I’ve been making annual lists of 50 Wonderful Pop Culture Things since 2010. They include famous things and smaller things, things that are meaningful and things that are hilarious, things that matter and things that don’t at all. I wonder sometimes whether I’m going to have trouble finding 50 things, and I never do.
The usual caveats apply: These are not objectively the best things from 2024; they are just wonderful things. There were far more than 50 wonderful things to admire this year, and there are far (far) more that I never saw or read or heard at all (or just haven’t yet). But it never hurts to look back on the year and realize that in fact, delight was upon you over and over.
1. In the third episode of the gorgeous Netflix adaptation Ripley, Tom Ripley (Andrew Scott) commits the heinous act of violence that you’ve been waiting for, if you’ve either seen 1999's The Talented Mr. Ripley or read Patricia Highsmith’s novel. And then, for 18 minutes, with no dialogue, he attempts to deal with the logistics. The sequence is part slapstick, part grim determination, part chilling psychopathy, and part good old can-do spirit.
2. Let us raise a glass to a stupendous year of work from actor Tim Bagley, who’s been doing TV and movies since the early 1990s. He brought nuance, grace and vulnerability to the role of Brad, Joel’s partner, on the exquisite Somebody Somewhere, becoming a crucial part of the ensemble on one of the greatest shows HBO has ever produced. But he also showed up on the Hacks episode “Yes, And” in a small but essential role, talking about the relationship between Deborah (Jean Smart) and the gay fans who loved her before she was a superstar. It was one of the best, most empathetic scenes of the year, and Bagley may radiate radical kindness better than anyone else currently working.
3. Samuel L. Jackson’s performance in The Piano Lesson, a play with which he has a decades-long history, was a welcome reminder for newer fans that before he was Nick Fury or a Tarantino badass, he was a theater actor who is just as deft with family drama as he is with big guns.
4. Anna Kendrick’s feature debut as a director, Woman of the Hour, is based on the true story of a woman who was matched with a serial killer on The Dating Game in the 1970s. Late in the film, in a long horizontal tracking shot, her character walks across a parking lot, shoes clacking on the pavement, desperate to get to her car and away from danger but resisting the urge to break into a run, lest she escalate the situation. The tension and fear in the sequence will be familiar to anyone who has taken that same walk anywhere.
5. His Three Daughters is the story of three sisters, played by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne. They come together in their father’s apartment in the last days of his life, and all three actors are just as good as you’d think. But the script from director Azazel Jacobs also excels at conveying what it looks like to be concerned versus being present, including by incorporating a bag of apples that means one thing and then another thing entirely.
6. The highlight of the Starz series Three Women, based on Lisa Taddeo’s nonfiction book of the same name, was yet another stellar turn from Betty Gilpin, who’s rapidly developing a reputation for being the best part of everything she does. Gilpin plays Lina, a woman who’s desperate to feel a very particular kind of love that she’s missing. In every moment, the character is complex, strange and compelling.
7. Rachel Bloom’s Death, Let Me Do My Special on Netflix is a (mostly) one-woman show in which she talks about an agonizing period she experienced in 2020. Within days, her daughter was born and sent to the NICU, and her creative collaborator, the brilliant songwriter Adam Schlesinger, died of COVID. Bloom’s capacity for balancing bawdy humor and devastating sweeps of emotion has always been one of the things that makes her a fascinating writer and performer, as in her former show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and this special is a bold and inventive (and often very funny) way to talk about an agonizing piece of her own history.
8. The American remake of the horror film Speak No Evil is an example of American Remake Syndrome, in that it is much less bleak than the Danish-Dutch original (and it would be difficult for it to be any more bleak, let’s put it that way). Nevertheless, taken on its own rather than as an indictment of its own existence, it’s a pretty nifty little trapped-in-the-house thriller, and it’s a lot of fun to watch Mackenzie Davis arm herself against James McAvoy. McAvoy makes a very effective homicidal weirdo, and that’s a compliment.
9. Practically nobody saw The Front Room, the horror thriller (or maybe dark comedy) in which Brandy Norwood plays a pregnant woman forced to take in her sublimely creepy mother-in-law, played by Kathryn Hunter. But the dynamic between the women is devilishly fun, and Hunter is an absolute blast as this woman whose spindly physicality is neck-and-neck with her bizarre way of speaking when it comes to defining “creepy mother-in-law.” To say this movie goes for it is to understate the case. You’ll see more blood in plenty of movies, but the number of different weird things that come out of bodies in this one is still pretty impressive.
10. Whether you did or didn’t enjoy the Netflix series The Perfect Couple, there’s no denying that the dance number in the opening credits was the buzziest opening of the year. Some of the cast (Liev Schreiber) seems very happy to be there and some of the cast (Nicole Kidman) does not.
11. Simone Biles was the star of the 2024 Summer Olympics — and more power to her for handling enormous pressure with grace (and success). If you’re looking for somebody who came into the games with less name-recognition, though, you likely want to follow rugby player Ilona Maher. Find her on social media, watch her work on Dancing With the Stars — she’s the fun-to-watch athlete we needed.
12. Is there anything Colman Domingo can’t do? If there is, we haven’t found it. This year, he was wrapped up in a conspiracy in the Netflix series The Madness, which gave him some action-sequence opportunities. But he does great and empathetic dramatic work in the film Sing Sing. It’s based on the real story of the drama program for incarcerated people at Sing Sing prison, and not only is it a very effective film, but it’s a great story of filmmaking. Former participants from the program appear in the movie as versions of themselves, and some helped develop the script as well.
13. Did we need Deadpool & Wolverine? Probably not. Was it fun to watch Jennifer Garner, decked out as Elektra, make a little joke about the inessential Daredevil, who was of course played by her ex, Ben Affleck? Yes. Yes, it was.
14. The TV adaptation of Presumed Innocent, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, had some story problems. Fortunately, it also had an outstanding and mesmerizingly odd (in the good way) performance from O-T Fagbenle, who gave his morally sketchy character an impossible-to-place mannered way of speaking, which emphasized how hard he was to pin down. Fagbenle was much more straightforwardly funny in the Netflix series No Good Deed, in which he and Teyonah Parris played a couple who want to buy a house. A good year for a good actor.
15. The third season of The Bear didn’t get quite the acclaim that the first two did, but it was still very, very good — particularly the episode “Napkins,” directed by series star Ayo Edebiri. It tells the story of Tina (Liza Colón-Zayas), and specifically of how she came to meet Mikey (Jon Bernthal). This episode, more than any other, told us who Mikey was, why he was as loved as he was, and why Tina’s time with Carmy has unfolded as it has. The scenes between Bernthal and Colón-Zayas are as good as anything the show has produced.
16. Glen Powell got very hot — or at least very busy — in 2024, appearing in both the Richard Linklater dark comedy Hit Man and the blockbuster Twisters. In Hit Man, he gets an opportunity to use his ingratiating grin-forward persona as part of his character, playing a guy who can charm anyone and pretend to be anything. The film doesn’t quite hold together overall, but every time Powell puts on his winky, slick-guy drag, it’s irresistible.
17. There is a moment in the terrific action comedy The Fall Guy when stars Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt are talking on the phone in split screen (while having a funny meta discussion about the use of split screen), and she’s doing a pretty common “sit with your chin in your hand” pose while listening to what he has to say. Except, playing the director of a sci-fi movie, she has a big prosthetic rubber monster hand on, with which she’s thoughtfully stroking her cheek. It’s exactly the kind of broad, silly move that makes the film so much fun.
18. The end of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, so ably led by Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist, is wonderfully ambiguous without being the least bit coy. You get the catharsis you’ve been waiting for, and you also are left with the fact that the relationships among these three people will always, always be too complicated for anyone outside their triad to understand.
19. This was the year Jake Gyllenhaal did adaptations that nobody necessarily asked for — the new adaptation of Presumed Innocent got better reviews, but the remake of Road House was more fun. You don’t necessarily need to watch the whole thing, but Gyllenhaal’s first standoff with a circle of toughs surrounding and threatening him, in which he opens by asking whether they have health insurance to treat the injuries he’s about to inflict, is pretty funny.
20. Whatever you think of the idea of remakes – and their ubiquity – sometimes the result is great. This year’s Prime Video series update of Mr. & Mrs. Smith starred Donald Glover and Maya Erskine as strangers recruited to play a married couple and operate as spies. Sexy and romantic at heart, the show also looked great, with lusciously cool costuming and great backdrops from snowy mountains to a fancy and glamorous party.
21. Netflix has had very mixed results from its efforts to make original blockbusters, whether it’s Red Notice or The Gray Man or Lift, this year’s Kevin Hart heist movie. And while Lift made almost no splash at all, those who checked it out had more fun than they might have expected, particularly with Billy Magnussen, who simply knows how to act like a weirdo when asked to do so.
22. Shrinking is one of the best shows on television, and while there is much to admire about its recent second season, perhaps the most purely delightful thing is that Ted McGinley got a chewy story with some drama to play, and he was great. He’s been so very funny on the show from the beginning, playing Liz’s husband, Derek, and this season, McGinley deftly took the same patience and indulgence and devotion to her that worked so well as comedy and flipped it into utterly convincing depth of feeling. Derek, as both a person and a husband, clicked into place in a new way. Give the man his Emmy nomination.
23. The Golden Globes’ decision to nominate Hugh Grant’s performance in Heretic under the “comedy or musical” category is absurd. With that said, you can see how they were fooled, because Grant uses the same slack, stammery charm that has served him well in comedy to create the menacing Mr. Reed, who puts weirder and weirder theological questions to a pair of young Mormon missionaries who visit his home. Honestly, the older and stranger Grant gets, the better he is.
24. Twice this year, films gave us stories about getting back at people who scam senior citizens. Thelma is a charming comedy (though be warned: it can also be sad) about a 93-year-old (June Squibb) who boards a scooter with her pal (Richard Roundtree) to recover $10,000 that was stolen from her. The Beekeeper is a more straightforward revenge thriller in which a big scam operation makes the mistake of ripping off someone beloved by Jason Statham. Things do not go well for said scam operation, and suffice it to say, it’s very satisfying.
25. The Netflix series A Man on the Inside reunited Ted Danson with The Good Place creator Mike Schur for a story about a man who goes undercover at a retirement community to help solve a crime. What emerges is the rare on-screen treatment of older people as full and vibrant social beings who have friendships, romances, scandals and whatever else you’d expect from a bunch of people living together. It also made time for Stephanie Beatriz’s great performance as Didi, the manager of the place, whose job is both very satisfying and very hard.
26. Conclave seemed, from some of its publicity, like it might be a terribly serious church movie about faith and God — it is not that. It is a fun little thriller about gossipy, grasping Cardinals who are trying to figure out who to elect as the next Pope. The film may not quite earn a surprise in its last few minutes, but the great cast (Ralph Fiennes! Stanley Tucci! John Lithgow!) and director Edward Berger’s love of shooting this crowd of identically dressed men like they’re in a Busby Berkeley musical goes a long way toward making it highly entertaining.
27. James Acaster: Hecklers Welcome is an unconventional comedy special, and Acaster continues to be a fascinating performer. In this show, as the title suggests, he welcomes heckling (with some guidelines), and that means it’s a little different every time he does it. In the performance that made it to Max, he is at least once compelled to acknowledge that a shouted joke is one he should have thought of. It’s a really thoughtful piece about relationships between comedians and audiences, and unlike a lot of people who are credited with being great thinkers about comedy, he doesn’t theorize about comedy primarily to justify what he wants to do anyway.
28. Natasha Rothwell’s Hulu comedy How to Die Alone is exactly what you most want to happen when a wonderful writer-performer creates a vehicle for herself. She plays to her own strengths, portraying a JFK airport worker whose near-death experience forces her to rethink her life. Like Somebody Somewhere, it’s a supremely compassionate examination of what it looks like to find yourself emotionally adrift for the simple reason that you haven’t had the confidence to do all the things you might have done.
29. Rebel Ridge is a sneakily upsetting thriller about a young man who gets on the wrong side of local police and quickly discovers that the tentacles of power can be long enough that every time you try to find a way out of trouble, the escape hatch is locked before you get there. Why do people worry about concentration of power, and why do they worry about corruption generally? Look no further than this story.
30. Every list like this needs a sports entry, so: This year, a World Series was not in the cards for my Philadelphia Phillies, but there were times when they did seem a bit enchanted, as in an August game, when outfielder Brandon Marsh lost a ball in the sun and caught it anyway.
31. Finally, finally, NBC did a genuinely terrific job with the Summer Olympics. And why? Largely because of Gold Zone, which they imported, hosts and all, from the ingenious NFL RedZone channel, which goes all day on Sundays cutting to whichever NFL game is most exciting (or closest to a scoring opportunity). At the Olympics, the anchors transferred from event to event, giving enough background to viewers that they could be invested in sports they might have never watched before — and that the anchors sometimes acknowledged they didn’t know well either.
32. Nicole Kidman has been rightly praised for her performance in the film Babygirl, in which she plays a CEO who has an affair with an intern. But save room, too, for the off-kilter performance from Harris Dickinson, who plays the young guy with alternating beats of swagger and awkwardness, as if he’s never quite sure whether he knows what he’s doing, but he’s determined to act like he does.
33. What’s happening in megaproducer Taylor Sheridan’s television universe right now is very strange, and one needs a competent guide. Enter Kathryn VanArendonk, whose work for Vulture explaining the bizarre late stages of Yellowstone gave it close attention while also refusing to take its stranger turns too seriously. (The character Sheridan plays shows up with Bella Hadid as his girlfriend, for instance.) Hopefully, she’ll soon do the same for Sheridan’s Landman, one of the most baffling new shows of the year.
34. The first sentence of Tracy Sierra’s novel Nightwatching is: “There was someone in the house.” What follows was one of my favorite scares of the year, just a good old scary story about a woman who has to hide from an intruder, with her kids, in a little secret space inside her old house. Sometimes the simplest premises are the best.
35. The film Nickel Boys, based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is unconventionally shot entirely from the points of view of the two lead characters, both boys sent to a brutal reform school. The style takes a while to get used to, but there’s a crucial moment when it shifts from one boy’s perspective to the other, and it’s a very fresh way to convey how connections between people can change their lives.
36. Disclaimer on Apple TV+ benefited from a very good Cate Blanchett performance as a woman who fears that an event from her past will destroy her life. But it also featured some creative structural decisions that effectively blurred the lines between truth and lies and memory, and particularly the way people live in entirely different worlds based on what they know, what they don’t know, and — maybe most hazardously — what they think they know.
37. Abbott Elementary is in its fourth season, and its ensemble has not lost a step. Quinta Brunson is still a wonderfully engaging lead (and leader), and everybody around her — though I can’t help expressing particular appreciation for Janelle James and Sheryl Lee Ralph — understands perfectly how to make a comedy that truly is a comedy but never feels hokey or forced. It’s a gem; we’re so lucky to have it. This season brought us Christmas onesies; what more could we ask for?
38. It’s fair to point out that Astro Bot, a platformer game for the PS5, is very much a self-aware piece of PS5 marketing — you fly around in a controller and so forth. But it’s also a really, really entertaining game. And unlike the structurally and tonally similar Mario games I’ve played on the Switch, it’s very user-friendly. If you mess up and fall off a cliff, you can redo that piece of your adventure without going back so far that you wind up replaying the same segment over and over trying to perfectly nail the very last step. Write off its warm reception to marketing if you will, but there are also a lot of good design decisions that went into its success.
39. M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap is a mess of a movie in many ways: Nothing anybody does makes a lick of sense, the effort to frame the movie around its soundtrack (performed by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka) doesn’t work, and the attempt to switch protagonists halfway through the movie destroys its momentum. However! I’ll be darned if Josh Hartnett didn’t give his all, pretty effectively, to playing a very creepy serial killer who’s also a nerdy and overexcited dad. Hey, a guy can be two things; it’s called nuance.
40. One of the secret weapons of FX’s historical epic Shōgun was its sense of humor. As a heavy drama with a lot of death and pain, it could have ended up being kind of a slog. But it wasn’t, in part because performers like Anna Sawai and Tadanobu Asano were able to maintain its weight and high stakes while also giving it just enough of a tinge of comedy to give it texture.
41. This was the year I got very, very into simulator games on my PC and PS5. I already played Planet Zoo and Two Point Hospital and Two Point Campus and so forth. But this year, I also played simulators that had me mowing lawns, getting out of escape rooms, power washing sidewalks, opening a motel, flipping houses and trying to run a farm (although that last one mostly found me accidentally knocking signs over with a tractor, which is its own kind of fun). As for a specific 2024 example, Planet Coaster 2 is my favorite way to accidentally put part of a log flume in the middle of an open field. Don’t worry — I’ll figure it out. I already manage several zoos and a few universities.
42. There are several puzzles I play every day, but none is more vexing than Vulture’s daily Cinematrix, a movie trivia game that launched in February. Do you know a movie with Sigourney Weaver in it that has the word “Snow” or “Ice” in the title? How about one with John Leguizamo that came out between 2000 and 2009? If you enjoy humbling yourself, these are the kinds of questions that will delight you. Many of the grids are the brainchildren of the diabolical Joe Reid of the podcast This Had Oscar Buzz. Joe is an old colleague and friend of mine, and if you don’t have his encyclopedic knowledge of release dates and award nominations, you’ll have to make some guesses. But you can do it! Maybe.
43. Mystery/thriller novels often disappoint, because effectively creating a confusing and unsettling situation is easier than resolving one in a satisfying, not-too-tidy way. Liz Moore’s God Of The Woods is an exception. Two mysteries, one in the past and one in the present, conclude in ways that are separately sound and also intertwined. You don’t always know how badly you crave a good ending until you read one.
44. There are the shows you can explain loving, and then there are the shows you just love. There was no show this year quite like Disaster Autopsy, an eight-episode National Geographic series I found on Hulu. It fully transformed me into a person who kept saying to friends, “LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS FIRE THAT HAPPENED.” Each installment takes an event like a train crash or a building collapse and goes step-by-step through the multiple failures, unintended consequences and human frailties that caused something terrible to happen. Are the outcomes often grim? Yes. But there is something coldly logical about the way that, over and over, it turns out that safety procedures are important, regulations are there for a reason, people should follow directions, and you never want to let too much lint build up under the escalator. (Really.)
45. Bianca Bosker’s book Get The Picture chronicles her travels through the art world – through galleries, studios and museums – as a journalist. While it does find some humor in certain things, it’s not a roasting of art people; it’s a genuine attempt to see the world the way they do and to understand what makes art good or bad. It’s lively and tries hard to be fair to everyone, even people who at first glance might seem like characters in a satire of art people.
46. Sometimes you hear a premise and you think, “I gotta read that book.” That’s how I felt about Better Left Unsent, by Lia Louis. It begins when a woman who uses draft emails as a form of journaling finds to her horror one day that they’ve all been sent. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Ashley Tucker, and it’s a clever exploration not only of the horrors of having your unfiltered feelings widely shared but also of the reasons we fear being known too well, even by the people we’re close to.
47. Another great premise: Holly Gramazio’s The Husbands, in which a woman who’s never been married discovers that her attic is producing husbands who seem to think they’ve always been with her. Whenever one goes back up into the attic, a new one comes down, and she starts over. There are obviously some entertaining logistics — how do you keep a husband you like from going up to the attic and vanishing? How do you get one you don’t particularly like to go up there and get vaporized so you can get a fresh one? But the whole time, I kept thinking, “I don’t know how this author is going to land this ending.” And then the ending is quite clever and poignant, and it makes a point to which the book has been quietly building about how people choose each other. .
48. In Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, Adrien Brody plays an architect named László Tóth who makes his way from Hungary to the United States after surviving the Holocaust. As someone who isn’t much of a brutalist architecture person, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the visuals. But the first time one of László's big projects is unveiled, the first time a set of doors opens gracefully from what seem to be plain walls, I believe I gasped.
49. It wouldn’t be a year of contemporary media without internet dogs. Two that I very much enjoyed in 2024 were Champ and Tyson, the stars of the Half Husky Bros channel. They are great fun all the time, but particularly when they wear t-shirts and try different foods. Here they are checking out Thanksgiving offerings. (You can also find them on TikTok or as @halfhuskybros on Instagram, where I follow them.) The best part is that they have an entire narrative going, which is that Champ (the more typically husky-looking one) will eat almost anything, and Tyson (the more retriever-looking one) is very judgmental about it, according to the obviously accurate captions supplied by their mom.
50. Can we just take a minute as we close this list and point out that everything should have Richard Kind in it? There were a lot of famous people in this season of Only Murders in the Building — Eugene Levy, Eva Longoria, Zach Galifianakis, Kumail Nanjiani, Meryl Streep, Paul Rudd, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, on and on. But most important, there was Richard Kind, holding down the “westies” part of the story by being, as always, expansively and humanely himself and yet always bringing something just a little bit unexpected. Every time he walks into a scene, you are in good hands. I say Kind for President of Hollywood.
Copyright 2024 NPR
