Pop Culture Happy Hour - The Social Reckoning and What’s Making Us Happy

Episode Date: October 9, 2026

Don’t call it a sequel: The Social Reckoning is a companion piece to The Social Network. While the first movie chronicled the invention of Facebook, this one focuses on where Facebook is now. Jeremy Allen White stars as a crusading reporter alongside Mikey Madison, a Facebook insider with damning information about the business’ practices. The film also features Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, will it be added to the canon of great films about investigative journalism?  Looking for other potential Oscar contenders? Check out these episodes:The movies and TV we’re most excited about this fall‘Primetime’ sits you down with sleazeTom Cruise in 'Digger' is loud, divisive and intensely committed to the bitConnect with Pop Culture Happy Hour:Letterboxd / FacebookOur weekly newsletterSupport public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include bonus episodes and sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

If you appreciate the nuance and context we bring you here at pop culture happy hour, look into NPR Plus. When you join, you're supporting the kind of deep dive storytelling that makes shows like pop culture happy hour possible. You also get perks like early access and bonus episodes for a wide variety of NPR shows. Join us at plus.npr.org. I think this is a funny movie with solid laugh lines because Aaron Sorkin is a funny writer. There are also equally enjoyable, wildly unintentional. Laugh lines because Aaron Sorkin is also a huge cheese ball. It's very corny.

Don't call it a sequel. No, the new film The Social Reckoning is a companion piece to the 2010 film The Social Network. But where that first movie chronicled the invention of Facebook, Reckoning focuses on where Facebook is now and what it's doing to the culture. It's framed as a kind of all the president's men for the digital age, with Jeremy Allen White as a crusading reporter and Mikey Madison as a Facebook insider, with damning information about Facebook business practices. I'm Glenn Weldon, and joining me today in NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour are a dream team, two people I want to talk about this movie with.

First up, my co-host Linda Holmes. Hey, Linda. Hello, Glenn. Also with us is NPR White House correspondent Danielle Kerchleben. Welcome back, Danielle. Very happy to be here. Let's get to it. The Social Reckoning is inspired by a series of Wall Street Journal articles called the Facebook files, most of which were written or co-written by reporter Jeff Horwitz.

He's played by Jeremy Allen White. A Facebook engineer named Francis Hogan disclosed thousands of internal documents to Horwitz. She's played by Mikey Madison. Those Facebook documents chronicled that the platform was causing measurable societal harm and that the company knew this and did nothing. The film's fractured timeline also features Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook isn't the ref. That's the point. That's the point, Charlie.

We're not the ref. We're the public square. It's Jeremy Strong, strongly Jeremy. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed the film. He won an Oscar for writing The Social Network. The Social Reckoning is in theaters now. Linda, if there was a graduate course in Sorkin's studies, I would want you teaching it. You go way back with Sorkin's work, the highs, the lows, the studio 60s. The Social Reckoning, what do you reckon?

I did not enjoy this to cut to the chase. I think it's pretty boring, except when it is weird in ways that I did not like. It's a pretty ordinary investigation tale. I think in terms of like the comparison to all the president's men, my response is like, It Wishes. They try to spice it up with a couple of odd touches. I think Jeremy Strong does a pretty good, strange Zuckerberg impression. I like Mikey Madison.

I like Jeremy Allen White. I think both of the characters are pretty seriously underwritten. So the only time it really held my attention was when I was wondering whether something very odd was true or not. in most cases, the answer to that seems to be no, which we can talk about, not a surprise based on how fast and loose the social network was with a lot of things. So I would say not a movie that I enjoyed and not a movie I took a lot away from either artistically or factually about Facebook. Okay. How about you, Danielle? I am in the exact same ballpark as Linda. I enjoyed it a little more, but I think I enjoyed it in ways that the movie did not intend. I was just kind of cackling at various points.

And if you are a student of Aaron Sorkin, as Linda is, and I am probably more intro level, but if you're a person who thinks a lot about Aaron Sorkin and how he does his shtick, it's probably entertaining in terms of you watch it and you can check off the boxes of like, oh, there's a Sorkin thing, there's a sorkin thing. Like gratuitously treating women in kind of gross ways. Yep, got that. Character is messing up pop culture references and correcting each other. Got that too. It's wild how quick you can tick through it. It really made me think so much about the social network and my continual wrestling with that movie. Like how much artistic license is too much with a, especially with a story that's so fresh and a story that features living people. And at what point is your artistic license obscuring the real story and obscuring some of the truth and interesting stuff that was going on? And are you using that license to try to make? a fairy tale-ish story of investigative reporting, which is what I think this movie is doing, is obscuring the truth in favor of trying to give you something sweeping and Frank Capra-ish.

Okay, well, I think I'm going to end up recommending this movie to our listeners. I'm going to recommend also that they see it in theaters this weekend because I think this is a funny movie with solid laugh lines because Aaron Sorkin is a funny writer. There are also equally enjoyable, wildly unintentional laugh lines because Aaron Sorkin is a funny writer. There are also equally enjoyable, wildly unintentional laugh lines because Aaron Sorkin's Sorkin is also a huge cheese ball. Things are true. It's very corny. Schrodinger's writer for me.

You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both there, you have Aaron Sorkin. What struck me is that when this movie is, you know, sailing in West Wing's sports night waters, you know, people doing their jobs that they're very passionate about and being clever and maybe a little noble, it's working for me. The closer this movie gets to depicting real world events and then trying to co-op those events to score its dramatic points, the more it slides into the newsroom waters, which is not surprising because that's exactly what the newsroom did. And that passion decays into kind of a sanctimoniousness, which doesn't make me angry because it is so self-important and so self-serious

that it is a hoot. And it's in those moments that I would recommend seeing it, listeners, I don't know if you can swing it. If you can see it sitting next to a trusted, acclaimed, seasoned political journalists like Daniel Kirchleben, because nothing is funnier, than seeing her curl into a fetal ball in her seat. Now, Danielle, we can't spoil the stuff that turned you into a pillbuck specifically. But can you unpack for me how you reacted to this movie specifically as a political reporter? Honestly, I don't know if it was so much the political reporterness that I can react with because, oh, gosh, there's a lot to unpack there. I will say, the thing that made me curl into a ball the most was at one point, it appeared almost that Jeremy Allen White's,

who plays the reporter Jeff Horwitz and Mikey Madison's Francis Hogan were about to kiss or hug or something at the end. And I would not put that past Mr. Aaron Sork. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, don't do it. Spoiler, they don't. Hey, everybody wins. But it wasn't the big reportery things that made me curl into a ball. It was little things that made me go, wait, wait, that can't be true. That feels heavy-handed.

Like, I don't know if Jeff Horwitz, the Wall Street Journal reporter, in fact, does not know how to use a car navigation, or how to use a map app. But that is a minor part of the plot. And it made me go, like, is this something you dropped into the script to show us that, oh, he's not a tech reporter. He's an outsider. He's coming in from Washington. And if that's true, there are other more mundane, but less make you sit up on your seat and go, whoa, wait a minute, ways to establish that. Another thing is that Francis Howgan is portrayed as a kind of mousy, meek, shy-ish character.

Now, whether or not she was that way in real life when she worked at Facebook, I don't know. But sometimes it just goes over a line into, I have written down in my notebook, is she an idiot? By which I mean. At one point, she points at a television and sees a basketball player pumping his fist and says, what is he so happy about? What is he doing? It's like, Francis Howgan has seen a basketball game. Why are we acting as if she hasn't? It's moments like that that lean into, like you said, the cheesy, the heavy-handedness where I go, the mundane would serve you so much better here. And that makes me think of movies like Spotlight or the insider, where you have imperfect heroes or subjects and reporters who are schlubby and. and wearing their dockers and pleaded ugly pants and everything and just doing their jobs like normal people. And this movie just tries to yossify all of that so much that it just pulled me entirely out of it. And I think even if you're not a political reporter, any type of reporter, I think you may well have that reaction to it.

You know, I think that when you have watched a lot of Sork and stuff and when you have liked a lot of it as I have. And that is not a lie. I have really loved a lot of his work. I think that there are certain things that he does that you recognize and you realize they're not neutral to do. And one of the things that he does in this film is create this kind of imaginary, as far as I know, imaginary, relationship between the two of them that's very, she is moral but often wrong. And he is generally right. but he needs her to be a moral person. That's an incredibly common Sorkin pattern is women are moral and they allow men to do great things.

I don't see any indication that that is how they saw this relationship between the two of them. There is a very strange decision as far as I know from looking at his book and looking at her book. They were meeting in his backyard of a house that he lived in with his wife. And it is moved to their meeting in a hotel that he lives in by himself so that when she comes to the hotel, her cover is to hope people think she's a sex worker, which means you get Mikey Madison and a lot of, like, revealing outfits, which I guess is what Aaron Sorkin thinks that would entail. For all I know, maybe there's some reason for this that is real. I can't declare there isn't. But to me, those kinds of decisions are not neutral. And when you throw in other really obvious, like there's a point early on where he refers to the two interns as Zach and girl intern, which is the most outrageous thing to do in the workplace.

And then later, the Jeremy Allen White character gives a lecture to her about how mansplaining is just something women say when they're losing an argument. The word mansplained does not appear in his book. It doesn't appear in her book. I haven't seen any evidence that this comes from anywhere except Aaron Sorkin, and it sounds like a very Aaron Sorkin thing. It's a very author insert, yes. So his gender politics are lousy and unfortunately are persistently lousy. And I think in this case it gets in the way of his storytelling. What I would love to hear from you guys about, you know, Glenn, you alluded in the introduction. to this like scrambled timeline, which involves a lot of sliding back and forth with an on-screen slider showing where you are in time, which to me is a flashing sign that says you didn't structure your movie correctly, especially like I don't think it accomplishes anything in this

situation, all this sliding back and forth, it's 2021, it's 2019. And by the way, like those are not real dates from real time. They are a fictional story that he is telling in terms of the timeline. I found the scrambled timeline interfered with the creation of narrative tension in many cases. I'll be honest, the timeline didn't bother me much because I was fine with, you know, sliding back and forth. And to me, if we're talking timelines, the issue wasn't so much bopping back and forth between 2019, 2021. Uh-oh, the coronavirus pandemic is coming, all of that. I could deal with that. It's more just the recency of it in general. I think the movie had to to work extra, to make it a revelation to Jeremy Allen White, that, wow, people engage with the more

emotional posts. And wow, these are the things that get people to click more and to stay on Facebook more. And like, to our modern 2026 brains, it's like, yeah, yeah, you're no kidding. I'm not saying you can't have that in the movie. I do think this is a worthy topic to have a movie about. I think it's a great story to tell. We get back to spotlight. told that story about something that at the time the movie came out, we all knew. We had all heard the story about Catholic priests. After the insider, we had all heard the story about the dangers of cigarettes and the horribleness of cigarette companies. There's a way to tell this story and make that feel like more of a revelation. That's a thing that this movie didn't manage to do. I don't know if that's impossible in 2026 or if there is a way, but this movie didn't succeed in making me go, wow, yeah, that was a big deal. Because it just doesn't feel that way right now. Well, there's two issues here. One is meta and one is within the film itself. So the meta one is that this movie's called The Social Reckoning. These articles came out in 2021. This movie frames them as being like Watergate, Watergate, and a presidency. It's five years later. I don't reckon there's been a reckoning. So if you called it the social bump in the road, the social mild turbulence, maybe I could be a little bit more on board with calling it. But the danger of couching what we know now to be true about the algorithm. as this mystery to be solved. If you think about it, it's the same problem you have, the same question you have

when you're trying to dramatize something like the discovery of penicillin or the creation of the atom bomb, which has recently been dramatized very powerfully. We know how it turns out. So you have to account for the fact that you got to do more work to invest your audience in finding out the answer to a question that it knows the answer to. So it can't just be about finding out the answer. It has to be about finding out how the answer affects the people who find it out, how it changes them.

And I think, to me, I would argue that this movie does that job somewhat, but along the way, it just has them explaining stuff to each other, which is the classic, you know, this is the Sorkan mode of him believing that everything you need to know about writing dialogue you can learn in debate club. And that's just not true. This film contains the Sorkan staple of thinking that it is somehow stirring and dramatic to watch characters cite statistics at each other. I mean, the number of times in this movie, these actors,

speak in these hushed portentious tones as the music is swelling around them while they deliver a line of dialogue that ends with the word percent. And then there's this giant reaction to that. It's all about Sorkin's belief that drama can be constructed out of real world events. If you have the characters react to, you know, just citing the recitation of facts and the recitation of data points like they would react to like the sight of a dead puppy or something, like have it be melodrama. As a dramatist, he's got this very old school, and I don't just mean boomer.

I mean like ancient Greek belief that drama isn't doing its job unless it's instructing us in some way. It can't just be about entertaining, can't just be about illuminating something about the human spirit. It has to be pedagogical in some way. Yeah, there was a moment in the movie where there's a character named Charlie, played by Bill Burr. And he is advising Mark Zuckerberg as Mark Zuckerberg prepares for what he fears is going to be. adversarial hearing about Section 230. Bill Burr is really poking at Mark Zuckerberg about his answers saying you're not, you know, you're not doing it right. You're not likable enough, et cetera, et cetera. And at some point, they get into an argument about whether Facebook is being

responsible. I'm a free speech absolutist. So except where there's imminent harm. You can't say absolutists and accept in the saints. With the new optimizations with the MSI, the fire hose of bad information you are injecting into the air supply is becoming jet powered. It's hydraulic. Like, harm, I promise you, is imminent. I can handle an argument. I can handle an Aaron Sorkin, you know, chatterbox back and forth, pitter-patter fight. This one went on for a while. And at some point, I found myself looking at my watch and be like, this is too much exposition.

This is too much explaining what Zuckerberg's ethos is, as opposed to showing. Please show, don't tell. And occasionally this movie lapses into, let's just have a couple of people bicker. with each other. But Linda, did you notice this is a Sorkan joint, but the pacing of that dialogue didn't strike me as kind of characteristically Sorkan? No. The thing that tends to win me over about his stuff and has always won me over about his

stuff is that it has a beautiful rhythm to it. It has a beautiful musicality to it that some people can't stand, but I've always really enjoyed. It's circular. It's patter back and forth. and it tends to kind of circle back on itself in ways that are very funny to me. This has far, far less of that. What it made me wonder about was, you know, Sorkin has always really benefited from working

with directors who I think really know how to make the best out of the kind of dialogue that he writes, right? Whether it's somebody like Thomas Schlamy, who we worked with on the West Wing, or somebody like Rob Reiner, who he worked with in the American president and a few good men or David Fincher, who he worked with in the social network. Here, he's directing. I have yet to see evidence that Sorkin is the right person to direct something that Sorkin wrote. So I don't even think, first of all, most of the kind of allegedly playful dialogue in this between these two characters, the reporter and the whistleblower, I found pretty obnoxious. It didn't feel affectionate to me as much as it felt

annoying. Abusive. So it didn't feel right to me. And I think maybe directors, like other directors, tend to be able to coax something different out of that. Now, obviously, in the social network, it's not warm either. But you're going for a very different thing. I think in this, they're going for a kind of a warm relationship between this whistleblower and this reporter. And I don't think it's directed correctly in terms of the pacing, in terms of the editing, and just in terms of having a feel for how it's going to come off, I don't think it was the right approach. And certainly, we have not talked about this yet, but certainly when you go to these scenes, which the overwhelming majority of what you see of Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg is Mark

Zuckerberg's preparation for upcoming testimony in front of Congress. So you're not really seeing him, like, as a person, as much as you're seeing him in this one very kind of specific situation. I just think, first of all, it plays this so much like the sequence in the Steve Jobs movie that he wrote, where Steve Jobs is preparing for this presentation. And Seth Rogen, as his kind of nemesis and doubter, is in the audience trying to be his conscience. Similarly to that, here you have Bill Burr sitting in the audience while he's preparing for this whole thing trying to be his conscience. It's a really literal. It's not a literal Greek course, but it's a really literal kind of, the man is on stage and someone in the audience is shouting out, ah, but what about this? A doubter, you know?

And I just don't think that works well at all. Yeah, I mean, it reminded me of the West Wing scenes where Jeff Bartlett is preparing for a debate and everybody in the West Wing is just shouting questions and feedback at him. It's exactly the same thing. It's a format he loves. I agree it works less well here. I do want to back up because I feel like I've done. pretty hard on this movie. I think there were some good things about this. I like the kind of casting trick of bringing Bill Burr in. It's sort of like bringing Justin Timberlake into the

social network. You're bringing in someone who does not fit with the other actors. This is a stand-up comedian first and foremost. I think he works as anyone can in that Greek chorusy, conscience-e role that Linda is talking about. He is good at being abrasive and still fitting in the scene. I thought he was good. I am also ride or die for Jeremy Strong. I love an intense tryhard, and he certainly reads as that. I think he does as well as he can with this role. Mark Zuckerberg doesn't have much to do except be a really intense jerk of a CEO in this movie. I didn't know why I find this less annoying than the newsroom. I just did. I thought the moments when it clunked, it clunked. And everybody in the audience around me realized the clunking and

laughed at the clunking. I thought that was an enjoyable thing. So we arrange ourselves on a spectrum as we sometimes do. But that is the social reckoning in theaters now. Up next, we're going to be talking about what is making us happy this week. Now it is time for our favorite segment of this week and every week. What is making us happy this week? Danielle Kurtzleben, what is making you happy this week? Well, this might fall into the category of things that are new to me and maybe less new to

others, but I am a big murder mystery person. And so I have really fallen in love with a British writer named Janice Hallett. She's really great because first of all, her murder mysteries hit this sweet spot for me of not quite cozy murder mystery, but also not horrific violence, children in peril, all sorts of horrible things happening to people. And also, most of her mysteries explore some sort of a subculture. Like there's a murder in the world of pub trivia, and you have a bunch of bar trivia people who take it way too seriously arguing with each other about who's cheating and who did it. And she's really good at taking a group of people and painting the way that people interact. You have one person who takes things too seriously, one person who's obnoxious, one person who's way too nice for their own good. It's delightful.

It's so much more fun than so many other thrillers and mysteries out there. I highly recommend the killer question. That's the pub trivia one. But go read all her books. The author is Janice Hallett. She's wonderful. Thank you very much. Great rack.

All right. Lenda Holmes, what's making you happy this week? Well, first of all, I'm writing down Danielle's recommendation because you know how I love to read a thriller. Oh, yes. What is making me happy this week, and it is one of those things that we often talk about where it's sobering to watch, but I'm really glad they made it, is a documentary that is on Peacock called Kill Berry Print. It is about a series of events in Ida Bell, Oklahoma, which is a very small town. One of the producers is Rachel Maddow. In this movie, a paper called the McCurtain Gazette, starts.

reporting on alleged corruption in the local sheriff's office. This is a, as I said, really small town, so small community. This is a family-run local newspaper that comes out three times a week. And what ensues between the sheriff's department and the members of the family that runs this paper was just shocking. And it ended up being a national story after the family came forward with an audio recording of some local officials musing about having them killed. It is not a rah-rah for how everything goes kind of in journalism sort of story. It is very sobering, as I said,

in terms of what can be done to interrupt the work of journalists. And I think that without implying that, you know, in any way that all local or small towns law enforcement is corrupt or bad or anything like that, you can, I think, in this film, see how grave the risks are. If what this family is saying is all true and it happened the way they say it did, you can see how dangerous the amount of power that local law enforcement has could be if they were up to no good, as we say. So I really do recommend it. Again, it's called Kill, Barry, Print. It is available on Peacock. It's just a documentary. It's about a hour and a half long, really worth a watch, I think.

All right. Appreciate that. Thank you very much, Linda Holmes. What is making me happy this week? The Tri-Gy-Gy-Guise. Look, everybody knows the Tri-Gy-Gyze. I didn't. I had heard of them, of course.

Glenn. Came across one tiny sliver of what is their vast internet. I think it's safe to call an empire, which is a show called The Tri-Gy-Gyze phoning it in. The premise is there are two actual cooks competing against one another. by standing in fake payphones and calling into earpieces of two cast members, comedians, try guys, people who do not know how to cook. And they instruct them to cook or bake a dish, but they cannot tell them what they are making. And they only have a certain amount of time to communicate what to do and when to do it. And if they want more time, they have to compete to get more quarters because the payphone, remember, and they do a little stupid game with each other to do that.

everybody gets frustrated, but, and this is the key, in a good-natured way. And so when the dish is finally ready, it's put under a cloche, there's the reveal, the judges taste the dish, and ask the competing chefs questions about it. And the competing chefs have to pretend that everything about the often hilariously inept final product is fully intentional, which leads to some very good comedy. So if you've got a nailed it whole in your heart, this is going to spackle over it. That is the try guys phoning it in. It is on YouTube. I would recommend starting with the episode The Try Guys Ruin, Glow in the Dark Cakes.

And that is what is making me happy this week. And that brings us to the end of our show. Daniel Kurtzleben, Linda Holmes, thank you so much for being here. Well, thank you. Absolutely delighted. This episode was produced by Mike Katz of Caden Mills and Hopsafathema and edited by our show winner, Jessica Reedy,

and Helokkman provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next week.