Pop Culture Happy Hour
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
Episodes
August 8, 2025 • 25 mins
Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis first switched bodies over 20 years ago in the beloved Disney body swap movie, Freaky Friday. They return in the long-awaited sequel, Freakier Friday, which offers twice as many body swaps, fights galore, and a whole lot of jokes about being old and kids these days.
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August 7, 2025 • 29 mins
We are 25 years into the 2000s, so we wanted to debate: what’s the most definitive piece of Y2K pop culture? We try to pinpoint the essence of that period when teens ruled the culture, viral internet memes first became a thing, and everyone was freaking out about stocking up on duct tape. We talk about Spice World, Get Over It, Britney Spears’ “Oops… I Did It Again” music video, and Janet Jackson’s “Empty.”
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August 6, 2025 • 15 mins
Every couple goes through certain rites of passage. You date, maybe you move in together, maybe you get married. And maybe a visit to a mysterious cave makes your bodies start to fuse together. That's what happens in the new horror film Together, starring real-life married couple Alison Brie and Dave Franco.
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August 5, 2025 • 14 mins
Wednesday is one of the most popular Netflix shows of all time, and it helped make Jenna Ortega a star. It takes the breakout Addams Family character Wednesday Addams and breaks her out of her home environment. Gomez (Luis Guzmán) and Morticia (Catherine Zeta-Jones) pack her off to their alma mater, the gloomy, gothy Nevermore Academy, and she’s soon drawn into the investigation of a series of grisly murders. Wednesday is about to...
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August 1, 2025 • 24 mins
The Naked Gun franchise has always been a rapid-fire delivery system for gags, delivered straight-faced by a cop who doesn't know that anything is funny. In the new Naked Gun movie, that role is handled by the very straight-faced Liam Neeson. With Pamela Anderson as his femme fatale, Neeson tries to save the world from, quite literally, a plot device. And like the original franchise, this Naked Gun is all about a joke pileup.
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July 31, 2025 • 20 mins
The Netflix series The Hunting Wives is a soapy murder mystery full of nudity and intrigue, about a group of Texas women who are up to no good. It stars Brittany Snow as a woman who follows her husband from the East Coast to Texas for a job working for a rich businessman and budding politician (Dermot Mulroney). Sophie is immediately enchanted by his sultry wife, played by Malin Åkerman. If you always thought Desperate Housewives ...
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July 30, 2025 • 15 mins
It's been almost 30 years since Happy Gilmore gave Adam Sandler one of his best-loved movie roles. The rowdy golf comedy gets a belated sequel on Netflix — full of callbacks, flashbacks, fan service, and so many cameos from the golf world and beyond. But how does Happy Gilmore 2 compare to the original?
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July 28, 2025 • 23 mins
Last year was Brat summer and saw the rise of Chappell Roan, Shaboozey, and Sabrina Carpenter. But is there a song of the summer for 2025? Today we're talking about the competing songs of this summer from Justin Bieber, Morgan Wallen, KPop Demon Hunters, PinkPantheress, and more.
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July 25, 2025 • 22 mins
The Fantastic Four are back again in a new movie--and it's an eye-popping good time. The Fantastic Four: First Steps stars Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, and Joseph Quinn as the famously fractious family with amazing powers who tangle with a godlike being who wants to eat the Earth. We've seen this story before, but the vibe is different this time. It's a brighter, boldly colored retro-future with flying cars, sem...
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July 24, 2025 • 19 mins
Today we're recommending a few of our favorite YouTube channels. These are the ones we find ourselves returning to again and again on subjects including board games, culinary history, silly tasks, celebrity interviews, urbanism — and ear gunk.
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July 22, 2025 • 22 mins
In the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, some very '90s teenagers are targeted by a killer clad in fisherman's garb and armed with a hook. Nearly 30 years later, a new sequel fires up a very similar plot. The movie includes a new group of young people — including Chase Sui Wonders and Madelyn Cline — and a few key survivors from the first go-'round (Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr.) But does it live up to the leg...
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July 21, 2025 • 15 mins
Sorry, Baby is a refreshingly disarming movie. The film was written and directed by Eva Victor, who also stars a newly minted professor at the liberal arts college where she received her graduate degree. The school is also where she was once sexually assaulted. The movie takes on a traumatic experience with wry humor and vulnerability — and it announces Victor as a filmmaker and performer to watch.
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July 20, 2025 • 2 mins
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July 18, 2025 • 23 mins
Eddington plunges us back into that familiarly distressing time of the early days of the pandemic. Directed by Ari Aster (Hereditary and Midsommar) Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal star as political rivals in a small southwest town. Their conflict collides with the news of George Floyd's murder, which brings tensions to a full-on boil for the whole community.
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July 17, 2025 • 19 mins
The Netflix animated movie KPop Demon Hunters is a phenomenon, with a soundtrack that's climbing the Billboard charts, and a fandom rivaling that of just about any K-pop idol. The film is loads of fun, it's packed with some of the catchiest bangers you'll hear all summer. It's about a superstar girl group called HUNTR/X, who also keeps busy protecting humanity against an army of demons.
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July 15, 2025 • 31 mins
This year's Emmy nominations are out, and it was a good year for familiar favorites like Hacks, The Bear, Abbott Elementary, The Last of Us and The White Lotus. There were also some newcomers that got some love as well including The Pitt, Adolescence, The Studio, The Penguin, and Paradise. We'll unpack this year's the notable nominees and make some predictions in the major categories.
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July 14, 2025 • 20 mins
When your long-term boyfriend leaves you for an Instagram influencer, what can you do? In the new Netflix romantic comedy series Too Much, the answer is to go to London for work, and meet a struggling musician who happens to be very, very handsome with a life almost as messy as yours. Starring Meg Stalter and Will Sharpe, and co-created by Lena Dunham, it features a cast full of comedy MVPs, a meet-cute, and a very unusual dog.
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July 11, 2025 • 24 mins
After much anticipation, there is a pretty great new Superman movie. And he's bringing exactly what we look to him for: hope. Writer and director James Gunn and new Man of Steel, David Corenswet, team up for a new tale of the eternal struggle between evil billionaire megalomaniac Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) and some people in colorful costumes who combine all their powers to stop him. And this time, there's a dog.
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July 10, 2025 • 23 mins
This summer marks Pop Culture Happy Hour's 15th birthday. We decided to re-watch the movies we loved at 15 with fresh eyes, and of course, some of them have aged better than others. Today on the show, we revisit the movies we loved as teens — including Chicago, Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, and The Hunger.
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July 8, 2025 • 26 mins
Love Island USA is pure chaos, and admittedly: we love it. It's one of many spinoffs of the long-running British hit series, Love Island — and it might be the closest thing we've got to a watercooler event. The latest season of Peacock's knowingly trashy reality dating show has fired up the group chats thanks to this messy batch of conventionally sexy singles. Sometimes, for better or worse, fans even get to stir the pot and decide...
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