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

This week, the Oscars drama would not quit, a new Fantastic Four movie maybe was not doomed and the Super Bowl loomed.

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

Chef John Mitzewich

Chef John Mitzewich has this YouTube channel, Food Wishes with Chef John, where he shares his recipes which are all really easy to follow. He has this sing-songy voice and his jokes are really corny, but I laugh every single time. He’s affiliated with the food site, AllRecipes, now too. — Regina Barber

Star Trek: The Next Generation

I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s comforting nostalgia and future hope at the same time. I watch it on my couch with a blanket and it’s available now on Paramount+. — Regina Barber

Baseball

I am watching this site called Spring Training Countdown which counts down the seconds until baseball returns with Spring training. We are just one day and hours away from baseball coming back. It’s been a long winter and baseball is the thing that I’m most looking forward to coming back in my life. Yeah, I live in L.A., but I’m a New Yorker in exile, so this has been a complicated season for me. I will say the Dodgers fans out here are a little insufferable, but very happy. The New Yorkers, not so much, but we’ll make it through either way. I just love the sounds, smells, and visuals of baseball so much. — Jeff Yang

Teardown

Teardown is a 2022 video game where you own a demolition company and you go on a series of assignments to steal or destroy things for your shady clients. At the beginning, you’re running around with a sledgehammer, smashing walls to get into buildings. As you progress, you start to realize that if you need to get into a building, you can jump into a nearby construction vehicle and just drive through the wall to get in. You get more tools as you go and your assignments get more complicated. There’s a lot of planning. At one point I was trying to complete an assignment and I was getting delayed because you had to run around this big body of water, then I realized that I could just drive all the construction vehicles into the water and leave them there to run across. It has a very particular aesthetic: it’s made of voxels, which are like pixels, but 3D. So it has a kind of blocky look that’s very appealing to me. I play it on PC. You can also play it on a PlayStation or an Xbox. You can also play this game in sandbox mode where you have no goal at all, you just run through the different places breaking stuff and smashing into walls. Some days, that’s exactly what I want. — Linda Holmes

More recommendations from the Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter

by Linda Holmes

I was delighted to see that Ke Huy Quan appeared with Rachel Martin on her terrific NPR show Wild Card, and I can’t wait to listen.

I’ve only seen one installment of Apple Cider Vinegar, the Netflix drama loosely based on a real story of a scammer, but I’ll tell you this: It stars Kaitlyn Dever. That’s enough of a reason to check it out.

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.