I’ve been making annual lists of 50 Wonderful Pop Culture Things since 2010. They include big and small things, inspirational and silly things, things that were very popular and things that it seemed like nobody cared about except me. Sometimes, a theme emerges, and this year — particularly when it comes to TV and film — it’s that a lot of what I loved came as part of projects I was, on the whole, ambivalent about. Elements sometimes work inside larger projects that only partly work, and that’s part of the lovely thing about art.
The usual caveats apply: These are not objectively the best things; they are just wonderful things. There were far more than 50 wonderful things to admire this year, and there is far (far) more that I never saw or read or heard at all. But it never hurts to look back on the year and realize that in fact, delight was upon you over and over.
1. Apple’s series The Afterparty, a murder mystery that presented each character’s version of the evening as a separate episode made in a different style, had a big and stellar cast including Sam Richardson, Tiffany Haddish and Ike Barinholtz. But the musical episode told from the POV of Ben Schwartz’s Yasper was both a believable spin on that guy’s view of the world and a terrific one-off extravaganza of song and dance.
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