The Enthusiast / Spring '25: Catherine O'Hara, Meghann Fahy v Julianne Moore, Marina and more

Time to roll down your windows and blast rude pop and cheer on complicated women.

I know you’re never supposed to open a letter with an apology, but the last time I was over here making recommendations it was Barbie season.

Fuck it, it’s late spring. It’s Friday night. Time to roll down your windows and blast rude pop and cheer on complicated women. And recommendations are my most enduring love language.

I’m excited to have my voice and my opinions back, not that I was really precluded under public media neutrality guidelines from, say, endorsing or not endorsing season two of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives (skip, it’s fallen into typical sophomore reality yelling).

But still, I have never believed cultural criticism, even in its most shamelessly enthusiastic form, could be fully divorced from the world it’s made and consumed in, and I need some space to do less over-thinking about the future and more OH MY ACTUAL GOD-ing in.

I also recently joined GALECA, the queer entertainment critics group, a long overdue association on my part and one that commits me to screening and voting for its annual awards cycles.

With no further ado, things I hope you might enjoy as much as I did:

Podcasts

I won’t bury the lede: present circumstances aside, my favorite piece of entertainment I have maybe ever co-created/produced has been NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING, a game show about Hollywood I made with the good folks at The Black List and

The Ankler.

There will be more. Listen to the most recent episode:

Series

The Crushing It In Multiple Roles Award of 2025 (so far anyway) goes to Catherine O’Hara, whose ousted exec-turned-producer on Apple TV+’s The Studio steals every scene she’s in. It’s almost too easy for her to commit the robbery: the show’s structure is basically Charlie Brown Goes to Hollywood, and though it’s not always O’Hara’s Lucy-esque character’s fault, the football gets predictably yanked out from under Seth Rogan every single time.

Over on (HBO) Max’s The Last Of Us, her tough love stoner-therapist has been possibly the only light point of the brutally painful second season. Yes, we were apparently the only people alive who literally had no idea what would happen to Pedro Pascal this year. Yes, my wife has now abandoned me to watch this show by myself. Yes I can’t stop.

You watched The Pitt already, right? It’s almost annoying how great it is, like this is what happens when a show has more than 8 episodes and a meticulous attention to detail and exceptionally skilled actors. Noah Wyle is hotter and more heartbreak-y than anyone could have guessed on John Carter’s first day in the ER. Shawn Hatosy hasn’t smirked so pointedly since SouthLAnd. I might have seen charge nurse Dana (Katherine LaNasa) at the Alcove this week and just learned she’s married to GRANT SHOW??

Over the last few months I watched a lot of Netflix international historical dramas with subtitles — and by drama I really mean bodice-ripping epics with fewer real plot points than The Crown, more real-life royalty than Bridgerton and less high camp than The Great.

Helpfully if accidentally I did this in approximate chronological order, which means that everything I learned (?) in two seasons of The Empress about the Austrian-Hungarian empire set me up for the contentious unification of Italy in The Leopard. These shows both had gorgeous fashion, exquisitely beautiful people, and languages I don’t really understand, which made them soothing and yet also compelling. A not-new take from me: subtitles keep you off the internet, and therefore are extra great. (Not to be confused with captions, which as a very visual person I can never look away from and thus mostly ruin my ability to enjoy English-language media.) If you have other favorite streaming historical dramas of this ilk, please send me your recommendations.

If you’re looking for something completely different, the just-concluded season of The Amazing Race did a great job of reviving some classic challenges AND the exact right team won.

Advance warning in case I don’t send another of these for a year or longer: Sirens comes out on Netflix on May 22 and YOU SHOULD WATCH IT. It’s the best binge I can remember in a while. Meghann Fahy, Julianne Moore and Milly Alcock aren’t ever too cool to be unattractively messy and self-righteous women just barely managing to survive by the skin of their own quirks and extremely questionable ethics. Also great in sharply drawn smaller roles are Kevin Bacon, Lauren Weedman, Josh Segarra and Felix Solis. It’s a little Revenge-y, a little Big Little Lies, a little The Affair, but also none of those things. Hey hey.

Films

I’m not here to tell you about Sinners (come on

Geneva S. Thomas

, still waiting for your spiritual expert take) except that if you haven’t seen it, you should. It felt appropriate to see the movie in gorgeous 70mm at Quentin Tarantino’s Vista Theater, given the grindhouse-y violence and of course inability for Hollywood trade media to fully cop to how racist gatekeeping happens at every level of decision making.

I enjoyed Another Simple Favor though nowhere near as much as the original, which I rewatched in preparation and was delighted not only holds up but feels a little true crime podcast satire prescient.

I finally got myself onto Letterboxd if only so that I can end 2025 knowing how many films I’ve seen in theaters. (So far: seven.)

Books

I’m also on StoryGraph now if you want to extrapolate whatever psychological conclusion you’d like from the months where I never text you back but I do read 17 gay romances.

At the slightly more literary intersection of those genres was last year’s The History of Sound, by Ben Shattuck, which is now a movie with Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal based on the title story of the inter-connected collection. I don’t say this lightly but the book reminded me of Annie Proulx’s Close Range, which begat Brokeback Mountain. They’re very different writers, but the strength of both collections is in so many distinct characters woven into a highly-specific geography. The film is premiering at Cannes so I’m hoping to see it soon for a take beyond this wonderful Vanity Fair preview by my former EW Awardist co-host David Canfield.

Speaking of my former EW colleagues, go read Carla Sosenko’s excellent memoir, I’ll Look So Hot in a Coffin. It’s about bodies, and fashion, and shopping, and dating, and medicine, and media, and I kept finding myself reaching out as if to high five Carla for getting something difficult so very right.

Music

Song of my month is Marina’s “Cuntissimo,” astounding on several levels but especially for the lyric this ain’t no Bonnie and Clyde / but you can be my Thelma on the side.

Her sixth album, Princess of Power, comes out June 25 — and while there are three tracks to play on repeat until then, it’s kind of killing me not to have more yet. In the meantime: roll down those windows and let ’er rip.

Want to shoot some recommendations or pitches back my way? Comment or hit me up at shananaomi@gmail.com.