If you’re Hannah, Christmas means one thing… watching cheesy Christmas romantic movies. She’s not alone. Hallmark Channel, Lifetime, and now Netflix have carved out a niche for themselves producing dozens of new low budget Christmas movies every year. They’ve become insanely popular. But why? Mav and Hannah are joined by Hannah’s sister Mary and Mav’s…
Category: Movies and Film
Call For Comments: The 2019 Fantasy Box Office Game
From Mav: There are many reasons I wanted to start this podcast. Obviously I like talking about the topics that we cover here a lot… sure. And honestly, a lot of what we do on the show is me working out concepts that I am addressing in my own work (or one of the other…
e35. SPOILERS! (and Mystery Boxes)
Ever since the rise of the Internet we have all lived in constant fear of all of our favorite movies, books, TV shows and every other media being spoiled by some jerk who just wants to be the first to ruin everything for everyone else… or maybe he’s just an idiot. It doesn’t matter… once…
Call for Comments: Watching/Streaming Cheesey Christmas Movies
From Hannah: Over the past few years Christmas has somehow become synonymous with cheesy Christmas movies from channels like Hallmark, Lifetime, and ABC Family (before it became Freeform). I’m not imagining things — Hallmark, for example, has increased its production of holiday movies to 37 and will add Hanukkah movies to its schedule next year.…
e32. Reboots, Remakes, Revivals
Albert Einstein once said, “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Well, honestly he probably never said that… or at least didn’t say it first, but the internet says over and over that he said it, so it must be true. Anyway, if this is something…
Call for Comments: Mystery Boxes, Spoilers, and Fandoms
From Hannah: Before I was on the show, we received a suggestion for a show topic on how popular culture fandoms react to spoilers from listener Jessi Bencloski. Spoilers are tricky, especially in big fandoms such as Harry Potter, Lost, Star Wars, and Game of Thrones. Part of what drives (or drove) those fandoms, especially once fan communities emerged online,…
e31. Heroes, Villains & Antiheroes
The antihero… just like the hero… except he can kill. Wait… heroes kill too now. In fact they always have. Well maybe it’s that the antihero swears… Actually, heroes swear now too. Is it that the antihero operates outside of the law? Nope, that’s true of heroes too. Well what is it then, and why…
Call for Comments: Media Reboots, Revivals and Adaptations
From Mav: So we had a topic suggested by a listener, specifically Maximilian, who wrote our theme song (and was on our music of your youth episode). By the way, if it isn’t obvious, you can totally suggest topics for us to use. Anyway, Max requested we do an episode talking about the recent trend…
e30. Monster Mash 2: Breaking Twilight
Way back in August we recorded our first Monster Mash episode where we discussed the place of the Monster and the Monster Hunter in popular culture. That was a great conversation that went all over the place and we swore right then that we would pick it up at a later time. For our final…

Call For Comments: Inertia and Media Addiction
December 30, 2018
From Mav: There’s something I’ve noticed about fans of the TV show The Walking Dead. They hate it. Seriously… most people I know who watch the show pretty much acknowledge that they’re not really enjoying it anymore, they’re just watching it because… they do. They have been watching it and they continue to. I’m not a fan…