What to Watch & Read This Spring
The season’s best streams and reads.
We are truly living in a golden age of content (this esteemed newsletter included), but there ought to be an app for that—because we have lists upon lists and still end up asking, “What are we going to watch,” almost nightly. While we don’t have an app in development, we do have a well-developed spring content checklist so you know just what to tune into when April showers fall.
Before times.
Is April too soon to name the best book we’ve read all year? We don’t care: We present our candidate, The Nineties: A Book. When we say we can’t remember before times (which has come to mean pre-COVID) Chuck Klosterman comes along to cover the true BEFORE times—pre-24 hour news cycle, pre-iPhone, pre-social media. Klosterman bookends the decade with the release of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1989 and 9/11/2001. Every word: all that & a bag of chips.
Mad Martha.
Those of you who listened to the first season of the podcast “Slow Burn” will no doubt recognize the name Martha Mitchell, wife of Richard Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell. Martha made some disturbing discoveries that threatened to blow the Watergate scandal wide open—until she was kidnapped. We can’t wait to see Julia Roberts depict her in the new Starz series “Gaslit,” premiering April 24.
Another endemic.
Speaking of Slow Burn, we’ve been listening to the podcast “Fiasco: The AIDS Crisis,” hosted by Leon Neyfakh. The series focuses particularly on the early days of the crisis, and the challenges and missteps in getting the medical community, the government and the public aligned. Sound familiar?
Meet cute.
Delia Ephron wrote some of the most beloved rom-coms with her legendary sister Nora, and in Left on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life, Delia describes a tale that could come straight out of one of her scripts. We can’t wait to read all the deets on her latest verse.
Stream, please.
We hate to throw out a suggestion you can’t immediately act on, but we want to enlist more of you to help us watch out for “The Duke.” Though it’s run in select theaters, we are not sure when it might be streaming. Perhaps it will come to HBO Max given its Warner Brothers backing? Time (and Verse readers) will tell.
Quite the next Verse.
Apologies if you saw this on our socials, but we can’t get enough of “Our Flag Means Death.” The true story of Stede Bonnett, who left his comfortable, upper-class life to become known as “The Gentleman Pirate,'' serves as the basis for the hilarious show. We find Stede to be more Michael Scott than Jack Sparrow as his crew of misfits tries to rule the high seas.
Bon appetit.
We loved the story of the person who re-edited “Julie & Julia” down to just the Julia Child story. Of course, Meryl Streep was magnificent as always, but Julia’s story is just so fascinating. That’s why we have been thoroughly enjoying the new series, “Julia.” While it takes a few liberties, the performances are wonderful and show what a pioneer she truly was.
