Kellams: It is time for our Culture Vulture. April Wallace, who's also an instructor at the University of Arkansas School of Journalism and Strategic Media, welcome back.
Wallace: Thank you, Kyle.
Kellams: Summer going well?
Wallace: It is, but it is too hot.
Kellams: You always have some recommendations for us as well as a question. What are we going to start with this time?
Wallace: Let's start with the question again. All right, when you finish a really good book, do you find it hard to start the next one?
Kellams: That's a really interesting question. What I do, if I have finished a book that I really enjoyed, is try to find something that I know will not be at all like it. So if I really enjoyed a nonfiction, let's go with that, if it was something that was really good in fiction, maybe I go to a light or cozy murder mystery or something, because I don't want to compare the next read to that one.
Wallace: Interesting. That's a good tactic. I might have to use that. I find that when there's just a really exceptional read, I almost can't take in any other book after that, because I guess I'm still processing it. Some days I have to give it some time to percolate.
Kellams: Fair. So does that mean now is the time to binge a television series?
Wallace: Yeah, okay, and today we've got a few of them that are lighthearted.
Kellams: Okay.
Wallace: It's too hot to take ourselves too seriously.
Kellams: I like this a lot.
Wallace: So let's start with one that I know that you finished recently as well, Not Suitable for Work.
Kellams: Yes, Mindy Kaling.
Wallace: Yes, so this is on Hulu. If you liked "Friends," you know this is similar, a bunch of twenty-somethings in the city trying to make it and discover who they are. This is about Abby and AJ, two girls who are roommates who live across the hall from Kel, Davis and Josh in New York. Girls are on one side of the hall, boys on the other. They're all working their first terrible job, and they're also trying to meet people to date, but they work too much, so they know they shouldn't, but they start to become attracted to people at work. I would say if you've watched other Mindy Kaling comedies like "The Sex Lives of College Girls" or "Never Have I Ever" or "The Mindy Project" or "Running Point," good grief, she's prolific, if you like those, you'll like this. If you had certain problems with those, like certain plot lines are introduced that seem major and then are tightly and comfortably resolved by the end of the episode, if you have a problem with that sort of storytelling, it's here too. I don't think you ever confuse this with real life.
Kellams: No, it's a sitcom, and a highly enjoyable one.
Wallace: Exactly, I agree. Next, I just wildly enjoyed "Rooster" on HBO.
Kellams: Okay, so you didn't. Well, I watched the first episode.
Wallace: Okay, and it's Steve Carell as a divorced man who's invited to speak at his daughter's school. He's a successful author of books that the literary world looks down upon. They sell well, they're thrillers.
Kellams: And I don't know, April, does he get likable? It seemed like it was another show about a middle-aged white guy who is very into his own problems.
Wallace: Oh, you've got to stick with it. Okay, best-selling author Greg Russo, played by Steve Carell, ordinarily writes cheap paperback romance adventure novels. It's got a ripped guy on the cover who kind of looks like Steve Carell, right, and he's asked to guest lecture, and when he's there, they want it to turn into a writer-in-residence sort of thing. They're like, please stay for half a semester, be our guest, teach these kids a little something about how to read. But more importantly, these students' parents have actually heard of you, unlike academics that would normally invite. But the problem is it's the university where his daughter is a faculty member, and she's got some problems. She's hoping to be considered for a dean position that just opened up, but her marriage is being put through the wringer, because her husband, who's also a faculty member, it's just come out that he's been sleeping with a grad student, and not only that, the grad student is pregnant. That would be unlikable enough to begin with, but also he is completely torn about whether he's going to go with the grad student or fix his marriage, and that's kind of the will-they-won't-they sort of relationship. But it's so funny and heartfelt, because he only takes this gig at the university so he can be near his daughter during a hard time in her life. So it's more about her and helping her than it is about him, at least at first.
Kellams: That's "Rooster," and that's on HBO. Yes, okay, I am going to try it some more. I highly recommend it.
Wallace: Okay, also for a lighthearted watch, I know we're watching "House of the Dragon" at the moment, which is not lighthearted, but "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms" is also set in Westeros, and so this is another "Game of Thrones" spinoff. It is, but a buddy comedy.
Kellams: Seriously?
Wallace: Yes.
Kellams: How are we on the blood and guts?
Wallace: Pretty low. There is some fighting, but it's more like very minor episodic stuff. So this is following Hedge Knight, Sir Duncan the Tall, and when we meet him, he is burying the knight who trained him. They're kind of out in the middle of nowhere, it's going to be too long to get him into a town and do a proper burial, so he's burying him, and it's clear that their relationship was more than just knight and squire. He was more like a father to him. Dunk, as they call him, is a really earnest guy. He always wants to do the right thing, but he has very limited means, and by that, I mean he's not always sure where his next meal is going to come from, but he does have this training, he is a knight technically, he's just very poor. Once he finishes the burial, he realizes he can compete in tournaments now, which he couldn't have before, so he heads off to begin that process, and he meets a young stable boy named Egg, called that because he is bald. This little guy, Sir Duncan is super tall, very giant, and this kid is tiny. This little guy seems to know more about the whole proper procedure of tournaments than he does, as well as all the politics surrounding it. He can tell you the backstory, kind of obsessive fan-level stuff.
Kellams: Yeah?
Wallace: And so the two become the pair. They are the friends. He wants to squire for Dunk, and he agrees reluctantly, but they wind up learning from each other. It's clear that Dunk learns more from Egg than vice versa, but Egg just needs the experience as a squire to be able to move up, to one day do similar things. So he's teaching him how to put in the grunt work and earn your place in the world, and meanwhile, Egg feeds him the necessary information, like exactly how to enter a tournament and how to act in town while you're there, or how to appear, maybe you need a different shield, you need a fresher logo, go get something new painted, stuff like that. We see it play out, and it helps him refine his appearance, but it has some of the typical knight things too. You see him defend a woman's honor. It was one of my favorite moments of the series when he did that, because he was standing up not only against ruthless behavior of someone in power, it was standing up against the system, the caste. And that scene is full of fear and love and hope, everything. And that's on HBO.
Kellams: It is, and finally, I have a book recommendation this week.
Wallace: I recently read Nora Ephron's "I Remember Nothing." We know her mainly for her screenplays, "When Harry Met Sally" is one of my favorites of all time, she wrote that, she wrote "You've Got Mail," "Sleepless in Seattle." Those are some of her biggest. But I have read her "I Feel Bad About My Neck," which is a series of short stories about her life. "I Remember Nothing" is reflections on her life, and this is the final book that she wrote before she passed in 2012. It's a similar short essay style, but it's full of nuggets for the mega fan like myself. My favorite essay in it is "Journalism: A Love Story," which tells us all about how she broke into the news business when she was starting out in the late '60s, I believe. When she graduated college and was looking for her first job in New York, news organizations didn't typically hire women. They certainly didn't hire them as writers. So she got hired at Newsweek as a mail girl, when there were no mail boys. If you were a woman who wanted to be a writer, they would tell you outright, that's not going to happen, but if you become a mail girl, you'll have more chance of opportunity than not. So she did that. It was her job to deliver the messages, including the telex, which had the dispatches from the bureaus, but it gave her a front-row seat to newsroom gossip, which I think makes sense if you've seen her movies, a lot of them are about female reporters, a lot of them have a very feature-y style. She kind of made herself indispensable, she moved up to researcher, which is a fancy term for fact-checker, and so she filled in the factoids, tidbits, checked everything. And that whole process, you get to learn more about what it was like to be a woman in the newsroom before you were allowed to report, which was interesting. My jaw just dropped when I got to the part where she met someone named Victor Navasky. Does that sound familiar to you?
Kellams: Vaguely.
Wallace: Okay, so in "You've Got Mail," there's a character named Frank Navasky, and he's the guy who dates Meg Ryan at the beginning. He's in love with his typewriter. He's a reporter, you never see him not going on about something. I assume that Victor Navasky was her inspiration for Frank.
Kellams: Well, I would assume that as well.
Wallace: Yes, he was the editor of Monocle, a satirical magazine, but he also came to produce New York Post and Daily News content, which were like parody papers. This was her big break, so she wrote a parody gossip column in one of these flops, frankly, and the publisher of the New York Post saw it, and instead of suing them for parody, she said, hire her, if she can parody it, she can write for the Post.
Kellams: Interesting.
Wallace: And that's how she broke into the business. It's just full of fun things for a news nerd. There's a couple other essays that were highly enjoyable. "My Life as an Heiress," in which she was one of the favored nieces of a rich uncle, and he dies within the course of this essay, and she has long known that she would come away with some inheritance. Spoiler alert, she doesn't get much, but she entertains this fantasy that if she gets this inheritance, she can stop writing the screenplay that she's currently working on. She even takes a break and flops on the bed and dreams about what she's going to do with all this money. And thank God that guy blew it on some real estate project in Cuba, because the screenplay was "When Harry Met Sally." Thank you, dear uncle.
Kellams: Yes, for being irresponsible.
Wallace: Or at least not too smart about real estate, because we're better off with that.
Kellams: Yeah, I can't imagine not having that. Nora Ephron, "I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections." The TV programs you recommended as lighthearted, remember, were "Not Suitable for Work," "Rooster" and "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," a "Game of Thrones" spinoff that you don't have to have seen "Game of Thrones" to enjoy.
Wallace: That's true.
Kellams: April Wallace, Culture Vulture, thank you so much.
Wallace: Thank you.
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