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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It feels like a minor miracle that there are so many high-quality shows coming to the small screen this season. Four NPR critics share their picks to keep you entertained during a challenging year. -
The US adaptation of a 2013-14 British series about comic book nerds attempting to save the world from a viral pandemic dials back the humor and cranks up the violence. -
This bright and breezy Netflix adaptation of a YA novel finds Millie Bobby Brown starring as the brilliant, fourth-wall-busting little sister of Sherlock Holmes. -
Director Luca Guadagnino brings his searching, emotionally intimate sensibility to HBO with this series about two American kids on a military base in Italy. -
In writer/director Charlie Kaufman's latest, a couple spouts pat, pseudo-intellectual bromides. But stay with it — because that's a clue to what's really going on in this tense, surprising film. -
Before working in TV animation (Bojack Horseman, Tuca & Bertie), Lisa Hanawalt chronicled her obsessions in a funny, filthy minicomic series that's been reprinted — with a wry update. -
HBO's new dark fantasy series serves up satisfyingly pulpy thrills even as it examines the enduring legacy of slavery through a prism of science-fiction and horror. -
The animated series spoofs Trek with in-jokes and easter eggs and even if the gags aren't yet firing on all nacelles, the premise — Starfleet's D-listers — holds promise. -
Writer/director Amy Seimetz's darkly, darkly comic meditation on the contagious nature of anxiety and paranoia plays with horror conventions while refusing to embrace the genre's pulpy pleasures. -
A new documentary chronicling the formation, rise and break-up of the iconic group hits all the familiar Behind the Music beats, but does so with a bracing, clear-eyed candor.
