The GQ Punch List: Six Things You Need to Watch, Hear and Read this Week

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This week, laugh at Amy Poehler’s bro, give (the insanely violent)_ The Strain_ a chance, add California to your before-bed reading list, and see how that whole Planet of the Apes thing happened.


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Photo: Benjamin Thuresson/NBC

If you only watch one (SITCOM) this month, make it…Welcome to Sweden. There are two reasons it’s surreal being Greg Poehler. First, he’s Amy Poehler’s brother, so he’s got that related-to-a-celebrity weirdness. Second, he moved with his now wife to her native Sweden eight years ago, and his fish-out-of-water life there is...even weirder. It’s also the subject of his cringe-funny new NBC sitcom, Welcome to Sweden.

GQ: It’s been almost a decade. Are you used to Sweden?

Greg Poehler: "At least once a day, I’ll just have that moment of ’How the fuck did I end up here?’ Last night was a Swedish holiday; it’s called Valborg. It’s a holiday where you just burn shit. There’s a big fire pit; everyone’s just throwing stuff into this gigantic fire. I was there with my kids, thinking, ’What the hell? Where am I?’ It never stops, that feeling."


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Photo: Linus Hallsenius/NBC

(Plus, find out what living is Sweden is like from the very funny expat.) In this extra from our conversation with Poehler for GQ’s July issue—

Super Bowls will never be the same again: "Mostly just like pop culture-y stuff. Like, Super Bowls and Oscars and Emmys—like, all that stuff happens at 3 a.m., my time. It’s depressing to be watching the Super Bowl and be very excited, and it’d be, like, 4 or 5 a.m. and like no one else around, and you’re in your underwear. You close your laptop and then go to bed. There’s something really sad about that."

The language is tough to nail down: "I know for a fact that I’m at like a 7-year-old level of Swedish—my six-year-old son’s friends think I’m cool and my eight-year-old son’s friends think I’m a total fucking moron. It’s hard, I mean, it’s such a crazy language. I started coaching my son’s basketball team recently, and it’s a shitshow. My Swedish is bad in general, but my basketball-Swedish is especially non-existent. "Defense-a"? "Rebound-a"? I don’t know."

…and prone to miscommunications: "The ultimate moment: we were in the States, and my 3-year-old son pointed at a woman and said, "Look at that crazy whore." Hair is hår [pronounced whore] in Swedish. Like, what do you say? There’s a 75-year-old woman, my son just called her a crazy whore. My three-year-old son. But it’s still kind of bad—my son thinks she has crazy hair. Marginally better, I guess."

…but totally worth it: "I love dusch [pronounced douche]. Dusch means shower in Swedish, so there’s no word that I use more in Swedish than that. It’s just so funny to me to say that I’m going to take a douche. I definitely over-use that joke. And of course hår. I use that as much as possible: ’Wash my hår.’"

Being naked is a thing: "It’s a totally different attitude across the board. My kids didn’t even know about bathing suits until, like, a year and a half ago. They thought that when you swam you swam naked. That’s what they had always done. When we’re in the U.S., my kids just disrobe and run to the hotel pool. I have to, like, run after them—’You can’t do that here!’"


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Photo: Frank Ockenfels/FX

If you only watch one (DRAMA) this month, make it…The Strain. To put it way more mildly than the phrase "to put it mildly" has ever been put, FX’s new hybrid vampire-zombie horror series The Strain is not for everyone. It is insanely violent—as in, a giant monster smashing a man’s head to bits with its bare hands/stubs/claws, and little wormy, linguine-ish thingies that burrow into skin and turn people (it’s unclear so far) undead, or actually dead, or, at best, alarmingly pallid. The show, which stars House of Cards’ Corey Stoll as a rakish CDC epidemiologist (!), is also preposterous and schlocky—words that tend to mean bad news. But since the co-creator here is Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) and inventive reinvention is his standard m.o., it somehow all adds up to freakishly silly fun.—Devin Gordon


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Photograph by Steven Pan, GQ, October 2013 (detail)

Be reminded about the best part of Masters of Sex: Lizzy Caplan. The Showtime drama about sex masters researchers, Virginia Johnson and William Masters—the team who, as Caplan told GQ last year as Caplan told GQ last year, "basically figured out that the female body is far better equipped for sex than the male body. Women can have multiple orgasms; men cannot. They’re actually the sexual athletes, not the men"—returns on Sunday for its second season. Which means Caplan returns to our TV every week. Which means we’re very, very, very, very happy.


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Photo: Amazon.com

Read this dystopic novel at night and under the stars. Imagine an awesome camping trip. Now take away all your friends and all the booze, and insert your pregnant wife. Plus, this camping trip is permanent.

If this all sounds A-OK to you, Edan Lepucki’s debut novel, California, might chill you only halfway to your core. There are no aliens in Lepucki’s apocalypse, no virtual-reality feeding tubes or grand-scale cataclysm—it’s just humanity’s dull shortsightedness that has driven the planet into chaos, which makes the horrors all the more visceral: humans preying on one another in the woods, lonely and unshaven and filthy and perpetually on the fringes of a nameless danger, which could take the form of rape, starvation, a sulky silent treatment from the only other voice you ever hear, or simply a day’s worthless foraging haul of "four pathetic chanterelles, which looked so much like a dead man’s ears he didn’t want to touch them, let alone eat them."

California occasionally suffers from the young novelist’s instinct to clutter quiet dread with outsized melodrama—think Sandra Bullock’s dead-child digression in Gravity—but Lepucki stays just enough on the smart side of V for Vendetta to keep us up nights. Keep it in your go-bag in case the real apocalypse hits before you have a chance to finish it.—Kira Henehan


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Photo: WETA/© 2014 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

Watch humans be outsmarted by apes in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Because you know how it’s going to end. (It’s, like, in the name.) Just like you instinctively know how this very tense, very terrifyingly real-looking scene—the same one that blew minds at CinemaCon—is going to end. Spoiler alert: NOT GOOD FOR THE HUMANS.