enough to be rescued.
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Duration:00:22:25
Star Trek: Starfleet Academy
1/29/2026
Star Trek fans are finally getting something they’ve wanted for a long time, and it doesn’t disappoint. The new series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy takes place at the college attended by kids who want to become officers in Starfleet. It stars Holly Hunter as the school’s chancellor, Paul Giamatti as a recurring bad guy, and a roster of hot young cadets who have classes to attend and lessons to learn.
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Duration:00:21:46
The Beauty
1/27/2026
The Beauty stars familiar faces from the Ryan Murphy universe, including Evan Peters, as well as new collaborators like Ashton Kutcher. In the show, a genetic biotech serum has been engineered to transform people into ridiculously good-looking supermodels. But there’s at least one problem: Eventually, those supermodels are dying suddenly, horrifically and spectacularly. Is it astute commentary, crass exploitation, or maybe a bit of both? Well, it’s definitely a Ryan Murphy production, through and through.
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Duration:00:20:24
A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
1/26/2026
The HBO series A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms may be set in the same fantasy world as Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon, but it’s a small, grounded story – a kind of medieval buddy comedy. It follows a sweet but dim knight (Peter Claffey) and his wise-beyond-his-years young squire (Dexter Sol Ansell) trying to make their way in a tough world. A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is based on a series of novellas by George R.R. Martin.
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Duration:00:19:19
‘One Battle After Another’ is revolutionary — and revelatory
1/23/2026
One Battle After Another earned 13 Oscar nominations - including best picture, best director and a lead actor nomination for Leonardo DiCaprio. In the action-thriller, DiCaprio plays a washed up ex-revolutionary searching for his missing daughter while raging against the machine. In this case, the machine is unabashedly racist, xenophobic, and corrupt. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the ensemble also includes Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor and Benicio del Toro. Today, we’re revisiting our episode about the film that originally aired in September 2025.
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Duration:00:24:13
2026 Oscar Nominations
1/22/2026
This year’s Oscars nominations are here, and we’re unpacking record-breaking nominations for Sinners, plus nominations for One Battle After Another and Hamnet. And as always, there’s an eclectic mix of heavy favorites, left-field surprises, and the dreaded snubs. We give a broad sense of this year’s major storylines, while also lamenting a few decisions we found baffling.
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Duration:00:19:53
Watch This: It Was Just An Accident
1/21/2026
The Iranian film It Was Just an Accident enters Oscars season with the wind at its back. It won the top prize at Cannes, a raft of other awards and has landed on a lot of top ten lists. The movie bears out those accolades. Directed by Jafar Panahi, it’s a tense, volatile, often darkly funny movie about what happens when a former political prisoner runs into a man he’s almost convinced is the one who tortured him and other prisoners.
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Duration:00:19:20
The Rip
1/20/2026
Matt Damon and Ben Affleck share the screen again in new Netflix film, The Rip. Similar to the pulpy, midbudget cop movies we used to get, The Rip is about a team of cops who are trying to take a huge stash of money from a drug cartel. But that work is not only dangerous, but also complicated as they encounter more money than they expected. The cast also includes Steven Yeun, Teyana Taylor, and Kyle Chandler.
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Duration:00:16:32
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple and What’s Making Us Happy
1/16/2026
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple picks up where 28 Years Later left off – in a world of zombie-like infecteds and vigilantes that turn out to be a murderous cult. Ralph Fiennes returns as Dr. Kelson, who makes an unlikely friend in his medical refuge slash memorial site slash bone temple.
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Duration:00:21:25
Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials
1/15/2026
The new Netflix series Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials centers on lesser known mystery solving protagonist Lady Eileen Brent (Mia McKenna-Bruce). It’s got all the familiar cozy mystery trappings like a manor house, snobby suspects, stiff upper lips and lots of secrets. Based on an early Christie novel, the show also features Martin Freeman and Helena Bonham-Carter.
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Duration:00:17:36
Hijack
1/14/2026
Idris Elba is in full action hero mode in the Apple TV series Hijack. He stars as a corporate business negotiator onboard an airplane that is taken hostage by an eclectic bunch of assailants with mysterious motives. The series is very fun and very silly. Hijack just came back for a second season, so we thought it was the perfect time to revisit our conversation about the series.
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Duration:00:16:44
Our Dream TV Crossovers
1/13/2026
There have been many TV crossovers over the years, but it’s a tricky balance to get right — for every mashup that feels organic, there are plenty more that amount to little other than weird stunts. So we decided to dream up the ultimate TV crossovers: Gilmore Girls and Nashville, Abbott Elementary and The Leftovers, Only Murders in the Building and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Bear and Happy Endings.
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Duration:00:21:11
People We Meet On Vacation and What's Making Us Happy
1/9/2026
The new Netflix rom-com People We Meet On Vacation is about best friends Poppy (Emily Bader) and Alex (Tom Blyth) who have gone on annual trips together since meeting in college. But there's always been something between them that's not quite platonic, and reconnecting at a wedding just might bring it to the surface. Based on the beloved Emily Henry novel, the movie’s got travel, banter, and even kissing in the rain. But does it capture the charm of the book?
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Duration:00:21:57
Sabrina Carpenter and the Embarrassing Truth of Dating Men
1/8/2026
What's it like to date a man? Ask Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Dean, or your friends, and you might hear it's a struggle. Today we’re bringing you an episode of NPR’s It’s Been a Minute. Host Brittany Luse and NPR Music Editor Hazel Cills break down a phenomenon called “heteropessimism.”
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Duration:00:14:50
No Other Choice
1/7/2026
No Other Choice is a new bleak comedy about a man (Lee Byung-hun) at a crossroads. After losing his job at a paper company, he resorts to desperate, unhinged measures to get a new job. He tracks down the other candidates and eliminates the competition, one by one. Directed by Park Chan-wook (Oldboy, The Handmaiden), it’s filled with great performances and truly masterful action set pieces.
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Duration:00:16:35
Stranger Things
1/6/2026
After five seasons and almost ten years, the saga of Netflix’s Stranger Things has reached its end. In a two-hour finale, we found out what happened to our heroes (including Millie Bobby Brown and Finn Wolfhard) when they set out to battle the forces of evil. The final season had new faces and new revelations, along with moments of friendship and conflict among the folks we've known and loved since the night Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) first disappeared. But did it stick the landing?
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Duration:00:22:06