Jez Recs: The Pop Culture We Loved This Week

It’s the last weekend of March, which means April is next weekend, which means Memorial Day is pretty much any day now, which means, it’s almost basically summer. But we’ve still got a handful of gross, meh, non-80-degree weekends to trudge through before reaching the sunny promised land—and what better way to spend them than by indulging your eyes, ears, and brain in some quality, Jezebel-approved content?

This week, the Jez staff has a few nostalgic shows we think deserve a rewatch (or a rewatch in anticipation of a highly anticipated premiere this Sunday!), a few books (one humorous, one thrilling, and one a collection of essays), and a TikTok account that may change your entire outlook on bugs. Searching for an outdoor activity in March is as useless as searching for meaning in a Pauly Shore movie, anyway.

I first came to Rax King’s writing through an episode of Low Culture Boil that recounted the unadulterated joys of the Cheesecake Factory. To this day, I have yet to encounter a restaurant that holds a candle to CF’s aggressive Egyptian interior design, its nonsensical cuisine-spanning menu, or its mothafuckin’ Fettuccine Alfredo. And as someone whose Bubbe was the undisputed champ of all things lowbrow—wearing Rite Aid-bought bubble shirts into her 70s, gifting expired cake mixes and packets of Ramen to my mother, and boasting about her bosom as a built-in bib for the schmutz always tumbling out of her mouth—King’s Tacky felt just as much like home to me as my Bubbe’s porcelain doll collection.

Shifting seamlessly between cultural analysis and personal dispatches, King’s musings about the construct of taste wormed their way into my brain, becoming a North Star of sorts—as functional as it was validating. “Nothing can upend [people with unimpeachable taste],” she writes. “No earworm is so catchy, no trashy gossip magazine so enthralling that these people will shrug off the mantle of correct aesthetics… They’re impervious to everything wonderful and silly in the world.” As with King, the wonderful and the silly rule my world. From Jersey Shore and Guy Fieri to Josie and the Pussycats to Hot Topic, King finds the treasured and tender in the depraved and corny, and I cannot think of a gift as crucial as that. Respectfully, fuck taste. —Emily Leibert

If you weren’t around for it, you probably have no idea just how massive Rosie O’Donnell’s relatively short-lived daytime talk show was. The Rosie O’Donnell Show ran for six seasons (from 1996 to 2002), led the Koosh ball revival, made Tickle Me Elmo the “hot toy” of the 1996 holiday season, rhapsodized Tom Cruise’s sex appeal regularly (this was before O’Donnell came out), and basically did the celeb talk-show thing as well, if not better, than anyone else. (O’Donnell famously walked away from the show well before its popularity tanked, turning down a small fortune to continue it for a few more years.) Much of it may have been lost to time if O’Donnell herself (or whoever she’s hired to run her YouTube channel) wasn’t uploading interviews regularly—hundreds are up, and they’re only in Season 2.

I chose to spotlight a 1998 interview with Celine Dion as it features her full performance of “To Love You More” (rights concerns be damned), O’Donnell playing a clip of Ana Gasteyer impersonating her (which Dion receives gracefully, albeit with some squirming, and then proceeds to imitate her imitator), and a commercial for golf clubs that Dion apparently appeared in (???). “With one of these, I know my drive will go on and on,” she says, seductively holding the club. That’s just great. Anyway, O’Donnell’s archive is a treasure trove of monoculture nostalgia and in great picture quality, to boot. —Rich Juzwiak

Succession’s fourth and final season is here, my little slime puppies! I got to watch the first episode, which premiers on HBO this Sunday, a few days early, and Nicholas Britell’s piano theme felt like I was coming home. If my home was actually filled with the richest and stupidest media owners around and a presidential hopeful or two, give or take.

The first episode finds us three months out from the Tuscany bloodbath that included Matthew Macfadyen’s Tom deliciously betraying Sarah Snook’s Shiv Roy, and a re-negotiated divorce settlement that lets Logan Roy do whatever the fuck he wants with Waystar RoyCo. All of the Roys are worse for it, but I wouldn’t count out any one of these—to borrow a phrase from Kendall Roy—“little Machiavellian fucks.” The episode has sweeping and lush sets that only the blackest of black AmExes can guarantee, and these grown-ass adults are scheming as if they’re children trading Pokemon cards. I recommend this season so you can keep up with the cool kids, of course, but also so you can see if the GoJo deal goes through, who will own ATN, how often Cherry Jones cameos pop up, and just how many Greggs you need to make a Tomlette. —Caitlin Cruz

Sink into the beautiful melancholy of Bella White’s bluegrass/folk music. In this single, while mourning a relationship that’s ended, she sits in that post-breakup moment when it feels impossible that life will go on, that the world keeps spinning, even when you yourself are frozen in time.

And I’ve been contemplating

Is my shadow moving?

And does the light still catch your wall?

Her lyrics are wise beyond her years—she’s 22, good lord—as is the warble in her voice.

White’s new album, Among Other Things, is out on April 21. That’s just enough time to familiarize yourself with her debut album from 2020, Just Like Leaving, in preparation. —Sarah Rense

I picked up this book after a friend recommended it but had no idea what to expect, beyond that it was lightly satirizing Silicon Valley. As it unfolds, it becomes clear that the Please Report Your Bug Here universe isn’t quite ours—though it resembles it in almost every way. That being said, this book isn’t quite science fiction either, and at times it feels far too real. I don’t want to spoil anything, because the plot points on which the book hinges develop in such unexpected ways, and I wouldn’t want to take that discovery away from you. —Nora Biette-Timmons

When the algorithm hits, it hits. This week my TikTok brought me to Legbootlegit, an account that, among other things, has created a mechanism that lets you give bugs a smooch. Marketed as “Dr. Odum’s Bugkiss” this innovative entrepreneur sliced out tiny lips from a doll’s face and fashioned them onto a pacifier with a spring so that they could go around kissing bugs.

It’s wholesome, it’s hilarious, and it’s flipping the entire bug narrative on its head. What if, instead of being scared or creeped out by bugs, we embraced them as our friends and fellow Earth inhabitants? The account is full of these funky, novelty inventions, but the Bugkiss is what made me hit follow. The most recent handful of posts has the creator giving various bugs little kisses and recording them all in a nifty field guide. In a platform full of repetitive dances, an infinite number of recipe videos, and too much interior design DIY, it’s definitely one of the more original—and delightful!—accounts I’ve ever come across. —Lauren Tousignant

As of Friday, The Office is officially legal, baby! And, incidentally, I can’t think of a better way to dissociate through a rainy weekend than by firing up the cost-free streamer Peacock and laugh-slash-wince through nine seasons of approximately zero workplace boundaries.

It’s often said that the sitcom, an ode to the romance and mundanity of the traditional American office, “hasn’t aged well”—fair enough, especially in the age of MeToo. But the show hardly endorsed the awful behaviors it displayed, and, I’d argue, it has aged well in the sense that as the world burns around us, there’s nothing more cathartic than a 2000s nostalgia cringe-fest. —Kylie Cheung

I’m currently halfway through Monica Heisey’s debut novel, Really Good, Actually and it’s a humorous account of a woman picking herself up after a rather young divorce. Maggie has just ended a marriage and 10-year relationship at 28 and is cycling through the emotions of being a young divorcee, especially when so many of her peers still aren’t even married. Heisey, who also divorced at 28, is great at capturing the comic side of the ridiculousness of self-pity and self-help. The novel opens with an epigraph of my favorite poet, Louise Glück’s poem “Telemachus’ Detachment.” “When I was a child looking at my parents’ lives, / you know what I thought? / heartbreaking. / Now I think heartbreaking, / but also insane. / Also very funny,” the short poem reads.

At times, the prose can feel a bit too casual and I crave more depth. But to be fair, as someone trying to get back in the swing of reading novels, it’s the perfect density (which is to say, not very dense at all). So if you’re looking for a book to kickstart you back into reading, this is a great one! —Kady Ruth Ashcraft

I will, on occasion, posit a provocative argument to my boyfriend, who, like me, loves food and eating but, unlike me, has never lived in New York City. “New York pizza is better than Italian pizza,” I say, largely to see if I’ve made any progress in convincing him of this take that I’m not entirely sure I even believe in, though I love its brashness. Well, today I woke up with a gift in the form of this article that he sent me, and that I am now sending to you, dear Jezebel readers. Beyond taking it as a personal victory, I am utterly fascinated by what it reveals: that the celebrated Italian food we revere, and have been taught that there is a single Right Way to prepare (Tiramisu, carbonara, even parmesan itself), did not exist in these quintessentially Italian ways until the post-war period. Many of them were regional specialties, and their popularity in the U.S. before that time period has as much to do with Italian immigration as it does with the fractured nature of Italy, which didn’t exist as a unified country until the 1860s, and parts of which remained very poor for the better part of the following century.

Every detail this article reveals is fascinating, and I would have read something twice its length! So in that vein, I am begging an English-language publisher to put out a translation of Alberto Grandi’s 2018 Italian-language book Denominazione di origine inventata (Invented Designation of Origin); with it, Grandi became one of the first voices to pinpoint that these cultural myths are just that: myths. —NBT

In anticipation of the Roys returning to HBO for their fourth and final season on Sunday, I re-watched Succession season 1 this week and, my god, it’s a masterpiece. The shadowy alliances are just as thrilling the second time around, the one-liners are just as acerbic, and every “oh fackoffgh” growl from Logan is perfectly placed. Rewatching means noticing how early the seeds of the Roman-Gerri subplot were planted and underscores just how much Tom will change as he absorbs the Machiavellian DNA of Shiv and her family. Since it’s all fresh, Kendall is still likable enough for you to really root for him as he tries, and fails, to take the reins of the family business, and Connor’s whole shtick is still funny—I don’t feel the same about these two in later seasons. It’s also amusing to observe the evils of the fictional Waystar RoyCo and ATN while the real-life News Corp. faces several billion-dollar lawsuits for things said on its news channel, Fox. You definitely have time to re-watch the first 10 episodes (and maybe more!) before 9 p.m. eastern on Sunday. —Susan Rinkunas