His books and lectures on storytelling are so iconic that he was portrayed by Brian Cox in the Oscar-winning film Adaptation, and guest starred as himself in an episode of The Simpsons. This week we're thrilled to chat with Robert McKee about his newest book, Character: The Art of Role and Cast Design for Page, Stage, and Screen.

Joining his classics the bestselling Story and Dialogue, this third entry in his trilogy on writing fiction finds McKee sharing his thoughts on how to create compelling characters, from keeping the well-worn antihero fresh to understanding that we can learn things from characters that we may not recognize in real humans.

Expanding on the examples of success he presents in Character – from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice to Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad – Bob also tells us some of his current favorite TV viewing and leaves both Jennifer and Kim thinking about those novel ideas they've been kicking around for years. Prepare to be inspired yourself by this very fun and informative chat with a true legend.

Read more about it:

• Character: The Art of Role and Cast Design for Page, Stage, and Screen
• Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen Dialogue
• Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting
• Robert McKee Seminars

Jeff Goldblum's career is a unique reflection of our times: He's a character actor who eschews attention outside of his films, yet he's more popular than ever, thanks to a quality that can only be described as memeability. He's also ageless, timeless, and stylish, and prefers magic and jazz to acting, all of which just makes him seem … perpetually cool, whether you spot in him a nearly wordless role in a 1970s film or in blockbusters like Jurassic Park and Independence Day.

On this episode, we dissect the magic that is Jeff Goldblum with Travis M. Andrews, author of Because He's Jeff Goldblum: The Movies, Memes, and Meaning of Hollywood's Most Enigmatic Actor. We talk about why he and Keanu make such good memes, how he invented the sexy scientist role in Jurassic Park, and why The Fly is so disgusting.

Resource Links:

• Because He's Jeff Goldblum by Travis M. Andrews
• Travis's work at The Washington Post

Prepare to be entertained, enlightened, and entranced in this week's episode of Pop Literacy, as we welcome Tony and Emmy-nominated actress and singer Tovah Feldshuh, who talks to us about her engrossing new book Lilyville: Mother, Daughter, and Other Roles I've Played. Lilyvilleis part memoir, part ode to Feldshuh's late mother, Lily, who lived to be 103 years old, and whose complicated relationship with her daughter helped shape Feldshuh into the fierce, thoughtful, loving, and supremely talented woman she is.

Whether you know her from more than four decades of Broadway performances in classics like Yentl, Pippin, and Golda's Balcony, memorable TV roles on The Walking Dead, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Law & Order, or her popular cabaret shows across the country, you will find reasons to love and be delighted by Feldshuh's remembrances of her incredibly accomplished career. As for the personal, you need only listen to the tour de force conversation we were so lucky to have with her to get a sample of how charming is Lilyville's sharing about her life with family and friends.

Resource links:

• Lilyville: Mother, Daughter, and Other Roles I've Played
• TovahFeldshuh.com

Dawnie Walton's debut novel The Final Revival of Opal & Nev is getting terrific reviews: "Feels truer and more mesmerizing than some true stories. It's a packed time capsule that doubles as a stick of dynamite," said The New York Times. "One of the most immersive novels I've ever read….This is a thrilling work of polyphony—a first novel, that reads like the work of an old hand," said Ta-Nehisi Coates.

And for good reason. This faux oral history of a '70s rock duo undone by a starring role in a racially charged concert incident reads like the best nonfiction pop culture opuses. In this episode, we talk to Walton about the real-life inspirations behind Black punk goddess Opal and white songwriter Nev, why music and politics are often intertwined, and the intriguing historical echoes between the book's central duo and the post-Wardrobe Malfunction careers of Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. We also recommend our favorite books (and a few movies) about the music industry.

Resource links:

• Dawnie Walton's official website
• The Final Revival of Opal & Nev
• Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
• Audrey Wait by Robin Benway
• Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby

She's a Pop Literacy returning guest. And though fans of her delicious, Netflix drama-inspiring thriller series of books about handsome stalker Joe Goldberg might not think it possible, we're telling you: You Love Me, the latest and third book in her Joe series is the best one yet. We're not spoiling anything major, but in our chat with Caroline, she tells you just enough of the whats and whys to tease this latest adventure – misadventure – with the perpetually lovesick Joe to have us sure that you will come to the same conclusion about You Love Me.

We also talk to her about how she continues to pack one of our favorite book series with another of our favorites – pop culture references galore, and cleverly deployed, as always – and we discuss the upcoming third season of the You TV series, which hits Netflix later this year. Two words: Scott Speedman, the yummy Felicity and Animal Kingdom alum about whom Caroline shares a delightful story. Not enough? Okay, one big teaser about You Love Me: it features one of our all-time fave fiction twists, which you won't see coming either!

Resource links:

Caroline Kepnes' official website

Caroline Kepnes' You Book Series:

• You Love Me (Book 3)
• You (Book 1)
• Hidden Bodies (Book 2)

Pop Literacy Episode 2: Female Authors Are Fueling TV's Darkest Shows

In 1974, Los Angeles crackled with astonishing creative output: movies such as Chinatown, The Godfather Part II, Shampoo, and Nashville; seminal albums from Joni Mitchell, Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and the Eagles; and the TV series All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and M*A*S*H. Not only were these great works of art, but they also signaled a major shift in Hollywood, from ignoring the political upheaval of the previous decade to reflecting the progressive values a huge, new, young audience of Baby Boomers demanded.

This is the story captured by two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Ronald Brownstein in his new bestseller Rock Me on the Water: 1974, The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics. We talk to Brownstein about the importance of such works as All in the Family, Chinatown, and Jackson Browne's "Rock Me on the Water"; the lasting cultural legacy of 1974; and why anyone who cares about politics should be paying more attention to pop culture.

Resource Links:

• Rock Me on the Water by Ronald Brownstein
• Rolling Stone: The '70s
• Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind
• Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted
• The Way We All Became The Brady Bunch

We all know Betty White from her years on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls. But decades before she was making us laugh in primetime, White was hosting a daytime TV talk show that saw her improvising more than five hours of programming every day. Yep, she's not only one of our most beloved funny ladies, she's also a TV pioneer. She is one of the superstars from the era When Women Invented Television, as Pop Literacy co-host Jennifer Keishin Armstrong chronicles in her fantastic new book of the same name.

From White and Gertrude Berg, the radio star who brought her long-running radio comedy The Goldbergs to television, to Hazel Scott, the singer and piano player who was also the first Black entertainer to host a national variety TV show, and Irna Phillips, another radio alum, who created the television soap opera, there's a lineup of women who truly set up the future of TV. This week, Jennifer shares not only the fascinating details of how these extraordinary women shaped the medium that helps shape our culture more than ever, but the sad forces that prevented most of them from being the household names they should be. Until now, that is, thanks to When Women Invented Television.

Resource links:

• When Women Invented Television
• Here We Go Again by Betty White
• The Betty White Show
• Hazel Scott: The Pioneering Journey of a Jazz Pianist, from Café Society to Hollywood to HUAC by Karen Chilton
• Hazel Scott at the piano
• Irna Phillips's The Guiding Light, 1953
• Something on My Own, a Gertrude Berg biography by Glenn D. Smith Jr.
• Gertrude Berg's The Goldbergs, 1954

Director Mike Nichols lived an extraordinary life: He immigrated from Berlin to America as a young boy in 1939, lost his father at age 12, and was bullied throughout childhood because of a condition that had rendered him permanently hairless. But his difficulties only fueled his rise to comedy, Broadway, and Hollywood success. He became a comedy sensation in his twenties as a duo with Elaine May, then switched to directing theater and won back-to-back Tonys for a run of Neil Simon plays that included Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple.

When he switched to film, he struck it big yet again with The Graduate, a groundbreaking critical and box office smash. He continued to direct major films until his death in 2014, including Silkwood, Working Girl, The Birdcage, and Closer. He counted Elizabeth Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, and Richard Avedon as friends.

We learned all of this and so, so much more in Mark Harris's astonishing biography Mike Nichols: A Life. In this episode we talk to Harris about Nichols's personal struggles, culture-defining successes, glitzy friendships, and lasting impact.

Our guest this week:

Mike Nichols: A Life by Mark Harris

"Video Killed the Radio Star," as the song and video that launched MTV in 1981 told us, and Millennials, among other pop culture deaths they have been accused of, killed the music video star at the end of the TRL era. It was replaced by reality series on MTV … though many current viewers may not know that before reality TV was the thing on MTV, it was most definitely athing – thanks to The Real World. The granddaddy of all MTV reality shows, and a seminal series in all of American reality TV, The Real World began in 1993 with seven strangers picked to live in a New York City loft together, and find out what would happen "when people stop being polite and start getting real." The show ran for more than 30 seasons, filled with fights, tears, hookups, and copious amounts of alcohol at its worst and most embarrassing moments. But then there were moments of pure grace, where the cast took the chance to understand people unlike anyone they'd ever met before. And for one very special season, the audience was riveted by a heroic young man named Pedro, who charmed, educated, and truly showed just how the real world, and The Real World, could be. Almost 30 years after the MTV series premiered, the Paramount+ streaming service is reuniting The Real World: New York cast in that same NYC loft, when we see Eric, Kevin, Norman, Julie, Heather, Becky, and Andre get real again.

This week on Pop Literacy, we talk with Amanda Ann Klein, the author of the fantastic new book Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV's Transition to Reality Programming, about The Real World's place in MTV history, why Pedro and that third season of the show changed reality TV, and what she, like us, her fellow Gen Xers, can't wait to see what the New York cast shares about 30 years of reality television fame.

Our guest this week:

Millennials Killed the Video Star: MTV's Transition to Reality Programming by Amanda Ann Klein

Read more about The Real World and the history of MTV:

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Ron Tannenbaum and Craig Marks

VJ: The Unplugged Adventures of MTV's First Wave – by Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, Martha Quinn, and Gavin Edwards

"To be a women's wrestling fan, particularly one who patronizes WWE … is to be constantly disappointed," Scarlett Harris writes in her book-length critical essay A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment.

In this episode, Harris walks us through some of that harrowingly sexist history—God help us, "bra and panty matches"!—which is also full of women whose determination, ambition, and athletic prowess have inspired generations of girls and women (and a few real-life female villains, to be sure). She also shares the heartbreak of being a fan despite the constant disappointment, her take on the women's evolution from sexy sideshow to serious (if not quite on par with the men's) main event, her thoughts on GLOW, and why she has hope for the future of women's wrestling.

Read more about it:

• A Diva Was a Female Version of a Wrestler: An Abbreviated Herstory of World Wrestling Entertainment by Scarlett Harris

Other great books about women in male-dominated arenas:

• Whole New Ballgame by Sue Macy
• The Incredible Women of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League by Anika Orrock
• When Women Invented Television by Jennifer Keishin Armstrong
• Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus