PS You're Wrong: A Pop Culture Podcast · Shelby and Matt

Primates We Meet on Vacation (Episode 321)

January 22, 2026·1 hr 10 min·15 clips

Shelby and Matt start with a blunt premise: a January movie that has people talking, even if the movie itself feels a little slippery. Primates We Meet on Vacation centers on two monkeys whose romance stretches across years of jungle trips. The setup is treated as iconic and ridiculous at the same time. The hosts lean into the absurdity instead of trying to dress it up. One of the monkeys carries a terrible Hawaii backstory, and the show brushes past that with the same shrug it gives the rest of the premise. Location talk only really lands in flashes. A CGI Hawaiian mountain, a cliffside view, and an Italian villa with yellow flowers are the main scenic beats that stick. Even then, the movie seems to spend most of its time in one house. That becomes part of the joke and part of the complaint. The conversation then shifts from the film itself to what people are actually watching. Letterboxd comes up as a rough barometer, especially the popular-this-week and popular-with-friends sections. People We Meet on Vacation has been sitting high in those lists for a while. The hosts compare that visibility with the much louder online presence of other releases. One host says the movie was watched alone on a laptop. That detail feeds into a longer check on whether the movie ever really built word of mouth. They talk about a friend who had read the book and liked it. They also compare the adaptation to Emily Henry's broader appeal and the way her writing lifts the romance genre. The book-versus-film question becomes the point where the episode gets most grounded. The hosts keep circling back to how much the film changed from the book and why that matters. By the end, the conversation settles into a skeptical but amused verdict that makes the episode useful for anyone trying to understand the movie's strange cultural footprint.

As heard by us

A dry, funny adaptation chat about a glossy monkey romance and the strange way people are responding to it.

Primates We Meet on Vacation gives Shelby and Matt room to do their best work: take a glossy, slightly silly pop-culture object and keep turning it over until the seams show.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when you want Shelby and Matt's snarky verdict on a buzzy adaptation with monkey-romance nonsense.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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