You know the deal.
Best Performance By An Edgy Teen Show Alumni: Charles Melton, May December Runner-up: Sidney Sweeney, Reality
I cannot overstate how good Charles Melton (also known as Hot Reggie from Riverdale) is in May December, Todd Haynes’ newest film about an actress studying to play a woman who groomed at 13 year old boy and married him. (it is very clearly based on the real life Mary Kay Letourneau, who is now dead so at least we’ve got that going for us) The movie is a slow horror in many ways, from Natalie Portman’s extreme method actress to Julianne Moore’s unflinching portrayal of a woman who has ruined so many lives but can still live with herself, but Melton is incredible as sympathetic third part of this triangle. At 36, he’s the same age as his wife was when she first seduced him and his children are all leaving the nest. He could bloom and fly away like his children or the precious butterflies he raises, but he’s stuck, reassuring a woman who stole his life when she loses a baking client. He’s a man-child, but not in the way we usually think of them. He’s responsible and caring, but he doesn’t know how to live his own life. He’s never been able to. And Melton carries all of this in his broad, hunching shoulders, in the slouch he watches home improvement TV and the unsure way he smokes a joint with his son. It would be easy to be overshadowed by two Oscar-winning actresses at the peaks of their careers, but he holds his own throughout. Fuck yeah, Hot Reggie. Fuck yeah.
You may have missed Reality, an HBO original about the whistleblower Reality Winner, but it’s a very interesting and good watch. The script is entirely from the real life interrogation and arrest of Winner. Sweeney plays her beautifully, all cautious nerves and worried about her pets while the FBI is about to fuck up her life.
Most Visually Stunning: Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
I mean, duh. This movie has done more for animation than anything since Toy Story. The integration of the comics art into the different characters’ worlds, particularly Gwen’s, really blew me away. So many superhero medias feel embarrassed to be based on comic books, but Spider-Verse never does and instead celebrates its origins. Gwen’s world is straight from Robbi Rodriguez and Rico Renzi’s technicolor paper world.
Best Character Work: Cocaine Bear
This is not a joke answer. I genuinely think Cocaine Bear did more to tell us about its characters with less run time than all of the other movies I watched this year. It also showed a bear high on cocaine killing people. Perfect film.
Best Ending: Killers of the Flower Moon
This movie is a masterpiece in many ways, but the ending is what takes it above and beyond into one of Scorsese’s best. I’m still thinking about it months later.
Must A Movie Be Good? Award: Fast X
Can’t a movie just be Jason Momoa chewing scenery in a scrunchie while 4 Oscar winning actresses hang out and Ludacris & Tyrese do shenanigans and Vin Diesel glowers? Also cars do unbelievable things? Can’t a movie just be that?
Weirdest Movie to Make A Gazillion Dollars: Barbie (also Oppenheimer)
I wasn’t able to see Barbie until this month, so I knew all of the hype and some of the surprises, but I was not prepared for how incredibly weird of a movie it is. It is genuinely shocking to me that Mattel signed off on it. I mean, yeah, they’re making tons of money off the merch from it (I’ve bought so much of it for my mom, a Barbie collector), but it’s very critical of Barbie as a institution and brand. It’s also just such a damn weird movie, with Barbieland somehow existing alongside the real world and the idea that the Barbies there are being actively played with. Magic Earring Ken was acknowledged! Don’t get me wrong, though, I love that it was weird! It’s actually really heartening to me that a movie like Barbie can make a bazillion dollars these days. Same with something like Oppenheimer, a very heavy and very long historical movie. That’s kind of cool!
Documentary All Timer Moment: The phone call in Navalny. Runner-up: Pulling a small squirrel out of a pocket in All That Breathes.
Best Improvised Weapon: John Wick Chapter 4, the playing card
Unexpected Cry: seeing ND Stevenson’s own artwork at the end of Nimona
Best Cameo Just For Me: Ryan Bergara and Marielle Scott in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
This Has No Right To Be So Good: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Movie Most Let Down By Marketing: Elemental. This movie is kind of incredible and the trailers really made it look like it was going to be a shallow star-crossed lovers romance when it’s a deeply personal immigrant story (and the romance is really sweet too!) I hope more people give it a chance now that it’s streaming.
Guy Who Treats High School Football Rules Like The Characters From Air Bud: that fuckin’ guy from BS High. “Well, the rules don’t SAY that kids can’t play football every day for a week straight! They don’t SAY they have to actually be in school!”
Best Gay Moments:
- Jason Momoa’s scrunchies, Fast X
- PJ being in love with a painfully straight girl, Bottoms
- Literally everything else in Bottoms
- Protect Trans Kids sign in Gwen’s bedroom, Across the Spider-Verse
- Julianne Moore yelling about hot dogs, May December
- The multiple queer love stories and gender journeys of Nimona
- The two Kens dancing together during the Ken fight, Barbie
- Eddie and Daveed’s whole entire thing but especially the ending, Cocaine Bear
Middle Aged Mom Content of The Year: Medical procedurals.
Why did I choose medical procedurals as my new go-to comfort shows? Couldn’t tell you. Procedurals (and certain reality shows) are comforting in their own ways, each episode isn’t that different and you don’t have to pay as close attention as some of the more interesting shows on TV. But I’ve never really watched medical shows before, besides my brief ER phase when I was in high school, so I’m not sure why I dove into all the recent big ones: Chicago Med, The Resident, New Amsterdam, and of course the GOAT, ER. I’m still early on in New Amsterdam so I can’t properly review it, but I can confidently say of these that Chicago Med is the worst yet compels me because it’s so bad with its main cast’s storylines (I will say that it did will with Covid and does a genuinely decent job with its psych stories since Oliver Platt is the main psychiatrist and he’s great, he’s Oliver Platt). The Resident started off pretty rough but really compelled me by the end, which I didn’t expect because my favorite character was killed off. This one did better by its cast but the cases of the week weren’t as memorable. Then there’s ER, the gold standard for a reason. I’m in season 8 right now, which is around when I first started watching it intermittently as a kid. I know Dr. Greene is about to die and even though I’ve seen it before, I know it is going to destroy me. I knew what happened to Carter and Lucy in the Valentine’s episode in season 6 and it still shook me to my core. ER is the best of television in so many ways, to watch these relationships grow and change over years is what we watch TV for. The feelings I got when Benton rushed to Carter’s side when he got stabbed, when he accompanied him to rehab, when they said goodbye in Benton’s last episode…television! This is what it’s all about!
Best Reboot/Remake/Sequel/Whatever We’re Calling These: Party Down. Runner-up: Futurama
So many shows that do this falter or just can’t capture the spirit of the original (for instance, I liked a lot about the Clone High reboot, but it’s just such a different show now that I can’t bring myself to love it as much as the original). Party Down is the exception, most likely because the conceit of the show is that these characters are forever stuck in neutral, unable to truly get ahead and stay there. For other shows, it’s pathetic that they haven’t moved on. For Party Down, that’s the norm. It helps that this season remained terrifically funny and creative with its events. The radio winner’s luau episode is a highlight, but every episode was worth a glowing comment card.
Futurama’s back, back again. They’ve been doing this since before it was a trend, so it’s easy to see why they’re better at it than most. Very glad the whole cast was able to come back and that they’ve kept Fry and Leela together without it fucking up the show.
Best Show About America: How To With John Wilson. Runner-up: Succession
How To With John Wilson is a miracle of a show. A documentary (or is it?) cobbled together from the hours and hours of video Wilson films every day of his life in New York is absolutely the most New York City show to ever exist. I can’t think of anything else that captures the spirit, the weirdness, the filth, the love, the attitude, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the violent self-cleaning bathrooms of NYC like this show. But it’s the times he goes beyond our biggest city that really showcase all the weird pockets of America in all its glory. In his final season, Wilson traveled to Arizona to engage with people who are going to be cryogenically frozen, to a hotel hosting a vacuum collectors convention, to the Tennessee Titanic museum, and maybe most memorably to a body building contest that invokes 9/11. While I’m sad the show is over, I’m so glad we got one more wonderfully weird season out of it.
Best Arrested Development Reboot: Succession
The Roys of Succession have long been prestige Bluths and it’s part of the reason I enjoy it so much, as AD is my all time favorite television show. But in its final season, the parallels have never been as stark. “Connor’s Wedding” will go down as one of the best episodes of television of all time, as Logan’s inevitable death still shocks the hell out of us and his family. It was tense and wild and emotional and the whole time all I could think of is the episode “Good Grief!”, when the family learns that George Sr. has died (he hadn’t) and everyone immediately thinks only of his will and where it is, where is it Barry??? You could practically hear the three Roy siblings who weren’t getting married wail “I don’t know what I’m saying!”
Also literally every time Kendall had a Moment(tm) in the water, I expected a seal to bite off his hand.
Finally Some Good Fuckin’ Star Wars: Ahsoka and The Mandalorian season 3
There is one man I trust with Star Wars and his name is Dave Filoni. Obviously not everyone agrees, but I don’t care because the new season of the Mandalorian and Ahsoka were the exact kind of Star Wars I’ve been wanting for years. Give me cape droids and Grogu trying to eat Babu Friks and darksaber bullshit and live-action lothcats and Nightsister magic and droid bars and Obi-Wan parallels with Ray Stevenson and a beautiful adult Ezra Bridger and Jack Black and Christopher Lloyd and Actual Child Ahsoka during the Clone Wars and Hayden Christensen and on and on and on. THIS IS STAR WARS.
Best Music Moment: “Lightning Crashes”, Yellowjackets. Runner-up: “Fuck Tha Police”, Yellowjackets
If Yellowjackets is good at nothing else, it knows how use a banger 90s song to perfection. This season was a bit uneven in the adult storylines for me (except for Misty. Oh my beloved psychopath), but the teenage timeline remained as riveting and devastating as ever. After Shauna has buried her son, she is filled with anger and rage and grief that anyone would have a hard time processing, let alone a starving teenager in the wilderness. Lottie gives her permission to let out on her, and so Shauna does as Live sings their most famous song, most often misinterpreted to be about miscarriage. In a show where cannibalism and murder are always on the table, it’s the most upsetting violence they’ve ever shown. The juxtaposition of the adults singing and dancing to the song as they reconnect for the first time in decades is powerful and captivating.
On the other end of the Yellowjackets’ music spectrum, there’s Jeff. Jeff, our most boring dumdum who loves his fucked up wife, listening to “Fuck Tha Police” by NWA in the parking lot of the police station while his wife and daughter are inside being questioned is the hardest I laughed at TV all year.
Honorable Mention to the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds musical episode, which was a highlight in a season where every episode was a certified banger.
If I Have To Pick a Favorite Show: Fionna and Cake
I don’t know what I expected from this Adventure Time sequel series, but it certainly wasn’t a young adult exploration of identity, love, and destiny. Adventure Time got very real towards the end of its run (along with the Distant Lands miniseries), but Fionna and Cake takes that to its next step, with swearing and giant buff adult Finn and more Simon Petrikov angst than Tumblr could handle. And it did all of this while still being one of the silliest and most colorful animated shows on television. It’s a small wonder of a show that I am very grateful for. Also so much gay shit between Marceline/PB and their counterparts Marshall Lee/Gary. So much.
Best The Other Two Joke That’s Too Real: Cary as the gay goo
The Other Two ended its run with some of its best skewering of Hollywood, millennials, queer culture, and celebrity, but none more than when Cary gets the chance to voice “Disney’s first gay character”, a literal glob of goo. And he’s gay because he’s in bed with another glob of goo because if he was heterosexual, he’d be in bed with a human woman.
Best True Crime Series: Last Call and Murder in Boston. Runner-up: Wild Crime
As you can tell, I watch a lot of true crime docuseries. Most of them are about the same, middling copaganda with an unusual crime at the center. Last Call and Murder in Boston are two exceptions, both from HBO. They are very critical of the police at the center of these two cases, from the homophobia that allowed a serial killer to thrive in the gay bars of New York to the racism that allowed them to terrorize Black Bostonians after a man claims a Black man killed his pregnant wife (spoiler, the husband did it). While both series interview some of the cops at the center of these cases, that doesn’t mean they let them off the hook. If you’re looking for true crime series that interrogate the systems that allow these crimes to happen, these are both some of your best bets of the year.
Wild Crime is much more straightforward typical copaganda true crime fair, but I really enjoyed the new season subtitled Blood Mountain. Yes, a lot of it is because this case was partially local to me, but I thought this show did a good job of showing how good investigative work can be done. I think part of the reason this series is a little better than most is that its investigators are park rangers first before being cops, so they come to the cases from a different background.
Best Bit: John Oliver’s Bird of the Century campaign
Best Reveal: the truth on Jury Duty
Best Dudes Rock Moment: Ron helping everyone out on Jury Duty. Runner-up: Jeff offering to take Shauna to colonial Williamsburg on Yellowjackets
Wildest Shit I’ve Ever Seen in a Documentary: what happens after Mother God dies, Love Has Won
Actual Funniest Episode: Urgent Care, What We Do in the Shadows
Most Unsettling Moment: When Sally is attacked in her home, Barry (or whatever happened there)
Best Reunion: Margo and Aleida, For All Mankind
I know this means nothing to anyone since only me and a bunch of dads watch this show but it was huge!
Best Gay Moments: In no particular order:
- The Pride Parade, What We Do in the Shadows
- Confirmation that Laszlo and Nandor fuck, What We Do in the Shadows (we knew but it’s nice to know)
- Cary blackmailing Lukas Gage at the AIDS play, The Other Two
- The episode “Long, Long Time” of The Last of Us
- Izzy sings “La Vie En Rose”, Our Flag Means Death
- Clayface using the word “bussy” in a text to Bane, Harley Quinn
- Colin and Trent Crimm in Amsterdam, Ted Lasso
- Sasha Colby wins Drag Race
- Boimler meets Spock, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover
- Juxtaposition of Marshall Lee and Gary’s first date with Marceline and Bubblegum fighting to the death, Fionna and Cake
- “I used to fuck LeBron James.” It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
- Shauna eats Jackie’s ear, Yellowjackets
Genre of the Year: 90s alternative
Like I am embracing my middle aged mom by watching medical procedurals, I’m also embracing my Gen X’er dad by devoting my fall very heavily to listening to the best and most popular alt hits of the 1990s. It started because Amazon Music is the easiest way for me to listen to music at work (I have Prime but not the full version so it is mostly terrible to use, for the record) and their 90s playlists caught my eye. For whatever reason, listening to these mostly-dead singers pour all of their angst into a three minute song hits the exact spot of my psyche this year. I’ve liked all these songs for years, but they’ve taken on new resonance now, whether it’s personal or globally. For instance:
Old Song of the Year: “Zombie” The Cranberries
I can’t think of a better song to encapsulate the violence and heartache that has perpetuated this year. Also, it showed up on both Yellowjackets and RuPaul’s Drag Race, in very different but effective ways.
New Song of the Year: “Bull Believer” Wednesday
Am I biased because they’re a local band? Yes. It his 8 minute song that includes a Mortal Kombat homage also a banger? Yes.
Favorite New Album: Fall Out Boy So Much (for) Stardust
Peter Wentz you got me again, goddammit. As you can see:
Game of the Year: Baldur’s Gate 3
Have I finished BG3? Sure haven’t. I’m stuck on a very annoying fight to finish Astarion’s companion quest, but it’s very easy to declare BG3 as the gaming achievement of the year. The sheer scale of this game cannot be overstated, from all the different interactions and outcomes to being able to talk to any animal or dead NPC to the unprecedented horniness. Larian outdid themselves with this one, we’ll be talking about this game for a long, long time.
Most Heartbreaking Sidequest: Howard and his pigeons, Spider-Man 2.
Best New Pokemon: Dipplin and Hydrapple
I love apple dragons so much
Best Soundtrack: Super Mario Wonder
Best Gay Moments:
- Aloy gets a girlfriend, Burning Shores DLC
- Slug guy and his husband who fell in love because they hated the same guy, Jedi Survivor
- Quite literally everything in Baldur’s Gate 3 but most significantly Isobel and Aylin
- Parvati is an ace lesbian, Outer Worlds
- Whatever is going on with Harry, Peter, and MJ, Spider-Man 2
And finally, The Voltron Award For the Year’s Worst Fandom goes to Our Flag Means Death! I’ve never seen a fandom speedrun all the best and worst wanks so quickly as this one did. I wasn’t in it (I enjoy the show but avoid online chatter about it), but just hearing about it was mentally exhausting.
zkywalkers 