“Is This Gonna Be A Lecture?"

Plus: Midnight Run and What's Making Us Happy This Week [View this email online]( [Pop Culture Happy Hour]( by Glen Weldon Welcome! It was the week the internet wigged out about a wig, as is its occasional wont – this time about [Ben Platt’s Dear Evan Hansen coiffure](. It was a week we got our first look at the [upcoming The Wonder Years reboot]( starring Dule Hill and others. And it was the week we lost [a master of the slow burn]( – more on that below. Let’s get to it. Opening Argument: “Is This Gonna Be A Lecture?” [Charles Grodin, who died Tuesday at age 86]( was perfectly capable of going big, onscreen. Check out his turn as the ultimate ‘70s bad guy – a bluff, ruthless oil exec – in Dino Di Laurentis’ King Kong. (He’s hilariously evil, and Kong ends up smushing him under his foot; take that, our nation’s fossil fuel dependency!) And he certainly made his character’s craven lust for Miss Piggy, in The Great Muppet Caper, something the audience could feel in our collective nethers. But these were outliers. Actors of his generation – De Niro, Hoffman, Hackman, Pesci, Keitel – sank their teeth into characters who directed their energy outward, at the world. Grodin’s energy was directed inward. Others acted, he watched, appraised, listened. They lunged out, he invited in. It’s probably why his comic timing was so precise; he had an uncanny feel for how long to let a silence simmer in the air between two characters. It was a week for revisiting Grodin’s guest appearances on [Carson]( and [Letterman]( in which he honed a species of pained prickliness into a recurring bit. They’re a joy to watch, chiefly because he’s constantly gauging his hosts, testing them. And while the mild exasperation he evinces flirts with pomposity and arrogance, he’s careful to ensure its coming from a place of bemusement with the trappings of celebrity – a dissatisfaction with the game of publicity, crudely disguised as breezy chat, that he and the host are stuck in. The Grodin who appeared on Letterman was my Grodin. Ditto the Grodin in Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, his breakout role, in which he played a guy on his honeymoon wracked with second thoughts – an unsympathetic situation, made sympathetic by Grodin’s manic inwardness. Friends and I still quote his scheming Cane, heir to a raisin fortune, in the underrated and under-remembered 1986 mini-series Fresno (“Is this gonna be a lecture?”). And the best parts of the 1984 Steve Martin comedy The Lonely Guy (a time capsule of mid-80s sexual politics, which: yikes) are scenes in which Grodin and Martin appear to be ad-libbing hilariously mundane conversations. Because he kept himself so still while those around him were forever gesticulating wildly, he could do exasperation better than anyone. He constructed it in a series of stages, building to a blowup we’d see coming a mile away, yet satisfying and hilarious when it arrived. Sometimes the source of that exasperation was a big St. Bernard, sometimes it was Martin Short in a wig. When he died, however, the movie that Film Twitter obsessed over was Martin Brest’s 1988 comedy Midnight Run, in which he plays an accountant who embezzled from the mob, and De Niro plays the bounty hunter taking Grodin on an eventful cross-country journey to turn him over to the cops. I hadn’t seen it since my friends and I went to see it on its opening night, back in ’88. We were Grodin fans, you see. Couldn’t wait to get us some of those Chuck Grodin acutely-timed, droll, dry, under-his-breath asides. We kind of hated the movie, I recall. Too much De Niro, not enough Grodin, was our discerning teenage assessment. But in the years since it’s been held up by friends and colleagues as a classic. (There is a species of straight white man that venerates mystifyingly unfunny films like Caddyshack, Animal House, Back to School and Fletch; I figured my distaste for Midnight Run put it in the same category – straight culture, and thus not for Glens.) But when he died, I discovered that Midnight Run was free on HBO Max, and checked it out. Basically? Teenage Glen got distracted by De Niro’s actorly fussiness – he’s forever fiddling with cigarettes, nodding, squinting; you come away from the film convinced he’s doing an above-average Robert De Niro impression throughout. Teenage Glen couldn’t look away, but he should have, because of course the two actors share the screen for most of the movie. This time, I just watched Grodin. And what I saw was … Grodin, watching. Gauging. Appraising. Throwing tiny entreating looks at the Amtrak clerk when De Niro’s credit card gets rejected, say. Switching from “scanning for a way to escape” to “expressing concern for De Niro’s cholesterol level” with just the twitch of an eyebrow. He’s a calm patch of ocean in a noisy, stormy movie, just as his tetchy, performatively thin-skinned Letterman appearances stand in stark contrast to the interviews Letterman would trudge through with the second lead from She’s the Sheriff, or whatever. The fact that Grodin cornered the market on what he did – that he carved out such a highly specific niche in his acting, writing and public appearances – doesn’t change the fact that nobody did what he did better than he did. Rest in Power; Droll On. --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- We Recommend: You can’t stream Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid anywhere (and the 2007 remake is a thin gruel indeed), but there’s a [fun episode of the podcast Blank Check]( on which they discuss the movie in-depth. You gotta pay to watch Steve Martin’s The Lonely Guy on a streaming service – and there’s a lot of jokes that fall flat on their face, in the age of the incel – but the [bits with Grodin and Martin]( just talking are on YouTube. Ditto the entire Fresno mini-series. For now. With its reunion special looming, we’re going to be talking about Friends in an upcoming episode, and we’re looking to get your input. You can [vote for The Best Friend (there is only one answer), The Worst Friend (ditto) and Your Favorite Auxiliary Friend here](. (Personally? My favorite episode of Friends is any episode of Happy Endings OHHHHH SNAP.) (We’ll be talking about Happy Endings on an upcoming episode, too. So why not [hie thee to Hulu]( to start watching (or rewatching) from the beginning, so you’re caught up?) What We Did This Week: [Woman in the window image]( Melinda Sue Gordon/Netflix [On Monday I talked to]( NPR TV critic Eric Deggans, Joelle Monique and Bedatri D. Choudhury about Amazon’s lyrical, brutal and, if you value your emotional health, completely un-bingeable The Underground Railroad. On Tuesday [Linda welcomed Kristen Meinzer]( to talk about Netflix’s The Woman in the Window, starring Amy Adams. On Wednesday Linda and Stephen [talked to Kat Chow and E. Alex Jung]( about the Top Chef franchise. On Thursday, [I was delighted to get to talk to]( Inkoo Kang about Mare of Easttown, a show that sends me back to my roots growing up on the mean streets (er, passive-aggressive cul-de-sacs, in my case) of Chester County, PA. [And on Friday]( we put a team together to discuss Zack Snyder’s zombie heist splatterfest, Army of the Dead. There’s me (the easily startled safecracker), NPR’s Neda Ulaby (the hard-bitten chopper pilot), NPR Politics’ Ayesha Rascoe (the tough-as-nails mercenary) and Ronald Young, Jr. (the no-nonsense sharpshooter hiding a dark secret). [I reviewed]( Hulu’s new (and just profoundly nerdy) Marvel supervillain comedy, M.O.D.O.K. Do you miss Robot Chicken? Here’s more Robot Chicken. Stephen went on WNYC’s All Of It With Alison Stewart to discuss the [latest inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame](. What's Making Us Happy: Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - What's Making Ayesha Happy: [The Upshaws on Netflix]( - What's Making Neda Happy: [The virtual events happening at the Palestine Museum]( - What's Making Ronald Happy: [The Challenge on Paramount+]( - What's Making Glen Happy: [Eurovision 2021 Finals on Peacock]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. --------------------------------------------------------------- What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: [pchh@npr.org](mailto:pchh@npr.org?subject=Newsletter%20Feedback) Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can [sign up here](. Looking for more great content? [Check out all of our newsletter offerings]( — including Music, Books, Daily News and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Pop Culture Happy Hour emails. 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