Best Weekend

How to Have the Best Weekend Ever: ‘Getting On,’ ‘Pioneer Girl,’ + More


What we’ll be listening to, watching, and reading to sate our pop culture needs.



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How will we go on without Getting On? Distract ourselves with all the other good stuff coming out this weekend, we guess.

‘Getting On’ Season Finale

We are not being hyperbolic when we say this is the best show no one is watching right now—and the best all-women’s ensemble on TV, period, starring Reno 911’s Niecy Nash, Roseanne‘s Laurie Metcalf, and MadTV alum Alex Borstein—droll comic geniuses, all. And this season, with brilliant guest performances by such amazing actresses as Ann Morgan Guilbert, Betty Buckley, Carrie Preston, and Mary Kay Place, you cringe, weep, and laugh cathartically as you watch the poignant and layered stories of this geriatric med team and their aging patients—not to mention Metcalf’s Dr. Jenna James’s very bizarre medical studies involving, um, feces and atrophying aging genitalia. Yes, really. Oh, please renew this show HBO.

‘Free the Nipple’

It’s illegal for women to go topless in 37 states, which is why #freethenipple is a cause many have taken up, from Miley Cyrus to Lena Dunham. This new film by Lina Esco is a fictionalized version of the growing movement, featuring lots of New York protests (where going topless is legal) and, well, nipples. We like a movie with a message.

‘Pioneer Girl: The Annotated Autobiography’ by Laura Ingalls Wilder

Laura Ingalls Wilder’s tales of growing up on the soon-to-be-settled prairie in the late 1800s are childhood staples. But this annotated version of her original draft of the stories, written for adults, is the grown-up version. Life is still full of blizzards, and horehound candy, and nights listening to Pa play his violin by the fire, but now there’s a bit of darkness too, a more realistic version of 19th-century trailblazing full of footnotes and maps and all the historical context a Little House lover could ask for.

‘Molly Drake’—Molly Drake

We’ll never get another record from the exquisite 1970s English folk singer-songwriter Nick Drake—perhaps best known for his song “Pink Moon”—but we can get a glimpse into his beautiful melancholy with this new album of unearthed songs from his mother, Molly. Recorded at home with only sparse piano accompaniment, her haunting vocals and poetic lyrics are belated foreshadowing of the touching sadness her son’s songs would bring us.

‘Top Five’ starring Chris Rock

Chris Rock has no problem calling out Hollywood’s racist bullshit (see his Hollywood Reporter essay) and that makes us respect him all the more. Luckily he’s got that platform right now thanks to Top Five, a semi-autobiographical film he wrote, directed, and stars in. In the bawdy satire that plays off his natural talents as a stand-up, he plays a comedian who’s lost his lust for laughter about to marry a reality TV star. In swoops Rosario Dawson—we’ve missed her as a leading lady!—as a New York Times journalist to make him rethink his life.

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