This Week in Pop Culture: April 26, 2024
The bizarre and supremely intense Baby Reindeer, a really great satirical thriller, and more in this week's pop culture round-up.
Happy Friday, friends. Chag Pesach sameach, or happy Passover! This week’s newsletter is brought to you by lots of chocolate toffee matzoh and barely hanging onto my sanity by a thread.1 As a result of this, expect a slightly lighter-than-usual newsletter in terms of content (and wit).2 1/1 fathers3 agree that I’m “quick on the draw” when it comes to pop culture:
This week has seen a lot of incredibly bleak news in the entertainment industry (not to mention the larger world, obvi), and I just…don’t want to write about it here? Instead, I’m choosing to focus on the fluff. It’s my newsletter and I can be delusional if I want to!
In that vein: can you believe this picture of the Spice Girls in 2024 (at Victoria Beckham’s 50th birthday party)? They look incredible:4
I also love this photo of David Beckham carrying Victoria out at the end of the night. It’s both extremely funny and very charming:
Speaking of celebrity couples: do you have a favorite one? Like one where if they broke up, you’d be genuinely devastated? For me it’s this one:5
I have loved Melanie Lynskey and Jason Ritter separately for decades, and have always been thrilled that they seem to be thriving in their relationship. I love that Lynksey is having such a great run of projects and want the same for Ritter, who I think is an underrated actor.6 Their love is pure and they will be together forever (or ELSE)!
Here’s the rest of the pop culture that took up space in my brain this week:
What I Read:
A Better World by Sarah Langan: When the Farmer-Bowens are selected to join the walled-off company town of Plymouth Valley, they know it’s a trial basis, and they’re determined to make it permanent. The town has clean air, excellent schools, an abundance of resources: everything that the outside world lacks as it falls apart. But the trial means fitting in, which proves difficult, especially with the strange customs and beliefs that the town refers to as Hollow. As the mysterious and ominous winter festival looms, Linda can’t stop asking questions - but the more she learns, the scarier their new home becomes.
This inventive, darkly funny, and absolutely compelling satirical thriller was almost a perfect read for me. For the first 250 pages, I was all in: I was fascinated by the town of Plymouth Valley and its residents, I was worried about the Farmer-Bowen family, and I couldn’t wait to see what was going to happen, because I was pretty sure it was not going to be good. Langan wrote in her acknowledgements that the story began as an exploration of a marriage falling apart, and then spiraled into something much larger and more complex. I loved her exploration of a future world in which the safest (and most dangerous) places are towns owned by corporations, where the ravages of climate change and broken political systems have made the world more disconnected than ever before. The world-building of Plymouth Valley was incredibly well-done, its characters well developed and the details about their religion/culture just creepy and unsettling enough to feel realistic. While I don’t think that Langan perfectly stuck the landing, I found the book as a whole to be a thought-provoking and tense read that I will be thinking about for a long time. Highly recommend!
One of Us Knows by Alyssa Cole: Kenetria Nash has dissociative identity disorder, and it has derailed her life. When Ken returns to her body after being dormant for years, she discovers that she and her alters have been given the opportunity to be a resident caretaker of a historic home. When a terrible storm hits the house just as its trust members visit for an inspection, Ken realizes that she might be in danger - and then someone turns up dead. With the help of her alters, she must race to figure out who the murderer is - and how she ended up in the situation to begin with.
Alyssa Cole is a (pretty) prolific writer of both thrillers and romance, and I’ve had a bumpy history with her work in the past: I’ve never been able to finish one of her romances, but I mostly liked When No One is Watching, a sharp thriller about gentrification. I’ll admit that I didn’t know this one featured a character with dissociative identity disorder when I ordered it from the library,7 and that in the interest of full disclosure, I find that this disorder is often used in fiction to create a gimmicky kind of ~mistrust~ in ways that are completely aggravating to me personally. But I decided to give it a try anyway. Despite having some fun twists and turns, this mostly didn’t work for me! I found all of the characters deeply annoying and found it to be full of plot contrivances that took me out of the narrative. A skip!
What I Watched:
Elsbeth, Season 1 (Paramount+): On a special assignment in New York, unconventional attorney Elsbeth Tascioni works to help the NYPD solve cases and apprehend criminals.
Technically a spin-off from The Good Wife/The Good Fight, this new show takes place in New York instead of Chicago, and the location change isn’t the only tweak that Michelle and Robert King have made to their franchise. Each episode starts with us witnessing the murder or crime, including who committed it, before we follow Elsbeth and the cops try to figure out what happened. I’ve gone on record before about The Good Wife being one of my favorite shows of all-time: this has some of the original’s wit and humor but feels tonally very different from that. I’m not sure that this is a great show, but Carrie Preston is so good as the titular character (and is clearly having so much fun) that it matters. It’s been perfect treadmill fare this week as many of my standbys are on a little bit of a hiatus. It’s been fun to see some high-profile guest stars, too.
Baby Reindeer (Netflix): A man who has repressed a trauma from his past has to confront his demons while dealing with a stalker who becomes obsessed with him when she meets him in the bar in which he works.
Based on comedian Richard Gad’s one-man show of the same name (and on his own experience being stalked by a woman when he was in his twenties), this buzzy Netflix show got its hooks in me from its first moments. I’ve never seen anything quite like this: darkly funny and unbelievably intense at the same time. Both Gadd and Jessica Gunning, who plays Martha, his stalker, are excellent.
As usual, people are being extremely un-chill in speculating on who the real-life people might be.
What I Listened To:
Would it surprise you to know that I’ve mostly still been listening to a lot of The Tortured Poets Department? I stand by what I sad last week about the album being too long, but I do find myself going back to a lot of the songs (especially on the first half). I think it’s a grower of an album and I’m finding more things to appreciate and be frustrated by on each listen.
I read and loved
’s essay about the album (“is that a bad thing to say in a song?”) and highly recommend reading it! It unlocked and articulated a lot of the feelings and thoughts I have about the music and where Swift seems to be at in her career at this juncture. I’ve also had a great time with some of the memes that have come out of TTPD’s release:
And this:
girl in red, I’M DOING IT AGAIN BABY!: I loved girl in red’s debut album. The Norwegian alt-pop singer Marie Ulven had a banger of a song with “serotonin,” and I found her frank discussions of her mental health struggles refreshing and very real. I was excited for her sophomore effort, and I finally had time to give it a close listen this week. While it’s clear that Ulven seems to be in a better headspace after taking some time off from the music industry (though she did open for several stops on the Eras tour last year, including the one I went to - and she was great live), this album fell flat for me as a whole. She’s got a great voice and her best moments are when she’s being vulnerable and raw, but the songwriting here is not great! There are multiple times where the writing feels sloppy (or even actively cringeworthy) in a way that distracts from the music. The line “got my Ray-Bans on/and I’m rolling with the boys” made me physically recoil. This one is mostly a miss for me, but I’m hopeful for something better in the future.
What I’m Looking Forward To:
Hit Man (Netflix, June 7): A buttoned-up professor poses as a fake hit man and meets his match when a client steals his heart. I’ve become a Glen Powell fan ever since he carried Anyone But You, and this looks delightfully silly.
Blink Twice (Theaters, August 23): When a tech billionaire invites a woman to join him and his friends on a private island for a dream vacation, it starts off great. But strange things start happening, and she’ll have to figure out the truth if she wants to survive. This one is directed by Zoe Kravitz and looks unhinged!
Trap (Theaters, August 9): A father and his teen daughter attend a pop concert only to discover that they’re in the midst of something much more sinister. Josh Hartnett as the father of a teenager is really sending me, but I’m definitely into whatever is happening in this M. Night Shyamalan movie!
That’s it for this week! I’ll be back next week with thoughts on the movie adaptation of The Idea of You (I am so NERVOUS), thoughts on Emily Henry’s newest book, and so much more. Have a great weekend, and thanks, as always, for reading!
Everything is FINE, but I’ve been having a couple of rough weeks. Life, etc.
The “wit” part is definitely a “your mileage may vary” kind of situation - I think I’m a delight all the time but weirdly that’s not always the feedback I receive? Taste is subjective (and those people are wrong).
This is not a statistically relevant sample size, not least of all because he followed up this exchange asking if Julia Garner had been married to Ben Affleck. Also, he doesn’t read this newsletter!
BRB, making an appointment with an aesthetician RIGHT NOW.
For my husband, it’s Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively. It takes all kinds, folks.
My toxic trait is that I think Lauren Graham’s character should have ended up with him on Parenthood, but I also have a vendetta against Ray Romano, who I think sucks. FIGHT ME.
Or if I did, it fell out of my head immediately! Who knows!
Ahhhhhh I think about celebrity couples way too much. I agree, Melanie Lynskey and Jason Ritter <3 <3 and also Tom Hanks/Rita Wilson and also Delta Burke/Gerald McRaney and also Will Sharpe and Sophia di Martino.
still emotionally recovering from Rhea/Danny.
alll these movies and baby reindeer sound soooo good! I am excited to check them out.
Agreed, Sarah Braverman should have absolutely ended up with Jason Ritter's character (Mark? I did not remember his name but this is what the internet tells me).
Melanie Lynskey and Jason Ritter 4eva! 💖 Also, I'm so excited for Hit Man I could scream. Love these recs!