This Week in Pop Culture: March 7, 2025
Meghan Markle's lifestyle show, the end of awards season, and more in this week's pop culture round-up.
Happy Friday, friends. I hope you made it through the week okay and are looking forward to the weekend.
With the Oscars last weekend, we’ve reached the end of awards season for another year! I thought the show was good overall, though I thought the musical numbers were mostly missteps (what was that James Bond thing?), and obviously Hulu really fumbled the bag when it came to their live streaming of the event. I did not get to watch the final two awards because Hulu said the event had ended (when I tell you I SCREAMED), but I managed to watch Mikey Madison’s acceptance speech the next morning. What an upset that was!
The fashion was very hit or miss for me this year; I found a lot of the gowns to be just okay, but there were a few standouts, including the custom Schiaparelli gown that Ariana Grande wore for the opening musical number:
It’s such a good color on her and it makes her cycle of wearing the palest pinks throughout the Wicked press tour all the more flummoxing. I did like a number of the metallic gowns on the carpet, though, including Mindy Kaling in Oscar de la Renta and Halle Berry in Christian Siriano:
I also thought Demi Moore looked incredible in custom Armani, and Michelle Yeoh absolutely stunned in custom Balenciaga.
The rest of the dresses were very meh for me? But it’s always fun to stalk professional photos after the event to see who wore what (and who changed multiple times during the night). Indeed, I found some of the outfits at Vanity Fair’s infamous Oscars party to be better than what we saw at the actual telecast, including Selena Gomez in Armani and Anna Sawai in Vivienne Westwood1:
I also LOVED Melanie Lynskey in custom Christian Siriano and Olivia Rodrigo in Roberto Cavalli:
Here’s the rest of the pop culture that took up space in my brain this week:
What I Read:
Blob: A Love Story by Maggie Su: Vi Liu has never quite felt at home in her Midwestern town. A college dropout who was recently dumped, she works as a front desk attendant at a hotel and tries to fend off the attempts at friendship from her blond coworker, Rachel. But when she goes out one night, she discovers a blob with beady black eyes in the alley next to a bar, and spontaneously decides to take it home with her. As the pet blob becomes sentient, she realizes it will obey her commands, and she begins shaping it into the perfect partner, but as it becomes a very handsome white man, Vi must reckon with who she really is and what she really wants.
In order for this book to work for you, you have to embrace the strange premise and the complete lack of science/physics related to the central plot (or just, like, think of it like a metaphor?). If you can do that, this is a surprising, tender, and often very funny story about a woman figuring herself out in the midst of some very weird circumstances. If I’m being honest, I’m not sure that the center quite holds. There are times when it feels flimsy even with the suspension of disbelief required to buy in, and the prose veers into the very obvious and heavy-handed at times. But it was still an interesting debut and an unusual bildungsroman, and I’d read more from Su in the future!
Sucker Punch: Essays by Scaachi Koul: Koul’s first book of essays about race, body image, love, and growing up with immigrant parents left readers with a glimpse into her future: an upcoming four-day wedding and settling into domestic bliss. Instead, the Covid pandemic hit, her marriage fell apart, she lost her job, and her mom was diagnosed with cancer. In this new collection, Koul examines what happens when the life you imagined for yourself doesn’t materialize and you have to forge a new path. She also examines fights she’s had throughout her life: with her parents, with her friends, with her ex, and with herself and tries to determine when it’s best to fight it out or walk away.
I loved Koul’s first collection of essays and was a huge fan of her culture writing when she worked at Buzzfeed.2 Her writing manages to be smart and sarcastic as well as deeply confessional, while also figuring out ways to marry her humor with analytical insights. As much as I was looking forward to this follow-up collection of essays, I found the experience of reading them to be strangely hollow. I struggled to figure out what Koul was trying to accomplish with them, and I found myself frustrated by the fact that they seemed to meander without offering any real insight or growth. She also attempts to connect Hindu mythology with the broader themes of her essays, and it absolutely does not work, which makes for a very uneven reading experience. Even her insights about why her marriage fell apart feel half-developed and like she’s holding back everything that the reader might relate or connect to. There are still funny moments in this, and sharp bits of writing that will stick with me, but the entire thing felt very underbaked to me. A stumble.
What I Watched:3
With Love, Meghan, Season 1 (Netflix): Meghan tries to reimagine the genre of lifestyle programming, blending practical tips and tricks for hosting with conversations with friends.
Look, I’m on the record about generally liking Meghan (Markle4), and finding her and Prince Harry’s story compelling and sympathetic, even if a little…flawed. I liked her when she was an actor on Suits and in a couple of (pretty good!) Hallmark movies and while I didn’t read her lifestyle blog The Tig, I know it was popular. I do think she’s had the most impossible time with the press and the British royal family, and am glad that they’ve escaped for the beautiful mountains of Montecito.5 This most recent foray into the lifestyle space makes sense for her, given the former blog and her attempt to launch a (luxury?) line of preserves. And there are certainly moments in this show that are pleasant enough to watch - who doesn’t love a beautifully set table for a tea party? Who doesn’t like to stare at an absolutely gorgeous mountain vista while drinking tea and eating cake?
But I’d be lying if I didn’t wonder, more than once during the handful of episodes I watched, who this show is for, given the state of…everything right now. I understand wanting to find beauty and joy in the small things, but I will admit that it’s a little dystopian to watch a very rich woman stage gorgeous tea parties for literally zero guests and not think of the cost, even as they talk about how it’s “so affordable if you go to flea markets.” There’s an almost desperate quality to her attempts to seem both relatable and aspirational, and the result is that the whole thing feels very hollow. In fact, my biggest takeaway of the episodes that I watched is that it all feels so weirdly joyless? There are glimpses of her charisma, but they’re eclipsed by her clear desire for perfection, and the result is a very beige viewing experience. It’s not unwatchable, but it’s not something that I would seek out or even tepidly recommend. If you want an excellent bullet-point rundown of each episode, Caroline Siede at Girl Culture has just that for you.
What I Listened To:
Lady Gaga, MAYHEM: Gaga promised that her seventh studio album would be a return to the sounds that her earliest fans knew and loved, and she really delivered on it. I’ve only gotten through the album a couple of times so far, but the sounds that launched her into fame are present throughout the 14 songs,6 and more than once I marveled at the similarities to “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face.” Indeed, there is a lot of the post-industrial dance music on this album, but there’s also a lot of 80s-inspired funk that sounds very good with Gaga’s maximalist songs. She’s not afraid to make weird pop music, that’s for sure. I’ve already written about how fun the single “Abracadbra” is,7 but I also love “Disease” and “How Bad Do U Want Me.” I’m not sure that this will end up in my top albums of the year, but there are a lot of bangers on here that will definitely make it onto my workout playlists. Fun!
What I’m Looking Forward To:
Government Cheese (Apple TV, April 16): The Chambers live in San Fernando Valleyd in 1969, and when their patriarch comes home after a stint in prison, he finds that his family have moved on without him, setting off a chaotic series of events. Apple TV shows are always extremely hit or miss for me, but the cast in this one is impressive and I’m excited to see what “surrealist family comedy” means in this context.
Long Bright River (Peacock, March 13): Mickey is a police officer in Philadelphia who finds herself embroiled in a series of murders that might have a connection to her past. This adaptation from a novel of the same name by Liz Moore boasts Amanda Seyfried in a starring role, and yet I’ve heard almost nothing about it? That doesn’t bode well, but I’ll eagerly check it out all the same.
A Nice Indian Boy (Theaters, April 4): When a soft-spoken Indian doctor brings his white boyfriend home to meet his traditional family, misunderstandings threaten to derail the relationship. Karan Soni8 and Jonathan Groff in a romcom? Sign me up!
That’s it for this week! I’ll be back next week with some TV tidbits, book reviews, and whatever else catches my fancy. Have a great weekend, and thanks, as always, for reading!
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Do I love a slinky black silhouette? Sure! Does that make me basic and/or boring? Maybe!
This was before the site turned into a listicle machine with the lowest quality content imaginable.
Still a lot of ER over here! I’m up to season 9, and somehow also convinced my husband to watch Doctor Odyssey from the start, so that’s what’s taking up our time. For the record, he thinks the show is absolutely ridiculous but is laughing so hard that it sparks joy for me. I love this smooth-brain stupid show!
There is a WILD moment in the show when she corrects Mindy Kaling about her last name now being Sussex, and how it’s SO IMPORTANT for her to feel connected to her children that way that is incredibly uncomfortable! That whole episode feels…uncanny valley.
Though the fact that this show is mostly filmed in a rented kitchen down the road from her actual house is…very distracting, at the least.
Inexplicably, the album ends with her Bruno Mars duet, “Die with a Smile,” a song that has somehow been at the top of the charts for weeks without me ever really hearing it anywhere.
It’s a good thing I like this song, because I’ve heard it in something like six Peloton rides in the past few weeks.
My husband is going to see this and say, “How do I know that guy?” The answer is from Deadpool.
I am with Elyse! I’ll watch that one and Government Cheese—if it doesn’t get too surreally violent. But Long Bright River—no way!
My favorite friday. activities isgoing thru the trailers on your note.