Linda Holmes

Sunday night's Mad Men was the antepenultimate episode of the series – a word we don't get to use enough, but one that can be surprisingly significant in television. The second to last episode is often (rightly or wrongly) understood and analyzed as finale table-setting, so this third to last ...

Another year, another Free Comic Book Day!

This year, we had our comics guide, Glen Weldon, take a break from reviewing the entire haul of 50 comics available this year at participating shops and bring a handful of comics to each of the rest of us on the ...

It's been many years since I did my three semesters of college a cappella, but it remains a genre of performance for which I have enormous affection. In 2012, the arrival of Pitch Perfect meant that suddenly, I knew a lot more people who even knew what a college a ...

Just a very quick post this week while I work my way through my emotions about the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella.

On the show this week, we're joined by our pals Gene Demby and Kat Chow to tackle the issue of food in culture, including cooking shows that ...

It's fair to say George Lucas is a person who has had a lot of attention paid to him.

Largely because of his creation of the Star Wars universe (though he also co-wrote the story of Raiders Of The Lost Ark), Lucas is a figure of enormous pop-cultural weight. When ...

The opening moments of Good Kill, a new drama starring Ethan Hawke and written and directed by Andrew Niccol (who also directed Hawke in Gattaca), almost eerily resemble the opening moments of American Sniper. A man watches and tries to interpret the movements of a woman and child who don't ...

Why open a film festival whose reputation is for independent voices with a documentary salute to Saturday Night Live?

There is a perplexing optical illusion around SNL: it looks less significant the closer you get to it. At a certain distance, it's massive simply because of the careers it has ...

One of the central conceits of the first season of HBO's Veep was the carnival of humiliations suffered by Selina Meyer, played so brilliantly by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in her capacity as vice president. She battled for relevance while waiting for the phone to ring, surrounded by a staff even more ...

This week, paired with the return of Louie, FX introduced a comedy series called The Comedians, which features Billy Crystal and Josh Gad as ... well, as Bizarro Billy Crystal and Josh Gad, forced to work together on a fictional FX sketch comedy show.

Does that make sense?

We talk ...

It's always a pleasure to welcome Barrie Hardymon to any Pop Culture Happy Hour, even a short one. So this week, we sat down to chat about Wolf Hall, the prizewinning novel an adaptation of which just started airing on PBS. Barrie and I talk sweating sickness, intrigue, kings, sad ...

I've written before about how I became a fan of Duke basketball. Stephen Thompson has talked before about being from Wisconsin (and, yes, even attending the University Of Wisconsin). As you can imagine, Monday night's men's final between our basketball teams will put us in a very tricky ...

["Spoiler" alert: This review of the season premiere of Mad Men discusses the season premiere of Mad Men.]

The first time I watched "Severance," the Mad Men episode that aired Sunday night and kicked off the show's final seven-episode run, I had one of my strongest reactions to the moment ...

Those of you with Netflix may have had a chance by now to catch up with Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a show created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock (of 30 Rock) that was originally intended for NBC before winding up at its online home. We spend some time with the ...

Chris Klimek has appeared on Pop Culture Happy Hour a number of times, including the time he was our fourth chair for a chat about the Hugh Jackman robot-boxing movie Real Steel. Despite the fact that he's very knowledgeable regarding a number of non-punching fields (he's a theater ...

There's a saying about lawyers in court, which is that you never ask a question you don't know the answer to. I'm going to warn you now that this is not court, and that at the heart of this piece are a bunch of questions I don't know the answers ...

It remains a sore point in my TV-watching heart that ABC Family's fabulous comedy-drama Bunheads lasted only one season, so I was particularly pleased to see that its star, Tony winner Sutton Foster, was coming back to television. Specifically, she's in a comedy called Younger on TV Land, which premieres ...

We learned Monday morning what will become of The Daily Show on Comedy Central after Jon Stewart departs: It will be hosted by Trevor Noah, a 31-year-old South African comedian who joined the show as a contributor in December of last year, where he opened with a joke ...

Kumail Nanjiani is a standup comedian, the co-host of the comedy show The Meltdown With Jonah And Kumail for Comedy Central, an actor (including a regular gig on HBO's Silicon Valley), and a popular Twitter presence. But the reason we sat down with ...

Recent reports were officially confirmed today — the upcoming sixth season will be the last for the very successful drama Downton Abbey, according to an announcement Thursday from Carnival Films and Masterpiece. Executive producer Gareth Neame had this to say:

Millions of people around the world have ...