Pop Culture Happy Hour NPR

Like many of you, the Pop Culture Happy Hour team is socially distancing at home. And we are watching more TV shows and movies than ever before. So that's one of the reasons we are going to start coming to you five days a week. We'll talk about great movies, television, books, music and videogames. So make sure to join us starting Monday, October 26th when Pop Culture Happy Hour goes daily.

Writer-director Aaron Sorkin knows his way around a courtroom drama: He wrote the screenplay for A Few Good Men nearly 30 years ago. Now, he's written and directed The Trial of the Chicago 7. The new movie dramatizes the trial of a far-flung group of anti-Vietnam War activists, including Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and Bobby Seale, who were each charged with inciting violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Ethan Hawke plays the abolitionist John Brown in the new series The Good Lord Bird, which traces the events leading up to the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry. Told from the point of view of a fictional Black teenager nicknamed "Onion," the series has plenty of drama. But it's also a dark comedy about following a leader who's extremely passionate and wildly unpredictable.

In the wonderful new film The Forty-Year-Old Version, playwright Radha Blank plays a variation on herself. In it, the fictional Radha, frustrated by a stall in her theater career, finds a new passion: she becomes a rapper. The Forty-Year-Old Version won the dramatic directing award at Sundance, and now it's on Netflix. It's about getting older, getting honest, and, yes, finding yourself.

Latinx music has experienced a huge boom in the last 10 years. We've seen the rise of global superstars like Bad Bunny and J Balvin. We've seen Shakira and Jennifer Lopez take over this year's Super Bowl halftime show. And, of course, we've seen the chart domination of "Despacito" by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee. The decade has also produced countless musical discoveries across the Latin world. And the whole time, our pals at NPR Music's Alt.Latino have been there to guide us through it all.

Fifty two years ago, Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band debuted off-Broadway. The structure was simple, and not unfamiliar to anyone who'd seen a play before: Over the course of an evening, characters gather, get drunk and turn on one another. The groundbreaking difference was that it was a group of gay men doing all that gathering and drinking and lashing out. Now, a new Netflix film adapts the recent Tony-winning revival of the play.