Wonder Man is, technically speaking, a Marvel show. It exists in the MCU. Captain America is out there somewhere. The Hulk is presumably smashing things. And none of that matters even a little bit, because this is a show about a guy who bombs auditions, self-sabotages every relationship he has, and quotes Pretty Woman during an improv because he's too afraid to access a genuine emotion. Simon Williams has a superpower, sure, but his actual problem is that he's every actor you've ever met who's three bad decisions away from selling real estate — which, by the way, Joey Pantoliano's character would enthusiastically recommend.Matthew Fox returns to the show and admits they’re the noob this time. Because while Matthew can navigate the MCU lore — explaining Trevor Slattery's bonkers journey from fake terrorist in Iron Man 3 to mystical land adventurer in Shang-Chi to reluctant government informant — it's Mandy who actually understands the world in which this show lives. The auditions that feel like psychological warfare. The directors who demand you "take risks" and then get furious when you do. The friends who call casting offices pretending to be your manager. All of it is painfully, hilariously real, and the show treats it with a respect that certain podcasts hosted by extremely famous actors have never managed.Matthew unpacks Wonder Man's superpower as a metaphor for passing — for anyone who's ever had to hide a fundamental part of themselves to get a job, keep a relationship, or just survive. It's the kind of reading that makes you realize why science fiction matters: not because the problems are unimaginable, but because they look exactly like the ones we can imagine. And if that doesn't get you, the show also features a black-and-white standalone episode about a guy called Damar the Doorman whose entire superpower is that people can walk through him, which is both the most absurd premise imaginable and a devastatingly accurate parable about how we consume and discard fame. Josh Gad plays himself as a monster. The episode description is literally just "Ding dong." It's perfect.By the finale, Simon hasn't become a hero in any traditional sense. He breaks his best friend out of jail — not to save the world, just because Trevor took the fall for him and that's what you do. It's personal and small and exactly right. Mandy and Matthew agree: this is a character study wearing a superhero costume it never actually puts on, and it's better for it.Links & Notes

• Matthew Fox's hub: TheEthicalPanda.com
• The Marvel Movie Minute podcast (currently covering Captain America: Winter Soldier)
• Wonder Man on Disney+

If you like this episode ... 

• The Goonies (featuring Mandy's Joey Pantoliano confession)
• Agatha All Along
• Captain America
• Thunderbolts (Make Me A Nerd)
• Thunderbolts (Superhero Ethics)
• Thunderbolts (The Film Board)
• The Penguin (with Matthew Fox)
• The Orville (with Matthew Fox)
• Last of Us (with Matthew Fox)

Links & Notes

• Follow Mandy on Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• Join the nerdy inner circle: makemeanerd.com/join

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The Traitors is, at its core, a game you play at birthday parties when someone's kid really wants to be a detective. You sit in a circle. Some people are secret murderers. Everyone points fingers based on vibes alone. This should not be compelling television. And yet — here we are, with millions of people staying up past their bedtimes on a Tuesday because they cannot possibly let it get spoiled.Patrick Gomez, editor-in-chief of Entertainment Weekly and a man who has watched competitive reality television with the devotion most people reserve for religion, joins Mandy to explain exactly how a glorified sleepover game became appointment TV.They go deep on the Season 4 cast — a philosophical grab-bag of Olympic gold medalists, Real Housewives who showed up for the Scotland trip and got ambushed by actual gameplay, and Michael Rapaport, who sucked the air out of every room he entered and somehow made everyone root for his elimination regardless of their feelings about traitors. Patrick walks Mandy through the housewives-versus-gamers dynamic, the unspoken strategy the show deliberately buries to protect its own conceit, and why Rob may be playing the smartest game nobody's being allowed to fully see on screen.And because this is Make Me a Nerd, the conversation goes exactly where it should: the nerd appeal of obsessive post-episode strategy analysis, the surprising parallels to LARPing and Dungeons and Dragons, the UK version filmed in the same castle with completely different results, and why Kristen Kish — Top Chef host, professional chef, person trapped in a Scottish castle with catering — spent three weeks desperately trying to melt candy bar ingredients into something edible.Referenced Episodes

• Survivor with Patrick Gomez
• Charmed with Patrick Gomez
• The Hunger Games with Mona Chatterjee
• The Great Pottery Throwdown with Jeremy Klavens

Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

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There are two kinds of people in the world: people who cross their arms and dare a comedian to make them laugh, and people who show up already giggling before the lights go down. Mandy is firmly in the first camp, which makes it all the more remarkable that Bo Burnham's Make Happy got her — really got her — starting with the moment the man wakes up in full clown makeup and ending with a gut-punch silence that reframes the entire hour you just watched. Tommy Metz III, Mandy's most recurring guest, self-identified comedy nerd, and a man who has memorized entire comedy albums without meaning to, is here to explain why.The conversation covers an absurd amount of ground: the rise and fall of the eighties comedy boom (when every laundromat had a comedy club and every comedian got a sitcom deal they couldn't sustain past episode two), the alternative comedy movement that killed the piano-tie artifice, why Dane Cook was basically the MySpace version of Bo Burnham, and Tommy's deeply held conviction that musical comedy is like impressions — transcendent when it works, a hat on a much less impressive hat when it doesn't.At the heart of it is what Tommy catches on his latest rewatch that he'd never noticed before: the Chipotle joke isn't just a Chipotle joke. When Burnham circles back to "I wouldn't have asked for all that if you'd told me it would be such a mess," he's not talking about a burrito you guys — he's talking about fame, perfectionism, and the loneliness of building something extraordinary entirely by yourself.And then the special ends the way it has to: with silence, an empty room, and the quiet admission that people don't laugh when they're alone. They laugh in groups. Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good argument for listening to this episode with someone. Go ahead. Introduce Grandma to Burnham by way of this podcast. What could go wrong?People & References Mentioned:

• Bo Burnham — Make Happy (2016, Netflix), Inside (2021, Netflix), Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous (MTV)
• Christopher Storer — Co-director of Make Happy, creator/director of The Bear
• Stephen Lynch — Musical comedian, starred in The Wedding Singer on Broadway
• Steve Martin — Comedian, actor, banjo enthusiast
• Anthony Jeselnik — Comedian
• Conan O'Brien — Late night host, former Simpsons and SNL writer
• Andy Kindler — Comedian, comedy deconstructionist
• Todd Glass — Comedian
• Dave Attell — Comedian's comedian
• Jeff Ross — Comedian
• Dane Cook — MySpace-era comedy disruptor
• Nate Bargatze — Comedian
• Flight of the Conchords — Musical comedy duo
• Tenacious D — Musical comedy duo
• Matt Friend — Impressionist, TikTok
• Rick Glassman — Comedian, host of Take Your Shoes Off podcast
• Fred Armisen — SNL cast member, Nicholas Fehn character
• Firesign Theatre — 1960s/70s counterculture comedy troupe
• Mr. Show with Bob and David, Kids in the Hall, The State — Sketch comedy shows
• Ben Folds — "Rockin' the Suburbs"
• Zac Brown Band — "Chicken Fried"
• Mortified — Live show and podcast where people read their childhood diaries
• George Carlin — "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television"

Tommy Metz III's Shows:

• All the Feelings Presents: Still Adulting (with Pete Wright) — allthefeelings.fun
• Sitting in the Dark — Horror movie monthly podcast
• The Film Board

Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

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Here's the thing about watching a movie one week after reading the book it's based on: you become the world's most insufferable viewing companion. And Mandy—who consumed Suzanne Collins's novel and then immediately sat down for the 2012 film like some kind of dystopian speed-run—has NOTES. Guest Mona Chatterjee is back for what is officially Make Me A Nerd's first-ever adaptation episode, and together they discover that reading the book first is both a gift and a curse, because now you know exactly what's missing and you will not shut up about it.What's missing, weirdly, is food. In a story literally called The Hunger Games, the movie manages to skip almost every meal, every hunt, every lovingly described roast beef with peas and bread and butter. Mandy invokes Andy Cohen's legendary insistence that Real Housewives viewers need to hear what everyone ordered at dinner, which is either the most unhinged comparison in podcast history or the most correct one.Beyond the missing meals, they devour the film's genuinely brilliant visual choices—the bleached-out gray of District 12 versus the candy-colored absurdity of Panem's Capitol residents (who look less Marie Antoinette and more "Andy Warhol meets Pablo Picasso"), the Apollo 11-style control room that gave Mandy exactly the behind-the-scenes Capitol view she begged for during the book episode, and Jennifer Lawrence's performance, which makes you forget you already know the ending.They snack through casting what-ifs (Kristin Chenoweth as Effie would have been INCREDIBLE, John C. Reilly as Haymitch would have been a disaster), why Lenny Kravitz as Cinna was "too mellow and sexy" for a character they both pictured as a fierce little costume gremlin, and the eternal mystery of why Hollywood cast four interchangeable pasty white guys as the male tributes and expected audiences to tell them apart during fight scenes. The answer, as always, is that maybe they all shouldn't have been white.Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

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Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

Yes, I know—it's 2026, Hunger Games came out almost two decades ago, and we've all moved on now to whatever fresh dystopian nightmare is currently trending. But here's the thing: Suzanne Collins' story about state-sponsored child murder dressed up as entertainment has only gotten MORE relevant, and that should terrify us all.Mandy welcomes back Mona Chatterjee (Miscast alum, Billboard chart artist, international beauty brand impresario) to explore why a book that opens with "the day of the reaping" manages to hook readers from age 12 to 52, and why its themes of inequality, complicity, and manufactured spectacle feel less like fiction and more like tomorrow's damned news.The conversation goes deep fast. Both Mandy and Mona fixate on the people we DON'T see enough of—the peacekeepers who beat kids into submission then go home to dinner, the styling team who beautify tributes before sending them to die, Haymitch drinking himself unconscious because he relives his trauma every single year.Mandy pitches "Below Deck: Panem Edition" to explore how normal people participate in monstrous systems, and honestly? That's the Hannah Arendt question applied to YA literature, and it's exactly what makes this book endure. They also tackle Katniss's backwards trust issues (she trusts Rue immediately but not Peeta, who literally saved her life), the Kaplan Curse (of course Prim's name would be drawn when it's only in there once), and Mandy's recurring obsessions: Why doesn't anyone mention how everything smells?As Mona says, the Capitol's greatest fear isn't violence—it's hope. Hope is what sparks rebellion. Hope is what makes people believe things could be different. Collins wrote this in 2008, drawing on her father's Vietnam experiences and her concerns about reality TV desensitization. Every year since, it's become more prescient, more uncomfortably close to our actual world. So yes, we're still talking about The Hunger Games—because we're still living in the world that made it necessary.Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

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Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

This week on Make Me a Nerd, Mandy Kaplan does the bravest thing a grown adult can do: she prescribes herself a medically unnecessary, emotionally essential dose of The Goonies—because sometimes “self-care” is a bubble bath, and sometimes it’s screaming “HEY YOU GUYS” into the void until the void screams back. Joined by recurring fan-favorite guest Krissy Lenz (of The Most Excellent 80s Movies), Mandy revisits Richard Donner’s chaotic, sweet, frequently-overlapping-yelling masterpiece and marvels at how it manages to be simultaneously a kids’ adventure film and a movie that opens with a fake suicide and drops the S-word roughly nineteen times like it’s being paid per syllable.They dig into why the character introductions during the opening chase are basically a clinic in “how to meet an ensemble cast fast,” why Brand deserves a modern reappraisal as the patron saint of big-brother competence, and why pirates apparently had both scurvy and an interior designer on payroll. Along the way, the conversation detours into Corey Feldman lore (including the surreal fact of Corey Feldman calling Krissy directly because he couldn’t get into the recording app), the weirdly persistent “octopus scene” ghost that’s referenced even when cut, and the uncomfortable 80s habit of using fat-shaming as a punchline so routinely you can practically hear a studio executive chanting, “Yes, yes, keep punching down, it’s working.”And because Mandy’s brain is both tender and mischievous, we also get: a brief masterclass in “planning crimes vs committing crimes” (involving a pizza smuggled into a movie theater), a quick Make Me a Nerd sidebar into the threat of scurvy in modern adulthood, and a round of Goonies trivia that ends exactly the way it should: with friendship intact and pride mildly wounded.Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

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Mandy’s latest “please turn me into a nerd” assignment comes disguised as the most harmless thing imaginable: a British competition show about pottery. And yes, at first it feels like the TV equivalent of a warm cup of tea you forgot you made. But then Jeremy Klavens (return guest, television editor, and the father of Mandy’s child—pending) walks her into The Great Pottery Throw Down and suddenly everyone is emotionally invested in cheese sets, kiln drama, and whether it’s legally possible for one judge to cry at this many objects in one lifetime.What follows is a cozy, gently chaotic tour of why this show hits different: the unusually kind contestant energy, the Bake Off DNA, the “we’re all trapped in a pandemic bubble so now we’re basically family” vibe, and the strange intimacy of watching hands work wet clay on a spinning wheel (this episode contains a brief detour into “is pottery… sexy?” and the answer is: it’s complicated, but also abso-potting-lutely). Along the way, Mandy and Jeremy size up the season’s personalities, judge quirks, and the occasional challenge that feels like the producers asked, “What if we simply made everyone fail at once?”And underneath the jokes, there’s a real question humming: why are shows like this so comforting, and why do we crave “soft competition” where the prize is mostly pride, a tiny trophy, and the right to say “bang on” with authority? If you’ve ever wanted a reality show palate cleanser that still gives you something to argue about on the couch, this is your invitation to the pottery parade. Bring subtitles. Possibly cheese.Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

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Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

Mandy continues her noble quest to become the kind of nerd who can say “Smallville” without immediately being asked which season she started with, and she brings in returning guest John Mundy to guide her through this corn-fed, meteor-soaked origin story of Clark Kent. What starts as “Is this just Superman: The Homeschool Years?” turns into a surprisingly thoughtful tour of what the show is really selling: not invulnerability, but adolescence—awkwardness, secrecy, and the exhausting burden of being good while everyone around you is making being normal look like a competitive sport. Along the way, Mandy clocks the show’s high-school cruelty, its very committed primary-color costuming, and the deeply specific tonal overlap with the early-2000s “monster of the week” ecosystem.John makes the case for Smallville as a long-form character experiment: what happens when Clark and Lex are allowed to be almost-friends for years, close enough to save each other, never close enough to trust each other. It’s basically an extended tragedy with great cheekbones, where the real villain is not kryptonite so much as the inability to just say the thing out loud. Mandy watches the show jump from pilot-era stiffness to later-season operatic intrigue (hello: Lana married to Lex), and the conversation gets into why “pre-Superman” is the point—because teenage Clark doesn’t always know the right thing, and that uncertainty is the actual engine.Yes, they talk about Alison Mack—because you can’t not talk about Alison Mack—and it’s handled with the weird double-vision that comes from rewatching a performance that used to read as “spunky, driven friend” and now carries a much darker cultural footnote. There’s also a genuinely moving detour into Christopher Reeve’s appearance and what it meant to have him show up as the show’s mythic, anchoring presence. Plus: romance-novel rules, gay hockey smut, and the kind of warm nerd argument that makes you want to pull up a chair, even if you’ve never once been within five miles of Kansas.Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

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Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.

Look, if you had told me six months ago that a Canadian hockey romance would become the most culturally significant television event since—actually, I don't have a comparison because NOTHING prepares you for Heated Rivalry. This is a movement. And based on Mandy's conversation with returning guest Jon Cassie (of MMAN Severance fame, but more importantly, of Heated Rivalry obsession fame), we might need to start building temples.Here's what Jon makes clear: this show kicks down the door in the first twelve minutes with full nudity, graphic intimacy, AND a deeply moving love story—all at once. Created by Crave Media (a Canadian company that rejected HBO's ridiculous notes about "saving steaminess for season two"), the series follows rivals Shane Hollander and Ilya Rosanoff through a decade-spanning secret relationship. Mandy, who wanted "some conversation before all the effing," eventually gets her Hepburn-Tracy wit in exchanges like "I might knock" / "I might open." The show delivers both physical chemistry and intellectual connection, launching four legendary careers while giving audiences a complete, satisfying journey.Jon hasn't been "swept away obsessively by a show in decades"—and he's watched this one multiple times. That's the power of Hudson Williams and Connor Finley's chemistry, the devastating beauty of feet touching under tables, and a show that respects its audience enough to be exactly what it set out to be. Heated Rivalry isn't just good queer television. It's exceptional television, period.
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Mandy Kaplan continues her slow, deliberate march into Nerd Territory by taking on one of the most sacred cows in cult-movie history: The Big Lebowski. Joining her is editor, bookstore owner, and self-described “hobbyist nerd” David Isser, who arrives armed with deep affection for the film, a working knowledge of Raymond Chandler, and a willingness to calmly explain why a movie that makes Mandy deeply uncomfortable has inspired conventions, philosophies, and a small but devoted bowling-industrial complex.What follows is less a review and more a thoughtful standoff. Mandy interrogates the film’s aggressively masculine energy, its simmering threat of violence, and its unapologetic embrace of pointlessness. David counters with rewatchability, linguistic rhythm, cinematography, and the Coen brothers’ fondness for rich worlds that don’t care whether you understand them. Along the way, they detour through David Mamet dialogue patterns, noir tropes, Busby Berkeley hallucinations, and Mandy’s firm belief that unwrapping a Russian nesting doll should eventually reveal something.This episode isn’t about convincing Mandy to love The Big Lebowski. It’s about understanding why some art invites obsessive devotion, why other art quietly asks you to leave, and why both reactions are completely valid—even if one of them involves licking a bowling ball.Make Me a Nerd:

• Website: makemeanerd.com/join
• Instagram: @mandy_kaplan_klavens
• TikTok & Bluesky: @mandymiscast

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Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. It's just $5/month or $55/year. Visit our website to learn more.