The Buzzy TV, Erotic Thrillers, and Obscure TikToks That Got Us Through the Week

It already feels like summer on the East Coast, which is a bad sign of things to come, if you prefer not sweating out of your eyeballs for months on end. Luckily, summer also brings new releases—movies competing for box office glory, singles competing for song of the summer, flirty novels to flip through on the beach (or the subway). The cultural gods keep us well-sated throughout the hottest months of the year.

We are still solidly in April but have plenty of recommendations to keep you occupied as you hide from (or bask in) the sun this weekend, including a fun novel about young love (and magic!) set in Mexico City, the Criterion Collection’s new erotic thrillers series, and a few wild cards (municipalities’ TikTok accounts, anyone??).

Your weekly Jezebel Recs await.

Not to sound too much like a college recommendation letter, but it gives me so much pleasure to recommend Ella Cerón’s debut novel ¡Viva Lola Espinoza! The world is so difficult to endure on a daily basis, so I’m really gravitating toward fiction that is juicy and fun, and a coming-of-age story about a girl dealing with a mysterious romantic curse, while still having to work at the family restaurant and trying to explore Mexico City?? Sold, babes!

Writing teenagers feels like a dying artform. Jenny Han’s Lara Jean Song Covey and Peter Kavinsky are the modern gold standard in my book, and Cerón’s main characters—Lola, Javi, and Rio—have that same magic. I can’t wait to see what other characters she publishes, and I hope y’all will buy this book so I have more people to discuss these love stories with. —Caitlin Cruz

Three weeks on from its release, I fear I have not stopped listening to Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. I am well aware that my kinship with Del Rey turns my general mood into a self-fulfilling prophecy of glamorized pain and suffering. Still, watching her grow as an artist—from a girl who cries of old money she desires and old men she fucks into someone who warbles about childhood, family, reckoning with her body, and a sense of home—has been oddly gratifying. “Paris, Texas” and its wistful piano tinkering is easily my favorite track on the album, but I keep circling back to the Jack Antonoff (ugh) production “A&W” (short for “American whore”), which unearths new sounds and layers with each listen.

In many ways, this song is an embodiment of the old Lana’s aestheticized self-destruction (Call him up, he comes over again/Yeah, I know I’m over my head, but, oh/It’s not about having someone to love me anymore/This is the experience of being an American whore). But it’s also a resignation of sorts: As a relentlessly objectified woman in the public eye, Del Rey has no choice but to accept that she will always be sexualized by beady-eyed vultures without her permission…and brutalized because of it (trigger warning! Mention of sexual assault ahead): I mean, look at my hair/Look at the length of it and the shape of my body/If I told you that I was raped/Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?/I didn’t ask for it.

She’s done fantasizing, she seems to tell us. She knows exactly what her reputation in the cultural sphere is, and she is resigned to letting people think what they want about her. —Emily Leibert

In my perusal (that is my euphemism for “full-blown addiction”) of TikTok, I’ve come across a genre that never fails to be charming: municipal TikTok accounts. Libraries, sanitation departments, and transportation services are putting out top tier content that’s not only hyper specific but refreshingly wholesome. My personal favorite is the NYC Ferry TikTok account. This week, it posted an excellent video of a fan cam for one of its boats, Lunchbox (all NYC ferry boats are named by second graders in the city). Here’s a delightfully stupid video from the Hays, Kansas, public library. Check out the head of the San Francisco DOT showing off his public transit suit. I feel confident that you can find a local government TikTok account that will bring you joy and useful tips on things going on in your area. It’s the best use of our tax dollars I’ve seen yet! —Kady Ruth Ashcraft

The ever-reliable Criterion Channel has curated 16 films from the ’80s and ’90s representing one of the most outrageous subgenres in American cinema history, the erotic thriller. As any good erotic thriller series should, this one includes unassailable classics (DePalma’s Dressed to Kill, Kasdan’s Body Heat, Dahl’s The Last Seduction), some howlingly entertaining flops (Richard Rush’s The Color of Night, in which Bruce Willis is at his absolute hottest AND shows peen), and some strange obscurities (Harry Hurwitz’s Fleshtone, which is about phone sex and plays like elevated Skinemax). If you haven’t seen DePalma’s absurdly over-the-top Body Double, well, now you have no excuse. —Rich Juzwiak

This week, folk icons Emmylou Harris and Joan Baez joined the Tennessee gun control protests and, in the grand Americana tradition of protest music, their contribution was quite literally their voices.

Outside the Tennessee state Capitol, Harris, Margo Price, and others celebrated Rep. Justin Jones’ reinstatement to the state legislature after his expulsion for protesting with music. They sang—what else—a cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” and though this recording is messy, it’s all the more significant for it.

As NPR described it, “voices colliding and coalescing, choked with emotion, reinvigorating a song that has sometimes felt overused and making it feel as bracing as the wind.” Choked with emotion myself, I can’t put it better than that.

In a similarly unfiltered moment, Jones and Baez sang a simple harmony together of “We Shall Overcome” after running into each other in the airport.

These are just two moments in a momentous couple of weeks in Nashville. This, while most of the mainstream country stars who call that city home only sing to protest, I don’t know, girls wearing not-tight jeans? A mythical incursion on small town values? Please. —Sarah Rense

This show is deservedly getting a ton of buzz right now (99% on Rotten Tomatoes, with an 89% audience score), so if you haven’t already watched, consider this your sign to start tonight. The foundations of this show are familiar. A successful, suburban mom’s internal rage is starting to leak out and muddy up her perfect-looking life; a man-child approaching mid-life is flailing and failing all over the place in a desperate attempt to do something for his immigrant parents. There are affairs, an unbearable mother-in-law, uppity rich folks, and a church group that loves to sing. But the plot of this suburbia-unraveling story is unlike anything I’ve ever seen—the way all these characters’ lives intersect is so fun and unique. Plus, the talent is out of this world, with Ali Wong’s performance in particular solidifying the fact that she’s only at the start of what’s going to be a very long and illustrious career. –Lauren Tousignant

I’ll admit it: I disassociate from abortion news every week by watching singing competition shows. The Voice and American Idol have saved me from too many mental breakdowns to count. This week, I fell particularly in love with one American Idol contestant from Hawaii whose voice sounds like butter—and whose guitar broke right before he had to go on stage for the duets round. Iam Tongi had promised his dad, who recently died, that he’d use the guitar he saved up to buy him in all future performances, but the guitar let him down last minute. So his duet partner, Oliver Steele, supported him through the disaster, and the two men delivered a lovely cover of “Save Your Tears” by the Weeknd that I’ll be thinking about for some time. —Laura Bassett

This week, I simply cannot stop telling people to start Single Drunk Female via every avenue available to me. It’s annoying, I know, but get used to it. I won’t stop until a third season is announced.

This series joins Samantha Fink (masterfully played by Sofia Black D’Elia) on her journey to sobriety just as she’s sufficiently imploded her life. After assaulting her boss at a BuzzFeed-esque media company, she lands herself back in her childhood home with her neurotic mother in suburban Boston, while attending AA multiple times a day. Sam’s earnest, albeit messy, attempts at rebuilding her life from the ruins that alcohol wrought was the stuff that made the first season so special, but maintaining the progress she’s made is why Season 2 is even better.

It’s funny! It’s profoundly relatable! Its ensemble cast feels like wholly realized individuals! It pulls zero punches about how shitty life can be—with and without alcohol—yet feels like a hug you actually asked for!

Please don’t make me take out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times; just grow up and watch it already. Then read this. —Audra Heinrichs

Drew Barrymore is having a moment—or, to be more precise, about 22 minutes per day, during which she has the time of her life getting really close with one celebrity guest or another on The Drew Barrymore Show. I am not a regular watcher of her show, mostly because, being in my mid-20s, daytime talk shows aren’t really for me (yet!). But I do catch the highlights, either via viral clips on my Twitter feed or The Drew Barrymore Show’s active TikTok page, which I recommend for your weekend perusal. Fans have likened Barrymore’s hosting presence to the equivalent of a spunky drunk girl you meet in the club bathroom, and I adore it—she asks smart questions while also being a hoot and fostering real intimacy with her guests, whom this week alone included Brooke Shields, Kathryn Hahn, Chloe Bailey, Toni Collette, and Nicholas Hoult. Maybe someday I’ll get around to watching a full-length episode on cable, but until that time, I’m having a lot of fun watching Ms. Barrymore sitting cross-legged on a couch, three inches away from Paris Hilton’s face. —Kylie Cheung

Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel scratches the perennial mental itch of anyone who follows celebrity gossip. The object of our protagonist’s affections is John Mayer without the weird racist baggage; a Pete Davidson-esque character dishes out jokes and also sage advice; even Lorne Michaels has a very obvious avatar. Sally, our narrator, is a writer on a Saturday Night Live-type show in her late 30s who is confounded by all the beautiful famous women who end up in long-term relationships with her schlubby comedy coworkers (your Scarlett Johanssons and Ariana Grandes). And then, the twist: She finds herself falling for the host (and musical guest) one week, a pop star roughly her age whose music she doesn’t really know. Hijinks ensue!

Is this plot breaking barriers or creating new genres? No, but it is utterly delightful while still taking its readers seriously, a longtime strength of Sittenfeld’s. —Nora Biette-Timmons