What’s Making Us Happy: A guide to your weekend viewing

This week, “brain rot” became Oxford’s word of the year, Dick Van Dyke continued to be awesome, and movies showed some life in theaters.

Here’s what NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour crew was paying attention to — and what you should check out this weekend.

Mississippi Masala

Mississippi Masala, the classic film, is streaming on Max. Mississippi Masala was made by Mira Nair, who later made Monsoon Wedding, and it stars Sarita Choudhury, who plays Seema Patel in And Just Like That, and a very young and beautiful Denzel Washington. The main protagonists are an Indian family who moved to the U.S. and it’s a rare love story between a brown female protagonist and a young Black man. It’s beautifully shot in the American South and also kind of reclaims the narrative of the usual American South that we see in films. — Bedatri D. Choudhury

Like Water for Chocolate

What’s making me happy right now is Como Agua para Chocolate or Like Water for Chocolate on HBO. It’s a beautiful Spanish language series all about family and food. It is sumptuously filmed. Every episode features a recipe that it really dives into, the credits have close ups of the ingredients. As a Spanish language show, it hasn’t gotten as much attention as it should have here in the U.S. And for those who are familiar with the book or the 1992 adaptation, this update has meaningful stuff in it. It better explains what was happening in Mexico at the time and talks about the racial politics of the moment that continue to affect us to this day. It also does a more interesting job with the mother and daughter dynamic. — Cristina Escobar

Hasan Minhaj: Off With His Head

I finally caught up with Hasan Minhaj’s latest Netflix special, Off With His Head and I really loved it. Last year he came under fire for a New Yorker interview that he gave where he admitted that some of the stories he told in previous stand-ups had been embellished for comedic effect. This led to him losing the gig to replace Trevor Noah as Daily Show host and he wound up posting a 20-minute rebuttal video. In this special, he is directly and also indirectly addressing the controversy while taking a prickly and more self-reflective approach than in his previous comedy. He offers very pointed observations of progressivism and in-group dynamics that don’t read as scolding, but more like blunt and honest. He has some choice words for Ruth Bader Ginsburg that I think a lot of people might share some similar ideas about. He cracks jokes about the financial diversity of the audience in San Jose, California. I think he’s doing some really interesting things here. While that New Yorker article clearly changed him, I don’t think it changed him for the worse, which is so refreshing. — Aisha Harris

More recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter

by Linda Holmes

James Acaster is one of my favorite standup comedians, and he has a new special streaming on Max called James Acaster: Hecklers Welcome. I don’t want to tell you too much about it, because it’s genuinely lively and unusual, and you deserve to discover its idiosyncratic thoughtfulness and goofiness for yourself. But he has a fabulously interesting mind that chews on ideas about comedy and audiences in ways that pay off with generosity and nuance. And there’s a very good story about Easter.

I caught up this week with Natasha Rothwell’s Hulu series How to Die Alone, which I thought was really touching and very funny. Rothwell is a gem (she was the best thing about the first season of The White Lotus for me), and here, she plays a woman who works at JFK who has a near-death experience that causes her to rethink everything. It’s a special show.

The best thing I made for myself this week was the Smitten Kitchen pumpkin bread. Pumpkin bread is a great example of a baked good with plentiful recipe options online, but you should just make the best one. Among other things: It’s designed to use a whole can of pumpkin instead of leaving you a third of a can you have to stick back in the fridge.

Dhanika Pineda adapted the Pop Culture Happy Hour segment “What’s Making Us Happy” for the Web. If you like these suggestions, consider signing up for our newsletter to get recommendations every week. And listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.