The Best Pop Culture That Got Us Through 2020

Typically, each December, scores of publications—WIRED included—race to line up and count down all of their favorite movies, television shows, books, albums, what-have-yous. This year, of course, is different. Covid-19 delayed, or outright canceled, the release of a lot of the culture we’d often write about, making a traditional set of lists feel like the wrong move. Meanwhile, the year brought a lot of wonderful surprises and opened the door for more low-key, lo-fi art. 2020 was also a year during which a lot of people turned to culture for comfort, and the stuff they chose wasn’t always typical. To that end, we’re rounding out this year with a megalist of everything that got us through the past 12 months. We hope it helped you too.

Within the marrow of Michaela Coel’s masterwork was a story of ferocious truths: formally, I May Destroy You concerned the themes of rape, consent, and trauma, but it was also a story about power and vengeance and vulnerability, about obsession, about finding closure, about transcendence and friendship and the bonds that make us who we are and who we want to be. For me, the best illustration of Coel’s thesis came in the penultimate scene of the finale, when Arabella (Coel) opens her mouth to read from her just-published book, but before the words can escape the camera cuts to Arabella on a beach in Italy, grinning with joy. It’s all there, the power, the vulnerability, the closure and earned transcendence, all of it swirling together, all of it waiting to be seized—but only when Arabella decides to speak life into her story. I May Destroy You was the most ambitious show of the year and unlike anything I’ve ever seen. —Jason Parham

No, it’s not a very good title. Sounds like an illustrated children’s book, with vaguely Buddhist lessons. (Eight tentacles, the eightfold path—there’s something there.) But that’s so surface-level, and this is a documentary about depths. The filmmaker has a midlife crisis, so he retreats to the ocean, his old childhood escape. There, he meets an octopus, hanging out in her cozy den. She’s wary at first, then curious. Eventually, they fall in love. Does that sound ridiculous? You won’t think so when you watch her stretch her little tentacles out toward him, in moments of need so aching and tender you’ll let yourself anthropomorphize recklessly. “It’s bullshit,” some guy recently said to me. “There’s no way it’s the same octopus.” I feel sad for this man, who’d rather poke holes than plumb depths. Who believes thinking means not-feeling. Who’s never known the touch of another soul, in wordless, rippling, alien understanding. —Jason Kehe

The only thing I don’t like about Jessie Ware’s shimmery disco album is that it came out in the worst possible moment for dancing. With its wall-to-wall glitterball bangers, What’s Your Pleasure? is meant to be played in rooms full of people talking, flirting, and moving their bodies. But its airy timeless tunes from South London’s down-to-earth diva will still be there when the vaccine properly drops. In the meantime, I’ll be dancing in my living room. —Kate Knibbs

If there’s one critique to be made of The Queen’s Gambit it’s that the Netflix miniseries is more style than substance. Fair enough. But the fashions are great, and Anya Taylor-Joy’s star turn as chess prodigy Beth Harmon often makes up for the show’s thin writing, even when it comes to her own character. It plays a little fast-and-lose with its substance-use plotline, but if you enjoy watching people play endless games of chess (I do), Gambit is the right move. —Angela Watercutter

The best avant-garde comedy didn’t happen on TikTok this year—it took place on the Instagram page of 19-year-old Elsa Majimbo. The Nairobi-based social media star wasn’t simply serving elite-level comedy, she was supplying much-needed life advice too. Want dewey skin? This is how you get it. Can’t decide between an iPhone or Android? Elsa’s got you covered. Perhaps you’re unclear on what to do about “the competition”? Look no further. Or maybe you need guidance on how to handle an unwanted admirer? Watch this and hit the follow button immediately. —Jason Parham

During quarantine, podcasts became a lifeline, a way to add voices to an empty apartment. Yet of all the ones that floated in and out, Nice White Parents became appointment listening. Produced by the folks at Serial and released by The New York Times following the publication’s purchase of Serial earlier this year, Nice White Parents lays out in stunning detail the story of public education in America as told through the lens of one Brooklyn school and the white parents who move into its district, altering its course time and again. Issa Rae and Adam McKay are currently turning the podcast, hosted by This American Life producer Chana Joffe-Walt, into a series for HBO. Frankly, I can’t wait. —Angela Watercutter

Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B’s irreverent banger “WAP” was already the song of this year’s bizarre summer, and then the internet got hold of it. Jokes of all kinds gushed onto social media—goofy, lewd, empowered, socially anxious, Kylie Jenner-related, and, eventually, political. See, if there’s one thing guaranteed to rile up conservative commentators, it’s successful Black women being sexually suggestive, and the ladies of “WAP” have plenty of suggestions. This time the figurehead of crusty moral panic was noted transphobe Ben Shapiro, who gifted the internet with a pearl-clutching dramatic reading of the song’s lyrics, bowdlerizing them into a dry, dry nursery rhyme about something called a “wet-ass p-word.” (He also tweeted that he and his “doctor wife” agree that the song’s description of p-words sounds like a medical condition, a bedroom self-own the internet hasn’t seen since DJ Khaled’s.) The internet—especially TikTok, which was already making wild remixes like Phantom of the WAP-ra —rejoiced. I’ve heard the nasally Ben Shapiro remix playing everywhere from protests to thirst traps, and it always makes me laugh, extra large and extra hard. —Emma Grey Ellis

Of all the pop culture condolences that came early on during the Covid-19 lockdown, Hulu putting Portrait of a Lady on Fire on its streaming service was the one that comforted me most. One of the last films I saw in theaters before quarantine began, writer-director Céline Sciamma’s drama felt like the ideal love story for isolated times. Set in a rural seaside home in 18th-century France, it focuses on the love between a painter, Marianne (Noémie Merlant) and her subject Héloïse (Adèle Haenel), who is hesitant to have her portrait made since it will be a gift to the man she’s being all but forced to marry. As they are drawn closer and closer to one another, despite the outside forces sure to pull them apart, it was hard not to watch and hope that one day the world would not be forcing everyone to stay separate and that we could all find loves of our own. Even if it wasn’t released in a pandemic, it would still have been a love story for our times, because it’s one for all times. —Angela Watercutter

Two words (at 1:26:50): Maya Rudolph saying “bubble bath.” —Jason Kehe

An upper-middle-class white family is driving toward the posh vacation home they’ve rented on Long Island. They’re successful, but not so successful that the matriarch, Amanda, doesn’t long to be the kind of person who owns a newly remodeled summer getaway. Her professor husband Clay cares more about sneaking cigarettes than ascending the class ladder, and their kids are just relieved the Wi-Fi works. Unexpectedly, the rental home’s owners, Ruth and GH, show up in the middle of the night and ask to come inside. The wealthy, elderly Black couple are flustered, having driven for hours from Manhattan after witnessing a blackout in New York. Amanda and Clay can’t verify anything they say, because the phone and internet have stopped working. The two families cohabitate uneasily as they try to figure out what has happened and what they should do next. As the adults circle each other warily, youngest child Rose notices something strange: The local animals are leaving in droves. By writing a story about sheltering in place and race and class tensions, Alam crafted the most of-the-moment apocalyptic novel possible. It’s an eerie, haunting thriller. —Kate Knibbs

To me, the twilight zone is more of a feeling than a TV show or a place: a mixture of quaint and eerie, a nostalgic menace. That’s the mood of The Vast of Night, a lo-fi sci-fi thriller about a ‘50s radio DJ and a switchboard operator chasing a mysterious sound across their sleepy New Mexico town. In theme, it cleaves to the classics, making heavy allusions to War of the Worlds, Roswell, and, yes, The Twilight Zone. But, as a movie, it’s an indie oddball. There’s almost no plot, crucial characters appear only as disembodied voices, you never see the monster, and sometimes the screen goes entirely black, leaving you alone with sound. I couldn’t look away. —Emma Grey Ellis

It’s hard to remember now, but Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters was the first huge musical release of 2020. At the time, it looked like it could take the Album of the Year spot. Our friends at Pitchfork even gave it a Perfect 10. The short attention spans that 2020 has caused may make Fiona Apple’s fifth album seem like a distant memory, but none of the praise heaped on it has faded, or become any less true. From “I Want You to Love Me” to the title track, it’s a sprawling, sparse-yet-complex offering that provides new nooks and hooks to investigate with each listen. —Angela Watercutter

“Analog computing” might strike some as an oxymoron. Isn’t computing by definition digital? Not only is it not—we’ve been computing nondigitally for centuries—it might also be the future. So George Dyson argues in this brilliant, idiosyncratic meta-meditation on analogical analogs throughout history. (It might even explain the current media crisis.) An independent historian, Dyson’s unencumbered by institutional obligations and conventions; he makes connections no silo-suffocated “scholar” could. To read him is to be led on the strangest of adventures, on paths untread, up and down trees, and through the rivers of time. —Jason Kehe

Some people don’t love raccoons, but those people are wrong. You know who does love raccoons? A kindly gentleman named James Blackwood, in Nova Scotia, Canada, who spends his evenings feeding a truly remarkable number of friendly neighborhood raccoons on his deck. Blackwood’s been rehabilitating injured raccoons for twenty years in his rural home, and he’s also developed a standing appointment with some of them to provide snacks. Since he began uploading videos of these nightly meetups on YouTube, he’s gone viral a few times, most recently this past year. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Blackwood chirp “I bought twenty pounds of hot dogs today, at Walmart!” while feeding a swarm of surprisingly polite and decidedly plump raccoons individual wieners. —Kate Knibbs

Time moves forward. Or does it? In director Garrett Bradley’s documentary about prison abolitionist Fox Rich, the idea of time—that is, the minutes, hours, days and years that account for one’s life; the experiences that shape who we are—feels more like an echo. Traces of the past and present constantly bounce off one another, and this cinematic sleight of hand is meant to give the effect of what it means to live at the mercy of the carceral state; how it warps time, how for the people involved, those behind bars and the families on the outside, time takes an indistinct shape. The horror becomes the uncertainty of the experience. Still, Rich’s story is not an uncommon one: She’s a mother of six tirelessly fighting to free her husband Rob, who is serving out a 60-year sentence at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (in the late 1990s, they robbed a credit union and Rich was the getaway driver; she served three and a half years). What separates Bradley’s documentary from other films focused on mass incarceration is its intimacy, its interior view. She uses old home video footage of Rich and her sons and threads it with present-day interviews with the Rich family. In Bradley’s hands, time isn’t a simple configuration: It moves forward but it also reaches back, it stagnates and loops, it aches. —Jason Parham

While Ariana Grande’s latest may not have any songs with the internet quotability of 2018’s “thank u, next,” that doesn’t mean it’s not full of gems. Delightfully horny, Positions is packed with string-laden ballads and synthy bops. It also finds more than one way to talk about grief and loss in a way that feels right at home in traditional pop. Honestly, in 2020, it felt like a respite. —Angela Watercutter

ESPN’s 10-part Bulls docuseries The Last Dance was saga-like, a Grecian drama with everything diehard hoop fans and Bull fanatics have wet dreams about. It was a masterpiece of the Shakespeareian kind—loaded with spectacle, thrill, and emotion. With director Jason Heir at the helm, the doc trained its eye on Michael Jordan’s last season with the Chicago franchise (‘97 to ‘98) and everything that propelled him into the pantheon of All Time Greatest Athletes. There’s the stylish swagger, the unmercifulness he harbored as a competitor, the gambling, the cigar-smoking, and deep, personal rivalries. For me, the series was at its most absorbing when it took episodic detours into the backstories of teammates Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman, the pre-social media bad boy influencer who courted fame with the same intensity he did rebounds on the hardwood. You won’t find a better, more comprehensive, more memeable sports docuseries from our otherwise insane year. —Jason Parham

Only Taylor Swift, America’s musical-journaling poet laureate, would begin a pandemic album by singing “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit.” She’s nothing if not literal in her double entendres. The album she opens with this line, folklore, was made almost entirely remotely, the product of a mid-lockdown long-distance collaboration with musicians like Bon Iver, Aaron Dessner, and Jack Antonoff. The song she’s singing, “the 1,” is about coming to terms with someone not being, well, the one, but the line is also about the fact that Swift, someone who normally plans her creative process to a T, released an album almost on a whim. She was holed up by the coronavirus, she decided to make some songs, and released them. Ta-da! (If you want to know more about that, you can watch the Disney+ documentary/live-studio-recording thingy about the making of the album. Again, Swift always has a plan, even when she’s off-the-cuff.) The result is richly crafted, but also feels just a little bit more loose than anything Swift has made before. It’s one of the best albums of her career. It’s also one that doesn’t stand alone. Earlier this month, Swift released a second full-length album, evermore, completely to everyone’s surprise. Often, it felt like a collection of folklore B-sides, but in no way is that a bad thing. —Angela Watercutter

Two words: Lipa Dupa! —Jason Parham

This year I either wanted to read great big sprawling books or extremely short and stunning books. Poet Molly Brodak provided the latter in her second collection, The Cipher, released in October. Her poems are arresting snapshots of a mind wrestling with how elusive solace can be. (And her “In the Morning, Before Anything Bad Happens” is probably the best repudiation of checking Twitter right when you wake up I’ve ever read.) Brodak died in March; she was only 39 years old. And I’ve returned to her “How Not to Be a Perfectionist” more than any other piece of writing this fall. It goes:

People are vivid

And small

And don’t live

Very long—

—Kate Knibbs

At a minimum, watch the first and last episodes of Midnight Gospel—the first because it will change the way you think about zombies, the last because it will make you cry. Also, don't go reading about the show beforehand, how it works, how it was made. All you need to know is it's animated (by freaks) and that there's something of a disconnect between words and images. It might bother you, at first. What am I looking at? What should I be concentrating on? Then you’ll embrace it and experience the very state—post-narrative, dreamlike—that the show is thematically/structurally/literally all about. Confused? Just accept it. Meditate. Be at peace. Eventually, it’ll make perfectly imperfect sense. —Jason Kehe

Swamp Dogg, the 77-year-old soul and R&B legend, put out a country album this year—working with Jenny Lewis, John Prine, and Justin Vernon—because Swamp Dogg can do whatever the hell he wants. It’s warm, elegiac, and funky; opener “Sleeping Without You Is a Dragg” and closer “Please Let Me Go Round Again,” a duet with John Prine, will break your heart. (It’s Prine’s last recorded song released before he died of Covid this year.) It sounds exactly how 2020 has felt: like a reminder to hold the ones you love while they’re here. —Kate Knibbs

TV’s sleeper hit of 2020 was a sensual southern noir that put the lives and concerns of sex workers, and women in particular, front and center. Even for a show about strippers struggling to make ends meet in the Mississippi Delta, P-Valley is about more than the eroticism it sells. The show’s real draw was its choice to not diminish its Blackness, its southerness, its raunchiness, and its womanness. To say nothing of its lush cinematography or the sumptuous script penned by creator Katori Hall (the show was inspired by an old play of hers, Pussy Valley), it’s a riot of pleasure in ways expected, surprising, and necessary. Anchored by actors Brandee Evans, as veteran dancer Mercedes, and Nicco Annan, who shined as the quick-tongued gender-fluid club owner Uncle Clifford, P-Valley is what the cultural historian Mark Anthony Neal calls a “critical intervention”—which is to say it’s a story that insists on a more imaginative contour of Black identity. It doesn’t play small. It knows what it is. We’re lucky to have it. —Jason Parham

Throughout the end of 2020, British director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave) released a series of five films on Amazon called Small Axe. The anthology, which told the stories of West Indians living in London from the late-1960s to the mid-’80s, was rich, but the one that’s stuck with me the most so far is Lovers Rock. It’s not the most hard-hitting—other installments deal with police brutality and the 1981 Brixton Uprising—but it’s the one that feels the most lived in. It has a scant 70-minute runtime, but nearly all of those minutes are spent lingering at a single party, experiencing the drama, exhilaration, and burgeoning romance of its celebrants. McQueen films it in such a lush, inviting way, it’s impossible not to feel swept up and engrossed. —Angela Watercutter

This year was one of reckoning, forcing me to recalculate every aspect of what I thought I knew. I thought I disliked most indie video games, that I needed low stakes, that looting would always be preferable to dying. Hades made me realize just how wrong I was. You’ll flit through the Greek underworld in an attempt to escape—hundreds if not thousands of times, each more satisfying than the last. Hades is about incremental progress, perseverance, certitude, and hope. It’s an especially fitting game for 2020 (and it helps that the soundtrack, art, and voice acting are incredible). I dedicated 1,200 words to it in this review, but you’ll see what I mean within the first 10 minutes of gameplay on PC or Nintendo Switch. —Louryn Strampe

The word of the year might have been “unprecedented.” We live in “unprecedented” times, et cetera—and yes, 2020 was a particularly trying stretch of time for the United States. It’s pretty much impossible to make sense of some recent events, but I found historian and journalist Rick Perlstein’s most recent book, Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 an invaluable source of context for understanding why things are the way they are. I’ve been a Perlstein fan for a while now; he manages to blend political history and cultural history in an organic and digestible way. If it was up to me every high schooler in America would have Perlstein’s series on American culture since the 1960s (he also wrote 2008’s equally indispensable Nixonland) as a backbone of their US history curriculum. The unprecedented usually has some precedent if you look hard enough. —Kate Knibbs

2020 hurt so much it’s almost funny, and so does Hulu’s bizarre social justice comedy Woke. The show stars New Girl’s Lamorne Davis as Keef Knight, a cartoonist who suffers a surreal nervous breakdown after experiencing police brutality. He talks to googly eyed markers, trash cans, bottles of malt liquor, and nightmarishly whitewashed versions of his own face; he sees racism everywhere. His friends diagnose him: “Man, you woke.” Which all sounds very virtuous and highbrow in a snoozy sort of way, but trust me, it’s too strange to be sanctimonious. One episode revolves around the hunt for an escaped koala rumored to understand sign language. Knight screams “I am the sausage!” at polite conference-goers. Davis is effortlessly funny playing straight man to a world gone mad, and watching him slowly come undone is only more poignant for the show’s unabashed wackiness. Of all the shows I watched this year, its tone resonated most with the soup between my ears. —Emma Grey Ellis

Truly all of Phoebe Bridgers’ second full-length, Punisher, is worth your time, but the album’s finale—rightfully the track titled “I Know the End”—is the reason to stick around until the finish. Simultaneously about the end of relationships and the end of the world, it starts with whisper-sung lyrics about feeling lost and looking for home, and ends in a cacophony of shredding guitars, horns, and guttural screams. Catharsis in audible form. —Angela Watercutter

Though technically released in December 2019, Kaytranada’s thump-resonant, dance floor radiant, synth-rich flurry of color and beats was the perfect reservoir of music to escape into this year. The DNA of the record is all about people coming together—13 of the 17 tracks have features; from the R&B singer Tinashe to cultural polyglot Pharrell—and works as a kind of metaphor: In a year that forced us to seek new ways to live and collaborate, Bubba is the ultimate collaborative effort. Dark times don’t last forever, but while they do, it’s best to take a note from Kaytranada and dance the darkness away. —Jason Parham

Earlier this year, Zendaya made history, becoming the youngest woman ever to win an Emmy for best actress in a drama series. It could easily be the most deserved award of the whole year. Her portrayal of Rue on HBO’s Euphoria is heartbreaking in its rawness. As Rue, she plays a teenager who is struggling with both crippling drug addiction and being in love with her best friend, Jules (Hunter Schafer). It’s the kind of role that could easily be taken too far. Every actor who wants to Go There and give a “real” performance attempts to portray the life of an addict. Yet, at no point in Euphoria does anything Zendaya does feel performed. It’s just lived. Nowhere is this more true than in Euphoria’s special one-off episode earlier this month. The show was supposed to begin filming its second season at the beginning of 2020, but got shut down due to Covid. To fill the void, show creator Sam Levinson wrote a bottle episode that begins with Rue’s dream of what her life with Jules could’ve been and then pivots to nearly an hour of conversation between Rue and Ali, a friend she met in NA, at a near-empty diner on Christmas Eve. They talk sobriety, spirituality, grief; ultimately, as Rue ponders her own end, Ali asks her how she’d like her sister and mother to remember her. The answer, given after nearly 30 seconds of silent trembling, is “as someone who tried really hard to be someone I couldn’t.” In a show that often gets by on style and movement, it's the most quietly wrenching minute of TV aired this year. —Angela Watercutter

In a year that left so many of us adrift in our spiritual seas, the arrival of Marnie has felt like a lifeboat. Marnie—a character created by actor Brian Jordan Alvarez—may look and sound like a counterfeit Marianne Williamson, but she is so much more than her bug eyes and blunt bangs. She is joy personified, pure source energy. When one of Marnie’s videos appears in your lifeless Twitter feed, you stop your scroll and listen to her dreamlike soliloquy, because Marnie contains infinite wisdom. Her credentials include a doctorate in astrology and a master’s in clinical spirituality. She invented drugs, and the idea of “the sexual breakfast buffet.” She has existed for longer than money, or light. How long can the joke go on? Seemingly forever, now that Alvarez has turned Marnie into a regular feature on Cameo. While you have spent the year relegated to your couch and your computer, Marnie has traveled various planes of consciousness, and to spiritual retreats in Turkey, Napa, and the Bahamas, to bring back an important message. And her message is this: You, the viewer, are god consciousness, you are love, you are the essence of the essence, and everything in this surrealist world will be OK so long as you sign up for Marnie’s class. — Arielle Pardes

The best thing about season 1 was Ruth Wilson’s Mrs. Coulter. She’s still the best thing about season 2—but the rest of the show, miraculously, has almost caught up to her. Gone are the pacing problems and the depressing non-focus on daemons. Now, the world feels real. Worlds plural, rather, since Lyra and her new friend Will must travel between them to realize their destinies. She has a truth-teller. He has a knife. Together, they can cut through the lies of religion! Or something. Let’s hope the show doesn’t back away from Philip Pullman’s greater blasphemies, speaking of. It doesn’t seem to be—Dr. Mary Malone is here, talking to angels on her supercomputer, learning of their vengeful ways. She’s played by Simone Kirby, in a performance so convincing it’s like they plucked her from a real physics lab. Watch out, Wilson—there’s a new woman in town, and she’s got science on her side. —Jason Kehe

Full disclosure: I’m biased. Bess Kalb and I used to work together in WIRED’s research department long before she became a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live! I’d like to think, though, that I would still love her book—an autobiography about three generations of women: Kalb, her mother, and grandmother—just as much. Funny, heart-wrenching, and written with a gentle flourish many attemp but few master, it’s a delight. It’s also a quick read that can be tackled on a weekend, or over a holiday break. Finish it in a few days and then call your mom. —Angela Watercutter

The unique, funny, tender HBO docuseries How To With John Wilson was just renewed for a second season, and it may take years to come together. Wilson has a laborious and not particularly efficient method of collecting footage for his episodes; he walks around New York with his camera and sees what he can see, and then cobbles together a narrative based on what he finds. I’ll wait a decade for another round. I reviewed the series for WIRED last month, and wholeheartedly meant it when I called it “the year’s best nature documentary.” It’s a feat of observation and mischief, and I promise you haven’t seen anything like it before. —Kate Knibbs

Solvig is a commercial deep sea diver who spends weeks working on the bottom of the ocean. She’s also trying to have a baby with her tender-hearted tattoo artist boyfriend, James. She’s also a finalist in a contest to become one of the first humans to colonize Mars, although James doesn’t know that yet. It’s a one-way trip. Bright and Dangerous Objects follows Solvig as she chases several incompatible dreams simultaneously, questioning what it means to be a mother and whether her impulses to explore the far-flung corners of the ocean and universe are something she should curtail or embrace. While most people would turn down a suicide mission to the Red Planet, Solvig’s struggle—how to make her dreams fit inside her life?—is a universal one, and this is a beautiful book. —Kate Knibbs

In any other year, Birds of Prey might have been the cherry on top of a sundae of superhero delights. As far as comic-book movies go, it’s definitely the quirkier—but also smarter—kid sibling to more serious-minded DC films like Justice League or Suicide Squad, and would’ve easily fit in as the beloved oddball of the bunch. But as it turned out, director Cathy Yan’s movie about the exploits of Harley Quinn ended up being one of the few movies to hit theaters, period, in 2020. Good thing it was a good time. Bright, action-filled, and perfect in its imperfections, it’s a delightful popcorn flick. And Margot Robbie’s embodiment of the film’s main antiheroine just gets better with each new movie where she plays her. —Angela Watercutter

Of the many things I thought we didn’t need this year, one of them was definitely a show about an aspiring white rapper trying to break into the music business in LA. Yet the awkward charm of Dave—created by and starring Dave Burd, aka rapper Lil Dicky as a version of himself—will eventually win you over, as it did me. Past the plethora of excessive dick jokes and its sometimes thorny treatment of fame, what the show did better than almost all of the TV shows I watched this year was write with empathy about mental health, and particularly what that means if you’re Black and have bipolar disorder. If there’s one episode of Dave to watch, it’s this one. It will change you. —Jason Parham

Earlier this year, I wrote that Raven Leilani’s debut was “a story about race, class, and everything else that eviscerates people’s ability to live and connect. Luster is bled through with an honesty about the subterfuge of survival that is both gripping and often hilarious.” I fully stand by every word of that. It’s been three months since I put it down and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. —Angela Watercutter

If you watch a lot of TV, Devs will feel wrong to you. Very wrong. It’s paced lugubriously. It’s highly visual. And like the science fiction of old—a genre of ideas—it’s actually about something. Something big. Something like destiny, as understood by godlike technology. The star of the show is a pulsing, bright-gold quantum computer. It sits right there in the center, influencing everything, and around it squirm and dance the engineers, churchgoers of a near future. No other show captures Bay Area tech worship quite the same. Or the Bay Area itself, riven with self-contradiction. (You’d think creator Alex Garland, a Brit, was a lifelong resident.) There’s also a Russian subplot, in case you were thinking this all sounds a bit heady and heavy. By the end, story and subject merge in a spectacular way. Maybe it’s one thing. Maybe it’s another. Observation is all. —Jason Kehe

All historical fiction, but especially historical fiction about conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly and the rise of second-wave feminism, should feature Cate Blanchett, Sarah Paulson, and Rose Byrne. —Angela Watercutter

Gael, Mark, Kayla, Issac, and Thomas are five teenagers from Anaheim, California. They make a podcast about teen life. Subjects include: high school crushes, depression, the presidential election, LGBTQ issues, racism, their favorite TV shows, what it’s like to lose a loved one, friendship, acne and skincare routines, abortion, Instagram, prioritizing happiness, the Black Lives Matter movement, eating disorders, navigating social media, heartbreak, body image, cancel culture, funny YouTube videos, struggling with self-worth, and basically anything that has to do with being human. From time to time, the show will bring on guests, like TikTok influencer Shalom or a specialist from The Trevor Project, but mostly it’s five friends sitting around talking about life. In other words, Teenager Therapy is a podcast about feelings and knowing that you’re not alone in the world. —Jason Parham

Taking its cues from Deborah Feldman’s autobiography Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots, this Netflix miniseries is an often heartbreaking, often liberating look at one woman’s struggle to escape her life, and marriage, in the ultra-Orthodox community of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. At times nerve-wracking, and often unexpectedly funny, Unorthodox is full of rich characters, but its true treasure is the breakout performance of Shira Haas as the show’s young heroine. She’s transfixing. —Angela Watercutter

A lot happens to human consciousness in our new collection of sci-fi short stories—it’s uploaded to servers (“Remembrance”), studied by machines (“Collaborative Configurations of Minds”), and beamed across the universe (“Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love,” “ars longa”). This was accidental; we didn’t tell these authors what to write about. Just gave them a prompt—what’s the future of work? Of course, science fiction reflects the present, and the world right now is in a state of hyperconsciousness. We’re all very aware of ourselves, our situations, our livelihoods, and we’re trying to survive as best we can. That’s the other thing that comes through in these illuminating stories—the desperation for human connection. In the end, the collection suggests, we’ll do anything to stay together. —Jason Kehe

I hate horror as a genre. I don’t require recreational fear. Real life is scary enough. But I loved Hulu’s horror anthology series Monsterland because, despite all the supernatural creatures, the real monster is real life. Specifically, American life. Each episode follows a drab, ordinary person in an American city during their gravest moment: losing a child, being unable to afford life saving medication, being the cause of a disastrous oil spill, learning that her husband is a sexual predator. Each time some supernatural creature appears to give form to their desperation, and it nearly always destroys them. The show makes no overt statements about social issues, but every character is driven into the arms of monsters by some grinding social ill, whether it's classism or climate change. It’s grotesque and it’s beautiful. In other words, it’s America. —Emma Grey Ellis

I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but big name celebrities hopping on Zoom to do live table readings of old movie and TV scripts became kind of a thing this year. Mostly it was a way for well-meaning Hollywood types to raise some money for charity and fill the hours they couldn’t work. Mostly these efforts were what folks would call A Perfectly Nice Time. But when everyone got together to read Fast Times at Ridgemont High to benefit Sean Penn’s Covid-19 relief efforts, it turned into Broken Up Couple Goals. As the table read started and each actor logged on, Brad Pitt spotted his former flame Jennifer Aniston and cooley said, “Hi, Aniston.” She replied with a similarly cool, ‘Hi, Pitt.” And when he inquired, “How you doin’?” she responded with a completely unbothered, “Good honey, how are you doin’?” It was the biggest, “Should I text my ex?” moment of 2020. (The answer to that question, though, is “no.” You should not text your ex; it is impossible to be as chill as these people when doing so.) Watch the whole thing at 0:19 below. —Angela Watercutter

Everything felt like TV this year. The last 12 months were an endless torrent of Zoom meetings, FaceTime calls, TikTok comedy, Verzuz Instagram battles, Netflix binges, chats with family members via Facebook portal, White House news conferences, Twitch streams, and strange YouTube conspiracy theory videos. We live on our phones and through our screens. We’re endlessly watching and being watched. More than that, though, we’re becoming TV—an infinite form of entertainment for one another to consume, share, and bicker over. One corner of the internet where traditional TV was reformatted in a radically cool new mode was Locally Grown, a streaming website with the luster of public access programming. With about a dozen user-curated channels, surfing through its slate of programming is like stumbling across lost treasure, from hard-to-find Soul Train episodes to discussions between academics and artists. One recent night this past February, just before midnight on a channel titled Black Art, Black Cinema, Black Excellence, I watched the French documentary Universal Techno; following in the next hour were clips from 1998’s Freaknik, the iconic spring break festival. The range of programming on Locally Grown is as robust, visionary, and exhaustive as Black culture itself. —Jason Parham

2020 was nothing if not a year in which almost everyone with internet access was Very Online. Largely this led to even more bickering, flame wars, and depressing scenes than before, but in the high-tension days before news outlets called the 2020 US presidential election for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, folks did manage to have some fun at the expense of Nevada. For days after November 4, as other states finished their vote counts, the tally coming out of the Battle Born State moved at a sloth’s pace. The resulting jokes broke the tension at a time when America needed it most. —Angela Watercutter

Just hit play, here. Do it now. Yes, that’s Cate Blanchett, in close-up, saying “virgin.” And there’s Sarah Paulson, smelling her pits and doing a Southern accent. Ostensibly they’re promoting Mrs. America, their Hulu show, but legendary actors eschew the expected. Their 40 minutes together devolves—evolves—into high art, a real-time redefining of the genre of the celebrity Zoom. They sink, they swim, they soar. This is what the medium promised us, but what no other actors have been able to achieve. When it’s over, your face will hurt, and you will know the power of pure performance. —Jason Kehe

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