Between movies, books, music, comics, podcasts, and the ever-growing glut of TV, there’s a ton of pop culture out there.
It can be a lot to keep up with. So we here at Vox Culture — where our current obsessions include the new Wonder Woman movie, a hilarious under-the-radar sitcom, and a slow jam about LaCroix sparkling water — have a few suggestions for how to make the best use of your pop culture–consuming time.
Here are some items you should really consider adding to your pop culture diet.
Wonder Woman is the best Warner Bros. superhero movie since Christopher Nolan’s Batman films
Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman — though no character in her new movie Wonder Woman addresses her as anyone other than Diana Prince — has been compared to Christopher Reeve’s Superman. It’s for good reason: Gadot brings the spirit, joy, and majesty of the legendary comic book hero to life in the film, the first solo female superhero film in our current cinematic superhero era.
Wonder Woman, from director Patty Jenkins, also happens to be the best-received Warner Bros. superhero movie since Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and it stands alone well, even if you aren’t super familiar with the DC cinematic universe. Go see it as soon as you can. —Alex Abad-Santos
Season 3 of My Dad Wrote a Porno is here. Who will blink next?
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8584871/my_dad_wrote_a_porno_cover_art_j1kurqvb.jpg)
If you’re a fan of the comedy podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno, it’s understandable if you’ve been wary about what season three might entail. Jamie Morton’s dad’s addictive porn writing might have grown self-aware (and less funny) thanks to the growing fame of the podcast, which has already garnered celebrity voice performers like Star Wars’ Daisy Ridley because they started out as fans themselves.
But now that it’s back — having returned on May 29 after a six-month hiatus — we can assure you that in the first weekly episode at least, the cast of characters from Dad’s Belinda Blinked novels are just as sexy and confused as ever. —Aja Romano
Watch the first season of NBC’s hilarious Trial & Error, assuming you missed it (like most of us did)
It’s too bad that NBC’s Trial & Error got lost in the general deluge of television this past spring, because the mockumentary comedy — which details a true crime case in the South, Making a Murderer–style — ended up being one of the funniest shows to come along in a while. As fish-out-of-water lawyer Josh (Nicholas D'Agosto) struggles to prove that his bumbling client Larry (the dependably great John Lithgow) didn’t kill his wife, the town of East Peck comes alive with oddballs played to perfection by the likes of Sherri Shepherd (30 Rock) and Jayma Mays (Glee).
The series is sharp, it’s weird, and it’s been renewed for an unlikely second season, so now’s a great time to check it out. The first season is available to buy on iTunes on Amazon, with episodes nine through 13 available to stream on Hulu and NBC.com. —Caroline Framke
The song of the summer is officially “Cut to the Feeling” by Carly Slay Rae Jepsen
Sorry, “Despacito” — Carly Rae Jepsen’s, a.k.a. the Canadian queen of joyful pop music, is poised to steal the title of 2017’s song of the summer. Jepsen’s soaring new track “Cut to the Feeling” is addictively catchy, fueled by the kind of euphoria that comes with forgetting about how dumb the world can be and just letting loose. Crank this one loud, often, and with zero regard for noise ordinances. Your summer will thank you. —CF
The great, cheesy-ass detective show Hart to Hart is now on DVD
The detective dramas of the ‘80s were positively dripping with cheese, but sometimes, that’s all you want out of life. This is why it’s a good thing that Shout! Factory has brought all five seasons of Hart to Hart — one of the cheesiest (and best) ‘80s detective dramas of them all — to DVD. (Okay, the show debuted in 1979, but that’s still ‘80s enough for me.)
Robert Wagner and Stefanie Powers (the ‘80s!) play married rich people Jonathan and Jennifer Hart, who lead lavish lives and seem to find themselves embroiled in murder investigations everywhere they go. Like you do! Their faithful butler Max (Lionel Stander) helps them out of jams and narrates their glorious title sequence. Is this great TV? Nah. But it’s great nostalgia. —Todd VanDerWerff
The Whole Plate explains film theory, using the Transformers films. Sure!
Video essayist Lindsay Ellis, one of the best YouTube critics out there (and, I should add, a Vox contributor), begins her new video series, The Whole Plate, with what sounds like a weird dare. The Transformers franchise is among the most successful in film history, she points out, but there’s very little critical writing about it compared to other franchises in its weight class, like Star Wars or even the Marvel films.
With The Whole Plate, Ellis aims not just to fix that, but also to teach viewers how to “read” a film; the series is basically Film Theory 101 using the Transformers movies. Even if you’ve heard a lot of this stuff before, Ellis’s witty presentation will reintroduce you to the concepts in a fun way. The third episode (embedded above) is one of the best pieces of criticism I’ve seen on why so many modern blockbusters can seem so forgettable. —TV
The book Version Control is the only book that makes sense of the world we live in. It is about time travel.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8619355/25733442.jpg)
Early in Dexter Palmer’s enormous novel Version Control — which was written between 2008 and 2015 and published in early 2016 — the main character can’t help but think that something is wrong with reality. The world just seems a little off-kilter. It feels like the wrong person is president. Little bits and pieces of her life keep drifting off course. And then her TV goes nuts, as its auto-Photoshopping features appear to go on the fritz and devour the faces of people onscreen.
Did I mention there’s a time machine? Our hero’s husband is attempting to build just such a thing (though he huffily calls it a “Causality Violation Device”), and throughout the book, you might think, “Oh, someone has time traveled, and that’s why the world feels wrong.”
But Version Control never quite goes where you expect it to. It’s a The Way We Live Now novel about the age of big data and social media and performative identity on the internet, only one that takes place a short while in the future. It is smart and compulsively readable and maybe a little too long, but I also never wanted it to end. Reading it feels like living in 2017, even though it never once calls attention to itself. Maybe someone in our reality is working on a causality violation device too. —TV
“LaCroix Boi” brings slow-jam sexiness to sparkling water
Rare — and glorious — is the comedy song that’s also a jam in its own right, but Chicago-via-LA rapper Big Dipper’s “LaCroix Boi” handily rises to that distinction. A fizzy slow jam laced with Autotuned entendre that grinds all over the line separating mockery and genuine affection, “La Croix Boi” turns on the assumed eroticism of the ultra-trendy “water juice,” celebrating the brand’s tongue-tickling bubbles and range of flavors. (Good luck getting “and that pamplemousse” out of your head after listening.) The accompanying video is a treat, too, featuring all manner of LaCroix can-based crafts, silk-pajamaed dancers, and seltzer showers aplenty. —Genevieve Koski
The Invisibilia podcast returns for an ambitious third season
It’s been 10 months since the NPR podcast Invisibilia (Latin for “invisible things”) wrapped its second season, and co-hosts Hanna Rosin and Alix Spiegel have spent that time cooking up a whopper of a third go-round. Presented as something akin to a concept album, season three is diving deep into what might be the murkiest and charged invisible force of all: emotions.
The through-line of the season is a theory called “constructed emotion,” a still-revolutionary idea that emotions are not innate and beyond our control, but rather learned concepts. The first two episodes premiered this week, with the first devoted to a bizarre and heartbreaking lawsuit that changed how the law interprets emotions, and the second following a man discovering a new emotion. —GK
