Kyle Kellams: I'm Kyle Kellams. With me in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio, April Wallace — welcome back.
April Wallace: Thank you, Kyle.
Kellams: You're our culture vulture.
Wallace: I am, which means we're going to talk about all sorts of things during our weekly visits — books, movies, television. What are we talking about this time? Well, I thought we'd mix it up. It's only our third episode, so to speak. But let's start with our question today instead of our series, because I think it will kind of tie in. Each conversation has a question that I generate. So what is your question?
Kellams: I get to be asked a question. Very few get to do that. All right.
Wallace: What do you consider to be a good beach read?
Kellams: Oh, well, now this is handy because I was just on the beach for a little bit more than a week. I want a book that needs to be read — well, not necessarily quickly, but at once. You don't want to pick up War and Peace and then have to put it down for three weeks because you got sidetracked. So I want a book that I can follow over the course of three or four days. Often for me, that will be a good murder mystery. This last trip I read Cindy Quail, who's a Fayetteville resident, the third in her series set in Florida. But I also read One Hundred Years of Solitude — which doesn't sound like a beach read, maybe. But there are so many characters that have the same name that a four-day concentrated read meant I was completely immersed in the world of Macondo.
Wallace: I totally get it. You've got some extra time on your hands, you are not distracted by the busyness of life, and so you're able to get into it more deeply. My husband and I occasionally read the same book around the same time. A couple years ago our beach read was The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt — that came out in 2013, but we were busy meeting and falling in love at that time, so we read it much later. It's a very long book. It's art thievery at its core, but there's so much to it. Doing that in between work and children and dinner — tough. Hard to really get immersed.
So I'll tell you one thing I read at the beach recently. I read The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett. She has written some other wonderful things, like Rabbit Cake. This is a road trip novel. PJ is just a lovable character — one of the favorites that I've seen. He is deeply flawed. He has won the lottery. He is still struggling with addiction. But he is such a good friend that he is still best friends with his ex-wife. They have breakfast together every morning. He winds up in a kind of godfather role — he inherits a couple of children whose parents have just died unexpectedly. He had no idea that he would be the person in this role. Suddenly he has a couple of kids, and he's about to reconnect with a high school sweetheart — he hasn't told her yet. They're going to make a road trip across the United States to see this woman while he's learning how to be a parent again. There are a lot of flaws in here, and it makes him incredibly lovable. Reading it, I just saw Jack Black written all over it, so I hope it becomes a movie.
Kellams: The Road to Tender Hearts.
Wallace: So for beach entertainment, everyone has a different interpretation of that. We've chosen a few movies and series of different varieties that you might want to watch. One of my favorites that I watched at the beach was Point Break, the 1991 version. Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Lori Petty as Tyler, the girlfriend. If you haven't seen it — FBI agent Johnny Utah, excellent name, played by Keanu Reeves, goes undercover to catch a gang of bank robbers slash surfers.
Kellams: It's not deep, but it's got action.
Wallace: Bodie is the head of the gang, portrayed by Patrick Swayze. I think it's at just the right time for these actors. Swayze had just done Dirty Dancing a few years before and Ghost only a year earlier — he's kind of at his peak. Lori Petty, the next year she would be in A League of Their Own, and I loved her in Orange Is the New Black. And then Keanu Reeves — this is right before Speed, and of course well before his Matrix fame. It's a neat time to see them all together. One of my favorite scenes is the Bodie and Johnny fight scene where Bodie has skydiving gear on but Johnny does not — he just leaps out of the plane. There's a struggle to pull the ripcord and they kind of play chicken for a while. You can watch this on Amazon Prime or rent it on Apple TV.
Next, one of my all-time favorite series is Bloodline, which came out in 2015. This is a family drama — to put it lightly.
Kellams: There's a hint of politics. You have a character who's running for county sheriff. It's set in Florida, and the cast is amazing, including Sissy Spacek as the matriarch.
Wallace: The Rayburns own a resort in the Florida Keys. Robert Rayburn, the patriarch, dies at the beginning, and the oldest son comes home. Danny is the outcast, and his presence completely changes everything — reigniting those dangerous dynamics they had before. They have a lot of secrets, this family, and the goal is to keep them.
John Rayburn is the golden child, played by Kyle Chandler. He's the detective running for sheriff, and he feels that burden — more than any of the siblings — of keeping the family secrets. Meg Rayburn is played by Linda Cardellini, and she's fantastic. Meg is a lawyer who moved to New York to escape the family dynamics but keeps getting roped back in. And then Danny is the black sheep — intelligent but manipulative. Of all of them, he is the most haunted by the death of their sister, who drowned when she was a child. And then there's Kevin, who's the least serious of the siblings. He owns a marina, he's very social and very emotional. He's very protective of their mother.
It touches on everything — abuse of power, the changing family dynamics, your expectations for each other. It's just so good. You can find it on Netflix.
Something I started watching at the beach a couple of years ago was The Bear, which is a different family drama — a lot of cousins, a lot of uncles.
Kellams: A restaurant in Chicago that may or may not make it. Carmy, played by Jeremy Allen White, who is fantastic, returns from his career in fine dining to take over the family restaurant — which is a sandwich shop — after a death in the family. The Original Beef is a popular sandwich shop that always has a line out the door, and by everyone else's account the business has been running just fine without him. But he comes in and starts to change things because he's been a chef at high-end restaurants. He starts by hiring a young, talented chef, Sydney, played by Ayo Edebiri.
Kellams: Who is amazing.
Wallace: Her character subscribes to the same brand of culinary standards that he has. They change the name of the place, they renovate, they change the menu. The reason I love it is because it's about the relationships of the family and how they understand each other and how they process things differently. Anyone who's worked in a kitchen for any amount of time will recognize the family dynamic of a kitchen that's at play. There is one season where I felt like it was a whole lot more about the food — maybe season three. They had a lot of guest chefs, and there are brief moments where you think, this is their time to have their thing to say about what food means in this context, which is interesting in its own right. But I think it's a bit of a deviation from the storyline.
Season five is coming out June 25. And if you just can't wait for the next installment, there is a 60-minute standalone episode called "Gary." It's a flashback — Richie and Mikey, who's the family member who died, take a trip to Gary, Indiana together. It completely removes almost the culinary element, and it's about them and who they were at that moment, which informs us more about who they are when we come back. You can find this on Hulu.
Kellams: April Wallace is our culture vulture, and we will be back next week. Not at the beach, but somewhere else. See you then.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
