This week, a beloved and strange journey continued, a guy who once seemed to be on the ropes continued riding high, and we remembered a visionary unlike any other.
Here's what NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to — and what you should check out this weekend.
The Agency
The Agency on Paramount+ stars Michael Fassbender, Jeffrey Wright and Jodie Turner-Smith. The first episode is directed by Joe Wright. It's fabulously good. The story is about a CIA agent who's been too quickly pulled back from undercover. He's got to go back to his real life, but he already started this beautiful relationship undercover. There's not enough transition so he has to abandon his old life and all these connections he's had, which is really a challenge. He comes back to work for the CIA, but now he works in the London office, and all of a sudden this love that he had from his past life shows up. Is she an agent or is it just happenstance? The universe wants them to be together. Joe Wright does romance so well. It's equal parts romance and espionage and now is the perfect time to jump in. It is excellent, fun to watch, beautifully filmed, and well-written. One of the best pilots I've seen in a long time. — Joelle Monique
The Pitt
The Pitt on Max is a show about an emergency room in Pittsburgh, which is part of why it's called "The Pitt." As a '90s kid, I'm never mad at Noah Wyle employment. He plays the head doctor and every episode is an hour at his ER during one day. The whole season is going to add up to 24 hours. It's all the nostalgia of the 1994 ER with more realism in portraying some of these scenarios. The show deals with things like having to tell a family that their child is brain dead, a mom trying to deal with her son being an incel. There's all of these different slice-of-life scenarios within an ER that I didn't realize I missed so much from the old show. — B.A. Parker
Philomena Cunk
Philomena Cunk is a character who is a know nothing investigative reporter. She goes around and makes these grand proclamations about the world and she's totally uninformed. She says things that are partially correct, but are also actually very incorrect. She wrote and narrated two audio books: Cunk on Everything and The World According to Cunk. These books are very funny. Cunk on Everything is alphabetical, so there's an entry for you art, there's an entry for architecture and she has a little blurb about each thing. It's like a dictionary by a person who doesn't know anything. — Linda Holmes
The work of late director David Lynch
Lynch was a towering and hugely influential figure in film and television. You'll see a lot of appreciations about him exposing the darkness and depravity hidden behind white picket fences, the seamy underbelly of suburbia in films like Blue Velvet and the TV series Twin Peaks.
He was a filmmaker drawn to dreams: How dreams intersect with and inform reality, how they're always kind of bubbling away in the subconscious. A lot of his work uses dream logic: it's not narrative structure that connects things scene to scene. Events don't happen sequentially. Instead, it's emotions and characters that are the connective tissue.
I think he's most compelling when he dials back some of those surreal impulses to let a traditional storytelling structure impose itself. Then, you get something like Twin Peaks, which he co-created with Mark Frost. The two of them snuck some very disturbing, surreal and cinematic images and ideas into American living rooms, into the heads of millions of people who would never be caught dead watching an "art film."
Here are two Lynch works I'd recommend checking out this weekend: Mulholland Drive on Criterion is Lynch at the height of his powers making a movie that only he would ever make. And then watch the eighth episode of Twin Peaks: The Return on Paramount Plus. Whether you are familiar with his work or not, you're going to come away from those two watches very confused. They are not interested in telling a simple story. They're interested in offering you a visual experience where story takes a backseat to things like emotions and imagery. — Glen Weldon
More recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter
by Linda Holmes
I haven't seen the Netflix movie Back in Action yet, but it stars Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx as parents who are spies, and it's been a while since Diaz has been in a big movie. As a noted defender of some of the Netflix blockbuster-y films, I'll be interested to see whether this one appeals.
This piece in The Cut about the investigation of a teenage girl who was cyberbullied mercilessly threw me for several loops. It ends with a veiled criticism of true crime content, but it's interesting to think about whether that fully lands, given that the girl and her family at the center had little to do with the piece. It's a fascinating, well-written story, but as a reader, deciding which explorations of someone's misery are just reporting and which pieces are exploitation is complicated.
I've been watching several entries in what I've been calling the "Gifted Eccentric Procedural" genre — which, as someone mentioned to me, goes back at least as far as Sherlock Holmes. A couple of them are relatively new: ABC's High Potential, starring Kaitlin Olson as a mom with a high IQ who becomes a consultant for the police, and Fox's Doc, a medical drama starring Molly Parker as a doctor who suffers from amnesia after a car accident. Both are streaming on Hulu, and I've been enjoying them, although High Potential is more comedic and Doc is more dramatic.
Dhanika Pineda adapted the Pop Culture Happy Hour segment "What's Making Us Happy" for the Web. If you like these suggestions, consider signing up for our newsletter to get recommendations every week. And listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
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