Fall Guide

This fall, there’s a lot of movies and TV on tap for you to see. And we're as excited for all of it to arrive as you are. So we’ve got a guide to what’s worth keeping on your radar, including Wicker, Wildwood, Wild Horse Nine, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother and Avatar: Seven Havens. Looking for more buzzy movie recommendations? Check out these episodes: ‘Resident Evil' is a grisly, funny fight to survive https://www.npr.org/2026/09/18/nx-s1-5973148/resident-evil-is-a-grisly-funny-fight-to-survive ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ is as looney as it needs to be https://www.npr.org/2026/08/28/nx-s1-5946403/coyote-vs-acme-is-as-looney-as-it-needs-to-be ‘The End Of Oak Street’ is a prehistoric good time https://www.npr.org/2026/08/14/nx-s1-5930407/the-end-of-oak-street-is-a-prehistoric-good-time Connect with Pop Culture Happy Hour: Letterboxd https://letterboxd.com/nprpopculture/ / Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pchh Our weekly newsletter https://www.npr.org/newsletter/pop-culture Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org http://plus.npr.org/. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Linda Holmes?

  You're listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour, the podcast that keeps you plugged in about the latest and greatest in pop culture. Now, if you're a pop culture enthusiast that's not following the show yet, we're recommending you fix that right away by following Pop Culture Happy Hour on your favorite podcast app.

• 0:30Stephen Thompson?

  All right. Well, first of all, the trailer includes a review that calls Wicker, quote, vulgar, horny and heartwarming, or as I call them, the big three.

• 0:40Linda Holmes?

  Uh huh.

• 0:41Stephen Thompson?

  Inside us, there are three wolves. They should all be fed constantly.

• 0:45Linda Holmes?

  Oh, right. Yeah.

• 0:50Linda Holmes?

  A handsome man made of wicker, heists, new efforts from great directors. The fall of 2026 has a lot on tap for you to see, and we are as excited for all of it to arrive as you are.

• 1:01Stephen Thompson?

  Whether you're looking to watch in theaters or at home, we expect these next couple of months to keep you and us very, very busy. I'm Stephen Thompson.

• 1:09Linda Holmes?

  And I'm Linda Holmes. And today on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour, we're offering a guide to some of the movies and TV we are most looking forward to checking out this fall. Joining us today are co-hosts Aisha Harris. Hello, Ayesha.

• 1:23Aisha Harris?

  Hey, Linda.

• 1:24Linda Holmes?

  And Glen Weldon. Hello there, Glenn.

• 1:26Speaker 04

  Hey, it's our fall guide. I call it our autumn guide because I'm pretentious, but hey.

• 1:31Linda Holmes?

  Oh, fair enough. Fair enough. All right, we are going to get right into our picks because I'm happy to say we have a lot of ground to cover. A few of these things we have seen, a lot of them we haven't yet. Ayesha, I'm going to start with one you did just see at the Toronto International Film Festival.

• 1:46Aisha Harris?

  Yes, yes. That is Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, or as I like to call it for short, Your Mother Cubed, because saying it three times gets a mouthful.

• 1:57Speaker 04

  Calls her into being, yeah.

• 1:59Aisha Harris?

  Yes, yes, yes. This is written and directed by Basam Tarek, who did Mogul Mogli, which was a very good film from a few years ago starring Riz Ahmed. This time, his star is Mahershala Ali. And if this sounds familiar, you might have seen this swirling in the news because Tarek and Ali were both attached to the Blade reboot that eventually got scrapped. And sort of out of the ashes of that, this movie has emerged. And I am very happy. Look, Blade, fun. I'm glad people were excited about that, but I will always prefer non IP. And this is an original story where Ali is playing Latif, a Muslim hitman who's suddenly thrust into single fatherhood after his wife dies. Obviously, this brings up some conflict because you can't just suddenly stop being a hitman.

• 2:42Stephen Thompson?

  Believe me, I've tried.

• 2:43Aisha Harris?

  Oh, yes. Once you're in, you're in, even if your wife dies. So he has to try and, you know, step into the role of being a father of these three kids. But then at the same time, his boss is at war with an eccentric Christian cult leader who's played by John Cho, who is like going big and silly here, like think righteous gemstones bonkers. That's all I'll say. This is not a movie that I think like, yes, you hear hitman, but it's not action-packed in the way that you might expect. It's not very John Wiki in that way. It has its moments, but it's a lot more meditative and thoughtful about religion and faith and how those things conflict with being a hitman. And Mahershala Ali is just doing some great work here, and it's beautiful. The cinematography is great. So Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother Cubed.

• 3:27Aisha Harris?

  It's a fun movie and deep and thoughtful.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Nice. Cool. I'm looking forward to this because I'd seen his film Mogul Mogli. That got released at the height of the pandemic, so I don't think enough people saw it, but I'm looking forward to it. I also note in passing that there's a character played by Tiffany Boone called Fugazi, which makes me, as a DC resident, wonder if there's also characters called Minor Threat and Rights of Spring. I'm looking forward to this.

• 3:49Linda Holmes?

  Yeah. The only thing I'm taking away from this one myself is Aisha Harris says you can't just stop being a hitman.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  Let it be known.

• 3:57Linda Holmes?

  That's what I've learned so far from our fall guide slash autumn guide. Okay. So you saw that in Toronto at the Film Festival. You also saw in Toronto at the Film Festival, my first pick, even though I have not seen it yet, my first pick is Elsinore. This is a film in which Andrew Scott, one of my personal favorite actors, plays the Scottish actor Ian Charlson. I suspect most Americans, if they know Charlson, would know him as one of the leads of Chariots of Fire. Elsinore is about the last chapter of his life in which he threw himself into playing Hamlet while he was dying of AIDS. And on the one hand, I will admit there is part of me that gets a little bit weary of

• 4:42Linda Holmes?

  the obsession with Hamlet.

• 4:44Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, it's having a moment.

• 4:45Linda Holmes?

  Doing Hamlet, productions of Hamlet, how Hamlet came to be. But of course, for a bunch of reasons, it is, to me, a very intriguing idea that Charlson was wrestling with this particular role while also thinking not only about mortality, which is very much what Hamlet is about, but also identity, since he was gay, but he was not out, certainly not an unusual decision in 1989 when this happened. But mostly, I just have a huge amount of trust in Andrew Scott.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 5:18Linda Holmes?

  Who I have found so riveting in so many things and so interesting in so many things. He's just an actor that I get so much out of watching. And the idea of him digging into this story is enough to make me very excited to see it despite any Hamlet fatigue.

• 5:36Aisha Harris?

  Absolutely. Yeah.

• 5:37Speaker 04

  I mean, as you say, it's Hamlet. There are resonances with mortality that folks have been finding for literally centuries. What interests me about this, though, is the Andrew Scott factor because he is a queer actor and queer actors often get slotted historically into playing, you know, AIDS narratives.

• 5:53Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 04

  That is something he has conspicuously avoided in his career. And it seems, you can't help it seem kind of intentional. So the fact that he's finally tackling this, I hope argues that this material, he thought, you know, rises above cliche. So I'm looking forward to his way into this.

• 6:09Stephen Thompson?

  Yeah. I mean, this movie's getting a ton of Oscar buzz, a lot of it surrounding Andrew Scott, who has somehow never been nominated for an Academy Award. I have not seen this film. I really hope it enters that conversation just because I have absolutely loved this guy's work for years and years and years.

• 6:25Aisha Harris?

  Yeah. And as the one person here who's seen it already, all I will say is that your trust in Andrew Scott will be rewarded.

• 6:33Linda Holmes?

  Well, that's good. I'm very glad to hear that. It would make me very sad if that were not the case. All right, from Hamlet to a very different milieu. Glenn, tell me about your first pick.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  My first pick is Club Kid, which hits theaters November 6. This is written, directed and stars Jordan Firstman. You know, Jordan Firstman, even if you don't know his name. You see him around a lot. He's very funny. He is also a very specific vibe. He used to write on Search Party, a show I loved. He's done a couple of short films. He appeared as a version of himself in the film Rotting in the Sun, a film I liked a lot. He was playing there, I think he often plays, which is a kind of vapid queer influencer type. That's the thing he likes to satirize. And he also, it seems to me, likes to dare the audience to find him likable, not antagonize outright, but just kind of like push. And when he shows up in shows like I Love LA or The English Teacher, he's playing with that, though of course he gets more screen time.

• 7:30Speaker 04

  So the character creates there, I think they're more sympathetic and more rounded. This seems to me to be the next step. He's playing a not as young as he was club promoter who discovers that he's got a 10 year old son that he didn't know he has and has to take care of. Now, my hackles are raised because that genre is not my tempo. What's going to be interesting is how does Jordan Firstman fit into that thing? Because that plot, you push very, not much on it, and it goes into machi and sentimental. You know, I used to be superficial and selfish, and then I had a kid and it saved my life. But Firstman is just not wired for the kind of broad, four quadrant, crowd pleasing, heartwarming stuff that this plot would indicate.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  So I just want to see how it works, right? How do you put an intentionally off putting persona into a film that trades on likability? Might not work, but it will be fascinating to watch. And my butt is already in the seat for this. That's Club Kid, which comes out on November 6.

• 8:29Linda Holmes?

  Yeah, I'm with you, Glenn. I think it's always interesting to see how a persona that's not likable becomes the center of a story. All right. Coming up, we've got more movies, including a curious looking one that has launched a ton of memes. Don't go away.

• 8:45Speaker 00

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• 10:00Speaker 05

  at Angie.com or on the Angie app.

• 10:04Linda Holmes?

  Welcome back. If you're not following Pop Culture Happy Hour yet, can you hit that follow button on your podcast app? Because that way you can stay plugged into everything PCHH has to offer. Stephen, why did you pick Wicker?

• 10:20Stephen Thompson?

  All right. Well, first of all, the trailer includes a review that calls Wicker, quote, vulgar, horny and heartwarming, or as I call them, the big three. Inside us, there are three wolves. They should all be fed constantly.

• 10:34Linda Holmes?

  Oh, right. Yeah.

• 10:35Stephen Thompson?

  And this film certainly seems like it's doing that. It stars Olivia Colman as a lonely fisherwoman in a small village, the kind of role that Olivia Colman has certainly played before. She enlists Peter Dinklage to make her a husband, and he makes her a Wicker man shaped like Alexander Skarsgård.

• 10:53Aisha Harris?

  Oof, hot.

• 10:54Stephen Thompson?

  Ayesha is fanning herself.

• 10:58Stephen Thompson?

  As we speak, and look, many would take this bargain. Y'all, I just want weird. I want weird and made by humans. And I also want to see Olivia Colman, who, not for nothing, is also in Elsinore. This is definitely an award season in which Olivia Colman plans to participate. When you watch the trailer, you see what Alexander Skarsgård looks like as a hot dude made out of wicker. The trailer is not hiding the ball on this at all, but this film looks weird. And I'm just here for that. I, like Aisha, I am definitely exhausted with IP. I want to see original stories. This looks like an original story. Sort of the way we talk about trusting Andrew Scott, I trust Olivia Colman. And I am enormously curious.

• 11:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is a fascinating plot. I mean, you gotta worry about chafing, that's A. But I bet he looks great on a patio. You also have to bring him inside during the winter, or he's gonna crack, so.

• 11:50Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, true.

• 11:51Speaker 04

  This is fascinating. I'm so in for this.

• 11:53Aisha Harris?

  Same. I think it premiered at Sundance, and I missed it, but everyone I know who saw it was like, it's weird in a good way, and that's exactly what you want to hear. So, yes, fanning myself, excited, yes.

• 12:06Linda Holmes?

  All right, all right, all right. We're gonna leave it there. So that is Wicker. It is in theaters on October 23rd. My second pick is not, I think, as offbeat as that, based on the description. I chose Wild Horse 9. Wild Horse 9 is from writer and director Martin McDonagh, who has done some things I like very, very much, and also made Three Billboards outside Epping, Missouri. A little bit like Aaron Sorkin. I like McDonagh better when he deals with lower stakes in something like The Banshees of Inisherin. Not low, I understand that the stakes are high emotionally and intimately and all of that stuff, but you know what I mean.

• 12:49Linda Holmes?

  So, a film like Wild Horse 9, which is about two CIA agents sent to Easter Island shortly before the 1973 coup in Chile, might seem too high stakes for me, but these two guys are being played by Sam Rockwell and John Malkovich. And somehow, I exactly feel like those two guys should play meddling CIA agents from the 1970s in a Martin McDonagh movie. That sounds exactly right to me. And I really loved the trailer. Steve Buscemi is in this, Parker Posey is in this. I might wind up not liking it at all, but it doesn't seem to have the earnest moralizing of some of the McDonagh stuff I don't like as much.

• 13:31Linda Holmes?

  While it does have more of the two guys talking weird energy that I tend to like from playwrights a lot of the time. So, I will do it. I will go see it.

• 13:42Stephen Thompson?

  As long as this movie is not trying to teach me about America.

• 13:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 13:45Stephen Thompson?

  I'm in.

• 13:46Linda Holmes?

  I think in some ways it is.

• 13:48Stephen Thompson?

  Okay.

• 13:48Linda Holmes?

  But maybe not in the same way. Aisha, you actually saw this in Toronto, so react for me.

• 13:54Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, I really, really dug this, and I'm with you. McDonagh is very much a, sometimes he works for me and sometimes he doesn't. This one is working, and yes, it's teaching you about America, but not in a didactic way. It's a criticism of a lot of the awful things we've done in other, in other countries and other territories. So, but it's also funny and also very macabre, and Malkovich is giving a very great performance here. I, I hate talking about award season already, but

• 14:22Linda Holmes?

  Right, right, right.

• 14:23Aisha Harris?

  I can smell it for him. I see it. It's, the smoke signals are going, you know, all that stuff.

• 14:29Linda Holmes?

  I feel like it's been a while since I saw, like, full-on Malkovich, high-energy, talk, talk, talk, really weird, kind of, I'm excited about that. That makes me very happy.

• 14:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I assure you have allayed my fears, because the last time that Rockwell worked with his director was Three Billboards. A film that was so bad, it made me think, wait, do I hate McDonagh? Has Sam Rockwell always been a cartoon?

• 14:53Aisha Harris?

  Oh, man.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  Is Frances McDormand not good? Like, that film had a power, a sinister power.

• 14:59Aisha Harris?

  It also has its defenders, so don't come for us.

• 15:02Speaker 04

  Trust me, I know.

• 15:03Stephen Thompson?

  It does. I am not among them.

• 15:05Linda Holmes?

  It does, for sure. I understand that. If you love it, that is fine for you. All right, so that is Wild Horse 9. We are gonna go next to one of Glenn's other picks. Glenn, you chose a movie that, from a director that I think you consistently like more than I consistently like McDonagh. What did you choose?

• 15:25Speaker 04

  I chose Bitter Christmas, which is a great title. Comes out in New York and LA November 13th, and then goes nationwide November 25th. This is, as you mentioned, the new Pedro Almodovar film, and that, to me, is reason enough. You know, going in, even not having seen a thing about it, that there's gonna be beautiful women and men in it. They're gonna have unusual striking features. It's gonna be melodrama. But in his later career, he tends to attack melodrama with utter sincerity. Whereas earlier, in things like Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, he would push the comedy into camp. Here, he's just playing it straight. Like a lot of his recent films, there's gonna be some, you know, navel casing about the creative life, the life of the artist, and also increasingly about aging.

• 16:07Speaker 04

  This film is about a tortured filmmaker making a film about a tortured filmmaker. So you got nested narrative, which is another thing, and then there's questions of how much of someone's life artists can use in their work. But I hope I'm not coming off as superficial as I know myself to be when I say that as soon as I watched the trailer, first thing I noticed was the colors. I am a mildly colorblind guy.

• 16:30Linda Holmes?

  Sure.

• 16:30Speaker 04

  I also noticed it in Greg Araki's I Want Your Sex. I mean, there are queer filmmakers out here who don't want to live in this gray, brown, raw, umber, washed-out universe that we're now making movies in.

• 16:41Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  There are his unusual, but I would say, characteristic color combinations. He's making these beautiful images. I will note that initial reviews have been kind of muted, saying he's just hitting the same beats he always hits.

• 16:54Speaker 04

  Make me want it more, right? I mean, like, symptomatically speaking, those are some block rocking beats.

• 16:59Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 16:59Speaker 04

  It's a nice beat, and it's easy to dance to, and I'm gonna get my cha-cha heels on. That's Bitter Christmas. I'm in.

• 17:04Linda Holmes?

  Bitter Christmas.

• 17:06Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Linda Holmes?

  Yeah. I think I value colors more and more as time goes on, because I share your distaste for things being too muted, too darkly shot, et cetera, et cetera.

• 17:17Speaker 04

  It's so funny. He's just somebody sitting in their office, and like, the wall is colored. There's color on the wall, and you're like, oh, so sad.

• 17:25Linda Holmes?

  No, it's true.

• 17:26Aisha Harris?

  I'll chime in here and say that I did see this at Toronto Film Festival, and, look, I'm very on board with this movie. I can see why some people might be like, this is more of this. It has a lot of similarities, I would say, to Pain and Glory. His movie from a few years ago with Antonio Banderas. Again, yes, the colors. It's Nancy Meyers and Almodovar movies. Like, I have so much house envy and decorating envy, and like, I want my house to look like one of these houses. And that's how I felt watching this, this movie. But the performances are great. Glenn, it will be, I think it will be your jam. I think it will.

• 18:00Linda Holmes?

  Yeah. I'm not so bothered by directors hitting familiar beats, because they all do that, you know?

• 18:06Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 18:07Linda Holmes?

  I think Scorsese does that, Spielberg does that. You get a lot of familiar beats from most of your, your major filmmakers who do a lot of work, so that does not bother me. Okay, speaking of, as we have been repeatedly, films Aisha saw in Toronto. We're gonna go to Aisha's next pick, which is called Possible Love. Tell me about this film.

• 18:28Aisha Harris?

  Yeah, we should probably just call this the Toronto Film Fest Fall Guide. But Possible Love is a movie that I was very much looking forward to, and I can say I wound up really enjoying, once I saw it. It's directed by Lee Chung Dong, whose last film was the great movie Burning, which came out in 2018, starred Steven Yeun. This is a, I wouldn't say it's a very different movie, but it's, as we were talking about with Almodovar, it's hitting some of the same notes as that one when it comes to examining class and wealth and disparities between those two things. But it's doing so in a very 2026 way. Basically, this is a movie about a couple who agree to become subjects for a documentary

• 19:10Aisha Harris?

  about laid-off employees and laborers' rights, and that couple's played by Jian Do Yan and Soo Kyung Gu. And then the documentarian is played by Cho Yo Jung, who I think a lot of listeners will probably recognize from the movie Parasite. And she's kind of this well-meaning, but kind of clueless documentarian who is basically inserting herself into their lives and trying to befriend them, thinking that she is in any way equal to them, even though her husband, who's played by Zoe In Sung, is an affluent businessman and very prominent, and they have this very large gap between the two. Basically, it's about the awkward, uncomfortable clashes between these couples' worlds. That's all I'll say about that, and I will say the movie goes in so many directions that I was not expecting it to do.

• 19:55Aisha Harris?

  It is not just your basic eat-the-rich sort of story. I think it's deeper than that. It's more thoughtful than that. And it's about how we attach ourselves to our work and what happens when you don't have that work anymore. This is like a pretty complimentary, I would say, to last year's No Other Choice in some ways, when we're talking about that. So, yeah, I, looking forward to this. It's being in theaters, limited release, in October 23rd, but then it'll be streaming on Netflix on November 6th. So, I imagine we're gonna be hearing a lot about this movie, because people will easily be able to see it very soon. So, Possible Love.

• 20:29Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 20:30Aisha Harris?

  Very good.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  I'm really looking forward to this, because I loved Burning so much. That film had such a slow burn feeling of dread, you know, this feeling that you just walked into a room and everyone stopped talking, and you don't know what's going on, but you know it's about you.

• 20:43Aisha Harris?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  It's a kind of thing that Hitchcock played with in a more kind of mass appeal way. This is more arthouse, this is more niche. I'm in, so in.

• 20:51Linda Holmes?

  All right. Possible love. Okay, we're gonna move on now to Stephen's pick, which is representing the world of animation, which we're always glad for. Stephen, tell me about your pick.

• 21:03Stephen Thompson?

  Well, earlier in this episode, I talked about Wicker, which comes out October 23rd. Also coming out October 23rd, Wildwood. I think you should pair these two films up for a wood double feature.

• 21:17Stephen Thompson?

  Look, Wildwood is, it's stop motion animation. It's about a girl and her friend who venture into an enchanted forest after the girl's infant brother is kidnapped by crows. It's based on a novel by Colin Malloy, the lead singer of The Decemberists. That book was very successful. And what sold me on Wildwood from the jump is that it is from Laika, the studio that brought us Coraline. The trailer actually says, "From the hands that made Coraline", which is telling you this is human art made by humans for human consumption.

• 21:50Linda Holmes?

  Not AI.

• 21:52Stephen Thompson?

  Laika also did Paranorman, they did Missing Link, they did the criminally underseen Kubo and the Two Strings,

• 21:59Speaker 04

  Agreed.

• 21:59Stephen Thompson?

  which was directed by Travis Knight, who also directs Wildwood. And, look, this movie looks extremely ambitious. If you watch the trailer, you will see epic battles. You will see, you will see a movie that looks like it not only cost a fortune, but took an unbelievable amount of time. It is beautiful to look at. It's also apparently going to be the longest stop motion animation film ever made, at 132 minutes. So this thing is gonna be an epic. It looks gorgeous. The trailer made me cry. It is engineered to make you cry. As Glenn was saying about a different film, my butt's in the seat.

• 22:36Linda Holmes?

  Yeah, Stephen Thompson crying, not exactly.

• 22:40Stephen Thompson?

  You know, it's like those directors who hit the familiar beats. I will hit the familiar beats of crying.

• 22:44Linda Holmes?

  Absolutely. Same, same.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's 2026, right? Everything is slick and glossy. Everything is slop. And this film has a texture. Everything has a roughness to it. There are sweaters in this trailer that actually have a nap to them. They pill, you know what I'm saying?

• 23:01Stephen Thompson?

  Oh, my gosh. Oh, the textures on the birds.

• 23:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:05Stephen Thompson?

  Looks so beautiful. And as with Wild Horse 9, it includes a performance by Tom Waits.

• 23:10Linda Holmes?

  Oh, okay, okay. So it's Tom Waits week on Pop Culture Happy Hour. All right. Thank you very much, Stephen Thompson. Again, that is Wildwood. Glenn, your next pick. I love this premise so much. I don't know anything about this movie, but I love this premise so much. Tell me about The Scout.

• 23:30Speaker 04

  This is The Scout, comes out September 25th in New York, then gets rolled out nationwide. This is not the 1994 Brendan Fraser baseball movie, although if you go searching for it online, that's all you're gonna find. This is a much smaller indie film. First feature written and directed by Paula Gonzalez-Nassar. It is based on her experiences as a location scout for television and movies. This is exactly the kind of small, little movie that is the darling of film festivals. It's giving Tribeca in a big way, which makes sense, because that's where it premiered last year. It's about a young woman who is a location scout. We follow her over the course of her day as she walks the streets of New York and gets invited into the homes of people whose apartments and townhouses might potentially be used in a television pilot.

• 24:13Speaker 04

  Do these people offer her charming quirky insights into their lives? Is it a love letter to New York? Well, I haven't seen it, but yes, and yes. I mean, I can feel very comfortable saying that. I've always been fascinated by the art of scouting locations. Ever since I read something, and this, tell me if this sounds familiar to you. Read something a while back by an actual location scout, who was complaining that directors always want the same Chinese restaurant. They always want the one that's dark red with beaded curtains and golden dragons everywhere. And this location scout was saying, "I tell them it doesn't exist. It hasn't existed since 1979." And they say, "No, I saw it in a movie. Just go down to Chinatown, you'll find it." And the location scout is like, "I've been to Chinatown. It's drop ceilings and fluorescent lights.

• 24:55Linda Holmes?

  Yes.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  This thing you want doesn't exist.

• 24:58Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  If you want it in your movie, you're gonna have to build it." So eventually they do, which perpetuates this idea that they still exist. So then directors will come to this person and say, "Yeah, just do it like the one that was in that movie." And he's like, "Ah." And this is something that, by the way, Charles used novel Interior Chinatown kind of riffs on. "I think it's just an interesting job because it's isolating. You spend your day alone, but then you're going from place to place. You're getting invited into these homes, but it's also about connection, because you're stepping into lives lived by real people to make something that isn't real." I'm in for this movie again. I agree with you, Lynda. Premise alone has had me.

• 25:31Linda Holmes?

  Yeah, well, speaking as someone whose only New York apartment I ever had was briefly considered to portray the despair of an isolated loner in a movie, I will say I find this entire process fascinating. I was ultimately kind of honored that my apartment did not make the cut.

• 25:48Stephen Thompson?

  I remember you saying, "I don't really want my apartment to signify a life of quiet desperation."

• 25:53Linda Holmes?

  That is true. And it didn't. Yeah. One point for me. That's all I can tell you. So I'm very, obviously very attached to this idea. All right, coming up, we've got some television that we're excited about, so stick around.

• 26:08Speaker 05

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• 27:28Linda Holmes?

  Okay, welcome back. Ayesha, this is a show that I know we are both jazzed about. Tell me about it.

• 27:34Aisha Harris?

  Well, guess what? I haven't seen this yet. So I'm going purely off of vibes. This is War, a show that will be on HBO and HBO Max starting in October 1st. This is written, created by George Kay. And where it has me at is that this is a legal drama that is set in London. And actually, it's already been greenlit for two seasons. And it's almost like an anthology type thing, where each season is focusing on a different legal battle with a different cast. So anthologies are hot right now. I'm into it. Let's see how this works. But Dominic West and Sienna Miller are playing this high-profile, like, celebrity couple who are getting a divorce. And that's basically all I know about it.

• 28:19Aisha Harris?

  And about what this is, you can probably say more about it, Lynda. But you had me at high-profile divorce. It's high stakes for them. It's not high stakes for anyone watching it. So that's how I feel about it. I'm like, yes, let's do this. And I love a legal drama.

• 28:33Linda Holmes?

  Yeah.

• 28:33Aisha Harris?

  I feel like I haven't had a good one, a new one, in a while, at least not on my radar. And so it feels perfect for fall. Like, give me a cozy legal drama about a high-profile couple who's, like, getting a very expensive divorce. Yes.

• 28:48Linda Holmes?

  This one right here is Point Holmes, because Ayesha has not seen this, but I have.

• 28:53Aisha Harris?

  Ooh.

• 28:53Linda Holmes?

  And I cannot say too much evaluating about it, because it is still embargoed, as of when our episode here is dropping. So I will not say too much about it to evaluate it. I do think you will find it to be more icy legal drama than cozy courtroom drama, which I don't mean to be negative. I just mean,

• 29:13Aisha Harris?

  Right.

• 29:13Linda Holmes?

  you know, all of those kind of cool, British, soapy, like, some of the stuff that, like, Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman and people like that pop up in, where everybody's just being very, very scandalous all the time? I think it's somewhat more in the tradition of that. I'm glad you picked it.

• 29:32Aisha Harris?

  Nice.

• 29:33Linda Holmes?

  I'm glad it's on our fall preview. Beyond that, I'm embargoed.

• 29:36Aisha Harris?

  You got it. You got it.

• 29:38Linda Holmes?

  It debuts October 1st on HBO. It'll be streaming on HBO Max. So War, legal thriller, legal drama. And not the only one that we're getting this fall, but yeah, I was excited about that one, too. All right, Stephen, we're moving on to you. Oh, buddy, tell me about this one. Avatar: Seven Havens.

• 29:57Stephen Thompson?

  All right, we have talked on this show at significant length about the TV shows Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. And I'm talking about the core original series, not the M. Night Shyamalan movie based on Avatar: The Last Airbender, not the kind of mediocre Netflix live-action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I'm talking about the core series. Avatar: Seven Havens is a continuation of the core series. It is a sequel to The Legend of Korra, so this is a post-Korra universe. For those who haven't seen the Avatar shows, it's about the world's four different clans, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water,

• 30:40Stephen Thompson?

  and the one Avatar who has the power to unite them. Seven Havens follows a new Avatar named Pavi. She's an earthbender in a world that's still reeling from a disaster of some kind. She's viewed with suspicion, because the Avatar is no longer viewed as kind of the savior of humanity. And, look, I mean, I'm so ready for a return to this kind of animation palette and these original kind of core feats of storytelling. I love the original Avatar. I really dug Legend of Korra, which is, you know, a little bit more flawed, but still extremely solid. I'm psyched to learn about a new Avatar and to watch these episodes kind of unfold.

• 31:23Stephen Thompson?

  They're gonna be rolling out on Paramount Plus, kind of three or four at a time, starting October 9th through the month of October. And, look, I'm very ready to jump back into this universe.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, Stephen, and if you want an amuse-bouche to, while you're waiting, I mean, we got an actual movie, Avatar: The Last Airbender, just dropped on streaming a couple of months ago. And it's the actual movie that's with all the Avatar Scooby gang as adults. And it's gorgeous. It was supposed to come out in theaters, got pushed and pushed onto streaming, but it's a return to that world. It's the kind of, the animation has kind of stepped up. So if that's the- Indication of where we're going with this. It looks good.

• 32:03Stephen Thompson?

  Right. I, you know, I missed that movie in part because these kind of offshoots have been so poor. That's a great idea to amuse, bush it up.

• 32:11Linda Holmes?

  Amuse, bush it up, amuse your bush. And Stephen will come back and tell us whether his bush was a boost.

• 32:20Linda Holmes?

  All right. Okay. So that is Avatar seven havens. Thank you very much, Stephen Thompson. So what are three things that I like more than a lot of people like them? Heist dramas.

• 32:34Aisha Harris?

  Mm hmm.

• 32:34Linda Holmes?

  Streaming thrillers.

• 32:35Aisha Harris?

  Sure.

• 32:37Linda Holmes?

  Timeline gimmicks.

• 32:38Aisha Harris?

  Okay.

• 32:39Linda Holmes?

  That brings me to 12 12 12.

• 32:41Aisha Harris?

  Oh, another three.

• 32:42Linda Holmes?

  Yeah, exactly. Just like your mother, your mother, your mother.

• 32:44Aisha Harris?

  Your mother, your mother.

• 32:45Linda Holmes?

  But probably not anything like that. 12 12 12 is an eight episode series coming in November to Apple TV. It stars Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan, a couple of dashing fellows. Heist piece needs some dashing people. And it follows three timelines, according to what I have read. It follows the 12 months of planning a bank heist, the 12 hours in which the heist happens, and the 12 days after the heist in which the people try not to get caught. I have no idea whether this is going to be good. There is only the slightest teaser trailer for it. But given how exhausted I have become by the whole, start with something very exciting

• 33:28Linda Holmes?

  and then say eight months earlier and go back to something very boring that then takes several episodes to get to the point. There is something that appeals to me about just make a wacky timeline decision that builds in all of these swerves and all of this timeline weirdness that you're convinced that you need, build it in from the start, tell me what you're doing, give me a heist, let us go. I feel like of the three things that I have chosen today, this is definitely the one that in a year I could definitely be saying, remember when I was excited about 12 12 12? But I will pretty much always give a chance to a heist project that includes the phrase cat and mouse in its marketing.

• 34:12Linda Holmes?

  So I am going to be very much seated for dashing robbery, heist timeline, streaming thing, 12 12 12.

• 34:23Aisha Harris?

  This looks fun. I, I'm not the biggest Anthony Mackie fan, but I do enjoy Jamie Dornan a lot. And yeah, I'm also big on heists and not as much streaming thrillers, but I will probably give this a shot. 12 12 12. Yes, yes, yes.

• 34:37Stephen Thompson?

  All it's missing, Holmesy, is baseball and scandals.

• 34:42Aisha Harris?

  And, and romance and romance.

• 34:44Linda Holmes?

  Yeah, it needs like a scammer. It needs some baseball, it needs some kissing. But other than that, we've pretty much got me covered entirely.

• 34:52Stephen Thompson?

  I mean, there's your next novel.

• 34:55Linda Holmes?

  Listen, have I considered writing a heist thriller? Absolutely, I have. So you never know, you never know.

• 35:00Stephen Thompson?

  Oh, my God.

• 35:01Linda Holmes?

  All right, that brings us to the end of our show. Glen Weldon, Aisha Harris, Stephen Thompson, thank you so much for being here.

• 35:07Stephen Thompson?

  Thank you.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 35:08Aisha Harris?

  Thank you.

• 35:09Linda Holmes?

  This episode is produced by Hufsefathama and Mike Katsef and edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy. And Hello, Come In provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. To keep listening and keep enjoying, please make sure to follow the show on your favorite podcast app. I'm Linda Holmes and we will see you all next time.

• 35:31Speaker 00

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