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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@NPR
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English
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635 Massachusetts Avenue NW Washington, DC 20001 (202) 513-3232
Episodes
2026 Resolutions and What’s Making Us Happy
1/2/2026
Hope springs eternal, and that is nowhere more true than in the realm of New Year’s Resolutions. Today, we give ourselves goals for 2026. And because we believe in accountability, we’ll tell you how well we stuck to our resolutions for 2025.
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Duration:00:25:34
2026 Pop Culture Predictions
12/31/2025
What does 2026 have in store for pop culture? Today, we’re back for another year of pop culture predictions. We’ll touch on A.I., the future of RuPaul’s Drag Race, and what’s to come for the Law & Order Universe. Plus, we check in on our prognosticating for 2025 and see how things worked out.
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Duration:00:29:22
2025 Best Video Games
12/30/2025
If you’re anything like us, you spend a fair amount of your screen time playing video games. Whether you like combat, horror, or peacefully going over archival research, NPR’s roundup of best games of 2025 is a helpful guide to find something that’s just right for you. Today we’re talking about some of the best video games featured including Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Hades II, Silent Hill f, Butcher’s Creek and The Roottrees Are Dead.
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Duration:00:19:59
2025 Books We Love
12/29/2025
NPR’s Books We Love is a roundup of the best books from the past year, sorted and tagged to help you find exactly what you’re looking for. This year we’ve got hundreds of book recommendations, so today, we’re highlighting some of our favorites – including Actress of a Certain Age by Jeff Hiller, The Ten Year Affair by Erin Somers, and Cannon by Lee Lai.
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Duration:00:10:06
Anaconda
12/26/2025
The new Anaconda movie is a meta reimaging in which Jack Black and Paul Rudd play aspiring filmmakers who attempt to make… a meta reimagining of Anaconda. It’s not quite a reboot, it’s not quite a sequel, and it’s played for laughs.
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Duration:00:20:37
Marty Supreme and What’s Making Us Happy
12/24/2025
The new movie Marty Supreme asks, can Timothée Chalamet play a supremely annoying character and still keep us interested from beginning to end? He stars as a working-class heel aiming to become a table tennis champion in the 1950s and features an eclectic supporting cast that includes Gwyneth Paltrow and Tyler, the Creator.
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Duration:00:23:18
Best Christmas Gift I Ever Received
12/23/2025
What's the best Christmas gift you ever received? You probably didn't have to think about it; you knew it in your bones. Today, in this encore episode, we're talking about the actual, tangible gift you found waiting for you under the tree and still think about it from time to time.
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Duration:00:21:51
The Housemaid
12/22/2025
The twisty thriller The Housemaid stars Sydney Sweeney as a newly hired live-in housekeeper to Amanda Seyfried’s wealthy housewife. Both women have dark secrets, and their dynamic goes downhill real fast. It’s directed by Paul Feig of Bridesmaids and A Simple Favor, so you know it’s going to be a bizarre, fun ride.
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Duration:00:21:32
Avatar: Fire And Ash and What’s Making Us Happy
12/19/2025
In Avatar: Fire and Ash, James Cameron’s saga continues in a visually stunning movie full of epic battles, uneasy alliances, human assimilation, and debates with whales. The film follows the Na’vi (aka blue guys) as they’re chased by a human military that seeks both resources and revenge. The cast includes Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña, and Sam Worthington.
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Duration:00:24:30
Heated Rivalry
12/18/2025
The new show Heated Rivalry is a very sexy and very queer hockey romance streaming on HBO Max–and it’s a phenomenon. It follows archrival players Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie) as they carry on a clandestine affair off the ice. And since it’s based on a whole series of interconnected romance novels by Rachel Reid, it may be with us for a very long time.
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Duration:00:20:55
Fallout
12/17/2025
Fallout is based on a hugely successful video game series known for blending a sardonic, very dark comedic sensibility, and violence. The series is set in the game's post-apocalyptic world – an America divided into factions wrestling for control of an irradiated wasteland. When the hopeful Lucy (Ella Purnell) steps out of the comfortable life she's known in an underground vault, the world she's confronted with is harsh, brutal, merciless – and kinda funny. Fallout just returned for a second season on Prime Video, so today we’re revisiting our conversation about the show.
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Duration:00:18:43
Great Movies We Missed
12/16/2025
Every year, we like to take a moment to look back and spotlight a few favorite films we didn’t have time to talk about. Today, we're making recommendations for great movies we missed in 2025 including The Secret Agent, Come See Me In the Good Light, Cactus Pears, and 100 Nights of Hero.
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Duration:00:19:04
Mailbag: The Movies We Walked Out Of
12/14/2025
This usually would be a bonus episode just for Pop Culture Happy Hour+ supporters, but this being the season of giving, we're sharing this one with everyone! To hear more bonus content like this every month and to support NPR and public radio, sign up for Pop Culture Happy Hour+ at plus.npr.org/happy
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Duration:00:14:55
Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery And What’s Making Us Happy
12/12/2025
Netflix’s Wake Up Dead Man is the third installment in the Knives Out franchise. Daniel Craig returns as detective Benoit Blanc -- with a cast of suspects that includes Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Jeremy Renner, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington and Thomas Haden Church. This time out, the mystery gets ecclesiastical in nature, involving the murder of Josh Brolin’s fire-and-brimstone priest at a small church.
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Duration:00:27:53
Jay Kelly
12/10/2025
In Netflix’s Jay Kelly, George Clooney plays the aging movie star Jay Kelly. His longtime manager (Adam Sander) and publicist (Laura Dern) struggle to manage Jay on a trip through Europe as he deals with the difficult relationship he has with his two grown daughters. From director and co-writer Noah Baumbach, the film is an exploration of regret and missed opportunities.
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Duration:00:21:56
The Worst Christmas Movies
12/9/2025
‘Tis the season you’ll find plenty of good holiday movies – films that can be counted upon to deliver warmth and cheer. And bad holiday movies? They can be fun in their own way. So we’re debating: what’s the worst Christmas movie of all time? We’ll talk about Love Actually, Jingle All The Way, I Believe In Santa, and Scrooge & Marley.
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Duration:00:24:18
The Abandons
12/8/2025
In Netflix’s The Abandons, Gillian Anderson and Lena Headey play two steely matriarchs that face off on the American frontier. But don’t let the spurs and cowboy hats fool you. At its heart, the new Western series is a sudsy nighttime soap. But is that a good thing?
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Duration:00:12:30
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 and What’s Making Us Happy
12/5/2025
In the new film Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, Josh Hutcherson returns as the protagonist trying to survive in a haunted children’s restaurant called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. The creepy animatronic robots remain, and the sequel adds fresh lore and extends the action beyond the original abandoned restaurant.
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Duration:00:17:37
2025 Pop Culture Favorites
12/4/2025
It’s been a great year for TV, movies, and music. And we are highlighting some of the best, including KPop Demon Hunters, Sinners, and Severance. We’ll also talk about some things you might have missed.
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Duration:00:43:28
Rereading Pride & Prejudice
12/2/2025
This year, readers around the world are celebrating Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. Today we’ve got an episode of NPR’s Books We’ve Loved where Linda Holmes, Andrew Limbong and B.A. Parker discuss Austen’s seminal novel Pride & Prejudice. The trio weighs in on how the romance genre continues to reference the book’s “enemies to lovers” story – and why the tale’s leads Lizzie Bennet and Mr. Darcy still make us and laugh and swoon even today.
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Duration:00:27:56