If you had to take stock of 2025’s pop culture — so far — what three words would you use? 

Mine would be: Not too optimistic. Hear me out. I KNOW that there will always be good movies and good music and good books made. Every year. But increasingly, the blur of infinite media — on-demand in the pocket-sized supercomputers that live in our purses and totes and backpockets — it all continues to be overwhelming, and increasingly pretty mid. 

The good stuff, more than ever before, is forced to compete with EVERYTHING else in our phones: the AI-generated rug-cleaning or pimple-popping ASMR videos TikTok keeps giving me; the newsletters in my inbox that I know I need to click through but don’t because they are forced to standoff against The New York Times Games app; the YouTube influencer I watch make elaborate food I will never make myself, which will lead me down another YouTube rabbit hole of rewatching ‘90s music videos I loved as a kid; we haven’t even gotten to the downright arduous task of navigating every streaming TV app I use on a regular basis. And all of this consumption can happen on my couch, whenever I want. How does one actually go to the movies with such constant and appealing distraction?

The irony in this era of media abundance is that all the streaming apps we use to ingest the media we love continue too much towards sameness. Spotify does video now (and comments, too?), and wants to be YouTube? The front page of Substack feels like… Twitter? Netflix has… video games? Instagram is now millennial QVC, while TikTok is the new online TJ Maxx. 

Any assessment of the pop cultural good and bad so far this year has to accept this reality — the best and the worst of pop culture swim in the same crowded waters. And it’s not that I’ve forgotten how to swim, it’s just that the tide feels choppier than ever before, and the water more clogged than ever before. Staying afloat still feels manageable, but definitely more exhausting than it was, say, ten years ago. 

With THAT off my chest, there’s still plenty of good stuff. So I had two of my favorite culture critics on the show this week to talk about it: Linda Holmes, host and founder of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour, and Ronald Young, podcast host and producer of shows like Weight For It, and also a frequent contributor to — you guessed it — Pop Culture Happy Hour. You’ll have to watch or listen to our episode to hear all of our picks, but I want to take a little time to highlight a movie from earlier this year that Linda says deserves more attention from all of us. 

It’s called Mountainhead, and it comes from the mind of Jesse Armstrong, the same creative genius who gave us Succession, among other hits. 

The film centers characters Armstrong has proven himself quite deft in writing: awful billionaires, played in this case by Steve Carrell, Jason Schwartzman, Corey Michael Smith and Rami Yousef. “This is a very dark comedy about guys with absolutely no self awareness whatsoever who just say increasingly bizarre things,” Linda told Ronald and I. “I will say,” she continued, “If you go in expecting Succession, it's not Succession.” Noted, Linda. 

Ronald disagreed. “I’m actually one of the divisive people who hated it,” he confessed, though we could all agree on one good thing about this film: Seeing Steve Carrell play a billionaire, which is really fun because you can imagine it’s Steve Carrell’s character from The Office. “You get moments in this where it’s kind of like: What if Michael Scott had a billion dollars?” Linda told us. Sign me up. Sign me up. Sign me up. 

Check out the rest of our picks (Sinners made the list, of course, as did Bad Bunny), and why I am still pitching an all-black version of The White Lotus, in this week’s episode, wherever you listen or watch. And if you’re so inclined, lemme know what pop culture you’ve most enjoyed (or hated!) so far this year. I am very, very curious. 

- Sam 

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