From Basement Nerds to Amazon Prime: The Improbable (and Inevitable) Rise of Vox Machina with Hem Brewster
Mandy finally meets the world where improv, fantasy, and a Goliath with a ginormous hidden heart collide — and it turns out The Legend of Vox Machina was designed exactly for people who need a good fart joke before they’ll commit to an eight-hour campaign. Hem Brewster, lead producer at Blighthouse Studio and D&D lifer, joins from Iceland to explain how a group of voice actors playing in someone’s basement became one of the most successful Kickstarters in history — and why none of that required knowing a single rule.
Movie Friends Michelle Rubinstein and Seth Vargas on the Strange Legacy of Ed Wood
Plan 9 from Outer Space was declared the worst movie ever made — by people who hadn’t even watched it. Mandy finally does, and walks away utterly charmed.
Nate McWhortor Makes Mandy a Future Folk Fan
A 2012 micro-budget alien bluegrass musical starring the lead singer of Twisted Sister somehow became one of the most charming films you’ve never seen. Mandy watched it skeptical, played a drinking game through it, and came out the other side recommending it far and wide.
It’s Manga Madness with Helen McCarthy!
Manga is one of the biggest storytelling mediums on the planet, and Mandy has been successfully avoiding it her whole life — until now. World-renowned expert Helen McCarthy hands her three wildly different titles, explains why a pirate cartoon is secretly a manual for surviving childhood, and makes a convincing case that the comics your mom threw out were probably worth something.
Wonder Man: A Superhero Show About Not Being a Superhero
Marvel made a superhero show where the hero spends eight episodes trying not to be a superhero, and somehow it’s the most compelling thing they’ve done in years. Mandy and returning guest Matthew Fox break down why Wonder Man works precisely because it ignores everything you expect from the MCU.
We Need to Talk About The Traitors (And Also Michael Rapaport) with Patrick Gomez
What happens when you take a children’s party game, move it to a Scottish castle, and fill it with Real Housewives who don’t know the rules? Mandy and Entertainment Weekly editor-in-chief Patrick Gomez break down The Traitors Season 4 — the strategy, the chaos, the Michael Rapaport of it all, and why the most popular reality show on television absolutely should not work.
The Stardom Burrito: Bo Burnham, Comedy Nerds, and Chipotle Metaphors with Tommy Metz III
Tommy Metz III returns to nerdjucate Mandy on the comedy special that made him believe musical humor could actually work — Bo Burnham’s Make Happy — and together they dissect why a twenty-five-year-old in clown makeup delivering Pavlovian crowd-work traps and country music takedowns might be the most important comedian of his generation.
Where’s the Food? The Hunger Games Book-to-Movie Breakdown with Mona Chatterjee
Mona Chatterjee returns for a Make Me A Nerd first: the show’s first-ever book-to-movie follow-up, tackling the 2012 film adaptation of The Hunger Games. Mandy and Mona debate what the movie nails, what it loses, and why a story called The Hunger Games somehow forgot to include the food.
May the Odds Ever Smell of Sweat: A Hunger Games Deep Dive with Mona Chatterjee • The Novel
Mandy and Mona dissect Suzanne Collins’ dystopian masterpiece The Hunger Games, exploring everything from Katniss’s questionable trust issues to the perfume potential of arena sweat. They tackle the big questions: Why don’t we get a peacekeepers’ reality show and how did a book about children murdering each other become required middle school reading?
It’s Our Time Down Here: A Goonies Comfort Rewatch with Krissy Lenz
Mandy Kaplan and Krissy Lenz revisit The Goonies as emotional medicine: messy, loud, wildly sincere, and somehow still perfectly engineered for joy. Along the way they unpack pirate aesthetics, missing octopuses, Corey Feldman weirdness, and why Brand is the underrated MVP of childhood adventure.