Glen Weldon
Glen Weldon is a host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast. He reviews books, movies, comics and more for the NPR Arts Desk.
Over the course of his career, he has spent time as a theater critic, a science writer, an oral historian, a writing teacher, a bookstore clerk, a PR flack, a completely inept marine biologist and a slightly better-ept competitive swimmer.
Weldon is the author of two cultural histories: Superman: The Unauthorized Biography and The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Atlantic, Slate, McSweeney's and more; his fiction has appeared in several anthologies and other publications. He is the recipient of an NEA Arts Journalism Fellowship, an Amtrak Writers' Residency, a Ragdale Writing Fellowship and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts for Fiction.
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Linda Holmes and Glen Weldon from NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour talk about their favorite 2020 holiday TV specials.
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A great cast and good intentions can't overcome Alan Ball's rushed, thin story about a closeted gay man returning to his South Carolina hometown in 1974. -
The new LEGO Star Wars Holiday Specialgently satirizes the franchise, but the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special nearly killed it. -
The Showtime comedy series about three NASA astronauts-in-training at a mock moonbase in the desert vibrates on its own singular wavelength, but never generates laughs. -
Nothing's as it seems in this Amazon series, which (sort of) re-teams Nick Frost and Simon Pegg for a gently funny and sometimes scary tale about a team of paranormal investigators. -
Netflix's adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's swooning gothic novel strips it of subtext — and sex — and tacks on a ending that misunderstands the "romance" at its center. -
A surfeit of subplots and secondary characters — and a complicated production history — take a minor Marvel occult hero on a journey that turns out to be a dead end. -
The follow-up to Netflix's The Haunting of Hill Houseseries may not be as spooky, but it does manage to wrap up its story in a more satisfying manner. -
A tech CEO (John Slattery) blows the whistle on his own in A.I., which has gained sentience and set out to destroy the human race in FOX's agreeably cheesy techno-thriller. -
Netflix's adaptation of Mart Crowley's 1968 play about a gay birthday party that goes off the rails features hard liquor, sharp tongues and broad types.
