It’s finals week. Well, ok, finals are over, so that means it’s finals GRADING week, the worst week of the academic semester for anyone who teaches for a living. It can really burn you out. So, for this week we decided to do something of a pallet cleanser episode. Longtime listeners might know that VoxPopcast…
Author: Monica Geraffo
e400. 400 Episodes?!?! Holy $#!†!
Wow… somehow we’ve managed to do 400 of these! On today’s very special anniversary episode of VoxPopcast we have the entire regular team of hosts to reminisce about the history of the show and the current state of popular culture and our predictions for where we think pop culture is going to go in the…
e399. The Show Must Go On! Navigating Main Character Exits and Recasts
There’s this funny thing that happens with TV shows. Because of the nature of human actors, TV shows are the one type of serialized media where a natural change to the series might be FORCED to occur because forces outside of the narrative require the change of the narrative. That is to say that in…
e386. Unpacking Long-Running TV: From Sitcoms to Soap Operas
They don’t make TV like they used to. They quite literally just don’t!. There’s lots of business reasons for this and culture changes and just an over abundance of content vs what there used to be. But for better or worse, the day epic 20+ season runs of several hundred episodes are probably behind us,…
e384. From Vanderbilt Glam to Oscar’s Shades: The Gilded Age Deep Dive
In 2022, a show premiered on HBO that was perhaps tailor made for us. The Gilded Age was a 1880s period drama from the creators of Downton Abbey with sexual and gender politics, racial dynamics and a treatise on the invention of class dynamics, all thrown together with a collection of Broadway’s finest actors in…
e380. Monica in Paris: The Tropes of Study Abroad
Eagle eyed (eared?) listeners might have noticed that it’s actually been a little tricky to get Monica booked on the show for the last couple of weeks because of a time zone issue. She’s currently living in Paris on a research fellowship for her dissertation. This means that she’s basically doing the bulk of her…
e376. Deconstructing RomComs: Genre, Trope and Capitalism
Last week, A24 released a new movie called Materialists starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal and directed by Celine Song. Critical praise was high, but audience reaction was… it’s probably fair to say mixed. Common wisdom here is that this is largely because the film was marketed as a modern romcom and when…
e375. Floppy Disks and Fast Cars: Technological Nostalgia in Media
Last week Monica saw the most recent Mission Impossible movie and was fascinated by a plot detail wherein the characters need to use ancient technology from the — shudder — 1990s! Just after that, John Oliver did an expose on air traffic control towers where he noted that they often still run on software from…